They don't have to worry about shielding and containment as much as civilian powerplants. In a submarine, in particular, the bottom portion of the reactor is barely shielded by more than the hull. The ocean does the job just fine.
Most of the time in port, you're connected to shore power so the reactor isn't running.
Even without the reactor "running" there is still heat and radiation from radioactive decay.
So when building individual units - bigger = more power for your money. Economics.
Which presumably offsets the costs involved with fueling the reactor. In order to replace the fuel in a reactor you need to shut it off and have it cool down (both in terms of heat and radio-isotopes).
The thing which I can not fathom about the American nuclear power policy is that they are encouraged to make HUGE reactors. (Had to look this up for nuclear physics class at one point) The US Navy has an almost perfect record with identical, small reactors.
Maybe it's cheaper to make one large reactor than a set of small ones...
Thought-experiment time. I represent the Fascist White-Power neo-Nazi rock band "Kill All the Mud-People". While I'm against almost everything Frank Zappa stood for, and for almost everything he disdained, I rather like some of his tunes, so I decide to re-name my band "Frank Zappa Would Agree: Kill All the Mud-People", and put up a big photoshop of Frank Zappa's face centered on a Nazi flag.
In a free society anyone can then look at you and say "what an idiot". Things would get disturbing if you first obtained the copyright from Gail Zappa. You might also be able to claim "fair use" under the parody exemption.
Really, to smother Frank Zappa's name and image under a mountain of lawyers like that seems kind of odd, especially considering how much disdain the man himself had for the music industry's choke-hold on everything.
No doubt this is only one of many cases of current copyright holders declaring a Jihad against infringers, where the actual creator dosn't have a problem (or wouldn't have a problem were they still alive). Whilst some creative people are "only in it for the money" for other's it is more important to either be recognised or even simply bring enjoyment to people.
If you start installing applications without forethought, you get the same situation as with ever other OS -- things break. Windows does this. Linux does this. The BSDs do this.
It's possible for an incompetent admin to mess up just about any system. The problem with Windows is that it is often also possible for a user to send things completly fubar. The same also applies to the likes of Lindows which attempt to emulate Windows using Linux.
Sorry, the real world doesn't work like you imagine: name me a commercial product that hasn't been released broken. Few truthfully acknowledge it. Are you going to get the source from them if they don't have the time/will to fix it themselves?
If a proprietary software company claims "it's a feature not a bug" then you are SOL. With OSS, even if all of the developers try the same kind of thing, you have the ability to get things fixed. As you are not paying for EULAs, so called "support", you probably have the money available to pay to get the software to do what you want/need it to do.
The world's biggest software company treats its customers as unpaid beta testers, charges top dollar for support (if you could call it that) and makes it difficult to research previous issues with a product by moving the webpage address regularly.
In a monopoly situation the supplier has power over the customer. In a free market it's the customer who is in a position of power. With proprietary software a free market is virtually impossible, since copyright law is applied in such a way as to ensure that one entity can control access to source code. With OSS a monopoly is virtually impossible, since copyright law is applied in such a way that access to source code is always freely available to any interested party.
Emotions and "feelings" should have nothing to do with making logical, factual business decisions. I don't want to buy software for my business because someone feels "emotionally attached" to it. That's absurd!
Quite a bit of "marketing" is about getting people emotionally attached to a product. If software purchase were entirely down to "making logical, factual business decisions" then there would be considerably less proprietary software in use in business. It is certainly less than logical for any company to accept the situation of a supplier dictating to them, through EULAs, how to operate their business. Or to continue throwing "good money after bad".
Emotions cloud your ability to make impartial decisions.
Hence marketing methods such as wineing and dineing executives, offering "free" samples, etc.
"Rabid zealotry" is in the eye of the beholder. What looks like frothing to you may look like intelligent advocacy to someone who isn't fearful of the message being delivered.
This statement could just as easily apply to Microsoft's "marketing" without changing a single thing. Proprietary software frequently comes with it's own brand of "zealots".
Thus you are taken in by the fiction of "a guarantee that someone will work with me"
You probably get exactly what the fine print says you will get. Did it mention that the "someone" will actually be any more use to you than a random member of the public though?
Moreover, with open source you don't need support -- you have the code. Support is critical when you are at the mercy of a proprietary code vendor and are legally barred from helping yourself.
The real barrier appears to be one of a perception that a certain kind of "support" is universally needed with all software. Without the understanding that OSS allows support mechanisms which are impossible with proprietary software.
Yeah right, In over 30 years in the computer industry, the ONLY commercial companies that has ever delivered any support other than putting me on hold, listening to a computer play the paino with one finger, till I find something better to do, are IBM and S3.
Possibly people who rave about telephone helplines either never use them or never use them for actual technical support (as opposed to user support).
When I complained to IBM I had a problem with OS/2 device drivers, the next day I had 3 men in gray suits at my desk, one from IBM Texas, one from IBM UK, and one from IBM Germany, saying "you have a problem? We will get someone to fix it!" - and they did!
Thus in only one case out of however many did you get something where it could be claimed that the money was well spent.
OTOH, S3 put me into a conference call with three people on crack who barely spoke English, and did not understand the problem.
Even less useful than listening to music played down the telephone. A set of CDs would probably be far cheaper than the "support" contract, in some cases it's possible that phone call would cost more than a CD...
By contrast, when I had a problem with kde, it was fixed in days, and I got an e-mail from Mr Kulow asking me to try the new version.
One other important thing is that there tend to be fewer barriers to contacting the people who actually wrote the software with OSS. Even if you do get to talk to a person on a "support line" you have no idea how much they know. It's quite possible that you could end up talking to someone who knows less about the software than you do...
This is totally unacceptable to the business world, and you should know that by now. With a company, I have a phone number, a support contract, and a guarantee that someone will work with me to answer my question.
You may have that or you may have a guarantee that if you call the phone number it will be answered. Between certain times it might even be answered by a human being:) As with an EULA you might need to consult a lawyer to find out what you are actually getting.
With newsgroups and IRC channels, someone might answer my question but only if I'm willing to wait, surf a lot, or put up with a few hundred "what a st00pid newbie you are" responses that invariably get made.
Oddly people do use these techniques with proprietary software, even in cases where they have a "support contract". Anyway how is being told "please hold" or "I'll call you back" not "waiting"?
A guy teaching us Novell told us that he had done work for a company - and that all of a sudden they wanted a server, 'a what' he said ? They meant an NT server. They didn't realise that they already had a netware server that had been running for a couple of years. They had totally forgotten it:) I bet they never forgot their NT server.
A bit like the case of a Netware server getting walled up. It was working so well that it took years for anyone to notice:)
Installing or tweaking Linux is still incredibly cumbersome, and next to impossible for someone who hasn't used it for years. This doesn't mean MS is perfect by any stretch, but they've done a much better job to help the user configure things.
But often a hopless job of enabling a sysadmin to configure things such that a user does not need to (or indeed cannot) mess around with settings.
Political OSS zealots who fabricate or exaggerate MS problems or OSS benefits,
There is plenty of zealotry in the proprietary software camp. Quite a bit of it has been comming from both MS and SCO recently.
Or the company could hire a programmer or two full-time to add features to open-source projects that are 'almost, but not quite' exactly what they need,
And to make sure that the software continues to be updated to suit your companies needs, should they change in future, in a way which follows your timescale.
for less money than it would cost to keep the company on the Microsoft Upgrade Treadmill.
Especially the lawyers needed to go through changing EULAs with a fine toothed comb:)
Why do you need a roadmap? If you're a proprietary software company, your roadmap tells your customers where your product is going to be years from now.
Which may or may not be where the user wants to be...
With open source, those same features could be available to you in weeks or even days from the time you express interest in such a feature.
Especially if your expression of interest includes paying people to make it do what you want it to. Altering software to fit your business is likely to be easier and cheaper than altering your business to fit software.
What corporate executives need to realize is that if they find an open source solution that's "almost" right, but just lacks one or two things, it may be because no one's expressed interest, and a quick email to the developer's mailing list and they're likely to see a beta version of the requested features
Or an honest assement of how easy it might be to do whatever.
before the proprietary vendor has even had time to respond to the message.
If they are selling software as an "off the shelf" product then they might not even respond at all.
IMHO you are confusing corporate users and home users. Without doubt, home users are disappointed in many of the unpolished sides of OSS.
IME this is a common problem with quite a few "Slashdotters". Whilst end user administration might be a good thing on a home PC it is a very bad thing on a workstation.
Also, users do not typically change system settings without contacting IT support.
Doing so being likely to get them shouted at or even looking for another job.
Most Windows boxes are so locked down that the only thing you are allowed to change are things like desktop background picture and IE home page. And I believe this is a good thing.
In the corporate environment end users being able to install software is generally a very bad thing. Installing unlicenced software or malware is not good for business.
It seems that Microsoft is all to happy to give people the privalige of getting a licensed copy of their (Microsoft's) software for a great deal of money, money that most people cannot afford, and then they give them a very restrictive EULA...
Interestingly the original article considers open source licences a "barrier". But fails to mention that they typically entail no restriction on how the software is used (only a tiny minority of business redistributes software to third parties) and are typically written in fairly simple language whereas proprietary software tends to come with EULAs, which do attempt to control how a piece of software is used and likely to require a lawyer to understand (especially if they don't acknowlage the idea of corporations as "legal people".)
So how long do I have to wait before I can report Darl McBride and Bill Gates?
More intersting is that when you do it will show the social status of these people. Depending on if they get dragged through the mill (Plebean) or the witch-hunt stops (Patrician).
Every witch hunt that we've had has mostly caught non-witches, because people figure out pretty quickly that this is a good way to make life difficult for people that they don't like. The actual subversives (whoever they might be that decade) have been hardly affected, of course.
It wouldn't suprise me if there are actually examples of "witches" being the ones actually running "witch hunts". Given that they can be such a good way to get rid of political opponents, especially if the result is capital punishment...
A well known author had a character set an essay entitled 'Witch-Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss'.
I think the federal government, in cooperation with Microsoft, should put together a database of all known information about every single person in the world, not limited to terror information. This database would be used by governments, as well as public and private companies, to deny services to persons for a variety of reasons.
Except that they wouldn't want a database on every person.
For example, you might find yourself unable to eat at any restaurant in the entire world because you are not a good tipper. Or you might be denied access to all gas stations because you were once seen smoking within 1000 feet of one. Or the government might suddenly burst into your home in the middle of the night, because you thought the president's neck tie was kind of funny in a speech he gave.
A database with everyone's details which was easily accessable probably wouldn't be too much of a problem to a typical member of the public. Most of the interest would be on what "celebrities" had been up to. So far as actions against regular people were to go it would be a case of "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Anyone who refused to serve you had better not have any skeletons in their cupboard, otherwise they could easily find themselves lacking customers. Such a database would also show what actually is "normal" and what is "divient" behaviour. Problems come when you have data on only some people accessable only to some people (including those who are not in the database).
McCarthyism was already a repeat of history. Hence Arthur Miller writing "The Crucible". The most likely way for witch hunts to end is when people with real political power are accused, by the "witch finder general". There is little evidence that a "pleb" listing "witch finders" as co-conspirators would help.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have to worry about shielding and containment as much as civilian powerplants. In a submarine, in particular, the bottom portion of the reactor is barely shielded by more than the hull. The ocean does the job just fine.
Most of the time in port, you're connected to shore power so the reactor isn't running.
Even without the reactor "running" there is still heat and radiation from radioactive decay.
So when building individual units - bigger = more power for your money. Economics.
Which presumably offsets the costs involved with fueling the reactor. In order to replace the fuel in a reactor you need to shut it off and have it cool down (both in terms of heat and radio-isotopes).
The thing which I can not fathom about the American nuclear power policy is that they are encouraged to make HUGE reactors. (Had to look this up for nuclear physics class at one point) The US Navy has an almost perfect record with identical, small reactors.
Maybe it's cheaper to make one large reactor than a set of small ones...
Thought-experiment time. I represent the Fascist White-Power neo-Nazi rock band "Kill All the Mud-People". While I'm against almost everything Frank Zappa stood for, and for almost everything he disdained, I rather like some of his tunes, so I decide to re-name my band "Frank Zappa Would Agree: Kill All the Mud-People", and put up a big photoshop of Frank Zappa's face centered on a Nazi flag.
In a free society anyone can then look at you and say "what an idiot". Things would get disturbing if you first obtained the copyright from Gail Zappa. You might also be able to claim "fair use" under the parody exemption.
Really, to smother Frank Zappa's name and image under a mountain of lawyers like that seems kind of odd, especially considering how much disdain the man himself had for the music industry's choke-hold on everything.
No doubt this is only one of many cases of current copyright holders declaring a Jihad against infringers, where the actual creator dosn't have a problem (or wouldn't have a problem were they still alive).
Whilst some creative people are "only in it for the money" for other's it is more important to either be recognised or even simply bring enjoyment to people.
If you start installing applications without forethought, you get the same situation as with ever other OS -- things break. Windows does this. Linux does this. The BSDs do this.
It's possible for an incompetent admin to mess up just about any system. The problem with Windows is that it is often also possible for a user to send things completly fubar. The same also applies to the likes of Lindows which attempt to emulate Windows using Linux.
Sorry, the real world doesn't work like you imagine: name me a commercial product that hasn't been released broken. Few truthfully acknowledge it. Are you going to get the source from them if they don't have the time/will to fix it themselves?
If a proprietary software company claims "it's a feature not a bug" then you are SOL. With OSS, even if all of the developers try the same kind of thing, you have the ability to get things fixed. As you are not paying for EULAs, so called "support", you probably have the money available to pay to get the software to do what you want/need it to do.
The world's biggest software company treats its customers as unpaid beta testers, charges top dollar for support (if you could call it that) and makes it difficult to research previous issues with a product by moving the webpage address regularly.
In a monopoly situation the supplier has power over the customer. In a free market it's the customer who is in a position of power. With proprietary software a free market is virtually impossible, since copyright law is applied in such a way as to ensure that one entity can control access to source code. With OSS a monopoly is virtually impossible, since copyright law is applied in such a way that access to source code is always freely available to any interested party.
If we pay money for something and it doesn't work it goes back.
Assuming you can return proprietary software and get your money back. Typically you have just bought the right to use it.
Emotions and "feelings" should have nothing to do with making logical, factual business decisions. I don't want to buy software for my business because someone feels "emotionally attached" to it. That's absurd!
Quite a bit of "marketing" is about getting people emotionally attached to a product. If software purchase were entirely down to "making logical, factual business decisions" then there would be considerably less proprietary software in use in business. It is certainly less than logical for any company to accept the situation of a supplier dictating to them, through EULAs, how to operate their business. Or to continue throwing "good money after bad".
Emotions cloud your ability to make impartial decisions.
Hence marketing methods such as wineing and dineing executives, offering "free" samples, etc.
"Rabid zealotry" is in the eye of the beholder. What looks like frothing to you may look like intelligent advocacy to someone who isn't fearful of the message being delivered.
This statement could just as easily apply to Microsoft's "marketing" without changing a single thing.
Proprietary software frequently comes with it's own brand of "zealots".
Thus you are taken in by the fiction of "a guarantee that someone will work with me"
You probably get exactly what the fine print says you will get. Did it mention that the "someone" will actually be any more use to you than a random member of the public though?
Moreover, with open source you don't need support -- you have the code. Support is critical when you are at the mercy of a proprietary code vendor and are legally barred from helping yourself.
The real barrier appears to be one of a perception that a certain kind of "support" is universally needed with all software. Without the understanding that OSS allows support mechanisms which are impossible with proprietary software.
Yeah right, In over 30 years in the computer industry, the ONLY commercial companies that has ever delivered any support other than putting me on hold, listening to a computer play the paino with one finger, till I find something better to do, are IBM and S3.
Possibly people who rave about telephone helplines either never use them or never use them for actual technical support (as opposed to user support).
When I complained to IBM I had a problem with OS/2 device drivers, the next day I had 3 men in gray suits at my desk, one from IBM Texas, one from IBM UK, and one from IBM Germany, saying "you have a problem? We will get someone to fix it!" - and they did!
Thus in only one case out of however many did you get something where it could be claimed that the money was well spent.
OTOH, S3 put me into a conference call with three people on crack who barely spoke English, and did not understand the problem.
Even less useful than listening to music played down the telephone. A set of CDs would probably be far cheaper than the "support" contract, in some cases it's possible that phone call would cost more than a CD...
By contrast, when I had a problem with kde, it was fixed in days, and I got an e-mail from Mr Kulow asking me to try the new version.
One other important thing is that there tend to be fewer barriers to contacting the people who actually wrote the software with OSS. Even if you do get to talk to a person on a "support line" you have no idea how much they know. It's quite possible that you could end up talking to someone who knows less about the software than you do...
This is totally unacceptable to the business world, and you should know that by now. With a company, I have a phone number, a support contract, and a guarantee that someone will work with me to answer my question.
:) As with an EULA you might need to consult a lawyer to find out what you are actually getting.
You may have that or you may have a guarantee that if you call the phone number it will be answered. Between certain times it might even be answered by a human being
With newsgroups and IRC channels, someone might answer my question but only if I'm willing to wait, surf a lot, or put up with a few hundred "what a st00pid newbie you are" responses that invariably get made.
Oddly people do use these techniques with proprietary software, even in cases where they have a "support contract". Anyway how is being told "please hold" or "I'll call you back" not "waiting"?
A guy teaching us Novell told us that he had done work for a company - and that all of a sudden they wanted a server, 'a what' he said ? They meant an NT server. They didn't realise that they already had a netware server that had been running for a couple of years. They had totally forgotten it :) I bet they never forgot their NT server.
:)
A bit like the case of a Netware server getting walled up. It was working so well that it took years for anyone to notice
Installing or tweaking Linux is still incredibly cumbersome, and next to impossible for someone who hasn't used it for years. This doesn't mean MS is perfect by any stretch, but they've done a much better job to help the user configure things.
But often a hopless job of enabling a sysadmin to configure things such that a user does not need to (or indeed cannot) mess around with settings.
Political OSS zealots who fabricate or exaggerate MS problems or OSS benefits,
There is plenty of zealotry in the proprietary software camp. Quite a bit of it has been comming from both MS and SCO recently.
Or the company could hire a programmer or two full-time to add features to open-source projects that are 'almost, but not quite' exactly what they need,
:)
And to make sure that the software continues to be updated to suit your companies needs, should they change in future, in a way which follows your timescale.
for less money than it would cost to keep the company on the Microsoft Upgrade Treadmill.
Especially the lawyers needed to go through changing EULAs with a fine toothed comb
Why do you need a roadmap? If you're a proprietary software company, your roadmap tells your customers where your product is going to be years from now.
Which may or may not be where the user wants to be...
With open source, those same features could be available to you in weeks or even days from the time you express interest in such a feature.
Especially if your expression of interest includes paying people to make it do what you want it to. Altering software to fit your business is likely to be easier and cheaper than altering your business to fit software.
What corporate executives need to realize is that if they find an open source solution that's "almost" right, but just lacks one or two things, it may be because no one's expressed interest, and a quick email to the developer's mailing list and they're likely to see a beta version of the requested features
Or an honest assement of how easy it might be to do whatever.
before the proprietary vendor has even had time to respond to the message.
If they are selling software as an "off the shelf" product then they might not even respond at all.
IMHO you are confusing corporate users and home users. Without doubt, home users are disappointed in many of the unpolished sides of OSS.
IME this is a common problem with quite a few "Slashdotters". Whilst end user administration might be a good thing on a home PC it is a very bad thing on a workstation.
Also, users do not typically change system settings without contacting IT support.
Doing so being likely to get them shouted at or even looking for another job.
Most Windows boxes are so locked down that the only thing you are allowed to change are things like desktop background picture and IE home page. And I believe this is a good thing.
In the corporate environment end users being able to install software is generally a very bad thing. Installing unlicenced software or malware is not good for business.
It seems that Microsoft is all to happy to give people the privalige of getting a licensed copy of their (Microsoft's) software for a great deal of money, money that most people cannot afford, and then they give them a very restrictive EULA...
Interestingly the original article considers open source licences a "barrier". But fails to mention that they typically entail no restriction on how the software is used (only a tiny minority of business redistributes software to third parties) and are typically written in fairly simple language whereas proprietary software tends to come with EULAs, which do attempt to control how a piece of software is used and likely to require a lawyer to understand (especially if they don't acknowlage the idea of corporations as "legal people".)
So how long do I have to wait before I can report Darl McBride and Bill Gates?
More intersting is that when you do it will show the social status of these people. Depending on if they get dragged through the mill (Plebean) or the witch-hunt stops (Patrician).
There is a history of this in the US.
Hardly confined to the history of the US.
Every witch hunt that we've had has mostly caught non-witches, because people figure out pretty quickly that this is a good way to make life difficult for people that they don't like. The actual subversives (whoever they might be that decade) have been hardly affected, of course.
It wouldn't suprise me if there are actually examples of "witches" being the ones actually running "witch hunts". Given that they can be such a good way to get rid of political opponents, especially if the result is capital punishment...
A well known author had a character set an essay entitled 'Witch-Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss'.
I think the federal government, in cooperation with Microsoft, should put together a database of all known information about every single person in the world, not limited to terror information. This database would be used by governments, as well as public and private companies, to deny services to persons for a variety of reasons.
Except that they wouldn't want a database on every person.
For example, you might find yourself unable to eat at any restaurant in the entire world because you are not a good tipper. Or you might be denied access to all gas stations because you were once seen smoking within 1000 feet of one. Or the government might suddenly burst into your home in the middle of the night, because you thought the president's neck tie was kind of funny in a speech he gave.
A database with everyone's details which was easily accessable probably wouldn't be too much of a problem to a typical member of the public. Most of the interest would be on what "celebrities" had been up to.
So far as actions against regular people were to go it would be a case of "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Anyone who refused to serve you had better not have any skeletons in their cupboard, otherwise they could easily find themselves lacking customers.
Such a database would also show what actually is "normal" and what is "divient" behaviour.
Problems come when you have data on only some people accessable only to some people (including those who are not in the database).
Wow, a little bit of history repeating.
McCarthyism was already a repeat of history. Hence Arthur Miller writing "The Crucible".
The most likely way for witch hunts to end is when people with real political power are accused, by the "witch finder general". There is little evidence that a "pleb" listing "witch finders" as co-conspirators would help.
I don't think you have to worry about that, unless you live a country that's been known to do that sort of thing in the past.
That would be a list of most of them. As for the remainder maybe they just havn't been caught yet.