Heh...I like the implied comment in the question: "didn't have the patience to dink with it"...as in, patience is a virtue, and lack of same is a fault.
It's not a fault to want something to just plug in and go after you spend a lot of money on it.
I 'dink with' a Linux box most evenings. I use MEPIS Linux, among the most plug-and-play distros ever developed. And the new version recently cost me most of a weekend with tedious, stupid stuff like not working with my new DVD writer and not being able to record audio because the ALSA controls are a whole separate level from the KMIX controls and they BOTH have to have "line' turned on.
And I am morally CERTAIN that setting up a MythTV box is the same deal, squared and cubed. The commentary from MythTV fans, both on the web and at the Calgary Unix Users Group that I chair, is clear on that point. It only "just goes" if you have just the right hardware and the Gods smile that day.
As for Linux never crashing, I don't mean full-blown BSOD; it just has to lock up for a few seconds to totally annoy most people. Now then, kindly put "mythTV freeze" into google and peruse the first few links. Then try "freeze pioneer "DVR-520" ' and note that while there are pages with both terms in them, none involve the product locking up. Some DVD players have frozen just playing a disk - a disk that a different player might handle. But none of the consumer-electronics products freeze when playing from the hard drive.
Then don't get me started on my TV being useless for one weekend a year when I decide that it's time to upgrade my MythTV version...
Bottom line: I get all the geeking and dinking my soul needs from playing with my general-purpose computer. I really tear my hair out on that a lot. Despite being committed to good old solid "uncrashable" Linux. I don't need any more of it when I'm just trying to knock back a few, get into a state of mind where I'm incompetent to handle complexity, and....watch TV.
I looked at TiVO, at the Interact-TV "Telly" (see interact-tv.com), at the Lite-On DVR, and very hard at MythTV.
And finally, I went and bought a "humble" Pioneer DVR-520, that's just a VCR except it burns DVDs and/or records to hard drive. No network access to TV schedules at all, you have to set it to record Channel X at Y o'clock on day Z.
TiVO might have won if they would just friggin' provide TV guide service to Canada, but they won't.
And all the solutions that are really a Linux or Windows PC in a smaller box had the same problem: they crash.
Most of them not often, but even once every few weeks is way too often. If it were just me, fine, but my wife was unequivocal: we don't NEED the thing, she's just wearily learning a new remote and whole new approach to TV just to get along with me..."But if it crashes like a PC in the middle of the Gilmore Girls, it's leaving the house through a closed window that you can pay for".
The Plain Ol' DVR is not from a computer company, but the long-experienced consumer electronics company that made the first LaserDisc machines. It just works, was working 5 minutes out of the box, and won't crash on her though it be a fairly sophisticated computer.
And frankly, I'm kind of glad to be talked into it as well. Upstairs, I geek out to my heart's content on a Linux box. Downstairs, watching TV, I'm generally beat, have a drink or so and supper inside me, and Just Want to Watch TV. Any technicalities deeper than picking my show off the playlist are unwelcome.
This box meets the 80/20 rule. Anything that can do "chasing playback", skip ads, avoids fussing with tapes, and can make a DVD of those few shows I want to save, meets at least 80% of what you want from the experience.
Setting it to catch all the shows we watch regularly took me about an hour. I guess another half hour per year will be needed to stop the recordings at the end of each season and start them again, often at new times, each fall. Avoiding that half-hour per year is not worth hundreds of dollars, and it ABSOLUTELY isn't worth managing another household computer through upgrades and patches and crashes.
Dang. I was on the brink of either getting a Telly or building my own MythTV using a Shuttle box with Intel. Now I see that there are six other products besides the Telly, and more coming.
My plans are starting to look like "early adopter impatience"...yes, yes, there's always a better system coming out, ut's never the perfect time to buy in, yada yada. But! I don't want to buy JUST before the cost/benefit curve goes through an elbow.
I'm getting a feeling that 2005 is the Year of the Elbow for DVRs.
Just a note from a GIS guy for his own local water utility. Calgary puts most of its map data on the net, please see (and enjoy): The government is certainly entitled to put restrictions on other use of private property: libraries have hours they are closed. Rules for use of that public property known as data, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, are not inappropriate. http://emaps.calgary.ca/asp/emaps. asp
We of course do the exercise of pondering whether anything on it could be used for public harm (no need to get melodramatic about terrorism, could it just be used by teenage vandals?) and came up dry. It's all available on paper maps or by walking around.
There IS data that would be useful for attacking public infrastructure (certain specs on the local dam, say) and we do regard it as our job to NOT release that (publicly-funded) information without good reason - but that's on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, each defensible in court (since we may have to).
The question about this story is whether the judge is handing the town total carte blanche to deny ANY request for GIS data without further challenge.
He didn't. Mr. Whitaker asked for the WHOLE DATABASE, everything the town had. The town pled a problem as much from jewel thieves able to find all the expensive houses using the property value database, as much as fear of terrorists.
What the people writing to say "publicly funded data must be given to any member of the public" are forgetting is that the City must act as custodian of that public property and use it for public benefit, not private. The government is certainly entitled to put restrictions on other use of private property: libraries have hours they are closed. Rules for use of that public property known as data, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, are not inappropriate.
Would they say that an oil company must be allowed to drill in public parks because the stockholders are public members too and have a right to use the park? Uh-uh, the rights of OTHER public are in conflict.
Calgary doesn't give out the database of property values, though it is publicly funded. We believe that the whole database has basically no value to any one private citizen. However, it has HUGE value to real estate agents. So we sell it to them, on BEHALF of the public, pocketing the money to keep their taxes a little lower. If a citizen wants to know the property values of their street, they can come in and look at the map for free. If they want to take home the map of the whole neighbourhood, small charge. The whole city - we figure they must be a real estate agent and they'd better have brought a fat chequebook.
As you can see, the matter requires a lot of judgement, compromises, and case-by-case decisions. And there are always the courts to render a final (case-by-case) decision on individual requests.
The sad thing for me about this case is that it wasn't decided on its merits - the Supremes used the "security" reason for their decision and Mr. Whitaker is not a terrorist or jewel thief but an architect and a good one, IMHO. His motive in the request was economic. Basically, he feels his couple of thou a year in property taxes entitles him not only to a couple of thou a year in police, fire protection and road paving and park mowing and all that, but about $10 million worth of data that his fellow citizens paid for jointly, and has little value to them personally, but huge value to him, a few more architects and real estate agents, maybe 0.1% of the Greenwich population, tops.
When the government has to do something ANYWAY, just to run the town/state/nation, and it can also hugely benefit some businessmen, should they then get that benefit for free (lucky them!), or should the servants of the people who paid for it charge them all the traffic will bear, like any other steward of property or services would do? Please don't see
No problemo, just wanted to fix any other goofs if needed. Thanx for catching the wave height thing. It's important because it means that ships well out to sea are NOT toast and indeed can be part of the warning network...
Yeah, sorry, but the brevity required for a post didn't leave room for that nuance. Just substitute "the height of the wave upon a given landfall" for "the wave" to correct. Said height varies enormously with the specific shape of the coast it hits (gentle slope or steep) but it DOES decrease with distance from the origin, such factors being equal.
You said, "especially" before your one example. Did you have others, or was that mere hyperbole?
In my area, the cable company is selling the Motorola DCT6208 at a loss ($500 Cdn = $400 US, even before rebates for first-time subscribers).
Presumably they are happy to take a loss because the buyers can't then jump to satellite easily...
Anyway, the 6208 (and presumably it's higher-end brother, the 6400
both allow direct recording to a firewire port, al though one reviewer said it just wouldn't work for PC, only Mac). of the post-decryption bitstream.
I clicked through, signed up for the free period (which involves giving them credit card stuff and remembering to Opt Out if you don't want to go beyond 2weeks/50 downloads) and browsed around.
The "download manager" does make things easier, and is offered as a Linux RPM. Which sent me on some "install fun": 1) convert-to-debian-with-alien, install with apt-get goes fine; 2) configuring Opera to run "emusicdm" for ".emp" files -- 3) it runs but can't connect 4) a visit to emusic's help which quickly yields the advice to install the "NSCD" daemon... 5) "apt-get install nscd"... 6) apt-get deciding to load in libraries at some length... works
You don't need it, by the way, but it allows such tricks as downloading an album with one click.
Also, you have to configure your browser to run XMMS or whatever for ".m3u" files, which are not text lists of track names, but rather the file type of the 30s streamed samples...wierd.
And the album downloads don't come with a real.M3U file to be the album index for the player. But you can make it use filenames with the track number prefixed ("01-title.mp3 02-title2.mp3") so that you can play them in order - or make an m3u file.
They have *some* well-known titles. I'm listening to Dizzy Gillespie as I type and have a Creedence Clearwater Revival oldie that's one of their top downloads at the moment.
But I can see if you don't want unknowns, you'd run out of things to download fairly fast unless you have broad tastes.
The question for me, is "Between the well-known ones and unknowns I like enough to spend two-bits/track after hearing a 30s sample, can I use up my 40 per month happily?" Yes.
(One amusing psychological effect, though: as a fixed price per track, in effect, I find myself resenting albums with more than a couple of two-minute songs on them and thinking "good deal" about 15-minute jazz or classical tracks...cheaper by the minute! Heh. Silly.)
I don't need every track on earth or unlimited downloads anymore than I need a lake of of water to scoop up a cup from. A bucket is fine, I can only drink a cup at a time. 40/month about matches the time I have to browse and get to like new music.
And the $10/month is maybe half (at most) of what I'm spending on music now. One less CD per month, in return for nearly 4X the music, and the ability to shop with 30s samples, which a record store doesn't give me.
I like Mr. Sawyer (he's an enthusiastic attender of conventions, willing to discuss his work with quite small rooms of readers) but this article made me shake my head. I read it the other day and tried to hit on Backbone's web site to respond. (Uh-uh. No forums.)
Virtually every single prediction is well over 10 years away, and not just because of politics. Self-driving cars interfacing with millions of chips buried in the road? Even if made workable tomorrow, and tested and proven six-sigma safe the day after (try 20 years for each) we only repave *major* roads once every 20 years. Accelerating the schedule would double local taxes! Sheesh.
And the rest of them run like that. I think I read this same stuff in 1994 at the height of the machines-of-loving-grace-will-run-the-world burbling from WIRED in its heyday. And always, always, this stuff is prefaced with Moore's Law. Because of Moore's Law, any prediction involving intelligence in machines is "OK", no matter how outlandish.
But we've had over 30 years of Moore's Law since the first microchips and we still have computers that are dumb as rocks, just 1M times faster at being dumb as rocks. They barely can parse words reliably, have no idea what a sentence means, and definitely can't *see*. So, sorry, no low-carb-cooking, kitchen wash-up robots in a lousy 10 years.
Some of it was at least techically possible; the "every TV show ever available" is obviously a political problem, if they can solve that, they can do the appliances and the networking. But anything involving, say, fiber to the home - i.e. more than ONE custom-download HDTV show at a time - will require over 10 years just to get the fiber strung.
Look, if you wear glasses, surely you know the phenomenon where they get all scratched up and you start seeing halos around light sources at night?
Well, the process does that to your cornea. And you start seeing halos around lights at night.
Most people get this only very mildly, but a few have a real bad case. Some have so much of it that they start seeing a dozen little lights around the "main" image, because the scars create a lot of refractive surfaces on the cornea, like a fly's eye.
I figure I can last a few more years with glasses while they work that little bug out of the system. Because once the damage is done, it's done.
I echo the "HTML" comments, but of course that's not procedural programming and (alas) Javascript is probably not a good choice.
But Perl is a language where very simple things like the "Qbasic" examples posted will also work, but it is able to do useful things quickly and can be a very good complement to knowing HTML.
I'm not a powerline guy either, and I probably shouldn't reply. But B. Fuller did talk to people that were, and I've mentioned this to others that were over the last 24 years since I heard it, and the concept seems to be believable.
You don't need to go much beyond the million-odd volts that is already used (if not common). It's not likely that you need to ship power from, say Australia to New York, even a "global grid" would mostly ship power 10,000 km or so. Don't forget, if you can ship it 10K, then THOSE people can free up plants to ship THEIR power another 10K, and so on. So in effect, you can make up a deficit in location X with power generated 20,000 km away from the need. Half way around the planet.
This all comes at major cost, and as I said, the far more sensible thing to do is concentrate on continental-sized power grids, use nuclear, most of it distributed to where its needed for base load, and only use solar/wind/hydro for 20% or so of the total need.
But global-level power sales, like the global oil market, are "merely" a political and economic problem, not an engineering impossibility.
I'm astonished that none of the hi-modded posters have mentioned the import of increasing power networking - increasing the amount and distance of power shared between generation facilities over the grid.
What frustrates pro-Nuke types (and yes, I'm one, but that's not my topic here) about renewable rants is that renewables are not useful for generating the "base load", the minimum level of power needed 7x24. Your wind and solar plants can't provide it when the sun isn't shining or the wind not blowing.
Buckminster Fuller pointed out nearly 50 years ago that the cost (in both $ and "lost energy" terms) of sharing power across great distances was rapidly dropping because it's a function of the voltage you can push the power up to. If you can transform it up to a million volts, you can share power across, say, 10,000km (all North America) with only a percent or so lost in transmission. This much is now becoming common today. BC and Alberta made out like bandits selling power to California during it's artificial "crisis" the other year.
Fuller proposed another order of magnitude: *global* sharing, and elaborated on it at a lecture at the U. of Calgary I was privileged to attend in 1980 (one of his last). He talked about running lines clear across the Bering Strait so that US power plants not needed when that side of the Earth was in sunlight could run the streetlights in China, Japan & Russia - and vice-versa. He told us that Russian engineers looked at the costs of the transformers and the big power lines in the 70's, ran the numbers on payback, and came back with "practicable and afforable - it's just a political problem". It still is.
Would a global grid cost trillions? Oh, yes; but big power towers and cables last a long time and the global banking system would be happy to hand you a 35-year mortgage on it.
It applies both to making renewables and nuclear more practicable.
For on thing, with long transmission distances, you can put the nuke plants where the uranium is and have NO transportation - just put the waste back in the mined-out drifts of the original uranium mine.
(Here's a wild thought: get a globe. Run a rough line from the major US power consumption area in the northeast, the Boston-Washington corridor, up to the Bering Straight, on the way to Asia. Notice it runs right through northern Saskatchewan? Where about 10% of the uranium on earth, most of the north American supply, just happens to sit. Good place for a cluster of plants, no? And if there's an accident, it's one of the emptiest places in the world.)
For another thing, the sun may not always shine, nor the wind always blow - in one place. But SOME solar/wind farms would always be generating.
With global thinking, you can put your solar where the reliability rate is high - across the great "world desert" that covers most of North Africa, through through Saudi, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan and parts of China. Then there's much of central Australia (60 degrees away); and another 90 degrees along, the western US and northern Mexico. If you can draw on all three of those places, you can get reliable solar 7x24.
Wind is chancier and more localized but the principle's the same - enough windfarms in enough places add up to a baseload.
If people really hated Nukes enough to pay triple the cost for renewable plants, then double AGAIN because they aren't always working and you have to build 2X as many all over the place to keep the global "grid" full - well, then we could get by with renewables ALONE.
With a big enough grid.
(Me, I'd just build about a quarter that costly a grid, do the base load with nukes and about 30% of the load with hydro and renewables for diversity. Then spend the ~~$300B/year difference on doing good works for both humans and the environment, but if you want to be a renewables fanatic, there's how you can make it work.)
I was reading the second article, and came to the bit about "No, I didn't forget to un-mute, because when there's no sound system recognized, you don't get a mixer tool" - and was hit by a sense of familiarity.
Looked around the back of my machine, and yes, built-in moboard sound plugs unused, and an older SoundBlaster with my audio plugs in it. And remembered, not a year back, a frustrating afternoon of re-installs wrestling with both the built-in LAN and the built-in sound. I finally settled on using the built-in LAN and disabling the sound because I wasn't doing anything with the old SB anyway.
It wasn't the hottest new motherboard - an ECS bargain-level; and at least the Linux was free (MEPIS). I'm planning to make a voluntary contribution at next upgrade but that little wrestling match dissuaded me on the first MEPIS install.
So I'm afraid I'm right in the same boat as Mr. Langa. I don't care WHAT the problem is, if you ruin my afternoon, I don't want to give you $100 for the OS.
If there's a bug in your salad, you don't have to pay the restaurant. It's an old rule, really.
Nobody has mentioned a thing I liked in the article. He points out in some detail that there are tricks requiring decryption of a DVD - I assume he's talking DeCSS that even most commercial products can't do, or don't do.
This is a terrific anti-DMCA argument, in the legal, not just moral, sense.
The Supremes let stand the existence of the VCR, that noted Boston Strangler of movie revenues, because of a single non-infringing use of recording: time shifting.
And here's this article mentions just in passing that a HTPC, using "piracy tools", can give the customer a fuller value out of his DVD purchase than anything available affordably that decodes the DVD legally. (And, "affordably" is important; Hollywood had no beef with the existence of $6000 studio VCRs).
The Johansen argument ("I wanted to watch it on my Linux box") wasn't convincing to a Windows person who'd never heard of Linux. Affordable solutions for "what can I do with this DVD" were available in the form of Windows and Mac software and for that matter $89 Sony players. The law need have no sympathy for Johansen wanting to see it on yet another platform.
But if I understood the article correctly, you can't get some of those very visible upsampling improvement features - an obvious real consumer benefit - ANY OTHER WAY than a PC using "piracy" tools.
And there's your one non-infringing use.
The trouble is the chip
on
KISS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, the real trouble is that they are putting more effort into having a long feature checklist to put in the sales pitch, of course, plus as repeatedly mentioned that people buy based on the feature checklist, not a lot of time spent "test driving".
Did you ever spend time in an electronics store looking at the remotes and panel controls and asking "what's this one do"? The salesmen generally don't know. They know how to read you the feature checklist.
But electronics manufacturers would put in better controls if it weren't expensive and hard compared to a minimal number of buttons.
They all have to put in the same (or about same-priced) chip to run the remote or digital watch or cell phone. The chip gives them the feature checklist ("DVD also plays MP3! And WMA!") everything after that is expense with very little selling power.
A wheel to scroll through menus faster? Way more expensive than one button you have to hit over and over and over.
Six buttons and a wheel on your digital watch so each button doesn't need three modes? Extra five dollars to manufacture. And higher failure rate.
We now have an industry full of chips that double in brainpower every two years, but their connections to the outside world remain the same cost. So you have the same four buttons to access 97 features on your digital watch that used to have six features.
None of which explains why my now-dead 1990 Quasar VCR had a brilliant little button where one press meant "record now, current channel, for a half hour" and successive presses upped that to a hour, 90min, 2 hrs, etc. The button beside it, you could hit first, to delay recording to the next even half-hour, 2 presses to an hour, etc. These two buttons handled 98% of my timed-recording needs. Every VCR since has required me to go to a menu to set the start-time to the minute, then the duration to same.
Why did this not become universal? I have no idea. Because they're stupid about human factors?
If you're in Calgary, drop by the Calgary Unix User's Group
http://www.cuug.ab.ca
Or even just hit on our "bsdwall" project
http://www.bsdwall.org
We'll show you how to turn any old 486 and a couple of $2 NICs into an OpenBSD firewalling router for your home that's safer than any Linksys.
I can't say I've heard of your problem, but definitely not experienced it, since my "router" is just another computer... (I've got 4 machines inside the firewall)
Not much on topic, but notice who found it: Parkes in Australia - and the final paragraph says they're major pulsar discoverers down there.
After recently catching "The Dish" on a movie channel, it's nice to see the successors of the guys that brought a 10-year-old me the Apollo 11 TV signal are still in there on the frontiers of science.
There seems to be a misapprehension in many posts that the book is skeptical of global warming itself. It isn't.
There are a *few* comments to the effect that the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not certain, or at any rate the *magnitude* of the warming is much disputed, but Lomborg's comments just mirror the ongoing debate in the meteorlogical community itself.
Then he gets on with it and says, basically, "but let's just take the final conclusions of the panel as the best estimate we have" - the rest of the chapter is about the 1.5C-5.8C (most likely number : 2.2C) of warming we will see by 2100, according to the IPCC.
What the global warming, ah, community(?) hates about Lomborg is that he takes a position against Kyoto, based on the models and figures in the IPCC report.
In brief: that Kyoto is unlikely to delay that 2.2C warming by more than a miserable six years, at a cost of hundreds of billions that could be better spent preparing the hardest-hit nations for the *effects* of the warming, not to mention on R&D for wind turbines, solar power, safer nuke plants, fuel cells, etc.
Well, I'd say that OpenBSD firewalls have been "tried and tested by many"...many banks, many gov't agencies, etc...
We debated setting up web administration, but it opens a vulnerability; every complexity you add creates another possible hole.
The focus of the debate was that it would be a rather unusual individual who
1) DID have enough computer expertise to open and close particular ports or screen out particular IP domains or whatever you wanted to admin;
2) DID NOT have enough expertise to run SSH to the machine and edit a rules file with a text editor.
As for me and most of the users, there's no admin anyway; I just leave the default rules running and "administration" consists of a reboot every hundred days or so, whether it needs it or not.
It was trivial indeed to implement a firewall for 486/33, 16MB (or better, of course) machines using OpenBSD.
We wrote up some instructions on what old NICs are supported and how to configure them (not needed if you have Pentium/PCI of course), plus very, very explicit OpenBSD install instructions based on the floppy-boot, over-the-net install.
Then we wrote a little Perl script to make the few changes to vanilla OpenBSD into a home/SOHO firewall, and called it "BSDwall".
based out of the Calgary Unix Users Group site. It's been recently checked to work OK with OpenBSD 3.4. I can't imagine why anybody would use Linux for a firewall with OpenBSD also free; I use Linux on the desktop, but....if both BMW's and M-1 Tanks were free, and you had to drive through Iraq tonight, which free vehicle would you use?
The points I'll try to make have all been made by others, talking about "teamwork" and not "throwing it over the wall", but Professor Franklin's classic, "The Real World of Technology" clarifies the debate a great deal.
She describes the difference between "Prescriptive Technologies" in which specialization is by task and "Holistic Technologies", in which specialization is by product.
Example: In my workplace, several years ago, some of the drafting staff became, over several years, sysadmins. Their job was to make maps. And they made maps with paper and pen. Then with CAD terminals running off a VAX. Then with CAD terminals running off a Intergraph UNIX server. Then with CAD UNIX workstations. Then with Windows NT workstations, but now running far more UNIX boxes than ever: file servers, plot servers, database servers (the maps were now stored in Oracle in a GIS). So they had to become database administrators, too. But they did all this in service of making maps. Specialization by product - and learn any technology you need to, to do it.
Developers used to be holistic, which is almost synonymous with "craftsman", and in turn with "slow production". They learned Assembler or FORTRAN or C or whatever, as long as it got their app out. They became a (minor) expert in whatever OS these tools were provided on.
Now, prescriptive technology has become dominant in IT, with specialization by task: database admins, server admins, web server admins, and various layers and kinds of developers. Prescriptive technologies' endpoint is the Henry Ford assembly line: able to produce products far faster, and with tighter quality controls than all but the finest craftsmen, but less flexibly. (Which is usually bad in early stages of invention and development!)
Teamwork means a coordination problem and only selfless teamwork - from everybody, admins and SAs and programmers all, can minimize the coordination inefficiencies. (see: Fred Brooks "The Mythical Man-Month", written when mainframe programming had become highly prescriptive - PCs and client/server programming broke up that model for a while, but now it's taken over the new technology as well!)
I, personally, doubt that as much prescriptive technology as most organizations develop is really needed in development - one poster wrote of being "more like engineering". Well, I'm an engineer as well as an IT guy, and I would remind him of various "skunk works" approaches to physical engineering: shops where the engineers are king, managers are kept in place, creativity runs free, iterative developement is rapid. (Results of that work are developed by NON-skunk-works, more prescriptive, engineering departments into final products.)
Similarly, I'd advocate most development go in two stages. Brooks again: "Plan to write it twice - you will anyway". The first draft of an app should come out of a "skunk works" where developers control their own servers, network, and software toolset. That prototype can go through the "administrator mill" of more tested, more documented, more approved-products-only process.
And the sniping about "you aren't the one blamed when it dies at 3AM" can be approached by bringing a more "holistic" attitude to the development team. Make the DEVELOPER responsible for the app, not the administrator. Page HIM at 3AM. You'll find he is suddenly much more eager to work with the administrators to be sure the app works as well on the Official Production Server as it did in the skunk works.
We should all welcome a new and (even safer?) design strategy, but all designs have trade-offs.
Canada is justly proud of its very safe CANDU design, some good links at:
http://www.nucleartourist.com/type/candu.htm...but the tradeoff is all that heavy water runs up the price of the thing.
They've got a new design out that's, yes, even safer, and (they hope) cheaper to run. They've got a good business going overseas, but you can't sell the things in North America at all.
So far.
One can only hope the interest in reducing carbon emissions will bring people to their senses. I'm all for green renewable technologies, too, but hydro, wind, and solar are just not yet up to being more than 20% or so of the generation mix. The other 80% has to be fossil or nuclear. Nukes are way cleaner.
Salon magazine recently has some hair-raising stories about environmental devastation from coal; and that's what "greens" are guaranteeing to continue by opposing nuclear.
about the Java Desktop, which clearly says its a JVE on top of Linux. A poster at a GNOME Board said it was:.. based on SuSE 8.2 and not on Red Hat Linux as it was originally said about a year ago. Yast2 and other SuSE/administrative utilities are only accessible via the command line and not from the graphical menu system. The desktop is based on Gnome 2.2, though Sun's engineers have tweaked it quite a bit.
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Heh...I like the implied comment in the question: "didn't have the patience to dink with it"...as in, patience is a virtue, and lack of same is a fault.
It's not a fault to want something to just plug in and go after you spend a lot of money on it.
I 'dink with' a Linux box most evenings. I use MEPIS Linux, among the most plug-and-play distros ever developed. And the new version recently cost me most of a weekend with tedious, stupid stuff like not working with my new DVD writer and not being able to record audio because the ALSA controls are a whole separate level from the KMIX controls and they BOTH have to have "line' turned on.
And I am morally CERTAIN that setting up a MythTV box is the same deal, squared and cubed. The commentary from MythTV fans, both on the web and at the Calgary Unix Users Group that I chair, is clear on that point. It only "just goes" if you have just the right hardware and the Gods smile that day.
As for Linux never crashing, I don't mean full-blown BSOD; it just has to lock up for a few seconds to totally annoy most people. Now then, kindly put "mythTV freeze" into google and peruse the first few links. Then try "freeze pioneer "DVR-520" ' and note that while there are pages with both terms in them, none involve the product locking up. Some DVD players have frozen just playing a disk - a disk that a different player might handle. But none of the consumer-electronics products freeze when playing from the hard drive.
Then don't get me started on my TV being useless for one weekend a year when I decide that it's time to upgrade my MythTV version...
Bottom line: I get all the geeking and dinking my soul needs from playing with my general-purpose computer. I really tear my hair out on that a lot. Despite being committed to good old solid "uncrashable" Linux. I don't need any more of it when I'm just trying to knock back a few, get into a state of mind where I'm incompetent to handle complexity, and....watch TV.
I looked at TiVO, at the Interact-TV "Telly" (see interact-tv.com), at the Lite-On DVR, and very hard at MythTV.
And finally, I went and bought a "humble" Pioneer DVR-520, that's just a VCR except it burns DVDs and/or records to hard drive. No network access to TV schedules at all, you have to set it to record Channel X at Y o'clock on day Z.
TiVO might have won if they would just friggin' provide TV guide service to Canada, but they won't.
And all the solutions that are really a Linux or Windows PC in a smaller box had the same problem: they crash.
Most of them not often, but even once every few weeks is way too often. If it were just me, fine, but my wife was unequivocal: we don't NEED the thing, she's just wearily learning a new remote and whole new approach to TV just to get along with me..."But if it crashes like a PC in the middle of the Gilmore Girls, it's leaving the house through a closed window that you can pay for".
The Plain Ol' DVR is not from a computer company, but the long-experienced consumer electronics company that made the first LaserDisc machines. It just works, was working 5 minutes out of the box, and won't crash on her though it be a fairly sophisticated computer.
And frankly, I'm kind of glad to be talked into it as well. Upstairs, I geek out to my heart's content on a Linux box. Downstairs, watching TV, I'm generally beat, have a drink or so and supper inside me, and Just Want to Watch TV. Any technicalities deeper than picking my show off the playlist are unwelcome.
This box meets the 80/20 rule. Anything that can do "chasing playback", skip ads, avoids fussing with tapes, and can make a DVD of those few shows I want to save, meets at least 80% of what you want from the experience.
Setting it to catch all the shows we watch regularly took me about an hour. I guess another half hour per year will be needed to stop the recordings at the end of each season and start them again, often at new times, each fall. Avoiding that half-hour per year is not worth hundreds of dollars, and it ABSOLUTELY isn't worth managing another household computer through upgrades and patches and crashes.
Dang. I was on the brink of either getting a Telly or building my own MythTV using a Shuttle box with Intel. Now I see that there are six other products besides the Telly, and more coming.
My plans are starting to look like "early adopter impatience"...yes, yes, there's always a better system coming out, ut's never the perfect time to buy in, yada yada. But! I don't want to buy JUST before the cost/benefit curve goes through an elbow.
I'm getting a feeling that 2005 is the Year of the Elbow for DVRs.
Just a note from a GIS guy for his own local water utility. Calgary puts most of its map data on the net, please see (and enjoy):
The government is certainly entitled to put restrictions on other use of private property: libraries have hours they are closed. Rules for use of that public property known as data, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, are not inappropriate.
http://emaps.calgary.ca/asp/emaps. asp
We of course do the exercise of pondering whether anything on it could be used for public harm (no need to get melodramatic about terrorism, could it just be used by teenage vandals?) and came up dry. It's all available on paper maps or by walking around.
There IS data that would be useful for attacking public infrastructure (certain specs on the local dam, say) and we do regard it as our job to NOT release that (publicly-funded) information without good reason - but that's on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, each defensible in court (since we may have to).
The question about this story is whether the judge is handing the town total carte blanche to deny ANY request for GIS data without further challenge.
He didn't. Mr. Whitaker asked for the WHOLE DATABASE, everything the town had. The town pled a problem as much from jewel thieves able to find all the expensive houses using the property value database, as much as fear of terrorists.
What the people writing to say "publicly funded data must be given to any member of the public" are forgetting is that the City must act as custodian of that public property and use it for public benefit, not private. The government is certainly entitled to put restrictions on other use of private property: libraries have hours they are closed. Rules for use of that public property known as data, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, are not inappropriate.
Would they say that an oil company must be allowed to drill in public parks because the stockholders are public members too and have a right to use the park? Uh-uh, the rights of OTHER public are in conflict.
Calgary doesn't give out the database of property values, though it is publicly funded. We believe that the whole database has basically no value to any one private citizen. However, it has HUGE value to real estate agents. So we sell it to them, on BEHALF of the public, pocketing the money to keep their taxes a little lower. If a citizen wants to know the property values of their street, they can come in and look at the map for free. If they want to take home the map of the whole neighbourhood, small charge. The whole city - we figure they must be a real estate agent and they'd better have brought a fat chequebook.
As you can see, the matter requires a lot of judgement, compromises, and case-by-case decisions. And there are always the courts to render a final (case-by-case) decision on individual requests.
The sad thing for me about this case is that it wasn't decided on its merits - the Supremes used the "security" reason for their decision and Mr. Whitaker is not a terrorist or jewel thief but an architect and a good one, IMHO. His motive in the request was economic. Basically, he feels his couple of thou a year in property taxes entitles him not only to a couple of thou a year in police, fire protection and road paving and park mowing and all that, but about $10 million worth of data that his fellow citizens paid for jointly, and has little value to them personally, but huge value to him, a few more architects and real estate agents, maybe 0.1% of the Greenwich population, tops.
When the government has to do something ANYWAY, just to run the town/state/nation, and it can also hugely benefit some businessmen, should they then get that benefit for free (lucky them!), or should the servants of the people who paid for it charge them all the traffic will bear, like any other steward of property or services would do? Please don't see
No problemo, just wanted to fix any other goofs if needed. Thanx for catching the wave height thing. It's important because it means that ships well out to sea are NOT toast and indeed can be part of the warning network...
Yeah, sorry, but the brevity required for a post didn't leave room for that nuance. Just substitute "the height of the wave upon a given landfall" for "the wave" to correct. Said height varies enormously with the specific shape of the coast it hits (gentle slope or steep) but it DOES decrease with distance from the origin, such factors being equal.
You said, "especially" before your one example. Did you have others, or was that mere hyperbole?
Presumably they are happy to take a loss because the buyers can't then jump to satellite easily...
Anyway, the 6208 (and presumably it's higher-end brother, the 6400 both allow direct recording to a firewire port, al though one reviewer said it just wouldn't work for PC, only Mac). of the post-decryption bitstream.
Hey, dude, you should give W.C. Fields the credit on that joke.
Well, they owe slashdot one customer, I guess.
... ... works
.M3U file to be the album index for the player. But you can make it use filenames with the track number prefixed ("01-title.mp3 02-title2.mp3") so that you can play them in order - or make an m3u file.
I clicked through, signed up for the free period (which involves giving them credit card stuff and remembering to Opt Out if you don't want to go beyond 2weeks/50 downloads) and browsed around.
The "download manager" does make things easier, and is offered as a Linux RPM. Which sent me on some "install fun":
1) convert-to-debian-with-alien, install with apt-get goes fine;
2) configuring Opera to run "emusicdm" for ".emp" files --
3) it runs but can't connect
4) a visit to emusic's help which quickly yields the advice to install the "NSCD" daemon...
5) "apt-get install nscd"
6) apt-get deciding to load in libraries
at some length
You don't need it, by the way, but it allows such tricks as downloading an album with one click.
Also, you have to configure your browser to run XMMS or whatever for ".m3u" files, which are not text lists of track names, but rather the file type of the 30s streamed samples...wierd.
And the album downloads don't come with a real
They have *some* well-known titles. I'm listening to Dizzy Gillespie as I type and have a Creedence Clearwater Revival oldie that's one of their top downloads at the moment.
But I can see if you don't want unknowns, you'd run out of things to download fairly fast unless you have broad tastes.
The question for me, is "Between the well-known ones and unknowns I like enough to spend two-bits/track after hearing a 30s sample, can I use up my 40 per month happily?" Yes.
(One amusing psychological effect, though: as a fixed price per track, in effect, I find myself resenting albums with more than a couple of two-minute songs on them and thinking "good deal" about 15-minute jazz or classical tracks...cheaper by the minute! Heh. Silly.)
I don't need every track on earth or unlimited downloads anymore than I need a lake of of water to scoop up a cup from. A bucket is fine, I can only drink a cup at a time. 40/month about matches the time I have to browse and get to like new music.
And the $10/month is maybe half (at most) of what I'm spending on music now. One less CD per month, in return for nearly 4X the music, and the ability to shop with 30s samples, which a record store doesn't give me.
It's a deal.
I like Mr. Sawyer (he's an enthusiastic attender of conventions, willing to discuss his work with quite small rooms of readers) but this article made me shake my head. I read it the other day and tried to hit on Backbone's web site to respond. (Uh-uh. No forums.)
Virtually every single prediction is well over 10 years away, and not just because of politics. Self-driving cars interfacing with millions of chips buried in the road? Even if made workable tomorrow, and tested and proven six-sigma safe the day after (try 20 years for each) we only repave *major* roads once every 20 years. Accelerating the schedule would double local taxes! Sheesh.
And the rest of them run like that. I think I read this same stuff in 1994 at the height of the machines-of-loving-grace-will-run-the-world burbling from WIRED in its heyday. And always, always, this stuff is prefaced with Moore's Law. Because of Moore's Law, any prediction involving intelligence in machines is "OK", no matter how outlandish.
But we've had over 30 years of Moore's Law since the first microchips and we still have computers that are dumb as rocks, just 1M times faster at being dumb as rocks. They barely can parse words reliably, have no idea what a sentence means, and definitely can't *see*. So, sorry, no low-carb-cooking, kitchen wash-up robots in a lousy 10 years.
Some of it was at least techically possible; the "every TV show ever available" is obviously a political problem, if they can solve that, they can do the appliances and the networking. But anything involving, say, fiber to the home - i.e. more than ONE custom-download HDTV show at a time - will require over 10 years just to get the fiber strung.
Shit takes TIME.
http://www.surgicaleyes.org
Look, if you wear glasses, surely you know the phenomenon where they get all scratched up and you start seeing halos around light sources at night?
Well, the process does that to your cornea. And you start seeing halos around lights at night.
Most people get this only very mildly, but a few have a real bad case. Some have so much of it that they start seeing a dozen little lights around the "main" image, because the scars create a lot of refractive surfaces on the cornea, like a fly's eye.
I figure I can last a few more years with glasses while they work that little bug out of the system. Because once the damage is done, it's done.
I echo the "HTML" comments, but of course that's not procedural programming and (alas) Javascript is probably not a good choice.
But Perl is a language where very simple things like the "Qbasic" examples posted will also work, but it is able to do useful things quickly and can be a very good complement to knowing HTML.
And it's free, works on every OS, etc...
I'm not a powerline guy either, and I probably shouldn't reply. But B. Fuller did talk to people that were, and I've mentioned this to others that were over the last 24 years since I heard it, and the concept seems to be believable.
You don't need to go much beyond the million-odd volts that is already used (if not common). It's not likely that you need to ship power from, say Australia to New York, even a "global grid" would mostly ship power 10,000 km or so. Don't forget, if you can ship it 10K, then THOSE people can free up plants to ship THEIR power another 10K, and so on. So in effect, you can make up a deficit in location X with power generated 20,000 km away from the need. Half way around the planet.
This all comes at major cost, and as I said, the far more sensible thing to do is concentrate on continental-sized power grids, use nuclear, most of it distributed to where its needed for base load, and only use solar/wind/hydro for 20% or so of the total need.
But global-level power sales, like the global oil market, are "merely" a political and economic problem, not an engineering impossibility.
I'm astonished that none of the hi-modded posters have mentioned the import of increasing power networking - increasing the amount and distance of power shared between generation facilities over the grid.
What frustrates pro-Nuke types (and yes, I'm one, but that's not my topic here) about renewable rants is that renewables are not useful for generating the "base load", the minimum level of power needed 7x24. Your wind and solar plants can't provide it when the sun isn't shining or the wind not blowing.
Buckminster Fuller pointed out nearly 50 years ago that the cost (in both $ and "lost energy" terms) of sharing power across great distances was rapidly dropping because it's a function of the voltage you can push the power up to. If you can transform it up to a million volts, you can share power across, say, 10,000km (all North America) with only a percent or so lost in transmission. This much is now becoming common today. BC and Alberta made out like bandits selling power to California during it's artificial "crisis" the other year.
Fuller proposed another order of magnitude: *global* sharing, and elaborated on it at a lecture at the U. of Calgary I was privileged to attend in 1980 (one of his last). He talked about running lines clear across the Bering Strait so that US power plants not needed when that side of the Earth was in sunlight could run the streetlights in China, Japan & Russia - and vice-versa. He told us that Russian engineers looked at the costs of the transformers and the big power lines in the 70's, ran the numbers on payback, and came back with "practicable and afforable - it's just a political problem". It still is.
Would a global grid cost trillions? Oh, yes; but big power towers and cables last a long time and the global banking system would be happy to hand you a 35-year mortgage on it.
It applies both to making renewables and nuclear more practicable.
For on thing, with long transmission distances, you can put the nuke plants where the uranium is and have NO transportation - just put the waste back in the mined-out drifts of the original uranium mine.
(Here's a wild thought: get a globe. Run a rough line from the major US power consumption area in the northeast, the Boston-Washington corridor, up to the Bering Straight, on the way to Asia. Notice it runs right through northern Saskatchewan? Where about 10% of the uranium on earth, most of the north American supply, just happens to sit. Good place for a cluster of plants, no? And if there's an accident, it's one of the emptiest places in the world.)
For another thing, the sun may not always shine, nor the wind always blow - in one place. But SOME solar/wind farms would always be generating.
With global thinking, you can put your solar where the reliability rate is high - across the great "world desert" that covers most of North Africa, through through Saudi, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan and parts of China. Then there's much of central Australia (60 degrees away); and another 90 degrees along, the western US and northern Mexico. If you can draw on all three of those places, you can get reliable solar 7x24.
Wind is chancier and more localized but the principle's the same - enough windfarms in enough places add up to a baseload.
If people really hated Nukes enough to pay triple the cost for renewable plants, then double AGAIN because they aren't always working and you have to build 2X as many all over the place to keep the global "grid" full - well, then we could get by with renewables ALONE.
With a big enough grid.
(Me, I'd just build about a quarter that costly a grid, do the base load with nukes and about 30% of the load with hydro and renewables for diversity. Then spend the ~~$300B/year difference on doing good works for both humans and the environment, but if you want to be a renewables fanatic, there's how you can make it work.)
I was reading the second article, and came to the bit about "No, I didn't forget to un-mute, because when there's no sound system recognized, you don't get a mixer tool" - and was hit by a sense of familiarity.
Looked around the back of my machine, and yes, built-in moboard sound plugs unused, and an older SoundBlaster with my audio plugs in it. And remembered, not a year back, a frustrating afternoon of re-installs wrestling with both the built-in LAN and the built-in sound. I finally settled on using the built-in LAN and disabling the sound because I wasn't doing anything with the old SB anyway.
It wasn't the hottest new motherboard - an ECS bargain-level; and at least the Linux was free (MEPIS). I'm planning to make a voluntary contribution at next upgrade but that little wrestling match dissuaded me on the first MEPIS install.
So I'm afraid I'm right in the same boat as Mr. Langa. I don't care WHAT the problem is, if you ruin my afternoon, I don't want to give you $100 for the OS.
If there's a bug in your salad, you don't have to pay the restaurant. It's an old rule, really.
Nobody has mentioned a thing I liked in the article. He points out in some detail that there are tricks requiring decryption of a DVD - I assume he's talking DeCSS that even most commercial products can't do, or don't do.
This is a terrific anti-DMCA argument, in the legal, not just moral, sense.
The Supremes let stand the existence of the VCR, that noted Boston Strangler of movie revenues, because of a single non-infringing use of recording: time shifting.
And here's this article mentions just in passing that a HTPC, using "piracy tools", can give the customer a fuller value out of his DVD purchase than anything available affordably that decodes the DVD legally. (And, "affordably" is important; Hollywood had no beef with the existence of $6000 studio VCRs).
The Johansen argument ("I wanted to watch it on my Linux box") wasn't convincing to a Windows person who'd never heard of Linux. Affordable solutions for "what can I do with this DVD" were available in the form of Windows and Mac software and for that matter $89 Sony players. The law need have no sympathy for Johansen wanting to see it on yet another platform.
But if I understood the article correctly, you can't get some of those very visible upsampling improvement features - an obvious real consumer benefit - ANY OTHER WAY than a PC using "piracy" tools.
And there's your one non-infringing use.
Well, the real trouble is that they are putting more effort into having a long feature checklist to put in the sales pitch, of course, plus as repeatedly mentioned that people buy based on the feature checklist, not a lot of time spent "test driving".
Did you ever spend time in an electronics store looking at the remotes and panel controls and asking "what's this one do"? The salesmen generally don't know. They know how to read you the feature checklist.
But electronics manufacturers would put in better controls if it weren't expensive and hard compared to a minimal number of buttons.
They all have to put in the same (or about same-priced) chip to run the remote or digital watch or cell phone. The chip gives them the feature checklist ("DVD also plays MP3! And WMA!") everything after that is expense with very little selling power.
A wheel to scroll through menus faster? Way more expensive than one button you have to hit over and over and over.
Six buttons and a wheel on your digital watch so each button doesn't need three modes? Extra five dollars to manufacture. And higher failure rate.
We now have an industry full of chips that double in brainpower every two years, but their connections to the outside world remain the same cost. So you have the same four buttons to access 97 features on your digital watch that used to have six features.
None of which explains why my now-dead 1990 Quasar VCR had a brilliant little button where one press meant "record now, current channel, for a half hour" and successive presses upped that to a hour, 90min, 2 hrs, etc. The button beside it, you could hit first, to delay recording to the next even half-hour, 2 presses to an hour, etc. These two buttons handled 98% of my timed-recording needs. Every VCR since has required me to go to a menu to set the start-time to the minute, then the duration to same.
Why did this not become universal? I have no idea. Because they're stupid about human factors?
If you're in Calgary, drop by the Calgary Unix User's Group
http://www.cuug.ab.ca
Or even just hit on our "bsdwall" project
http://www.bsdwall.org
We'll show you how to turn any old 486 and a couple of $2 NICs into an OpenBSD firewalling router for your home that's safer than any Linksys.
I can't say I've heard of your problem, but definitely not experienced it, since my "router" is just another computer... (I've got 4 machines inside the firewall)
Not much on topic, but notice who found it: Parkes in Australia - and the final paragraph says they're major pulsar discoverers down there.
After recently catching "The Dish" on a movie channel, it's nice to see the successors of the guys that brought a 10-year-old me the Apollo 11 TV signal are still in there on the frontiers of science.
There seems to be a misapprehension in many posts that the book is skeptical of global warming itself. It isn't.
There are a *few* comments to the effect that the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not certain, or at any rate the *magnitude* of the warming is much disputed, but Lomborg's comments just mirror the ongoing debate in the meteorlogical community itself.
Then he gets on with it and says, basically, "but let's just take the final conclusions of the panel as the best estimate we have" - the rest of the chapter is about the 1.5C-5.8C (most likely number : 2.2C) of warming we will see by 2100, according to the IPCC.
What the global warming, ah, community(?) hates about Lomborg is that he takes a position against Kyoto, based on the models and figures in the IPCC report.
In brief: that Kyoto is unlikely to delay that 2.2C warming by more than a miserable six years, at a cost of hundreds of billions that could be better spent preparing the hardest-hit nations for the *effects* of the warming, not to mention on R&D for wind turbines, solar power, safer nuke plants, fuel cells, etc.
This, I found pretty convincing.
Well, I'd say that OpenBSD firewalls have been "tried and tested by many"...many banks, many gov't agencies, etc...
We debated setting up web administration, but it opens a vulnerability; every complexity you add creates another possible hole.
The focus of the debate was that it would be a rather unusual individual who
1) DID have enough computer expertise to open and close particular ports or screen out particular IP domains or whatever you wanted to admin;
2) DID NOT have enough expertise to run SSH to the machine and edit a rules file with a text editor.
As for me and most of the users, there's no admin anyway; I just leave the default rules running and "administration" consists of a reboot every hundred days or so, whether it needs it or not.
We wrote up some instructions on what old NICs are supported and how to configure them (not needed if you have Pentium/PCI of course), plus very, very explicit OpenBSD install instructions based on the floppy-boot, over-the-net install.
Then we wrote a little Perl script to make the few changes to vanilla OpenBSD into a home/SOHO firewall, and called it "BSDwall".
See www.bsdwall.org
based out of the Calgary Unix Users Group site. It's been recently checked to work OK with OpenBSD 3.4. I can't imagine why anybody would use Linux for a firewall with OpenBSD also free; I use Linux on the desktop, but....if both BMW's and M-1 Tanks were free, and you had to drive through Iraq tonight, which free vehicle would you use?
Enjoy
Example: In my workplace, several years ago, some of the drafting staff became, over several years, sysadmins. Their job was to make maps. And they made maps with paper and pen. Then with CAD terminals running off a VAX. Then with CAD terminals running off a Intergraph UNIX server. Then with CAD UNIX workstations. Then with Windows NT workstations, but now running far more UNIX boxes than ever: file servers, plot servers, database servers (the maps were now stored in Oracle in a GIS). So they had to become database administrators, too. But they did all this in service of making maps. Specialization by product - and learn any technology you need to, to do it.
Developers used to be holistic, which is almost synonymous with "craftsman", and in turn with "slow production". They learned Assembler or FORTRAN or C or whatever, as long as it got their app out. They became a (minor) expert in whatever OS these tools were provided on. Now, prescriptive technology has become dominant in IT, with specialization by task: database admins, server admins, web server admins, and various layers and kinds of developers. Prescriptive technologies' endpoint is the Henry Ford assembly line: able to produce products far faster, and with tighter quality controls than all but the finest craftsmen, but less flexibly. (Which is usually bad in early stages of invention and development!)
Teamwork means a coordination problem and only selfless teamwork - from everybody, admins and SAs and programmers all, can minimize the coordination inefficiencies. (see: Fred Brooks "The Mythical Man-Month", written when mainframe programming had become highly prescriptive - PCs and client/server programming broke up that model for a while, but now it's taken over the new technology as well!)
I, personally, doubt that as much prescriptive technology as most organizations develop is really needed in development - one poster wrote of being "more like engineering". Well, I'm an engineer as well as an IT guy, and I would remind him of various "skunk works" approaches to physical engineering: shops where the engineers are king, managers are kept in place, creativity runs free, iterative developement is rapid. (Results of that work are developed by NON-skunk-works, more prescriptive, engineering departments into final products.)
Similarly, I'd advocate most development go in two stages. Brooks again: "Plan to write it twice - you will anyway". The first draft of an app should come out of a "skunk works" where developers control their own servers, network, and software toolset. That prototype can go through the "administrator mill" of more tested, more documented, more approved-products-only process.
And the sniping about "you aren't the one blamed when it dies at 3AM" can be approached by bringing a more "holistic" attitude to the development team. Make the DEVELOPER responsible for the app, not the administrator. Page HIM at 3AM. You'll find he is suddenly much more eager to work with the administrators to be sure the app works as well on the Official Production Server as it did in the skunk works.
We should all welcome a new and (even safer?) design strategy, but all designs have trade-offs.
...but the tradeoff is all that heavy water runs up the price of the thing.
Canada is justly proud of its very safe CANDU design, some good links at:
http://www.nucleartourist.com/type/candu.htm
They've got a new design out that's, yes, even safer, and (they hope) cheaper to run. They've got a good business going overseas, but you can't sell the things in North America at all.
So far.
One can only hope the interest in reducing carbon emissions will bring people to their senses. I'm all for green renewable technologies, too, but hydro, wind, and solar are just not yet up to being more than 20% or so of the generation mix. The other 80% has to be fossil or nuclear. Nukes are way cleaner.
Salon magazine recently has some hair-raising stories about environmental devastation from coal; and that's what "greens" are guaranteeing to continue by opposing nuclear.
DOH! A moment's further reading would have found me:
s ys tem/index.html
.. based on SuSE 8.2 and not on Red Hat Linux as it was originally said about a year ago. Yast2 and other SuSE/administrative utilities are only accessible via the command line and not from the graphical menu system. The desktop is based on Gnome 2.2, though Sun's engineers have tweaked it quite a bit.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/learnabout/desktop
about the Java Desktop, which clearly says its a JVE on top of Linux. A poster at a GNOME Board said it was: