The original poster's objections still stand - the most imnportant features you gain with an expensive interactive "board" can be had for less than $200 with a simple digital camera, or better yet, just go back to handwritten overhead slides, and scan them in after the class: Cost? $60 for the scanner, and a few minutes of TA labor that is effectively free.
I have only seen ONE active board system that worked well enough to be useful, and unfortunately, it's not produced anymore: Xerox used to have a division called LiveWorks, which made a product called the LiveBoard. LiveBoard was a Windows 95 PC (This was about 1995, so that was current) with a very nice rear-projection LCD screen, and a set of smart "markers" of different colors. It could, of course display anything the PC could, plus overlay annotations, remote videoconference pictures, of pretty much whatever else you might want. As you might expect from a PARC-derived product, it was very well thought-out, and offered user interface capabilities that *really* made sense in the context - things like the ability to build lists with text recognition and insert things in a list or outline live, select text or drawings by simply drawing a circle around them and then dragging them where you want (great for suddenly realizing you didn't leave *quite* enough room for the equation describing the detailed diagram you just finished), and, of course, the ability to interoperate seamlessly with remote LiveBoards in other locations.
I can tell you that LiveBoard and a good (full duplex, ala Polycom) speakerphone was a far, far better remote teamwork tool than any videoconferencing system ever built.
Like many Xerox products, it was a bit ahead of the market, and Xerox made its usual marketing mistakes: 1) Try to recover development costs in the first units sold, pricing yourself well out of the market, and 2) Once this results in disappointing sales, kill the program, because it obviously has no potential to generate revenue. The number of times Xerox has screwed up really good products using this exact formula is mind-boggling.
Anyway, that's all to say the LiveBoard was better in 1995 than I think anything is even today. It's a shame that software isn't available, since the outline processing part alone would be quite useful on a tablet computer, too... There really should be somthing that allows this sort of interaction, should touchscreen-like things become as common as they should be. (Sun's old ShowMe product came as close as anyone has to doing this correctly in software only, but lacked support for nonstandard input hardware. Maybe Sun will think about turning ShowMe loose under the SCSL...)
But like you said, the best fix is use Mozilla, IE, or another browser that doesn't do this.
Of course, as has been pointed out in other messages in this thread, both IE and Mozilla do indeed behave similarly.
This looks to me like another round of Slashdot Netscape-bashing. It's no wonder that despite pitiful quality and worse security, Microsoft is kicking butt as open source alternatives risk sliding into irrelevance. (Of course, as long as any type of reconfiguration requires "rebuilding the kernel", we won't gain any traction.)
Someone mod up parent - there's some good stuff there, although I'm not sure she realizes *why* the problem exists, and that the problem is NOT only with AMD systems.
(Note: I am not an ACPI expert, but I know far more than most posters here, since I was once program manager in charge of Win98 and NT5(W2K) for a large computer company here in Austin. ACPI was a major PITA for me for about a year, and a key hurdle to the Win98 product launch.)
There are several points that need to be made about ACPI, Microsoft, and hardware:
1. ACPI support as been required by Microsoft since Windows 98. Win2K and XP *really* want it. MS wants APM to have died back in 1998, along with the rest of the "legacy" stuff. Yes, Virginia, Microsoft dictates with an iron fist the features of the hardware you buy, right down to the behavior of the power switch. Even (or especially?) the largest OEMs must comply with the MS hardware dictates, or face losing the OS discounts that they *must* have. (When MS says "You Must Comply", they mean it: In general, losing the OEM discount more than consumes the entire margin on a box, putting the OEM immediately out of business!) This is probably the area where MS most flagrantly and illegally leverages its monopoly, but it gets very little attention - even many people in the industry don't realize the extent of MS' power and control over computer hardware and the companies that build it.
2. ACPI is very different in 98 and W2K/XP. For reasons that boggle the mind, the Win98 team built their own terribly broken ACPI implementation rather than using the properly conforming, standards-compliant ACPI code written by the NT group. It's not a stretch to say that the Win98 ACPI code is some of the most profoundly broken code ever released on a large scale. Microsoft knew it was that badly broken, but the decree came down that it *would* ship by the RTM date as an in-your-face message to Janet Reno and the DoJ. (Although I have to laugh at the Microserf that once joked, "Q: What's the best thing about Janet Reno? A: Her looks.")
As a result, even though the ACPI code was known to be broken and non-functional in Win98, it shipped anyway, and the OEMs had only 90 days to begin shipping machines with Win98 (or lose that discount again - the stick, at least, is consistent.) It was essentially left to the OEMs to work around the twisted wreckage of the Win98 ACPI code. This in turn, forced some very bad decisions, because a BIOS that worked with NT (which was correctly engineered) would NOT work with 98, and vice versa. (This is when many just started putting ACPI on/off switches in the BIOS, which was an effective, but terribly ugly way to deal with the problem, given that a major purpose of ACPI was to eliminate user intervention with the BIOS!) In our case, a brilliant and observant BIOS programmer noticed something wierd, and used it to create a truly scary, but effective work-around: He noticed that NT and 98 made the initial ACPI call very slightly differently - in essence, it was possible for the BIOS to tell which OS it was serving. This led to a crash re-write of huge tracts of the BIOS to support a truly bizarre behavior: Instead of writing the ACPI tables at initialization, the BIOS would wait for the first ACPI call to see what OS is running, then re-write the ACPI tables on the fly to either work correctly (NT), or work around grisly broken code (98). This is NOT the sort of thing a BIOs should be doing, and explains why some modern BIOses are so large and complex - they are essentially workarounds for bugs Microsoft has rendered more or less permanent. It also explains why virtually every new MS OS release requires yet another BIOS upgrade, and why the correct BIOS for your machine may be determined by the OS you are running. Obviously, unless the dynamic approach above is used, it can be effectively impossible to have a properly functioning dual-boot machine...
3. Now that MS senses that they are just getting a slap on the wrist from the feds, I'm told they are starting thier strong-arm tactics again. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if.NET Passport/DRM hardware soon became required for OEMs to stay in the game. You'll notice the OEMs that dance closest to the MS party line do the best in the "open" marketplace. It's funny how that always happens, but not so funny how no one has really tried to stand up to MS since they prectically killed Acer for non-compliance a few years back.
ACPI is a pretty good thing, far better than the kludgey APM, but it got botched by MS' own ineptitude. Linux and BSD implementors need to use NT/2K/XP as their model, not 98. Sadly, we've seen similar faux pas with USB, device bays in laptops, and more recently, Bluetooth.
I think perhaps the most frustrating thing is how MS claims to be driving innovation, when in relaity the are holding the industry back by years.
I have copied that tech report, along with a diagram you can use to do cold fusion on your desktop for less than US$500, in this directory:
http://www.bovik.org/codeposition [bovik.org]
Well, for $500 after you've somehow acquired the Heavy Water, which might as well be unobtainium. An educated guess is that D20 is even harder to get hold of now than it was a few months ago...
everything gets built on top of it because port 80 is pretty much the only thing that's guaranteed to get through firewalls, most of which are stupidly configured
Ehh, NO
The correct phrasing of that should be "most of which are securely configured."
No, I meant stupidly configured. The refusal to use other ports as they should be used is what has caused the Tragedy of the Commons we now see on Port 80 - there's no telling *what* is passing through there, so now it's *impossible* to have a secure configuration, as opposed to a very clean, simple scenario where protocol/port mappings are 1:1. You can hardly shut off Port 80, so firewalls are mostly a joke anymore. (To quote Marshall Rose again, "Firewalls just give you the illusion of security." That is more true today than ever, as the number of potentially dangerous things riding atop HTTP reaches truly scary proportions...)
In a course I took years ago (when Interop was a small show for net-heads that fit easily in the San Jose convention center), Marshall Rose was talking about security and transports and showed us how some really twisted grad student had implemented PPP over a DNS transport just to prove it could be done.
Sadly, pretty much everyone agrees that HTTP isn't suited for the things it's being used for today, but everything gets built on top of it because port 80 is pretty much the only thing that's guaranteed to get through firewalls, most of which are stupidly configured and require the corporate equivalent of an act of Congress to get opened up.
By the way, Marshall Rose is relevant here for another reason, too: his proposed BEEP protocol is (IMO) a far better way to deal with providing a multipurpose transport suitable for a wide variety of things. There's a good BEEP Q&A document by Rose on the beepcore.org site. We should be using things like BEEP to avoid having the same arguments and reinventing the same wheels over again every few years/months/weeks. BEEP seems to be gaining traction: The IESG recently approved APEX4 the application datagram protocol over BEEP as a proposed standard, and SOAP over BEEP was similarly approved last summer. Let's hope these get through the grinder in time to do some good, and that the true Internet standard of "Rough Consensus and Running Code" prevails over corporate landgrabs by Microsoft, et al.
Of course, this is one more reason to stick with old-fashioned analog cable with no converter box. (Well that and about $50 a month in my pocket.)
The picture I get from that setup is far better than the pixellated mosaic that Time Warner passes off as "Digital Television" here in Austin. Seriously, I think old-fashioned analog cable is often superior to many of the digital cable and satellite pictures out there. Just being digital doesn't make it better. Digital *can* be better but often isn't. I guess that makes me an official heretic now...
First, I admire the Newton as much as anyone - it's an elegant, if odd, architecture that Apple never put its heart into and couldn't figure out how to sell at the ridiculous prices they charged - but the Newton WAS NOT THE FIRST PDA, not by a long shot.
Whatever was "first" will depend on how you decide to define "PDA", but I think it's pretty clear that the early Sharp (later Zaurus) and Casio BOSS "personal organizers" were early, crude PDAs. These predate the Newton by several years, and most of the Japanese consumer electronics companies offered something similar. In general, the organizers seemed to be a branch from the programmable calculator family in the early 1980s, a move that was heavily influenced by Tandy at the time. (Remember Tandy was the 800-lb gorilla in the PC market circa 1980, staying there until the IBM PC started to gain traction around 1983, largely through Lotus 1-2-3.)
The problem isn't the voice-dialing with Sprint PCS (the recognition domain is pretty limited, so number recognition is quite good in many VoRec systems now), but rather "Claire, your electronic customer service representative".
In my experience (as recent as yesterday), Claire is both hard of hearing and pretty darn stupid. The most frustrating thing is that the entire system is designed to prevent you from ever getting to a real person, so if Claire can't help you, you're SOL. I did notice that after about a half-dozen failed attmepts to go through Claire, I got a different answer (I was dialing 611 to try to get them to do the PRL update they've been unable to do since August), this time asking for the last 4 digits of the SSN of the account holder. I'm not sure if this was programmed, or if Claire just happened to go off-line at that time.
I *really* hate companies that use IVR systems to *prevent* you from getting customer service. Sprint is probably the worst offender I've encountered at this, but then they have by far the worst customer service I've ever encountered in a service company. (Although Home Depot clearly takes the cake for worst customer service overall - they direct all complaints to "Ben Hill". Like Arlington Hewes, Mr. Hill does not exist - the phone is answered by a rotation of store assistant managers, who do not track or follow-up on complaints. It's essentially a well-desiged and deliberate bit-bucket for Home Depot's customer complaints. Once they have your money, they're not really interested in hearing if you have a problem - the height of poor customer service.)
I believe that Sun retains the right to sue kaffe for breach of license. not exactly open.
At the time Java came out, the world had never seen anything from any corporation that was as open as Sun made Java. From Day 1, the Java specification has been freely available for anyone to implement (the SPARC specification is, too - anyone can build SPARC chips.) The only thing you can't do once that's done is call it Java without Sun's permission, since they own the trademark. However, Sun generously allows others to use the Java trademark if a) they license Sun's own Java, or b) their implementation of the public spec is certified as meeting Sun's quality and functionality requirements (not hard, if it's built right.) That seems pretty reasonable to me.
Sun, like the rest of us, always has the right to sue anyone for any reason - they can sue you for sitting in a chair, if they want to. They won't win, and they'll tick off the judge, but they can...
I disagree with this conclusion. Why wait. If you wait until.NET is popular and widespread before starting a compatable project, then it will already be too late and you will be eternally playing catch-up. Think how much more accepted Linux might have been if it was also able run Windows applications well from the get-go.
This may be the most intelligent thing posted in this thread. It's both funny and very sad to watch Miguel de Icaza get gutted by the open source community, when it's clear he's the one thinking about the future. Miguel realizes (quite correctly) that 1) the GPL is totally unacceptable to many people because of its viral nature - in particular, it is completely incompatible with commercial adoption (by design), and 2) that Stallman's shrill position that "nothing is compatible with the GPL but the GPL" drives off a great many that might have considered the GPL.
While I disagree with the idea of Mono, Miguel is absolutely right in selecting the X11 license for Mono for the reasons stated above, and since CORBA never made sense for a desktop environment, it makes sense to leverage this work for GNOME. (I think instead of Mono, the open source community should embrace Java standards instead, which already do what.NET plans to do, and are set through an open process that cannot be easily poisoned like MS can, and likely will, do with.NET.)
Miguel is making a bold move here to ensure that the open source community is not once again forced into irrelevancy by playing catch-up. He should be applauded and supported in this effort. This sort of enlightenment (groan) could cause me to reevaluate my opposition to Gnome...
for RMS and others LISP is the right foundation, but hasn't got so sophisticated envelopes yet. But LISP with Gnome, yum yum...
I can only assume you have never tried to actually *do* anything with LISP. I have (robotics code, in the late '80s), and I am firmly convinced that LISP is nothing but a gigantic academic sham intended to keep perpetual CS grad students in school forever. It is impossible to significant build real-world applications in a language that has little more than if-thens and a grotesque, error-prone syntax to boot.
I do agree with RMS on one thing (so for all you doubters, see, I can agree with him): Interpreted languages will eventually win out, but the ones that do will be far more like (and maybe even) Python than LISP. I think Java has indelibly altered the landscape too, since it blends (or at least attempts to) the advantages of interpretation with the IP protection of compilation. RMS hates the latter, but it's the basis of the 21st century economy, so it will not go away any time soon. (Nor should it, lest we kill the economic incentive that drives the huge investments required for technological progress - such progress cannot exist apart from a live and functioning technology-based market economy.)
Pre-production versions of the SonicBlue/FrontPath ProGear webpad ran Midori Linux, but that may have changed. (I tested one of the preproduction units and worked with the people doing the Linux work - I know they considered Slackware, too, and am not sure what they finally settled on.)
It was a nice unit in many ways: it even supported an internal 2.5" HD, so you could cram 20 GB or so into it if you wanted to. The major problem (at least with the early units) was that it was relatively fragile - not really tough enough to survive the treatment such a unit gets in the real world, and it nneded help on the input front, as most such Linux-based devices do. (Why the various companies working to do this don't pool their resources an do it RIGHT, I still don't know - as it is, everyone hacks up thier own pretty much useless rehash of bad on-screen keyboards and, if they're ambitious, text recognizers.)
Still, I want a webpad far more than I want a new laptop: The simple fact is that even a mediocre webpad is 10x more useful than a good laptop for the things most people do, especially if outfitted to provide "instant-on" access via wireless networking. (Sadly, the "instant-on" part is one area where CE has a decided advantage, even as totally brain-dead as it is...)
I think most of the problem here is that web pad manufacturers are trying to build devices that can be both a wireless browser *and* a laptop replacement, driving up costs and ensuring that they do neither job very well. A wireless, browser-only box (or even a remote Terminal Services box using Microsoft's RDP) would sell for those many of us that would like to treat the web more like a book and not be tied to a desk while reading. Sorry folks, but Microsoft's RDP is a FAR better protocol choice than something like VNC for a device like this. RDP is actually excellent, and it would be nice to see open source RDP servers and clients for other OSes. Try the two side by side, and you'll see what I mean. I've done just that with my Epods webpad: RDP is quite usable, while VNC is far slower than dialup (although in fairness the CE VNC client is pretty bad.)
for the moment, I thank him for the GPL since it's the only protection the public domain seems to have from the likes of Microsoft.
I get a little tired of the argument that the GPL is the only thing protecting freedom in software. We managed to get along quite nicely without it for many years, producing such vital things as X and even Unix itself without any viral licensing at all. The GPL is fundamentally flawed in several important respects, but mostly in that it's designed expressly to control derivative works, and make it impossible to use them without spreading the GPL virus.
Interestingly, more and more people are realizing this: Even Miguel de Icaza, who recently decided that Mono could not be produced under the GPL, so Ximian is using a variant of the X11 license (itself derived from the BSD license) instead.
By the way, copyrights and patents are strong expressly because they are supposed to be: changing them substantially (or eliminating them) would require not simply a change of law, but a Constitutional amendment, since these protections are writteninto the Constitution itself. That was not an accident or an oversight, and technology changes only the form, not the substance, of the argument.
But in another sense the fight between Microsoft and the GPL is a fight for survival.
Lord help us if those are our only two choices!
One is no better than the other from the point of view of promoting true freedom and avoiding ideological restictions on what may and/or must be done with the program or code in question. Both the Microsoft and the GPL license models *force* restrictions on how programs are to be used. Many of us find either sort of restriction unreasonable. The more I look at the deplorable behavior of the FSF crowd (the GPL is the ONLY valid license, and nothing else is compatible with it unless it is virtually identical - and resistance is futile, we'll bully you if you don't agree with us) the more convinced I am that the BSD folks are far closer to "right" - thier license and others like it are actually considerably more free than the GPL, which places onerous (and one hopes, ultimately unenforceable) restrictions on what may be done with programs in order to advance a blatantly communist/socialist political agenda.
(I know I will be flamed unmercifully for this, but the simple fact is that although RMS and the FSF deny their communist leanings, any thoughtful reading of what Stallman has written over the years make it clear that such a denial is just a ploy to deflect legitimate criticism. Stallman is fundamentally opposed to the very idea of capitalism in the modern world, and seeks to enforce his view of a communal software state through deliberate (even admitted) abuse of copyright protections. In typical Big Brother fashion, he calls his totalitarian scheme "freedom" - while nothing could be further from the truth. I'm constantly amazed at how few people realize that what the FSF is doing will ultimately bring about a situation far worse than we have today.)
This doesn't mean I'm abcking Microsoft, either: I don't want software controlled by either Microsoft *or* the FSF - if ever a "none of the above" vote was needed, this is the place!
This is clearly an aggregate composite (the "particulate" term is also accurate, but not one I've heard before, and I worked for years with automated manufacturing of advanced high-temperature aerospace composites - "aggregate composite" was always used in the books to describe concrete.)
More importantly, though, I haven't seen anyone zero in on the single thing that I would think would categorize an aggregate composite as a member of the "concrete" family: the use of portland cement or other finely powdered clay substance as the binder and activator. Concrete is generally ugly, but it's pretty amazing stuff. Much of the modern world could not exist without the use of something so strong and cheap as steel-reinforced concrete.
FWIW, I don't think this is Windows-only. Hibernation should work in any OS that understands how the APM or ACPI BIOs APIs work. Sadly, the only Linux I've found that even comes close to understanding these correctly is Corel. (They actually did a great deal of the "hard stuff" right - I hated to see them fade away before making their mark...)
(FWIW, I prefer to use the terms "suspend-to-RAM" (S2R or STR) and suspend-to-disk (S2D or STD), since there's no ambiguity about what's going on that way, as there can be with terms like sleep, suspend, snooze, and hibernate.)
I'll get modded down for this, but xah is absolutely right here. Slashdot, which has always walked the ragged edge of illiteracy, has lately become an absolute crapfest of linguistic carelessness and ignorance.
Don't we care about the quality of what we're saying? If we don't, we shouldn't post at all. Perhaps this the the linguistic spawn of the grunge movement - the textual equivalent of the filthy jeans, stringy unwashed hair, odoriforous clothing, and replusive tatoos and piercings that were so common when jobs were plentiful, but thankfully seem to be much scarcer these days.
It would be nice to be able to filter posts that commit Englicide, something broader in scope than simply blocking Jon Katz.;-) As I think about it, I realize I may only be half joking: If there can be a lameness filter for submissions, surely there can be one of a different type for viewing, one that will help demoronize Slashdot by automatically modding down posts that confuse "than" and "then", use "alot", botch "there/their", etc. The real question is whether or not there would be more than a handful of posts left after such an filter was loosed...
English is arguably the world's best language: It has shamelessly borrowed from other languages as needed (or perhaps just wanted) and as a result it allows for an expressiveness and granularity of meaning simply not possible in other languages. English is enormously complex, but that complexity allows unmatched specificity in distinguishing shades of meaning, an attribute that turns out to be tremendously valuable in the real world.
English is a lot like Unix/Linux in this respect - Thomas Scoville wrote an excellent paper a few years ago on the subject of why a love of English is almost a prerequisite for mastering Unix: Elements of Unix Style. A love of English is perhaps one of the best predictors for aptitude in Unix-land. Those that can't (or don't) write well will never really develop fluency and the ablity to effortlessly "think in Unix" that marks the true masters.
On the other hand, the same things that give English its strength have produced inconsistencies that vex, flummox, and perplex non-English speakers, especially in the realm of pronunciation. Try this one out - I'd bet most US college students can't get through it without being tripped up at least once or twice (actually, given the general illiteracy of the college grads I've talked with lately, I'm certain of it): English is tough stuff. Perhaps I should make reading this part of my interview process. At least it would filter out those that think technical skills are the only thing required for success, and the others that fail to recognize that it's far easier to take a good communicator and teach them technical skills than the other way around...
Patents on specific inventions seem reasonable to me, though. I approve of the patent for the lightbulb, but not a patent on the use of electricity to provide light!
Actually, such a thing did indeed happen at the beginning of the electric age, and it was entirely appropriate. The story behind those patents shaped our world in a non-trivial way:
After inventing the light bulb, Edison went on to patent pretty much all of the other components of his system to provide power generation (the famous "long-waisted Mary Ann" generators), electrical transmission, switching, etc. Of course, all these patents were for Edison's DC system. All these patents were appropriate, although some stole from the work of an employee anmed Nikola Tesla, whom Edison promised $50,000 if he would solve thorny problems with his DC distribution system. Edison did not pay as promised, claiming he was joking.
Tesla, though, soon had patents for his ingenious polyphase AC system - avoiding the troublesome commutators of DC motors was a BIG deal, and AC could actually be transmitted over reasonable distances without terrific losses. Tesla later licensed these patents exclusively to George Westinghouse for the then princely sum of $1 million PLUS a staggering royalty of $2.50 per horsepower of equipment sold. This would have made Tesla the richest man in the world, every year (even today, that royalty would be worth billions per year just for generators alone, back then it was unimaginable.)
In a financial power play (ugh) Westinghouse was forced into a financial corner by FUD from J.P. Morgan (who controlled Edison's patents.) The cash crunch made it clear that if he (and AC power) were to survive, the royalty agreement would have to be altered to avoid leaving Westinghouse too over-extended to survive long-term. Tesla famously tore up the contract granting hi the royalties making it clear that Westinghouse had treated him fairly and that Tesla preferred AC prevailing to all the money:
"Mr. Westinghouse, you have been my friend, you believed in me when others had no faith; you were brave enough to go ahead... when others lacked courage; you supported me when even your own engineers lacked vision... you have stood by me as a friend...
"Here is your contract, and here is my contract. I will tear both of them to pieces, and you will no longer have any troubles from my royalties. Is that sufficient?"
This is not strictly speaking a W2K function. The real kicker here for Linux folks is that the easiest way to do hibernation in the modern world is to use ACPI, which Linux doesn't do very well. (See this week's LWN for a timely discussion.
APM BIOSes can also do this, but they aren't as standard: Often the implementation details are specific to the hardware. For instance, Phoenix BIOSes (at least as of two years ago, I haven't messed with this stuff much since then) tend to want to put the STD (suspend-to-disk) data in a special file in a Windows partition, while some others (Dell for sure, since I used to work this stuff for them) save this info in a special STD partition (type 84, IIRC) which is a more generic solution, but requires more knowledge when setting up the box. (When was the last time you thought you might need an STD partition when building your box? BTW, they should be at a minimum, PhysicalMemorySize + 1 MB for state info, video register settings, etc.)
No, my point is not at all short-sighted, just realistic...
When the oilfields are gone, so is 'natural' gas.
That will be a very long time: at current forecast growth rates, well after hydrogen itself is no longer desirable. (100+ years - With conservation and more efficient use, such as turbines, the supply could last for centuries. Eliminating Pentiums alone would help tremendously...) In 1978, proven reserves of oil were 648 Billion barrels. By March 2000, the USGS estimated that world reserves were 2.2 TRILLION barrels, this same study also estimated natural gas and similar liquid reserves at another 2.3 TRILLION barrels, for a total supply increase of around 70X. It's also worth noting that this increased supply has resulted in a significant drop in real energy prices (except in the Peoples Republic of California, where Bozoid centralized planning and control prevent deregulation from working there as it has in Pennsylvania), a trend that will likely continue for many decades.
According to Robert L. Bradley, Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research, "probable resources of oil, gas, and coal are officially forecast to be 114, 200, and 1,884 years of present usage, respectively. Moreover, an array of unconventional fossil-fuel sources promises that, when crude oil, natural gas, and coal become scarcer (hence, more expensive) in the future, fossil-fuel substitutes may still be the best source of fuels to fill the gap before synthetic substitutes come into play." (Source: http://www.heartland.org/perspectives/automobility 5.htm)
Also, keep in mind that Hydrogen is not an especially dense energy storage medium. Really good battery technologies could well exceed the energy density of LH2 without the problems associated with hydrogen.
I think you're also underestimating the rate of change in the next 50 years. 50 years from now tech won't be as different from our tech as our tech is from 1950's tech - it will be as different from our tech as our tech is from 1850's tech.
I think you're obviously so young that your perception has been warped by sci-fi: The rate of change has been *FAR* less than forecast for well over 100 years now. 50 years ago, except for the Internet, and computers sucking up endless man-hours that could be used to produce real value-add rather than the overhead of systems administration, things were pretty much as they are now. Some things have improved, many have gotten worse, and most things are about the same. I see no reason to believe that somehow the next 50 years will be all that much different, especially as Moore's law starts to falter and gate density hits the wall. There will likely be some big advances, but almost by definition, those are impossible to effectively predict. (I also believe the liklihood of another great depression is fairly high in the next 50 years, which will make the last one look like a cake walk, and set back economic progress for many decades - not pessimistic, just a recognition that major depressions have a stubborn tendency to crop up every 50-100 years, so both the timing and debt conditions are building up to the inevitable.)
Picking the long-term solution now seems sensible when you look at the ultimate cost of re-tooling all machinery for a new power source - do you want to do that once, or several times?
I and many others would argue we're more likely to do this again if we foolishly choose hydrogen power now, and tooling up for hydrogen would be REALLY expensive. No thanks.
Solar power and hydrogen power will not run out in the lifespan of the human species.
Solar is neither efficient nor environmentally friendly when deployed on the scale required to replace all fossil fuels, whether or not the additional stupid step of making hydrogen is pursued. (see below)
They will becom cheaper and cheaper and cleaner and cleaner. Picture floating factories refining hydrogen from the oceans using solar power - how ultimately efficient can that become?
The simple fact is this: there is no clean way to produce large quantities of hydrogen. Solar energy is free and "clean", but is not terribly energy-dense, and suffers from the problem of being "low quality" thermodynamically. Even if you could collect *all* the energy falling on a square yard of the Earth's surface at high noon and perpindicular latitude, you still don't get enough to run a microwave oven, and in reality, we can't even afford to get the pitiful 3% that Solar cells catch (sadly, they often wear out before they've paid for themselves.) Racheting that back to account for the terrible efficeincies involved in splitting water by electrolysis results in having such huge areas covered by solar collectors that they themselves begin to be a significant source of environmental damage. (To head off the usual argument at the pass: "But it's out in the middle of the ocean!" isn't a valid response here unless you buy that argument for toxic waste as well...)
My guess is that the future is likely to be far more electrical than hydrogen powered, but we'll have to wait and see. In any case, nothing much will (or should) cause a mass move to hydrogen for at least another 50 years or so. If efficiency and environmental concerns are really important, more effort should be put on the new diesel technologies, which are making impressive progress.
Real hybrids, not the wimpy and ridiculously expensive toys for yuppies we see now, could make a difference, espcially if powered by efficient microturbines.
Hydrogen power is an amazing thing, but it'd be something like suddenly replacing the staple foods in the world with chemical products - it dents a rather secure and stable part of our lifestyle and global economy.
As I've pointed out in several posts lately in response to the "Hydrogen Economy Hysteria" sweeping both/. and the halls of geovernment, Hydrogen is NOT a clean and cost-effective fuel - in fact, as hydrogen has to be produced today, it it neither as clean nor as cost effective as natural gas.
The ONLY economical source for large quantities of hydrogen is natural gas - this is how almost all industrial hydrogen is made today. There is no technology on the foreseeable horizon that will change that. Almost all the hydrogen on this planet is tied up in water, an incredibly stable molecule that is notoriously difficult to separate. You *can* pull hydrogen out of either natural gas or water, but either is relatiely expensive and inefficient (water much more so.)
Also, remember that even once you've got it, if your're reacting the hydrogen in air (as opposed to pure oxygen), there will *still* be pollutants (oxides of nitrogen and such) regardless of whether you burn it or react it in a fuel-cell-type reactor. (As an aside, the process of cracking natural gas for hydrogen produces fairly large quantities of CO2...)
Since NG is already one of the cleanest-burning fuels known, you just have to wonder why everyone is pushing hydrogen as the answer: total energy efficiency is better and the environment is thus less damaged by simply using the natural gas directly, rather than first reforming it into hydrogen.
Hydrogen is NOT a good fuel with any technology that will be reasonable on a commercial scale in the next 50 years. Any claims that it's "clean" (the "only water" lie) fail to take into account the inherent energy loss and pollution created by the entire hydrogen manufacturing & use process. That pretty much makes Hydrogen irrelevant to any serious discussion of energy sources. (Of course, I don't expect that to stop environmentalist wackos and the wooly-thinking governments from pushing the whole ridiculous idea in their zeal to demonize all methods achievable with foreseeable technology...)
Re:I would prefer the other way around
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 3, Interesting
personally, I would like to see a BSD distro with ports and all, but with a linux kernel.
I agree. Although I think the BSD kernel is arguably superior, having a Linux kernel would allow the rapidly increasing number of commercial applications that run on Linux to work.
The big, ugly, problem for me (and almost anyone else that's really worked with and appreciated the real power of *real* Unix, as opposed to Linux) has always been the GNU utilities. They're acceptable, but just barely. GNU Documentation stinks when iut's there at all, at least partly because even most FSF-backers recognize that man pages are the expected form of OS docs and info pages are a hoppeless GNU-ism.
The GNU utilities insist on using their own hopelessly convoluted syntax, (especially the hideous "--" options, another perversity enforced by the gnazis that intentionally creates a gulf between the GNU wasteland and the civilization of the Unix/BSD world.
The BSD utilities are one of the best reasons to run BSD - they are orders of magnitude more stable and standard than their GNU hack counterparts. The code for many of these utilities is indeed old, but has not remained static: The BSD utilities provide a level of maturity that GNU will probably never reach, simply because structure and gols of their organization forces the BSD folks care about such things, while that of GNU seems to ensure that that level of care and attention will not be lavished on the code. In my mind, this is a distinction that is far too often overlooked.
Slashdot Mirror
The original poster's objections still stand - the most imnportant features you gain with an expensive interactive "board" can be had for less than $200 with a simple digital camera, or better yet, just go back to handwritten overhead slides, and scan them in after the class: Cost? $60 for the scanner, and a few minutes of TA labor that is effectively free.
I have only seen ONE active board system that worked well enough to be useful, and unfortunately, it's not produced anymore: Xerox used to have a division called LiveWorks, which made a product called the LiveBoard. LiveBoard was a Windows 95 PC (This was about 1995, so that was current) with a very nice rear-projection LCD screen, and a set of smart "markers" of different colors. It could, of course display anything the PC could, plus overlay annotations, remote videoconference pictures, of pretty much whatever else you might want. As you might expect from a PARC-derived product, it was very well thought-out, and offered user interface capabilities that *really* made sense in the context - things like the ability to build lists with text recognition and insert things in a list or outline live, select text or drawings by simply drawing a circle around them and then dragging them where you want (great for suddenly realizing you didn't leave *quite* enough room for the equation describing the detailed diagram you just finished), and, of course, the ability to interoperate seamlessly with remote LiveBoards in other locations.
I can tell you that LiveBoard and a good (full duplex, ala Polycom) speakerphone was a far, far better remote teamwork tool than any videoconferencing system ever built.
Like many Xerox products, it was a bit ahead of the market, and Xerox made its usual marketing mistakes: 1) Try to recover development costs in the first units sold, pricing yourself well out of the market, and 2) Once this results in disappointing sales, kill the program, because it obviously has no potential to generate revenue. The number of times Xerox has screwed up really good products using this exact formula is mind-boggling.
Anyway, that's all to say the LiveBoard was better in 1995 than I think anything is even today. It's a shame that software isn't available, since the outline processing part alone would be quite useful on a tablet computer, too... There really should be somthing that allows this sort of interaction, should touchscreen-like things become as common as they should be. (Sun's old ShowMe product came as close as anyone has to doing this correctly in software only, but lacked support for nonstandard input hardware. Maybe Sun will think about turning ShowMe loose under the SCSL...)
But like you said, the best fix is use Mozilla, IE, or another browser that doesn't do this.
Of course, as has been pointed out in other messages in this thread, both IE and Mozilla do indeed behave similarly.
This looks to me like another round of Slashdot Netscape-bashing. It's no wonder that despite pitiful quality and worse security, Microsoft is kicking butt as open source alternatives risk sliding into irrelevance. (Of course, as long as any type of reconfiguration requires "rebuilding the kernel", we won't gain any traction.)
Someone mod up parent - there's some good stuff there, although I'm not sure she realizes *why* the problem exists, and that the problem is NOT only with AMD systems.
.NET Passport/DRM hardware soon became required for OEMs to stay in the game. You'll notice the OEMs that dance closest to the MS party line do the best in the "open" marketplace. It's funny how that always happens, but not so funny how no one has really tried to stand up to MS since they prectically killed Acer for non-compliance a few years back.
(Note: I am not an ACPI expert, but I know far more than most posters here, since I was once program manager in charge of Win98 and NT5(W2K) for a large computer company here in Austin. ACPI was a major PITA for me for about a year, and a key hurdle to the Win98 product launch.)
There are several points that need to be made about ACPI, Microsoft, and hardware:
1. ACPI support as been required by Microsoft since Windows 98. Win2K and XP *really* want it. MS wants APM to have died back in 1998, along with the rest of the "legacy" stuff. Yes, Virginia, Microsoft dictates with an iron fist the features of the hardware you buy, right down to the behavior of the power switch. Even (or especially?) the largest OEMs must comply with the MS hardware dictates, or face losing the OS discounts that they *must* have. (When MS says "You Must Comply", they mean it: In general, losing the OEM discount more than consumes the entire margin on a box, putting the OEM immediately out of business!) This is probably the area where MS most flagrantly and illegally leverages its monopoly, but it gets very little attention - even many people in the industry don't realize the extent of MS' power and control over computer hardware and the companies that build it.
2. ACPI is very different in 98 and W2K/XP. For reasons that boggle the mind, the Win98 team built their own terribly broken ACPI implementation rather than using the properly conforming, standards-compliant ACPI code written by the NT group. It's not a stretch to say that the Win98 ACPI code is some of the most profoundly broken code ever released on a large scale. Microsoft knew it was that badly broken, but the decree came down that it *would* ship by the RTM date as an in-your-face message to Janet Reno and the DoJ. (Although I have to laugh at the Microserf that once joked, "Q: What's the best thing about Janet Reno? A: Her looks.")
As a result, even though the ACPI code was known to be broken and non-functional in Win98, it shipped anyway, and the OEMs had only 90 days to begin shipping machines with Win98 (or lose that discount again - the stick, at least, is consistent.) It was essentially left to the OEMs to work around the twisted wreckage of the Win98 ACPI code. This in turn, forced some very bad decisions, because a BIOS that worked with NT (which was correctly engineered) would NOT work with 98, and vice versa. (This is when many just started putting ACPI on/off switches in the BIOS, which was an effective, but terribly ugly way to deal with the problem, given that a major purpose of ACPI was to eliminate user intervention with the BIOS!) In our case, a brilliant and observant BIOS programmer noticed something wierd, and used it to create a truly scary, but effective work-around: He noticed that NT and 98 made the initial ACPI call very slightly differently - in essence, it was possible for the BIOS to tell which OS it was serving. This led to a crash re-write of huge tracts of the BIOS to support a truly bizarre behavior: Instead of writing the ACPI tables at initialization, the BIOS would wait for the first ACPI call to see what OS is running, then re-write the ACPI tables on the fly to either work correctly (NT), or work around grisly broken code (98). This is NOT the sort of thing a BIOs should be doing, and explains why some modern BIOses are so large and complex - they are essentially workarounds for bugs Microsoft has rendered more or less permanent. It also explains why virtually every new MS OS release requires yet another BIOS upgrade, and why the correct BIOS for your machine may be determined by the OS you are running. Obviously, unless the dynamic approach above is used, it can be effectively impossible to have a properly functioning dual-boot machine...
3. Now that MS senses that they are just getting a slap on the wrist from the feds, I'm told they are starting thier strong-arm tactics again. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if
ACPI is a pretty good thing, far better than the kludgey APM, but it got botched by MS' own ineptitude. Linux and BSD implementors need to use NT/2K/XP as their model, not 98. Sadly, we've seen similar faux pas with USB, device bays in laptops, and more recently, Bluetooth.
I think perhaps the most frustrating thing is how MS claims to be driving innovation, when in relaity the are holding the industry back by years.
I have copied that tech report, along with a diagram you can use to do cold fusion on your desktop for less than US$500, in this directory:
http://www.bovik.org/codeposition [bovik.org]
Well, for $500 after you've somehow acquired the Heavy Water, which might as well be unobtainium. An educated guess is that D20 is even harder to get hold of now than it was a few months ago...
everything gets built on top of it because port 80 is pretty much the only thing that's guaranteed to get through firewalls, most of which are stupidly configured
Ehh, NO
The correct phrasing of that should be "most of which are securely configured."
No, I meant stupidly configured. The refusal to use other ports as they should be used is what has caused the Tragedy of the Commons we now see on Port 80 - there's no telling *what* is passing through there, so now it's *impossible* to have a secure configuration, as opposed to a very clean, simple scenario where protocol/port mappings are 1:1. You can hardly shut off Port 80, so firewalls are mostly a joke anymore. (To quote Marshall Rose again, "Firewalls just give you the illusion of security." That is more true today than ever, as the number of potentially dangerous things riding atop HTTP reaches truly scary proportions...)
In a course I took years ago (when Interop was a small show for net-heads that fit easily in the San Jose convention center), Marshall Rose was talking about security and transports and showed us how some really twisted grad student had implemented PPP over a DNS transport just to prove it could be done.
Sadly, pretty much everyone agrees that HTTP isn't suited for the things it's being used for today, but everything gets built on top of it because port 80 is pretty much the only thing that's guaranteed to get through firewalls, most of which are stupidly configured and require the corporate equivalent of an act of Congress to get opened up.
By the way, Marshall Rose is relevant here for another reason, too: his proposed BEEP protocol is (IMO) a far better way to deal with providing a multipurpose transport suitable for a wide variety of things. There's a good BEEP Q&A document by Rose on the beepcore.org site. We should be using things like BEEP to avoid having the same arguments and reinventing the same wheels over again every few years/months/weeks. BEEP seems to be gaining traction: The IESG recently approved APEX4 the application datagram protocol over BEEP as a proposed standard, and SOAP over BEEP was similarly approved last summer. Let's hope these get through the grinder in time to do some good, and that the true Internet standard of "Rough Consensus and Running Code" prevails over corporate landgrabs by Microsoft, et al.
Of course, this is one more reason to stick with old-fashioned analog cable with no converter box. (Well that and about $50 a month in my pocket.)
The picture I get from that setup is far better than the pixellated mosaic that Time Warner passes off as "Digital Television" here in Austin. Seriously, I think old-fashioned analog cable is often superior to many of the digital cable and satellite pictures out there. Just being digital doesn't make it better. Digital *can* be better but often isn't. I guess that makes me an official heretic now...
First, I admire the Newton as much as anyone - it's an elegant, if odd, architecture that Apple never put its heart into and couldn't figure out how to sell at the ridiculous prices they charged - but the Newton WAS NOT THE FIRST PDA, not by a long shot.
Whatever was "first" will depend on how you decide to define "PDA", but I think it's pretty clear that the early Sharp (later Zaurus) and Casio BOSS "personal organizers" were early, crude PDAs. These predate the Newton by several years, and most of the Japanese consumer electronics companies offered something similar. In general, the organizers seemed to be a branch from the programmable calculator family in the early 1980s, a move that was heavily influenced by Tandy at the time. (Remember Tandy was the 800-lb gorilla in the PC market circa 1980, staying there until the IBM PC started to gain traction around 1983, largely through Lotus 1-2-3.)
The problem isn't the voice-dialing with Sprint PCS (the recognition domain is pretty limited, so number recognition is quite good in many VoRec systems now), but rather "Claire, your electronic customer service representative".
In my experience (as recent as yesterday), Claire is both hard of hearing and pretty darn stupid. The most frustrating thing is that the entire system is designed to prevent you from ever getting to a real person, so if Claire can't help you, you're SOL. I did notice that after about a half-dozen failed attmepts to go through Claire, I got a different answer (I was dialing 611 to try to get them to do the PRL update they've been unable to do since August), this time asking for the last 4 digits of the SSN of the account holder. I'm not sure if this was programmed, or if Claire just happened to go off-line at that time.
I *really* hate companies that use IVR systems to *prevent* you from getting customer service. Sprint is probably the worst offender I've encountered at this, but then they have by far the worst customer service I've ever encountered in a service company. (Although Home Depot clearly takes the cake for worst customer service overall - they direct all complaints to "Ben Hill". Like Arlington Hewes, Mr. Hill does not exist - the phone is answered by a rotation of store assistant managers, who do not track or follow-up on complaints. It's essentially a well-desiged and deliberate bit-bucket for Home Depot's customer complaints. Once they have your money, they're not really interested in hearing if you have a problem - the height of poor customer service.)
I believe that Sun retains the right to sue kaffe for breach of license. not exactly open.
At the time Java came out, the world had never seen anything from any corporation that was as open as Sun made Java. From Day 1, the Java specification has been freely available for anyone to implement (the SPARC specification is, too - anyone can build SPARC chips.) The only thing you can't do once that's done is call it Java without Sun's permission, since they own the trademark. However, Sun generously allows others to use the Java trademark if a) they license Sun's own Java, or b) their implementation of the public spec is certified as meeting Sun's quality and functionality requirements (not hard, if it's built right.) That seems pretty reasonable to me.
Sun, like the rest of us, always has the right to sue anyone for any reason - they can sue you for sitting in a chair, if they want to. They won't win, and they'll tick off the judge, but they can...
I disagree with this conclusion. Why wait. If you wait until .NET is popular and widespread before starting a compatable project, then it will already be too late and you will be eternally playing catch-up. Think how much more accepted Linux might have been if it was also able run Windows applications well from the get-go.
.NET plans to do, and are set through an open process that cannot be easily poisoned like MS can, and likely will, do with .NET.)
This may be the most intelligent thing posted in this thread. It's both funny and very sad to watch Miguel de Icaza get gutted by the open source community, when it's clear he's the one thinking about the future. Miguel realizes (quite correctly) that 1) the GPL is totally unacceptable to many people because of its viral nature - in particular, it is completely incompatible with commercial adoption (by design), and 2) that Stallman's shrill position that "nothing is compatible with the GPL but the GPL" drives off a great many that might have considered the GPL.
While I disagree with the idea of Mono, Miguel is absolutely right in selecting the X11 license for Mono for the reasons stated above, and since CORBA never made sense for a desktop environment, it makes sense to leverage this work for GNOME. (I think instead of Mono, the open source community should embrace Java standards instead, which already do what
Miguel is making a bold move here to ensure that the open source community is not once again forced into irrelevancy by playing catch-up. He should be applauded and supported in this effort. This sort of enlightenment (groan) could cause me to reevaluate my opposition to Gnome...
for RMS and others LISP is the right foundation, but hasn't got so sophisticated envelopes yet. But LISP with Gnome, yum yum...
I can only assume you have never tried to actually *do* anything with LISP. I have (robotics code, in the late '80s), and I am firmly convinced that LISP is nothing but a gigantic academic sham intended to keep perpetual CS grad students in school forever. It is impossible to significant build real-world applications in a language that has little more than if-thens and a grotesque, error-prone syntax to boot.
I do agree with RMS on one thing (so for all you doubters, see, I can agree with him): Interpreted languages will eventually win out, but the ones that do will be far more like (and maybe even) Python than LISP. I think Java has indelibly altered the landscape too, since it blends (or at least attempts to) the advantages of interpretation with the IP protection of compilation. RMS hates the latter, but it's the basis of the 21st century economy, so it will not go away any time soon. (Nor should it, lest we kill the economic incentive that drives the huge investments required for technological progress - such progress cannot exist apart from a live and functioning technology-based market economy.)
Pre-production versions of the SonicBlue/FrontPath ProGear webpad ran Midori Linux, but that may have changed. (I tested one of the preproduction units and worked with the people doing the Linux work - I know they considered Slackware, too, and am not sure what they finally settled on.)
It was a nice unit in many ways: it even supported an internal 2.5" HD, so you could cram 20 GB or so into it if you wanted to. The major problem (at least with the early units) was that it was relatively fragile - not really tough enough to survive the treatment such a unit gets in the real world, and it nneded help on the input front, as most such Linux-based devices do. (Why the various companies working to do this don't pool their resources an do it RIGHT, I still don't know - as it is, everyone hacks up thier own pretty much useless rehash of bad on-screen keyboards and, if they're ambitious, text recognizers.)
Still, I want a webpad far more than I want a new laptop: The simple fact is that even a mediocre webpad is 10x more useful than a good laptop for the things most people do, especially if outfitted to provide "instant-on" access via wireless networking. (Sadly, the "instant-on" part is one area where CE has a decided advantage, even as totally brain-dead as it is...)
I think most of the problem here is that web pad manufacturers are trying to build devices that can be both a wireless browser *and* a laptop replacement, driving up costs and ensuring that they do neither job very well. A wireless, browser-only box (or even a remote Terminal Services box using Microsoft's RDP) would sell for those many of us that would like to treat the web more like a book and not be tied to a desk while reading. Sorry folks, but Microsoft's RDP is a FAR better protocol choice than something like VNC for a device like this. RDP is actually excellent, and it would be nice to see open source RDP servers and clients for other OSes. Try the two side by side, and you'll see what I mean. I've done just that with my Epods webpad: RDP is quite usable, while VNC is far slower than dialup (although in fairness the CE VNC client is pretty bad.)
for the moment, I thank him for the GPL since it's the only protection the public domain seems to have from the likes of Microsoft.
I get a little tired of the argument that the GPL is the only thing protecting freedom in software. We managed to get along quite nicely without it for many years, producing such vital things as X and even Unix itself without any viral licensing at all. The GPL is fundamentally flawed in several important respects, but mostly in that it's designed expressly to control derivative works, and make it impossible to use them without spreading the GPL virus.
Interestingly, more and more people are realizing this: Even Miguel de Icaza, who recently decided that Mono could not be produced under the GPL, so Ximian is using a variant of the X11 license (itself derived from the BSD license) instead.
By the way, copyrights and patents are strong expressly because they are supposed to be: changing them substantially (or eliminating them) would require not simply a change of law, but a Constitutional amendment, since these protections are writteninto the Constitution itself. That was not an accident or an oversight, and technology changes only the form, not the substance, of the argument.
Thanks for the pointers, I had never heard this before. Where can I get more informationon this chain of events?
But in another sense the fight between Microsoft and the GPL is a fight for survival.
Lord help us if those are our only two choices!
One is no better than the other from the point of view of promoting true freedom and avoiding ideological restictions on what may and/or must be done with the program or code in question. Both the Microsoft and the GPL license models *force* restrictions on how programs are to be used. Many of us find either sort of restriction unreasonable. The more I look at the deplorable behavior of the FSF crowd (the GPL is the ONLY valid license, and nothing else is compatible with it unless it is virtually identical - and resistance is futile, we'll bully you if you don't agree with us) the more convinced I am that the BSD folks are far closer to "right" - thier license and others like it are actually considerably more free than the GPL, which places onerous (and one hopes, ultimately unenforceable) restrictions on what may be done with programs in order to advance a blatantly communist/socialist political agenda.
(I know I will be flamed unmercifully for this, but the simple fact is that although RMS and the FSF deny their communist leanings, any thoughtful reading of what Stallman has written over the years make it clear that such a denial is just a ploy to deflect legitimate criticism. Stallman is fundamentally opposed to the very idea of capitalism in the modern world, and seeks to enforce his view of a communal software state through deliberate (even admitted) abuse of copyright protections. In typical Big Brother fashion, he calls his totalitarian scheme "freedom" - while nothing could be further from the truth. I'm constantly amazed at how few people realize that what the FSF is doing will ultimately bring about a situation far worse than we have today.)
This doesn't mean I'm abcking Microsoft, either: I don't want software controlled by either Microsoft *or* the FSF - if ever a "none of the above" vote was needed, this is the place!
This is clearly an aggregate composite (the "particulate" term is also accurate, but not one I've heard before, and I worked for years with automated manufacturing of advanced high-temperature aerospace composites - "aggregate composite" was always used in the books to describe concrete.)
More importantly, though, I haven't seen anyone zero in on the single thing that I would think would categorize an aggregate composite as a member of the "concrete" family: the use of portland cement or other finely powdered clay substance as the binder and activator. Concrete is generally ugly, but it's pretty amazing stuff. Much of the modern world could not exist without the use of something so strong and cheap as steel-reinforced concrete.
FWIW, I don't think this is Windows-only. Hibernation should work in any OS that understands how the APM or ACPI BIOs APIs work. Sadly, the only Linux I've found that even comes close to understanding these correctly is Corel. (They actually did a great deal of the "hard stuff" right - I hated to see them fade away before making their mark...)
(FWIW, I prefer to use the terms "suspend-to-RAM" (S2R or STR) and suspend-to-disk (S2D or STD), since there's no ambiguity about what's going on that way, as there can be with terms like sleep, suspend, snooze, and hibernate.)
I'll get modded down for this, but xah is absolutely right here. Slashdot, which has always walked the ragged edge of illiteracy, has lately become an absolute crapfest of linguistic carelessness and ignorance.
;-) As I think about it, I realize I may only be half joking: If there can be a lameness filter for submissions, surely there can be one of a different type for viewing, one that will help demoronize Slashdot by automatically modding down posts that confuse "than" and "then", use "alot", botch "there/their", etc. The real question is whether or not there would be more than a handful of posts left after such an filter was loosed...
Don't we care about the quality of what we're saying? If we don't, we shouldn't post at all. Perhaps this the the linguistic spawn of the grunge movement - the textual equivalent of the filthy jeans, stringy unwashed hair, odoriforous clothing, and replusive tatoos and piercings that were so common when jobs were plentiful, but thankfully seem to be much scarcer these days.
It would be nice to be able to filter posts that commit Englicide, something broader in scope than simply blocking Jon Katz.
English is arguably the world's best language: It has shamelessly borrowed from other languages as needed (or perhaps just wanted) and as a result it allows for an expressiveness and granularity of meaning simply not possible in other languages. English is enormously complex, but that complexity allows unmatched specificity in distinguishing shades of meaning, an attribute that turns out to be tremendously valuable in the real world.
English is a lot like Unix/Linux in this respect - Thomas Scoville wrote an excellent paper a few years ago on the subject of why a love of English is almost a prerequisite for mastering Unix: Elements of Unix Style. A love of English is perhaps one of the best predictors for aptitude in Unix-land. Those that can't (or don't) write well will never really develop fluency and the ablity to effortlessly "think in Unix" that marks the true masters.
On the other hand, the same things that give English its strength have produced inconsistencies that vex, flummox, and perplex non-English speakers, especially in the realm of pronunciation. Try this one out - I'd bet most US college students can't get through it without being tripped up at least once or twice (actually, given the general illiteracy of the college grads I've talked with lately, I'm certain of it): English is tough stuff. Perhaps I should make reading this part of my interview process. At least it would filter out those that think technical skills are the only thing required for success, and the others that fail to recognize that it's far easier to take a good communicator and teach them technical skills than the other way around...
Actually, such a thing did indeed happen at the beginning of the electric age, and it was entirely appropriate. The story behind those patents shaped our world in a non-trivial way:
After inventing the light bulb, Edison went on to patent pretty much all of the other components of his system to provide power generation (the famous "long-waisted Mary Ann" generators), electrical transmission, switching, etc. Of course, all these patents were for Edison's DC system. All these patents were appropriate, although some stole from the work of an employee anmed Nikola Tesla, whom Edison promised $50,000 if he would solve thorny problems with his DC distribution system. Edison did not pay as promised, claiming he was joking.
Tesla, though, soon had patents for his ingenious polyphase AC system - avoiding the troublesome commutators of DC motors was a BIG deal, and AC could actually be transmitted over reasonable distances without terrific losses. Tesla later licensed these patents exclusively to George Westinghouse for the then princely sum of $1 million PLUS a staggering royalty of $2.50 per horsepower of equipment sold. This would have made Tesla the richest man in the world, every year (even today, that royalty would be worth billions per year just for generators alone, back then it was unimaginable.)
In a financial power play (ugh) Westinghouse was forced into a financial corner by FUD from J.P. Morgan (who controlled Edison's patents.) The cash crunch made it clear that if he (and AC power) were to survive, the royalty agreement would have to be altered to avoid leaving Westinghouse too over-extended to survive long-term. Tesla famously tore up the contract granting hi the royalties making it clear that Westinghouse had treated him fairly and that Tesla preferred AC prevailing to all the money: The rest, as they say, is history...
This is not strictly speaking a W2K function. The real kicker here for Linux folks is that the easiest way to do hibernation in the modern world is to use ACPI, which Linux doesn't do very well. (See this week's LWN for a timely discussion.
APM BIOSes can also do this, but they aren't as standard: Often the implementation details are specific to the hardware. For instance, Phoenix BIOSes (at least as of two years ago, I haven't messed with this stuff much since then) tend to want to put the STD (suspend-to-disk) data in a special file in a Windows partition, while some others (Dell for sure, since I used to work this stuff for them) save this info in a special STD partition (type 84, IIRC) which is a more generic solution, but requires more knowledge when setting up the box. (When was the last time you thought you might need an STD partition when building your box? BTW, they should be at a minimum, PhysicalMemorySize + 1 MB for state info, video register settings, etc.)
No, my point is not at all short-sighted, just realistic...
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When the oilfields are gone, so is 'natural' gas.
That will be a very long time: at current forecast growth rates, well after hydrogen itself is no longer desirable. (100+ years - With conservation and more efficient use, such as turbines, the supply could last for centuries. Eliminating Pentiums alone would help tremendously...) In 1978, proven reserves of oil were 648 Billion barrels. By March 2000, the USGS estimated that world reserves were 2.2 TRILLION barrels, this same study also estimated natural gas and similar liquid reserves at another 2.3 TRILLION barrels, for a total supply increase of around 70X. It's also worth noting that this increased supply has resulted in a significant drop in real energy prices (except in the Peoples Republic of California, where Bozoid centralized planning and control prevent deregulation from working there as it has in Pennsylvania), a trend that will likely continue for many decades.
According to Robert L. Bradley, Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research, "probable resources of oil, gas, and coal are officially forecast to be 114, 200, and 1,884 years of present usage, respectively. Moreover, an array of unconventional fossil-fuel sources promises that, when crude oil, natural gas, and coal become scarcer (hence, more expensive) in the future, fossil-fuel substitutes may still be the best source of fuels to fill the gap before synthetic substitutes come into play." (Source: http://www.heartland.org/perspectives/automobilit
Also, keep in mind that Hydrogen is not an especially dense energy storage medium. Really good battery technologies could well exceed the energy density of LH2 without the problems associated with hydrogen.
I think you're also underestimating the rate of change in the next 50 years. 50 years from now tech won't be as different from our tech as our tech is from 1950's tech - it will be as different from our tech as our tech is from 1850's tech.
I think you're obviously so young that your perception has been warped by sci-fi: The rate of change has been *FAR* less than forecast for well over 100 years now. 50 years ago, except for the Internet, and computers sucking up endless man-hours that could be used to produce real value-add rather than the overhead of systems administration, things were pretty much as they are now. Some things have improved, many have gotten worse, and most things are about the same. I see no reason to believe that somehow the next 50 years will be all that much different, especially as Moore's law starts to falter and gate density hits the wall. There will likely be some big advances, but almost by definition, those are impossible to effectively predict. (I also believe the liklihood of another great depression is fairly high in the next 50 years, which will make the last one look like a cake walk, and set back economic progress for many decades - not pessimistic, just a recognition that major depressions have a stubborn tendency to crop up every 50-100 years, so both the timing and debt conditions are building up to the inevitable.)
Picking the long-term solution now seems sensible when you look at the ultimate cost of re-tooling all machinery for a new power source - do you want to do that once, or several times?
I and many others would argue we're more likely to do this again if we foolishly choose hydrogen power now, and tooling up for hydrogen would be REALLY expensive. No thanks.
Solar power and hydrogen power will not run out in the lifespan of the human species.
Solar is neither efficient nor environmentally friendly when deployed on the scale required to replace all fossil fuels, whether or not the additional stupid step of making hydrogen is pursued. (see below)
They will becom cheaper and cheaper and cleaner and cleaner. Picture floating factories refining hydrogen from the oceans using solar power - how ultimately efficient can that become?
The simple fact is this: there is no clean way to produce large quantities of hydrogen. Solar energy is free and "clean", but is not terribly energy-dense, and suffers from the problem of being "low quality" thermodynamically. Even if you could collect *all* the energy falling on a square yard of the Earth's surface at high noon and perpindicular latitude, you still don't get enough to run a microwave oven, and in reality, we can't even afford to get the pitiful 3% that Solar cells catch (sadly, they often wear out before they've paid for themselves.) Racheting that back to account for the terrible efficeincies involved in splitting water by electrolysis results in having such huge areas covered by solar collectors that they themselves begin to be a significant source of environmental damage. (To head off the usual argument at the pass: "But it's out in the middle of the ocean!" isn't a valid response here unless you buy that argument for toxic waste as well...)
My guess is that the future is likely to be far more electrical than hydrogen powered, but we'll have to wait and see. In any case, nothing much will (or should) cause a mass move to hydrogen for at least another 50 years or so. If efficiency and environmental concerns are really important, more effort should be put on the new diesel technologies, which are making impressive progress.
Real hybrids, not the wimpy and ridiculously expensive toys for yuppies we see now, could make a difference, espcially if powered by efficient microturbines.
Hydrogen power is an amazing thing, but it'd be something like suddenly replacing the staple foods in the world with chemical products - it dents a rather secure and stable part of our lifestyle and global economy.
/. and the halls of geovernment, Hydrogen is NOT a clean and cost-effective fuel - in fact, as hydrogen has to be produced today, it it neither as clean nor as cost effective as natural gas.
As I've pointed out in several posts lately in response to the "Hydrogen Economy Hysteria" sweeping both
The ONLY economical source for large quantities of hydrogen is natural gas - this is how almost all industrial hydrogen is made today. There is no technology on the foreseeable horizon that will change that. Almost all the hydrogen on this planet is tied up in water, an incredibly stable molecule that is notoriously difficult to separate. You *can* pull hydrogen out of either natural gas or water, but either is relatiely expensive and inefficient (water much more so.)
Also, remember that even once you've got it, if your're reacting the hydrogen in air (as opposed to pure oxygen), there will *still* be pollutants (oxides of nitrogen and such) regardless of whether you burn it or react it in a fuel-cell-type reactor. (As an aside, the process of cracking natural gas for hydrogen produces fairly large quantities of CO2...)
Since NG is already one of the cleanest-burning fuels known, you just have to wonder why everyone is pushing hydrogen as the answer: total energy efficiency is better and the environment is thus less damaged by simply using the natural gas directly, rather than first reforming it into hydrogen.
Hydrogen is NOT a good fuel with any technology that will be reasonable on a commercial scale in the next 50 years. Any claims that it's "clean" (the "only water" lie) fail to take into account the inherent energy loss and pollution created by the entire hydrogen manufacturing & use process. That pretty much makes Hydrogen irrelevant to any serious discussion of energy sources. (Of course, I don't expect that to stop environmentalist wackos and the wooly-thinking governments from pushing the whole ridiculous idea in their zeal to demonize all methods achievable with foreseeable technology...)
personally, I would like to see a BSD distro with ports and all, but with a linux kernel.
I agree. Although I think the BSD kernel is arguably superior, having a Linux kernel would allow the rapidly increasing number of commercial applications that run on Linux to work.
The big, ugly, problem for me (and almost anyone else that's really worked with and appreciated the real power of *real* Unix, as opposed to Linux) has always been the GNU utilities. They're acceptable, but just barely. GNU Documentation stinks when iut's there at all, at least partly because even most FSF-backers recognize that man pages are the expected form of OS docs and info pages are a hoppeless GNU-ism.
The GNU utilities insist on using their own hopelessly convoluted syntax, (especially the hideous "--" options, another perversity enforced by the gnazis that intentionally creates a gulf between the GNU wasteland and the civilization of the Unix/BSD world.
The BSD utilities are one of the best reasons to run BSD - they are orders of magnitude more stable and standard than their GNU hack counterparts. The code for many of these utilities is indeed old, but has not remained static: The BSD utilities provide a level of maturity that GNU will probably never reach, simply because structure and gols of their organization forces the BSD folks care about such things, while that of GNU seems to ensure that that level of care and attention will not be lavished on the code. In my mind, this is a distinction that is far too often overlooked.