...at least as far as the JB7's adverts in Private Eye http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ are concerned. Brennan often take out one or two page spreads, along with at least two other services that offer to rip your CD's/tapes/vinyl/anything to MP3/FLAC/Vorbis/AAC for you.
As other posters have pointed out, format shifting is illegal in the UK, meaning approx 95% of our population have broken the law at some point in their lives - something that has no doubt cost the UK 279% of the GDP every year - but it's never really been brought up by the authorities for the simple reason that such a landmark case as questioning the lawlessness of format shifting is almost certain to have major repercussions in the law, namely the introduction of fair use provisions similar to the US. Almost everyone in the UK already *thinks* format shifting is fine and dandy (hey, iTunes makes it so easy!), and any major media attention brought to it will do nothing but weaken the case of the incumbent record labels.
Sadly, I doubt the Brennan company has the money or inclination to pursue such a case. Writing's on the wall though, I just expect it to be bundled along with "...but only if we can get 'copyright = life of every living descendant plus 200 years!". On the plus side, if Cliff Richard is busy posturing about how his songs from the 50's coming out of copyright will mean the end of all humanity, he won't have time to write any news ones (which, ironically, would actually result in the end of all humanity).
Nitpick: plutonium is rarely absorbed when it goes through the digestive tract, but is readily absorbed into the bloodstream through your lungs. The problem with asbestos is that it breaks into tiny spillikins which will also lodge in your digestive tract (or anywhere in fact), and lead is also readily absorbed by the body.
Maybe it's because I'm an old fart with a dinky laptop, but I'll definitely miss them. I've yet to see any smartphone that lasts for more than a day without a charge, whereas my current E52 and past 6130i both last a week. And my 6130i is nearly 10 years old and still on the original battery.
I guess I'm just not a part of the "app" generation; all I really want from a phone is calls, texts and a calendar. The GPS/maps in the E52 was an awesome bonus though. I'm also pathologically allergic to what I perceive as form-over-function UI's, and the relatively spartan appearance of the Nokias has always been appealing to me whereas I find the swishy swoopy IOS and android UI's to be like a stripper puking molten chrome in my face.
Well, not quite all - I'll sing XBMC's praises for a bit. It's got quite extensive media metadata + storage backend functionality; you basically just define a directory (or a bunch of directories), and tell XBMC "this contains movies" and "get movie metdata from themoviedb.org" and you're away. After a while scanning your files and pulling down the metadata, you have a very swish interface and movies subdivided into title, genre, director and actors. I've got a collection of about 1000 of my DVD rips and the interface is just as fast if you only have 10.
Same deal for TV shows, it just grabs from a different source, although the caveat here is it must have a recognisable number structure in the filename in order to pull down the metadata. I ended up rolling my own set of regexps in advancedsettings.xml.
Of course, if you're looking for a purely desktop application I'm not sure - XBMC is pretty much only a "full screen" HTPC app, although you can run it windows. I've also have problems playing back some of my older XviD+Ogg+OGM rips, but other than that it's a great piece of software.
I used to use MythTV for movie/TV playback, but XBMC has a much nicer interface, not to mention a faster one - not only did Myth not have automated metadata lookup, but the movie browser didn't scale, and got slower and slower as my collection expanded. I also find the player much more fully featured. And, of course, XBMC runs everywhere very easily, giving it much higher WAF for people who want to use it on their laptops (windows) as well as on the TV (linux HTPC).
You're certainly right about renewables in Germany pissing off the power companies. My girlfriend in German, with her family hailing from a cow farm in Schleswig-Holstein (that's the north of germany, very flat and with lots of wind and a generally rural economy). What with the bottom falling out of the livestock/milk market, her father outfitted the cow shed with 10kW of photovoltaics and runs a small (six 1MW turbines IIRC) and her brother runs a biogas plant, powered by cow shit and wheat. Not sure what the power output of the biogas plant is, but it runs two converted truck diesel engines (so probably at least 1.5MW) and they're looking at ways to pipe the waste heat to nearby houses.
The problem is that when the subsidies arrived, along with a law that mandated the grid to buy from renewable sources before they buy from coal/gas power stations, is that everyone started putting up photovoltaics and wind turbines (heck, people started building cowsheds with no cows to put in them just so they could get subsidised photovoltaics). And now the problem is, when it's windy or sunny, there's a massive spike in power output, which the grid basically can't handle, and then they stop buying baseload from the biogas plants. Essentially the grid in this area at least requires a massive upgrade before it can use *all* the power produces at any one time, and at present there's no impetus to do so since it's cheaper and more predictable for EON to buy from larger baseload plants. Hopefully the gov will mandate the grid be upgraded in areas which require it. But still, a politicial/monetary problem endemic to wind/solar unpredictability rather than a failure of the technology itself.
I think by now about 15% of mains power in germany comes from renewables, with biogas making up about half of that - since it's far more predictable and is more suited for base loads, although it's still heavily dependant on hydrocarbon-based feeds and fertilisers, especially in winter. The problem still is that, despite the awesome investment in money, technology and time from the german people, there are literally decades of work to get even close to eclipsing nuclear and especially coal/gas based power sources - and personally I'd rather see coal/gas phased out in favour of nuclear rather than the other way around.
Disclaimer: Pro-nuclear myself, as last I looked it was still one of the safest and most dependable technologies (as a counterpoint to Germany, about 80% of France's mains power comes from their nuclear sources and it's something they've gotten very good at to the extent they're selling it to us here in the UK), but that doesn't mean I'm not a fan of renewables. The renewables law in germany's been a good thing, but much like the policy of every other western nation, it's been too little too late - there's no way to make up the shortfall quickly enough. And like the parent says, fission should just be stepping stone to fusion and better renewable sources. I also get my info on german power second-hand so happy to receive connections.
...if ISOhunt changed their search engine for a day, so that any searches were just forwarded to google with a filetype:torrent string appended?
It wouldn't make any difference to the legal case of course, which is more about ISOhunt being poor and accessible (and therefore prosecutable), unlike google. It'll also show users what magic incantations they need to mutter if/when torrent aggregators are closed, and maybe then we'll see MPAA vs. Google.
I don't torrent myself, I just buy lots of DVD's (except when I can't get a hold of a work by legitimate means - I'm not aware of anyone who's able to sell Dunvavi Karatan Adam for instance), but there are plenty of people at work who do (well, torrent and newsgroups), and every so often you'll come in and find an unmarked 500GB drive on your desk. People who don't contribute to the drive but copy stuff from it have to buy the first round at the pub. People who bring in a drive are excused from buying rounds next time at the pub. Works remarkably well for groups of 5-10 people.
P.S. I'm told rounds aren't that common outside of the UK, but I'm thinking that, seeing as they're obviously a facilitator of illegal file sharing, they should be banned. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishPubs
Sometimes I think the true purpose of the Turner Prize is not to further the causes of artists, but to troll the readers of knee-jerk British tabloids into having an art debate:)
Well, there "leaking" hydrogen and there's leaking hyrdogen. The hydrogen releases appear to be a by-product of the coolant evaporating into steam, and then being cracked into constituent hydrogen + oxygen. In the first explosion this was vented off into the reactor building itself (i.e. outside the containment vessel), but was still volatile enough to explode and take away the metal shell at the top of the building; the superstructure remains intact. There's low level radioisotopes in these vented gases (most dangerously iodine) but the overall volume of them is low and they have a short half life - there's a big difference between leaking that and leaking reactor fuel, although the news don't seem to be aware of the difference.
There's multiple modes of failure built into the reactor, and if anything's going to break the reactor vessel it'll be the fuel melting through it (downwards) - it's strong enough not to crack under pressure, unlike the zero-containment reactor core at chernobyl (which literally had a crappy tin roof separating the reactor room from the rest of the world), and there's not enough latent heat to flash the coolant into steam (which is what blew the chernobyl reactor apart).
The fuel (mostly uranium oxide) is also the last thing to melt, at about 3000degC, the fuel rods themselves at about 2200degC. The things failing one after one another are doing so exactly as designed as far as I can tell, despite the fact the earthquake that hit the reactors was seven times larger than its official tolerances and was of an outmoded design with no passive safety (e.g. convective cooling systems).
Details still scant though, but the inquiry is certainly going to be interesting.
I'm sure AT&T can fix this for you by introducing their own music service that doesn't count towards the cap - then all you need to do is give your money to AT&T instead of last.fm, since last.fm using your network connection will be costing you extra money.
Chernobyl's RBMK reactors were too big to contain without it costing a ridiculous amount, so the building was the secondary containment structure - and it fell apart like tissue paper, as expected
IIRC it's not that the RBMK reactors themselves were too big, but that they were designed to have their fuel replaced whilst the reactor was running and keeping all the loading gear inside containment was space prohibitive. There's an awesome cutaway model here http://neutron.kth.se/gallery/power_reactors/Ignalina_model.JPG that shows the colossal crane/gantry above the core, along with what basically amounts to a shed roof covering the reactor core. Not pictured is the cooling pond, which sits parallel to the core (and takes up more space) that the spent fuel rods are dropped into.
Fitting all that folderol inside decent containment would be very expensive, because you now need at least twice the height and width of the reactor to fit everything in. So why bother? Allowing refuelling whilst the reactor is running meant a) you wouldn't need to close the reactor down to refuel it and b) you could make lots of weapons-grade plutonium very quickly. Weapons grade stuff requires very short fuel runs on a low burnup (exactly what you don't want in a reactor for power generation), whereas extracting P239 from all the other plutonium isotopes in "regular" nuclear wastes is exceptionally difficult. Since these reactors are expensive, lots of countries decided to cheap out and build dual purposed reactors which, after enough warheads had been made, could then be converted to civilian fuel loads. Hence you had a bunch of suboptimal design decisions taking place, such as the lack of containment on RBMK and other reactors. Yay for the cold war.
Not meant as a nitpick BTW, just thought people might find it interesting.
I'd love to agree with you, but I can't. I know a bit about nuclear power and a fair amount about geology and have been following the whole thing very closely indeed (and I've nothing but admiration for the way Japan has handled the aftermath of the quake), but a lot of my friends here have swallowed the kool-aid and are fixated on the nuclear angle.
I had an argument with my gf yesterday about nuclear power, and it's mirrored other "discussions" I've had with friends about it. You say "meltdown", they think explosion. You say "40 year old reactor not designed with safety in mind" they think explosion. You say "defence in depth", "multiple backup systems", "containment vessel" and they just can't get their mind off a nuclear bomb going kaboom. Unfortunately this is just human nature; it's the same flawed logic that makes people think it's safer to drive than to take a plane.
People who know a little about how inadequate the design of this reactor is, and how well Japan has handled the emergency (wrong plugs on the generators notwithstanding), will see it as a positive win for nuclear energy. Everyone else will just see it as more zany mad scientists fooling around with things that weren't meant for the human mind, designing things that blow up at the drop of a hat because all scientists are immature kids at heart - they were bullied at school for being too smart, and nuclear reactors is their way of getting their own back on a world they hate. We'll show them smartasses, won't we voters! Here, scientists, gimme your lunc... I mean, funding money or I'll stick your plans down the toilet!
As soon as seawater and boric acid are pumped into a core, it's junk - it's essentially contaminated with god-knows-what, and you can't be sure how it'll behave if you resume nuclear reactions.
If there's a meltdown, even a partial one, you can no longer be certain of the integrity of the core/containment. If the fuel gets out of secondary containment, then the core is totally junked and would be harder to repair than to replace.
The amount of energy in the fuel. The linked article has the full explanation (seriously, read it) but the gist of it is: once the control rods are inserted, nuclear fission stops happening. But radioactive decay - from the uranium itself but mostly from the radioactive byproducts - keeps happening. Fortunately, the radioactive byproducts (caesium and iodine isotopes for the most part) are quite short lived, and the heat output will have dropped off after a few days.
The emergency cooling systems are there to remove this residual heat. If they fail for long enough, the core will start to go into meltdown. Fortunately, beneath the reactor is a massive slab of concrete underlain by a massive slab of granite - there to a) ensure any fuel spreads out to let it cool more quickly and b) provide enough ballast to act as a massive heatsink. There's not enough latent energy in the fuel to melt all the way through it.
Compare Chernobyl (the wikipedia page on that is a very good read if you're not aware of the details), which was incompetently designed, maintained and operated at any number of levels and had utterly shitty containment. Lots of the fuel there melted and, thanks to there being no big fat concrete/granite base there was a real possibility the fuel would leak out the bottom of the building and, ultimately, into the water table. They actually contemplated pumping liquid nitrogen into the soil under the building to mitigate this.
Everything you said in your first paragraph applies to fossil fuels as well. Wind and solar can't provide base load because they're too unreliable, so I'm assuming you're advocating either burning more coal and gas (until we run out) or stopping people using electricity.
If the incident with the reactors in Japan has proved anything, it's that people have absolutely no sense of perspective. Miniscule amounts of radiation equivalent to a couple of transatlantic flights released? OMG THEY'RE ALL GONNA DIE. Billions of tons of water moving inland at 60mph killing thousands of people? Meh, they're already dead, who gives a shit, making hyperbolic statements about nuclear power gets me higher in the ratings.
It's an attitude I find strange as well. Personally, I'm anti-nuclear weapons, but totally pro-nuclear for terms of power generation - indeed, it was trying to understand how the hell a nuclear bomb could be so destructive that got me interested in physics.
IMHO, it was the arms race that totally got nuclear power generation off on the wrong foot; too many reactor designs optimised for producing weapons-grade fuels, and then often dual-purposed to power generation almost as an afterthought. My parents lived through the Windscale disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire and I remember my father explaining to me what a stupid design for a reactor it was, and how we were saved more by luck than judgement, and there were echoes of this in the RBMK/Chernobyl designs.
Hence nuclear power was forever tarnished by the short-sightedness of everyone trying to build their own nuclear stockpile, which produced dangerous and inefficient reactor designs. Compare with modern designs like CANDU which, as far as I can tell, have been designed for power and safety first, with capability for weapons-grade loads very much an afterthought - if it's even possible. But nuclear power (both fission and fusion) won't shake the public stigma for decades, if not whole generations, because they're hard for the layman to understand even without the news going ARGH NUCLEAR!!!!! at the drop of a hat.
Back on topic - I'm frankly amazed this whole thing with the Japanese reactors wasn't worse. Wikipedia currently has the total amount of energy released as 600 *million* Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, we've all seen the videos of the tsunami hitting the coast (and these stations were in a region closest to the epicentre); I was dumbstruck at the scale of it all. And yet despite near total failure of all cooling systems, there's been no massive release of radiation. It's a testament to Japanese engineering and professionalism that they're doing as well as they are - look at how few casualties there were due to structural failures (not to mention all those people already alerted by Japan's best-of-breed EWS and extensive training in how to deal with such a situation), in one of the most massive earthquakes on record. They're happily prepared to junk the reactor core - worth billions, especially when you factor in cleanup costs - in order to limit damage. What's happened in Japan is an utter catastrophe. The nuclear reactors are a tiny, tiny fraction of this but it receives disproportionate attention in the news because, judging by the reaction of a lot of my friends here in the UK, it appears to be something we (and, by extension, the news) care about more than all those already dead or missing, and the (hundreds of?) thousands homeless or without power or drinking water.
Rant over. FWIW, I'm not a nuclear scientist but have a degree in geology, and nuclear power is one of my pet pipe dreams (don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of wind and solar plants as well, and the brother-in-law runs a biogas plant in Germany). I also have a bunch of friends in Tokyo, who are thankfully fine. Happy to receive criticism if I come across as overly optimistic.
You just can't do that without dumbing-down the system.
You know Miguel works for the GNOME project, right?!
Joking aside, it's perfectly possible thanks to open source's inherently modular structure. Someone makes an idiot-proof GUI, distro X bundles it as the default and only option. Someone makes a uberhacker GUI, distro Y bundles it as the default and only option. Distro Z prides itself on being able to switch from newbie to expert and back again in less than three seconds.
IMHO, GNOME tries too hard to lower itself to the lowest common denominator jack of all trades - look at the recent decision to remove the "minimise" button from the taskbar because it's apparently not useful and not optimised for touchscreens. But neither is the rest of GNOME, or all the apps it's going to run. Sorry, if it's touchscreen users you're after then I'm sure GTK is perfectly capable of having a new UI constructed from the same frameworks.
Similarly, KDE often gets flak for having too many confusing options. It's personally the UI I prefer (after I've spent forever configuring it) in *nix but it's not without its own share of problems either, and much like GNOME they seem to have some project heads who are entirely convinced that theirs is the One True Way of doing it. KDE remains more usable to me because of its configuration flexibility though, but it can be baffling if you don't already know your way around, and they make fewer stupid choices than GNOME.
The problem with both KDE and GNOME's approaches (and windows as well for that matter) is people who are convinced that one tool can be everything to everybody (this goes for almost every DE I've seen in the PC world), and that the inherent differences between, say, a 5" touchscreen and a 60" TV warrant completely different approaches. So to answer your question: yes, Linux can (and does) cater to computer novices (I'm not aware of anyone needing to use the CLI in ubuntu for example, but I could be wrong) and still leave all the juicy stuff available to geeks like me. I'm no fan of apple, but when they released a phone they were smart enough to realise it would need a brand new interface, not a badly screwed fork of their desktop OS as MS did with WinCE. This supposedly revolutionary idea has netted them billions because it's the only approach that makes sense. Tightly coupled with the need to have differentiated UI's for different purposes is the attitude some people take is that theirs is the only way to do something, anyone not doing it their way must be stupid. This is tragically false - everyone has a different way of working, and what works for one person doesn't work for another. For instance, I can't live without focus-follows-mouse, despite the fact it took a lot of effort to get working in windows 7, but almost everyone else hates it. Some people just don't want the options to be there because they don't think they're important, and this stops people from finding tricks and tweaks that may help them work better; some bury the config panels with boxes and the user often doesn't have a clue what options to start with.
Off my high horse now. All YMMV, IANAL, IMHO, etc. I just think all these "there is one best way" arguments are detrimental to the computer experience as a whole.
Anyone interested in the history of acorn (and sinclair) and how their efforts to one-up each other effectively killed the British computer industry might like to watch Micro Men; it's not much of a documentary and has a few details that are less than accurate, but it gives a nice overview of the time.
I also remember the first time I used one of those Acorn Archimedes computers at school - an A300 I think. Fullscreen video and 3D graphics were jaw-dropping for the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch I met one of the programmers who'd worked for acorn at the time at a do... his tales of Sophie Wilson's (lead designer for the way-ahead-of-their-time video extensions on the original ARM) eccentricities were mind boggling.
I do the "take a look at it" thing, but it's what it says on the tin - I'll just look at it. You get a five minute appraisal for free and then I tell them I charge £30/hr, or mates rates of £20/hr, discountable to a bottle of single malt every 2 hrs. I did once trade for a meal, but that *was* lobster thermidore and a whole bunch else, made by a chef I knew who worked at a michelin starred seafood restaurant.
And before I touch the computer, I'll tell them that even if it breaks later, and they're "sure" it was my fiddling that caused the breakage (since they're the computer expert) then they can pay me to fix it, or they can pay someone else to fix it. I don't go around doing this for fun, and thankfully only spend about five days a year fixing shit like most peoples' laptops.
I'm generally happy to help friends and family, but some people just take the piss.
This cartoon has probably been posted here already, but the same thing has happened to me as well. Some people just don't think it's real work when you spend your weekend fixing their computer.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers...and once you've spent one weekend working for free, people don't give a crap about taking care about their computer any more because in their heads you'll *always* fix it for free. That lecture you gave them about antivirus, spyware and not browsing for midget donkey porn and handing out their credit card details like comedy night flyers? Ignored. If you want people to heed your advice, charge them money./mercenary
Yeah, I really had to question Intel's logic in releasing this thing *after* the sandy bridge chips.
I'm a 2600K owner, upgraded from the 1st gen i7 860 and the 2600K is a colossal increase in speed... and most of my cycles are spent on x264 encodes (something that scales nicely over multiple cores, although I generally limit my encodes to using only two or four threads), something the 6-core chips are even better at... but only very marginally.
In most single and dual-threaded workloads, the 2500 and 2600 i7 chips beat out the 990X by a medium to large margin; the 990X pulls ahead slightly for benches that are able to utilise all six cores/12 threads efficiently, but that's about it. The sandy bridge chips also suck much less power both under load and at idle.
I picked my 2600K up for £246 at launch (costs about the same now), plus a £130 motherboard. The 990X is currently ~£800, plus another £100 for the motherboard say. So for the cost of one of these 6-core chips I could buy two 2600K systems and still have money left over for an extra 8GB of DDR3.
Conclusion: late to the party, brought out of date beer. IMHO solely for people with more money than sense:)
RSI aside - anyone who's had to do any amount of drag-dropping with only a laptop trackpad will know just how painful it can be, especially whenever a trackpad runs out of space and/or decides you've randomly lifted a finger and drops all your stuff en route.
Sill decision in my book, but then I gave up on gnome years ago.
Even with great scripts, I doubt the production design would be up to much. Never before and never since had a I seen a sci-fi universe brought to life with such confidence, style and scope - and that in itself was a crucial part of the Blade Runner story. Awesome vision from Scott plus Trumbull and team at the absolute peak of their powers, and one of the last epic films to make extensive use of models before the CGI revolution kicked in.
Heck, when was the last time you saw a film that was even as well *lit* as Blade Runner?
Making a film as artistically distinct as Blade Runner appears to be a dead art. Or rather a type of art that no-one is willing to finance. Not that I'm saying Blade Runner was all about the effects, it wasn't, but damn if they didn't almost singlehandedly define the visuals of the genre for a generation to come.
Chances of requels/prequels/sequels/bleaquels having the same effect? Nil.
If it's anything like most of the... how to put this politely?...idiosynctratic naming schemes I've seen dotted about, it's frequently a combination of office high jinks, deadlines and higher than normal blood alcohol content:) Not to mention continuing the fine tradition of nonsensical metasysntactic variables.
We've got an app whose logs are full of BISH, BASH and BOSH which are used as exit flags for certain DB operations and some sort of reporting app that has PUGH, PUGH2, BARNEY, MCGREW, CUTHBERT, DIBBLE and GRUBB all over it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpton
Agreed that there's need to be a lot of rapid juggling done by the forensics and legal sides.
I'm wondering if laws will be pushed through to allow SSD's to be powered on with the GC/TRIM/Secure Erase functionality of the controller disabled; essentially a god/basic mode so that drives can remain in a legally safe area like with write blockers.
TTBOMK there's nothing like that in the pipeline at the moment, so yes, you're right in that the next few years will be crucial. You'll need to be able to take the controller out of the loop entirely to ensure forensic integrity, as well as giving you access to the spare area but... well, it's early days yet.
I should ask my friend if any new products are popping up to deal with SSD's; bypassing the controller should be relatively simple, re-assembling the bits from the chips in a controller-specific fashion won't be.
Thanks for the reply by the way, always nice to see the author participate with their audience.
Slashdot Mirror
...at least as far as the JB7's adverts in Private Eye http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ are concerned. Brennan often take out one or two page spreads, along with at least two other services that offer to rip your CD's/tapes/vinyl/anything to MP3/FLAC/Vorbis/AAC for you.
As other posters have pointed out, format shifting is illegal in the UK, meaning approx 95% of our population have broken the law at some point in their lives - something that has no doubt cost the UK 279% of the GDP every year - but it's never really been brought up by the authorities for the simple reason that such a landmark case as questioning the lawlessness of format shifting is almost certain to have major repercussions in the law, namely the introduction of fair use provisions similar to the US. Almost everyone in the UK already *thinks* format shifting is fine and dandy (hey, iTunes makes it so easy!), and any major media attention brought to it will do nothing but weaken the case of the incumbent record labels.
Sadly, I doubt the Brennan company has the money or inclination to pursue such a case. Writing's on the wall though, I just expect it to be bundled along with "...but only if we can get 'copyright = life of every living descendant plus 200 years!". On the plus side, if Cliff Richard is busy posturing about how his songs from the 50's coming out of copyright will mean the end of all humanity, he won't have time to write any news ones (which, ironically, would actually result in the end of all humanity).
Nitpick: plutonium is rarely absorbed when it goes through the digestive tract, but is readily absorbed into the bloodstream through your lungs. The problem with asbestos is that it breaks into tiny spillikins which will also lodge in your digestive tract (or anywhere in fact), and lead is also readily absorbed by the body.
So, yeah, plutonium ;)
Maybe it's because I'm an old fart with a dinky laptop, but I'll definitely miss them. I've yet to see any smartphone that lasts for more than a day without a charge, whereas my current E52 and past 6130i both last a week. And my 6130i is nearly 10 years old and still on the original battery.
I guess I'm just not a part of the "app" generation; all I really want from a phone is calls, texts and a calendar. The GPS/maps in the E52 was an awesome bonus though. I'm also pathologically allergic to what I perceive as form-over-function UI's, and the relatively spartan appearance of the Nokias has always been appealing to me whereas I find the swishy swoopy IOS and android UI's to be like a stripper puking molten chrome in my face.
That is all.
Well, not quite all - I'll sing XBMC's praises for a bit. It's got quite extensive media metadata + storage backend functionality; you basically just define a directory (or a bunch of directories), and tell XBMC "this contains movies" and "get movie metdata from themoviedb.org" and you're away. After a while scanning your files and pulling down the metadata, you have a very swish interface and movies subdivided into title, genre, director and actors. I've got a collection of about 1000 of my DVD rips and the interface is just as fast if you only have 10.
Same deal for TV shows, it just grabs from a different source, although the caveat here is it must have a recognisable number structure in the filename in order to pull down the metadata. I ended up rolling my own set of regexps in advancedsettings.xml.
Of course, if you're looking for a purely desktop application I'm not sure - XBMC is pretty much only a "full screen" HTPC app, although you can run it windows. I've also have problems playing back some of my older XviD+Ogg+OGM rips, but other than that it's a great piece of software.
I used to use MythTV for movie/TV playback, but XBMC has a much nicer interface, not to mention a faster one - not only did Myth not have automated metadata lookup, but the movie browser didn't scale, and got slower and slower as my collection expanded. I also find the player much more fully featured. And, of course, XBMC runs everywhere very easily, giving it much higher WAF for people who want to use it on their laptops (windows) as well as on the TV (linux HTPC).
You're certainly right about renewables in Germany pissing off the power companies. My girlfriend in German, with her family hailing from a cow farm in Schleswig-Holstein (that's the north of germany, very flat and with lots of wind and a generally rural economy). What with the bottom falling out of the livestock/milk market, her father outfitted the cow shed with 10kW of photovoltaics and runs a small (six 1MW turbines IIRC) and her brother runs a biogas plant, powered by cow shit and wheat. Not sure what the power output of the biogas plant is, but it runs two converted truck diesel engines (so probably at least 1.5MW) and they're looking at ways to pipe the waste heat to nearby houses.
The problem is that when the subsidies arrived, along with a law that mandated the grid to buy from renewable sources before they buy from coal/gas power stations, is that everyone started putting up photovoltaics and wind turbines (heck, people started building cowsheds with no cows to put in them just so they could get subsidised photovoltaics). And now the problem is, when it's windy or sunny, there's a massive spike in power output, which the grid basically can't handle, and then they stop buying baseload from the biogas plants. Essentially the grid in this area at least requires a massive upgrade before it can use *all* the power produces at any one time, and at present there's no impetus to do so since it's cheaper and more predictable for EON to buy from larger baseload plants. Hopefully the gov will mandate the grid be upgraded in areas which require it. But still, a politicial/monetary problem endemic to wind/solar unpredictability rather than a failure of the technology itself.
I think by now about 15% of mains power in germany comes from renewables, with biogas making up about half of that - since it's far more predictable and is more suited for base loads, although it's still heavily dependant on hydrocarbon-based feeds and fertilisers, especially in winter. The problem still is that, despite the awesome investment in money, technology and time from the german people, there are literally decades of work to get even close to eclipsing nuclear and especially coal/gas based power sources - and personally I'd rather see coal/gas phased out in favour of nuclear rather than the other way around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in_Germany.PNG
Disclaimer: Pro-nuclear myself, as last I looked it was still one of the safest and most dependable technologies (as a counterpoint to Germany, about 80% of France's mains power comes from their nuclear sources and it's something they've gotten very good at to the extent they're selling it to us here in the UK), but that doesn't mean I'm not a fan of renewables. The renewables law in germany's been a good thing, but much like the policy of every other western nation, it's been too little too late - there's no way to make up the shortfall quickly enough. And like the parent says, fission should just be stepping stone to fusion and better renewable sources. I also get my info on german power second-hand so happy to receive connections.
That is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?
But wait. You ain't seen nothing yet. Raised lettering. Pale Nimbus. White.
Brilliant scene from a film with Bale's best performance. Can't believe more suit-hating geeks aren't namedropping it!
...if ISOhunt changed their search engine for a day, so that any searches were just forwarded to google with a filetype:torrent string appended?
It wouldn't make any difference to the legal case of course, which is more about ISOhunt being poor and accessible (and therefore prosecutable), unlike google. It'll also show users what magic incantations they need to mutter if/when torrent aggregators are closed, and maybe then we'll see MPAA vs. Google.
I don't torrent myself, I just buy lots of DVD's (except when I can't get a hold of a work by legitimate means - I'm not aware of anyone who's able to sell Dunvavi Karatan Adam for instance), but there are plenty of people at work who do (well, torrent and newsgroups), and every so often you'll come in and find an unmarked 500GB drive on your desk. People who don't contribute to the drive but copy stuff from it have to buy the first round at the pub. People who bring in a drive are excused from buying rounds next time at the pub. Works remarkably well for groups of 5-10 people.
P.S. I'm told rounds aren't that common outside of the UK, but I'm thinking that, seeing as they're obviously a facilitator of illegal file sharing, they should be banned. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishPubs
Sometimes I think the true purpose of the Turner Prize is not to further the causes of artists, but to troll the readers of knee-jerk British tabloids into having an art debate :)
Well, there "leaking" hydrogen and there's leaking hyrdogen. The hydrogen releases appear to be a by-product of the coolant evaporating into steam, and then being cracked into constituent hydrogen + oxygen. In the first explosion this was vented off into the reactor building itself (i.e. outside the containment vessel), but was still volatile enough to explode and take away the metal shell at the top of the building; the superstructure remains intact. There's low level radioisotopes in these vented gases (most dangerously iodine) but the overall volume of them is low and they have a short half life - there's a big difference between leaking that and leaking reactor fuel, although the news don't seem to be aware of the difference.
There's multiple modes of failure built into the reactor, and if anything's going to break the reactor vessel it'll be the fuel melting through it (downwards) - it's strong enough not to crack under pressure, unlike the zero-containment reactor core at chernobyl (which literally had a crappy tin roof separating the reactor room from the rest of the world), and there's not enough latent heat to flash the coolant into steam (which is what blew the chernobyl reactor apart).
The fuel (mostly uranium oxide) is also the last thing to melt, at about 3000degC, the fuel rods themselves at about 2200degC. The things failing one after one another are doing so exactly as designed as far as I can tell, despite the fact the earthquake that hit the reactors was seven times larger than its official tolerances and was of an outmoded design with no passive safety (e.g. convective cooling systems).
Details still scant though, but the inquiry is certainly going to be interesting.
I'm sure AT&T can fix this for you by introducing their own music service that doesn't count towards the cap - then all you need to do is give your money to AT&T instead of last.fm, since last.fm using your network connection will be costing you extra money.
Whilst you're at it, why not look at our other payment plans? See how much YOU could save!
http://thefuturebuzz.com/pics/viral-images-3/net-neutrality.png
IIRC it's not that the RBMK reactors themselves were too big, but that they were designed to have their fuel replaced whilst the reactor was running and keeping all the loading gear inside containment was space prohibitive. There's an awesome cutaway model here http://neutron.kth.se/gallery/power_reactors/Ignalina_model.JPG that shows the colossal crane/gantry above the core, along with what basically amounts to a shed roof covering the reactor core. Not pictured is the cooling pond, which sits parallel to the core (and takes up more space) that the spent fuel rods are dropped into.
Fitting all that folderol inside decent containment would be very expensive, because you now need at least twice the height and width of the reactor to fit everything in. So why bother? Allowing refuelling whilst the reactor is running meant a) you wouldn't need to close the reactor down to refuel it and b) you could make lots of weapons-grade plutonium very quickly. Weapons grade stuff requires very short fuel runs on a low burnup (exactly what you don't want in a reactor for power generation), whereas extracting P239 from all the other plutonium isotopes in "regular" nuclear wastes is exceptionally difficult. Since these reactors are expensive, lots of countries decided to cheap out and build dual purposed reactors which, after enough warheads had been made, could then be converted to civilian fuel loads. Hence you had a bunch of suboptimal design decisions taking place, such as the lack of containment on RBMK and other reactors. Yay for the cold war.
Not meant as a nitpick BTW, just thought people might find it interesting.
I'd love to agree with you, but I can't. I know a bit about nuclear power and a fair amount about geology and have been following the whole thing very closely indeed (and I've nothing but admiration for the way Japan has handled the aftermath of the quake), but a lot of my friends here have swallowed the kool-aid and are fixated on the nuclear angle.
I had an argument with my gf yesterday about nuclear power, and it's mirrored other "discussions" I've had with friends about it. You say "meltdown", they think explosion. You say "40 year old reactor not designed with safety in mind" they think explosion. You say "defence in depth", "multiple backup systems", "containment vessel" and they just can't get their mind off a nuclear bomb going kaboom. Unfortunately this is just human nature; it's the same flawed logic that makes people think it's safer to drive than to take a plane.
People who know a little about how inadequate the design of this reactor is, and how well Japan has handled the emergency (wrong plugs on the generators notwithstanding), will see it as a positive win for nuclear energy. Everyone else will just see it as more zany mad scientists fooling around with things that weren't meant for the human mind, designing things that blow up at the drop of a hat because all scientists are immature kids at heart - they were bullied at school for being too smart, and nuclear reactors is their way of getting their own back on a world they hate. We'll show them smartasses, won't we voters! Here, scientists, gimme your lunc... I mean, funding money or I'll stick your plans down the toilet!
As soon as seawater and boric acid are pumped into a core, it's junk - it's essentially contaminated with god-knows-what, and you can't be sure how it'll behave if you resume nuclear reactions.
If there's a meltdown, even a partial one, you can no longer be certain of the integrity of the core/containment. If the fuel gets out of secondary containment, then the core is totally junked and would be harder to repair than to replace.
The amount of energy in the fuel. The linked article has the full explanation (seriously, read it) but the gist of it is: once the control rods are inserted, nuclear fission stops happening. But radioactive decay - from the uranium itself but mostly from the radioactive byproducts - keeps happening. Fortunately, the radioactive byproducts (caesium and iodine isotopes for the most part) are quite short lived, and the heat output will have dropped off after a few days.
The emergency cooling systems are there to remove this residual heat. If they fail for long enough, the core will start to go into meltdown. Fortunately, beneath the reactor is a massive slab of concrete underlain by a massive slab of granite - there to a) ensure any fuel spreads out to let it cool more quickly and b) provide enough ballast to act as a massive heatsink. There's not enough latent energy in the fuel to melt all the way through it.
Compare Chernobyl (the wikipedia page on that is a very good read if you're not aware of the details), which was incompetently designed, maintained and operated at any number of levels and had utterly shitty containment. Lots of the fuel there melted and, thanks to there being no big fat concrete/granite base there was a real possibility the fuel would leak out the bottom of the building and, ultimately, into the water table. They actually contemplated pumping liquid nitrogen into the soil under the building to mitigate this.
Everything you said in your first paragraph applies to fossil fuels as well. Wind and solar can't provide base load because they're too unreliable, so I'm assuming you're advocating either burning more coal and gas (until we run out) or stopping people using electricity.
If the incident with the reactors in Japan has proved anything, it's that people have absolutely no sense of perspective. Miniscule amounts of radiation equivalent to a couple of transatlantic flights released? OMG THEY'RE ALL GONNA DIE. Billions of tons of water moving inland at 60mph killing thousands of people? Meh, they're already dead, who gives a shit, making hyperbolic statements about nuclear power gets me higher in the ratings.
It's an attitude I find strange as well. Personally, I'm anti-nuclear weapons, but totally pro-nuclear for terms of power generation - indeed, it was trying to understand how the hell a nuclear bomb could be so destructive that got me interested in physics.
IMHO, it was the arms race that totally got nuclear power generation off on the wrong foot; too many reactor designs optimised for producing weapons-grade fuels, and then often dual-purposed to power generation almost as an afterthought. My parents lived through the Windscale disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire and I remember my father explaining to me what a stupid design for a reactor it was, and how we were saved more by luck than judgement, and there were echoes of this in the RBMK/Chernobyl designs.
Hence nuclear power was forever tarnished by the short-sightedness of everyone trying to build their own nuclear stockpile, which produced dangerous and inefficient reactor designs. Compare with modern designs like CANDU which, as far as I can tell, have been designed for power and safety first, with capability for weapons-grade loads very much an afterthought - if it's even possible. But nuclear power (both fission and fusion) won't shake the public stigma for decades, if not whole generations, because they're hard for the layman to understand even without the news going ARGH NUCLEAR!!!!! at the drop of a hat.
Back on topic - I'm frankly amazed this whole thing with the Japanese reactors wasn't worse. Wikipedia currently has the total amount of energy released as 600 *million* Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, we've all seen the videos of the tsunami hitting the coast (and these stations were in a region closest to the epicentre); I was dumbstruck at the scale of it all. And yet despite near total failure of all cooling systems, there's been no massive release of radiation. It's a testament to Japanese engineering and professionalism that they're doing as well as they are - look at how few casualties there were due to structural failures (not to mention all those people already alerted by Japan's best-of-breed EWS and extensive training in how to deal with such a situation), in one of the most massive earthquakes on record. They're happily prepared to junk the reactor core - worth billions, especially when you factor in cleanup costs - in order to limit damage. What's happened in Japan is an utter catastrophe. The nuclear reactors are a tiny, tiny fraction of this but it receives disproportionate attention in the news because, judging by the reaction of a lot of my friends here in the UK, it appears to be something we (and, by extension, the news) care about more than all those already dead or missing, and the (hundreds of?) thousands homeless or without power or drinking water.
Rant over. FWIW, I'm not a nuclear scientist but have a degree in geology, and nuclear power is one of my pet pipe dreams (don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of wind and solar plants as well, and the brother-in-law runs a biogas plant in Germany). I also have a bunch of friends in Tokyo, who are thankfully fine. Happy to receive criticism if I come across as overly optimistic.
You know Miguel works for the GNOME project, right?!
Joking aside, it's perfectly possible thanks to open source's inherently modular structure. Someone makes an idiot-proof GUI, distro X bundles it as the default and only option. Someone makes a uberhacker GUI, distro Y bundles it as the default and only option. Distro Z prides itself on being able to switch from newbie to expert and back again in less than three seconds.
IMHO, GNOME tries too hard to lower itself to the lowest common denominator jack of all trades - look at the recent decision to remove the "minimise" button from the taskbar because it's apparently not useful and not optimised for touchscreens. But neither is the rest of GNOME, or all the apps it's going to run. Sorry, if it's touchscreen users you're after then I'm sure GTK is perfectly capable of having a new UI constructed from the same frameworks.
Similarly, KDE often gets flak for having too many confusing options. It's personally the UI I prefer (after I've spent forever configuring it) in *nix but it's not without its own share of problems either, and much like GNOME they seem to have some project heads who are entirely convinced that theirs is the One True Way of doing it. KDE remains more usable to me because of its configuration flexibility though, but it can be baffling if you don't already know your way around, and they make fewer stupid choices than GNOME.
The problem with both KDE and GNOME's approaches (and windows as well for that matter) is people who are convinced that one tool can be everything to everybody (this goes for almost every DE I've seen in the PC world), and that the inherent differences between, say, a 5" touchscreen and a 60" TV warrant completely different approaches. So to answer your question: yes, Linux can (and does) cater to computer novices (I'm not aware of anyone needing to use the CLI in ubuntu for example, but I could be wrong) and still leave all the juicy stuff available to geeks like me. I'm no fan of apple, but when they released a phone they were smart enough to realise it would need a brand new interface, not a badly screwed fork of their desktop OS as MS did with WinCE. This supposedly revolutionary idea has netted them billions because it's the only approach that makes sense. Tightly coupled with the need to have differentiated UI's for different purposes is the attitude some people take is that theirs is the only way to do something, anyone not doing it their way must be stupid. This is tragically false - everyone has a different way of working, and what works for one person doesn't work for another. For instance, I can't live without focus-follows-mouse, despite the fact it took a lot of effort to get working in windows 7, but almost everyone else hates it. Some people just don't want the options to be there because they don't think they're important, and this stops people from finding tricks and tweaks that may help them work better; some bury the config panels with boxes and the user often doesn't have a clue what options to start with.
Off my high horse now. All YMMV, IANAL, IMHO, etc. I just think all these "there is one best way" arguments are detrimental to the computer experience as a whole.
Anyone interested in the history of acorn (and sinclair) and how their efforts to one-up each other effectively killed the British computer industry might like to watch Micro Men; it's not much of a documentary and has a few details that are less than accurate, but it gives a nice overview of the time.
http://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=118061
I also remember the first time I used one of those Acorn Archimedes computers at school - an A300 I think. Fullscreen video and 3D graphics were jaw-dropping for the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch
I met one of the programmers who'd worked for acorn at the time at a do... his tales of Sophie Wilson's (lead designer for the way-ahead-of-their-time video extensions on the original ARM) eccentricities were mind boggling.
Masterful post :)
I do the "take a look at it" thing, but it's what it says on the tin - I'll just look at it. You get a five minute appraisal for free and then I tell them I charge £30/hr, or mates rates of £20/hr, discountable to a bottle of single malt every 2 hrs. I did once trade for a meal, but that *was* lobster thermidore and a whole bunch else, made by a chef I knew who worked at a michelin starred seafood restaurant.
And before I touch the computer, I'll tell them that even if it breaks later, and they're "sure" it was my fiddling that caused the breakage (since they're the computer expert) then they can pay me to fix it, or they can pay someone else to fix it. I don't go around doing this for fun, and thankfully only spend about five days a year fixing shit like most peoples' laptops.
Posted it another post, but it's so true I hope I can get away with linkspam:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers
I'm generally happy to help friends and family, but some people just take the piss.
This cartoon has probably been posted here already, but the same thing has happened to me as well. Some people just don't think it's real work when you spend your weekend fixing their computer.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers ...and once you've spent one weekend working for free, people don't give a crap about taking care about their computer any more because in their heads you'll *always* fix it for free. That lecture you gave them about antivirus, spyware and not browsing for midget donkey porn and handing out their credit card details like comedy night flyers? Ignored. If you want people to heed your advice, charge them money. /mercenary
Yeah, I really had to question Intel's logic in releasing this thing *after* the sandy bridge chips.
I'm a 2600K owner, upgraded from the 1st gen i7 860 and the 2600K is a colossal increase in speed... and most of my cycles are spent on x264 encodes (something that scales nicely over multiple cores, although I generally limit my encodes to using only two or four threads), something the 6-core chips are even better at... but only very marginally.
In most single and dual-threaded workloads, the 2500 and 2600 i7 chips beat out the 990X by a medium to large margin; the 990X pulls ahead slightly for benches that are able to utilise all six cores/12 threads efficiently, but that's about it. The sandy bridge chips also suck much less power both under load and at idle.
I picked my 2600K up for £246 at launch (costs about the same now), plus a £130 motherboard. The 990X is currently ~£800, plus another £100 for the motherboard say. So for the cost of one of these 6-core chips I could buy two 2600K systems and still have money left over for an extra 8GB of DDR3.
Conclusion: late to the party, brought out of date beer. IMHO solely for people with more money than sense :)
RSI aside - anyone who's had to do any amount of drag-dropping with only a laptop trackpad will know just how painful it can be, especially whenever a trackpad runs out of space and/or decides you've randomly lifted a finger and drops all your stuff en route.
Sill decision in my book, but then I gave up on gnome years ago.
Even with great scripts, I doubt the production design would be up to much. Never before and never since had a I seen a sci-fi universe brought to life with such confidence, style and scope - and that in itself was a crucial part of the Blade Runner story. Awesome vision from Scott plus Trumbull and team at the absolute peak of their powers, and one of the last epic films to make extensive use of models before the CGI revolution kicked in.
Heck, when was the last time you saw a film that was even as well *lit* as Blade Runner?
Making a film as artistically distinct as Blade Runner appears to be a dead art. Or rather a type of art that no-one is willing to finance. Not that I'm saying Blade Runner was all about the effects, it wasn't, but damn if they didn't almost singlehandedly define the visuals of the genre for a generation to come.
Chances of requels/prequels/sequels/bleaquels having the same effect? Nil.
If it's anything like most of the... how to put this politely? ...idiosynctratic naming schemes I've seen dotted about, it's frequently a combination of office high jinks, deadlines and higher than normal blood alcohol content :) Not to mention continuing the fine tradition of nonsensical metasysntactic variables.
We've got an app whose logs are full of BISH, BASH and BOSH which are used as exit flags for certain DB operations and some sort of reporting app that has PUGH, PUGH2, BARNEY, MCGREW, CUTHBERT, DIBBLE and GRUBB all over it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpton
Agreed that there's need to be a lot of rapid juggling done by the forensics and legal sides.
I'm wondering if laws will be pushed through to allow SSD's to be powered on with the GC/TRIM/Secure Erase functionality of the controller disabled; essentially a god/basic mode so that drives can remain in a legally safe area like with write blockers.
TTBOMK there's nothing like that in the pipeline at the moment, so yes, you're right in that the next few years will be crucial. You'll need to be able to take the controller out of the loop entirely to ensure forensic integrity, as well as giving you access to the spare area but... well, it's early days yet.
I should ask my friend if any new products are popping up to deal with SSD's; bypassing the controller should be relatively simple, re-assembling the bits from the chips in a controller-specific fashion won't be.
Thanks for the reply by the way, always nice to see the author participate with their audience.