You've forgotten part of the equation. You show 25% efficiency from production to electricity, but not all the way to the wheels. How efficient is that electrical engine powering the wheels? If it's also 50%, then we have an overall "well-to-wheel" efficiency of 12.5%. An insignificant improvement.
Actually, most of those people living near oceans and beaches live in what's called the "Ring of Fire", so the odds of them losing their homes to volcanoes, earthquakes or tsunamis is much higher than losing them to global warming.
Yes, the real world is different than the over-simplified ideals in your physics book. It's not a zero-sum game, where nothing matters.
I think a man called Newton might have an issue with that. I was not implying that the incredibly complex world was merely a zero-sum game. Rather I was asserting the fact that no technology is without consequences.
Where do you people come from? In case you haven't noticed, the war has been over for a long time. A very long time. Perhaps you mean the "occupation" instead. If so, be aware that the US is currently in the process of leaving. Do you get the newspaper where you live?
We've got this new tech that can copy things all over and circulate ideas like wildfire, yet money always gets in the way because writers have got to eat.
Actually it's the writers who get in the way. Don't anthropomorphize money. It's the writers who decide to wait until they find someone willing to pay them before they release their works.
Their stance is that there ought to be nothing constraining corporations, neither government nor especially "we the people"
While I have some problems with the corporation as an institution, they are still a "we the people" institution. That's because the investors, board of directors, management and employees are all "people". Corporations only have as much coercive power as the government gives them.
Are we really about to turn a corner in global climate change response?
Please keep the science fiction your read separate from the universe you live in. I'm finding it difficult to parse your buzzwords, but it sounds like you think fuels cells will offer a tremendously lower impact on the environment. Sorry, that's not how it works.
I don't have to be a fuel cell chemist to understand that the energy doesn't come for free. While hydrogen is certainly less polluting than other fuels, it still takes more energy to place that hydrogen in your hands than the energy you're going to get out of it. Sheesh, Newton didn't know anything at all about cracking hydrogen and even he knew that!
Your convenient energy is going to cause pollution of some kind (smog, chemical or nuclear waste, etc). It might be less pollution, but it won't be enough to cause a "global climate change response". And it will probably result in a redirection of otherwise productive efforts, such as growing crops for ethanol instead of for food. Even cracking hydrogen via hydroelectic energy is still going mean damming up an awful lot of rivers, with an unknown effect on the weather. Oh, and there's also waste heat on both the production and consumption side of the equation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against fuel cells. They sound extremely convenient, and I'll probably be one of the first customers. But don't imagine that it's going to solve all of our global climate problems. The only way to do that is to reduce our total energy consumption.
down with Microsoft... hurray for the browser for it frees us from the tyranny of Windows.
Windows is deployed in enterprises because enterprises choose Windows. Nobody is going to stumbling all over themselves to dump Windows just because a web app arrived on the scene. Heck, in all probability that web app with be IE-only, like several the enterprise I work for makes me use.
The point isn't that the firmware is closed, but rather that the firmware A) isn't on the hardware and B) isn't redistributable.
What this means is that ONLY Intel has the capabilities to write this driver. For everyone else it's illegal. No porting to to other operating systems. As a FreeBSD user, this announcment is completely worthless.
Also, it means you can't fix any bugs in the firmware. While this isn't going to be something very many people will be able to do, there are enough of them that we don't have to wait for Intel to get around to it. We don't want to make it play the radio, we only want to fix the inevitable bug that shows up. How long has it been since the release of Centrino and this driver? Do you want to wait that long for each and every bug fix?
When I have to communicate with the rest of my programming team, I have to stay up late at night so I can catch them eating their morning breakfast in Bangalore.
Because.NET is the only platform that exists today that allows you to re-use code written in other languages
I'm sure you mean this in positive sense, but it's not that great of an idea. For large projects it can actually be a hinderance.
Imagine going through one part of the code, written in language A, and running across a component written in language B, both using a library written in language C. Are you really expecting every member of that team to know those three languages fluently? Are you expecting unknown future maintainers to know all of them as well?
Noting that execution time should, for most purposes, be made irrelevant in about 6 months and faster and cheaper hardware.
I've been hearing this in regards to Java for the past ten years. Yet loading and executing a relatively feature rich Java application on my current 3.0GHz PIV is still an exercise in patience. Having used a.NET end-user application, I'm not seeing much difference.
.NET is pretty damned good, and people recognize that.
I understand that this is a rather novel concept under Windows, and if I were a Windows application developer I might just go along with it. It's certainly less painful than MFC/COM+. But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.
Absolutely nothing, but you're not the target demographic.
Okay, imagine I also write end user applications for Linux/Unix users. What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not? What does it give me that non-Ximian C/GTK/GNOME does not? What does it give me that RubyQT and wxPython do not?
Or to put it another way, why should I jump on the.NET bandwagon when Java is here today and Parrot is just around the corner?
I think the world has finally left me behind. I just don't get this obsession with.NET. Even the Java ecstacies back in the mid 90's weren't this enthusiastic. There are fifty stories on related topics on OSNews, and.NET evangelists are work are sprouting up everywhere like dandelions. Hell, Miguel can't take a dump these days without Slashdot reporting it.
Why the obsession with Microsoft technology? What's it going to give me, an embedded systems developer? Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product? Frankly it appears to me that the world has gone stark raving mad.
Has there EVER been any language or framework that generated so much unbridled enthusiasm before? Did they lace the spec with speed or something? I'm not doubting that these various Microsoft cloning projects have some merit, but some of you guys are going way over the top.
I guess I'm just an old fashioned fuddy duddy who should stick with old fashioned languages, frameworks and music.
My question is "why"? I've got a 3.0 GHz CPU in my system, so I don't understand the urgency to have it remain idle while I place all the load on someone's server.
Call me unclear on the concept, but it seems to me that the days when the user couldn't afford processing power and memory space are long gone. Why does it seem that just as the common man gets adequate computing power, the elite comes along to take away their CPUs and RAM?
I said I switched *partly* because of this. It wasn't my only concern, or even one of my primary concerns. If I were to sit down and list my reasons for switching, I would probably come up with four or five primary reasons, and about fifty to sixty minor to trivial reasons. The attitude of the Linux users was one of those minor reasons.
Of course, now that I've said that, I do have to admit that that one particular reason, while small and trivial, was exceedingly annoying. Sort of like a boil on your bum. It's not enough to make you go see the doctor, but while you're there you'll make sure to have him lance it.
I'm not talking about mechanics or underpinnings or the guts of devices. I'm talking about operating them. The automobile is a single purpose device for performing a specific task, namely driving. Yet people still need to take a class or equivalent before they're qualified to use one.
But computers are general purpose devices designed to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. We have no other device in technology that is similary broad in application. You can't make a computer simple! Any computer that appears to be simple is merely an illusion. Windows is not simple. OSX is not simple. Unix is only slightly more complicated than those systems when you take into consideration the magnitude of complexity involved.
Back before my company got bought out by a Microsoft partner, we were a Solaris shop. Everyone used CDE on Solaris. By all Slashdot accounts, that should have been enough to drive [sic] newbies into head-exploding confusion and despair. But nothing of the sort happened. In fact, technically illiterate newbies handled it just fine. After a few days they were up and running and being productive.
That's because they weren't expected to be mechanics. That's what our IT department was for.
Is Windows easy enough to do away with IT departments? Hah! We have more IT personnel that ever after switching to Windows, without any corresponding increase in the number of employees.
p.s. According to my pilot friend, airplanes are actually easier to fly than automobiles are to drive. You just don't know it because you're so used to automobiles.
What's the big deal about trying to replace everything on the desktop with an online app? For some applications it makes sense. But everything? It's almost like people want my desktop to be nothing more than a thin client running a browser connected to beefy servers. Did Wyse dump something in the water supply?
Couldn't I just *store* my documents online, instead of having to move all my applications there as well?
Slashdot Mirror
You've forgotten part of the equation. You show 25% efficiency from production to electricity, but not all the way to the wheels. How efficient is that electrical engine powering the wheels? If it's also 50%, then we have an overall "well-to-wheel" efficiency of 12.5%. An insignificant improvement.
Actually, most of those people living near oceans and beaches live in what's called the "Ring of Fire", so the odds of them losing their homes to volcanoes, earthquakes or tsunamis is much higher than losing them to global warming.
By your definition, the US civil war isn't over, because the KKK is still around and still occasionally performing acts of terror.
??? Where did that come from? Were you replying to a different post?
Yes, the real world is different than the over-simplified ideals in your physics book. It's not a zero-sum game, where nothing matters.
I think a man called Newton might have an issue with that. I was not implying that the incredibly complex world was merely a zero-sum game. Rather I was asserting the fact that no technology is without consequences.
Where do you people come from? In case you haven't noticed, the war has been over for a long time. A very long time. Perhaps you mean the "occupation" instead. If so, be aware that the US is currently in the process of leaving. Do you get the newspaper where you live?
We've got this new tech that can copy things all over and circulate ideas like wildfire, yet money always gets in the way because writers have got to eat.
Actually it's the writers who get in the way. Don't anthropomorphize money. It's the writers who decide to wait until they find someone willing to pay them before they release their works.
Their stance is that there ought to be nothing constraining corporations, neither government nor especially "we the people"
While I have some problems with the corporation as an institution, they are still a "we the people" institution. That's because the investors, board of directors, management and employees are all "people". Corporations only have as much coercive power as the government gives them.
Something new? While it won't be sci-fi or world war II, odds are it will still be the same old first person shooter.
Are we really about to turn a corner in global climate change response?
Please keep the science fiction your read separate from the universe you live in. I'm finding it difficult to parse your buzzwords, but it sounds like you think fuels cells will offer a tremendously lower impact on the environment. Sorry, that's not how it works.
I don't have to be a fuel cell chemist to understand that the energy doesn't come for free. While hydrogen is certainly less polluting than other fuels, it still takes more energy to place that hydrogen in your hands than the energy you're going to get out of it. Sheesh, Newton didn't know anything at all about cracking hydrogen and even he knew that!
Your convenient energy is going to cause pollution of some kind (smog, chemical or nuclear waste, etc). It might be less pollution, but it won't be enough to cause a "global climate change response". And it will probably result in a redirection of otherwise productive efforts, such as growing crops for ethanol instead of for food. Even cracking hydrogen via hydroelectic energy is still going mean damming up an awful lot of rivers, with an unknown effect on the weather. Oh, and there's also waste heat on both the production and consumption side of the equation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing against fuel cells. They sound extremely convenient, and I'll probably be one of the first customers. But don't imagine that it's going to solve all of our global climate problems. The only way to do that is to reduce our total energy consumption.
down with Microsoft... hurray for the browser for it frees us from the tyranny of Windows.
Windows is deployed in enterprises because enterprises choose Windows. Nobody is going to stumbling all over themselves to dump Windows just because a web app arrived on the scene. Heck, in all probability that web app with be IE-only, like several the enterprise I work for makes me use.
The point isn't that the firmware is closed, but rather that the firmware A) isn't on the hardware and B) isn't redistributable.
What this means is that ONLY Intel has the capabilities to write this driver. For everyone else it's illegal. No porting to to other operating systems. As a FreeBSD user, this announcment is completely worthless.
Also, it means you can't fix any bugs in the firmware. While this isn't going to be something very many people will be able to do, there are enough of them that we don't have to wait for Intel to get around to it. We don't want to make it play the radio, we only want to fix the inevitable bug that shows up. How long has it been since the release of Centrino and this driver? Do you want to wait that long for each and every bug fix?
Was that Fox News, or a Fox commentary show like O'R or H&C?
When I have to communicate with the rest of my programming team, I have to stay up late at night so I can catch them eating their morning breakfast in Bangalore.
Because .NET is the only platform that exists today that allows you to re-use code written in other languages
I'm sure you mean this in positive sense, but it's not that great of an idea. For large projects it can actually be a hinderance.
Imagine going through one part of the code, written in language A, and running across a component written in language B, both using a library written in language C. Are you really expecting every member of that team to know those three languages fluently? Are you expecting unknown future maintainers to know all of them as well?
Bingo! The ideas behind .NET are good. What puzzles me is the urgency to clone it.
Noting that execution time should, for most purposes, be made irrelevant in about 6 months and faster and cheaper hardware.
.NET end-user application, I'm not seeing much difference.
I've been hearing this in regards to Java for the past ten years. Yet loading and executing a relatively feature rich Java application on my current 3.0GHz PIV is still an exercise in patience. Having used a
Mono is building an entire platform
Wait, I already have a platform! Heck, I've got a whole slew of platforms to choose from. Why should I throw them all away for a new unfinished one?
.NET is pretty damned good, and people recognize that.
.NET bandwagon when Java is here today and Parrot is just around the corner?
I understand that this is a rather novel concept under Windows, and if I were a Windows application developer I might just go along with it. It's certainly less painful than MFC/COM+. But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.
Absolutely nothing, but you're not the target demographic.
Okay, imagine I also write end user applications for Linux/Unix users. What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not? What does it give me that non-Ximian C/GTK/GNOME does not? What does it give me that RubyQT and wxPython do not?
Or to put it another way, why should I jump on the
I think the world has finally left me behind. I just don't get this obsession with .NET. Even the Java ecstacies back in the mid 90's weren't this enthusiastic. There are fifty stories on related topics on OSNews, and .NET evangelists are work are sprouting up everywhere like dandelions. Hell, Miguel can't take a dump these days without Slashdot reporting it.
Why the obsession with Microsoft technology? What's it going to give me, an embedded systems developer? Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product? Frankly it appears to me that the world has gone stark raving mad.
Has there EVER been any language or framework that generated so much unbridled enthusiasm before? Did they lace the spec with speed or something? I'm not doubting that these various Microsoft cloning projects have some merit, but some of you guys are going way over the top.
I guess I'm just an old fashioned fuddy duddy who should stick with old fashioned languages, frameworks and music.
My question is "why"? I've got a 3.0 GHz CPU in my system, so I don't understand the urgency to have it remain idle while I place all the load on someone's server.
Call me unclear on the concept, but it seems to me that the days when the user couldn't afford processing power and memory space are long gone. Why does it seem that just as the common man gets adequate computing power, the elite comes along to take away their CPUs and RAM?
Why?
I said I switched *partly* because of this. It wasn't my only concern, or even one of my primary concerns. If I were to sit down and list my reasons for switching, I would probably come up with four or five primary reasons, and about fifty to sixty minor to trivial reasons. The attitude of the Linux users was one of those minor reasons.
Of course, now that I've said that, I do have to admit that that one particular reason, while small and trivial, was exceedingly annoying. Sort of like a boil on your bum. It's not enough to make you go see the doctor, but while you're there you'll make sure to have him lance it.
I'm not talking about mechanics or underpinnings or the guts of devices. I'm talking about operating them. The automobile is a single purpose device for performing a specific task, namely driving. Yet people still need to take a class or equivalent before they're qualified to use one.
But computers are general purpose devices designed to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. We have no other device in technology that is similary broad in application. You can't make a computer simple! Any computer that appears to be simple is merely an illusion. Windows is not simple. OSX is not simple. Unix is only slightly more complicated than those systems when you take into consideration the magnitude of complexity involved.
Back before my company got bought out by a Microsoft partner, we were a Solaris shop. Everyone used CDE on Solaris. By all Slashdot accounts, that should have been enough to drive [sic] newbies into head-exploding confusion and despair. But nothing of the sort happened. In fact, technically illiterate newbies handled it just fine. After a few days they were up and running and being productive.
That's because they weren't expected to be mechanics. That's what our IT department was for.
Is Windows easy enough to do away with IT departments? Hah! We have more IT personnel that ever after switching to Windows, without any corresponding increase in the number of employees.
p.s. According to my pilot friend, airplanes are actually easier to fly than automobiles are to drive. You just don't know it because you're so used to automobiles.
What's the big deal about trying to replace everything on the desktop with an online app? For some applications it makes sense. But everything? It's almost like people want my desktop to be nothing more than a thin client running a browser connected to beefy servers. Did Wyse dump something in the water supply?
Couldn't I just *store* my documents online, instead of having to move all my applications there as well?
The problem is that it's so hard to tell, what with all the moronic liberal viewpoints being modded up.