and i dont have to fill out a form every 60 days. i download the updates every night from one of their mirrors. i setup an apt repository and automate everything from there. you guys were probably referring to redhats up2date service. redhat is a business, and they have no obligation to provide their up2date service for free. i havent seen anything indicating they are going to deny access to their rpm's, and i dont think that $60 a year for their up2date service is alot to ask if you are not willing to update the computers yourself.
redhat provides alot to the Free software (in the gnu sense) community by employing many programmers and releasing the source code to the community. the parent comment comparing them to microsoft is ridiculous. what does skaeight do for the community aside from making gross predictions and unrealistic comparisions.
That being said, I still think bumping 8.1 to 9.0 will have a negative impact for Linux. These version wars make Linux as a whole come off as childish and immature, and we haven't seen any technical reasoning behind why this version will be 9.0. So what else can we
redhat generally increases the major version number when they break binary compatability. i would assume this version number increase has little to do with version wars and more to do with new versions of gcc, glibc, etc. i personally like their versioning scheme because i think it has little to do with increasing the version for the sake of competing the version numbers of other distros.
Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. Rest assured, however, that we verify prices of products sold and shipped by Amazon.com as part of our shipping procedures.
wouldnt it be easier, with all of these fancy computers and stuff, to verify prices at order time? couldnt you run a check when a price is entered into the system that looks for stuff like discounts of 75% or more of the wholesale cost? this could raise a red flag and alert the necessary people. how hard is it to catch stuff like this? or is there already stuff to catch this stuff and these things just happened to slip through?
interesting article analyzing bushes stance on...
on
A Hydrogen-Based Economy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
hydrogen powered cars. it also addresses alot of the issues associated with a shift of this nature:
"A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free." President Bush said these words during his State of the Union address, introducing the FreedomFUEL proposal--which is really how the White House spells it. The president wants to spend $1.2 billion over the next five years to research the production of hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline in automobiles.
Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell" motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants, including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.
The attraction of hydrogen is great, since hydrogen-based transportation would both be environmentally benign and reduce the need for the United States to import petroleum. But Bush's proposal joins a new convention of rhapsodizing about hydrogen-powered transportation--Jeremy Rifkin numbers among current hydrogen zealots--while skipping over the small matter of where we get the hydrogen. Worse, the White House plan offers a long-term distraction from a short-term need: While the administration dreams big about our hydrogen-powered future, it does little to improve fuel-economy standards today.
here are many impediments to a future in which fuel-cell automobiles dominate America's roadways. What form--gaseous, liquid, or mixed with metallic dust to prevent explosion should there be an accident--would the hydrogen we pump into our cars take? How would the hydrogen be moved in commercial quantities to those filling stations? Could average motorists pump hydrogen themselves, considering it is now handled only by specialists? But these are engineering questions and presumably can be answered.
Unfortunately, a cost-effective answer to the question of how to obtain hydrogen may prove more elusive than answers to questions about how to handle it. At first glance, this issue would seem simple. After all, our world contains gargantuan amounts of hydrogen--two-thirds of the oceans, for instance, are made up of this element. But the pure form of hydrogen needed to power fuel-cell cars does not occur naturally on Earth, where hydrogen is chemically bound to other elements, such as oxygen in the case of the oceans. And, while the stars contain an almost inexpressible amount of hydrogen in its pure form, stellar material will not be on sale at your local filling station anytime soon, or ever.
Because pure hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, any pure hydrogen for use as fuel must be manufactured. Today, pure hydrogen is most often made using natural gas as a feedstock, but that means fossil fuels are still being consumed: Basically, the process turns a fossil fuel, methane, into something that seems not to be a fossil fuel, hydrogen. Pure hydrogen can also be manufactured using petroleum or coal, which of course are the very fossil fuels whose grip we wish to loosen. And, while pure hydrogen has been manufactured from agricultural products--plants contain hydrogen bound as carbohydrates--at the research level, it remains to be seen whether this could work commercially. Enviros rhapsodize about making hydrogen from seawater. But there's a catch: Making hydrogen from water requires loads of electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that is obtained, and something--be it a coal-fired power plant or an atomic reactor--must provide the electricity. Indeed, the big misconception about hydrogen is that it is a "source" of energy. Pure hydrogen is not an energy source, except to stars. As it will be used in cars or to power homes and offices, hydrogen--like a battery--is an energy medium, a way to store power that has been obtained in some other way. Hydrogen makes an attractive energy medium because its "fuel-cycle" calculations--the sum of all steps of manufacture and use--show reductions in greenhouse gases compared with any automotive fuel burned today. But hydrogen is going to be an expensive energy medium and, in the early decades at least, will be a medium either for natural gas, a fossil fuel, or for atomic power.
Today, the most practical means to make pure hydrogen is a process called "steam reforming" of natural gas. A natural-gas molecule has one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen; "reforming" strips off the carbon atoms, leaving pure hydrogen. But not only is a fossil fuel--natural gas--the raw material of this process, energy must be expended for the "reforming" itself, meaning a net loss of BTUs. Using Department of Energy estimates, the White House says pure hydrogen from natural gas is currently "four times as expensive to produce as gasoline."
Applied engineering and commercial-scale production would surely bring down the price. The most optimistic credible projection I have seen comes from Jesse Ausubel, a specialist in "industrial ecology" at the Rockefeller University, who thinks commercial-scale hydrogen made from natural gas could be produced for about 40 percent more than the price of gasoline. That's within striking distance of a good deal. But there is a catch to this catch: Optimistic estimates for hydrogen from natural gas are based on the current low selling price of natural gas. Significant new demand for natural gas might raise its price. And, while natural-gas supplies are steady at the moment, who knows what the effect on supply would be if hydrogen manufacturing caused natural-gas consumption to skyrocket?
So maybe the hydrogen should be made from coal or petroleum. Fuel-cycle calculations show that using coal or petroleum to manufacture hydrogen would lead to some reduction in greenhouse gases but not to a big cut; moreover, we'd still be digging coal and importing petroleum. Maybe hydrogen should be made from agricultural products-- "biomass," in energy lingo. But biomass feedstocks might be grown using fertilizer, which is made mainly from fossil fuels, and again the fuel-cycle calculations show only a moderate gain in pollution reduction for the large capital costs entailed in establishing an agriculture-hydrogen economy. (All hydrogen schemes, it should be noted, involve large capital costs.) Owing to these concerns, John McCarthy, a Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science, has written, "The large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar electricity." Otherwise, it's just repackaging fossil fuels.
But solar power on the scale required is far from practical. It is possible to imagine a green-dream-come-true energy cycle that uses solar collectors to generate electricity to crack hydrogen out of water: zero greenhouse gases and endlessly renewable. For the moment, solar collectors are much too expensive. The Worldwatch Institute, a much-admired, left-leaning environmental organization, recently rated sources of electricity by combining their capital cost and true social cost--that is, taking into account "externalities" such as pollution and entanglements with the Gulf states. Solar power finished last, much more expensive than coal-generated power, even when coal's external costs are factored in. An indicator: Solar-derived electricity currently wholesales for around ten times as much per kilowatt-hour as coal-fired watts.
Even if the price of solar power fell by orders of magnitude, there would be the not-so-little problem of where to put the solar collectors. To replace the petroleum we use to power our cars with hydrogen split from water might entail doubling America's electricity-generating capacity. Doing that with solar collectors could require covering a land area roughly the size of Connecticut with photovoltaic cells. In theory, the collectors could be put in space, where sunlight has eight times as many watts per square meter as on the ground and where no one's land need be taken. Figures in a recent study in Science magazine suggested that doubling the electricity-production capacity of the United States would require placing approximately 40 photovoltaic collector dishes, each the size of Manhattan, into orbit. Even if capital cost were no object and society possessed the technical means to build objects in space the size of Manhattan, such a project would take a century.
hich brings us to atomic power, the energy source everyone loves to hate. In theory, lots of new atomic stations could be built to make electricity to manufacture hydrogen, and the stations could use new, "inherently safe" reactors designed so that they cannot melt down. (In inherently safe reactors, the atomic chain reaction is initiated in such a way that, if safety systems fail, the chain breaks; researchers have deliberately turned off all cooling and safety systems of inherently safe prototypes and nothing happens.) But political opposition to atomic reactors is intense, and capital costs here would be high as well. Some estimates also suggest that, if a significant number of new reactors were put into service, uranium--currently plentiful--would become scarce after a few decades. This could be avoided by building "breeder" reactors that make more fuel than they consume. But breeders work by breeding plutonium, and most nations, including the United States, have suspended construction of breeder reactors because such machines would increase the risk of plutonium being diverted for nuclear weapons production.
Many researchers continue to believe that "fusion" reactors, which mimic the internal process of the sun, someday will be perfected. Over the long term, fusion reactors might solve all global-energy questions, oddly, by using hydrogen to make hydrogen! In a fusion reactor, tiny amounts of hydrogen isotope are fused into helium, generating heat. (The sun fuses hydrogen into helium for its luminescence, and nuclear bombs get much of their force from fusing a small amount of hydrogen isotope.) Heat from a fusion reactor would drive turbines to make electricity; the electricity would crack hydrogen out of water in large quantities; the hydrogen would power cars or be turned back into electricity in individual fuel cells in people's homes. Though a hydrogen-to-hydrogen energy cycle might sound like a perpetual-motion machine, it could end up being the technology that someday makes global-energy needs a solved issue.
But this is all blue sky because fusion reactors barely function in the laboratory--there is nothing remotely close to a commercial prototype. And, even if a grad student ran from a laboratory tomorrow yelling, "Eureka!" and clutching the secret of an unlimited-energy-fusion future, it would be another century-long project to convert the world to an energy economy based on machines that simulate the centers of stars.
Realistically, these concerns dictate that, for the next few decades, hydrogen would be manufactured either from natural gas or by using power from a new generation of atomic reactors. The most cost-effective combination, some researchers think, might be natural gas heated directly by atomic reactors, whose high operating temperatures turn out to be ideal for the reforming of hydrogen from natural gas. But that means our miracle zero-emission hydrogen will be produced from fossil fuels via an intermediate stop at a nuclear reactor--not exactly what the Sierra Club had in mind.
All these drawbacks do not rule out hydrogen as a fuel, they merely represent problems to be overcome. Hydrogen is sure to enter common use someday, perhaps during the lifetimes of children now being born. After all, a century ago, smart engineers and economists would have sworn it physically impossible--to say nothing of impossibly expensive--for the world to consume 75 million barrels of oil per day, as we do today, at affordable prices. But there is almost no chance hydrogen will make a dent in energy-use patterns during a two-term Bush administration. Even the White House concedes that the earliest a significant number of service stations could offer pure hydrogen would be 2020.
i'm a chemical engineer, and i'm working on a phd in a process control research group. as a result there is alot of process simulation and optimization. for the simulation stuff we use matlab exclusively. i would rather use octave, but my boss makes this decision. for solving lp and milp's we use cplex from ilog. i'm looking into gams right now for minlp stuff.
This is a good thing. I know, I know, M$==bad and all of that, and yes, you have to activate the product - break out the tinfoil hats! But this sort of DRM is on your side - as in, people can't break into your files.
people cannot break into my files now. that is what pgp is for. ms could of course use a standard like pgp, but then they woldnt be able to lock out their competitors. i'm sorry. propritery drm is not in my best interests or yours. by using their formats you are preventing yourself from viewing your own doucments without their software-you are doing yourselves no favors.
wow that's cool. i wasn't aware they were coming out with a new album. it's a shame it's copy protected, i wont be able to use it since i dont own a normal cd player.
actually the parent comment says that higher specs implies higher sales. since counter strike "has been doing so well", that would lead me to conclude that it has high specs.
not that i agree or disagree with this, i just dont think you understood it.
well it's not a commercial site, so i'm assuming this is the part of the faq you are referring to:
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date! /. could simply provide the cache and a link to the original site. this way people can visit the original site if they want to. then when the story is archived delete the cache and links to the cache. this would leave the archive story with only the original link to the site.
The problem of no one is responsible for problems, damage and other stuff.
so if windows damages your files then you can hold microsoft responsible?
you cannot because if you read their eula they cannot be held responsible for damages done by their product.
when there is a bug in their software, are they required to provide a patch?
i'm afraid not, you have to wait for patches, just like you do with open source applications.
the difference here is that you can fix the problems with oss applications yourself or hire someone to do it for you. this is not possible with microsofts business model. if there were enough people interested in the patches for gnome 2.2 they should have forked it.
you say that opensource will never be programed the way the customer wants it. linux running on the new ibm hardware, openoffice being deployed in many organizations across the planet, motorola using linux as their os for their phones , are all examples of opensouce fullfilling the customers needs. not all customers have the same needs, and microsoft will have customers for a while to come.
as software becomes a commodity item, businesses will start to consider using oss to reduce development costs. if you want to sell a pvr, you're not really concerned with making money on the software. if you can find a cheap opensouce platform to build on and get your product to market for less money in less time it's going to be hard for the propritary solutions to compete.
opensource applications will get that polish it needs from companies who want to take advantage of the large code base available. these will be companies who need software to power their hardware-which they intend on making their money.
i'm on your side. instead of complaining about the companies not providing the service, perhaps we should form our own public database. granted we would need the help of many lawyers to do this.
re:... but some of the information is out of date, and the tricks suggested by people a year ago may be no longer needed today.
this is something you are going to face when you are considering a technology that changes rapidly. a book on the subject isnt going to change the dynamic nature of linux.
A GPL violation is a GPL violation. If you use GPL code in your product, the modified code and anything it touches must be made freely available to *anyone* who asks.
if i take gpl'ed code and modify it for internal use do i have to release the code to any person who asks for it?
your comment would suggest yes, but that is not the case here.
from the gpl " For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. " so if i have not recieved the software, then i'm not entitiled to the source. this entitlement comes with the software and not by the action of modification. in other words you must have the product in order to have the rights associated with that software.
actually they only have to honor that to people who have the software they produced in which the gpl'ed software was used to make. so if you dont have a copy of their software, you dont have the right to ask for them to make you a copy. now if you buy a copy of their software, download it off their site (i dont know if they offer free downloads), etc. then you have the right to ask for a copy.
so everyone with a copy of their software that was compiled with source that contained gpled code should feel free to ask for a copy of the source.
actually, i would think that it does. if he was in charge of network security, that wouldn't limit him to just microsoft.com. it would probably include microsofts entire network. part of protecting a network includes making sure computers that are only supposed to be accessable internally are in fact not accessable from the outside. another part of protecting the network would include making sure all of the computers on your network are patched and up to date.
classically what would happen is that the government will pay for the infrastructure and then it will be handed over to private ownership. the price paid by the purchaser is normally a small fraction of the original cost. so basically the government takes tax payers money, builds stuff, gives the stuff to some old rich white man.
i'm using wget to mirror that directory. eventually it will get the images. once it's fetched the images, it will update the html to reflect that the images have been mirrored. it's just that the site is so slow right now, it's taking a while.
(A smart professor will adjust what he's teaching according to the quality of his students; if they're consistently getting everything he should consider expanding the course to cover more material.)
i'm ok with this as long as you place a lower limit on how far you can drop the bar. most classes, in engineering at least, have a set of topics that must be covered to consider the class to have been completed. as long as your adjustment doesnt compromise this minimum set of topics then i agree with you completely.
perhaps the mozilla guys could be could be persuaded to make key bindings userconfigurable-ala.rc file in/etc or the users home directory.
then if standards happened to be established, this could be implemented at the user level. this way mozilla, konqueror, etc could have their own by default, which could be overwritten by the user. then we could encorporate this into the linux standard base and all of the distros could ship with the defaults in/etc and/etc/skel.
or perhaps i'm just smoking crack:). if we could get it included into the lsb then it might be enough of a shove to push standards compliance.
would it be prudent for developers who work on applications similar in nature (eg web browsers) to get together and decide on a standard for things like this?
integration issues such as this are a useability issue that i think will seriously effect the success of linux on the desktop.
dont take this as a negative slice towards kde, since communication works both ways, its just a suggestion. it's also a problem which occurs in all applications: email clients, editors, etc. it would just make sense for developers to work together on this and come up with a default set of key bindings that is standard across all applications.
apart from the constructive criticism above, the screenshots 3.1 looks very sharp. i look forward to the tabbed browsing in konqueror among other things. good job to all of you.
Slashdot Mirror
and i dont have to fill out a form every 60 days. i download the updates every night from one of their mirrors. i setup an apt repository and automate everything from there. you guys were probably referring to redhats up2date service. redhat is a business, and they have no obligation to provide their up2date service for free. i havent seen anything indicating they are going to deny access to their rpm's, and i dont think that $60 a year for their up2date service is alot to ask if you are not willing to update the computers yourself.
redhat provides alot to the Free software (in the gnu sense) community by employing many programmers and releasing the source code to the community. the parent comment comparing them to microsoft is ridiculous. what does skaeight do for the community aside from making gross predictions and unrealistic comparisions.
That being said, I still think bumping 8.1 to 9.0 will have a negative impact for Linux. These version wars make Linux as a whole come off as childish and immature, and we haven't seen any technical reasoning behind why this version will be 9.0. So what else can we
redhat generally increases the major version number when they break binary compatability. i would assume this version number increase has little to do with version wars and more to do with new versions of gcc, glibc, etc. i personally like their versioning scheme because i think it has little to do with increasing the version for the sake of competing the version numbers of other distros.
Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. Rest assured, however, that we verify prices of products sold and shipped by Amazon.com as part of our shipping procedures.
wouldnt it be easier, with all of these fancy computers and stuff, to verify prices at order time? couldnt you run a check when a price is entered into the system that looks for stuff like discounts of 75% or more of the wholesale cost? this could raise a red flag and alert the necessary people. how hard is it to catch stuff like this? or is there already stuff to catch this stuff and these things just happened to slip through?
car talk
"A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy,
which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With
a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome
obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first
car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and
pollution-free." President Bush said these words during his State of the Union
address, introducing the FreedomFUEL proposal--which is really how the White
House spells it. The president wants to spend $1.2 billion over the next five
years to research the production of hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline in
automobiles.
Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell"
motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants,
including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of
hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the
world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a
hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked
Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by
something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.
The attraction of hydrogen is great, since hydrogen-based transportation
would both be environmentally benign and reduce the need for the United States
to import petroleum. But Bush's proposal joins a new convention of
rhapsodizing about hydrogen-powered transportation--Jeremy Rifkin numbers
among current hydrogen zealots--while skipping over the small matter of where
we get the hydrogen. Worse, the White House plan offers a long-term
distraction from a short-term need: While the administration dreams big about
our hydrogen-powered future, it does little to improve fuel-economy standards
today.
here are many impediments to a future in which fuel-cell automobiles
dominate America's roadways. What form--gaseous, liquid, or mixed with
metallic dust to prevent explosion should there be an accident--would the
hydrogen we pump into our cars take? How would the hydrogen be moved in
commercial quantities to those filling stations? Could average motorists pump
hydrogen themselves, considering it is now handled only by specialists? But
these are engineering questions and presumably can be answered.
Unfortunately, a cost-effective answer to the question of how to obtain
hydrogen may prove more elusive than answers to questions about how to handle
it. At first glance, this issue would seem simple. After all, our world
contains gargantuan amounts of hydrogen--two-thirds of the oceans, for
instance, are made up of this element. But the pure form of hydrogen needed to
power fuel-cell cars does not occur naturally on Earth, where hydrogen is
chemically bound to other elements, such as oxygen in the case of the oceans.
And, while the stars contain an almost inexpressible amount of hydrogen in its
pure form, stellar material will not be on sale at your local filling station
anytime soon, or ever.
Because pure hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, any pure hydrogen
for use as fuel must be manufactured. Today, pure hydrogen is most often made
using natural gas as a feedstock, but that means fossil fuels are still being
consumed: Basically, the process turns a fossil fuel, methane, into something
that seems not to be a fossil fuel, hydrogen. Pure hydrogen can also be
manufactured using petroleum or coal, which of course are the very fossil
fuels whose grip we wish to loosen. And, while pure hydrogen has been
manufactured from agricultural products--plants contain hydrogen bound as
carbohydrates--at the research level, it remains to be seen whether this could
work commercially. Enviros rhapsodize about making hydrogen from seawater. But
there's a catch: Making hydrogen from water requires loads of
electricity, far more electricity than the energy value of the hydrogen that
is obtained, and something--be it a coal-fired power plant or an atomic
reactor--must provide the electricity. Indeed, the big misconception about
hydrogen is that it is a "source" of energy. Pure hydrogen is not an energy
source, except to stars. As it will be used in cars or to power homes and
offices, hydrogen--like a battery--is an energy medium, a way to store
power that has been obtained in some other way. Hydrogen makes an attractive
energy medium because its "fuel-cycle" calculations--the sum of all steps of
manufacture and use--show reductions in greenhouse gases compared with any
automotive fuel burned today. But hydrogen is going to be an expensive energy
medium and, in the early decades at least, will be a medium either for natural
gas, a fossil fuel, or for atomic power.
Today, the most practical means to make pure hydrogen is a process called
"steam reforming" of natural gas. A natural-gas molecule has one atom of
carbon and four atoms of hydrogen; "reforming" strips off the carbon atoms,
leaving pure hydrogen. But not only is a fossil fuel--natural gas--the raw
material of this process, energy must be expended for the "reforming" itself,
meaning a net loss of BTUs. Using Department of Energy estimates, the White
House says pure hydrogen from natural gas is currently "four times as
expensive to produce as gasoline."
Applied engineering and commercial-scale production would surely bring
down the price. The most optimistic credible projection I have seen comes from
Jesse Ausubel, a specialist in "industrial ecology" at the Rockefeller
University, who thinks commercial-scale hydrogen made from natural gas could
be produced for about 40 percent more than the price of gasoline. That's
within striking distance of a good deal. But there is a catch to this catch:
Optimistic estimates for hydrogen from natural gas are based on the current
low selling price of natural gas. Significant new demand for natural gas might
raise its price. And, while natural-gas supplies are steady at the moment, who
knows what the effect on supply would be if hydrogen manufacturing caused
natural-gas consumption to skyrocket?
So maybe the hydrogen should be made from coal or petroleum. Fuel-cycle
calculations show that using coal or petroleum to manufacture hydrogen would
lead to some reduction in greenhouse gases but not to a big cut; moreover,
we'd still be digging coal and importing petroleum. Maybe hydrogen should be
made from agricultural products-- "biomass," in energy lingo. But biomass
feedstocks might be grown using fertilizer, which is made mainly from fossil
fuels, and again the fuel-cycle calculations show only a moderate gain in
pollution reduction for the large capital costs entailed in establishing an
agriculture-hydrogen economy. (All hydrogen schemes, it should be noted,
involve large capital costs.) Owing to these concerns, John McCarthy, a
Stanford University professor emeritus of computer science, has written, "The
large-scale use of hydrogen depends on using either nuclear or solar
electricity." Otherwise, it's just repackaging fossil fuels.
But solar power on the scale required is far from practical. It is
possible to imagine a green-dream-come-true energy cycle that uses solar
collectors to generate electricity to crack hydrogen out of water: zero
greenhouse gases and endlessly renewable. For the moment, solar collectors are
much too expensive. The Worldwatch Institute, a much-admired, left-leaning
environmental organization, recently rated sources of electricity by combining
their capital cost and true social cost--that is, taking into account
"externalities" such as pollution and entanglements with the Gulf states.
Solar power finished last, much more expensive than coal-generated
power, even when coal's external costs are factored in. An indicator:
Solar-derived electricity currently wholesales for around ten times as much
per kilowatt-hour as coal-fired watts.
Even if the price of solar power fell by orders of magnitude, there would
be the not-so-little problem of where to put the solar collectors. To replace
the petroleum we use to power our cars with hydrogen split from water might
entail doubling America's electricity-generating capacity. Doing that with
solar collectors could require covering a land area roughly the size of
Connecticut with photovoltaic cells. In theory, the collectors could be put in
space, where sunlight has eight times as many watts per square meter as on the
ground and where no one's land need be taken. Figures in a recent study in
Science magazine suggested that doubling the electricity-production
capacity of the United States would require placing approximately 40
photovoltaic collector dishes, each the size of Manhattan, into orbit. Even if
capital cost were no object and society possessed the technical means to build
objects in space the size of Manhattan, such a project would take a century.
hich brings us to atomic power, the energy source everyone loves to
hate. In theory, lots of new atomic stations could be built to make
electricity to manufacture hydrogen, and the stations could use new,
"inherently safe" reactors designed so that they cannot melt down. (In
inherently safe reactors, the atomic chain reaction is initiated in such a way
that, if safety systems fail, the chain breaks; researchers have deliberately
turned off all cooling and safety systems of inherently safe prototypes and
nothing happens.) But political opposition to atomic reactors is intense, and
capital costs here would be high as well. Some estimates also suggest that, if
a significant number of new reactors were put into service, uranium--currently
plentiful--would become scarce after a few decades. This could be avoided by
building "breeder" reactors that make more fuel than they consume. But
breeders work by breeding plutonium, and most nations, including the United
States, have suspended construction of breeder reactors because such machines
would increase the risk of plutonium being diverted for nuclear weapons
production.
Many researchers continue to believe that "fusion" reactors, which mimic
the internal process of the sun, someday will be perfected. Over the long
term, fusion reactors might solve all global-energy questions, oddly, by using
hydrogen to make hydrogen! In a fusion reactor, tiny amounts of hydrogen
isotope are fused into helium, generating heat. (The sun fuses hydrogen into
helium for its luminescence, and nuclear bombs get much of their force from
fusing a small amount of hydrogen isotope.) Heat from a fusion reactor would
drive turbines to make electricity; the electricity would crack hydrogen out
of water in large quantities; the hydrogen would power cars or be turned back
into electricity in individual fuel cells in people's homes. Though a
hydrogen-to-hydrogen energy cycle might sound like a perpetual-motion machine,
it could end up being the technology that someday makes global-energy needs a
solved issue.
But this is all blue sky because fusion reactors barely function in the
laboratory--there is nothing remotely close to a commercial prototype. And,
even if a grad student ran from a laboratory tomorrow yelling, "Eureka!" and
clutching the secret of an unlimited-energy-fusion future, it would be another
century-long project to convert the world to an energy economy based on
machines that simulate the centers of stars.
Realistically, these concerns dictate that, for the next few decades,
hydrogen would be manufactured either from natural gas or by using power from
a new generation of atomic reactors. The most cost-effective combination, some
researchers think, might be natural gas heated directly by atomic reactors,
whose high operating temperatures turn out to be ideal for the reforming of
hydrogen from natural gas. But that means our miracle zero-emission hydrogen
will be produced from fossil fuels via an intermediate stop at a nuclear
reactor--not exactly what the Sierra Club had in mind.
All these drawbacks do not rule out hydrogen as a fuel, they merely
represent problems to be overcome. Hydrogen is sure to enter common use
someday, perhaps during the lifetimes of children now being born. After all, a
century ago, smart engineers and economists would have sworn it physically
impossible--to say nothing of impossibly expensive--for the world to consume
75 million barrels of oil per day, as we do today, at affordable prices. But
there is almost no chance hydrogen will make a dent in energy-use patterns
during a two-term Bush administration. Even the White House concedes that the
earliest a significant number of service stations could offer pure hydrogen
would be 2020.
i'm a chemical engineer, and i'm working on a phd in a process control research group. as a result there is alot of process simulation and optimization. for the simulation stuff we use matlab exclusively. i would rather use octave, but my boss makes this decision. for solving lp and milp's we use cplex from ilog. i'm looking into gams right now for minlp stuff.
i suppose timmothy dosent know the slashdot policy about linking to sites that require registration, except of cours the ny times.
This is a good thing. I know, I know, M$==bad and all of that, and yes, you have to activate the product - break out the tinfoil hats! But this sort of DRM is on your side - as in, people can't break into your files.
people cannot break into my files now. that is what pgp is for. ms could of course use a standard like pgp, but then they woldnt be able to lock out their competitors. i'm sorry. propritery drm is not in my best interests or yours. by using their formats you are preventing yourself from viewing your own doucments without their software-you are doing yourselves no favors.
wow that's cool. i wasn't aware they were coming out with a new album. it's a shame it's copy protected, i wont be able to use it since i dont own a normal cd player.
actually the parent comment says that higher specs implies higher sales. since counter strike "has been doing so well", that would lead me to conclude that it has high specs.
not that i agree or disagree with this, i just dont think you understood it.
well it's not a commercial site, so i'm assuming this is the part of the faq you are referring to:
/. could simply provide the cache and a link to the original site. this way people can visit the original site if they want to. then when the story is archived delete the cache and links to the cache. this would leave the archive story with only the original link to the site.
/. does to smaller sites is irresposible.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
what
you cannot because if you read their eula they cannot be held responsible for damages done by their product.
i'm afraid not, you have to wait for patches, just like you do with open source applications.
the difference here is that you can fix the problems with oss applications yourself or hire someone to do it for you. this is not possible with microsofts business model. if there were enough people interested in the patches for gnome 2.2 they should have forked it.
you say that opensource will never be programed the way the customer wants it. linux running on the new ibm hardware, openoffice being deployed in many organizations across the planet, motorola using linux as their os for their phones , are all examples of opensouce fullfilling the customers needs. not all customers have the same needs, and microsoft will have customers for a while to come.
as software becomes a commodity item, businesses will start to consider using oss to reduce development costs. if you want to sell a pvr, you're not really concerned with making money on the software. if you can find a cheap opensouce platform to build on and get your product to market for less money in less time it's going to be hard for the propritary solutions to compete.
opensource applications will get that polish it needs from companies who want to take advantage of the large code base available. these will be companies who need software to power their hardware-which they intend on making their money.
there's pictures
is the same as
there is pictures
since pictures is plural and he is talking about the current story, it should be.
there are pictures
or the contraction
there're pictures
i'm on your side. instead of complaining about the companies not providing the service, perhaps we should form our own public database. granted we would need the help of many lawyers to do this.
might not valid in a year or so.
... but some of the information is out of date, and the tricks suggested by people a year ago may be no longer needed today.
re:
this is something you are going to face when you are considering a technology that changes rapidly. a book on the subject isnt going to change the dynamic nature of linux.
i got your point, and i thought it was funny...
perhaps you could inform this poor soul also.
A GPL violation is a GPL violation. If you use GPL code in your product, the modified code and anything it touches must be made freely available to *anyone* who asks.
if i take gpl'ed code and modify it for internal use do i have to release the code to any person who asks for it?
your comment would suggest yes, but that is not the case here.
from the gpl
"
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.
"
so if i have not recieved the software, then i'm not entitiled to the source. this entitlement comes with the software and not by the action of modification. in other words you must have the product in order to have the rights associated with that software.
actually they only have to honor that to people who have the software they produced in which the gpl'ed software was used to make. so if you dont have a copy of their software, you dont have the right to ask for them to make you a copy. now if you buy a copy of their software, download it off their site (i dont know if they offer free downloads), etc. then you have the right to ask for a copy.
so everyone with a copy of their software that was compiled with source that contained gpled code should feel free to ask for a copy of the source.
trolltech makes qt. they have different licensing schemes depending on what you are using it for.
actually, i would think that it does. if he was in charge of network security, that wouldn't limit him to just microsoft.com. it would probably include microsofts entire network. part of protecting a network includes making sure computers that are only supposed to be accessable internally are in fact not accessable from the outside. another part of protecting the network would include making sure all of the computers on your network are patched and up to date.
classically what would happen is that the government will pay for the infrastructure and then it will be handed over to private ownership. the price paid by the purchaser is normally a small fraction of the original cost. so basically the government takes tax payers money, builds stuff, gives the stuff to some old rich white man.
i'm using wget to mirror that directory. eventually it will get the images. once it's fetched the images, it will update the html to reflect that the images have been mirrored. it's just that the site is so slow right now, it's taking a while.
i'm working on it right now. it's slower than dirt :). i emailed the guy and asked for a tar ball. when it's done it will be here:. pdrap.org/photo_albums/columbia_disaster/
http://sage.che.pitt.edu/~harrold/tmp/shuttle/www
it's going to be a while though.
(A smart professor will adjust what he's teaching according to the quality of his students; if they're consistently getting everything he should consider expanding the course to cover more material.)
i'm ok with this as long as you place a lower limit on how far you can drop the bar. most classes, in engineering at least, have a set of topics that must be covered to consider the class to have been completed. as long as your adjustment doesnt compromise this minimum set of topics then i agree with you completely.
perhaps the mozilla guys could be could be persuaded to make key bindings userconfigurable-ala .rc file in /etc or the users home directory.
/etc and /etc/skel.
:). if we could get it included into the lsb then it might be enough of a shove to push standards compliance.
then if standards happened to be established, this could be implemented at the user level. this way mozilla, konqueror, etc could have their own by default, which could be overwritten by the user. then we could encorporate this into the linux standard base and all of the distros could ship with the defaults in
or perhaps i'm just smoking crack
would it be prudent for developers who work on applications similar in nature (eg web browsers) to get together and decide on a standard for things like this?
integration issues such as this are a useability issue that i think will seriously effect the success of linux on the desktop.
dont take this as a negative slice towards kde, since communication works both ways, its just a suggestion. it's also a problem which occurs in all applications: email clients, editors, etc. it would just make sense for developers to work together on this and come up with a default set of key bindings that is standard across all applications.
apart from the constructive criticism above, the screenshots 3.1 looks very sharp. i look forward to the tabbed browsing in konqueror among other things. good job to all of you.