While I don't disagree with what you wrote, GP AC is essentially correct.
Not 100% of the people who buy PCs want or need to do everything a PC can do. For many people the browser is the Internet, Facebook their home page, and that is all their PC has ever given them. For them, "the network is the computer". They have no want or need to do spreadsheets, PC games, or CAD. As the power, utility and grace of these new mobile platforms allows these people to to have this utility the PC gave them in a portable format they can take with them the less they need or want a PC - that the mobile device is also a media player and ereader, has all-day battery is bonus because those are features they want. As the mobile platforms become more facile, the larger this group grows and it has become a considerable fraction of former PC buyers - particularly in emerging markets. That the mobile platforms are less expensive is bonus.
Then there is the emerging markets thing. In many of these places a dollar goes a lot further than it does in the US, their power might not be as reliable, for many other reasons for a considerable portion of the public the $1000 PC and its voracious power needs never would have been appropriate. They can start with cheap phones with compute features in them, migrate to an inexpensive tablet, and stop. This market was a huge part of the PC's growth story the last few years, and that tale has come to an end.
Additionally as many other here have said the PC has been overkill for several years for the tasks most people put it to, so they don't need a new one. The cheap upgrade to Windows 8 tempted many Vista sufferers and doubtless they found the improved performance and responsiveness as good as buying a new PC as machines from that era were quite good, software notwithstanding. Those "upgrade" purchases are lost to PC sellers for a long, long time. SSDs come with software to migrate your OS and data to the SSD now, making an easy swap that makes an existing PC better than one you can get at retail, for a minor price less than swapping out the whole machine. This further delays the time when people might need to buy a new PC. For some, whose needs never will extend to more than a C2D or whatever they have with SSD, this is the End. Many of us have bought our last pc ever - or at least until this one dies. No more is needed. The failure rate is insufficient to sustain the PC market.
All these things have been true for a while and affecting the numbers a bit in small, deniable ways that could be written off as impacts from "economic downturn" but now people are finding out all over the world that their PC buying habit may no longer be necessary, that buying a PC is not required to join the technology revolution.
The PC is not required any more. You could plant a whiz-kid in a shack in Belize with nothing but a Transformer Infinity, a nice monitor and keyboard and mouse, solar power with battery, wi-fi Internet, a freezer full of hot-pockets and a credit card and through the magic of the Cloud he could still invent the Next Big Thing and run it for a year. He does not need a PC. Not at all. The magic is once again between his ears, not under his desk.
For these reasons and many others mentioned here even if Microsoft released a Windows Blue today with W8 features and a classic W7 user interface PC sales would remain in decline at least 7% in units against the year-ago quarter pretty much indefinitely. The era of unit growth in PCs is over, forever - or at least until we adjust to the fact that these new mobile things actually are personal computers and adjust the terminology accordingly.
The good news is that the tech economy is booming like never before. More units of smart connected devices are being sold than ever before, with unheard-of 50% quarter over year ago growth. They are being used more as well, people interacting with them more hours each day and more frequently, and almost always online - in more and more interconnected an
Obviously they would like to drive Google's adoption rate down and costs up so as to put a stop to this gigabit nonsense before it goes national. Cut off the air supply even if they have to engage in dumping, but only in areas Google is targeting, not TWC areas they have agreed to stay out of. Not going to work. They are still ATT.
Agree. They have a year. If they can't get 5% of their neighbors to sign up for this in a year Google actually should work somewhere they are more wanted instead. The best KC neighborhoods actually got over 100%. More homes signed up than Google thought there were.
In the very announcement they link to the FCC broadband page about how to build out your own community gigabit municipal fiber network. You don't have to wait for Google. They would rather you didn't.
This is 1800 servers per rack, each a dual-core 2.0GHz 64bit Atom processor with 8GB RAM. It has a custom low-latency redundant mesh network between the nodes. For workloads like Hadoop it should be outstanding. If they're priced right I could see them including this as a type of machine in their cloud. 3,600 cores per rack, vs Xeon at 768 cores per rack (blades). This could be interesting.
That's not how it works. This sort of geothermal energy is heat stored from the infall of the earth, and natural fission reactions in the core of the planet. This heat is already migrating out to the surface and into space, and it is continually replenished from the core. All a geothermal plant does is let the heat out a little sooner, and take advantage of the energy. It doesn't run out, unless you try to take too much out too fast for the size of your resource - which takes years.
Every one comes at every thing from their own point of view. They cannot help it, as they see the world from the direction of their own experience. I can respect that. I can't too far exceed my own experience, and I'm aware of that limitation. Though I try to take an objective view I am well aware that my experiences build a belief framework that limits the potential solutions I can imagine, and respect that others have other experiential frameworks to build their beliefs and solutions upon. I actually rely upon that in my work. I do find here those who help me expand my point of view.
But yes, there are many here who are more limited, who seem to stop at "ur retarted" and not grow.
Right now we're talking about US and Japan, both of whom have ample geothermal resources - as does all of South America, Indonesia - the entire Ring of Fire.
There are some places that geothermal isn't apt for, but as the technology evolves they grow fewer. You would think Russia isn't a geothermal powerhouse, but they have the Siberian Traps and have more potential even than the US. North and South America, Russia, India, China, Pakistan all have ample geothermal resources, and that's the home of 90% of breathing humans. I think we'd be OK with the rest of us making do with other sources of local power if the people with geothermal resources would just make use of what they have.
Geothermal is immune from international strife as it requires no imported fuel, nor rail or pipelines to deliver fuel. Distribution lines are vulnerable but they can be made redundant and are rather hard to hit. They can be made absolutely immune from international strife by burying to adequate depths.
Geothermal is the baseload power that is the perfect counterpoint to wind and solar. It can be ramped up at dusk and down at dawn; increase output when the wind doesn't blow, and decrease it when it does. It can exceed its base for years while alternative plants are being built and then decrease it to avoid depleting the thermal resource. You can't do any of those things with nuclear power.
Many countries with no terrestrial geothermal resources have them just offshore, and the availability of the ocean as a thermal countersink is compelling.
OK fine. I wasn't looking to censor you - only to encourage you to execute your advocacy in a more effective manner. If this is the way you enjoy doing your bit and effectiveness is irrelevant to your joy then knock yourself out.
I'm not a fan of DRM nor the company. The company had done so many things to get my knickers in a twist 25 years ago and since that I'm in no danger of contributing to their top line ever, and they've not changed a whit since on ethics. Being schooled in the art I know that DRM is a fool's game that makes the biggest fool the buyer, so I'm in no danger of buying DRM'd content either - except for Netflix and Hulu+, who have managed to find a service model I can deal with though I'm not entirely pleased. Certainly designing the system this way limits the scope to people who not only demand online interactive content, but demand only that.
My only issue was with the notion that designing an always-connected game is a bad thing morally, ethically or practically. You can't even play Words With Friends at a reasonable pace unless your friends are reliably online. The potentials for an immersive massively multiplayer socially interactive game between always-on folk is there and it is real, has a market and it will be served. It would be really cool. It has vast potentials. It doesn't need DRM or Microsoft to make it cool. Do I think that is the broad market they want? No. But it is a market so somebody will serve it.
I'm not one to defend Microsoft here as anyone regular here will know. No matter how hard I try I can't find a problem with this particular thing.
And of course you're entitled to your opinion too.
I share your enthusiasm for the topic and your point of view. The whole coining words like "Fuckupshima" thing is antihelpful. Could you not do that? Please?
Making public comment free motivates profit-oriented bodies to participate and contend for space in the process until the contributions of individuals speaking their own mind is lost in the noise. Such is the nature of open discussion and there is no cure for this problem. If there is a soapbox in the public square, profit-motivated individuals subsidized to do so will contend against personally motivated folk to stand on it until there is no personally motivated person able to survive the wait time for his turn.
Why, whenever anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about nuclear power here on Slashdot, does someone come and start whining about coal?
Coal is traditional and cheap. Coal-fired plants have the least startup cost and the quickest time to operation. Nuclear proponents need to sell their advantages over coal. They have a point - to a point - but like all admen they are blinded by the money.
If the entire US converted to nuclear power electricity generation (beyond the huge share we get from hydroelectric) that would not slow down US coal mining, natural gas or oil production a whit. The coal would be shipped overland by trains, the gas and oil through pipelines to ports where they would be shipped overseas to be used to power developing economies and contribute even more to greenhouse gas production in places where emission standards are more lax. The net result would be even more growth of greenhouse gas emissions than present. The carcinogens would still come into the air - even more so than they are now. We would still breathe the air contaminated by these plants. Our coal miners would still die in scary numbers. But the source of these problems would be overseas, and beyond the reach of domestic policy. It's a NIMBY thing.
If US nuclear power advances to the point where it can drive more efficient extraction of fossil fuels it will be used to do so, stripping the land of them even more quickly than at present - because these resources have value and the companies that do this have obligations to their shareholders.
Think about bunker fuel. This is the sulfur-rich tar left over from converting oil to gasoline so viscous it must be heated before it is used. Instead of being used in US power plants it powers the ships that move stuff over the oceans just outside the reach of US regulation. Just because US regulations don't allow it to be burned here doesn't mean that it doesn't get burned, and the waste gasses waft over our shores. It has energy in it. Do you think anybody is just going to throw that away? By exporting the problem beyond our international boundaries we can absolve ourselves of guilt for it without actually contributing to a solution to the problem.
There is no fission solution to this problem. You're not going to get fission-powered superfreighters any time soon, and if you did they would be used to carry our local fossil fuels more efficiently to places they could be burned less and less optimally.
This is completely off-topic and I expect it to be moderated that way and that's OK.
The costs of combating the ideas of Fascism, Global communism (or what was presented as such), Japanese imperialism, militarized Islam and other such notions offensive to personal liberty so *far* outweigh the costs in lives and treasure of these accidental excursions into nuclear physics as to be on an entirely different scale. It seems the pen is still mightier than the sword even when the sword is a MIRV.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't disagree with what you wrote, GP AC is essentially correct.
Not 100% of the people who buy PCs want or need to do everything a PC can do. For many people the browser is the Internet, Facebook their home page, and that is all their PC has ever given them. For them, "the network is the computer". They have no want or need to do spreadsheets, PC games, or CAD. As the power, utility and grace of these new mobile platforms allows these people to to have this utility the PC gave them in a portable format they can take with them the less they need or want a PC - that the mobile device is also a media player and ereader, has all-day battery is bonus because those are features they want. As the mobile platforms become more facile, the larger this group grows and it has become a considerable fraction of former PC buyers - particularly in emerging markets. That the mobile platforms are less expensive is bonus.
Then there is the emerging markets thing. In many of these places a dollar goes a lot further than it does in the US, their power might not be as reliable, for many other reasons for a considerable portion of the public the $1000 PC and its voracious power needs never would have been appropriate. They can start with cheap phones with compute features in them, migrate to an inexpensive tablet, and stop. This market was a huge part of the PC's growth story the last few years, and that tale has come to an end.
Additionally as many other here have said the PC has been overkill for several years for the tasks most people put it to, so they don't need a new one. The cheap upgrade to Windows 8 tempted many Vista sufferers and doubtless they found the improved performance and responsiveness as good as buying a new PC as machines from that era were quite good, software notwithstanding. Those "upgrade" purchases are lost to PC sellers for a long, long time. SSDs come with software to migrate your OS and data to the SSD now, making an easy swap that makes an existing PC better than one you can get at retail, for a minor price less than swapping out the whole machine. This further delays the time when people might need to buy a new PC. For some, whose needs never will extend to more than a C2D or whatever they have with SSD, this is the End. Many of us have bought our last pc ever - or at least until this one dies. No more is needed. The failure rate is insufficient to sustain the PC market.
All these things have been true for a while and affecting the numbers a bit in small, deniable ways that could be written off as impacts from "economic downturn" but now people are finding out all over the world that their PC buying habit may no longer be necessary, that buying a PC is not required to join the technology revolution.
The PC is not required any more. You could plant a whiz-kid in a shack in Belize with nothing but a Transformer Infinity, a nice monitor and keyboard and mouse, solar power with battery, wi-fi Internet, a freezer full of hot-pockets and a credit card and through the magic of the Cloud he could still invent the Next Big Thing and run it for a year. He does not need a PC. Not at all. The magic is once again between his ears, not under his desk.
For these reasons and many others mentioned here even if Microsoft released a Windows Blue today with W8 features and a classic W7 user interface PC sales would remain in decline at least 7% in units against the year-ago quarter pretty much indefinitely. The era of unit growth in PCs is over, forever - or at least until we adjust to the fact that these new mobile things actually are personal computers and adjust the terminology accordingly.
The good news is that the tech economy is booming like never before. More units of smart connected devices are being sold than ever before, with unheard-of 50% quarter over year ago growth. They are being used more as well, people interacting with them more hours each day and more frequently, and almost always online - in more and more interconnected an
Chromebook Pixel. Linus Torvalds loves his.
Stripes, you fool! Speed stripes. And a spoiler.
To be balanced and fair this comment needs a response from the incumbent internet and cable TV providers. Fortunately there is one.
Obviously they would like to drive Google's adoption rate down and costs up so as to put a stop to this gigabit nonsense before it goes national. Cut off the air supply even if they have to engage in dumping, but only in areas Google is targeting, not TWC areas they have agreed to stay out of. Not going to work. They are still ATT.
Agree. They have a year. If they can't get 5% of their neighbors to sign up for this in a year Google actually should work somewhere they are more wanted instead. The best KC neighborhoods actually got over 100%. More homes signed up than Google thought there were.
In the very announcement they link to the FCC broadband page about how to build out your own community gigabit municipal fiber network. You don't have to wait for Google. They would rather you didn't.
This is 1800 servers per rack, each a dual-core 2.0GHz 64bit Atom processor with 8GB RAM. It has a custom low-latency redundant mesh network between the nodes. For workloads like Hadoop it should be outstanding. If they're priced right I could see them including this as a type of machine in their cloud. 3,600 cores per rack, vs Xeon at 768 cores per rack (blades). This could be interesting.
This one?
It's not like they ever found all the exploited flaws anyway.
That's not how it works. This sort of geothermal energy is heat stored from the infall of the earth, and natural fission reactions in the core of the planet. This heat is already migrating out to the surface and into space, and it is continually replenished from the core. All a geothermal plant does is let the heat out a little sooner, and take advantage of the energy. It doesn't run out, unless you try to take too much out too fast for the size of your resource - which takes years.
Not sure what you're getting at here, nor who you're responding to, as we've reached max threading depth.
Of course lack of situational awareness is only a small part of your communication problem.
It turns out we need only one law, and it's really really simple. Fifteen words will do.
Every one comes at every thing from their own point of view. They cannot help it, as they see the world from the direction of their own experience. I can respect that. I can't too far exceed my own experience, and I'm aware of that limitation. Though I try to take an objective view I am well aware that my experiences build a belief framework that limits the potential solutions I can imagine, and respect that others have other experiential frameworks to build their beliefs and solutions upon. I actually rely upon that in my work. I do find here those who help me expand my point of view.
But yes, there are many here who are more limited, who seem to stop at "ur retarted" and not grow.
"as the firm said it has a deal in place with Parallel Iron after signing a previous patent settlement with them."
If you pay the Danegeld you will never be rid of the Dane.
Ah, Drinkypoo, you're the local NIMBY for this one. Sorry, but that's how it is.
Right now we're talking about US and Japan, both of whom have ample geothermal resources - as does all of South America, Indonesia - the entire Ring of Fire.
There are some places that geothermal isn't apt for, but as the technology evolves they grow fewer. You would think Russia isn't a geothermal powerhouse, but they have the Siberian Traps and have more potential even than the US. North and South America, Russia, India, China, Pakistan all have ample geothermal resources, and that's the home of 90% of breathing humans. I think we'd be OK with the rest of us making do with other sources of local power if the people with geothermal resources would just make use of what they have.
Geothermal is immune from international strife as it requires no imported fuel, nor rail or pipelines to deliver fuel. Distribution lines are vulnerable but they can be made redundant and are rather hard to hit. They can be made absolutely immune from international strife by burying to adequate depths.
Geothermal is the baseload power that is the perfect counterpoint to wind and solar. It can be ramped up at dusk and down at dawn; increase output when the wind doesn't blow, and decrease it when it does. It can exceed its base for years while alternative plants are being built and then decrease it to avoid depleting the thermal resource. You can't do any of those things with nuclear power.
Many countries with no terrestrial geothermal resources have them just offshore, and the availability of the ocean as a thermal countersink is compelling.
If we agree that nuclear and coal both kill people and should be avoided, let us agree to pursue sources of energy that don't, like geothermal.
OK fine. I wasn't looking to censor you - only to encourage you to execute your advocacy in a more effective manner. If this is the way you enjoy doing your bit and effectiveness is irrelevant to your joy then knock yourself out.
I'm not a fan of DRM nor the company. The company had done so many things to get my knickers in a twist 25 years ago and since that I'm in no danger of contributing to their top line ever, and they've not changed a whit since on ethics. Being schooled in the art I know that DRM is a fool's game that makes the biggest fool the buyer, so I'm in no danger of buying DRM'd content either - except for Netflix and Hulu+, who have managed to find a service model I can deal with though I'm not entirely pleased. Certainly designing the system this way limits the scope to people who not only demand online interactive content, but demand only that.
My only issue was with the notion that designing an always-connected game is a bad thing morally, ethically or practically. You can't even play Words With Friends at a reasonable pace unless your friends are reliably online. The potentials for an immersive massively multiplayer socially interactive game between always-on folk is there and it is real, has a market and it will be served. It would be really cool. It has vast potentials. It doesn't need DRM or Microsoft to make it cool. Do I think that is the broad market they want? No. But it is a market so somebody will serve it.
I'm not one to defend Microsoft here as anyone regular here will know. No matter how hard I try I can't find a problem with this particular thing.
And of course you're entitled to your opinion too.
I share your enthusiasm for the topic and your point of view. The whole coining words like "Fuckupshima" thing is antihelpful. Could you not do that? Please?
Making public comment free motivates profit-oriented bodies to participate and contend for space in the process until the contributions of individuals speaking their own mind is lost in the noise. Such is the nature of open discussion and there is no cure for this problem. If there is a soapbox in the public square, profit-motivated individuals subsidized to do so will contend against personally motivated folk to stand on it until there is no personally motivated person able to survive the wait time for his turn.
Why, whenever anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about nuclear power here on Slashdot, does someone come and start whining about coal?
Coal is traditional and cheap. Coal-fired plants have the least startup cost and the quickest time to operation. Nuclear proponents need to sell their advantages over coal. They have a point - to a point - but like all admen they are blinded by the money.
If the entire US converted to nuclear power electricity generation (beyond the huge share we get from hydroelectric) that would not slow down US coal mining, natural gas or oil production a whit. The coal would be shipped overland by trains, the gas and oil through pipelines to ports where they would be shipped overseas to be used to power developing economies and contribute even more to greenhouse gas production in places where emission standards are more lax. The net result would be even more growth of greenhouse gas emissions than present. The carcinogens would still come into the air - even more so than they are now. We would still breathe the air contaminated by these plants. Our coal miners would still die in scary numbers. But the source of these problems would be overseas, and beyond the reach of domestic policy. It's a NIMBY thing.
If US nuclear power advances to the point where it can drive more efficient extraction of fossil fuels it will be used to do so, stripping the land of them even more quickly than at present - because these resources have value and the companies that do this have obligations to their shareholders.
Think about bunker fuel. This is the sulfur-rich tar left over from converting oil to gasoline so viscous it must be heated before it is used. Instead of being used in US power plants it powers the ships that move stuff over the oceans just outside the reach of US regulation. Just because US regulations don't allow it to be burned here doesn't mean that it doesn't get burned, and the waste gasses waft over our shores. It has energy in it. Do you think anybody is just going to throw that away? By exporting the problem beyond our international boundaries we can absolve ourselves of guilt for it without actually contributing to a solution to the problem.
There is no fission solution to this problem. You're not going to get fission-powered superfreighters any time soon, and if you did they would be used to carry our local fossil fuels more efficiently to places they could be burned less and less optimally.
This is completely off-topic and I expect it to be moderated that way and that's OK.
The costs of combating the ideas of Fascism, Global communism (or what was presented as such), Japanese imperialism, militarized Islam and other such notions offensive to personal liberty so *far* outweigh the costs in lives and treasure of these accidental excursions into nuclear physics as to be on an entirely different scale. It seems the pen is still mightier than the sword even when the sword is a MIRV.
What strange fools these mortals be.
The deaths from Fukushima happened before the fuel even showed up at the plant.