I'm certainly interested what you mean, is it with respect to salt as a moderator?
No I was indirectly referring to WIPP, which as I understand it, the salt traps water/etc so you don't have to worry about the waste migrating anywhere.
That is what IBM tells you, try generating your own numbers for once instead of spouting the ones the IBM sales guy tells you.
Sure, some of those machines have very high raw performance numbers... But a very large percentage of the installs actually partition that expensive machine up into a dozen or so smaller system images. Which of course negates a lot of the argument about operational costs because the majority of long term operational costs is related to the number of system images you are maintaining. Sure there are hardware support costs etc, but lots of companies can't even identify the performance bottlenecks in their system. Instead they just buy the latest pitch from $LARGEVENDOR, take their slight performance improvement, then repeat the process in a couple years.
Thats not to say, there aren't customers where the numbers for POWER or whatnot work out in their favor, its simply saying that its a smaller portion of the market every year. I have a POWER system sitting less than 10 feet from me right now. But I also have a quad socket westmere, and both the CPU and IO performance on the westmere is frankly astonishing with our application when compared with the POWER. That said the sweet spot is actually the dual socket setups as they are significantly less expensive, and our application scales well in a cluster.
Anyone buying POWER or SPARC is a lost cause anyway. Sure Intel might gain a few sales, but frankly the RISC volumes are pretty small and a huge number of them are "stuck" because they have existing applications that they are unwilling/unable to port to an alternative. Or the IT guys are religious zealots. This is the same reason you find AS400s/i5, Nonstops, OpenVMS, zos, etc machines running in data centers the world over. Its not because those OS's or the hardware actually provide some huge benefit that outweighs the 5x (or more, the sky is the limit in some cases) price difference between them and a basic Intel system. Its because companies have 8 and 9 figure investments in software running on them. They will probably still be in datacenters for decades into the future if IBM/Oracle/HP/etc don't decide to kill them off. They zombie on, as long as the original manufacturer supports them and the perceived/actual cost to port the application out weights the cost of buying a new machine/os every 5 years or so.
Except that in the case of FBR's the technology works and has been proven. Its more a question of which design is safest. The biggest problems are human/political.
Renewable on the other-hand are possible too, their biggest problems are more economic, mostly due to efficiency problems which are _REALLY_ hard to engineer around. Even if we chose to, it would be very difficult to convert 100% of our power to renewable over the next 50 years. Its a case of diminishing returns, you build the first few wind farms, in fairly windy areas close to the load. The next few end up farther away, resulting in a few percent higher losses, until your building wind farms with power capacities an order of magnitude larger than what the load demands to compensate for variations in the wind, and the distance from the load.
Same with solar, sure you can buy cheap CIGS today, but once your ramping large quantities the limiting factor becomes your ability to mine rare earth minerals. Or you can build solar thermal, and deal with many of the issues like wind, plus the fact your plants will literally cover hundreds of square miles to power reasonably sized cities. So while you can share farmland with wind, the same isn't true of solar.
So, in the end we will probably use coal until its to late, then we will end up building the nukes, unless there is some great breakthrough in renewable, which will continue to grow until the low hanging fruit is to high. Its the same with pumped hydro, a technology that is a fantastic pairing with solar/wind, except the number of places which have both high wind energy, a load nearby and a good place to install pumped hydro are rare.
Seimens funding for Nuclear will probably go to make Solar and Wind power more economically viable.
While I wish you were correct, solar is _NOT_ going to get more economically viable unless the Government bans coal or a major breakthrough in PV or similar happens. Even solar thermal which could scale, isn't going to get much cheaper.
That is false, repeat after me.. There is no such thing as nuclear waste. IFR type designs burn everything down. The nice thing about the IFR design is that the existing "waste" stored at plants across the US could actually meet the US power needs for the next 100 years.
Yah, all the greenheads screaming about renewable are basically voting for both massive increases in energy pricing, and natural gas.
That is because the renewable sources need to be supplemented with some kind of backup or energy storage mechanism. This drives their cost up significantly. Furthermore, overwhelmingly the backup method appears to be natural gas generators because they can be spun up/down rapidly.
Even worse is the fact that because you are locating your wind farms in windy areas, rather than near the load you incur large transmission losses, which significantly reduces their efficiency.
Definitely PalmOS. Still use the thing (treo 650), as I have 100% control over it. Plus, the parts are nearly free, and the battery life is measured in days... Finally, its built like a tank. I actually tried to break on at one point, and was only successful at breaking the screen and dislodging the battery connector. 20 minutes later I had it working again.
Sales taxes sound fine at first, but they are way regressive, although there are a few "tweaks" that might make them work, the most important IMHO, is a 100% estate tax on amounts over some limit defined as 10x the median personal worth or something similar.
Of course the truly rich would find loopholes and setup trust funds/etc, but given the right laws i'm sure it would be possible to fix that too. But there isn't any political will, even if the trust funds are blatant attempts at avoiding taxes.
We're pretty unique in the world in that our Government demands you pay "your fair share" of every dollar you make anywhere in the world.
But AFAIK, you do get to deduct foreign taxes, so if you living somewhere with a significantly higher tax rate, then you aren't going to owe taxes in the US too.
Starbuck's coffee bar in the lobby and cup holders on every chair.
The amazing thing is that they cannot see their own hypocrisy even when its right in front of them. Next time your in church, next to the church bookstore/starbucks/etc, ask someone if they can remember the only time Jesus was angry/violent in the bible. Yah, that's right, the money changers and vendors selling goods for passover in the temple. I wonder what Jesus thinks about the "christian" stores that seem to be in every church now.
I heard it best described in this way: There's a hot new gadget that's being released today, and you *really* want to go buy one. Unfortunately, as you're walking down the street, some hedge fund investors see you coming and quickly jump in front of the store milliseconds before you get there
You could have stopped right there and said, "It works like the HP touchpad fire sale"
I buy an HP, sure it says it supports RAID 5 or 6 but that's Windows only and is software RAID prone to problems.
I guess it must be the MBA's, but the arrogance at HP really started to piss me off a few years ago.
First it was the removal of 3.5" bays from their machines, because after all none of their customers want to put high capacity low cost drives in the machines. Instead we all want to buy 10x as many 2.5" drives at 20x the cost.
Then it was their refusal to even send out system diagrams of the CPU->chipset->bus configurations. Something that can be reverse engineered in about 1/4 hour with a copy of lspci, and looking at the motherboard.
Then there are the outrageous licensing costs for things like "advanced ILO"
Or maybe even the total shit they sell people like the HP smart arrays (aka CCISS) that quite literally are slower with $10k of drives packed into them than a basic desktop SATA drive running standalone.
Just goes to show that copyright terms are far too long. Anything that falls into the public domain will be long forgotten. Media should fall into the public domain once the original authors stop selling it.
And that, I think is the point. The media companies are having enough problems selling you their latest trash. The last thing they want is to have to compete with free public domain content. There are enough books on Gutenberg project at this point that I could _NEVER_ expect to read them all in my lifetime. When that starts to happens to audio and video, the industry will be in for big changes. So the best plan is to lock it in the vault for the last 50 years of copyright so that no one has a copy by the time the copyrights expire. At which point the media is simply gone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Obama, and the next time there is a republican pres. I will be bitching about the dems for the same reason
Except for the fact that the democrats rarely are as cohesive as the republicans. This means that even when the R's hold the pres, and the D's hold the house or senate, there are always a few D's willing to vote with the R's in return for a pet project or two. This means the R's tend to get more of what they want even with smaller percentages. Even when the D's hold everything, they are rarely affective at getting anything remotely liberal passed. This is evidenced by the healthcare bill which sat around for months even though the D's had super majority in the senate.
Frankly, I'm going to quote whoever said, "The D's are incompetent, and the R's are insane." Or maybe there is truth in the idea that at this point the D's are a loose poorly run coalition of everyone who isn't an R.
No problem, I can supply them all day long. But two things need to be considered. 1st They won't run win7 or similar because the hardware specs will be ~5-10 years old, 2nd they won't all be the same because I will be trolling for deals from "PC recyclers".
Aka, at this point in history if someone doesn't have a PC, its probably not because they are too expensive to acquire. If you want to give children in Africa PC's the cheapest way is to divert a container full of PC's destined for some illegal recycling operation. One or two people can teach a kid how to fix an old PC in a matter of hours. Powering them, might be a different problem.
Unfortunately, what you personally want to pay and what studios want to charge are obviously not in synch right now, and it's possible they never will be.
Yah, the ~$6 to rent a movie on the roku from amazon is about $4 to much for my taste. Its basic economics, and you would think that the fact its $5 more expensive than redbox might give them a clue...
Its to bad that netflix hasn't figured out a way to stream the DVD library and avoid the resulting lawsuit. That way instead of mailing you a DVD they simply rent it for the two hours it takes to play. This of course is one of the 100 things wrong with copyright/content providers. They should not be able to control the distribution method once they have given you a license to something.
It's a button bar that resizes itself to whatever size the window is. It's a button bar that adapts contextually to what you're doing. It's a button bar that makes the most used items larger, and thus easier to hit. It's a button bar that gets out of your way with a single keystroke if you don't want it there....
Except that one of the most important aspects of _GOOD_ UI design is consistency. Constantly moving things around violates this principal. Consistent interfaces are boring because the user knows what to expect. Microsoft's problems is that boring interfaces don't get people excited about spending $300 to upgrade their OS/office package.
MS has totally jumped the shark, the day that alt-f,s stopped saving in MS products was the beginning of the end. When they started hiding the keyboard shortcuts by default might be another choice. Frankly, the windows UI is a mess. When I first installed the win7 betas I proceeded to start like 8 different applications that _SHIP_ with windows and they were all using different UI paradigms.
Really, the number of ways that the ribbon is not "just a buttonbar" is tiring to have to educate you about.
Yah, I know... Its a _TABBED_ button bar, christ, its shit because it doesn't really make anything clearer, and you have to "explore" it 3/4 of the time by mousing over everything to find what the fck your trying to do. Frequently little icons can't replace two words of text to describe a function. It may make it easier for grandma who uses word once a month, but it does nothing for people who sit at it all day, unless they are the kind of people who can't learn keyboard shortcuts. But even then, I think there is a class of people who are totally screwed. My mother is one of those people who takes notes when you show her how to do something on a computer. In the past those notes would be a simple as "click table" "click insert" now its like "click on the funny green icon with the square in the middle, and a white line through it, if you can't find the square click this other button"
Granted the menus in office 2003 were a mess, but they could have fixed 99% of the problems by cleaning up the menus and properly categorizing everything. Instead they decided to create yet another UI paradigm with a different set of strengths/weaknesses. The fact that we are having this discussion means its possible that in balance, the new UI isn't significantly better than the old one, just different.
Yah, its lame because the ribbon is just a fancy button bar, funny enough, word, etc allowed you to put anything you want to on the button bar. Which means the ribbon is what? Make-work for UI developers? And M$ wonders why apple is eating market share every-time they release a new OS...
Yah, same here, I thought/. had gone to the dark side. Took me another ~6 months to actually register.
But that seems to be a common theme, If everyone had known that low/. UIDs would be a measure of geek cred, then they would probably have jumped on it, but that story never made it to the front page...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certainly interested what you mean, is it with respect to salt as a moderator?
No I was indirectly referring to WIPP, which as I understand it, the salt traps water/etc so you don't have to worry about the waste migrating anywhere.
That is what IBM tells you, try generating your own numbers for once instead of spouting the ones the IBM sales guy tells you.
Sure, some of those machines have very high raw performance numbers... But a very large percentage of the installs actually partition that expensive machine up into a dozen or so smaller system images. Which of course negates a lot of the argument about operational costs because the majority of long term operational costs is related to the number of system images you are maintaining. Sure there are hardware support costs etc, but lots of companies can't even identify the performance bottlenecks in their system. Instead they just buy the latest pitch from $LARGEVENDOR, take their slight performance improvement, then repeat the process in a couple years.
Thats not to say, there aren't customers where the numbers for POWER or whatnot work out in their favor, its simply saying that its a smaller portion of the market every year. I have a POWER system sitting less than 10 feet from me right now. But I also have a quad socket westmere, and both the CPU and IO performance on the westmere is frankly astonishing with our application when compared with the POWER. That said the sweet spot is actually the dual socket setups as they are significantly less expensive, and our application scales well in a cluster.
Anyone buying POWER or SPARC is a lost cause anyway. Sure Intel might gain a few sales, but frankly the RISC volumes are pretty small and a huge number of them are "stuck" because they have existing applications that they are unwilling/unable to port to an alternative. Or the IT guys are religious zealots. This is the same reason you find AS400s/i5, Nonstops, OpenVMS, zos, etc machines running in data centers the world over. Its not because those OS's or the hardware actually provide some huge benefit that outweighs the 5x (or more, the sky is the limit in some cases) price difference between them and a basic Intel system. Its because companies have 8 and 9 figure investments in software running on them. They will probably still be in datacenters for decades into the future if IBM/Oracle/HP/etc don't decide to kill them off. They zombie on, as long as the original manufacturer supports them and the perceived/actual cost to port the application out weights the cost of buying a new machine/os every 5 years or so.
Except that in the case of FBR's the technology works and has been proven. Its more a question of which design is safest. The biggest problems are human/political.
Renewable on the other-hand are possible too, their biggest problems are more economic, mostly due to efficiency problems which are _REALLY_ hard to engineer around. Even if we chose to, it would be very difficult to convert 100% of our power to renewable over the next 50 years. Its a case of diminishing returns, you build the first few wind farms, in fairly windy areas close to the load. The next few end up farther away, resulting in a few percent higher losses, until your building wind farms with power capacities an order of magnitude larger than what the load demands to compensate for variations in the wind, and the distance from the load.
Same with solar, sure you can buy cheap CIGS today, but once your ramping large quantities the limiting factor becomes your ability to mine rare earth minerals. Or you can build solar thermal, and deal with many of the issues like wind, plus the fact your plants will literally cover hundreds of square miles to power reasonably sized cities. So while you can share farmland with wind, the same isn't true of solar.
So, in the end we will probably use coal until its to late, then we will end up building the nukes, unless there is some great breakthrough in renewable, which will continue to grow until the low hanging fruit is to high. Its the same with pumped hydro, a technology that is a fantastic pairing with solar/wind, except the number of places which have both high wind energy, a load nearby and a good place to install pumped hydro are rare.
I call for the immediate establishment of a geologically stable spent fuel containment facility built into granite
granite? Are you serious? My understanding was the salt is a much better solution.
Seimens funding for Nuclear will probably go to make Solar and Wind power more economically viable.
While I wish you were correct, solar is _NOT_ going to get more economically viable unless the Government bans coal or a major breakthrough in PV or similar happens. Even solar thermal which could scale, isn't going to get much cheaper.
that waste has to be stored for a loooooong time,
That is false, repeat after me.. There is no such thing as nuclear waste. IFR type designs burn everything down. The nice thing about the IFR design is that the existing "waste" stored at plants across the US could actually meet the US power needs for the next 100 years.
Yah, all the greenheads screaming about renewable are basically voting for both massive increases in energy pricing, and natural gas.
That is because the renewable sources need to be supplemented with some kind of backup or energy storage mechanism. This drives their cost up significantly. Furthermore, overwhelmingly the backup method appears to be natural gas generators because they can be spun up/down rapidly.
Even worse is the fact that because you are locating your wind farms in windy areas, rather than near the load you incur large transmission losses, which significantly reduces their efficiency.
Those 2% of the Sahara will be covered by a total of 158 billion panels
Your right PV isn't scalable, in the desert or on peoples roofs. Solar thermal might be.. But no one seem particularly interested in that.
Besides the main problem with these arguments is the loss due to transmission over long distances.
Definitely PalmOS. Still use the thing (treo 650), as I have 100% control over it. Plus, the parts are nearly free, and the battery life is measured in days... Finally, its built like a tank. I actually tried to break on at one point, and was only successful at breaking the screen and dislodging the battery connector. 20 minutes later I had it working again.
The dev kits are also free software.
Sales taxes sound fine at first, but they are way regressive, although there are a few "tweaks" that might make them work, the most important IMHO, is a 100% estate tax on amounts over some limit defined as 10x the median personal worth or something similar.
Of course the truly rich would find loopholes and setup trust funds/etc, but given the right laws i'm sure it would be possible to fix that too. But there isn't any political will, even if the trust funds are blatant attempts at avoiding taxes.
We're pretty unique in the world in that our Government demands you pay "your fair share" of every dollar you make anywhere in the world.
But AFAIK, you do get to deduct foreign taxes, so if you living somewhere with a significantly higher tax rate, then you aren't going to owe taxes in the US too.
Starbuck's coffee bar in the lobby and cup holders on every chair.
The amazing thing is that they cannot see their own hypocrisy even when its right in front of them. Next time your in church, next to the church bookstore/starbucks/etc, ask someone if they can remember the only time Jesus was angry/violent in the bible. Yah, that's right, the money changers and vendors selling goods for passover in the temple. I wonder what Jesus thinks about the "christian" stores that seem to be in every church now.
Up next: the War on Lulz
That should go well with the war on terrror...
I heard it best described in this way: There's a hot new gadget that's being released today, and you *really* want to go buy one. Unfortunately, as you're walking down the street, some hedge fund investors see you coming and quickly jump in front of the store milliseconds before you get there
You could have stopped right there and said, "It works like the HP touchpad fire sale"
LOL... Sorry couldn't resist..
I buy an HP, sure it says it supports RAID 5 or 6 but that's Windows only and is software RAID prone to problems.
I guess it must be the MBA's, but the arrogance at HP really started to piss me off a few years ago.
First it was the removal of 3.5" bays from their machines, because after all none of their customers want to put high capacity low cost drives in the machines. Instead we all want to buy 10x as many 2.5" drives at 20x the cost.
Then it was their refusal to even send out system diagrams of the CPU->chipset->bus configurations. Something that can be reverse engineered in about 1/4 hour with a copy of lspci, and looking at the motherboard.
Then there are the outrageous licensing costs for things like "advanced ILO"
Or maybe even the total shit they sell people like the HP smart arrays (aka CCISS) that quite literally are slower with $10k of drives packed into them than a basic desktop SATA drive running standalone.
Just goes to show that copyright terms are far too long. Anything that falls into the public domain will be long forgotten. Media should fall into the public domain once the original authors stop selling it.
And that, I think is the point. The media companies are having enough problems selling you their latest trash. The last thing they want is to have to compete with free public domain content. There are enough books on Gutenberg project at this point that I could _NEVER_ expect to read them all in my lifetime. When that starts to happens to audio and video, the industry will be in for big changes. So the best plan is to lock it in the vault for the last 50 years of copyright so that no one has a copy by the time the copyrights expire. At which point the media is simply gone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Obama, and the next time there is a republican pres. I will be bitching about the dems for the same reason
Except for the fact that the democrats rarely are as cohesive as the republicans. This means that even when the R's hold the pres, and the D's hold the house or senate, there are always a few D's willing to vote with the R's in return for a pet project or two. This means the R's tend to get more of what they want even with smaller percentages. Even when the D's hold everything, they are rarely affective at getting anything remotely liberal passed. This is evidenced by the healthcare bill which sat around for months even though the D's had super majority in the senate.
Frankly, I'm going to quote whoever said, "The D's are incompetent, and the R's are insane." Or maybe there is truth in the idea that at this point the D's are a loose poorly run coalition of everyone who isn't an R.
No problem, I can supply them all day long. But two things need to be considered. 1st They won't run win7 or similar because the hardware specs will be ~5-10 years old, 2nd they won't all be the same because I will be trolling for deals from "PC recyclers".
Aka, at this point in history if someone doesn't have a PC, its probably not because they are too expensive to acquire. If you want to give children in Africa PC's the cheapest way is to divert a container full of PC's destined for some illegal recycling operation. One or two people can teach a kid how to fix an old PC in a matter of hours. Powering them, might be a different problem.
Unfortunately, what you personally want to pay and what studios want to charge are obviously not in synch right now, and it's possible they never will be.
Yah, the ~$6 to rent a movie on the roku from amazon is about $4 to much for my taste. Its basic economics, and you would think that the fact its $5 more expensive than redbox might give them a clue...
Its to bad that netflix hasn't figured out a way to stream the DVD library and avoid the resulting lawsuit. That way instead of mailing you a DVD they simply rent it for the two hours it takes to play. This of course is one of the 100 things wrong with copyright/content providers. They should not be able to control the distribution method once they have given you a license to something.
No, Dallas and Houston haven't frozen over just yet.
Austin here at 112... Hasn't frozen over here either.
It's a button bar that resizes itself to whatever size the window is. It's a button bar that adapts contextually to what you're doing. It's a button bar that makes the most used items larger, and thus easier to hit. It's a button bar that gets out of your way with a single keystroke if you don't want it there....
Except that one of the most important aspects of _GOOD_ UI design is consistency. Constantly moving things around violates this principal. Consistent interfaces are boring because the user knows what to expect. Microsoft's problems is that boring interfaces don't get people excited about spending $300 to upgrade their OS/office package.
MS has totally jumped the shark, the day that alt-f,s stopped saving in MS products was the beginning of the end. When they started hiding the keyboard shortcuts by default might be another choice. Frankly, the windows UI is a mess. When I first installed the win7 betas I proceeded to start like 8 different applications that _SHIP_ with windows and they were all using different UI paradigms.
Really, the number of ways that the ribbon is not "just a buttonbar" is tiring to have to educate you about.
Yah, I know... Its a _TABBED_ button bar, christ, its shit because it doesn't really make anything clearer, and you have to "explore" it 3/4 of the time by mousing over everything to find what the fck your trying to do. Frequently little icons can't replace two words of text to describe a function. It may make it easier for grandma who uses word once a month, but it does nothing for people who sit at it all day, unless they are the kind of people who can't learn keyboard shortcuts. But even then, I think there is a class of people who are totally screwed. My mother is one of those people who takes notes when you show her how to do something on a computer. In the past those notes would be a simple as "click table" "click insert" now its like "click on the funny green icon with the square in the middle, and a white line through it, if you can't find the square click this other button"
Granted the menus in office 2003 were a mess, but they could have fixed 99% of the problems by cleaning up the menus and properly categorizing everything. Instead they decided to create yet another UI paradigm with a different set of strengths/weaknesses. The fact that we are having this discussion means its possible that in balance, the new UI isn't significantly better than the old one, just different.
Yah, its lame because the ribbon is just a fancy button bar, funny enough, word, etc allowed you to put anything you want to on the button bar. Which means the ribbon is what? Make-work for UI developers? And M$ wonders why apple is eating market share every-time they release a new OS...
"another site to register at?"
Yah, same here, I thought /. had gone to the dark side. Took me another ~6 months to actually register.
But that seems to be a common theme, If everyone had known that low /. UIDs would be a measure of geek cred, then they would probably have jumped on it, but that story never made it to the front page...
That is a trick question, I ask it too. People who are too eager to answer tend to spend more time on /. than coding...