Fiber is being rolled out in Denmark too, mostly in the country-side because the old electric utilities (owned by the residents) decided to have a go at it. So I too have been wondering about this. But if you have 3 TV sets/house streaming on demand in a good quality, you're going to need more than 20 Mbit/s. And with most of the ADSL solutions, it's a hit or miss whether they can actually deliver up to what they promise.
I have a friend who moved to the middle of a 300k residents city and his 20 Mbit ADSL couldn't actually deliver more than about 7 Mbit. So if his girlfriend is watching a SD channel, the line is so bogged down that it's more or less useless.
Also I have an online backup of our family photos, and working with even 40 GB of data over ADSL is sloooooow.
So more juice is definitely needed in the not-so-distant future.
Legislation published in July, 2011 removes these exemptions.
Apart from a few exemptions, RoHS2 covers all types of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) including some medical devices and monitoring and control equipment which have been exempt in the past. Previous exemptions to product from categories 8 and 9 will be gradually phased out,[16] with:[17]
- Cat. 8: Medical Devices - 3 years after publication - Cat. 8: In-vitro-Diagnostics - 5 years after publication - Cat. 9: Control and monitoring instruments - 3 years after publication - Cat. 9: Industrial control and monitoring instruments - 6 years after publication
The reason stated on Wikipedia for exempting these things in the first place was being cautious until enough experience had been collected, considering that they only constituted only a small part of the electronics garbage pile anyway.
Those who have not followed the development of competitive power markets over the past 35 years sometimes blame the collapse of new nuclear orders on a loss of public confidence and a surge in costly overregulation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. If these were the true causes, the remedies might indeed lie in more political support and a streamlined licensing process, but neither evidence nor experience supports this scenario.
Hey, if you are interested in nuclear power, do read the article Unknown Lamer links to: How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing. It has nothing to do with Japan, but offers an explanation to why there's little development of nuclear in the US. Excerpt:
In phase two, from roughly 1978 to 1990, rising nuclear construction costs met falling fossil fuel prices, emerging energy efficiency efforts, and the success of independent power generators enabled by the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. The result was an end to nuclear construction in the United States.
And:
Those who have not followed the development of competitive power markets over the past 35 years sometimes blame the collapse of new nuclear orders on a loss of public confidence and a surge in costly overregulation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. If these were the true causes, the remedies might indeed lie in more political support and a streamlined licensing process, but neither evidence nor experience supports this scenario.
It is easy to spout such nonsense out of ignorance, but there is a wealth of research that shows that the concept is perfectly sound. Moreover, they ran a test reactor for about five years and discovered no issues that were not easily solved. The only thing that remains is a solid engineering and development effort, and a government that will allow it to happen.
I'm sorry, but you are misinformed. Even without hippies etc., new nuclear plants are expensive. They are not competitive. Look it up if you don't believe me.
People are proposing new designs - but how's having to work out the kinks of new designs going to cut already high capital costs?
Nuclear energy in some places could be the sole source of energy if need be
Now where would that place be? I don't think it's anywhere on earth.
(Hint: a new nuclear power plant needs to deliver near constant output to be cost-effective, but consumption is far from constant. You can only use 100% nuclear with storage or heavy, heavy subsidies.)
New power plants are much cheaper to run, lower risk, lower cost of operating materials, lower waste, etc - but are simply unbuildable under the wests anti-everything regime due to the wonders of local/global pressure groups making regulators tie it up in so much red tape..
I'm not particularly against nuclear power plants (as long as I don't get to live near one) but you're downplaying capital costs. Operating costs etc. are irrelevant if the initial capital costs are too high. It's the same with fusion power - so the energy source may be cheap but unless the actual reactor ends up being cheaper to build than a fission reactor, are we really going to see any commercial fusion plants? No.
What you call stupidity is really economics 101. Old power plants have been paid of many years ago so are now virtually impossible to compete against. If you want to change that you need subsidies. That's true of many renewable power plants too.
You can claim that the costs are caused by unnecessary regulation. But AFAIK regulations are determined by nuclear engineers, not green nuts.
Also keep in mind that what is once built, tends to stay up for a long period. So shortsightedness in city planning can have long-lasting consequences.
I don't agree. Non-science includes things such as making up theories with no way of validating them, or denying evidence logically incompatible with the theory.
But nothing in the scientific method precludes studying a complex field displaying chaotic behaviour. Sure, it's not a walk in the park, and extrapolating results in an evolving society is probably not the safest bet. IMHO, that's where the problem is - you need some kind of safe guard or way of interpreting how realistic the predictions are, and it needs to be easy to understand, not some statistical mumbojumbo.
I've always liked the pattern matching/machine learning computer science way of thinking about this - set apart part of the data set for validation, build an explicit prediction model, train it and you get some easy-to-interpret results like "23% were predicted incorrectly, here's how they look like/are distributed". There's no "under these assumptions which we don't know to which degree hold, there's a number that should be below 5 according to a statistics professor speaking in a general context for the results to be valid".
Systemd is turning out nicely, they're getting the rough corners polished and one can start enjoying the extra features. For instance I had a runaway database server last week: systemctl kill bad.service - job done!
Look, the thing is that the rest of the platforms switched to new tech long ago. It was felt that GNOME had to do something serious about if it wasn't going to end up looking like Windows 95 does today.
Whether you like or not, most people prefer the interfaces of newer Windows releases to Windows 95 or XP for that matter.
That's the reason. It really isn't more complicated than that. You can loose the battle if you listen too much to your existing power users. Look at Kodak.
Fallback mode is going away in GNOME 3.8. But recognizing that some people miss the functionality provided by the old panel, there are going to be some official extensions to emulate some of it.
No, it's not going to be exactly the same. So those who like to complain can still do that.
But it's illogical because you don't allow companies to opt out of something that they've designed their business to avoid.
As the GP said: Suck it up. There's a balance between having people pay for what they use and having the government fund things. And that balance is not decided by you alone. Not paying is the same as going to a potluck and not bringing food. If you want to participate, you need to bring something even if you don't eat most of the stuff others bring. Otherwise people will dislike you.
Also, your world-view seems a bit shortsighted. Maybe your business doesn't use roads, but chances are your customers do. Same with courts - there needs to be consequences for the misdemeanors, and the fact that courts exist probably also affects your business relations even if you never see the inside of a court room.
You can't just pick individual elements out and pretend the world would be the same.
Huh? Last time I looked, the low wages in China and similar countries allow people around me to buy lots of crap really cheap. People here can easily afford 5-10 times the crap my parents could at similar age, to a large degree I think owing to low foreign wages.
We can discuss whether this is a good thing or not, but people do seem to care a lot about their latest iPhone.
If you're thinking about the number of poor people in the US, this is distribution problem that can actually be solved to some extent. But Americans in general seem to care more about keeping their crap to themselves and out of the hands of the government than doing something about this. This is speaking as a person from Denmark where we tax people to a much higher degree, but also have a lot less economic inequality and, apparently, happier people.
Now gmail and to some extent also video chat in Google are pretty impressive. But the rest of the Google Apps are pretty pathetic feature-wise compared to MS Office. Except for collaboration features that just work out of the box.
But the problem for Microsoft is that with more and more business communication never going through paper, many of these features are actually not terribly important compared to effortless collaboration, in fact their existence just make the products more complicated.
An exception here might be Excel and the support for extending Word/Excel/Outlook - some people integrate their workflow toolchain into Office rather than the other way around. But still, a sizable chunk of Microsoft's market could probably switch and be happier.
I guess that's why Microsoft is jumping on the cloud bandwagon too. Which strikes me as a smart idea, I do think that most organizations would probably prefer to continue to pay Microsoft, even if it's a bit more expensive.
Actually, it's a valid point. I don't know about the cost in the US, but I've seen figures for European nuclear plants to be built (we'll se if it actually happens), and they end up being a lot more expensive than wind turbines per kWh (probably similar for solar if you are a bit closer to equator than we are in Scandinavia) because the whole thing is so damn complex.
Now before someone chimes in with "base load", remember that consumption isn't flat like the output of a nuclear plant. Meaning that either you can only use nuclear power for a smaller part of the total required electricity, or you will have to have the power stations go idle (in the summer or in the winter or at night depending on location) meaning no income = higher cost per kWh. Or you need storage, just like you do with intermittent sources like solar and wind.
People laugh at the decision of the Germans to eventually close their nuclear plants and not replace them, but fact is that new nuclear is a lot more expensive than people seem to think. Perhaps because people look at old plants where the huge initial capital costs have long been sunk.
In all reality, cookies enable some pretty good behavior on web sites, but more often than not, are designed to track user behavior against their own interests.
That's just plain bullshit. Cookies were introduced to solve a real problem. The fact that people hang out on crappy gossip sites that get their income from shady ads is just unfortunate. Do you really think this law will cause those sites to change their behaviour? No, they just need to trick people into saying yes - and that should be easy given all the legitimate sites now need to ask too.
This directive is a big fail. I believe most European countries have privacy laws in place to crack down on those shady ad companies anyway, if the authorities really felt it was a big problem.
Look, the whole purpose of cookies is to store a bit of information so you can track the visitor through what is otherwise a stateless protocol. The idea is that you store a small id (the cookie) which you then match up to something you've stored in your database, e.g. the user account, or shopping basket, or whatever. That's what they are intended for.
Yes, there are other ways to track sessions, but they suck more.
Your whole rant smells of someone who has little knowledge of how HTTP works. For instance, how do you determine that "a visitor has left"? You can't. You can do some approximate hacks, but in reality what your model describes is simply not the way browsers work. Browsers don't send you a nice HTTP GOODBYE.
The directive is retarded because instead of targeting creepy misuse of personal information, the way it's written it's targeting a useful (for all parties) mechanism of the web. It's like nuking a whole town because you know there's a killer somewhere in it.
What happens when computers are able to out-think humans? I haven't an artistic bone in my body and mass media has made it so we don't need many artists anyway. What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
Well, that's easy. Either people invent new ways to create value that other people want to pay for, or we have in fact free (robotic) labour available, in which case everyone can sit on their arse and relax and focus on stuff they enjoy since nothing will really cost anything since the labour involved in making it was free.
I'm sorry, but you can't create your doomsday scenario of robotic overlords without also lowering the costs of everything dramatically.
It doesn't take a lot of human labor to fulfill our basic needs anymore
I don't believe this is actually true. As I understand things, unless the goods are scarce, the cost in a competetive market is in the end more or less the sum of the human labour that went into it.
When I look at my income, most of it is actually spent on what I consider basic needs - food, home, heating (I live in a Nordic country), taxes that go to medical aid and infrastructure for supporting society, etc.
Now you could argue that one can do with less, and that's certainly true. But we're far from a world where almost all the income goes to entertainment.
Also, what I think you're missing is well, obviously some kinds of jobs disappear, nobody denies that - but apparently new kinds of jobs then pop up after a while. I didn't live 100 years ago so it's not easy to think of examples. But I don't think jobs like "designer" or "professional soccer player" or "travel agency salesman" were widespread 100 years ago.
While your points are valid, what you're pointing out is mostly the difference between having commercial support or not. Debian is volunteer-run and hence best effort. Strictly speaking most commercial offerings are best effort when the shit really hits the fan also, but at least they can hire people to fix things for you. And keep supporting really old software.
Still, if you do not not lock yourself down in the manner you describe (I'm not saying that's the wrong way to do things, just saying it's not right for everyone), Debian is really good. Debian people are serious about server needs.
Slashdot Mirror
Fiber is being rolled out in Denmark too, mostly in the country-side because the old electric utilities (owned by the residents) decided to have a go at it. So I too have been wondering about this. But if you have 3 TV sets/house streaming on demand in a good quality, you're going to need more than 20 Mbit/s. And with most of the ADSL solutions, it's a hit or miss whether they can actually deliver up to what they promise.
I have a friend who moved to the middle of a 300k residents city and his 20 Mbit ADSL couldn't actually deliver more than about 7 Mbit. So if his girlfriend is watching a SD channel, the line is so bogged down that it's more or less useless.
Also I have an online backup of our family photos, and working with even 40 GB of data over ADSL is sloooooow.
So more juice is definitely needed in the not-so-distant future.
Quote from Wikipedia:
Legislation published in July, 2011 removes these exemptions.
Apart from a few exemptions, RoHS2 covers all types of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) including some medical devices and monitoring and control equipment which have been exempt in the past. Previous exemptions to product from categories 8 and 9 will be gradually phased out,[16] with:[17]
- Cat. 8: Medical Devices - 3 years after publication
- Cat. 8: In-vitro-Diagnostics - 5 years after publication
- Cat. 9: Control and monitoring instruments - 3 years after publication
- Cat. 9: Industrial control and monitoring instruments - 6 years after publication
The reason stated on Wikipedia for exempting these things in the first place was being cautious until enough experience had been collected, considering that they only constituted only a small part of the electronics garbage pile anyway.
This is discussed in TFA:
Those who have not followed the development of competitive power markets over the past 35 years sometimes blame the collapse of new nuclear orders on a loss of public confidence and a surge in costly overregulation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. If these were the true causes, the remedies might indeed lie in more political support and a streamlined licensing process, but neither evidence nor experience supports this scenario.
How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing
(I'm not going to repeat the long explanation afterwards backing up the above claims.)
Hey, if you are interested in nuclear power, do read the article Unknown Lamer links to: How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing. It has nothing to do with Japan, but offers an explanation to why there's little development of nuclear in the US. Excerpt:
In phase two, from roughly 1978 to 1990, rising nuclear construction costs met falling fossil fuel prices, emerging energy efficiency efforts, and the success of independent power generators enabled by the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. The result was an end to nuclear construction in the United States.
And:
Those who have not followed the development of competitive power markets over the past 35 years sometimes blame the collapse of new nuclear orders on a loss of public confidence and a surge in costly overregulation following the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. If these were the true causes, the remedies might indeed lie in more political support and a streamlined licensing process, but neither evidence nor experience supports this scenario.
It is easy to spout such nonsense out of ignorance, but there is a wealth of research that shows that the concept is perfectly sound. Moreover, they ran a test reactor for about five years and discovered no issues that were not easily solved. The only thing that remains is a solid engineering and development effort, and a government that will allow it to happen.
... and huge subsidies to pay for it.
Maybe that would be worth it, maybe not.
I'm sorry, but you are misinformed. Even without hippies etc., new nuclear plants are expensive. They are not competitive. Look it up if you don't believe me.
People are proposing new designs - but how's having to work out the kinks of new designs going to cut already high capital costs?
Nuclear energy in some places could be the sole source of energy if need be
Now where would that place be? I don't think it's anywhere on earth.
(Hint: a new nuclear power plant needs to deliver near constant output to be cost-effective, but consumption is far from constant. You can only use 100% nuclear with storage or heavy, heavy subsidies.)
New power plants are much cheaper to run, lower risk, lower cost of operating materials, lower waste, etc - but are simply unbuildable under the wests anti-everything regime due to the wonders of local/global pressure groups making regulators tie it up in so much red tape..
I'm not particularly against nuclear power plants (as long as I don't get to live near one) but you're downplaying capital costs. Operating costs etc. are irrelevant if the initial capital costs are too high. It's the same with fusion power - so the energy source may be cheap but unless the actual reactor ends up being cheaper to build than a fission reactor, are we really going to see any commercial fusion plants? No.
What you call stupidity is really economics 101. Old power plants have been paid of many years ago so are now virtually impossible to compete against. If you want to change that you need subsidies. That's true of many renewable power plants too.
You can claim that the costs are caused by unnecessary regulation. But AFAIK regulations are determined by nuclear engineers, not green nuts.
Sounds like you need a new freezer.
Great comment.
Also keep in mind that what is once built, tends to stay up for a long period. So shortsightedness in city planning can have long-lasting consequences.
I don't agree. Non-science includes things such as making up theories with no way of validating them, or denying evidence logically incompatible with the theory.
But nothing in the scientific method precludes studying a complex field displaying chaotic behaviour. Sure, it's not a walk in the park, and extrapolating results in an evolving society is probably not the safest bet. IMHO, that's where the problem is - you need some kind of safe guard or way of interpreting how realistic the predictions are, and it needs to be easy to understand, not some statistical mumbojumbo.
I've always liked the pattern matching/machine learning computer science way of thinking about this - set apart part of the data set for validation, build an explicit prediction model, train it and you get some easy-to-interpret results like "23% were predicted incorrectly, here's how they look like/are distributed". There's no "under these assumptions which we don't know to which degree hold, there's a number that should be below 5 according to a statistics professor speaking in a general context for the results to be valid".
Systemd is turning out nicely, they're getting the rough corners polished and one can start enjoying the extra features. For instance I had a runaway database server last week: systemctl kill bad.service - job done!
Look, the thing is that the rest of the platforms switched to new tech long ago. It was felt that GNOME had to do something serious about if it wasn't going to end up looking like Windows 95 does today.
Whether you like or not, most people prefer the interfaces of newer Windows releases to Windows 95 or XP for that matter.
That's the reason. It really isn't more complicated than that. You can loose the battle if you listen too much to your existing power users. Look at Kodak.
Fallback mode is going away in GNOME 3.8. But recognizing that some people miss the functionality provided by the old panel, there are going to be some official extensions to emulate some of it.
No, it's not going to be exactly the same. So those who like to complain can still do that.
But it's illogical because you don't allow companies to opt out of something that they've designed their business to avoid.
As the GP said: Suck it up. There's a balance between having people pay for what they use and having the government fund things. And that balance is not decided by you alone. Not paying is the same as going to a potluck and not bringing food. If you want to participate, you need to bring something even if you don't eat most of the stuff others bring. Otherwise people will dislike you.
Also, your world-view seems a bit shortsighted. Maybe your business doesn't use roads, but chances are your customers do. Same with courts - there needs to be consequences for the misdemeanors, and the fact that courts exist probably also affects your business relations even if you never see the inside of a court room.
You can't just pick individual elements out and pretend the world would be the same.
Huh? Last time I looked, the low wages in China and similar countries allow people around me to buy lots of crap really cheap. People here can easily afford 5-10 times the crap my parents could at similar age, to a large degree I think owing to low foreign wages.
We can discuss whether this is a good thing or not, but people do seem to care a lot about their latest iPhone.
If you're thinking about the number of poor people in the US, this is distribution problem that can actually be solved to some extent. But Americans in general seem to care more about keeping their crap to themselves and out of the hands of the government than doing something about this. This is speaking as a person from Denmark where we tax people to a much higher degree, but also have a lot less economic inequality and, apparently, happier people.
Now gmail and to some extent also video chat in Google are pretty impressive. But the rest of the Google Apps are pretty pathetic feature-wise compared to MS Office. Except for collaboration features that just work out of the box.
But the problem for Microsoft is that with more and more business communication never going through paper, many of these features are actually not terribly important compared to effortless collaboration, in fact their existence just make the products more complicated.
An exception here might be Excel and the support for extending Word/Excel/Outlook - some people integrate their workflow toolchain into Office rather than the other way around. But still, a sizable chunk of Microsoft's market could probably switch and be happier.
I guess that's why Microsoft is jumping on the cloud bandwagon too. Which strikes me as a smart idea, I do think that most organizations would probably prefer to continue to pay Microsoft, even if it's a bit more expensive.
Actually, it's a valid point. I don't know about the cost in the US, but I've seen figures for European nuclear plants to be built (we'll se if it actually happens), and they end up being a lot more expensive than wind turbines per kWh (probably similar for solar if you are a bit closer to equator than we are in Scandinavia) because the whole thing is so damn complex.
Now before someone chimes in with "base load", remember that consumption isn't flat like the output of a nuclear plant. Meaning that either you can only use nuclear power for a smaller part of the total required electricity, or you will have to have the power stations go idle (in the summer or in the winter or at night depending on location) meaning no income = higher cost per kWh. Or you need storage, just like you do with intermittent sources like solar and wind.
People laugh at the decision of the Germans to eventually close their nuclear plants and not replace them, but fact is that new nuclear is a lot more expensive than people seem to think. Perhaps because people look at old plants where the huge initial capital costs have long been sunk.
In all reality, cookies enable some pretty good behavior on web sites, but more often than not, are designed to track user behavior against their own interests.
That's just plain bullshit. Cookies were introduced to solve a real problem. The fact that people hang out on crappy gossip sites that get their income from shady ads is just unfortunate. Do you really think this law will cause those sites to change their behaviour? No, they just need to trick people into saying yes - and that should be easy given all the legitimate sites now need to ask too.
This directive is a big fail. I believe most European countries have privacy laws in place to crack down on those shady ad companies anyway, if the authorities really felt it was a big problem.
Look, the whole purpose of cookies is to store a bit of information so you can track the visitor through what is otherwise a stateless protocol. The idea is that you store a small id (the cookie) which you then match up to something you've stored in your database, e.g. the user account, or shopping basket, or whatever. That's what they are intended for.
Yes, there are other ways to track sessions, but they suck more.
Your whole rant smells of someone who has little knowledge of how HTTP works. For instance, how do you determine that "a visitor has left"? You can't. You can do some approximate hacks, but in reality what your model describes is simply not the way browsers work. Browsers don't send you a nice HTTP GOODBYE.
The directive is retarded because instead of targeting creepy misuse of personal information, the way it's written it's targeting a useful (for all parties) mechanism of the web. It's like nuking a whole town because you know there's a killer somewhere in it.
Huh, did you even read what you are replying to? The dude said
It's true that the LFTR reactors don't have the same failure modes as the pressurized light-water reactors
There's a really good graph at Silent PC Review with real measurements of power lost to heat:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/A_Better_Way_to_Compare_PSU_Efficiency
What happens when computers are able to out-think humans? I haven't an artistic bone in my body and mass media has made it so we don't need many artists anyway. What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
Well, that's easy. Either people invent new ways to create value that other people want to pay for, or we have in fact free (robotic) labour available, in which case everyone can sit on their arse and relax and focus on stuff they enjoy since nothing will really cost anything since the labour involved in making it was free.
I'm sorry, but you can't create your doomsday scenario of robotic overlords without also lowering the costs of everything dramatically.
It doesn't take a lot of human labor to fulfill our basic needs anymore
I don't believe this is actually true. As I understand things, unless the goods are scarce, the cost in a competetive market is in the end more or less the sum of the human labour that went into it.
When I look at my income, most of it is actually spent on what I consider basic needs - food, home, heating (I live in a Nordic country), taxes that go to medical aid and infrastructure for supporting society, etc.
Now you could argue that one can do with less, and that's certainly true. But we're far from a world where almost all the income goes to entertainment.
Also, what I think you're missing is well, obviously some kinds of jobs disappear, nobody denies that - but apparently new kinds of jobs then pop up after a while. I didn't live 100 years ago so it's not easy to think of examples. But I don't think jobs like "designer" or "professional soccer player" or "travel agency salesman" were widespread 100 years ago.
While your points are valid, what you're pointing out is mostly the difference between having commercial support or not. Debian is volunteer-run and hence best effort. Strictly speaking most commercial offerings are best effort when the shit really hits the fan also, but at least they can hire people to fix things for you. And keep supporting really old software.
Still, if you do not not lock yourself down in the manner you describe (I'm not saying that's the wrong way to do things, just saying it's not right for everyone), Debian is really good. Debian people are serious about server needs.
Perhaps your children wouldn't agree either?