Is the parity drive a bottle neck to RAID performance? I wonder what the impact would be of using SSDs for the parity drives, and regular drives for the data drives? Assuming you either don't need the same size drive for the parity drives as you do for the data drives, or you simply don't need any more data than an SSD holds, and you can afford 1 or 2 SSDs but not enough for the entire array to be SSDs.:)
According to actual research, you're wrong. eBook readers reduce net CO2 emissions.
The solution is to scale up the number of books you're talking about. If you have enough, you can do what I do and line the walls with them, thus increasing the effective insulation of your home.:)
By this same logic, when our sun lines up with the plane of the milky way at 11:11am on Dec 21st, 2012,... Who knows what will happen when we face that.
I still have high hopes for a zombie apocalypse before the end of everything at the end of 2012. *crossing my fingers*
The general public doesn't know how long it takes to get there. They think we can get there in a couple hours using impulse engines. We can't.
Hell, if you don't have inertial dampeners, you're not going to realistically push humans for long periods with anything more than 1G acceleration even WITH impulse engines, so it'll take you weeks to get to any other planet in the solar system. Impulse engines aren't the hard sublight technology from Star Trek as far as I can see, compared to 'inertial dampeners'.
Well, $40, yeah, but 'survive more', not so sure. Plus if you DO fail, or your political clout goes south, you could be erased from history. Not worth it to save $110, especially for current values of US $110.
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
Sure they do. They install it to copy the few upgraded included bits and then reinstall Windows 98SE and put those WinME bits that actually were upgrades on top of it. And then you image that disc and throw away your WinME CD.
OR
They use it to create an install CD of some Linux distribution for low-resource machines.
If by "good" you mean "a lot of advanced features" then you probably would be right. If "good" however includes enough performance to be useful, OS/2 never was a very good OS. Windows 95 would scream (to quote Steve Jobs) on my 486 DX in the day, while OS/2 Warp 3 would present me with an hourglass mouse pointer most of the time.
OS/2 wasn't in the same category as Windows 95 - it was in the same category as Windows NT. OS/2 and Windows NT required much more memory than Windows 9x. Once you got an OS/2 machine up to >= 16Meg of memory, it was just fine.
Anyone seen a good comparison of Maemo vs Android? I'm not sure I'd want to invest in a phone with an OS that isn't going to be mainstream like Android obviously is, unless they're compatible enough to not worry about. Yes, I know they're both based on Linux, but we are talking about the most proprietary of hardware here - cellphones.
I'm not seeing how your arguments against wind power generation make space-based power generation look any more attractive.
It's not an either/or equation. Building space-based solar power stations doesn't mean you can't have wind generation, or vice versa. A multi-method approach is generally accepted as the only viable answer to the question of "How do we replace fossil fuel for power generation?" Also, I've not been arguing against wind power, just pointing out that the costs and technical & regulatory/legal hurdles are much more involved than most people realize. By no means am I against wind power. I must admit I think CSP (concentrated solar power) gets short shrift in the industry, though. I don't think space-based solar power is going to save us, but I think it's a great thing to invest in, if for no other reason than the more stuff we send into orbit, the more likely cost-to-orbit will come down.
Transmission costs: Space-based power cannot beam its energy into the middle of a residential (or industrial) area. Because of safety tolerances the receiving stations need to be in unpopulated areas with a buffer zone and you'll still need to transport that power over cables to the consumers just as you would with any other form of power generation. Japan doesn't have much free land area available, so that probably means that the receiving stations will be in the seas/oceans surrounding it and power will travel via undersea cables to the communities that it services.
Keep in mind that the issue of rights of way for undersea cable are likely far easier than for over land, plus the cost of laying it is probably less, too, given my admittedly vague understanding of the technology.
Environmental costs: Even if there's no risk to the local wildlife, which there will be since it's microwave radiation afterall, you're still get a whole bunch of greenies telling you that there are. In addition, you'll probably get a bunch of people with the usual "I don't want that next door to my place" arguments.
You have that no matter what technology you use. Land-based solar power requires lots of land area to generate significant amounts of power, which brings out protests on land use. Wind power has issues with bird & bat kills, sound pollution, and 'sight' pollution issues which brings out protests, etc. You're never going to find a method of power generation that some group somewhere doesn't object to. I'm leery of space stations beaming power into the Earth's atmosphere via microwaves myself, but I do realize that there are much worse power sources already widely in use.
Terrorism threats: You don't need physical access to the solar-based generator to turn it into a weapon. It'll be controlled from computers on the ground.
True, but that's generally more of a security issue that other nations go for, rather than terrorists. Plus, Japan still doesn't have much of a terrorism problem. Maybe because they don't have a foreign military presence in Muslim countries. This is by far the smallest-looking problem with this plan to me. You want to get scared about terrorism and power generation, you don't even want to know how pathetic the security is around most U.S. nuclear power plants.
Here's hoping that the costs will scale much, much better as more units come online. $21B over 294,000 homes works out to $71,428/home - it'll take a while to pay that off so you could turn a profit!
True, but this is the first one, so applying that cost and saying that's how much this technology will cost is pretty ridiculous. If they then license this technology, they could make more money that way. Either way, this is the first one, and the first one of anything always costs way more than subsequent ones.
The only differences are erection of towers and granting of easements or rights of way.
Rights of way are a HUGE deal. And that's not even all of it. There was a plan a few years ago (when I stopped reporting on these things - no idea what the status of it is now) to bring some HVDC lines down from Alberta into the US down through MT, WY, etc, into California, connecting wind and other power plants on the way. Then California enacted a ban on importation of fossil-fuel generated power, and that plan went by the wayside. The people wanting to make the HVDC line didn't think the project would suceed with _just_ connecting new (unbuilt) wind farms to the grid. So what did they do? They talked to the people in the Phoenix area, who are also starving for power, and have no such ban on fossil fuel-generated power. And with that one thing, the end course of that unbuilt transmission line changed the state it goes to, with all the planning on that end having to be redone, etc. Lawsuits after deals are signed can shut down or delay wind farms for VERY long periods of time. Seriously, it's a very complicated matter.
In places where cables already exist the cables need to be replaced with higher capacity cables. And of course where there is no capacity everything has to be put in place, however with current problems costing $80 Billion plus annually, those costs are cheap.
There is cheap and there is relatively cheap. Neither of those implies easy, btw. Sadly. There could and should be a LOT more wind farms in the U.S., and actual construction cost is a relatively minor part of why there aren't.
My problem was that you kept implying wind as costs that are a lot higher than building new reactors.
Not higher than building new reactors, but higher than are usually understood, since it's not the total picture, and higher than people attempting to do a direct comparison to what is actually building new reactors _at existing generating stations_. Also, scaling up a wind farm to the same power output as even one nuclear reactor in the 1000MW range is going to be interesting - as I don't think it's been done yet. And many nuclear stations have multiple reactors.
And I didn't even address the fact that nuclear power would not be profitable without subsidies, the nuclear industry is Hooked on Subsidies.
Like the wind power industry isn't? Dude, you need to do some reading! The tax credit for wind power that has to get renewed every year or every other year is one of the most annoying parts of the wind power industry! Entire wind farm deals stall for months on end until they know whether the tax credit will be renewed or not. As before, my info on this industry is a few years out of date - hopefully the Democratically-controlled Congress and recent energy legislation has extended this considerably - but I wouldn't bet on it.
As stated above that applies to nuclear power as well. It applies to all sources of electricity including coal and gas fired powerplants. The fact you're only applying it to wind shows you're biased against wind.
You don't seem to realize that most, if not all of the proposed new nuclear power plants in the U.S. (which is the only market I know well) are _additional_ reactors at _existing_ nuclear power plants. I was an energy industry reporter (reporting on the Western Interconnect) a few years ago - I'm about 3.5 years out of date now, so new nuclear reactors at new sites may have been proposed since then that I don't know of. Siting of nuclear power plants is COMPLETELY different than siting of wind farms.
My being neutral and talking about facts doesn't mean I'm biased against wind. I love it. I'm also a proponent of nuclear power, solar, tidal, etc. Anything but fossil plants. But one has to be realistic. It also helps to know the facts, and how each method differs, and what strengths and weaknesses each has. No one solution is perfect. If someone doesn't agree with your opinion, that hardly means they're biased. They might just have information you don't.
Wind is about $1B per gigawatt, and an installation is good for 150 years with generator replacements on average 35-50 years... It also creates thousands of jobs, is easy to repair, and is not a single point terorist threat target...
Direct comparisons aren't as easy as you think. Wind also doesn't scale as easily - you're not taking transmission costs into account, or the massive siting problems. Many of the large wind farms in the Western Interconnect have had - or are having - lots of opposition from the locals who don't want large turbines 'spoiling' (personal opinion) their view, or making noise 24/7. When you put them in out of the way places (which is where the best wind is anyway), then you're generally putting them where there aren't already heavy duty transmission lines. Then when you also add in heavy transmission line costs, you also get to deal with rights of way and environmental impact studies for that entire transmission line route, etc, etc. Wind is not a baseload power source - it varies, which adds costs to how you hook it up to the grid. Orbiting solar will be 24/7/365/forever, plus you can put as many up there as you can afford to, and the cost of these things will come down as our cost-to-orbit drops in the future.
You seem to think this *first* orbiting power station means *only* (hence your 'single point'). There's always gotta be a first. I'd plan on LOTS more of these if I were you.
re: terrorist target
Lots of terrorists targeting Japan? The Taliban has space capability now, too, eh?
I'm not saying this project doesn't have its problems, but you need to put it into perspective.
What you don't realize is that by "neutrality" they mean politically; all Republican websites will be required to forward half the incoming traffic to liberal pages.
You're smoking something if you think there are currently the same number of Republicans as Democrats in the U.S.:)
The really sad part is, there are a lot of conservative Democrats, which is the big reason Obama is having trouble getting things passed - the Democratic pols aren't one homogeneous group in the same way the smaller Republican party is, because the Republican party has been forcing its non-extremely-right members out for awhile now. As Bill Maher has said, the Democrats are the Republicans of a few decades ago, and are generally not all that liberal.
Too bad there isn't a functioning national Progressive Party anymore. *sigh*
Can someone explain me what's so good about capacitive touchscreens? It won't let me use the thing while wearing gloves (which, depending on your climate zone, can be an issue), and, if I understand correctly, it won't let me use a stylus for precision control or handwriting input. These are clear downsides, so what is the benefit?
It's more responsive. Plus, there are styluses (stylii?) that work with them, though they're not generally included with such phones. I think HTC is planning on that with one of their upcoming phones, though. Gloves, though, yeah, that's a problem. No one type of phone is perfect for everyone, though, which is why many of us don't like the iPhone.:)
I think John Gruber (as usual) nails it. Google should follow the Apple model and make one really really good phone.
I don't think John Gruber understands that Google doesn't make phones. They make the Android platform. There are multiple form factors, and different people have different preferences and needs. For example, I want a WVGA display with no keyboard, to keep the phone thin. But that's just me - many people won't buy a phone without an actual qwerty keyboard, some want a clamshell, etc. If the iPhone was a clamshell, it would be just as popular.
As for an open marketplace, I d it's a good idea in theory, but in practice you have to be able to police it somehow. People complain that there's lots of crap on Apple's App Store, but an open marketplace would be worse.
The point of an 'open' marketplace has nothing to do with the quality of the best apps, for you'll find good and bad apps on any type of marketplace, but is rather to allow competition, which a closed marketplace does not. Apple is showing their dark side lately with their refusal to allow many apps they "don't approve" of, irrespective of the app's _quality_. This cannot be allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, couldn't the marketing droids come up with a better name?
No problemo!
Turbo Boost+ //e)
Turbo Boost xTreme!
iTurbo Boost
Turbo Boost ][+ (or
Turb0 B005t - L33t 3d1t10n
Turbo Boost 3000
Turbo Boost 3000++ Gold Pro Enterprise Edition...For Kids
Intel Marketing Deparment: We Look for Things. Things to Make Us Go.
Is the parity drive a bottle neck to RAID performance? I wonder what the impact would be of using SSDs for the parity drives, and regular drives for the data drives? Assuming you either don't need the same size drive for the parity drives as you do for the data drives, or you simply don't need any more data than an SSD holds, and you can afford 1 or 2 SSDs but not enough for the entire array to be SSDs. :)
According to actual research, you're wrong. eBook readers reduce net CO2 emissions.
The solution is to scale up the number of books you're talking about. If you have enough, you can do what I do and line the walls with them, thus increasing the effective insulation of your home. :)
By this same logic, when our sun lines up with the plane of the milky way at 11:11am on Dec 21st, 2012, ... Who knows what will happen when we face that.
I still have high hopes for a zombie apocalypse before the end of everything at the end of 2012. *crossing my fingers*
The general public doesn't know how long it takes to get there. They think we can get there in a couple hours using impulse engines. We can't.
Hell, if you don't have inertial dampeners, you're not going to realistically push humans for long periods with anything more than 1G acceleration even WITH impulse engines, so it'll take you weeks to get to any other planet in the solar system. Impulse engines aren't the hard sublight technology from Star Trek as far as I can see, compared to 'inertial dampeners'.
Pffft, Russians do it for $40, and survive more.
Well, $40, yeah, but 'survive more', not so sure. Plus if you DO fail, or your political clout goes south, you could be erased from history. Not worth it to save $110, especially for current values of US $110.
Switch crops and grow tomacco! It's a win-win for everybody. Can't we all just get along?
Microsoft had one that never made it.
I'm pretty sure Bob was reincarnated as Clippy.
I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.
Sure they do. They install it to copy the few upgraded included bits and then reinstall Windows 98SE and put those WinME bits that actually were upgrades on top of it. And then you image that disc and throw away your WinME CD.
OR
They use it to create an install CD of some Linux distribution for low-resource machines.
If by "good" you mean "a lot of advanced features" then you probably would be right. If "good" however includes enough performance to be useful, OS/2 never was a very good OS. Windows 95 would scream (to quote Steve Jobs) on my 486 DX in the day, while OS/2 Warp 3 would present me with an hourglass mouse pointer most of the time.
OS/2 wasn't in the same category as Windows 95 - it was in the same category as Windows NT. OS/2 and Windows NT required much more memory than Windows 9x. Once you got an OS/2 machine up to >= 16Meg of memory, it was just fine.
Good thing you skipped the 0th day. I'd be expect the conversations with the folks in HR would be less than productive.
Is there ever any other kind of conversation with the folks in HR?
Since when is an online petition worth more than a squirt of piss?
I'm pretty sure aiming a quart of piss at PM Brown wouldn't have gotten the same response.
Pretty sure, anyway. Ya never know with those Brits...
> linux gurus who can rebuild their kernel six times a day
How did they manage that before support for 4096 cores?
They used a Beowulf cluster.
Anyone seen a good comparison of Maemo vs Android? I'm not sure I'd want to invest in a phone with an OS that isn't going to be mainstream like Android obviously is, unless they're compatible enough to not worry about. Yes, I know they're both based on Linux, but we are talking about the most proprietary of hardware here - cellphones.
you mean the googlebar thing?
No, the search field in FF, or just the address field in Chrome.
Just don't put a "I'm feeling lucky" button, and you're bueno va!
I'm surprised, though - Google has a 'home page'? Does anybody still actually GO to GOOG's home page? I just use it from my browser. *shrug*
I'm not seeing how your arguments against wind power generation make space-based power generation look any more attractive.
It's not an either/or equation. Building space-based solar power stations doesn't mean you can't have wind generation, or vice versa. A multi-method approach is generally accepted as the only viable answer to the question of "How do we replace fossil fuel for power generation?" Also, I've not been arguing against wind power, just pointing out that the costs and technical & regulatory/legal hurdles are much more involved than most people realize. By no means am I against wind power. I must admit I think CSP (concentrated solar power) gets short shrift in the industry, though. I don't think space-based solar power is going to save us, but I think it's a great thing to invest in, if for no other reason than the more stuff we send into orbit, the more likely cost-to-orbit will come down.
Transmission costs: Space-based power cannot beam its energy into the middle of a residential (or industrial) area. Because of safety tolerances the receiving stations need to be in unpopulated areas with a buffer zone and you'll still need to transport that power over cables to the consumers just as you would with any other form of power generation. Japan doesn't have much free land area available, so that probably means that the receiving stations will be in the seas/oceans surrounding it and power will travel via undersea cables to the communities that it services.
Keep in mind that the issue of rights of way for undersea cable are likely far easier than for over land, plus the cost of laying it is probably less, too, given my admittedly vague understanding of the technology.
Environmental costs: Even if there's no risk to the local wildlife, which there will be since it's microwave radiation afterall, you're still get a whole bunch of greenies telling you that there are. In addition, you'll probably get a bunch of people with the usual "I don't want that next door to my place" arguments.
You have that no matter what technology you use. Land-based solar power requires lots of land area to generate significant amounts of power, which brings out protests on land use. Wind power has issues with bird & bat kills, sound pollution, and 'sight' pollution issues which brings out protests, etc. You're never going to find a method of power generation that some group somewhere doesn't object to. I'm leery of space stations beaming power into the Earth's atmosphere via microwaves myself, but I do realize that there are much worse power sources already widely in use.
Terrorism threats: You don't need physical access to the solar-based generator to turn it into a weapon. It'll be controlled from computers on the ground.
True, but that's generally more of a security issue that other nations go for, rather than terrorists. Plus, Japan still doesn't have much of a terrorism problem. Maybe because they don't have a foreign military presence in Muslim countries. This is by far the smallest-looking problem with this plan to me. You want to get scared about terrorism and power generation, you don't even want to know how pathetic the security is around most U.S. nuclear power plants.
Here's hoping that the costs will scale much, much better as more units come online. $21B over 294,000 homes works out to $71,428/home - it'll take a while to pay that off so you could turn a profit!
True, but this is the first one, so applying that cost and saying that's how much this technology will cost is pretty ridiculous. If they then license this technology, they could make more money that way. Either way, this is the first one, and the first one of anything always costs way more than subsequent ones.
The only differences are erection of towers and granting of easements or rights of way.
Rights of way are a HUGE deal. And that's not even all of it. There was a plan a few years ago (when I stopped reporting on these things - no idea what the status of it is now) to bring some HVDC lines down from Alberta into the US down through MT, WY, etc, into California, connecting wind and other power plants on the way. Then California enacted a ban on importation of fossil-fuel generated power, and that plan went by the wayside. The people wanting to make the HVDC line didn't think the project would suceed with _just_ connecting new (unbuilt) wind farms to the grid. So what did they do? They talked to the people in the Phoenix area, who are also starving for power, and have no such ban on fossil fuel-generated power. And with that one thing, the end course of that unbuilt transmission line changed the state it goes to, with all the planning on that end having to be redone, etc. Lawsuits after deals are signed can shut down or delay wind farms for VERY long periods of time. Seriously, it's a very complicated matter.
In places where cables already exist the cables need to be replaced with higher capacity cables. And of course where there is no capacity everything has to be put in place, however with current problems costing $80 Billion plus annually, those costs are cheap.
There is cheap and there is relatively cheap. Neither of those implies easy, btw. Sadly. There could and should be a LOT more wind farms in the U.S., and actual construction cost is a relatively minor part of why there aren't.
My problem was that you kept implying wind as costs that are a lot higher than building new reactors.
Not higher than building new reactors, but higher than are usually understood, since it's not the total picture, and higher than people attempting to do a direct comparison to what is actually building new reactors _at existing generating stations_. Also, scaling up a wind farm to the same power output as even one nuclear reactor in the 1000MW range is going to be interesting - as I don't think it's been done yet. And many nuclear stations have multiple reactors.
And I didn't even address the fact that nuclear power would not be profitable without subsidies, the nuclear industry is Hooked on Subsidies.
Like the wind power industry isn't? Dude, you need to do some reading! The tax credit for wind power that has to get renewed every year or every other year is one of the most annoying parts of the wind power industry! Entire wind farm deals stall for months on end until they know whether the tax credit will be renewed or not. As before, my info on this industry is a few years out of date - hopefully the Democratically-controlled Congress and recent energy legislation has extended this considerably - but I wouldn't bet on it.
When you say wind has transmission costs but do not say nuclear power has those same cost then you are showing your bias.,
There are costs to upgrading transmission lines, but they're nowhere _near_ the costs of running lines where there weren't any before.
As stated above that applies to nuclear power as well. It applies to all sources of electricity including coal and gas fired powerplants. The fact you're only applying it to wind shows you're biased against wind.
You don't seem to realize that most, if not all of the proposed new nuclear power plants in the U.S. (which is the only market I know well) are _additional_ reactors at _existing_ nuclear power plants. I was an energy industry reporter (reporting on the Western Interconnect) a few years ago - I'm about 3.5 years out of date now, so new nuclear reactors at new sites may have been proposed since then that I don't know of. Siting of nuclear power plants is COMPLETELY different than siting of wind farms.
My being neutral and talking about facts doesn't mean I'm biased against wind. I love it. I'm also a proponent of nuclear power, solar, tidal, etc. Anything but fossil plants. But one has to be realistic. It also helps to know the facts, and how each method differs, and what strengths and weaknesses each has. No one solution is perfect. If someone doesn't agree with your opinion, that hardly means they're biased. They might just have information you don't.
Wind is about $1B per gigawatt, and an installation is good for 150 years with generator replacements on average 35-50 years... It also creates thousands of jobs, is easy to repair, and is not a single point terorist threat target...
Direct comparisons aren't as easy as you think. Wind also doesn't scale as easily - you're not taking transmission costs into account, or the massive siting problems. Many of the large wind farms in the Western Interconnect have had - or are having - lots of opposition from the locals who don't want large turbines 'spoiling' (personal opinion) their view, or making noise 24/7. When you put them in out of the way places (which is where the best wind is anyway), then you're generally putting them where there aren't already heavy duty transmission lines. Then when you also add in heavy transmission line costs, you also get to deal with rights of way and environmental impact studies for that entire transmission line route, etc, etc. Wind is not a baseload power source - it varies, which adds costs to how you hook it up to the grid. Orbiting solar will be 24/7/365/forever, plus you can put as many up there as you can afford to, and the cost of these things will come down as our cost-to-orbit drops in the future.
You seem to think this *first* orbiting power station means *only* (hence your 'single point'). There's always gotta be a first. I'd plan on LOTS more of these if I were you.
re: terrorist target
Lots of terrorists targeting Japan? The Taliban has space capability now, too, eh?
I'm not saying this project doesn't have its problems, but you need to put it into perspective.
Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) my monthly bill is about $22. I use electric baseboard heaters, too!
Yeah, but using hydro is cheating! :)
What you don't realize is that by "neutrality" they mean politically; all Republican websites will be required to forward half the incoming traffic to liberal pages.
You're smoking something if you think there are currently the same number of Republicans as Democrats in the U.S. :)
The really sad part is, there are a lot of conservative Democrats, which is the big reason Obama is having trouble getting things passed - the Democratic pols aren't one homogeneous group in the same way the smaller Republican party is, because the Republican party has been forcing its non-extremely-right members out for awhile now. As Bill Maher has said, the Democrats are the Republicans of a few decades ago, and are generally not all that liberal.
Too bad there isn't a functioning national Progressive Party anymore. *sigh*
Can someone explain me what's so good about capacitive touchscreens? It won't let me use the thing while wearing gloves (which, depending on your climate zone, can be an issue), and, if I understand correctly, it won't let me use a stylus for precision control or handwriting input. These are clear downsides, so what is the benefit?
It's more responsive. Plus, there are styluses (stylii?) that work with them, though they're not generally included with such phones. I think HTC is planning on that with one of their upcoming phones, though. Gloves, though, yeah, that's a problem. No one type of phone is perfect for everyone, though, which is why many of us don't like the iPhone. :)
I think John Gruber (as usual) nails it. Google should follow the Apple model and make one really really good phone.
I don't think John Gruber understands that Google doesn't make phones. They make the Android platform. There are multiple form factors, and different people have different preferences and needs. For example, I want a WVGA display with no keyboard, to keep the phone thin. But that's just me - many people won't buy a phone without an actual qwerty keyboard, some want a clamshell, etc. If the iPhone was a clamshell, it would be just as popular.
As for an open marketplace, I d it's a good idea in theory, but in practice you have to be able to police it somehow. People complain that there's lots of crap on Apple's App Store, but an open marketplace would be worse.
The point of an 'open' marketplace has nothing to do with the quality of the best apps, for you'll find good and bad apps on any type of marketplace, but is rather to allow competition, which a closed marketplace does not. Apple is showing their dark side lately with their refusal to allow many apps they "don't approve" of, irrespective of the app's _quality_. This cannot be allowed.