Yes, and then you've also cost the other 127 people in the organization who couldn't care less about HRPROD22-NA01 at least 30 seconds to read and discard the email, plus the lost time for task switching between what they were doing and reading your email. This equates to 2 hours of lost time with one press of the send-button.
One thing that technology has made very easy is for a single person to annoy a very large group of people with minimal effort. And that person does not even have to be out to annoy them, merely stupidity suffices. In fact, technology has not only increased the power of the competent to do good, it has also multiplied the power of the evil or incompetent to do bad (SPAM anyone?).
Glad to see there is at least one other perceptive soul out there who read the article and paid attention during physics class. Its a pity the author of the article didn't, because this is read by a lot of people who will only remember the conclusion.
Why do we get comments like this every time ? People still say things like this every time solar power is mentioned, and now again with water power. How much energy is needed do you think to produce the generators for your coal/oil/gas powered plant ? Besides, if we eventually switch completely to renewable sources, those factories will emit no CO2 at all, since they too will be powered from renewable sources. Look, the only way we can ever completely reduce our impact on the environment is by committing mass suicide. I don't think that is very likely, so until then we are stuck with trying to improve our technologies.
I believe, although the article isn't very clear on it, that the 1c is the added cost when compared to conventional energy sources. Electricity produced by coal or gas fired plants at the moment is around 4 to 4.5c per kWh, while wind energy in a state of the art wind farm is around 5c. This last cost is still dropping though, and is projected to be about 4.5c at the end of the decade, and perhaps even cheaper than gas or coal by 2015. The key here is that once a wind farm is up and running, only (little) maintanance is required, while coal plants for instance need hundreds of fuel trucks every day to keep running, and gas prices are fluctuating quite much.
An interesting document with some more info is http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Cost2001.PDF
I agree that quantum computing will simultaneously benefit cde making and code breaking, so it would seem it balances out. However, in all likelyhood the first decade of quantum-computing will be mostly in the hands of government and possibly big corporations, because until someone figures out a low-cost way of making quantum-computers, they will be the only ones able to afford it. That means that during that time, they will be able to break just about any encryption that you can generate. Echelon++, here we come !
Offcourse, all this is not a problem if you trust your government (and everyone in it) not to misuse their power.
While I agree with your choice to get your news from teh internet instead of the big media, that is only a stop-gap measure. First of, the majority of people still doesn't use the internet to get news, or gets it from sites like cnn.com, newyorktimes.com and so on. Obviously, when the media own the newspapers, they also control the internet versions of those papers.
Starting your own network is expensive, and will also be so on the internet. The main cost is not in airing, but in producing content: paying the journalists, the show writers,... This means large fixed costs, and relatively small costs per viewer. No way is a starting company going to be able to compete with a media giant when the giant is able to write off its fixed costs over a viewerbase that is 100 times larger. Keeping the media companies smaller improves the odds, ensuring that at least sometimes someone can make it to the bigtime.
I can allready imagine the conversation: Officer: Sir, I request for the third time that you give me your name. Anonymous man: Sorry, I won't give you that. O: Then I'm going to arrest you for refusing to give your name. AM: You can't do that. I'm a suspect. O: Prove it. AM: How? O: Well, just give me your name and I can verify it in the computer. AM: Ok, I'm Homer Simpson..... Doh !!!
Correct, but also consider what happens when the challenge is over your head. It's all nice to assume that stress automatically makes you a better/smarter person, but if the challenge is too big for you, the stress becomes harmful. This is exactly the reason people get burn-outs.
Actually, it is not the conversion that is more efficient. The article you mentioned compares the use of ethanol directly as a fuel for a combustion engine with the conversion of ethanol to H2, and then using the H2 in a fuel cell to drive an electric motor.
A combustion engine is a nightmare from an efficiency standpoint. Most of the energy produced (about 60 to 80 %) is wasted in the forms of heat and friction losses.
Conversely, an electric motor can easily be made to be more than 90 % efficient, and electricity generation from H2 using fuel cells only wastes about 30% to 40%, so the overal efficiency is much better (about 60 %, as mentioned).
As for environmental benefits, we must take into account that producing the ethanol (growing corn and harvesting it, then fermenting to get ethanol) using currently popular techniques, also uses alot of fossil fuels. It only starts to get better when the energy for the ethanol production comes from renewable sources (solar, wind). However, then you are maybe better of directly generating H2. It might still be a good idea though. the thing with renewable energy is that it is not always there when you need it. You need some way to store the excess energy when it is not needed, and release it when it is. Ethanol is stored and transported more easily than H2-gas, so it presents a likely candidate.
While I'm not saying success is guaranteed, they stand a fair chance. Test-Aankoop has a long history of going up against pretty big players, such as the Belgian insurance industry (which includes international banking/insurance companies like Fortis and ING), where they forced a new standard for life insurance policies.
It's interesting to draw a parallel to the biological world. When you are growing monoculture crops, and one disease comes along that really likes the stuff you are growing, then your entire crop might be lost. Same goes for our current habit of breeding livestock that often originates from only one or a few successful parents. Here in Europe for instance we've had pig's plague, bird's plague, mad cow disease, all in the past couple of years. Each of those caused massive damage.
Secondly, it's also interesting to observe that the most successful computer viruses are those that do relatively little damage to the host system. Obviously, thats because they go unnoticed longer, and when noticed, less effort is taken to eliminate them, because "it's not really doing any harm".
This is strangely similar to real life, where the most successful virus ever may be the common cold. It does just enough to make you sneeze copies of the virus all over the place, but not enough to make you stay at home.
Interesting point. I guess that's partly because a human collects stuff in a more or less linear fashion. Everything you collect, create or use takes time, and time is a resource that we don't get more of simply because our computers get faster. It is possible to handle one single 4 GB file such as a movie, but it would be impossible to do something meaningfull with 4000 1MB files, it would simply take too much time. Offcourse, you could think of automated tasks operating on large sets of files, but again random access would serve no benefit here. Throughput is important in the case of a program handling a sequence of small files.
The article actually says that the 5700 model which was allready sold by HP for some time has a price range of $599 to $629. The 5700 model uses the 1GHz version of the TM5800. The new thing is that models based on the lower speed processors are introduced, but no prices are known about those yet. I may be kicking in open doors here, but they probably will be lower.
Here in fact is the complete analysis on which the computer wire article is based. Apparently, as can be seen a few paragraphs below the quoted text, Bruce meant that the code duplicates a function allready in the linux kernel elsewere, is only applicable to one specific SGI system, and thus should never have been in the Linux kernel distribution in the first place, "for technical reasons". All the same, the code was released years ago under an open source license in 2002 by Caldera, now SCO, and that even if it had still been in the kernel, the developers would be completely in their right.
I keep reading this every once in a while, but it is simply not true. This myth probably started when solar cells were first being produced, but nowadays, the production has become much more efficient. At present, it takes about 5 years for a typical solar cell to win back the energy cost of production. That number will come down even more as large scale production becomes a reality. A lot of companies are investing in more energy-efficient production, since lower production cost means higher margin, or a lower price to beat the competition. Check out this link for a recent study on future life-cycle cost of solar cells. The worst case assumption is that payback time in the Netherlands (which does not exactly have a warm and sunny climate) by 2010 will be less than 4 years, while the base case would be 1.3 years.
I know the US gets blamed a lot, and perhaps unfairly so. True, alot of pollution is caused there, but China is just as responsible, with it's 1.3 billion popuplation using mostly coal and fossil fuel for heating.
But unfortunately, the US is now the only selfstyled "superpower" left in the world. This brings with it a certain responsability to lead by example. It only strengthens the belief of alot of countries that the US is only interested in protecting its own agenda when it won't ratify international treaties (yes, such as the Kyoto one). Other countries then use this as an excuse not to ratify them either. Eventhough that makes them at least as bad, they wouldn't have been able to do so had the US given the example.
True. I entirely agree with you. One thing though, with reference to the Aral sea disaster: this did not have to happen. According to the article, about 80 % of the water that is diverted upstream for irrigation is simply lost due to evaporation. An efficient irrigation system would be able to have the same benefits while using only half or even less of the water. At the very least, this would have postponed the drying of the sea with several decades, maybe giving enough time to find a more permanent solution.
One second thought: yes, we are going to have an effect on the ecosystem. But like you said, the hard part is not screwing it up totally, and it looks like we may be doing just that. I'm an optimist, so I like to believe that the human species will pull through eventually, perhaps learning from their past mistakes (it could happen). But I also fear that before we get there, we are going to have to pay the consequences of our neglect in the past century, and that is going to cost us dearly.
Frankly, I don't know whether any country will be interested. After all, we are talking about a dry sea-bed, in an arid clime, consisting of mainly salty desert sprinkled with pesticides from the cotton plantations upstream. Unless they discover oil underneath, not much chance that anyone will go to war over it. Then again, wars have been fought over even more ridiculous things.
I thought I might point out the following webpage: http://www.hobbyspace.com/Links/RLVNews.html I recently discovered this page, and it is really up-to-date with all sorts of initiatives with reusable launch vehicles, including a lot of promising commercial ones. The enthousiasts there also seem to have given up on NASA. I share their opinion that to do it "Faster, better, cheaper", you need to steer clear of the good old NASA. I am especially interested in the Burt Rutan initiative, and the SpaceX rocket, which should fly beginning next year.
There actually are such products as 25$ 500 MHz processors and all the other stufff you just described. However, they are not used in the typical PC you buy at Walmart or some such store. Rather, they are used by OEMs, usually in speciality devices, such as controllers for automated processes or robotized assembly lines. The main reason is that up till recently there was a real need to get faster processors, and graphic cards and so on. However, we are reaching a point where the latest and greatest in CPU and graphic cards will only be of interest to a very limited number of users. I foresee a not-so-distant future where the PC market as it exists now will mostly dissapear, except for the aforementioned group of high end users. The remainder of the market will probably be filled up with XBox or DVR-like devices, which allow its users to do the most common things, like websurfing, playing games, listening to music. The internals of such a device will probably be largely based on the PC-architecture, but the look and interface of such devices will be different. It will probably be much more like a VCR than like a PC. The manufacturers of such devices will obviously not use the latest and greatest technology if the device doesn't need it. Think XBox: it's a PC with a high end graphics card, but only a 10GB hard drive, because it needs to have fast graphics, but doesn't need to store that much data.
Re:Other Infinion story - instant-boot chip
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
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· Score: 1
Yes, I also read it. I've been following the technology since Infineon and IBM first announced their partnership back in 2000. They appear to be running a bit behind schedule, because their original goal was to have mass-production in 2004. Motorola would seem to be slightly ahead in the race. But still, even if it is late, this kind of technology could take the world by storm. There is only one condition they would need to fulfill: the MRAM would have to be about as cheap as conventional flash RAM. The other characteristics of the MRAM are fenomenal compared to ordinary flash. If they can make it cheap, in about five years MRAM will replace more than half of all current flash RAM applications, and probably a lot of DRAM as well.
Yes, the way I understand it, it will give observable results. The way it seems to work is they bounce light back and forth inside the crystal. This changes the frequency of the beam through interaction with the shock waves (strong vibration). If they manufacture the crystal so as to allow only green light to come out, they could send in for example red light, and at the point where it is shifted enough to become green, it can then escape from the crystal.
Agreed, fullheartedly. This game made me think of the few really great books or films that I have read or seen. What makes this game so good, way beyond the technical merits of the game engine, is the great story that it tells. I cannot think of any other game where the characters came to life as much as here, eventhough I have played a great many of them (though as mentioned by others, the Gabriel Knight series was pretty good as well). This is usually what sells me on games: whether or not they tell a good story.
Considering that hotmail by default shares your email address and some other info with "selected partners", that does not surprise me much. You have to go to your user preferences page to turn of the "feature". They got in the news about six months ago when the default was changed to this, and they also changed it for everyone who allready had an account. The most annoying thing was that only IE would load the page where you could change the user preferences, the other browsers just got an "this browser is not supported" message. So i had to boot to windows just to turn it off. I only get about one in five mails of spam, but still thats an increase, because up to last year, i never got a single spam message on hotmail.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and then you've also cost the other 127 people in the organization who couldn't care less about HRPROD22-NA01 at least 30 seconds to read and discard the email, plus the lost time for task switching between what they were doing and reading your email. This equates to 2 hours of lost time with one press of the send-button.
One thing that technology has made very easy is for a single person to annoy a very large group of people with minimal effort. And that person does not even have to be out to annoy them, merely stupidity suffices. In fact, technology has not only increased the power of the competent to do good, it has also multiplied the power of the evil or incompetent to do bad (SPAM anyone?).
Glad to see there is at least one other perceptive soul out there who read the article and paid attention during physics class. Its a pity the author of the article didn't, because this is read by a lot of people who will only remember the conclusion.
Why do we get comments like this every time ? People still say things like this every time solar power is mentioned, and now again with water power. How much energy is needed do you think to produce the generators for your coal/oil/gas powered plant ? Besides, if we eventually switch completely to renewable sources, those factories will emit no CO2 at all, since they too will be powered from renewable sources.
Look, the only way we can ever completely reduce our impact on the environment is by committing mass suicide. I don't think that is very likely, so until then we are stuck with trying to improve our technologies.
I believe, although the article isn't very clear on it, that the 1c is the added cost when compared to conventional energy sources. Electricity produced by coal or gas fired plants at the moment is around 4 to 4.5c per kWh, while wind energy in a state of the art wind farm is around 5c. This last cost is still dropping though, and is projected to be about 4.5c at the end of the decade, and perhaps even cheaper than gas or coal by 2015. The key here is that once a wind farm is up and running, only (little) maintanance is required, while coal plants for instance need hundreds of fuel trucks every day to keep running, and gas prices are fluctuating quite much.
An interesting document with some more info is http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Cost2001.PDF
I agree that quantum computing will simultaneously benefit cde making and code breaking, so it would seem it balances out. However, in all likelyhood the first decade of quantum-computing will be mostly in the hands of government and possibly big corporations, because until someone figures out a low-cost way of making quantum-computers, they will be the only ones able to afford it. That means that during that time, they will be able to break just about any encryption that you can generate. Echelon++, here we come !
Offcourse, all this is not a problem if you trust your government (and everyone in it) not to misuse their power.
While I agree with your choice to get your news from teh internet instead of the big media, that is only a stop-gap measure. First of, the majority of people still doesn't use the internet to get news, or gets it from sites like cnn.com, newyorktimes.com and so on. Obviously, when the media own the newspapers, they also control the internet versions of those papers.
... This means large fixed costs, and relatively small costs per viewer. No way is a starting company going to be able to compete with a media giant when the giant is able to write off its fixed costs over a viewerbase that is 100 times larger. Keeping the media companies smaller improves the odds, ensuring that at least sometimes someone can make it to the bigtime.
Starting your own network is expensive, and will also be so on the internet. The main cost is not in airing, but in producing content: paying the journalists, the show writers,
I can allready imagine the conversation:
Officer: Sir, I request for the third time that you give me your name.
Anonymous man: Sorry, I won't give you that.
O: Then I'm going to arrest you for refusing to give your name.
AM: You can't do that. I'm a suspect.
O: Prove it.
AM: How?
O: Well, just give me your name and I can verify it in the computer.
AM: Ok, I'm Homer Simpson..... Doh !!!
Correct, but also consider what happens when the challenge is over your head. It's all nice to assume that stress automatically makes you a better/smarter person, but if the challenge is too big for you, the stress becomes harmful. This is exactly the reason people get burn-outs.
Actually, it is not the conversion that is more efficient. The article you mentioned compares the use of ethanol directly as a fuel for a combustion engine with the conversion of ethanol to H2, and then using the H2 in a fuel cell to drive an electric motor.
A combustion engine is a nightmare from an efficiency standpoint. Most of the energy produced (about 60 to 80 %) is wasted in the forms of heat and friction losses.
Conversely, an electric motor can easily be made to be more than 90 % efficient, and electricity generation from H2 using fuel cells only wastes about 30% to 40%, so the overal efficiency is much better (about 60 %, as mentioned).
As for environmental benefits, we must take into account that producing the ethanol (growing corn and harvesting it, then fermenting to get ethanol) using currently popular techniques, also uses alot of fossil fuels. It only starts to get better when the energy for the ethanol production comes from renewable sources (solar, wind). However, then you are maybe better of directly generating H2. It might still be a good idea though. the thing with renewable energy is that it is not always there when you need it. You need some way to store the excess energy when it is not needed, and release it when it is.
Ethanol is stored and transported more easily than H2-gas, so it presents a likely candidate.
Hmm, actually Magnatune gives you a choice between several formats. Among them are uncompressed .wav, high quality .ogg, and ofcourse, high quality mp3.
While I'm not saying success is guaranteed, they stand a fair chance. Test-Aankoop has a long history of going up against pretty big players, such as the Belgian insurance industry (which includes international banking/insurance companies like Fortis and ING), where they forced a new standard for life insurance policies.
It's interesting to draw a parallel to the biological world. When you are growing monoculture crops, and one disease comes along that really likes the stuff you are growing, then your entire crop might be lost. Same goes for our current habit of breeding livestock that often originates from only one or a few successful parents. Here in Europe for instance we've had pig's plague, bird's plague, mad cow disease, all in the past couple of years. Each of those caused massive damage. Secondly, it's also interesting to observe that the most successful computer viruses are those that do relatively little damage to the host system. Obviously, thats because they go unnoticed longer, and when noticed, less effort is taken to eliminate them, because "it's not really doing any harm". This is strangely similar to real life, where the most successful virus ever may be the common cold. It does just enough to make you sneeze copies of the virus all over the place, but not enough to make you stay at home.
Interesting point. I guess that's partly because a human collects stuff in a more or less linear fashion. Everything you collect, create or use takes time, and time is a resource that we don't get more of simply because our computers get faster. It is possible to handle one single 4 GB file such as a movie, but it would be impossible to do something meaningfull with 4000 1MB files, it would simply take too much time. Offcourse, you could think of automated tasks operating on large sets of files, but again random access would serve no benefit here. Throughput is important in the case of a program handling a sequence of small files.
The article actually says that the 5700 model which was allready sold by HP for some time has a price range of $599 to $629. The 5700 model uses the 1GHz version of the TM5800. The new thing is that models based on the lower speed processors are introduced, but no prices are known about those yet. I may be kicking in open doors here, but they probably will be lower.
Here in fact is the complete analysis on which the computer wire article is based. Apparently, as can be seen a few paragraphs below the quoted text, Bruce meant that the code duplicates a function allready in the linux kernel elsewere, is only applicable to one specific SGI system, and thus should never have been in the Linux kernel distribution in the first place, "for technical reasons".
All the same, the code was released years ago under an open source license in 2002 by Caldera, now SCO, and that even if it had still been in the kernel, the developers would be completely in their right.
I keep reading this every once in a while, but it is simply not true. This myth probably started when solar cells were first being produced, but nowadays, the production has become much more efficient. At present, it takes about 5 years for a typical solar cell to win back the energy cost of production. That number will come down even more as large scale production becomes a reality. A lot of companies are investing in more energy-efficient production, since lower production cost means higher margin, or a lower price to beat the competition. Check out this link for a recent study on future life-cycle cost of solar cells. The worst case assumption is that payback time in the Netherlands (which does not exactly have a warm and sunny climate) by 2010 will be less than 4 years, while the base case would be 1.3 years.
I know the US gets blamed a lot, and perhaps unfairly so. True, alot of pollution is caused there, but China is just as responsible, with it's 1.3 billion popuplation using mostly coal and fossil fuel for heating. But unfortunately, the US is now the only selfstyled "superpower" left in the world. This brings with it a certain responsability to lead by example. It only strengthens the belief of alot of countries that the US is only interested in protecting its own agenda when it won't ratify international treaties (yes, such as the Kyoto one). Other countries then use this as an excuse not to ratify them either. Eventhough that makes them at least as bad, they wouldn't have been able to do so had the US given the example.
True. I entirely agree with you. One thing though, with reference to the Aral sea disaster: this did not have to happen. According to the article, about 80 % of the water that is diverted upstream for irrigation is simply lost due to evaporation. An efficient irrigation system would be able to have the same benefits while using only half or even less of the water. At the very least, this would have postponed the drying of the sea with several decades, maybe giving enough time to find a more permanent solution. One second thought: yes, we are going to have an effect on the ecosystem. But like you said, the hard part is not screwing it up totally, and it looks like we may be doing just that. I'm an optimist, so I like to believe that the human species will pull through eventually, perhaps learning from their past mistakes (it could happen). But I also fear that before we get there, we are going to have to pay the consequences of our neglect in the past century, and that is going to cost us dearly.
Frankly, I don't know whether any country will be interested. After all, we are talking about a dry sea-bed, in an arid clime, consisting of mainly salty desert sprinkled with pesticides from the cotton plantations upstream. Unless they discover oil underneath, not much chance that anyone will go to war over it. Then again, wars have been fought over even more ridiculous things.
I thought I might point out the following webpage: http://www.hobbyspace.com/Links/RLVNews.html
I recently discovered this page, and it is really up-to-date with all sorts of initiatives with reusable launch vehicles, including a lot of promising commercial ones.
The enthousiasts there also seem to have given up on NASA. I share their opinion that to do it "Faster, better, cheaper", you need to steer clear of the good old NASA. I am especially interested in the Burt Rutan initiative, and the SpaceX rocket, which should fly beginning next year.
There actually are such products as 25$ 500 MHz processors and all the other stufff you just described. However, they are not used in the typical PC you buy at Walmart or some such store. Rather, they are used by OEMs, usually in speciality devices, such as controllers for automated processes or robotized assembly lines.
The main reason is that up till recently there was a real need to get faster processors, and graphic cards and so on. However, we are reaching a point where the latest and greatest in CPU and graphic cards will only be of interest to a very limited number of users.
I foresee a not-so-distant future where the PC market as it exists now will mostly dissapear, except for the aforementioned group of high end users. The remainder of the market will probably be filled up with XBox or DVR-like devices, which allow its users to do the most common things, like websurfing, playing games, listening to music. The internals of such a device will probably be largely based on the PC-architecture, but the look and interface of such devices will be different.
It will probably be much more like a VCR than like a PC. The manufacturers of such devices will obviously not use the latest and greatest technology if the device doesn't need it. Think XBox: it's a PC with a high end graphics card, but only a 10GB hard drive, because it needs to have fast graphics, but doesn't need to store that much data.
Yes, I also read it. I've been following the technology since Infineon and IBM first announced their partnership back in 2000. They appear to be running a bit behind schedule, because their original goal was to have mass-production in 2004. Motorola would seem to be slightly ahead in the race.
But still, even if it is late, this kind of technology could take the world by storm. There is only one condition they would need to fulfill: the MRAM would have to be about as cheap as conventional flash RAM. The other characteristics of the MRAM are fenomenal compared to ordinary flash. If they can make it cheap, in about five years MRAM will replace more than half of all current flash RAM applications, and probably a lot of DRAM as well.
Yes, the way I understand it, it will give observable results. The way it seems to work is they bounce light back and forth inside the crystal. This changes the frequency of the beam through interaction with the shock waves (strong vibration). If they manufacture the crystal so as to allow only green light to come out, they could send in for example red light, and at the point where it is shifted enough to become green, it can then escape from the crystal.
Agreed, fullheartedly. This game made me think of the few really great books or films that I have read or seen. What makes this game so good, way beyond the technical merits of the game engine, is the great story that it tells. I cannot think of any other game where the characters came to life as much as here, eventhough I have played a great many of them (though as mentioned by others, the Gabriel Knight series was pretty good as well). This is usually what sells me on games: whether or not they tell a good story.
Considering that hotmail by default shares your email address and some other info with "selected partners", that does not surprise me much. You have to go to your user preferences page to turn of the "feature". They got in the news about six months ago when the default was changed to this, and they also changed it for everyone who allready had an account. The most annoying thing was that only IE would load the page where you could change the user preferences, the other browsers just got an "this browser is not supported" message. So i had to boot to windows just to turn it off. I only get about one in five mails of spam, but still thats an increase, because up to last year, i never got a single spam message on hotmail.