Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
I think the reason hydrogen isn't being adopted, is because it changes too many things at once. Give us biofuels (biodiesel is technically feasable today, economically feasable not quite so much yet). Then, work towards a hybrid solution (internal combustion engine, driving an electric motor). These can be done simultaneously. It doesn't change the infrastructure (pumps, "gas" stations, etc), and allows folks to fuel up in a manner consistant with that which they're used to and accept today.
Meanwhile, we're learning how to make electric drive systems, regenerative braking, and all that stuff more economical. At that point, it's a matter of letting the marketplace decide the best way to power the motors. Keep up with IC? Great, we can do that. Batteries? Doubtful, but hey, maybe there will be a breakthrough, who knows. Fuel cells? I'd love it, but I'm not holding my breath. Something else entirely? Quite possible, who knows.
The point is, if you ask people to change how they fuel their cars *and* the driving energy source at the same time, it's too big of a change for the masses to understand, let alone accept. When your great-aunt buys a hybrid car because she can fill it up at the same station (go to that pump on the end instead of the gas pump - whatever - that she can deal with), _then_ is the time to move forward into other fuel sources.
A hydrogen car would change too many things at once, and is doomed to failure by the tendancies of social inertia.
Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
While that may be effective, trying to get the Hydrogen People to cooperate with the Nuclear People is a bit, er, unrealistic, woulsn't you agree?
Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How do you expect you'll be getting your hydrogen, exactly? Hydrogen is a _storage mechanism_, not a fuel. You have to put energy into the chemical reaction to get Hydrogen - it's not something you can mine. The same (or more) emissions would be created in a hydrogen-fueled infrastructure, just that that CO2 would be produced at the hydrogen production facility, rather than at the point of use.
Speaking from direct personal experience, a contract for FreeFlow (the a248.g.akamai.net/blah/blah/blah.html type addresses) goes for about $2,000.00 US per 1MB/s of bandwidth usage (measured on a 95th percentile - so peaks don't kill you). If you want edgesuite (where it's your domain name cnamed over to akamai's edge servers - like i.cnn.com for instance), it's slightly more per megabit of bandwith initially, but cheaper if you go over say 10Mb/second.
It's not cheap, but for us it was cheaper than adding more servers and more bandwidth into our datacenter, and the added benefit of faster pages for the customers (or rather, faster static object delivery to build those pages) makes it a win-win.
I don't know how many megabits/second of usage your company is using, but even for a moderately small shop (few million pages served a day) it's economical.
Re:If he wants to save bandwidth.
on
RSS & BT Together?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A base Akamai contract starts at $2,000 a month for a 1Mb/second bandwidth allowance. Not sure if many/any Open Source projects have a budget for such.
Akamai is great for offloading bandwidth and speeding up customer's page load times, but you're paying for the bandwidth one way or another.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Sun guy going back to the SunOS 3.5 days, Solaris is a wonderful thing. But, for x86, we have lots of *BSD and Linux options. Solaris on x86 has previously been limited in hardware supported, and in community participation.
Can someone suggest a case where it would make more sense to use x86 Solaris rather than Sparc solaris?
It seems to me that Sun's resources in these (ahem) difficult times for them would be better spent in developing what they're best at - big, robust, server-room boxes, rather than diluting their OS development efforts by spending time porting it to Intel.
Maybe someone could introduce them to an open OS like Linux? Nobody is "stuck" with Windows95 on new hardware unless they choose to be, or think they are out of ignorance.
...it's called "selective breeding". Traits that are useful are reinforced by breeding those who show it, and culling those who don't. OK, so they're getting genes from a jellyfish or whatever to get the glow, rather than from something inside the species. If someone wants to get upset about it, they should center on it being cross-species, rather than complaining about someone applying engineering to genetics.
I'm very glad to see a statement from you, Julian, regarding this. I've been a customer since way back in the "how much fuel did I burn this month" days, and the headline caught my eye (and concern). As I have every reason, based on your reputation, to believe your word as truth, I am very glad to see your side of the story.
Thanks for a great service, and know that your user base (at least, this particular user within it) appreciates you doing whatever it takes to uphold your high standards.
Sure, the spammers have SpamAssassin too, so they can tweak their messages to get below 4, or 5, or whatever, but you're still blocking 97% or better of the crap that would otherwise show up in my inbox, and providing an easy way to report it (and to learn how to effectively read headers). I'm glad to know that you're upholding your well-deserved reputation for being on the right side of the fight.
Last I checked, when Nasa spends money on a project, it's used to pay people to do things or make things for them. The high-tech industry benefits directly by having more projects to work on, and indirectly by getting new technologies that Nasa is _very_ good about sharing.
The rest of the world (non hi-tech folks) benefit indirectly by the fact that we techies then go and spend the money we earned doing stuff for Nasa, *and* in that they get the benefit of the new technolgies as well. That money could be spent on a whole lot less useful stuff.
And here I've been helping fund them by bringing back their books after they're overdue and paying the fines. Turns out I could just buy the books from them on eBay. Who knew?
...was an entire inside wall of a compartment from an airplane, with an integrated toilet seat. It's held up as an example of wasteful government spending, but it's not as represented. I'd expect the hundred-dollar-hammer and similar stories probably have similar truths behind them.
Not saying governments don't waste our money, but this one just plain is misrepresented.
Yes, and so were (and are) a bunch of ideas which truly are crazy. Just because one can point to examples of theories that at first sounded impossible which later were accepted as fact, doesn't mean that all (or indeed, many) of them are.
In other words - for every crazy idea that turns out to be right, there are 999 that are just plain crazy. The fact that one turned out to be correct doesn't in any way validate those which are just plain wrong.
We got stuck in "It's a small world" with that damn song going over and over and over. Talk about an earworm, that's got to be the worst one ever. To this day, I can elicit a visceral response from my folks by launching into that song.
The gnome-things were all smiling, though, so they seemed to be enjoying it well enough. Hell, we were just passing through, they're stuck there 24x7.
This is as bad as the old V-8 Mustang-IIs that required the engine be dropped to replace the back two spark plugs.
So, removing the back of the iPod is as complicated as removing an engine from a Mustang? I think you're being overly-dramatic here. Batteries have a finite life; always have, always will. Battery hatches can be held on with a screw, or a clip, or any other manner of things. The fact that the hatch isn't separate with the cover, hardly makes this a non-servicable part. If someone wants to be lazy and/or scared to do the work themselves, they can drop 99 bucks to have someone else do it, or they can do it themselves for 50 bucks.
This is no different from any other value-added service of a product - if you want someone else to do something for you, they get to set the price and you get to decide if it's worth the money.
Looking at these guys' site, I can't help but wonder if the situation is truly as they describe - the price is wrong, what else did they get wrong and/or distort?
I think you've got it right, but think about their motivation. Why would they do it this way? If the goal is FUD rather than money, then they're accomplishing their goals this way. They're evil, but not stupid...I think that they know exactly how to get to their goal, which is spreading a bunch of FUD around while making it *look* like pure greed. People can relate to greed, it's easy for anyone to understand - to understand the technical and legalities involved requires motivation and understanding.
I think the whole money thing is a diversion from the real tactic. Now, who, oh who, could possibly want to freely bash the open-source software movement?
If IBM buys SCO to shut them up, then all of the FUD about linux in general and the GPL specifically, stays out there without being ruled on. This way, those who want to believe (or exploit) the FUD can put whatever spin they want on it.
If IBM buys them out (or someone else), and the court cases just go away, then the people who want Linux and the GPL to be discredited have won anyway.
I'm not sure how this can be resolved in a good way. We wait for the legal system to rule, it takes years. If IBM buys them out, it's basically paying extortion, sets a _very_ bad precedent, and allows the FUD to remain.
Am I seeing this wrong? Does someone have a realistic positive outcome, and a path to get there?
I've had a bunch of Redhat stock since the day they IPO'd. Sold a chunk of it near the 300 (150, post-split) level, held a few hundred shares.
Yeah, what I have is trivial compared to the total number of shares out there, but dammit, this kind of thing pisses me off. I mean, yay enterprise version and all that, but first spinning desktop off to fedora, then shooting it down as "not ready", is complete and utter crap. WTF are they thinking?
Is it time to dump the rest of my rhat stock, or no?
Absolutely - any IT professional knows that once a system is put in place for a demo, chances are very high that it'll stay that technology for production. It's just too easy to keep something that works and put off re-designing it.
Sometimes, this is good, as in the case you describe. Too often, though, it's the other way around, and we get stuck supporting some crufty POS that was thrown together using the wrong ingredients. The PHBs know that that can happen, and don't understand that sometimes, just sometimes, the quick and cheap (free) solution *is* the right answer.
And actually, this being a civil rather than a criminal matter makes proving the case that much easier - instead of "Beyond a reasonable doubt", it has to be proven "By a preponderance of evidence".
To put that into perspective - OJ was found "Not Guilty" in a criminal court, because it wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it. The civil court proceedings, however, found him guilty "By a preponderance of evidence". So, by one standard he's not guilty, by another he is guilty. At the end of the day, he killed 'em, but the case wasn't good enough to prosecute criminally.
For our purposes of the DNC list, I would think that this will make nailing the slime who try to weasel through the loopholes easier...we don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they're a weasel, we just have to show through a preponderance of evidence that they are a small, furry mammal of the Mustelid family, behaving in a weasel-like way.
The preceeding is noted as being gratuitously insulting to weasels, for which I apologize.
Glad to hear that there is an enforcement of the DNC happening...getting legal precedent set is important, so that we know that the law is truly in force.
On a practical note, this way when the telemarketers call, we can know that we're dealing with a felon, and proceed accordingly.
NRA certified instructors train the police - the NRA has been emphasising safe gun use and responsible ownership for more than a century - the NRA has pushed for laws making the use of a firearm in a crime a mandatory additional sentence - which of these do you disagree with?
Most recently, the NRA is working to allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons, to deter the criminals (who, by the way, are already carrying concealed weapons, illegally). This has reduced crime in every one of the 45 states which allow it. Are you perhaps against that?
What, specifically, that the NRA does, are you against, Alex?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reason hydrogen isn't being adopted, is because it changes too many things at once. Give us biofuels (biodiesel is technically feasable today, economically feasable not quite so much yet). Then, work towards a hybrid solution (internal combustion engine, driving an electric motor). These can be done simultaneously. It doesn't change the infrastructure (pumps, "gas" stations, etc), and allows folks to fuel up in a manner consistant with that which they're used to and accept today.
Meanwhile, we're learning how to make electric drive systems, regenerative braking, and all that stuff more economical. At that point, it's a matter of letting the marketplace decide the best way to power the motors. Keep up with IC? Great, we can do that. Batteries? Doubtful, but hey, maybe there will be a breakthrough, who knows. Fuel cells? I'd love it, but I'm not holding my breath. Something else entirely? Quite possible, who knows.
The point is, if you ask people to change how they fuel their cars *and* the driving energy source at the same time, it's too big of a change for the masses to understand, let alone accept. When your great-aunt buys a hybrid car because she can fill it up at the same station (go to that pump on the end instead of the gas pump - whatever - that she can deal with), _then_ is the time to move forward into other fuel sources.
A hydrogen car would change too many things at once, and is doomed to failure by the tendancies of social inertia.
While that may be effective, trying to get the Hydrogen People to cooperate with the Nuclear People is a bit, er, unrealistic, woulsn't you agree?
How do you expect you'll be getting your hydrogen, exactly? Hydrogen is a _storage mechanism_, not a fuel. You have to put energy into the chemical reaction to get Hydrogen - it's not something you can mine. The same (or more) emissions would be created in a hydrogen-fueled infrastructure, just that that CO2 would be produced at the hydrogen production facility, rather than at the point of use.
Speaking from direct personal experience, a contract for FreeFlow (the a248.g.akamai.net/blah/blah/blah.html type addresses) goes for about $2,000.00 US per 1MB/s of bandwidth usage (measured on a 95th percentile - so peaks don't kill you). If you want edgesuite (where it's your domain name cnamed over to akamai's edge servers - like i.cnn.com for instance), it's slightly more per megabit of bandwith initially, but cheaper if you go over say 10Mb/second.
It's not cheap, but for us it was cheaper than adding more servers and more bandwidth into our datacenter, and the added benefit of faster pages for the customers (or rather, faster static object delivery to build those pages) makes it a win-win.
I don't know how many megabits/second of usage your company is using, but even for a moderately small shop (few million pages served a day) it's economical.
A base Akamai contract starts at $2,000 a month for a 1Mb/second bandwidth allowance. Not sure if many/any Open Source projects have a budget for such.
Akamai is great for offloading bandwidth and speeding up customer's page load times, but you're paying for the bandwidth one way or another.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a Sun guy going back to the SunOS 3.5 days, Solaris is a wonderful thing. But, for x86, we have lots of *BSD and Linux options. Solaris on x86 has previously been limited in hardware supported, and in community participation.
Can someone suggest a case where it would make more sense to use x86 Solaris rather than Sparc solaris?
It seems to me that Sun's resources in these (ahem) difficult times for them would be better spent in developing what they're best at - big, robust, server-room boxes, rather than diluting their OS development efforts by spending time porting it to Intel.
Maybe someone could introduce them to an open OS like Linux? Nobody is "stuck" with Windows95 on new hardware unless they choose to be, or think they are out of ignorance.
...only outlaws will have glowfish.
...it's called "selective breeding". Traits that are useful are reinforced by breeding those who show it, and culling those who don't. OK, so they're getting genes from a jellyfish or whatever to get the glow, rather than from something inside the species. If someone wants to get upset about it, they should center on it being cross-species, rather than complaining about someone applying engineering to genetics.
I'm very glad to see a statement from you, Julian, regarding this. I've been a customer since way back in the "how much fuel did I burn this month" days, and the headline caught my eye (and concern). As I have every reason, based on your reputation, to believe your word as truth, I am very glad to see your side of the story.
Thanks for a great service, and know that your user base (at least, this particular user within it) appreciates you doing whatever it takes to uphold your high standards.
Sure, the spammers have SpamAssassin too, so they can tweak their messages to get below 4, or 5, or whatever, but you're still blocking 97% or better of the crap that would otherwise show up in my inbox, and providing an easy way to report it (and to learn how to effectively read headers). I'm glad to know that you're upholding your well-deserved reputation for being on the right side of the fight.
davehinz@(youknowwhere).com
Last I checked, when Nasa spends money on a project, it's used to pay people to do things or make things for them. The high-tech industry benefits directly by having more projects to work on, and indirectly by getting new technologies that Nasa is _very_ good about sharing.
The rest of the world (non hi-tech folks) benefit indirectly by the fact that we techies then go and spend the money we earned doing stuff for Nasa, *and* in that they get the benefit of the new technolgies as well. That money could be spent on a whole lot less useful stuff.
And here I've been helping fund them by bringing back their books after they're overdue and paying the fines. Turns out I could just buy the books from them on eBay. Who knew?
...was an entire inside wall of a compartment from an airplane, with an integrated toilet seat. It's held up as an example of wasteful government spending, but it's not as represented. I'd expect the hundred-dollar-hammer and similar stories probably have similar truths behind them.
Not saying governments don't waste our money, but this one just plain is misrepresented.
Yes, and so were (and are) a bunch of ideas which truly are crazy. Just because one can point to examples of theories that at first sounded impossible which later were accepted as fact, doesn't mean that all (or indeed, many) of them are.
In other words - for every crazy idea that turns out to be right, there are 999 that are just plain crazy. The fact that one turned out to be correct doesn't in any way validate those which are just plain wrong.
We got stuck in "It's a small world" with that damn song going over and over and over. Talk about an earworm, that's got to be the worst one ever. To this day, I can elicit a visceral response from my folks by launching into that song.
The gnome-things were all smiling, though, so they seemed to be enjoying it well enough. Hell, we were just passing through, they're stuck there 24x7.
This is as bad as the old V-8 Mustang-IIs that required the engine be dropped to replace the back two spark plugs.
So, removing the back of the iPod is as complicated as removing an engine from a Mustang? I think you're being overly-dramatic here. Batteries have a finite life; always have, always will. Battery hatches can be held on with a screw, or a clip, or any other manner of things. The fact that the hatch isn't separate with the cover, hardly makes this a non-servicable part. If someone wants to be lazy and/or scared to do the work themselves, they can drop 99 bucks to have someone else do it, or they can do it themselves for 50 bucks.
This is no different from any other value-added service of a product - if you want someone else to do something for you, they get to set the price and you get to decide if it's worth the money.
Looking at these guys' site, I can't help but wonder if the situation is truly as they describe - the price is wrong, what else did they get wrong and/or distort?
Now, it'd be funny if that page had gone 404 on us...
I think you've got it right, but think about their motivation. Why would they do it this way? If the goal is FUD rather than money, then they're accomplishing their goals this way. They're evil, but not stupid...I think that they know exactly how to get to their goal, which is spreading a bunch of FUD around while making it *look* like pure greed. People can relate to greed, it's easy for anyone to understand - to understand the technical and legalities involved requires motivation and understanding.
I think the whole money thing is a diversion from the real tactic. Now, who, oh who, could possibly want to freely bash the open-source software movement?
If IBM buys SCO to shut them up, then all of the FUD about linux in general and the GPL specifically, stays out there without being ruled on. This way, those who want to believe (or exploit) the FUD can put whatever spin they want on it.
If IBM buys them out (or someone else), and the court cases just go away, then the people who want Linux and the GPL to be discredited have won anyway.
I'm not sure how this can be resolved in a good way. We wait for the legal system to rule, it takes years. If IBM buys them out, it's basically paying extortion, sets a _very_ bad precedent, and allows the FUD to remain.
Am I seeing this wrong? Does someone have a realistic positive outcome, and a path to get there?
I've had a bunch of Redhat stock since the day they IPO'd. Sold a chunk of it near the 300 (150, post-split) level, held a few hundred shares.
Yeah, what I have is trivial compared to the total number of shares out there, but dammit, this kind of thing pisses me off. I mean, yay enterprise version and all that, but first spinning desktop off to fedora, then shooting it down as "not ready", is complete and utter crap. WTF are they thinking? Is it time to dump the rest of my rhat stock, or no?
Absolutely - any IT professional knows that once a system is put in place for a demo, chances are very high that it'll stay that technology for production. It's just too easy to keep something that works and put off re-designing it.
Sometimes, this is good, as in the case you describe. Too often, though, it's the other way around, and we get stuck supporting some crufty POS that was thrown together using the wrong ingredients. The PHBs know that that can happen, and don't understand that sometimes, just sometimes, the quick and cheap (free) solution *is* the right answer.
And actually, this being a civil rather than a criminal matter makes proving the case that much easier - instead of "Beyond a reasonable doubt", it has to be proven "By a preponderance of evidence".
To put that into perspective - OJ was found "Not Guilty" in a criminal court, because it wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it. The civil court proceedings, however, found him guilty "By a preponderance of evidence". So, by one standard he's not guilty, by another he is guilty. At the end of the day, he killed 'em, but the case wasn't good enough to prosecute criminally.
For our purposes of the DNC list, I would think that this will make nailing the slime who try to weasel through the loopholes easier...we don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they're a weasel, we just have to show through a preponderance of evidence that they are a small, furry mammal of the Mustelid family, behaving in a weasel-like way.
The preceeding is noted as being gratuitously insulting to weasels, for which I apologize.
Glad to hear that there is an enforcement of the DNC happening...getting legal precedent set is important, so that we know that the law is truly in force.
On a practical note, this way when the telemarketers call, we can know that we're dealing with a felon, and proceed accordingly.
Seems to me that the product formerly known as Redhat Linux, is now called Fedora. What's the big deal?
What do you actually know about the NRA, Alex?
NRA certified instructors train the police - the NRA has been emphasising safe gun use and responsible ownership for more than a century - the NRA has pushed for laws making the use of a firearm in a crime a mandatory additional sentence - which of these do you disagree with?
Most recently, the NRA is working to allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons, to deter the criminals (who, by the way, are already carrying concealed weapons, illegally). This has reduced crime in every one of the 45 states which allow it. Are you perhaps against that?
What, specifically, that the NRA does, are you against, Alex?