They don't have the infrastructure to compete on a world wide scale with the big automakers.
Ah, see, but that's where it gets interesting: the big automakers don't have the infrastructure either to compete on a world-wide scale with Tesla on BEVs.
Apparently it's not unusual that it takes some time to work out the production line for a new car model. The difference here is that we a) get served an overly optimistic timeline, b) get to hear about it because news about Tesla always make it to the front page. It's too early to tell if it's going to pan out or not.
Linux has been losing its reliance on configuration files gradually over the years. These days, most of the popular packages are really install and forget.
It's a cheap Microsoft model, with a bit of curvature built into it, making Emacsing a bit easier. Probably lasts about 3-6 years. I like the way it feels, there's a lot of shitty keyboards out there (or at least used to be, last time I actually went out trying a lot of models, that's probably a decade ago though, hmmm).
So, yeah, I'd say they need replacing every few years, can probably last longer if you buy higher quality. Unless you're using one of the good old IBM tankers (CLICK, CLICK, CLICKCLICKCLICK), wouldn't be surprised if they could last a lifetime.
Is that an honest question? Please read up on what Wikipedia is and what the intended audience is.
I'll give you a hint - it's not a handbook for any specific field.
Having said that, having details is fine, as long as the concept itself is explained clearly. Clearly means that someone not familiar with the field can understand the explanation without first attending a graduate course on the subject.
That means that all of the electricity the company consumes in both its data centers and offices are provided by wind and solar energy.
It means that Google has purchased certificates and similar corresponding to their energy consumption. The data centers and offices are still running on power from coal and whatnot just like all their neighbours.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that Google as a great resource hog is investing in renewables. But the above "explanation" is spreading misinformation. For the above to be true, Google would have to run everything in isolated as isolated islands. That would be a lot more expensive.
- Cars: battery tech is improving exponentially at the moment, and it's no longer a question of how, but how soon
- Trucks: short range trucks are going to appear in a couple of years, long range are probably not as far off as you might think as people need to take breaks anyway
- Trains: batteries + electrification of some tracks - I've seen an analysis for passenger trains, and it's viable today, some train manufacturers are already looking into it
- Planes: You can produce renewable jet fuel today - it's more expensive, but the tech is there
IEA is known for persistently underestimating the rollout of renewable energi. Here's the latest analysis I know of.
Basically, they project a linear growth, even though they've themselves increased their estimates with several percents on each revision of their estimates, i.e. exponentially...
In other words, any discussion based on their forecasts is most likely going to be way off.
I, for one, think those are great, in the sense that they are efficient compared to the comparable stuff delivered by the professionel networks/producers. There's very little overhead.
Remember, we don't have to watch it. In that sense, it's even better than the old tv reality/talk shows.
Paid-under-the-table promotions are bad though, that part needs to go.
I talked to a lawyer about the data protection directives in EU not long ago, and according to her it's just a question of time.
The directive is actually clear - due to the whole NSA thing (gag orders and whatnot), US-based companies can't provide the necessary guarantees that personal data for EU citizens will be adequately protected.
Google has a form you can fill in that they claim is good enough. But according to her, it's pretty obvious it's not. People just pretend it is. They can keep pretending some time yet, but at some point a verdict is going land and set the precedent that it isn't.
Once that precedent is set, organizations in the EU will face a legal risk if they continue using the services. The new data protection directives to come into force next year has some relatively high fines associated.
I'm not an expert, but I'm of the impression that the EU directive is actually reasonable and acknowledges that law enforcement sometimes needs to access to information after having consulted a court - it's the situation with NSA and the almost total lack of control with that organization in the US that's the problem.
I think Stallman has a blind spot here. He's always been sceptical of porting efforts - I remember DJGPP back in the MSDOS/Windows 95 days. But the fact is that we're a bunch of people who used that ported software, eventually figured out that we were being second-class citizens and moved to a GPL'ed kernel and userspace.
This latest initiative is essentially free advertising. I think it's likely it will eventually move more people over to a free OS than it will keep people on Windows. Once you start depending on them, what is keeping people on Windows is mostly habit and the fact that it came pre-installed. (But yeah, sure, YMMV.)
Alt-tab behaviour is still stupid by default and probably will stay that way for a while, but it's one configuration option away to fix it (or an extension, can't remember the details anymore).
The rest works well. The launcher thing is especially nice - I hit the Windows key and type teCtrl+RET to get a terminal, for instance.
Otherwise it's unobtrusive and stays out of the way.
Won't argue about the study which may very well be flawed, but I don't think your last assertion is correct.
The data centers certainly aren't full of search histories. Let's say each person generates 1 KB of data per day in search history (with compression) - that's 1 TB/day to store data from 1 billion. What's the marginal cost of storing that data per year? 100,000 dollars?
One thing you need to keep in mind is that a company like Google ultimately isn't storing data because of the value it provides to their users. They are storing the data because of the value Google themselves derive from it.
This old data may be a treasure trove for Google, but only of marginal value to each user, and they would still fight very hard to keep it.
The best way to keep the data is of course to tell people how important it is to help us, and not tell us about any analysis that people may find disgusting.
The other day I read an example about data mining transactions in a bank. One of the goals was to identify alcoholics by looking at how much you're spending on booze or in bars. Telling, isn't it, how much you can infer about people just by looking at where they've been and what they've bought.
Examples like that makes you wonder what kind of labels we all might have inside the googleplex and similar.
Usually someone proposes an intricate cryptographic protocol as a fool-proof solution. But that's a great way to ensure that 99.9999% of the population will never be able to verify that the machine hasn't been tampered with.
You need something which is obviously correct. That is just difficult to do with complex machinery.
Ferries around here are beginning to look into batteries. The first is already being built, and It's expected that all short-range routes will have converted in the next couple of decades.
Container and cruise ships are a different game. I think they are going to need synthetic fuel for the foreseeable future.
Can't comment on your death count - I find it hard to believe that PV standing on the ground would have many deaths associated and the fact that it focuses on deaths while both Chernobyl and Fukushima forced a lot of people to evacuate is interesting, but nevermind.
With regards to your cost estimates, there's an interesting conundrum in the fact that EIA has put up similar numbers for years, while back in the real world very few nuclear plants are being built in the Western world. Meanwhile PV and wind turbines have seen massive growth, with exponentially falling costs.
In my backyard, the power company with most offshore wind turbines under its belt recently won a bid to build a farm of offshore wind turbines some years from now. Their bid was a subsidy of zero. How can they compete when according to EIA's chart, they are more expensive than almost anything else?
No math or model is better than its assumptions.
Here's a prediction based on trends that are actually happening: Unless a revolution actually happens with nuclear tech, you won't find any commercial nuclear plants 50 years from now in the US. They're being shut down, one-by-one, and not being replaced, with a few exceptions. I think at some point the industry will just collapse. Westinghouse Nuclear went bankrupt a couple of months ago.
I don't think GP is right, though. There is anti-trust legislation in the US too. I just think these American businesses are more succesful at lobbying in the US and hence seem to avoid getting in the spotlight.
It's the same in Europe - take the VW emission scandal as an example. Huge fine across the Atlantic, but what about in Germany? It's depressing.
Another thing you need to keep in mind about Europe: Despite the efforts of EU, Europe is still just a bunch of independent countries, each with its own language. Most prefer languages other than English.
It really takes a lot of work to localize not just the product but also marketing and sales. So I think companies in the US just by the virtue of a big, relatively homogeneous home market has better opportunities to grow larger.
The reason they haven't gone after Apple is perhaps related to the fact that Apple has always been a niche player, although that niche at times has been pretty large.
This will be a lesson to anyone who wants to try to monetize an open source model.
And the lesson would be that if you try to do that, you shouldn't follow up with closed-source apps and strong-arming tactics from a dominant market position?
How do you know that repairability is so much more expensive? For the products I've repaired, small design changes would make it much easier to do common repairs.
It might also make them easier and faster to assemble in the first place. Some of the designs I've seen feel like the designer never actually worked with the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have the infrastructure to compete on a world wide scale with the big automakers.
Ah, see, but that's where it gets interesting: the big automakers don't have the infrastructure either to compete on a world-wide scale with Tesla on BEVs.
Apparently it's not unusual that it takes some time to work out the production line for a new car model. The difference here is that we a) get served an overly optimistic timeline, b) get to hear about it because news about Tesla always make it to the front page. It's too early to tell if it's going to pan out or not.
Not directly.
It might be due to lack of natural light, though.
Linux has been losing its reliance on configuration files gradually over the years. These days, most of the popular packages are really install and forget.
Even Debian isn't that hard to install anymore.
Search for payment gateway. It's an old concept.
I replace mine every few years.
It's a cheap Microsoft model, with a bit of curvature built into it, making Emacsing a bit easier. Probably lasts about 3-6 years. I like the way it feels, there's a lot of shitty keyboards out there (or at least used to be, last time I actually went out trying a lot of models, that's probably a decade ago though, hmmm).
So, yeah, I'd say they need replacing every few years, can probably last longer if you buy higher quality. Unless you're using one of the good old IBM tankers (CLICK, CLICK, CLICKCLICKCLICK), wouldn't be surprised if they could last a lifetime.
Is that an honest question? Please read up on what Wikipedia is and what the intended audience is.
I'll give you a hint - it's not a handbook for any specific field.
Having said that, having details is fine, as long as the concept itself is explained clearly. Clearly means that someone not familiar with the field can understand the explanation without first attending a graduate course on the subject.
It's also one of those things we can't do much about.
Recently saw a suggestion from NASA JPL to try to tap some of the heat to stabilize it.
That means that all of the electricity the company consumes in both its data centers and offices are provided by wind and solar energy.
It means that Google has purchased certificates and similar corresponding to their energy consumption. The data centers and offices are still running on power from coal and whatnot just like all their neighbours.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that Google as a great resource hog is investing in renewables. But the above "explanation" is spreading misinformation. For the above to be true, Google would have to run everything in isolated as isolated islands. That would be a lot more expensive.
Transportation sector:
- Cars: battery tech is improving exponentially at the moment, and it's no longer a question of how, but how soon
- Trucks: short range trucks are going to appear in a couple of years, long range are probably not as far off as you might think as people need to take breaks anyway
- Trains: batteries + electrification of some tracks - I've seen an analysis for passenger trains, and it's viable today, some train manufacturers are already looking into it
- Planes: You can produce renewable jet fuel today - it's more expensive, but the tech is there
IEA is known for persistently underestimating the rollout of renewable energi. Here's the latest analysis I know of.
Basically, they project a linear growth, even though they've themselves increased their estimates with several percents on each revision of their estimates, i.e. exponentially...
In other words, any discussion based on their forecasts is most likely going to be way off.
Eh, did you read your link? It says that they choose to become a state in November 2012 and then asked the US to enable them to become one.
I think a better question is, why have they been stalled since?
I, for one, think those are great, in the sense that they are efficient compared to the comparable stuff delivered by the professionel networks/producers. There's very little overhead.
Remember, we don't have to watch it. In that sense, it's even better than the old tv reality/talk shows.
Paid-under-the-table promotions are bad though, that part needs to go.
I talked to a lawyer about the data protection directives in EU not long ago, and according to her it's just a question of time.
The directive is actually clear - due to the whole NSA thing (gag orders and whatnot), US-based companies can't provide the necessary guarantees that personal data for EU citizens will be adequately protected.
Google has a form you can fill in that they claim is good enough. But according to her, it's pretty obvious it's not. People just pretend it is. They can keep pretending some time yet, but at some point a verdict is going land and set the precedent that it isn't.
Once that precedent is set, organizations in the EU will face a legal risk if they continue using the services. The new data protection directives to come into force next year has some relatively high fines associated.
I'm not an expert, but I'm of the impression that the EU directive is actually reasonable and acknowledges that law enforcement sometimes needs to access to information after having consulted a court - it's the situation with NSA and the almost total lack of control with that organization in the US that's the problem.
Agreed.
I think Stallman has a blind spot here. He's always been sceptical of porting efforts - I remember DJGPP back in the MSDOS/Windows 95 days. But the fact is that we're a bunch of people who used that ported software, eventually figured out that we were being second-class citizens and moved to a GPL'ed kernel and userspace.
This latest initiative is essentially free advertising. I think it's likely it will eventually move more people over to a free OS than it will keep people on Windows. Once you start depending on them, what is keeping people on Windows is mostly habit and the fact that it came pre-installed. (But yeah, sure, YMMV.)
Well, it's pretty minimalistic, it gets out of the way. I can run my terminals and Emacs and a browser. What more do you want?
Yes, a couple of the defaults are annoying, but you can change them. There's a big set of extensions.
You should give it a try, maybe you'd be surprised.
GNOME's working fine.
Alt-tab behaviour is still stupid by default and probably will stay that way for a while, but it's one configuration option away to fix it (or an extension, can't remember the details anymore).
The rest works well. The launcher thing is especially nice - I hit the Windows key and type teCtrl+RET to get a terminal, for instance.
Otherwise it's unobtrusive and stays out of the way.
Won't argue about the study which may very well be flawed, but I don't think your last assertion is correct.
The data centers certainly aren't full of search histories. Let's say each person generates 1 KB of data per day in search history (with compression) - that's 1 TB/day to store data from 1 billion. What's the marginal cost of storing that data per year? 100,000 dollars?
One thing you need to keep in mind is that a company like Google ultimately isn't storing data because of the value it provides to their users. They are storing the data because of the value Google themselves derive from it.
This old data may be a treasure trove for Google, but only of marginal value to each user, and they would still fight very hard to keep it.
The best way to keep the data is of course to tell people how important it is to help us, and not tell us about any analysis that people may find disgusting.
The other day I read an example about data mining transactions in a bank. One of the goals was to identify alcoholics by looking at how much you're spending on booze or in bars. Telling, isn't it, how much you can infer about people just by looking at where they've been and what they've bought.
Examples like that makes you wonder what kind of labels we all might have inside the googleplex and similar.
It's easy to build one.
But how do you know it hasn't been tampered with?
Usually someone proposes an intricate cryptographic protocol as a fool-proof solution. But that's a great way to ensure that 99.9999% of the population will never be able to verify that the machine hasn't been tampered with.
You need something which is obviously correct. That is just difficult to do with complex machinery.
Ferries around here are beginning to look into batteries. The first is already being built, and It's expected that all short-range routes will have converted in the next couple of decades.
Container and cruise ships are a different game. I think they are going to need synthetic fuel for the foreseeable future.
Turns out the alternatives are not commercially viable and are technologically problematic.
You are ignoring the fact that this is what Musk is trying to solve. But will it work? We don't know. It's beginning to look like we'll see, though.
These are not small problems, these are problems requiring huge industrial facitlities.
If it wasn't for Elon Musk's track record, it would seem ridiculous. But his track record says he'll keep hammering on the problem.
Can't comment on your death count - I find it hard to believe that PV standing on the ground would have many deaths associated and the fact that it focuses on deaths while both Chernobyl and Fukushima forced a lot of people to evacuate is interesting, but nevermind.
With regards to your cost estimates, there's an interesting conundrum in the fact that EIA has put up similar numbers for years, while back in the real world very few nuclear plants are being built in the Western world. Meanwhile PV and wind turbines have seen massive growth, with exponentially falling costs.
In my backyard, the power company with most offshore wind turbines under its belt recently won a bid to build a farm of offshore wind turbines some years from now. Their bid was a subsidy of zero. How can they compete when according to EIA's chart, they are more expensive than almost anything else?
No math or model is better than its assumptions.
Here's a prediction based on trends that are actually happening: Unless a revolution actually happens with nuclear tech, you won't find any commercial nuclear plants 50 years from now in the US. They're being shut down, one-by-one, and not being replaced, with a few exceptions. I think at some point the industry will just collapse. Westinghouse Nuclear went bankrupt a couple of months ago.
Eh, so Siemens, Nokia and all these companies listed here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
could never happen?
I don't think GP is right, though. There is anti-trust legislation in the US too. I just think these American businesses are more succesful at lobbying in the US and hence seem to avoid getting in the spotlight.
It's the same in Europe - take the VW emission scandal as an example. Huge fine across the Atlantic, but what about in Germany? It's depressing.
Another thing you need to keep in mind about Europe: Despite the efforts of EU, Europe is still just a bunch of independent countries, each with its own language. Most prefer languages other than English.
It really takes a lot of work to localize not just the product but also marketing and sales. So I think companies in the US just by the virtue of a big, relatively homogeneous home market has better opportunities to grow larger.
Do you have any evidence of those claims?
The EU has in fact gone after Microsoft.
The reason they haven't gone after Apple is perhaps related to the fact that Apple has always been a niche player, although that niche at times has been pretty large.
This will be a lesson to anyone who wants to try to monetize an open source model.
And the lesson would be that if you try to do that, you shouldn't follow up with closed-source apps and strong-arming tactics from a dominant market position?
How do you know that repairability is so much more expensive? For the products I've repaired, small design changes would make it much easier to do common repairs.
It might also make them easier and faster to assemble in the first place. Some of the designs I've seen feel like the designer never actually worked with the thing.