In case you didn't notice, there is a car industry in this country. You made a decision to buy a car produced elsewhere...why? Presumably it was the best-priced vehicle for your needs...so why is software any different?
Ok, so lets say I have a piece of software on the computer sitting under my desk that automagically writes programs. I write detailed design specs, then run a shell script, say ./program.sh . A week or two later, I have a written program. Would anybody object to the creation of such a program? No, of course not.
But if, instead of DELL writing programs, it's 5 guys in Bangalore, and my computer simply acts as a communications point, then suddenly we're getting out the pitchforks and torches? Why the difference? I ask my Economics classes this every course, and I've yet to hear a reasonable answer...it all comes back to "but those are PEOPLE", as if them being Intels, or AMDs, or chickens would make it more acceptable.
Remember the scare about robots in the 1980's? Remember the chicken littles running around warning of the disappearance of jobs in America, as we were all replaced by robots? It's happening again.
I am so sick of people whining "outsourcing sent my job to India" then walking out the door to climb into their Toyota. I'm sorry that your job has been outsourced, I am. But don't you realize that your decisions sent others to the same fate--where was your sense of moral outrage then?
none uses less energy per unit mass of ethanol produced than is available for later use per unit mass.
In fact, they almost all do, you can check Dr. Pimentel's research on this. The real issue with net energy is when you include the factors that you later cite.
power for pumping irrigation water Except that most corn produced in the US isn't irrigated. (See the USDA Ag Census-1997 is the most recent w/ irrigation stats, about 30% is irrigated)
no one has been able to demonstrate a process that, when taking all the energy costs into consideration, that can show a positive energy balance once you subtract the energy expended during ethanol production from the energy input from the sun in the first place
and
A is always negative for ethanol production processes from biomass
Really? The scientists at Argonne National labs disagree. See http://www.transportation.anl.gov/fuels/index.html
As I argue in a later post--in the long-term, the issue really isn't the efficiency of corn-based ethanol anyway. Sugar-cane based ethanol is much cheaper & easier to produce.
If ethanol is actually to play an increasing role in the energy needs of the first world (or the US specifically), it will not come from corn, it will be a result of the refining of sugar cane in Latin & South America & the Caribbean. Sugar cane has a much higher energy level and is much easier to convert to ethanol.
Quick quiz: which nation is the largest producer of ethanol, and what is its feedstock?
And as long as we are injecting facts into this discussion (yes, I'm new here...), while corn production does require lots of water, less than a third of US corn production is irrigated.
And finally, as for all of the "Does producing ethanol require more energy than it uses" discussion, the real question is whether ethanol is an efficient mechanism to capture solar energy and store it in chemical form. The evidence is mixed. The professor at Cornell who is frequently cited is David Pimentel, an entymologist. According to those who specialize in energy, the conclusion for corn-based ethanol is much, much more nuanced. Newer processing plants (those built in the last 3 years) fed by farmers using appropriate nitrogen application techniques are energy-positive. But there are many legacy plants (as well as legacy farmers). Again, in the long-term, the cost of conversion & transport from warmer climes is actually more relevant, though.
And yes, by the way, IAAAE (I am an agricultural economist). In fact, IAAGE (I am a grains economist for a Big Ten University)
As a professor at a Big-10 University, I now find myself in the curious situation that RedHat, for either server or workstation usage, is more expensive than Windows, owing to the terms that MS offers academia and the new licensing of RH products. Most Universities can _purchase_ Win2k3 Server for the price of one year of RHEL WS support.
Does academia constitute one more market segment that RH is no longer contesting?
I'm an agricultural economist (IAAAE?) at a Big-10 university, and I can attest that not only is the story real, but the issues are actually quite important.
Most/.ers are pretty libertarian, and agree that one's right to swing his/her own fist ends at another's face. But what happens when what is being 'swung' is subjective in both intensity and offensiveness? At that point, it becomes very difficult to arbitrate property rights.
As the story points out, the individuals involved are being trained for the evaluation of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). In determining the impact of a CAFO on another's property rights, the strength of the odor emitted by the CAFO is key. But how do you measure 'strength' and offensiveness? Do you just take the property-owner's word for it? In order to be able to assess the actual impact of these operations, there must be some quantifiable measure of their effects on the surrounding property owners, hence the Nasal Rangers.
With all due respect, what makes you so sure that they *will* win this?
SCO v. IBM is *not* an IP battle.
Let me reiterate: SCO v. IBM is *not* an IP battle.
It is a contract law dispute (read the original complaint). So unless the NDA allowed you to read the contracts that governed the IBM purchase from AT&T, and then the Novell purchase from AT&T, and then the SCO purchase from Novell, along with all of the side letter agreements, and you understand how the concept of 'derivative works' applies to software, as well as the legal admissibility of both that definition as well as the definition contained in said contracts, I am unsure of your ability to make such an assertion.
This doesn't mean that I think you are wrong. I am just curious on grounds you base your assertion.
Is there a professor that you know well enough to approach about this? I would tell them the facts and ask them what to do.
It is highly likely that they will be willing to approach the PTB about the issue--leaving you entirely out of it. At most universities, such a software vendor won't try to get your identity from a prof, they know where their bread is buttered.
If all else fails, drop me an email at roberts period six-two-eight period osu period edu. I'm a prof at Ohio State and I'll be happy to lend a hand.
The number of bugs is smaller. Think of the systems used by the telcos, or NASA. Are they perfect? No, but they are much, much more stable than Win32, or Mac, or Linux. The reason is simple, the owners demand them to be.
There are costs associated with fixing bugs and reducing crashes. The more stable an operating system is to be, the more time and money that must be devoted to its design and implementation. PC users are not willing to pay this amount for stability, either in explicit cost, or in hardware restrictions or in trade-offs for other features.
As Linux evolves over time, its stability will always improve, but it may still never reach the stability of, say, VMS. Why? Because even with the open source model of development, there are still tradeoffs to be made, tradeoffs between new features and stability, mostly. And successive bugs are harder and harder to fix, requiring greater and greater amounts of time. At some point, the community/individual decides that they would rather spend their time going after some lower-hanging fruit.
While I don't know about contributions to a PAC that supports him in general, I think that a non-resident, non-citizen making donations to a sitting US senator would probably not help his cause--since its illegal.
The hydrogen economy has lately gotten lots of press, but much of it mistates role that hydrogen can play.
Hydrogen will not, can not, be a primary energy source for our society. Current hydrocarbons provide net energy (at least in a temporal sense) because the energy that was consumed in their creation was used millenia ago. There are no similar, vast reserves of hydrogen waiting to be exploited.
While other posters here (and many others in varied other media) talk of a supply of hydrogen gained from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, they have forgotten that this process requires energy, thus necessitating some other primary energy source. Some suggest that source may be solar or wind or hydro--but then they are the actual source of the energy, hydrogen is merely an intermediate storage device.
It is much more likely that any 'hydrogen economy' that emerges in the next 3-4 decades will be based upon the extraction of hydrogen from methane, either at a large scale, or in fuel cells at the point of generation.
I'm not saying that hydrogen has no place or not interesting, but in our excitement, let's not forget the law of conservation of energy.
Check out the latest edition of OilIT. Applications like this are why Fortran is still a very popular language among those who use computers for numerically-intensive work. Fortran9x is so easily portable, its not even funny. Bindings exist for all of the major threading standards (OMP, MPI, etc) and it is FAST. Further, is there any language with a better selection of libraries available for number-crunching? I doubt it.
Develop your 'work' code in Fortran, and your front-end in Java. Both highly portable. The interface between the two will be platform specific, but this will only be a small portion of the total project & much easier to maintain than the large #ifdef heavy project you now have.
$0.02
What kind of testing have you done for your design(s)? Wind tunnel tests, computational fluid dynamics, flying scale models, etc? I've also noticed that your design has changed considerably since the first time you were featured on Slashdot, and as an aerospace engineer myself it would be interesting to know what your design criteria were and how you arrived at them.
RG: My design has changed because I do not profess to be an aeronautical engineer of any sort, and as I have proceeded, I have allowed myself to make the necessary changes resulting in a better design. A number of people have a called me on several design concerns, and I listened. As for wind tunnel tests and the like, no. The rocket is near perfect in its shape, and for what I require it to do (go up and down in a relatively stable manner), it is fine.
Does this remind anyone of The Flight of the Phoenix? (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0059183)
RG: Of course I know what a perfect rocket looks like, after all I am the inventor of the Pop-it Rocket (http://www.rocketguy.com/toys/poppit_rockit.html)
Slashdot Mirror
What if the project manager for the software is based in America? Does that make a difference?
In case you didn't notice, there is a car industry in this country. You made a decision to buy a car produced elsewhere...why? Presumably it was the best-priced vehicle for your needs...so why is software any different?
PC
As a colleague of mine likes to point out, the plural of anecdote is not data.
PC.
Ok, so lets say I have a piece of software on the computer sitting under my desk that automagically writes programs. I write detailed design specs, then run a shell script, say ./program.sh . A week or two later, I have a written program. Would anybody object to the creation of such a program? No, of course not.
But if, instead of DELL writing programs, it's 5 guys in Bangalore, and my computer simply acts as a communications point, then suddenly we're getting out the pitchforks and torches? Why the difference? I ask my Economics classes this every course, and I've yet to hear a reasonable answer...it all comes back to "but those are PEOPLE", as if them being Intels, or AMDs, or chickens would make it more acceptable.
Remember the scare about robots in the 1980's? Remember the chicken littles running around warning of the disappearance of jobs in America, as we were all replaced by robots? It's happening again.
PC.
Seriously.
I am so sick of people whining "outsourcing sent my job to India" then walking out the door to climb into their Toyota. I'm sorry that your job has been outsourced, I am. But don't you realize that your decisions sent others to the same fate--where was your sense of moral outrage then?
They can't copyright that--its too common. Now, mapping it to a hotkey, that's innovation.
Why, why, why did you paste that link?
Until 5 minutes ago, I was a George Bush-supporting, evangelical Southern Baptist. Really.
Now--I'm Jacques Chirac.
Why...why.........
none uses less energy per unit mass of ethanol produced than is available for later use per unit mass.
l
In fact, they almost all do, you can check Dr. Pimentel's research on this. The real issue with net energy is when you include the factors that you later cite.
power for pumping irrigation water
Except that most corn produced in the US isn't irrigated. (See the USDA Ag Census-1997 is the most recent w/ irrigation stats, about 30% is irrigated)
no one has been able to demonstrate a process that, when taking all the energy costs into consideration, that can show a positive energy balance once you subtract the energy expended during ethanol production from the energy input from the sun in the first place
and
A is always negative for ethanol production processes from biomass
Really? The scientists at Argonne National labs disagree. See http://www.transportation.anl.gov/fuels/index.htm
As I argue in a later post--in the long-term, the issue really isn't the efficiency of corn-based ethanol anyway. Sugar-cane based ethanol is much cheaper & easier to produce.
Yes, IAAAE (I Am An Agricultural Economist)
If ethanol is actually to play an increasing role in the energy needs of the first world (or the US specifically), it will not come from corn, it will be a result of the refining of sugar cane in Latin & South America & the Caribbean. Sugar cane has a much higher energy level and is much easier to convert to ethanol.
Quick quiz: which nation is the largest producer of ethanol, and what is its feedstock?
And as long as we are injecting facts into this discussion (yes, I'm new here...), while corn production does require lots of water, less than a third of US corn production is irrigated.
And finally, as for all of the "Does producing ethanol require more energy than it uses" discussion, the real question is whether ethanol is an efficient mechanism to capture solar energy and store it in chemical form. The evidence is mixed. The professor at Cornell who is frequently cited is David Pimentel, an entymologist. According to those who specialize in energy, the conclusion for corn-based ethanol is much, much more nuanced. Newer processing plants (those built in the last 3 years) fed by farmers using appropriate nitrogen application techniques are energy-positive. But there are many legacy plants (as well as legacy farmers). Again, in the long-term, the cost of conversion & transport from warmer climes is actually more relevant, though.
And yes, by the way, IAAAE (I am an agricultural economist). In fact, IAAGE (I am a grains economist for a Big Ten University)
Answer: Brazil, sugar cane.
she got my gumby doll
So that's what you kids are calling it these days...
Mr. Szulik,
As a professor at a Big-10 University, I now find myself in the curious situation that RedHat, for either server or workstation usage, is more expensive than Windows, owing to the terms that MS offers academia and the new licensing of RH products. Most Universities can _purchase_ Win2k3 Server for the price of one year of RHEL WS support.
Does academia constitute one more market segment that RH is no longer contesting?
Uhhhh, you consider these SCO stories signal?
Doh! You are, of course, correct. You and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
I'm an agricultural economist (IAAAE?) at a Big-10 university, and I can attest that not only is the story real, but the issues are actually quite important.
/.ers are pretty libertarian, and agree that one's right to swing his/her own fist ends at another's face. But what happens when what is being 'swung' is subjective in both intensity and offensiveness? At that point, it becomes very difficult to arbitrate property rights.
Most
As the story points out, the individuals involved are being trained for the evaluation of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). In determining the impact of a CAFO on another's property rights, the strength of the odor emitted by the CAFO is key. But how do you measure 'strength' and offensiveness? Do you just take the property-owner's word for it? In order to be able to assess the actual impact of these operations, there must be some quantifiable measure of their effects on the surrounding property owners, hence the Nasal Rangers.
With all due respect, what makes you so sure that they *will* win this?
SCO v. IBM is *not* an IP battle.
Let me reiterate: SCO v. IBM is *not* an IP battle.
It is a contract law dispute (read the original complaint). So unless the NDA allowed you to read the contracts that governed the IBM purchase from AT&T, and then the Novell purchase from AT&T, and then the SCO purchase from Novell, along with all of the side letter agreements, and you understand how the concept of 'derivative works' applies to software, as well as the legal admissibility of both that definition as well as the definition contained in said contracts, I am unsure of your ability to make such an assertion.
This doesn't mean that I think you are wrong. I am just curious on grounds you base your assertion.
Matt.
Is there a professor that you know well enough to approach about this? I would tell them the facts and ask them what to do.
It is highly likely that they will be willing to approach the PTB about the issue--leaving you entirely out of it. At most universities, such a software vendor won't try to get your identity from a prof, they know where their bread is buttered.
If all else fails, drop me an email at roberts period six-two-eight period osu period edu. I'm a prof at Ohio State and I'll be happy to lend a hand.
The number of bugs is smaller. Think of the systems used by the telcos, or NASA. Are they perfect? No, but they are much, much more stable than Win32, or Mac, or Linux. The reason is simple, the owners demand them to be.
There are costs associated with fixing bugs and reducing crashes. The more stable an operating system is to be, the more time and money that must be devoted to its design and implementation. PC users are not willing to pay this amount for stability, either in explicit cost, or in hardware restrictions or in trade-offs for other features.
As Linux evolves over time, its stability will always improve, but it may still never reach the stability of, say, VMS. Why? Because even with the open source model of development, there are still tradeoffs to be made, tradeoffs between new features and stability, mostly. And successive bugs are harder and harder to fix, requiring greater and greater amounts of time. At some point, the community/individual decides that they would rather spend their time going after some lower-hanging fruit.
Just my $0.02
Actually, IAAE.
While I don't know about contributions to a PAC that supports him in general, I think that a non-resident, non-citizen making donations to a sitting US senator would probably not help his cause--since its illegal.
The hydrogen economy has lately gotten lots of press, but much of it mistates role that hydrogen can play.
Hydrogen will not, can not, be a primary energy source for our society. Current hydrocarbons provide net energy (at least in a temporal sense) because the energy that was consumed in their creation was used millenia ago. There are no similar, vast reserves of hydrogen waiting to be exploited.
While other posters here (and many others in varied other media) talk of a supply of hydrogen gained from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, they have forgotten that this process requires energy, thus necessitating some other primary energy source. Some suggest that source may be solar or wind or hydro--but then they are the actual source of the energy, hydrogen is merely an intermediate storage device.
It is much more likely that any 'hydrogen economy' that emerges in the next 3-4 decades will be based upon the extraction of hydrogen from methane, either at a large scale, or in fuel cells at the point of generation.
I'm not saying that hydrogen has no place or not interesting, but in our excitement, let's not forget the law of conservation of energy.
--my $0.02
If we can't be properly crude, at least be crude properly.
Check out the latest edition of OilIT. Applications like this are why Fortran is still a very popular language among those who use computers for numerically-intensive work. Fortran9x is so easily portable, its not even funny. Bindings exist for all of the major threading standards (OMP, MPI, etc) and it is FAST. Further, is there any language with a better selection of libraries available for number-crunching? I doubt it. Develop your 'work' code in Fortran, and your front-end in Java. Both highly portable. The interface between the two will be platform specific, but this will only be a small portion of the total project & much easier to maintain than the large #ifdef heavy project you now have. $0.02
2) operational testing?
)
by Nehemiah S
What kind of testing have you done for your design(s)? Wind tunnel tests, computational fluid dynamics, flying scale models, etc? I've also noticed that your design has changed considerably since the first time you were featured on Slashdot, and as an aerospace engineer myself it would be interesting to know what your design criteria were and how you arrived at them.
RG: My design has changed because I do not profess to be an aeronautical engineer of any sort, and as I have proceeded, I have allowed myself to make the necessary changes resulting in a better design. A number of people have a called me on several design concerns, and I listened. As for wind tunnel tests and the like, no. The rocket is near perfect in its shape, and for what I require it to do (go up and down in a relatively stable manner), it is fine.
Does this remind anyone of The Flight of the Phoenix? (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0059183)
RG: Of course I know what a perfect rocket looks like, after all I am the inventor of the Pop-it Rocket (http://www.rocketguy.com/toys/poppit_rockit.html