Thanks for your post. You provide some interesting food for thought, and you've prompted me to do some more research.
If you could, I would be very happy if you could provide me with links to back up some of your claims. In particular:
``Hybrids do have more-efficient engine designs than the Otto cycle.''
Really? That's good news. What kind of engines do they use, then?
``Huge amounts of money have been spent trying to get algae farms to work, and nobody has ever come close to making it even stay alive, let alone becoming economically competitive.''
Can you point me to sources to back up those claims?
``Converting mechanical motion into electricity, back to motion, is terribly inefficient, and would waste fuel, not save it.''
Of course. But common gasoline engines are also terribly inefficient, particularly when they have to change speed all the time. I can completely imagine that running an engine at its peak efficiency for electricity generation, then using the electricity to power an electric motor (which can have 80% to 90% efficiency) would be more efficient than using the engine to drive the wheels directly. At any rate, my hybrid uses about 4 to 5 liters of gasoline per 100 km, whereas other gasoline cars in the same class use about twice as much. I like to think that this is at least partially due to the combustion engine being used to generate electricity and the electromotor converting that to motion.
``Why haven't you bought a Zap Xebra yet?''
For whatever reason, many electric vehicles, including the Xebra, are not available here. Otherwise, I would certainly have checked them out and might even have bought one, provided that I were convinced of its merits. As it stands, I think the electric vehicle landscape is pretty saddening. I would expect that with advances in battery technology, electric cars would have become viable by now and, looking at the Tesla Roadster, it seems they have, but they are certainly not taking the market by storm.
You can _never_ know the relative security of two systems. There simply isn't any way to measure it fairly.
Count disclosed vulnerabilities? What about the vulnerabilities that weren't disclosed?
Have teams search for vulnerabilities and compare the results? What does that tell you? Was one team equally good at finding vulnerabilities in one system as the other was at finding them in the other system? What if one system had many easy to find vulnerabilities, and the other had a couple of severe but harder to find vulnerabilities?
Count actual break-ins? Well, was that due to the system being vulnerable the way the vendor left it, or because of the administrator? What about break-ins you don't know about?
It's always a matter of what you don't know about. You don't know the vulnerabilities that weren't reported. You don't know the vulnerabilities that weren't found. You don't know the relative skills of the teams you used. You don't know if you tested for all possible classes of vulnerability.
And I haven't even mentioned the severity of vulnerabilities, the availability of exploit code, the way vulnerabilities are dealt with by the vendor, and a host of other issues.
The take home message is that you just _can't_ know. It's a hard pill to swallow, but you will just never know which system is more secure. All you have is flawed metrics and your gut feeling.
It's nice that this is up and coming, but that sort of thing is also known as "vaporware". We've been hearing announcements of cleaner vehicles for years and years. Even Lada demonstrated one last century! And what do we have? A handful of hybrids...
Why is it taking so long? Why is it that I can see things that could be improved, and it's not being done? For example, why do the two hybrid cars I can buy here have gasoline engines and a fuel economy comparable to a diesel in the same price class, when they could (1) burn diesel, which has a much better fuel economy _and_ is cheaper here, and (2) use the combustion engine _only_ for electricity generation, so that it can run at its optimum efficiency? And, while I'm at it, why not a more efficient engine (e.g. Sterling or Wankel instead of Otto)?
And why do we have cars that can run on up to 85% ethanol (the rest being gasoline) instead of 100%? And why do diesel cars not run on straight vegetable oil right out of the factory, even though you can get them converted for about 2 thousand euros, after which they can run on straight vegetable oil _or_ diesel?
Come on, people! It's not like there are unsolved technical problems here! The solutions are known, they are just not in mass-manufactured cars.
And governments! The (well, some previous) government here has refused to lower taxes for CO2-neutral fuels because "the environmental benefits are not clear". This despite studies having found that using straight vegetable oil instead of diesel reduces CO2 emissions _even_ if fossil fuels are burnt in every possible phase of the production and transportation. If it wasn't for that, straight vegetable oil would be cheaper than diesel here.
And all the misconceptions people have. "But electricity generation emits CO2, too!" Well, depends how you generate your electricity, don't you think? "But the crops for producing vegetable oil will use up valuable arable land!" Well, not if you use crops that don't, or algae, which grow in deserts and on salt water and have a much higher yield anyway. And on and on.
I don't claim _I_ have all the right answers, but it's sad to see how messed up the situation is, considering the things that _are_ known and _could_ be used.
``On many of these electrics, you do need to plug-in to get your initial charge. Isn't that causing just as much, if not more, pollution than burning oil locally?''
It depends on how you generate your electricity. I would have thought that's obvious, but apparently it isn't to many people.
``I'm still not sure that anyone can actually decipher all the different impacts that "environmentally-friendly" vehicles or machines have.''
I agree. The only thing that is certain for now is that they _do_ cause pollution. Exactly how much, I couldn't say, but it means that the environmental friendliness is only relative.
``I know I read an article this year that spoke of the CO2 emissions for just peddling a bike or taking a walk, so even not using machinery seems to have an impact.''
Of course. The human body consumes O2 and emits CO2. But there is something worth noting: the carbon we emit typically comes from renewable resources (i.e. plants or animals). This means it is released after recently having been absorbed, so the net effect is 0. Contrast this with burning fossil fuels, where you are releasing carbon that had been buried for millions of years into the atmosphere.
``Then again, I'm not a big fan of the global warming scams out there, nor am I a fan of peak oil theory.''
Global warming is a fact, and that mineral oil extraction will peak at some point is given. Whether these are things we should be afraid of or feel guilty about is a different matter.
``I just need to see the whole picture, rather than what some people will say is a small portion of the picture, but ignores other ramifications of decision making.''
It is very hard to get a clear picture, with all the clueless people shouting so loudly. One the one hand, there are people still pretending and trying to convince others that the changes that are happening to the environment aren't really there. On the other hand, you have people who have blind faith in some clean technology and think it will solve all problems if only the evil governments and oil companies stopped fighting it. Millions of people just parrot one camp or another, and they're all wrong. In the meantime, there _are_ good ideas that we could implement, but they are mostly left by the wayside because they don't stand out among all the wrong-headed noise makers.
``I'd rather pollute MY area, so we can see the direct effect, than push it off to a poorer neighborhood where we won't.''
That, of course, is the main problem with any kind of pollution. The effect isn't felt in full by the people generating it, and thus doesn't factor into the cost of things. Therefore, cleaner alternatives almost universally seem more expensive. Thus, it makes economic sense to pollute. It's hard to do something about this without resorting to heavy-handed, commitee-decided, wrong-headed measures. Like, for example, in the Netherlands, where there is a tax cut on hybrid cars. Think about it. It's on hybrid cars. Not on clean cars. If it's a hybrid, it gets the cut, no matter how polluting it is. If it's a clean car but not a hybrid, it doesn't get the cut. Madness!
Questions that pop up in my mind at this point are:
- Does using multiple browsers as described actually do anything for security?
- Why?
- Is it supposed to be that way?
- Shouldn't we be secure using just one browser?
``and that is a heck of a challenge. most users do not understand what can happen and many likely do not really care''...and they shouldn't have to. You open these attachments (etc.) because you think they will do something good. You don't expect them to mess up your computer. Without support from the operating system and other legit software on the computer, attachments _couldn't_ mess up your computer. The only reason they can is that the software people use to open them is insecure. It allows (through design, sloppiness, or bugs) arbitrary code execution where all it _should_ allow is viewing images and perhaps movies and sound. Proper sandboxing and safe code (which is easy to write in all but a handful of commonly used programming languages) will solve this problem.
As an example of the above, I am working on a programming language, and one thing this programming language will feature is different subsets for different niches. One such subset will allow any program to be written, so long as it doesn't change the state of anything outside the program that was not passed into it as a modifiable data structure. That means no interaction with any files on your system, no popup windows, no phoning home, no sending spam, etc. If you give it a file to read and an area of the screen to draw on, these are the only things it will be able to do.
Good! Now that somebody has done a benchmark and it's been featured here, I expect some serious work will be done on JavaScript. I think performance will increase enormously in at least the developer-friendly browsers.
Now that's the way to do it. Not just the environmentally friendly power generation, but the performance per Watt of the computer, too. According to an article at The Register, the SC648 is built from MIPS (the type of CPU) cores that run at 500 MHz and execute two intructions per cycle. That should work out to about 1000 MIPS (the performance unit) per core, which, according to el Reg, the SC648 has 2916 of. In other words, these students got 2.9 million MIPS for 1200 Watts. That's some 2400 MIPS per Watt! How does a typical home PC compare to that?
Note: I might have gotten the number of cores wrong, in which case the results are also wrong. Supposing there were 648 cores (which the Slashdot summary may imply), it would work out to 648 thousand MIPS for 1200 Watts, or 540 MIPS per Watt. I don't think my (still low power at 20W) PC can come close to that (assuming the VIA C7 at 1.2 GHz does 1200 MIPS, it would be 60 MIPS per Watt...).
The report may be accurate, but all that really tells us is that Vista had more _disclosed_ vulnerabilities than OS X. While such a large difference (a factor 5!) is certainly cause for raising eyebrows, the concrete implications of these figures are far from clear. In particular, it says nothing at all about the relative security of the systems. Of course, people will use them that way.
First of all, is it just Windows users who want stuff for free?
Secondly, are all Windows users like that?
I think you will find that the answer to both questions is "no". There are people on other operating systems who want stuff for free and don't care a whit about ideology, and there are Windows users who care about ideology and actively participate in open source projects, and don't violate others' copyrights.
This sounds like an opportunity for Apple to add a logout feature for HTTP Basic authentication to their browser. After all, they control both the browser and.mac; they can make this work. I've never understood why there is no logout feature for HTTP Basic authentication.
I don't know if.mac actually uses HTTP Basic auth for authentication (if I were to guess I would guess not), but still.
While I agree with the general gist of your post, I'd just like to point out that I've run KDE 3 (I think it was 3.1) on 200 MHz Pentium MMX machines with 64 MB RAM and been impressed with the performance. It had Keramik and the nice eye-candy icon set (something with Crystal, maybe?).
I don't know what point I'm trying to make here (KDE 3.5 isn't KDE 3.1, of course). I do believe this was in the GHz era, though. Firefox, of course, was unbearable on those machines, and that's how I got to love Konqueror, which I still prefer nowadays.
``So, I guess when I do a make && make install under Linux, I'm "jumping through hoops" in exactly the same manner, right? After all, I download an "installation script" for some program off the web, I "run" the file...and then the process starts!''
If it's like that, you would be jumping through some minor hoops, yes. Having to hunt down the source, dowload it, make, and make install is not how software installation works on a good linux distro.
Also, it's not realistic. More likely, you would have to go through hell and back to get it to compile at all, with missing dependencies that you have to hunt down, download, compile, and install.
Quite a bit more involved that upgrading Vista to Vista RC1, I would guess. Also, I'd like to emphasize it once more, not the normal way to install software on a decent Linux distro. And probably not worse than compiling and installing from source on Windows would be.
My opinion of your post so far: nice red herring. And then you go on and pretend _I_ am misrepresenting things.
``Also, I'll bring up that there's more than a few Linux programs these days that allow you to download and install short install script that does nothing more than download and install the full executable from some web-based distribution site. How in any way is this different than what's being described in the RC1 install docs?''
1. It doesn't (as stated) require manual interaction, such as reboots. 2. It doesn't (as stated) require reboots. (yes, that's a separate point)
Also, what does that have to do with anything? Another red herring.
``Furthermore, your "apt-get dist-upgrade" is great, but it requires you to reboot in order to take advantage of certain things such as an upgraded kernel. Since SP1 modifies the Windows kernel, it's in the exact same class as a Linux kernel patch, and most (if not all) of those require restarting the OS in order to make the changes take effect.''
Valid point, but notice the difference between "requires you to reboot in order to take advantage of certain things such as an upgraded kernel" and the grandparents "couple of reboots".
``I'll also point out that you're running an updater/installer tool (apt-get) that is functionally identical to Windows Update,''
BEEP! I wish, for the souls of all Windows users. Windows Update, at best, updates all Microsoft software. apt-get, in principle, updates _all_ software on your system, and allows you fine control about what repositories it scans and which versions of software it will install.
``so you run the command...and then the process STARTS! That fizzling sound you hear is the air leaking out of your argument.''
I am not so sure. I don't think a couple of red herrings are enough to invalidate my argument.
Right now I'm tempted to stop typing, cause I feel I'm just feeding a troll. But then, you made me go this far...I might as well continue, on the off-chance of helping someone who was misled by your arguments.
So yes. When you "apt-get dist-upgrade", the process starts. And the process consists of waiting until everything is downloaded, unpacked, configured, and installed. Perhaps you'll have to reboot in the end to start using a new version of the kernel.
The GP said something like "HOOPS?! You just 1. download file. 2. run program. and done!!", disregarding that there are actions to be taken after that, such as reboots (more than one!), which interrupt your work flow.
I agree that calling that "hoops" may be a stretch, but it's hardly what I would consider "done!", either.
``And since when is rebooting "jumping through a hoop"? If that's something you consider difficult, you're a pathetic example of a computer user.''
It's not that it's difficult, it's just that it's disrupting. And unnecesasry, as my experience with Debian shows. That's the only reason I brought up apt-get; to show that it doesn't _have_ to be as much work as it is on Windows. I fully agree that the Vista -> Vista SP1
``This move makes no sense. PlaysForSure devices/stores are not compatible with Zune devices/stores, but they'll both carry the same logo? This defeats the entire point of the PlaysForSure branding in the first place: that any device and any store with the branding will work together.''
BEEP. You fail it!
Compatibility was never the idea of PlaysForSure. First of all, PlaysForSure is DRM. DRM is all about making sure things _don't_ play for sure. Secondly, Microsoft introduced the Zune with a PFS-incompatible scheme, without so much as blinking.
I don't know what exactly the strategy is, but it smells like sucking as much money as they can out of as many idiots who will fall for it. First, they bought into PlaysForSure. Then, Microsoft introduced the Zune...which would have made Zune DRM the tech to get, had it taken off. Now, those who bought into PlaysForSure is screwed because it isn't what Microsoft's _own_ player uses. And those who bought into Zune are screwed, because nobody uses the damn thing.
And Microsoft, who brought them to this hell, is sitting on piles of money.
And it became night. And it became day. Just another day in monopoly land.
``Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.''
In other words, you download, you run the.cmd file...and then the process STARTS!
Then you "install everything with a couple of reboots", and that's your hoops for you right there.
I completely agree with your post, but I must add that I am surprised about something. You wrote:
``Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?''
You're only now noticing that Microsoft doesn't provide backward compatibility anymore? Ever since people got their hands on Vista, the complaint has been that X (that worked in previous versions) no longer worked. Where X is a lot of software, but especially hardware. At some point, I was sure more devices and win32 programs work under Linux/AMD64 than Vista/AMD64.
Also, Microsoft introduced changed, severely changed user interfaces to a large portion of their desktop software. IE7, MS Office, Windows itself, Outlook,... The transition to the open-source lookalike is much smoother than to the new, Vista-era version from Microsoft.
(This post is a dupe, but it seems appropriate here, and I don't think many people have read the original.)
HTML was a great way to get things up and going back in the day, but we have reasons to move on. Moreover, I think we have a good way forward.
One of the problems with HTML is that it tries to be too many things at once. One, a semantic representation of data. Two, a page structure in which to present the data. Three, a description of how to render the data (this has been downplayed, but the fact to the matter is that tags like i and u still exist). It falls short on all three, and there is so much legacy code and mini-languages that writing a web browser is a total pain. So I really don't believe in HTML for the future.
Instead, I believe in a more rigid approach. Data formats that are simple and easy to parse, without all the exceptions and special cases that are in HTML. No more mixing of semantics and presentation. Different jobs, different tools.
So here is the proposal. For every kind of data, we invent a mini-language, specifically for that kind of data. It will have all the elements needed to represent data of that kind, and nothing else. These mini-languages can be standardized, but they don't have to be.
One such mini-language will be a presentation language. This one will be standardized, and it will be what "viewers" will implement. It will be a language with everything needed to make proper interfaces to information; formatted text, graphics, GUI widgets, the lot.
To add interactivity to the presentation, and possibly to perform the transformation from the semantic language(s) to the presentation language, there must be a programming language, which must also be standardized, as it will be run by viewers.
Now we have everything we need. A semantic language for representing data, without any presentation junk. A presentation language for _presenting_ data, without any semantic junk. And a way to transform data into presentation.
To ease the transformation from semantic language to presentation language, it would probably help if both used the same syntax. I would like it to be lightweight, perhaps s-expressions, but I could live with XML. As for the programming language, I am sure everybody has their favorites. ECMAScript would be one of the candidates. And there is no reason we couldn't have more than one of each language.
I think, technically, all challenges have been solved. The problem will be getting things adopted. I foresee endless debating about which languages should be in the standard, large corporations baking their own, and lots of people arguing in favor of just using an existing proprietary solution that accomplishes the same task. In the meantime, developers will keep plodding along with HTML.
``Ah, I love the open source world: why help someone else, when you can re-invent your own wheel''
That's not unique to the open-source world, though. However, in the world of proprietary software
1. You _can't_ help somebody else, even if you want to 2. You may or may not have access to the specs without paying through your nose 3. One or a few big players will push everyone else out of the market
By contrast, with open source, you know that
1. You can not only use, but also contribute; you can fix the bugs and add features yourself 2. There may or may not be documentation, but there is always source code 3. The project is only dead when the last contributor quits
``A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics and that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML would be the best way for the new web.''
Wow! Now, there's something I agree with 100%!
HTML was a great way to get things up and going back in the day, but we have reasons to move on. Moreover, I think we have a good way forward.
One of the problems with HTML is that it tries to be too many things at once. One, a semantic representation of data. Two, a page structure in which to present the data. Three, a description of how to render the data (this has been downplayed, but the fact to the matter is that tags like i and u still exist). It falls short on all three, and there is so much legacy code and mini-languages that writing a web browser is a total pain. So I really don't believe in HTML for the future.
Instead, I believe in a more rigid approach. Data formats that are simple and easy to parse, without all the exceptions and special cases that are in HTML. No more mixing of semantics and presentation. Different jobs, different tools.
So here is the proposal. For every kind of data, we invent a mini-language, specifically for that kind of data. It will have all the elements needed to represent data of that kind, and nothing else. These mini-languages can be standardized, but they don't have to be.
One such mini-language will be a presentation language. This one will be standardized, and it will be what "viewers" will implement. It will be a language with everything needed to make proper interfaces to information; formatted text, graphics, GUI widgets, the lot.
To add interactivity to the presentation, and possibly to perform the transformation from the semantic language(s) to the presentation language, there must be a programming language, which must also be standardized, as it will be run by viewers.
Now we have everything we need. A semantic language for representing data, without any presentation junk. A presentation language for _presenting_ data, without any semantic junk. And a way to transform data into presentation.
To ease the transformation from semantic language to presentation language, it would probably help if both used the same syntax. I would like it to be lightweight, perhaps s-expressions, but I could live with XML. As for the programming language, I am sure everybody has their favorites. ECMAScript would be one of the candidates. And there is no reason we couldn't have more than one of each language.
I think, technically, all challenges have been solved. The problem will be getting things adopted. I foresee endless debating about which languages should be in the standard, large corporations baking their own, and lots of people arguing in favor of just using an existing proprietary solution that accomplishes the same task. In the meantime, developers will keep plodding along with HTML.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, geeks and trolls, bots and overlords, is why privacy is important.
At least, that was my first thought. Then I realized that it doesn't have too much to do with privacy per se. After all, it doesn't matter if the data about the victim of the murder were accurate. It could have been entirely made up. Then, it's not really about privacy anymore, but about what people write about others, and how people react to that.
I recently moved into a new city. It would be easy for someone to tell the people in my new neigborhood that I am a child molester. If there is a respectable-looking website for posting this kind of information (and I'm sure there is), they could put a post up there for extra credibility. Doing so would be wrong, because I am not a child molester (of course, that's just me saying that, but just accept it for the sake of argument).
Then, someone might read the aforementioned post and conclude that I am, in fact, a child molester. That would be wrong, because they would have arrived at that conclusion by blindly believing what was written about me, without checking the facts. If they had checked the facts, they would have found that the claim was completely baseless.
Now let's assume that someone did, in fact, buy the claim that I am a child molester. Remember, they did so without checking the facts, the claim is baseless, and I am actually _not_ a child molester. But they think I am, and kill me to protect their child.
Mr. Dodele's case could be seen as a privacy case, because the information in the database supposedly was based on things he actually did. But in my (hypothetical) case, the claims were completely fabricated.
I think the real problem here is not that privacy is being violated, but that people (1) kill, and (2) do so without being sure their victim is actually guilty of the things they kill them for.
Assuming that the killer really did kill to protect his child, I think he did her a nice disservice - now she will have to live with the fact that her daddy is a murderer and an idiot, and probably an inmate, too.
The message I would like to send is (1) take everything with a healthy dose of scepsis, and (2) avoid doing things that are irreversible.
Slashdot Mirror
What about Linux? Can the kernels shipped with current 32-bit Linux systems use the full 4 GBs?
Of course, I guess, on these machines you'd just use a 64-bit installation.
``Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in
the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.''
Thanks for your post. You provide some interesting food for thought, and you've prompted me to do some more research.
If you could, I would be very happy if you could provide me with links to back up some of your claims. In particular:
``Hybrids do have more-efficient engine designs than the Otto cycle.''
Really? That's good news. What kind of engines do they use, then?
``Huge amounts of money have been spent trying to get algae farms to work, and nobody has ever come close to making it even stay alive, let alone becoming economically competitive.''
Can you point me to sources to back up those claims?
``Converting mechanical motion into electricity, back to motion, is terribly inefficient, and would waste fuel, not save it.''
Of course. But common gasoline engines are also terribly inefficient, particularly when they have to change speed all the time. I can completely imagine that running an engine at its peak efficiency for electricity generation, then using the electricity to power an electric motor (which can have 80% to 90% efficiency) would be more efficient than using the engine to drive the wheels directly. At any rate, my hybrid uses about 4 to 5 liters of gasoline per 100 km, whereas other gasoline cars in the same class use about twice as much. I like to think that this is at least partially due to the combustion engine being used to generate electricity and the electromotor converting that to motion.
``Why haven't you bought a Zap Xebra yet?''
For whatever reason, many electric vehicles, including the Xebra, are not available here. Otherwise, I would certainly have checked them out and might even have bought one, provided that I were convinced of its merits. As it stands, I think the electric vehicle landscape is pretty saddening. I would expect that with advances in battery technology, electric cars would have become viable by now and, looking at the Tesla Roadster, it seems they have, but they are certainly not taking the market by storm.
We keep hearing this again and again and again.
It's very simple, really.
You can _never_ know the relative security of two systems. There simply isn't any way to measure it fairly.
Count disclosed vulnerabilities? What about the vulnerabilities that weren't disclosed?
Have teams search for vulnerabilities and compare the results? What does that tell you? Was one team equally good at finding vulnerabilities in one system as the other was at finding them in the other system? What if one system had many easy to find vulnerabilities, and the other had a couple of severe but harder to find vulnerabilities?
Count actual break-ins? Well, was that due to the system being vulnerable the way the vendor left it, or because of the administrator? What about break-ins you don't know about?
It's always a matter of what you don't know about. You don't know the vulnerabilities that weren't reported. You don't know the vulnerabilities that weren't found. You don't know the relative skills of the teams you used. You don't know if you tested for all possible classes of vulnerability.
And I haven't even mentioned the severity of vulnerabilities, the availability of exploit code, the way vulnerabilities are dealt with by the vendor, and a host of other issues.
The take home message is that you just _can't_ know. It's a hard pill to swallow, but you will just never know which system is more secure. All you have is flawed metrics and your gut feeling.
It's nice that this is up and coming, but that sort of thing is also known as "vaporware". We've been hearing announcements of cleaner vehicles for years and years. Even Lada demonstrated one last century! And what do we have? A handful of hybrids...
Why is it taking so long? Why is it that I can see things that could be improved, and it's not being done? For example, why do the two hybrid cars I can buy here have gasoline engines and a fuel economy comparable to a diesel in the same price class, when they could (1) burn diesel, which has a much better fuel economy _and_ is cheaper here, and (2) use the combustion engine _only_ for electricity generation, so that it can run at its optimum efficiency? And, while I'm at it, why not a more efficient engine (e.g. Sterling or Wankel instead of Otto)?
And why do we have cars that can run on up to 85% ethanol (the rest being gasoline) instead of 100%? And why do diesel cars not run on straight vegetable oil right out of the factory, even though you can get them converted for about 2 thousand euros, after which they can run on straight vegetable oil _or_ diesel?
Come on, people! It's not like there are unsolved technical problems here! The solutions are known, they are just not in mass-manufactured cars.
And governments! The (well, some previous) government here has refused to lower taxes for CO2-neutral fuels because "the environmental benefits are not clear". This despite studies having found that using straight vegetable oil instead of diesel reduces CO2 emissions _even_ if fossil fuels are burnt in every possible phase of the production and transportation. If it wasn't for that, straight vegetable oil would be cheaper than diesel here.
And all the misconceptions people have. "But electricity generation emits CO2, too!" Well, depends how you generate your electricity, don't you think? "But the crops for producing vegetable oil will use up valuable arable land!" Well, not if you use crops that don't, or algae, which grow in deserts and on salt water and have a much higher yield anyway. And on and on.
I don't claim _I_ have all the right answers, but it's sad to see how messed up the situation is, considering the things that _are_ known and _could_ be used.
``On many of these electrics, you do need to plug-in to get your initial charge. Isn't that causing just as much, if not more, pollution than burning oil locally?''
It depends on how you generate your electricity. I would have thought that's obvious, but apparently it isn't to many people.
``I'm still not sure that anyone can actually decipher all the different impacts that "environmentally-friendly" vehicles or machines have.''
I agree. The only thing that is certain for now is that they _do_ cause pollution. Exactly how much, I couldn't say, but it means that the environmental friendliness is only relative.
``I know I read an article this year that spoke of the CO2 emissions for just peddling a bike or taking a walk, so even not using machinery seems to have an impact.''
Of course. The human body consumes O2 and emits CO2. But there is something worth noting: the carbon we emit typically comes from renewable resources (i.e. plants or animals). This means it is released after recently having been absorbed, so the net effect is 0. Contrast this with burning fossil fuels, where you are releasing carbon that had been buried for millions of years into the atmosphere.
``Then again, I'm not a big fan of the global warming scams out there, nor am I a fan of peak oil theory.''
Global warming is a fact, and that mineral oil extraction will peak at some point is given. Whether these are things we should be afraid of or feel guilty about is a different matter.
``I just need to see the whole picture, rather than what some people will say is a small portion of the picture, but ignores other ramifications of decision making.''
It is very hard to get a clear picture, with all the clueless people shouting so loudly. One the one hand, there are people still pretending and trying to convince others that the changes that are happening to the environment aren't really there. On the other hand, you have people who have blind faith in some clean technology and think it will solve all problems if only the evil governments and oil companies stopped fighting it. Millions of people just parrot one camp or another, and they're all wrong. In the meantime, there _are_ good ideas that we could implement, but they are mostly left by the wayside because they don't stand out among all the wrong-headed noise makers.
``I'd rather pollute MY area, so we can see the direct effect, than push it off to a poorer neighborhood where we won't.''
That, of course, is the main problem with any kind of pollution. The effect isn't felt in full by the people generating it, and thus doesn't factor into the cost of things. Therefore, cleaner alternatives almost universally seem more expensive. Thus, it makes economic sense to pollute. It's hard to do something about this without resorting to heavy-handed, commitee-decided, wrong-headed measures. Like, for example, in the Netherlands, where there is a tax cut on hybrid cars. Think about it. It's on hybrid cars. Not on clean cars. If it's a hybrid, it gets the cut, no matter how polluting it is. If it's a clean car but not a hybrid, it doesn't get the cut. Madness!
Questions that pop up in my mind at this point are:
- Does using multiple browsers as described actually do anything for security?
- Why?
- Is it supposed to be that way?
- Shouldn't we be secure using just one browser?
``The real defense here is preventing this from happening in the first place.''
...and they shouldn't have to. You open these attachments (etc.) because you think they will do something good. You don't expect them to mess up your computer. Without support from the operating system and other legit software on the computer, attachments _couldn't_ mess up your computer. The only reason they can is that the software people use to open them is insecure. It allows (through design, sloppiness, or bugs) arbitrary code execution where all it _should_ allow is viewing images and perhaps movies and sound. Proper sandboxing and safe code (which is easy to write in all but a handful of commonly used programming languages) will solve this problem.
Yes.
``That is, educating users not to click haphazerdly at anything that they feel like''
No.
Because, as you yourself point out,
``and that is a heck of a challenge. most users do not understand what can happen and many likely do not really care''
As an example of the above, I am working on a programming language, and one thing this programming language will feature is different subsets for different niches. One such subset will allow any program to be written, so long as it doesn't change the state of anything outside the program that was not passed into it as a modifiable data structure. That means no interaction with any files on your system, no popup windows, no phoning home, no sending spam, etc. If you give it a file to read and an area of the screen to draw on, these are the only things it will be able to do.
``Double digit version #s aren't alphanumerically OK''
Right. And this being Perl, I don't understand why they didn't just continued with the next ASCII character, `:'.
``In a list of files, etc, Perl 5.10 will come between 5.1 and 5.2, which makes no sense at all.''
Ah. That's why...
Good! Now that somebody has done a benchmark and it's been featured here, I expect some serious work will be done on JavaScript. I think performance will increase enormously in at least the developer-friendly browsers.
``What's next?
Dogs living with cats??''
Been there, seen that. Actually, they didn't just _live_ together, I saw the cat...shall we say lingually stimulate the dog's private parts.
_That_ was a weird experience.
Now that's the way to do it. Not just the environmentally friendly power generation, but the performance per Watt of the computer, too. According to an article at The Register, the SC648 is built from MIPS (the type of CPU) cores that run at 500 MHz and execute two intructions per cycle. That should work out to about 1000 MIPS (the performance unit) per core, which, according to el Reg, the SC648 has 2916 of. In other words, these students got 2.9 million MIPS for 1200 Watts. That's some 2400 MIPS per Watt! How does a typical home PC compare to that?
Note: I might have gotten the number of cores wrong, in which case the results are also wrong. Supposing there were 648 cores (which the Slashdot summary may imply), it would work out to 648 thousand MIPS for 1200 Watts, or 540 MIPS per Watt. I don't think my (still low power at 20W) PC can come close to that (assuming the VIA C7 at 1.2 GHz does 1200 MIPS, it would be 60 MIPS per Watt...).
The report may be accurate, but all that really tells us is that Vista had more _disclosed_ vulnerabilities than OS X. While such a large difference (a factor 5!) is certainly cause for raising eyebrows, the concrete implications of these figures are far from clear. In particular, it says nothing at all about the relative security of the systems. Of course, people will use them that way.
Well, there are two qualifications to make.
First of all, is it just Windows users who want stuff for free?
Secondly, are all Windows users like that?
I think you will find that the answer to both questions is "no". There are people on other operating systems who want stuff for free and don't care a whit about ideology, and there are Windows users who care about ideology and actively participate in open source projects, and don't violate others' copyrights.
This sounds like an opportunity for Apple to add a logout feature for HTTP Basic authentication to their browser. After all, they control both the browser and .mac; they can make this work. I've never understood why there is no logout feature for HTTP Basic authentication.
.mac actually uses HTTP Basic auth for authentication (if I were to guess I would guess not), but still.
I don't know if
Err...what is the argument for _not_ including proofs? I can't come up with any good reason for that...
While I agree with the general gist of your post, I'd just like to point out that I've run KDE 3 (I think it was 3.1) on 200 MHz Pentium MMX machines with 64 MB RAM and been impressed with the performance. It had Keramik and the nice eye-candy icon set (something with Crystal, maybe?).
I don't know what point I'm trying to make here (KDE 3.5 isn't KDE 3.1, of course). I do believe this was in the GHz era, though. Firefox, of course, was unbearable on those machines, and that's how I got to love Konqueror, which I still prefer nowadays.
``So, I guess when I do a make && make install under Linux, I'm "jumping through hoops" in exactly the same manner, right? After all, I download an "installation script" for some program off the web, I "run" the file...and then the process starts!''
If it's like that, you would be jumping through some minor hoops, yes. Having to hunt down the source, dowload it, make, and make install is not how software installation works on a good linux distro.
Also, it's not realistic. More likely, you would have to go through hell and back to get it to compile at all, with missing dependencies that you have to hunt down, download, compile, and install.
Quite a bit more involved that upgrading Vista to Vista RC1, I would guess. Also, I'd like to emphasize it once more, not the normal way to install software on a decent Linux distro. And probably not worse than compiling and installing from source on Windows would be.
My opinion of your post so far: nice red herring. And then you go on and pretend _I_ am misrepresenting things.
``Also, I'll bring up that there's more than a few Linux programs these days that allow you to download and install short install script that does nothing more than download and install the full executable from some web-based distribution site. How in any way is this different than what's being described in the RC1 install docs?''
1. It doesn't (as stated) require manual interaction, such as reboots.
2. It doesn't (as stated) require reboots. (yes, that's a separate point)
Also, what does that have to do with anything? Another red herring.
``Furthermore, your "apt-get dist-upgrade" is great, but it requires you to reboot in order to take advantage of certain things such as an upgraded kernel. Since SP1 modifies the Windows kernel, it's in the exact same class as a Linux kernel patch, and most (if not all) of those require restarting the OS in order to make the changes take effect.''
Valid point, but notice the difference between "requires you to reboot in order to take advantage of certain things such as an upgraded kernel" and the grandparents "couple of reboots".
``I'll also point out that you're running an updater/installer tool (apt-get) that is functionally identical to Windows Update,''
BEEP! I wish, for the souls of all Windows users. Windows Update, at best, updates all Microsoft software. apt-get, in principle, updates _all_ software on your system, and allows you fine control about what repositories it scans and which versions of software it will install.
``so you run the command...and then the process STARTS! That fizzling sound you hear is the air leaking out of your argument.''
I am not so sure. I don't think a couple of red herrings are enough to invalidate my argument.
Right now I'm tempted to stop typing, cause I feel I'm just feeding a troll. But then, you made me go this far...I might as well continue, on the off-chance of helping someone who was misled by your arguments.
So yes. When you "apt-get dist-upgrade", the process starts. And the process consists of waiting until everything is downloaded, unpacked, configured, and installed. Perhaps you'll have to reboot in the end to start using a new version of the kernel.
The GP said something like "HOOPS?! You just 1. download file. 2. run program. and done!!", disregarding that there are actions to be taken after that, such as reboots (more than one!), which interrupt your work flow.
I agree that calling that "hoops" may be a stretch, but it's hardly what I would consider "done!", either.
``And since when is rebooting "jumping through a hoop"? If that's something you consider difficult, you're a pathetic example of a computer user.''
It's not that it's difficult, it's just that it's disrupting. And unnecesasry, as my experience with Debian shows. That's the only reason I brought up apt-get; to show that it doesn't _have_ to be as much work as it is on Windows. I fully agree that the Vista -> Vista SP1
``This move makes no sense. PlaysForSure devices/stores are not compatible with Zune devices/stores, but they'll both carry the same logo? This defeats the entire point of the PlaysForSure branding in the first place: that any device and any store with the branding will work together.''
BEEP. You fail it!
Compatibility was never the idea of PlaysForSure. First of all, PlaysForSure is DRM. DRM is all about making sure things _don't_ play for sure. Secondly, Microsoft introduced the Zune with a PFS-incompatible scheme, without so much as blinking.
I don't know what exactly the strategy is, but it smells like sucking as much money as they can out of as many idiots who will fall for it. First, they bought into PlaysForSure. Then, Microsoft introduced the Zune...which would have made Zune DRM the tech to get, had it taken off. Now, those who bought into PlaysForSure is screwed because it isn't what Microsoft's _own_ player uses. And those who bought into Zune are screwed, because nobody uses the damn thing.
And Microsoft, who brought them to this hell, is sitting on piles of money.
And it became night. And it became day. Just another day in monopoly land.
LOL. At least, I hope you weren't serious...
.CMD file.
.cmd file...and then the process STARTS!
``Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:
1. Download the RC1 package.
2. Execute the
3. Done!''
Ok, fair enough. But then:
``Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.''
In other words, you download, you run the
Then you "install everything with a couple of reboots", and that's your hoops for you right there.
For me, it's just "apt-get dist-upgrade".
I completely agree with your post, but I must add that I am surprised about something. You wrote:
... The transition to the open-source lookalike is much smoother than to the new, Vista-era version from Microsoft.
``Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?''
You're only now noticing that Microsoft doesn't provide backward compatibility anymore? Ever since people got their hands on Vista, the complaint has been that X (that worked in previous versions) no longer worked. Where X is a lot of software, but especially hardware. At some point, I was sure more devices and win32 programs work under Linux/AMD64 than Vista/AMD64.
Also, Microsoft introduced changed, severely changed user interfaces to a large portion of their desktop software. IE7, MS Office, Windows itself, Outlook,
(This post is a dupe, but it seems appropriate here, and I don't think many people have read the original.)
HTML was a great way to get things up and going back in the day, but we have reasons to move on. Moreover, I think we have a good way forward.
One of the problems with HTML is that it tries to be too many things at once. One, a semantic representation of data. Two, a page structure in which to present the data. Three, a description of how to render the data (this has been downplayed, but the fact to the matter is that tags like i and u still exist). It falls short on all three, and there is so much legacy code and mini-languages that writing a web browser is a total pain. So I really don't believe in HTML for the future.
Instead, I believe in a more rigid approach. Data formats that are simple and easy to parse, without all the exceptions and special cases that are in HTML. No more mixing of semantics and presentation. Different jobs, different tools.
So here is the proposal. For every kind of data, we invent a mini-language, specifically for that kind of data. It will have all the elements needed to represent data of that kind, and nothing else. These mini-languages can be standardized, but they don't have to be.
One such mini-language will be a presentation language. This one will be standardized, and it will be what "viewers" will implement. It will be a language with everything needed to make proper interfaces to information; formatted text, graphics, GUI widgets, the lot.
To add interactivity to the presentation, and possibly to perform the transformation from the semantic language(s) to the presentation language, there must be a programming language, which must also be standardized, as it will be run by viewers.
Now we have everything we need. A semantic language for representing data, without any presentation junk. A presentation language for _presenting_ data, without any semantic junk. And a way to transform data into presentation.
To ease the transformation from semantic language to presentation language, it would probably help if both used the same syntax. I would like it to be lightweight, perhaps s-expressions, but I could live with XML. As for the programming language, I am sure everybody has their favorites. ECMAScript would be one of the candidates. And there is no reason we couldn't have more than one of each language.
I think, technically, all challenges have been solved. The problem will be getting things adopted. I foresee endless debating about which languages should be in the standard, large corporations baking their own, and lots of people arguing in favor of just using an existing proprietary solution that accomplishes the same task. In the meantime, developers will keep plodding along with HTML.
``Ah, I love the open source world: why help someone else, when you can re-invent your own wheel''
That's not unique to the open-source world, though. However, in the world of proprietary software
1. You _can't_ help somebody else, even if you want to
2. You may or may not have access to the specs without paying through your nose
3. One or a few big players will push everyone else out of the market
By contrast, with open source, you know that
1. You can not only use, but also contribute; you can fix the bugs and add features yourself
2. There may or may not be documentation, but there is always source code
3. The project is only dead when the last contributor quits
``A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics and that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML would be the best way for the new web.''
Wow! Now, there's something I agree with 100%!
HTML was a great way to get things up and going back in the day, but we have reasons to move on. Moreover, I think we have a good way forward.
One of the problems with HTML is that it tries to be too many things at once. One, a semantic representation of data. Two, a page structure in which to present the data. Three, a description of how to render the data (this has been downplayed, but the fact to the matter is that tags like i and u still exist). It falls short on all three, and there is so much legacy code and mini-languages that writing a web browser is a total pain. So I really don't believe in HTML for the future.
Instead, I believe in a more rigid approach. Data formats that are simple and easy to parse, without all the exceptions and special cases that are in HTML. No more mixing of semantics and presentation. Different jobs, different tools.
So here is the proposal. For every kind of data, we invent a mini-language, specifically for that kind of data. It will have all the elements needed to represent data of that kind, and nothing else. These mini-languages can be standardized, but they don't have to be.
One such mini-language will be a presentation language. This one will be standardized, and it will be what "viewers" will implement. It will be a language with everything needed to make proper interfaces to information; formatted text, graphics, GUI widgets, the lot.
To add interactivity to the presentation, and possibly to perform the transformation from the semantic language(s) to the presentation language, there must be a programming language, which must also be standardized, as it will be run by viewers.
Now we have everything we need. A semantic language for representing data, without any presentation junk. A presentation language for _presenting_ data, without any semantic junk. And a way to transform data into presentation.
To ease the transformation from semantic language to presentation language, it would probably help if both used the same syntax. I would like it to be lightweight, perhaps s-expressions, but I could live with XML. As for the programming language, I am sure everybody has their favorites. ECMAScript would be one of the candidates. And there is no reason we couldn't have more than one of each language.
I think, technically, all challenges have been solved. The problem will be getting things adopted. I foresee endless debating about which languages should be in the standard, large corporations baking their own, and lots of people arguing in favor of just using an existing proprietary solution that accomplishes the same task. In the meantime, developers will keep plodding along with HTML.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, geeks and trolls, bots and overlords, is why privacy is important.
At least, that was my first thought. Then I realized that it doesn't have too much to do with privacy per se. After all, it doesn't matter if the data about the victim of the murder were accurate. It could have been entirely made up. Then, it's not really about privacy anymore, but about what people write about others, and how people react to that.
I recently moved into a new city. It would be easy for someone to tell the people in my new neigborhood that I am a child molester. If there is a respectable-looking website for posting this kind of information (and I'm sure there is), they could put a post up there for extra credibility. Doing so would be wrong, because I am not a child molester (of course, that's just me saying that, but just accept it for the sake of argument).
Then, someone might read the aforementioned post and conclude that I am, in fact, a child molester. That would be wrong, because they would have arrived at that conclusion by blindly believing what was written about me, without checking the facts. If they had checked the facts, they would have found that the claim was completely baseless.
Now let's assume that someone did, in fact, buy the claim that I am a child molester. Remember, they did so without checking the facts, the claim is baseless, and I am actually _not_ a child molester. But they think I am, and kill me to protect their child.
Mr. Dodele's case could be seen as a privacy case, because the information in the database supposedly was based on things he actually did. But in my (hypothetical) case, the claims were completely fabricated.
I think the real problem here is not that privacy is being violated, but that people (1) kill, and (2) do so without being sure their victim is actually guilty of the things they kill them for.
Assuming that the killer really did kill to protect his child, I think he did her a nice disservice - now she will have to live with the fact that her daddy is a murderer and an idiot, and probably an inmate, too.
The message I would like to send is (1) take everything with a healthy dose of scepsis, and (2) avoid doing things that are irreversible.
Have a nice day.