Second reply. Bad form, sorry. When these nuclear plants were built geothermal wasn't an option because the science had not sufficiently advanced. Japan embraced nuclear power like no other except France. The cheap power enabled them to become an economic superpower and the benefits far outweigh the harm caused by these meltdowns.
Now though the science of geothermal has progressed. Japan is so rich with geothermal resources and engineering talent that they could provide all their electrical energy needs for the rest of forever with offshore geothermal resources and not taint their landscape with cooling towers nor risk their precious hotspring mineral baths. They don't need nuclear any more, at all. For Japan it's a technology that served its purpose and should be retired. Other nations are not so fortunate to be blessed with such rich geothermal resources.
The dose limits for practices are intended to ensure that no individual is committed to unacceptable risk due to radiation exposure. For the public the limit is 1 mSv in a year, or in special circumstances up to 5 mSv in a single year provided that the average does over five consecutive years does not exceed 1 mSv per year.
Typically permissible levels are lower for children because they have more time to develop cancer. In theory children exposed at the 20 mSv per annum level can be expected to increase their rates of cancer from one in 500 to one in 200. In practice the children aren't going to be exposed to environmental radioactivity at the maximum level for the whole time. Regardless, many millions of children are going to be exposed to higher levels of environmental radiation because of this. Zero is the optimum healthful level of radiation and there is no healthful effect from any increase. More of them are going to get cancer. Some 30 years hence, some few hundred of them will have died who would not yet have if this had not happened. Japan's explanation for why they raised the limit is sanguine: effectively, "because we must. The radiation is in the schools. We cannot evacuate the entire region." Japan is an island. It's not like they have an Alaska to evacuate people to. Besides, it's not like the schools and playgrounds have any more radiation than the homes at this point.
Now please do go on about how this is all ok, nothing important has happened, how nuclear power is the cure for all the world's ills - too cheap to meter. Tell me how you get more radiation from your Brita. Please continue to ignore that Japan has the choice of geothermal which is cheaper renewable baseload power that doesn't have these risks at all. I want to see you try to justify this.
But before you start... the worst may not yet be over. Criticality is probably still occurring in at least one of these reactors or they wouldn't be injecting them with Boron. The US is probably watching this go on because we have satellites particularly sensitive to "neutron beams" but we're too polite to point it out. It's too late to inject these reactors with Boron because the water, and hence the Boric acid, can't reach the heart of the corium piles on the floor of the primary containment. It all boils off before it gets even close to the physical place where it can damp the ongoing reaction. Eventually one or more of these corium lava piles may melt into the flooded basement, come into contact with the highly radioactive pools of water, and explode in a giant flash of radioactive steam. If that happens the cloud will be visible for many miles. There's no hiding it. If the wind is blowing inland that day it will deposit most of its nuclear enhanced goodness on the bulk of the island, including Tokyo, before moving on to contaminate China and Korea. Japan's neighbors will not be amused. And they won't be pouring any new water in for a few weeks anyway, because they have no place to store the radioactive runoff afterward.
At the time Japan chose the nuclear path it was a brilliant stroke with some risks. They took the risks and benefited from that choice for 30 years. With abundant cheap electricity they became an economic engine for the rest of the world to envy. I can't be critical of the choice they took at that time: the cost of not doing it was far higher. But then is not now. Science has progressed to the point where Japan no longer needs nuclear power. As they recover from this disaster I expect they will turn away from it. Others may need nuclear now, but not Japan.
A moment on Google will show you that Japan has the third most plentiful surveyed geothermal resources of any nation on earth. A few more moments would show that the US DOE finds it ten percent cheaper than nuclear per unit of electricity. Advanced geothermal is a closed cycle so no emissions, no fuel costs, no spent fuel storage, no loss of fuel sources in times of international strife or commodity shortages. Now we come to why, which was my question.
At this point one might question the logic of evaluating the risk at all. As in, "If there's a cheaper method of producing the same amount of renewable base load power that doesn't have any of these risks, we should use that first." Like, frinstance, geothermal. Why play with nuclear fire if you don't have to? Because it's exciting?
Japan has increased by 20 times the permissible level of radiation for schools, to the limits permitted a German nuclear worker. Thousands of parents are protesting, which in Japan is a pretty big deal. The Fukushima plant is out of places to store radioactive water, more storage is weeks away, and they still need to pump water to keep the fuel cool. The evacuation area may expand again. The slaughter and disposal of livestock in the evacuation zone has begun. Nobody really knows whether or not the fuel is burning through all three primary containment vessels on its way to massive contamination release.
Investors don't give Microsoft's earnings - past or future - full credit because the company has proven itself a spendthrift. They're like an idiot cousin any of us might have who hits it big in the lottery and can be expected to fritter it all away shortly. Except of course that they hit the jackpot every single day. Several times each day. It takes more foolishness than should be humanly possible to be reliably rid of that much excess. Somehow though, the company is gettin' her done.
Numbers on this scale are hard to grasp. To give you an idea of the scale of this foolishness, at a modest 8% APR the $7B Microsoft has burned in their Online Services Division since it last turned a profit would return over half a billion dollars a year - forever. Five hundred and sixty million dollars a year interest is enough money to employ a small US town or a respectable city in India, China or Pakistan, full time for the rest of forever. Add the $8.5 billion they spent on Skype and the money from their other failed acquisitions and it's enough money to migrate the entire US carbon-based electricity system to clean renewable next-generation geothermal energy over a decade just from the interest and have the principal and some capital growth left afterward too. Add the $100B in stock buybacks from the last decade that didn't achieve the goal of lifting the stock price and it's enough money to do those things, wire gigabit fiber to every US home, and fund commercially viable space exploitation too - without ever touching the capital. One Hundred Billion Dollars is the inflation adjusted price of The New Deal. $100B is more money than the entire 2004 Gross Domestic Product of Pakistan when their population was 152 million souls and they commanded the natural resources of their 307,000 square miles of our planet.
All Microsoft has bought with that lost power is the right to throw more bales of money on that fire. It's sick. It's disgusting. It ought not be possible. It is possible though, and perfectly legal. That so many have done so little with so much is appalling. It's offensive. It's wrong. The stock market is not rewarding this behavior, which is right and good.
Something like 90% of companies fail in the first decade. Most of the rest don't survive the retirement of the founders by a decade. IBM becomes 100 years old on June 16th of this year, though it traces its ancestry back 30 years more. When a company has survived the retirement of its founders for so long it means that it has management processes in place to become nigh immortal.
It's part of the marketing campaign to spin away the openness of all these products. It's a failed strategy that highlights just how toxic the closed products are: you don't get to choose whether you want open or closed.
It's DRM that's not open and isn't ever going to be. If you want DRM'd services like movies badly enough to give up the openness, that's your choice. For music we don't have to put up with that crud any more. As far as I can tell the people who pay for DRM'd services like Netflix and this Android Movie Market validate the DRM business model and defer the day when the video vendors give up on DRM - perhaps forever.
But having a model that lets people choose? That seems fair even if I don't like how people choose. A reasonable person can't find fault with that.
That looks good. nVidia is doing some good work too. For now though Imagination Technologies is "best in class." It's used in the Kal-El chipset specced for the next generation PSP. It scales to 16 threads and more. The watts are incredibly low for what it does even at 65nm, and a die shrink to 22nm would just make it all the better. It's what Samsung uses in their Galaxy S II. An old version of Imagination Technologies graphics are used in the Atom line. For Intel to get an exclusive on this stuff they would have to buy the company to prevent anybody else from using it. That would probably not get past antitrust review, but to even try would be evil prevention of progress in the first degree. This stuff is what progress is made of, and the company that buys IT to prevent this good stuff will be pilloried in the marketplace as a preventer of progress.
The right thing to do is for Intel to continue to license IT's latest tech, rapid-response die-shrink it to deliver the best power performance out of this tech, and speed up platform development to a six month cycle. Only Intel has the tech to get this done. Intel needs to become more nimble because the lifecycle on mobile products is six months before obsolescence. They need to trim some levels of management to make this happen.
IT will inevitably be bought because it's a hugely successful font of innovation with a small market cap. That's how these things go. The company that buys them has to have a solid record of providing openness and progress, of not being evil, to not lose money on the deal. It has to have a reputation for platform ambivalence. Otherwise IT is the poison pill that drags down whomever swallows it and the purchase will turn out to be less than no value because competitors offer similar benefits without the drama.
BTW: This is metaphorical in the sense that I would work against their organization's efforts to hinder them if they did this bad thing. As in to indulge in digging into the details of each and every thing they do whether or not related and bring the weak parts, every negative possibility to light, to put the worst possible spin on it and to distribute that as best I may, and encourage others to do so. Not in the online terroristic threats sense that I might actually harm any person. Hurting people isn't my thing.
Once malware has run on your box, it's a wipe and reinstall issue. And if it is a business machine then there are potential legal issues with disclosures and so on. In that environment there is no safe guidance a technician can give.
Yeah, that was a little strong. Playing keep-away with innovation is not ok. Seriously, the blowback from a strategic maneuver like that would be severe.
Did I say Linux? No. Many Linux distros are also bloated. Some few Linux distros, and some BSD's, iOS, and many others are designed to be light and swift. They make the most of lighter hardware. Windows just seems to be designed to burn up all the improvements Moore's law gives us, as in: "Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away."
And if it was the laws of physics, how did the iPad defy them? Are you saying that's a miracle?
Intel went so far as to say that legacy software would "not ever" run on ARM. To do that they have to have to have the stick of software patents to prevent an ARM->x86 emulator.
This is not good for Microsoft. It means their relationship with Intel is irretrievably broken. The WinTel alliance is no more.
As consumers we can win from this. Without the constraint of making the bloated Windows OS run on their chips, Intel can dive into low power. Without the glacial software development lifecycle in Redmond Intel can bring out new stuff faster. That's good stuff.
The distant threat is that when Intel seeks a market they want all of it. They're late to this game and their Atom chips don't cut it yet - their promises are some 24-36 months out, and ARM and Microsoft are not going to be standing still in the meantime. They're promising "best in class mobile video tech" but I swear to God if they buy Imagination Technologies to cut out ARM mobile chipset vendors I'm going to fucking do everything in my power to kill them. That would shift Intel from the "Invention of technologies" camp to the "prevention of technologies" camp. I'm not OK with that.
But if what Intel means is that they're going to let the legacy go and deliver the best low-power chips they can, that's a good thing. Your PC doesn't have to burn the watts it does. There are lots of folk in the third world with valuable input who don't have watts. It does not take a kilowatt gaming rig to work spreadsheets any longer.
ARM on the other hand has mobile products in the joyful hands of millions of happy customers. They have the support of Apple, Android device makers, HP WebOS and soon Microsoft. Every consmer electronics store in the world has mobile ARM products on the shelf and they are moving briskly - in a lot of cases rescuing vendors from a downturn in the economy where people aren't buying a lot else.
I am glad Intel has decided to tell us they intend to compete at this level. It indicates that at least they hear us now. But they have been promising that for five years and we have Atom that is not working in mobile. The desktops still burn watts like they are free. Laptops with Intel are thick, bulky, heavy and still take three minutes to boot. There is no credible tablet.
I want to believe, but after all these years and broken promises it is time to say "show me. If you have it, ship it. If you don't... then shut up and get back to work."
Yeah, I'm going to disagree with you too. There's lots of little Linux servers that consolidate well and really bring the watts per server down. Then there's live migration so you can do hardware firmware updates without bringing incidences down, network consolidation, hardware platform migration and lots of other things that virtual machines just make easier.
I'm a big fan of KVM. But you can't compare it to either Hyper-V or vSphere in terms ease of use. Let's be realistic here. It's nice to have the KVM option when you want to get started with virtualization and you just don't have the budget for any software. It's also great when your needs grow huge enough to employ a full-time crew of experts to herd it. In between those extremes the cost of VMWare or Windows Server or XenServer can be worth the money for the convenience, unless you're just into that sort of thing.
If you're using Hyper-V in Production for business you pretty much need datacenter edition. 4 VMs per box is ridiculous - it doesn't even begin to pay off and Enterprise doesn't have the features you need. That means $3K per processor or $6K per 2 socket box, and a fairly automatic upgrade to Software Assurance where you pay again every year. And you need two servers worth, plus the High Availability program to start being a comfortable environment you would trust to use in business - otherwise you're just aggregating all your failure mode in one box so that when something fails everything goes down at once and nobody sane wants that. You need two servers worth because you have to have someplace to migrate your virtual servers to when you're updating the firmware, the hardware or the OS. It's better to have three so you can stay redundant while updates occur. That way you can start thinking about "0 planned downtime" and a fourth of July barbecue where your iPhone doesn't blow up and drag you back to work.
People do use Hyper-V, and they're selling more of it lately than ever. But please, let's not call it free: Software Assurance and support puts the price of Hyper-V close to the cost of VMWare Enterprise Plus in the long run. Say it costs less than a Xen geek, or that it costs less than the overtime would for monthly patching on the weekend, and the ease of management and high-availability features are just bonus. Say that the Test/Dev servers then won't cost any extra server hardware, and people can more readily try new things. But it's not free.
And yes, Hyper-V can handle a lot more VMs than that. Oversubscribing CPU is one of the justifications for virtualization in the first place. Given proper back-end high-performance storage to keep them fed, and a decent amount of RAM, modern server processors are brutally overpowered for the tasks we give most of them.
There are a lot of talking points for Hyper-V, but please be honest with people: "free" is not one of them. People know it's not free. Saying it's free in some way shape or form is just attacking your own credibility. People don't need for it to be free. They need for it to be a good fit for their needs, and in many cases it is. Business people are realistic, and they don't have a lot of time. You may as well come right out and say that if you want to play the Hyper-V HA game then it costs $18K for the software licensing, plus more for the hardware and networking, just to sit at the table. Add a few thousand for 24/7 support and a few more thousand for a server geek to come get it running smoothly for you using best practice because you're just not going to wade in and get it right the first time.
In Japan they have a spiritual reverence for their hot springs and the natural areas that surround them. The technologies that use lower temperature water and dry rock resources from much deeper are fairly new, the exploration and drilling phases are more costly. But the work is ramping up in the US, with a 5x expansion of capacity planned in the next 20 years or so. Japan will be looking at it also.
Eventually we may find that sub-seafloor enhanced geothermal resources are the ideal solution for many of the social issues.
Agree. Geothermal binary cycle is costly up front, but it has many advantages and according to the DOE it's ten percent cheaper than advanced nuclear in the long run. Japan is rich in geothermal energy resources - the third such richest nation in the world. It's a closed loop, so there's no emissions at all. There is no fuel, so running out of imported fuel is not a problem. It produces no waste, uses far less water than even nuclear. It's hugely scalable. It works all the time and capacity factors of up to 97% have been achieved. The turbines wear out or need upgrading, but the plants themselves don't so once the cost of building the thing is paid it's straight profits from then on. The geothermal plants in the Sendai neighborhood are still operating.
So what's not to like about geothermal? Cheaper, reliable, available, waste-free, riskless. The new methods weren't available when the Fukushima plants were built, but they are now. Japan is probably going to give geothermal a closer look as they turn from nuclear power.
What's meaningful is that Sony's networks had these vulnerabilities for years. It lines up with their DRM efforts that are easily exploited. It means that the folk involved with decision-making at Sony really are clueless. Hence this won't be the last exploit until that changes.
Many websites have security problems. When we deal with a global brand like Sony we expect better than the results from anonymous bloggers. We expect that they know what security is, and that they act on that. That is the value of the brand.
Slashdot Mirror
Second reply. Bad form, sorry. When these nuclear plants were built geothermal wasn't an option because the science had not sufficiently advanced. Japan embraced nuclear power like no other except France. The cheap power enabled them to become an economic superpower and the benefits far outweigh the harm caused by these meltdowns.
Now though the science of geothermal has progressed. Japan is so rich with geothermal resources and engineering talent that they could provide all their electrical energy needs for the rest of forever with offshore geothermal resources and not taint their landscape with cooling towers nor risk their precious hotspring mineral baths. They don't need nuclear any more, at all. For Japan it's a technology that served its purpose and should be retired. Other nations are not so fortunate to be blessed with such rich geothermal resources.
The new level is 20 millisieverts per year. That's 2 rem per year using the older dosing method. Playgrounds are new permitted up to 3.6 microsieverts per hour. The IAEA gives this guidance:
The dose limits for practices are intended to ensure that no individual is committed to unacceptable risk due to radiation exposure. For the public the limit is 1 mSv in a year, or in special circumstances up to 5 mSv in a single year provided that the average does over five consecutive years does not exceed 1 mSv per year.
Typically permissible levels are lower for children because they have more time to develop cancer. In theory children exposed at the 20 mSv per annum level can be expected to increase their rates of cancer from one in 500 to one in 200. In practice the children aren't going to be exposed to environmental radioactivity at the maximum level for the whole time. Regardless, many millions of children are going to be exposed to higher levels of environmental radiation because of this. Zero is the optimum healthful level of radiation and there is no healthful effect from any increase. More of them are going to get cancer. Some 30 years hence, some few hundred of them will have died who would not yet have if this had not happened. Japan's explanation for why they raised the limit is sanguine: effectively, "because we must. The radiation is in the schools. We cannot evacuate the entire region." Japan is an island. It's not like they have an Alaska to evacuate people to. Besides, it's not like the schools and playgrounds have any more radiation than the homes at this point.
Now please do go on about how this is all ok, nothing important has happened, how nuclear power is the cure for all the world's ills - too cheap to meter. Tell me how you get more radiation from your Brita. Please continue to ignore that Japan has the choice of geothermal which is cheaper renewable baseload power that doesn't have these risks at all. I want to see you try to justify this.
But before you start... the worst may not yet be over. Criticality is probably still occurring in at least one of these reactors or they wouldn't be injecting them with Boron. The US is probably watching this go on because we have satellites particularly sensitive to "neutron beams" but we're too polite to point it out. It's too late to inject these reactors with Boron because the water, and hence the Boric acid, can't reach the heart of the corium piles on the floor of the primary containment. It all boils off before it gets even close to the physical place where it can damp the ongoing reaction. Eventually one or more of these corium lava piles may melt into the flooded basement, come into contact with the highly radioactive pools of water, and explode in a giant flash of radioactive steam. If that happens the cloud will be visible for many miles. There's no hiding it. If the wind is blowing inland that day it will deposit most of its nuclear enhanced goodness on the bulk of the island, including Tokyo, before moving on to contaminate China and Korea. Japan's neighbors will not be amused. And they won't be pouring any new water in for a few weeks anyway, because they have no place to store the radioactive runoff afterward.
At the time Japan chose the nuclear path it was a brilliant stroke with some risks. They took the risks and benefited from that choice for 30 years. With abundant cheap electricity they became an economic engine for the rest of the world to envy. I can't be critical of the choice they took at that time: the cost of not doing it was far higher. But then is not now. Science has progressed to the point where Japan no longer needs nuclear power. As they recover from this disaster I expect they will turn away from it. Others may need nuclear now, but not Japan.
A moment on Google will show you that Japan has the third most plentiful surveyed geothermal resources of any nation on earth. A few more moments would show that the US DOE finds it ten percent cheaper than nuclear per unit of electricity. Advanced geothermal is a closed cycle so no emissions, no fuel costs, no spent fuel storage, no loss of fuel sources in times of international strife or commodity shortages. Now we come to why, which was my question.
At this point one might question the logic of evaluating the risk at all. As in, "If there's a cheaper method of producing the same amount of renewable base load power that doesn't have any of these risks, we should use that first." Like, frinstance, geothermal. Why play with nuclear fire if you don't have to? Because it's exciting?
Japan has increased by 20 times the permissible level of radiation for schools, to the limits permitted a German nuclear worker. Thousands of parents are protesting, which in Japan is a pretty big deal. The Fukushima plant is out of places to store radioactive water, more storage is weeks away, and they still need to pump water to keep the fuel cool. The evacuation area may expand again. The slaughter and disposal of livestock in the evacuation zone has begun. Nobody really knows whether or not the fuel is burning through all three primary containment vessels on its way to massive contamination release.
Investors don't give Microsoft's earnings - past or future - full credit because the company has proven itself a spendthrift. They're like an idiot cousin any of us might have who hits it big in the lottery and can be expected to fritter it all away shortly. Except of course that they hit the jackpot every single day. Several times each day. It takes more foolishness than should be humanly possible to be reliably rid of that much excess. Somehow though, the company is gettin' her done.
Numbers on this scale are hard to grasp. To give you an idea of the scale of this foolishness, at a modest 8% APR the $7B Microsoft has burned in their Online Services Division since it last turned a profit would return over half a billion dollars a year - forever. Five hundred and sixty million dollars a year interest is enough money to employ a small US town or a respectable city in India, China or Pakistan, full time for the rest of forever. Add the $8.5 billion they spent on Skype and the money from their other failed acquisitions and it's enough money to migrate the entire US carbon-based electricity system to clean renewable next-generation geothermal energy over a decade just from the interest and have the principal and some capital growth left afterward too. Add the $100B in stock buybacks from the last decade that didn't achieve the goal of lifting the stock price and it's enough money to do those things, wire gigabit fiber to every US home, and fund commercially viable space exploitation too - without ever touching the capital. One Hundred Billion Dollars is the inflation adjusted price of The New Deal. $100B is more money than the entire 2004 Gross Domestic Product of Pakistan when their population was 152 million souls and they commanded the natural resources of their 307,000 square miles of our planet.
All Microsoft has bought with that lost power is the right to throw more bales of money on that fire. It's sick. It's disgusting. It ought not be possible. It is possible though, and perfectly legal. That so many have done so little with so much is appalling. It's offensive. It's wrong. The stock market is not rewarding this behavior, which is right and good.
Something like 90% of companies fail in the first decade. Most of the rest don't survive the retirement of the founders by a decade. IBM becomes 100 years old on June 16th of this year, though it traces its ancestry back 30 years more. When a company has survived the retirement of its founders for so long it means that it has management processes in place to become nigh immortal.
It was an important part of their PC plans. Counting on Microsoft to help them develop the thing was a serious strategic error.
It's part of the marketing campaign to spin away the openness of all these products. It's a failed strategy that highlights just how toxic the closed products are: you don't get to choose whether you want open or closed.
It's DRM that's not open and isn't ever going to be. If you want DRM'd services like movies badly enough to give up the openness, that's your choice. For music we don't have to put up with that crud any more. As far as I can tell the people who pay for DRM'd services like Netflix and this Android Movie Market validate the DRM business model and defer the day when the video vendors give up on DRM - perhaps forever.
But having a model that lets people choose? That seems fair even if I don't like how people choose. A reasonable person can't find fault with that.
Once again the studios are #winning by making it harder to give them money than to just download the movie you want in an open format. [/sarcasm]
That looks good. nVidia is doing some good work too. For now though Imagination Technologies is "best in class." It's used in the Kal-El chipset specced for the next generation PSP. It scales to 16 threads and more. The watts are incredibly low for what it does even at 65nm, and a die shrink to 22nm would just make it all the better. It's what Samsung uses in their Galaxy S II. An old version of Imagination Technologies graphics are used in the Atom line. For Intel to get an exclusive on this stuff they would have to buy the company to prevent anybody else from using it. That would probably not get past antitrust review, but to even try would be evil prevention of progress in the first degree. This stuff is what progress is made of, and the company that buys IT to prevent this good stuff will be pilloried in the marketplace as a preventer of progress.
The right thing to do is for Intel to continue to license IT's latest tech, rapid-response die-shrink it to deliver the best power performance out of this tech, and speed up platform development to a six month cycle. Only Intel has the tech to get this done. Intel needs to become more nimble because the lifecycle on mobile products is six months before obsolescence. They need to trim some levels of management to make this happen.
IT will inevitably be bought because it's a hugely successful font of innovation with a small market cap. That's how these things go. The company that buys them has to have a solid record of providing openness and progress, of not being evil, to not lose money on the deal. It has to have a reputation for platform ambivalence. Otherwise IT is the poison pill that drags down whomever swallows it and the purchase will turn out to be less than no value because competitors offer similar benefits without the drama.
BTW: This is metaphorical in the sense that I would work against their organization's efforts to hinder them if they did this bad thing. As in to indulge in digging into the details of each and every thing they do whether or not related and bring the weak parts, every negative possibility to light, to put the worst possible spin on it and to distribute that as best I may, and encourage others to do so. Not in the online terroristic threats sense that I might actually harm any person. Hurting people isn't my thing.
/note to self: bedtime is midnight.
Once malware has run on your box, it's a wipe and reinstall issue. And if it is a business machine then there are potential legal issues with disclosures and so on. In that environment there is no safe guidance a technician can give.
Yeah, that was a little strong. Playing keep-away with innovation is not ok. Seriously, the blowback from a strategic maneuver like that would be severe.
Did I say Linux? No. Many Linux distros are also bloated. Some few Linux distros, and some BSD's, iOS, and many others are designed to be light and swift. They make the most of lighter hardware. Windows just seems to be designed to burn up all the improvements Moore's law gives us, as in: "Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away."
And if it was the laws of physics, how did the iPad defy them? Are you saying that's a miracle?
Intel went so far as to say that legacy software would "not ever" run on ARM. To do that they have to have to have the stick of software patents to prevent an ARM->x86 emulator.
This is not good for Microsoft. It means their relationship with Intel is irretrievably broken. The WinTel alliance is no more.
As consumers we can win from this. Without the constraint of making the bloated Windows OS run on their chips, Intel can dive into low power. Without the glacial software development lifecycle in Redmond Intel can bring out new stuff faster. That's good stuff.
The distant threat is that when Intel seeks a market they want all of it. They're late to this game and their Atom chips don't cut it yet - their promises are some 24-36 months out, and ARM and Microsoft are not going to be standing still in the meantime. They're promising "best in class mobile video tech" but I swear to God if they buy Imagination Technologies to cut out ARM mobile chipset vendors I'm going to fucking do everything in my power to kill them. That would shift Intel from the "Invention of technologies" camp to the "prevention of technologies" camp. I'm not OK with that.
But if what Intel means is that they're going to let the legacy go and deliver the best low-power chips they can, that's a good thing. Your PC doesn't have to burn the watts it does. There are lots of folk in the third world with valuable input who don't have watts. It does not take a kilowatt gaming rig to work spreadsheets any longer.
This is pretty close to nVidia's plan.
ARM on the other hand has mobile products in the joyful hands of millions of happy customers. They have the support of Apple, Android device makers, HP WebOS and soon Microsoft. Every consmer electronics store in the world has mobile ARM products on the shelf and they are moving briskly - in a lot of cases rescuing vendors from a downturn in the economy where people aren't buying a lot else.
I am glad Intel has decided to tell us they intend to compete at this level. It indicates that at least they hear us now. But they have been promising that for five years and we have Atom that is not working in mobile. The desktops still burn watts like they are free. Laptops with Intel are thick, bulky, heavy and still take three minutes to boot. There is no credible tablet.
I want to believe, but after all these years and broken promises it is time to say "show me. If you have it, ship it. If you don't... then shut up and get back to work."
Yeah, I'm going to disagree with you too. There's lots of little Linux servers that consolidate well and really bring the watts per server down. Then there's live migration so you can do hardware firmware updates without bringing incidences down, network consolidation, hardware platform migration and lots of other things that virtual machines just make easier.
I'm a big fan of KVM. But you can't compare it to either Hyper-V or vSphere in terms ease of use. Let's be realistic here. It's nice to have the KVM option when you want to get started with virtualization and you just don't have the budget for any software. It's also great when your needs grow huge enough to employ a full-time crew of experts to herd it. In between those extremes the cost of VMWare or Windows Server or XenServer can be worth the money for the convenience, unless you're just into that sort of thing.
If you're using Hyper-V in Production for business you pretty much need datacenter edition. 4 VMs per box is ridiculous - it doesn't even begin to pay off and Enterprise doesn't have the features you need. That means $3K per processor or $6K per 2 socket box, and a fairly automatic upgrade to Software Assurance where you pay again every year. And you need two servers worth, plus the High Availability program to start being a comfortable environment you would trust to use in business - otherwise you're just aggregating all your failure mode in one box so that when something fails everything goes down at once and nobody sane wants that. You need two servers worth because you have to have someplace to migrate your virtual servers to when you're updating the firmware, the hardware or the OS. It's better to have three so you can stay redundant while updates occur. That way you can start thinking about "0 planned downtime" and a fourth of July barbecue where your iPhone doesn't blow up and drag you back to work.
People do use Hyper-V, and they're selling more of it lately than ever. But please, let's not call it free: Software Assurance and support puts the price of Hyper-V close to the cost of VMWare Enterprise Plus in the long run. Say it costs less than a Xen geek, or that it costs less than the overtime would for monthly patching on the weekend, and the ease of management and high-availability features are just bonus. Say that the Test/Dev servers then won't cost any extra server hardware, and people can more readily try new things. But it's not free.
And yes, Hyper-V can handle a lot more VMs than that. Oversubscribing CPU is one of the justifications for virtualization in the first place. Given proper back-end high-performance storage to keep them fed, and a decent amount of RAM, modern server processors are brutally overpowered for the tasks we give most of them.
There are a lot of talking points for Hyper-V, but please be honest with people: "free" is not one of them. People know it's not free. Saying it's free in some way shape or form is just attacking your own credibility. People don't need for it to be free. They need for it to be a good fit for their needs, and in many cases it is. Business people are realistic, and they don't have a lot of time. You may as well come right out and say that if you want to play the Hyper-V HA game then it costs $18K for the software licensing, plus more for the hardware and networking, just to sit at the table. Add a few thousand for 24/7 support and a few more thousand for a server geek to come get it running smoothly for you using best practice because you're just not going to wade in and get it right the first time.
In Japan they have a spiritual reverence for their hot springs and the natural areas that surround them. The technologies that use lower temperature water and dry rock resources from much deeper are fairly new, the exploration and drilling phases are more costly. But the work is ramping up in the US, with a 5x expansion of capacity planned in the next 20 years or so. Japan will be looking at it also.
Eventually we may find that sub-seafloor enhanced geothermal resources are the ideal solution for many of the social issues.
Agree. Geothermal binary cycle is costly up front, but it has many advantages and according to the DOE it's ten percent cheaper than advanced nuclear in the long run. Japan is rich in geothermal energy resources - the third such richest nation in the world. It's a closed loop, so there's no emissions at all. There is no fuel, so running out of imported fuel is not a problem. It produces no waste, uses far less water than even nuclear. It's hugely scalable. It works all the time and capacity factors of up to 97% have been achieved. The turbines wear out or need upgrading, but the plants themselves don't so once the cost of building the thing is paid it's straight profits from then on. The geothermal plants in the Sendai neighborhood are still operating.
So what's not to like about geothermal? Cheaper, reliable, available, waste-free, riskless. The new methods weren't available when the Fukushima plants were built, but they are now. Japan is probably going to give geothermal a closer look as they turn from nuclear power.
What's meaningful is that Sony's networks had these vulnerabilities for years. It lines up with their DRM efforts that are easily exploited. It means that the folk involved with decision-making at Sony really are clueless. Hence this won't be the last exploit until that changes.
Many websites have security problems. When we deal with a global brand like Sony we expect better than the results from anonymous bloggers. We expect that they know what security is, and that they act on that. That is the value of the brand.