Ha, ha. Your post should have received a score 2, funny. Polluting more to enhance global dimming is only a way to alleviate the symptom; it does nothing to solve the problem in the long run. Pollution is also undesirable for other obvious reasons (just look at the situation in China). Cutting back on the large scale use of fossil fuels sooner rather than later is the only solution that makes economic sense.
Regarding the corporate disinterest towards Vista, that's normal. They're simply a conservative lot that will not be upgrading any time soon. IMO, one of the reasons businesses eventually do decide to upgrade is social pressure: once everybody including the boss has been running the new OS at home for a while, people start to complain and make remarks and IT departments find it more difficult to resist change. Plus, if the IT dept. have been using it themselves for ages, so why not? In other words, after the home users have become familiar with the product and have accepted it (for all kinds of reasons), businesses are more likely to follow.
This time around, however, I wonder if the home users will be as enthusiastic. Why? Generally speaking, Vista is not good news for consumers. For them it means:
No more illegal software, movies and music.
Hardware that doesn't work.
Hardware that suddenly stops working.
Absurd hardware requirements.
Poor performance that won't be appealing, especially gamers.
DRM technology that decreases stability.
Security that is no better and possibly worse than before.
High cost.
In light of all this, I believe the advantages of running an alternative operating system, especially Linux, will soon become more apparent to normal PC users than ever before. For example, I know lots of people who have told me they don't need Linux because they've always been able to do everything they wanted with Windows, running loads of illegal software, and never have to pay anything for it -- they love that! Well, if Vista puts an end to all that, and they hear how much is now possible with Linux, and how easy it is to install distros like Ubuntu and Fedora these days, why wouldn't they be more likely to switch, or at least start running dual-boot systems? I think many of them will do exactly that. Who knows: it may actually become cool to run Linux!
Bottom line: Vista may be the best thing to happen to Linux in years.
... every time I think of Gerald Ford, I think of a 1976 TV campaign
advert in which they showed this feisty little old lady saying:
"Right now I'm voting for Jerry Ford definitely!
Well, I was still too young to vote at the time, but at our Florida
high-school mock elections, he lost big time. He wasn't exactly
inspiring to the younger generation.
Yes, recharging definitely takes longer than filling a tank with gas, but on the other hand many people will only have to recharge at home and will no longer have to make regular visits to the local gas station.
Milage will increase as battery capacity increases, but with companies like Chevron calling the shots for now, this will sometimes an uphill battle.
Swapping battery packs might work. I guess you'd buy new cars with (or even without) standard battery packs installed and either charge them up yourself at home or swap them out at the nearest charging station. But, you're right: so much would have to be standardized that it's something that governments would probably have to force upon the auto industry.
You're way off with the electrical grid capacity problem, though, since 60 million electric cars will never hit the streets all at once. Obviously, the numbers will grow slowly, giving plenty time for the grid to adapt to the new demand (nuclear is fine with me as well, at least in the relatively short term). And, as you say yourself, most of the charging will take place at night when usage is traditionally low.
Charging an electric car if you have to park it down the street will be a more difficult problem to solve. At first, this will make it harder to sell these cars to some people, but as demand grows I believe that solutions will be found.
The important thing is that more people, especially governments, become aware of the electric car as a viable solution to some of the big problems we face today: air pollution and especially global warming. There is plenty of demand for these vehicles, despite their limitations, yet there is a conspicuous lack of supply. Additional research will definitely improve electric car performance, but the point is that for many people the performance is already good enough the way it is now. The same cannot be said for vehicles powered by hydrogen.
Has anybody seen that documentary movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" In it, they look into hydrogen vehicles and the auto industry's support for it, but get a technician involved to admit that these machines are nowhere near being available to the public. This idea, along with Bush's much vaunted "hydrogen economy", is nothing more than a white elephant -- a strategy for getting the public think that the industry is doing its best, while in actual fact hydrogen powered vehicles are a dead end. They pay lip service to the idea by investing few million a year into their hydrogen research projects, while in the mean time moving along with business as usual.
As the movie points out, electric cars are the real answer: they're simple, cheap, fast, efficient, convenient and low maintenance, so there's absolutely no need for hydrogen to enter the equation. Hydrogen just makes these cars more complicated and less efficient. The only thing holding back the electric car is the will of the industry. For instance, Chevron holds the patents for one of the most promising battery technologies, but they specifically forbid the current manufacturer to sell them for use in private vehicles (only public transport).
I suppose you could argue that the auto manufacturers the oil companies are only acting in the best interests of their stock holders, and that's probably true, but at this rate they might as well be evil.
Indeed. Another major problem has to do with backups, or just moving around large blocks of data. Hard disks continue to grow and next year we'll probably see the first terabyte drives, but what about the maximum sustainable throughput? It's unlikely anything significant will ever change here because of the inherent physical (and perhaps economic) limitations. As a result, it's taking longer and longer to read all of the data off of these huge drives. This means backups are taking longer and the chances of full data recovery from dying hard disks are decreasing. Personally, I think MRAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mram) would be a great solution, but this stuff is still expensive and it's tough to compete with hard disks that offer so much storage space for so little cash.
Sad, but true. I keep thinking that the human race is no better than a bacterial culture in a hypothetical closed-ecosystem lab experiment, where the bacteria can't help but eat up and poison their environment, some algae for example, faster than the latter can regenerate. The bacteria are incapable of self-regulation, even if their own survival is at stake. Individually, some of us may be aware of what's going on and attempt to alert the majority to the danger, but most of us don't seem to understand the trouble we're in. Rich or poor, most people are just too busy looking out for themselves to even give the environment and their impact on it more than a second thought. In other words, collectively we're no smarter than those bacteria: we're not capable of self-regulation either. Add to that the fact that there's now over six billion of us and counting and that we're using up the world's resources much faster than is sustainable with or without the greenhouse effect, and it's pretty obvious we're all heading for the mother of all disasters.
(I'm supposed to say something funny or ironic now,
but for some reason I can't think of anything).
This is exactly the point. It's nice that we can now use sunlight and a protein to split water and make hydrogen, but indeed, How efficient is the process? Screen printed poly-crystalline solar panels are about 12-15% efficient and produce around 120-150 W/m2... directly (=very convenient). Can this new method do any better? Let's hope so, because otherwise we might as well use solar panels to produce electricity to split water.
A long time ago I knew a guy who was into amphetamines.
His habit intensified and one day he figured he didn't
have to sleep anymore, so he sold his bed (probably to
buy more speed). Unfortunately, he collapsed several
days later and ended up looking for a new one. Bummer.
(this is a true story, too.)
Oh, get real! Slashdot isn't a orderly process. When it comes to topics like this one, it's more like a group hug. The faithful do it every Sunday, so why can't we do it a few times a year?
Personally, even though I've been here for a while, I still love harping on the issue... Dawkins is right: religion is like a virus, and America is by far the worst infected western democracy!. However, I don't see it as a bad thing that we repeat our position on this every once in a while. After all, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support creationism or any of the religious beliefs. At best religions are collections of myths, traditions and metaphysical nonsense that give people a kind of emotional support, while at worst they are an endless source of misunderstanding, violence, war, suffering and death. Should we always have to remain "polite" and stay silent on this issue, even as the evangelists actively prostylize and the Oval Office is occupied by someone who simultaneously has conversations with God, invades foreign countries and helps to destroy the environment? Absolutely not. It's important that we speak out, or at least let our fellow Slashdotters know where we stand from time to time.
... just print all the ones and zeros out on paper, so that later on others
can just read it all back in again with OCR! Oh, I know we could use
punch cards instead, but we don't want our kids to laugh at us, do we?
Besides, if we print the ones and zeros real small, we can achieve higher
data densities.
But then again, without any real competition, why should they care? Once again, it's clear that Microsoft's primary obligation is to its stockholders -- you can be sure that they're doing the very best they can to maximize their profits.
But, it'll never work. I worked on a translation program for several years back in the 90's and it comes down to this: to translate from one language to another you don't just have to understand the meaning of the words, but their context. And language just isn't logical. You can try and include lots of pre-translated phrases, but the combinations are infinite! In other words, the only way to solve this is to first create a real artificial intelligence... which may never happen.
Yeah, but an SDSL subscription costs a lot more and the telcos could easily raise our ADSL upload bandwidth a little -- I've got 16-20 Mbps down at the moment and only 1 Mbps up. I'm told that this is simply the telecom provider's business plan: to make more of a distinction this way between consumer and business subscriptions. But, in big business it's never that simple. In such situations like this I ask myself, Cui bono (who profits)? With less people watching television or reading newspapers these days and sitting in front of the PC instead -- now even reading each other's blogs -- Big Media is worried. I never mentioned the word conspiracy, but in both of these cases the outcome is bad for free speech and good for Big Media.
Everybody's got a digital camera or a webcam these days capable of shooting video and so many people have websites, how can the government possibly hope to monitor all that? Are they going to include moving GIFs in this definition as well?
This totally stinks on another level too. Part of the Internet revolution was that we would all become information providers for each other, but now they're trying to limit what we can say. (First, with broadband they limit our upload bandwidth, and now this). I wouldn't be surprised if Big Media was more to blame for this initiative than the taxman.
Maybe this would be a reasonable option if most subscribers were running Linux, but last I heard over 90% are still running Windows. And if a good chunk of those people were constantly to be cut off from the Internet due to botnet infections ("Sorry, Sir. Your PC is infected and you have to re-install before we can restore your Internet connection."), then that would probably be a strong incentive for them to consider moving another ISP.
...There are articles for musicians, actors, and movies, but they're not in a database like IMDB with all the proper connections....
As a Wikipedia editor, I just hate the way they insist on using "the most popular" common names instead of scientific names whenever possible for all their articles on biological organisms. It makes it all that much more difficult to organize. The usual complaint is that the average visitor would be confused, but I don't see that this has to be a problem if redirects are made for all the common names and a few of them are displayed prominently at the top of every article. Instead, their's no reasoning with them. Would they listen to a taxonomist? No way! At Wikipedia, everyone seems to be an expert on this subject.
If Citizendium decides to correct this problem, I'm joining up for sure!
With all this talk of ever faster download speeds, I sure do wish my provider could do something about my upload speed. My download speed is now 20 MBps, but my upload speed has been stuck at 1 MBps for years. My IPS has complained to my telco (ADSL provider) about this, but so far nothing has changed. I'm told that the teco's business strategy is to only sell the higher upload speeds together with business accounts, which are way more expensive. Even the damned cable companies apply this strategy, even though there's never been a technical reason for it. Not so long ago I had a speed ratio of 4:1 -- 4MBps down and 1 MBps up. Now it's 20:1. Will I soon be seeing 100:1? Will I be stuck at 1 MBps upload forever?
This past summer I've been busy writing a series of articles for Wikipedia on venomous snakes. I only because aware of YouTube when someone started to leave links to it in the articles I was working on. The videos are made by a guy who has an impressive collection of venomous snakes. It's great! He's been sharing examples of snake behavior that I've never seen anywhere else. For example, check out this strange head-bobbing rhinoceros viper.
I had no idea that others might be uploading videos that contained copyrighted tunes. Oh, well. I guess this is what we get for dancing to proprietary music as opposed to "open source." A good example of copyrights crushing innovation.
Forget it! With billions at stake, Microsoft will find a way to extend its monopoly. As opposed to their stockholders, the complexity of their new OS will have little influence in this matter. If necessary, subsequent versions of Vista will only include things like cosmetic changes, new file formats (not compatible with previous versions) and some extra features stolen from the competition. However, you can bet that they will market every new version as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha, ha. Your post should have received a score 2, funny. Polluting more to enhance global dimming is only a way to alleviate the symptom; it does nothing to solve the problem in the long run. Pollution is also undesirable for other obvious reasons (just look at the situation in China). Cutting back on the large scale use of fossil fuels sooner rather than later is the only solution that makes economic sense.
Once an asshole, always an asshole.
Did anyone really think he was
turning over a new leaf?
This time around, however, I wonder if the home users will be as enthusiastic. Why? Generally speaking, Vista is not good news for consumers. For them it means:
- No more illegal software, movies and music.
- Hardware that doesn't work.
- Hardware that suddenly stops working.
- Absurd hardware requirements.
- Poor performance that won't be appealing, especially gamers.
- DRM technology that decreases stability.
- Security that is no better and possibly worse than before.
- High cost.
In light of all this, I believe the advantages of running an alternative operating system, especially Linux, will soon become more apparent to normal PC users than ever before. For example, I know lots of people who have told me they don't need Linux because they've always been able to do everything they wanted with Windows, running loads of illegal software, and never have to pay anything for it -- they love that! Well, if Vista puts an end to all that, and they hear how much is now possible with Linux, and how easy it is to install distros like Ubuntu and Fedora these days, why wouldn't they be more likely to switch, or at least start running dual-boot systems? I think many of them will do exactly that. Who knows: it may actually become cool to run Linux!Bottom line: Vista may be the best thing to happen to Linux in years.
advert in which they showed this feisty little old lady saying:
Well, I was still too young to vote at the time, but at our Florida
high-school mock elections, he lost big time. He wasn't exactly
inspiring to the younger generation.
- Yes, recharging definitely takes longer than filling a tank with gas, but on the other hand many people will only have to recharge at home and will no longer have to make regular visits to the local gas station.
- Milage will increase as battery capacity increases, but with companies like Chevron calling the shots for now, this will sometimes an uphill battle.
- Swapping battery packs might work. I guess you'd buy new cars with (or even without) standard battery packs installed and either charge them up yourself at home or swap them out at the nearest charging station. But, you're right: so much would have to be standardized that it's something that governments would probably have to force upon the auto industry.
- You're way off with the electrical grid capacity problem, though, since 60 million electric cars will never hit the streets all at once. Obviously, the numbers will grow slowly, giving plenty time for the grid to adapt to the new demand (nuclear is fine with me as well, at least in the relatively short term). And, as you say yourself, most of the charging will take place at night when usage is traditionally low.
- Charging an electric car if you have to park it down the street will be a more difficult problem to solve. At first, this will make it harder to sell these cars to some people, but as demand grows I believe that solutions will be found.
The important thing is that more people, especially governments, become aware of the electric car as a viable solution to some of the big problems we face today: air pollution and especially global warming. There is plenty of demand for these vehicles, despite their limitations, yet there is a conspicuous lack of supply. Additional research will definitely improve electric car performance, but the point is that for many people the performance is already good enough the way it is now. The same cannot be said for vehicles powered by hydrogen.Has anybody seen that documentary movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" In it, they look into hydrogen vehicles and the auto industry's support for it, but get a technician involved to admit that these machines are nowhere near being available to the public. This idea, along with Bush's much vaunted "hydrogen economy", is nothing more than a white elephant -- a strategy for getting the public think that the industry is doing its best, while in actual fact hydrogen powered vehicles are a dead end. They pay lip service to the idea by investing few million a year into their hydrogen research projects, while in the mean time moving along with business as usual.
As the movie points out, electric cars are the real answer: they're simple, cheap, fast, efficient, convenient and low maintenance, so there's absolutely no need for hydrogen to enter the equation. Hydrogen just makes these cars more complicated and less efficient. The only thing holding back the electric car is the will of the industry. For instance, Chevron holds the patents for one of the most promising battery technologies, but they specifically forbid the current manufacturer to sell them for use in private vehicles (only public transport).
I suppose you could argue that the auto manufacturers the oil companies are only acting in the best interests of their stock holders, and that's probably true, but at this rate they might as well be evil.
Good thing this kind of criminal behavior doesn't go on in the market for software!
Indeed. Another major problem has to do with backups, or just moving around large blocks of data. Hard disks continue to grow and next year we'll probably see the first terabyte drives, but what about the maximum sustainable throughput? It's unlikely anything significant will ever change here because of the inherent physical (and perhaps economic) limitations. As a result, it's taking longer and longer to read all of the data off of these huge drives. This means backups are taking longer and the chances of full data recovery from dying hard disks are decreasing. Personally, I think MRAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mram) would be a great solution, but this stuff is still expensive and it's tough to compete with hard disks that offer so much storage space for so little cash.
Sad, but true. I keep thinking that the human race is no better than a bacterial culture in a hypothetical closed-ecosystem lab experiment, where the bacteria can't help but eat up and poison their environment, some algae for example, faster than the latter can regenerate. The bacteria are incapable of self-regulation, even if their own survival is at stake. Individually, some of us may be aware of what's going on and attempt to alert the majority to the danger, but most of us don't seem to understand the trouble we're in. Rich or poor, most people are just too busy looking out for themselves to even give the environment and their impact on it more than a second thought. In other words, collectively we're no smarter than those bacteria: we're not capable of self-regulation either. Add to that the fact that there's now over six billion of us and counting and that we're using up the world's resources much faster than is sustainable with or without the greenhouse effect, and it's pretty obvious we're all heading for the mother of all disasters.
(I'm supposed to say something funny or ironic now,
but for some reason I can't think of anything).
This is exactly the point. It's nice that we can now use sunlight and a protein to split water and make hydrogen, but indeed, How efficient is the process? Screen printed poly-crystalline solar panels are about 12-15% efficient and produce around 120-150 W/m2... directly (=very convenient). Can this new method do any better? Let's hope so, because otherwise we might as well use solar panels to produce electricity to split water.
A long time ago I knew a guy who was into amphetamines.
His habit intensified and one day he figured he didn't
have to sleep anymore, so he sold his bed (probably to
buy more speed). Unfortunately, he collapsed several
days later and ended up looking for a new one. Bummer.
(this is a true story, too.)
Oh, get real! Slashdot isn't a orderly process. When it comes to topics like this one, it's more like a group hug. The faithful do it every Sunday, so why can't we do it a few times a year?
Personally, even though I've been here for a while, I still love harping on the issue... Dawkins is right: religion is like a virus, and America is by far the worst infected western democracy!. However, I don't see it as a bad thing that we repeat our position on this every once in a while. After all, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support creationism or any of the religious beliefs. At best religions are collections of myths, traditions and metaphysical nonsense that give people a kind of emotional support, while at worst they are an endless source of misunderstanding, violence, war, suffering and death. Should we always have to remain "polite" and stay silent on this issue, even as the evangelists actively prostylize and the Oval Office is occupied by someone who simultaneously has conversations with God, invades foreign countries and helps to destroy the environment? Absolutely not. It's important that we speak out, or at least let our fellow Slashdotters know where we stand from time to time.
... just print all the ones and zeros out on paper, so that later on others
can just read it all back in again with OCR! Oh, I know we could use
punch cards instead, but we don't want our kids to laugh at us, do we?
Besides, if we print the ones and zeros real small, we can achieve higher
data densities.
Great! But, if Bush gets impeached then his brain (Cheney) takes over. How would that make things any better?
But then again, without any real competition, why should they care? Once again, it's clear that Microsoft's primary obligation is to its stockholders -- you can be sure that they're doing the very best they can to maximize their profits.
But, it'll never work. I worked on a translation program for several years back in the 90's and it comes down to this: to translate from one language to another you don't just have to understand the meaning of the words, but their context. And language just isn't logical. You can try and include lots of pre-translated phrases, but the combinations are infinite! In other words, the only way to solve this is to first create a real artificial intelligence... which may never happen.
Yeah, but an SDSL subscription costs a lot more and the telcos could easily raise our ADSL upload bandwidth a little -- I've got 16-20 Mbps down at the moment and only 1 Mbps up. I'm told that this is simply the telecom provider's business plan: to make more of a distinction this way between consumer and business subscriptions. But, in big business it's never that simple. In such situations like this I ask myself, Cui bono (who profits)? With less people watching television or reading newspapers these days and sitting in front of the PC instead -- now even reading each other's blogs -- Big Media is worried. I never mentioned the word conspiracy, but in both of these cases the outcome is bad for free speech and good for Big Media.
Everybody's got a digital camera or a webcam these days capable of shooting video and so many people have websites, how can the government possibly hope to monitor all that? Are they going to include moving GIFs in this definition as well?
This totally stinks on another level too. Part of the Internet revolution was that we would all become information providers for each other, but now they're trying to limit what we can say. (First, with broadband they limit our upload bandwidth, and now this). I wouldn't be surprised if Big Media was more to blame for this initiative than the taxman.
Maybe this would be a reasonable option if most subscribers were running Linux, but last I heard over 90% are still running Windows. And if a good chunk of those people were constantly to be cut off from the Internet due to botnet infections ("Sorry, Sir. Your PC is infected and you have to re-install before we can restore your Internet connection."), then that would probably be a strong incentive for them to consider moving another ISP.
If Citizendium decides to correct this problem, I'm joining up for sure!
With all this talk of ever faster download speeds, I sure do wish my provider could do something about my upload speed. My download speed is now 20 MBps, but my upload speed has been stuck at 1 MBps for years. My IPS has complained to my telco (ADSL provider) about this, but so far nothing has changed. I'm told that the teco's business strategy is to only sell the higher upload speeds together with business accounts, which are way more expensive. Even the damned cable companies apply this strategy, even though there's never been a technical reason for it. Not so long ago I had a speed ratio of 4:1 -- 4MBps down and 1 MBps up. Now it's 20:1. Will I soon be seeing 100:1? Will I be stuck at 1 MBps upload forever?
And I still can't even remember some of my own phone numbers!
This past summer I've been busy writing a series of articles for Wikipedia on venomous snakes. I only because aware of YouTube when someone started to leave links to it in the articles I was working on. The videos are made by a guy who has an impressive collection of venomous snakes. It's great! He's been sharing examples of snake behavior that I've never seen anywhere else. For example, check out this strange head-bobbing rhinoceros viper.
I had no idea that others might be uploading videos that contained copyrighted tunes. Oh, well. I guess this is what we get for dancing to proprietary music as opposed to "open source." A good example of copyrights crushing innovation.
Forget it! With billions at stake, Microsoft will find a way to extend its monopoly. As opposed to their stockholders, the complexity of their new OS will have little influence in this matter. If necessary, subsequent versions of Vista will only include things like cosmetic changes, new file formats (not compatible with previous versions) and some extra features stolen from the competition. However, you can bet that they will market every new version as the greatest thing since sliced bread.