Modern 2TB and 3TB mechanical drives can saturate a 1 Gbps connection, not to mention even the cheapest SSDs... You don't need an expensive computer to saturate GigE.
It can still be hard or expensive to use such things.
I recently needed an RS-232 connection to talk to the serial console of my PandaBoard. I saw that the local The Source store claimed to have four USB adapters for $20 a pop, but when I showed up they had none. The only other store within a few blocks I could find wanted $70 for theirs, which was a bit silly.
In the end, I had to borrow a friend's ancient AMD K6 laptop (K6, no bloody 2 or 3), running Mandrake 8, which had a serial port. Luckily, the laptop had a PCMCIA ethernet card, enabling me to use it as an enormous serial-to-ethernet adapter.
650 meg CDs were unusually large. Heck, my first computer with a 2x CD-ROM drive had a 160MB hard disk. But one of the wonderful things about such an enormous capacity media is that it suddenly enabled a huge range of things that weren't possible before.
Myst? The Seventh Guest? Computer encyclopedias? None of this was really feasible before. Sure, a game like Myst looks bloated today because modern multimedia compression could offer significantly better quality in far less space (Cinepak, how I loathed and loved you), but at the time it enabled computers to access content that you could never have achieved with floppy disks.
1Gbps is pretty decent, but for a lot of modern file sharing, it's a bottleneck. My disk-based home fileserver can transfer at several times that, and even my desktop's SSD (which can likely be had for $200-300 today) can double that.
Do I *need* to be able to copy files at 250MB/s or 500MB/s instead of 125MB/s? No, but it's just as hard to argue that I need 1 Gbps instead of 100 Mbps. Point is, 1 Gbps is a bottleneck for an increasingly large number of consumers now, not 4 years from now.
It's possible. I consider 3 million businesses using a service to be an "enormous" success. How many businesses need to use a service before you consider it to be an "enormous" success?
I think that the enormous success of Google Apps in the enterprise and government spaces kind of disproves your point. Google claims to have already over 3 million businesses using Google Apps, and some of those are pretty big enterprises. Moving to ChromeOS isn't changing what's already there in the cloud.
Then, if you really want avoid putting your mail and documents in the public cloud, you can still give your employees access to Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. via Citrix Receiver on a ChromeOS machine. It integrates into the browser pretty nicely, each Citrix app in its own tab, and pretty darned responsive, if the demos are to be believed.
Google's pricing model for businesses is pretty attractive, since it includes the support contract. It gives me the feeling that the corporate domain is really their primary intended market for ChromeOS, particularly the ChromeOS desktops (which I believe are or will be only available to businesses, at least initially).
There is still some support for businesses to get custom apps running on these things. There's obviously the custom web-app, and beyond that, there's Citrix Receiver support. You can run Microsoft Office on a ChromeBook if you really want to, or any other Windows app, although I wonder at the performance of it. It'd have to use NaCL to get reasonable performance...
I'm not sure why people don't get this - if they can get you to do everything through Chrome, they have 100% of your information. That's why they do this.
Sure, OK, no argument there. Why is that a problem?
It's an inferior solution to using Wubi for testing, which installs Ubuntu as a managed program inside of Windows without touching the partition table, but enables you to boot the machine fully into Linux without any virtualization (just some abstraction since you're running off a disk image on a mounted NTFS partition).
It's perfect for testing. Install from inside of Windows with minimal risk, try it out, if you don't like it, uninstall from inside of Windows.
It's an Ubuntu installer (I believe there is an option to pick Xubuntu or Kubuntu during the install) that runs from inside of Windows. It automatically sets up dual boot without touching the partition table; it creates a disk image on your Windows partition and takes over the bootloader. If you choose to boot into Ubuntu, it mounts the Windows partition and then the disk image from there. It also puts Ubuntu in the Windows Add/Remove control panel, so Ubuntu can be uninstalled like any other Windows program.
Yes, there's a performance penalty for disk performance, but it's a great way for a Windows user to get their toe in the water with minimal risk and effort, and there is a tool that can convert a Wubi install to a proper multi-partition multi-boot setup later if you decide you want to take the next step.
tl;dr: Environmental movements are not having any real impact in Canada, or at least not in Quebec, which produces a third of the Canada's power.
This does not appear to be true in Quebec, which is the province producing the most hydro in Canada. While there is certainly opposition to individual projects, it appears to have had no impact on HydroQuebec's general plans for new dams and upgrades to existing dams (there are substantial plans or actual construction underway). The fact that essentially all of our power comes from hydro (so, no acceptable alternatives to add large amounts of capacity) and that most Quebecers see the crown corporation as a source of pride (and are therefore generally unopposed to further expansion) limits opposition.
The idea that politicians in Quebec are actually listening to people saying that HydroQuebec should dismantle Quebec's electrical infrastructure is silly. In fact, the politicians see HydroQuebec as a cash cow since it produces billions and billions of dollars of additional revenue for the government every year, despite having among (if not the) lowest electrical rates in North America. I can't speak first-hand about the situation in other provinces, but my understanding is that there are projects underway in other provinces too. HydroQuebec produces about half of all hydro in Canada, and about a third of all electricity in Canada in general, but several other provinces have high percentages of hydro power. Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, and British Columbia are all at 85%+ for hydro.
Hydro might be niche in the US, but in Canada, it's the dominant source (61%), and in Quebec, it's virtually the only source (92%). I figure HydroQuebec only maintains their tiny collection of alternative sources of energy (one nuclear, one thermal, three gas, one wind, etc) so that they can maintain the capability.
Then don't use them to fill gaps, use them for the base production. Virtually all of Quebec's power comes from hydro, and we've got a mix of run-of-the-river and reservoir plants, because there's always going to be a minimum that you've got to generate 24/7/365. And since we sell significant amounts of our power to other provinces and countries, that helps keep minimum demand up too (while turning a substantial profit despite prices among the lowest in North America).
Sure, but that problem is "over the top"; there's always going to need to be a minimum load that must be supplied at all times, so any calculations made as to total greenhouse gas emissions should include both reservoir and run-of-the-river plants.
Hydro plants don't have to use reservoirs. We've got an almost 2GW hydro plant in Quebec that is a run-of-the-river type.
In terms of scale, I'd note that Canada, with 10% the population, generates 1.47x more hydro power than the entire US. HydroQuébec alone (36.8 GW) has ~5.4 GW of additional capacity and upgrades under construction.
Plant matter decaying, but that depends on the environment. Let me quote Wikipedia, because I'm lazy:
"In boreal reservoirs of Canada and Northern Europe, however, greenhouse gas emissions are typically only 2% to 8% of any kind of conventional fossil-fuel thermal generation. A new class of underwater logging operation that targets drowned forests can mitigate the effect of forest decay."
Of course, there's a fixed amount of plant matter that can decay; over the long term, I imagine the methane production becomes negligible. And while dams will eventually need to be replaced (I believe they can last about 50-100 years), there's no reason that you can't use the same reservoir for a new dam.
Of course, I'm biased. My province gets 92.3% of its power from hydro, and the producer, HydroQuébec, is the single largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world (36.8 GW). Canada as a whole only produces 61% of its power from hydro, but that's a damned sight better than the US at under 6%. Heck, HydroQuébec supplies almost a third of Vermont's power...
Also, you don't need a reservoir for hydro. For example, the Beauharnois generator is almost 2GW, and doesn't use a reservoir.
I'm pretty sure that having a dominant market share *is* the legal definition of a monopoly. Having a monopoly isn't illegal in and of itself, but it places additional restrictions on your behaviour under various countries' competition laws.
They can get away with this because most people don't care about this stuff anyhow. There is a significant portion who do (two years ago, it was said that 10% of iPhone users were jailbreaking), but that still leaves 90% who don't, and I suspect a decent chunk of those 10% are jailbreaking to pirate stuff anyhow (not judging, just saying).
Yes, Unity runs on ARM already. But it uses OpenGL. ARM-based stuff like the PandaBoard tends to only support OpenGL ES because nobody licenses the OpenGL drivers from Imagination Technologies (only OpenGL ES drivers). This Linaro announcement is of note because they've ported Unity 3D to OpenGL ES.
I've been playing around with Ubuntu 11.04 on a PandaBoard for the past few days, and while most software works, there's a decent chunk of software that is either missing from the armel repositories, or if it's there, it just doesn't work.
But by far the bigger limitation is the complete lack of accelerated 2D support for the PowerVR SGX. The xorg drivers (either omapfb or the pvr drivers) do everything entirely in software. Take FCEUX as an example, since it seems to be the only emulator in the repositories that works (SNES9X runs but won't actually emulate anything). It uses SDL for video output, the only SDL video driver usable is x11, and that means that all your scaling is done in software. Any scaling whatsoever results in choppy uneven framerates, and even unscaled isn't quite perfect.
There's also near-zero hardware accelerated 3D support, because most Linux software uses OpenGL, and the only drivers Imagination Technologies seems to have licensed to anybody are for OpenGL ES.
If only we had either proper OpenGL drivers, or a system-wide OpenGL to OpenGL ES wrapper, then a lot of software would work *MUCH* better. FCEUX, for example, does support OpenGL for hardware scaling...
At Concordia University in Montreal, all public computers in labs dual-boot Windows and Linux. When I graduated, this was Windows XP and Fedora, but I suspect they've changed since.
IITS, our IT department, normally provided wireless connection instructions for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux (GNOME, if memory serves).
I'm a big Baen fan too. You pay an affordable amount (which seems to usually be ~$5 for a book), and get the eBook in every format you can imagine. epub, mobi, pdf, html, lit, etc. Personally, I download 'em in mobi and stick 'em on my Kindle 3.
More than that, though, Baen offers a lot of their books for free. Usually the first book or two in a series is free, the rest are cheap.
They also let readers buy books early, before they've been edited; they call them "Advanced Reader Copies", and usually charge $15 for them. They're unedited, so tend to have mistakes, but if you're desperate for the latest book from a favourite author, some people are willing to pay for that.
They also include CDs of lots of their books with some physical hardcovers. Some of David Weber's recent Honor Harrington novels have shipped with a CD containing what seems like every other book David Weber has ever written in DRM-free eBook format. Strangely, Baen encourages users to share and copy these CDs that come with some of their novels, and seems to generally be happy with the site that has ISOs of them all.
That's how I got into some of their series. Downloaded the first few free from their free library, read some more from the free CDs, then ended up buying the newer ones as they came out. It's smart, because I probably would never have started on any of Baen's series if they didn't have the first ones free.
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Modern 2TB and 3TB mechanical drives can saturate a 1 Gbps connection, not to mention even the cheapest SSDs... You don't need an expensive computer to saturate GigE.
It can still be hard or expensive to use such things.
I recently needed an RS-232 connection to talk to the serial console of my PandaBoard. I saw that the local The Source store claimed to have four USB adapters for $20 a pop, but when I showed up they had none. The only other store within a few blocks I could find wanted $70 for theirs, which was a bit silly.
In the end, I had to borrow a friend's ancient AMD K6 laptop (K6, no bloody 2 or 3), running Mandrake 8, which had a serial port. Luckily, the laptop had a PCMCIA ethernet card, enabling me to use it as an enormous serial-to-ethernet adapter.
650 meg CDs were unusually large. Heck, my first computer with a 2x CD-ROM drive had a 160MB hard disk. But one of the wonderful things about such an enormous capacity media is that it suddenly enabled a huge range of things that weren't possible before.
Myst? The Seventh Guest? Computer encyclopedias? None of this was really feasible before. Sure, a game like Myst looks bloated today because modern multimedia compression could offer significantly better quality in far less space (Cinepak, how I loathed and loved you), but at the time it enabled computers to access content that you could never have achieved with floppy disks.
1Gbps is pretty decent, but for a lot of modern file sharing, it's a bottleneck. My disk-based home fileserver can transfer at several times that, and even my desktop's SSD (which can likely be had for $200-300 today) can double that.
Do I *need* to be able to copy files at 250MB/s or 500MB/s instead of 125MB/s? No, but it's just as hard to argue that I need 1 Gbps instead of 100 Mbps. Point is, 1 Gbps is a bottleneck for an increasingly large number of consumers now, not 4 years from now.
It's possible. I consider 3 million businesses using a service to be an "enormous" success. How many businesses need to use a service before you consider it to be an "enormous" success?
I think that the enormous success of Google Apps in the enterprise and government spaces kind of disproves your point. Google claims to have already over 3 million businesses using Google Apps, and some of those are pretty big enterprises. Moving to ChromeOS isn't changing what's already there in the cloud.
Then, if you really want avoid putting your mail and documents in the public cloud, you can still give your employees access to Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. via Citrix Receiver on a ChromeOS machine. It integrates into the browser pretty nicely, each Citrix app in its own tab, and pretty darned responsive, if the demos are to be believed.
Google's pricing model for businesses is pretty attractive, since it includes the support contract. It gives me the feeling that the corporate domain is really their primary intended market for ChromeOS, particularly the ChromeOS desktops (which I believe are or will be only available to businesses, at least initially).
There is still some support for businesses to get custom apps running on these things. There's obviously the custom web-app, and beyond that, there's Citrix Receiver support. You can run Microsoft Office on a ChromeBook if you really want to, or any other Windows app, although I wonder at the performance of it. It'd have to use NaCL to get reasonable performance...
I'm not sure why people don't get this - if they can get you to do everything through Chrome, they have 100% of your information. That's why they do this.
Sure, OK, no argument there. Why is that a problem?
I'm sure he'll have a cameo at the very least.
It's an inferior solution to using Wubi for testing, which installs Ubuntu as a managed program inside of Windows without touching the partition table, but enables you to boot the machine fully into Linux without any virtualization (just some abstraction since you're running off a disk image on a mounted NTFS partition).
It's perfect for testing. Install from inside of Windows with minimal risk, try it out, if you don't like it, uninstall from inside of Windows.
This is the perfect time for Wubi: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer
It's an Ubuntu installer (I believe there is an option to pick Xubuntu or Kubuntu during the install) that runs from inside of Windows. It automatically sets up dual boot without touching the partition table; it creates a disk image on your Windows partition and takes over the bootloader. If you choose to boot into Ubuntu, it mounts the Windows partition and then the disk image from there. It also puts Ubuntu in the Windows Add/Remove control panel, so Ubuntu can be uninstalled like any other Windows program.
Yes, there's a performance penalty for disk performance, but it's a great way for a Windows user to get their toe in the water with minimal risk and effort, and there is a tool that can convert a Wubi install to a proper multi-partition multi-boot setup later if you decide you want to take the next step.
tl;dr: Environmental movements are not having any real impact in Canada, or at least not in Quebec, which produces a third of the Canada's power.
This does not appear to be true in Quebec, which is the province producing the most hydro in Canada. While there is certainly opposition to individual projects, it appears to have had no impact on HydroQuebec's general plans for new dams and upgrades to existing dams (there are substantial plans or actual construction underway). The fact that essentially all of our power comes from hydro (so, no acceptable alternatives to add large amounts of capacity) and that most Quebecers see the crown corporation as a source of pride (and are therefore generally unopposed to further expansion) limits opposition.
The idea that politicians in Quebec are actually listening to people saying that HydroQuebec should dismantle Quebec's electrical infrastructure is silly. In fact, the politicians see HydroQuebec as a cash cow since it produces billions and billions of dollars of additional revenue for the government every year, despite having among (if not the) lowest electrical rates in North America. I can't speak first-hand about the situation in other provinces, but my understanding is that there are projects underway in other provinces too. HydroQuebec produces about half of all hydro in Canada, and about a third of all electricity in Canada in general, but several other provinces have high percentages of hydro power. Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, and British Columbia are all at 85%+ for hydro.
Hydro might be niche in the US, but in Canada, it's the dominant source (61%), and in Quebec, it's virtually the only source (92%). I figure HydroQuebec only maintains their tiny collection of alternative sources of energy (one nuclear, one thermal, three gas, one wind, etc) so that they can maintain the capability.
Then don't use them to fill gaps, use them for the base production. Virtually all of Quebec's power comes from hydro, and we've got a mix of run-of-the-river and reservoir plants, because there's always going to be a minimum that you've got to generate 24/7/365. And since we sell significant amounts of our power to other provinces and countries, that helps keep minimum demand up too (while turning a substantial profit despite prices among the lowest in North America).
Except, before posting that, I actually went and looked at some random UK stores that sold air conditioners. And I saw a lot of BTU ratings.
Depends on what for. They still use them for some things. Air conditioner ratings, for example.
Sure, but that problem is "over the top"; there's always going to need to be a minimum load that must be supplied at all times, so any calculations made as to total greenhouse gas emissions should include both reservoir and run-of-the-river plants.
You know who else uses British Thermal Units? The British.
Hydro plants don't have to use reservoirs. We've got an almost 2GW hydro plant in Quebec that is a run-of-the-river type.
In terms of scale, I'd note that Canada, with 10% the population, generates 1.47x more hydro power than the entire US. HydroQuébec alone (36.8 GW) has ~5.4 GW of additional capacity and upgrades under construction.
Plant matter decaying, but that depends on the environment. Let me quote Wikipedia, because I'm lazy:
"In boreal reservoirs of Canada and Northern Europe, however, greenhouse gas emissions are typically only 2% to 8% of any kind of conventional fossil-fuel thermal generation. A new class of underwater logging operation that targets drowned forests can mitigate the effect of forest decay."
Of course, there's a fixed amount of plant matter that can decay; over the long term, I imagine the methane production becomes negligible. And while dams will eventually need to be replaced (I believe they can last about 50-100 years), there's no reason that you can't use the same reservoir for a new dam.
Of course, I'm biased. My province gets 92.3% of its power from hydro, and the producer, HydroQuébec, is the single largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world (36.8 GW). Canada as a whole only produces 61% of its power from hydro, but that's a damned sight better than the US at under 6%. Heck, HydroQuébec supplies almost a third of Vermont's power...
Also, you don't need a reservoir for hydro. For example, the Beauharnois generator is almost 2GW, and doesn't use a reservoir.
I'm pretty sure that having a dominant market share *is* the legal definition of a monopoly. Having a monopoly isn't illegal in and of itself, but it places additional restrictions on your behaviour under various countries' competition laws.
They can get away with this because most people don't care about this stuff anyhow. There is a significant portion who do (two years ago, it was said that 10% of iPhone users were jailbreaking), but that still leaves 90% who don't, and I suspect a decent chunk of those 10% are jailbreaking to pirate stuff anyhow (not judging, just saying).
Yes, Unity runs on ARM already. But it uses OpenGL. ARM-based stuff like the PandaBoard tends to only support OpenGL ES because nobody licenses the OpenGL drivers from Imagination Technologies (only OpenGL ES drivers). This Linaro announcement is of note because they've ported Unity 3D to OpenGL ES.
I've been playing around with Ubuntu 11.04 on a PandaBoard for the past few days, and while most software works, there's a decent chunk of software that is either missing from the armel repositories, or if it's there, it just doesn't work.
But by far the bigger limitation is the complete lack of accelerated 2D support for the PowerVR SGX. The xorg drivers (either omapfb or the pvr drivers) do everything entirely in software. Take FCEUX as an example, since it seems to be the only emulator in the repositories that works (SNES9X runs but won't actually emulate anything). It uses SDL for video output, the only SDL video driver usable is x11, and that means that all your scaling is done in software. Any scaling whatsoever results in choppy uneven framerates, and even unscaled isn't quite perfect.
There's also near-zero hardware accelerated 3D support, because most Linux software uses OpenGL, and the only drivers Imagination Technologies seems to have licensed to anybody are for OpenGL ES.
If only we had either proper OpenGL drivers, or a system-wide OpenGL to OpenGL ES wrapper, then a lot of software would work *MUCH* better. FCEUX, for example, does support OpenGL for hardware scaling...
voip.ms is not per minute, they bill by 6 second increments.
At Concordia University in Montreal, all public computers in labs dual-boot Windows and Linux. When I graduated, this was Windows XP and Fedora, but I suspect they've changed since.
IITS, our IT department, normally provided wireless connection instructions for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux (GNOME, if memory serves).
I'm a big Baen fan too. You pay an affordable amount (which seems to usually be ~$5 for a book), and get the eBook in every format you can imagine. epub, mobi, pdf, html, lit, etc. Personally, I download 'em in mobi and stick 'em on my Kindle 3.
More than that, though, Baen offers a lot of their books for free. Usually the first book or two in a series is free, the rest are cheap.
They also let readers buy books early, before they've been edited; they call them "Advanced Reader Copies", and usually charge $15 for them. They're unedited, so tend to have mistakes, but if you're desperate for the latest book from a favourite author, some people are willing to pay for that.
They also include CDs of lots of their books with some physical hardcovers. Some of David Weber's recent Honor Harrington novels have shipped with a CD containing what seems like every other book David Weber has ever written in DRM-free eBook format. Strangely, Baen encourages users to share and copy these CDs that come with some of their novels, and seems to generally be happy with the site that has ISOs of them all.
That's how I got into some of their series. Downloaded the first few free from their free library, read some more from the free CDs, then ended up buying the newer ones as they came out. It's smart, because I probably would never have started on any of Baen's series if they didn't have the first ones free.