A bit of googling tells me that, in a year, the sun puts out 150 EJ.
Yes, that is Wikipedia being wrong. I'm getting a bit tired of that number, I keep correcting Slashdot posts based on it. Perhaps I should get myself a Wikipedia account. As Chris Mattern points out, you are out by more than 6 orders of magnitude.
You could have discovered rather easily, by the way. The total food consumption of all animals must surely be at least an order of magnitude higher than what humans alone consume. More food is therefore consumed than total insolation. This is obviously nonsense.
Wind turbines produce way more than 12% of their nameplate rating, unless you're talking silly ones for home use. The rest of your conspirational garbage is just not worth reading.
A quote from the article: "corporate cronyism that preyed upon public ignorance of earth science to create a crisis — global warming — to exploit and loot the Treasury."
What about the situations when one has actual evidence of real conspiracy that involves mass murder and terrible horrific stuff? How about solid evidence of other, less-serious stuff. For example, what would you do if you had, in your possession, detailed memoranda from big-name people describing the particulars of how they conducted [successful] election fraud?
It is not a conspiracy if it is true. There are plenty of things which the general public just don't get and/or care about. You can try to educate people, but eventually you just have to pick your battles.
I.e. how many people keep track of U.S. drone strikes or even know that they happen? Believing in them does not make you a conspiracy theorist, it just means that you are better informed than most.
According to the Bible, the Romans didn't particularly care about that minor troublemaker. Instead it was the local population incited by people with power who asked the governing Romans to get rid of him. I would say that it worked out pretty well for the Romans, there certainly was no mass insurrection at the time.
There are practically no references to any of this outside the Bible, which implies that the Roman Empire basically had no idea that he existed.
The reason "free-market" types totally lose it when discussing solutions to climate change is that the main solution proposed is a blasphemously fake free-market in CO2. Carbon markets are anethema to those who believe in free markets, they're more or less a free anti-market that governs the non-production of something instead of the production of it.
Actually the main solution proposed was simply taxing CO2 pollution. The idiotic CO2 market was an attempt to get USA to agree to the Kyoto accord. Since that failed anyway, the sensible thing to do would be to say "stuff it" and go back to taxing CO2. Alas, once enough effort has been put into inventing something bad, it is very difficult for humanity to just go back and say oops, that was stupid, let us forget that idea.
The solution I favor, and that I believe will be the successful one, is the natural move to alternative forms of energy. I think that advances in alternative energy (both lowering cost and increasing efficiency) will lead to clean electricity generation, and that electric vehicles (and/or hybrids) will be the norm in the next 20-30 years. I think all of this can happen without the burden of a carbon market.
A lot of the fossil fuels available can be dug out of the ground for the equivalent of USD 50 per barrel of oil or less. We can hope that clean energy sources manage to get cheaper than that in 20 years, but it seems like quite a large gamble. Even at energy prices equivalent to USD 25 per barrel of oil, quite a lot of fossil fuels are worth digging up, and that seems like an impossible 20-year target right now. Also, that price would make consumption skyrocket, so it is likely that manufacture of solar panels and so on would not be able to keep up with demand, even if the cost of production was low enough.
What do you propose to do if the problem does not happen to solve itself?
The article is total crap, every disk supports NCQ as half the world's population has pointed out in the comments.
The problems are elsewhere: When a disk suddenly loses power while it is writing, there is a risk of various interesting errors. The disk may a) write nulls instead of the correct data, b) write garbage instead of the correct data, c) fail in the middle of a Read-Modify-Write operation and therefore destroy data in files which weren't written to at all, d) write good data to the wrong place on the disk, e) write garbage to a random spot on the disk. Sometimes you are lucky and the errors result in bad hardware checksums so you know you have lost data, at other times the wrong data gets the correct checksum.
In practice, very few desktop/notebook/whatever users will see these problems. No reviews test for these types of errors, so you cannot try to buy drives which fail in less harmful ways. If you care enough, you will use file systems with checksumming designed to catch all the above errors and more (Btrfs and ZFS come to mind). They will at least notify you that it happened, and depending on the redundancy settings they may be able to rescue the destroyed data.
The problem is that detecting infected computers invariably requires some level of privacy intrusion, and possibly committing numerous felonies to probe the machine.
In many cases it doesn't. Sometimes it just requires noticing that one customer is responsible for 30% of all traffic flows in a particular core router. You can call that privacy intrusion, but in most of Europe doing flow monitoring is mandated by law, so you might as well run statistics.
And yes, the ISP I work for has in a few cases blocked customer traffic from infected machines. It is a medium-sized ISP, so that can be done without angering the infected customers. It can be difficult to get hold of the right people at the customer, and the large ISP's probably only have billing contacts for most customers.
After April 2014, when Microsoft stops publishing patches to correct security defects in Windows XP, expect computer criminals to discover a way to 0wn all XP boxes on the net.
I highly doubt that. Perhaps all XP boxes connected without a hardware firewall in front, but by 2014 we will be out of IPv4-addresses, so almost everyone will be behind some kind of gateway which will cause trouble for incoming connections. Not much security, but probably enough to keep a passive XP box from being compromised.
Browsing on XP will likely be fraught with dangers, but for a game machine that is not much of a concern. Outside of exploits in the games themselves (they strangely haven't been much of a target yet), running XP for games should be just fine.
It'll hardly be the first time that a scientifically observed phenomenon has no current theoretical explanation.
However, most of them turn out to just be false observation.
There are many more cold fusions and Pioneer anomalies and FTL neutrinos than there are observations leading to actual new physics. It is certainly important that these observations are being tested independently, but it is also almost certain that there will be funding and interest in doing so.
Over-hyping the current observations is likely to result in the public getting this message: "scientists are wrong, again".
How about, "DDT is causing birth defects in Greenland"? (And no, Greenland doesn't use DDT itself)
Since there are fewer people on Greenland than people who suffer from malaria, it is still worth it to use DDT. Don't say that causing one baby in Greenland to live with deformity in order to save a hundred babies in Africa is a morally easy choice to make. Pure utilitarianism is scary.
Maybe a bit overdramatic - but the truth is that overpopulation is every bit as much of a problem as climate change - if not more so.
World population is growing at 1% a year, and the rate is slowing down. Overpopulation is a solved problem. Population density in Africa is very low on average.
Climate change on the other hand is far from a solved problem, and killing people is unlikely to help anything. The people who die are the people who do not contribute to the climate change.
Improvements in child mortality lead to falling birth rates. Also, most of Africa is very sparsely populated. Africa could feed 10 times the current population if they industrialized to the level of China or India.
Absolutely, I am not saying that mainframes don't have a role or that people are stupid for buying them. Mainframes are great at what they do, and almost every time high-end Unix boxes "steal" a reliability or I/O-performance feature from mainframes, the mainframe people seem to invent a new one.
I am only saying that if your primary need is a lot of CPU in a small amount of space, without requiring I/O or reliability or the other benefits of a mainframe, you should not buy a mainframe. However, the number of people who impulse buy a mainframe based on what they read in a Slashdot post is likely low.
Mainframes are probably one of the most underutilized tools out there. However, for performance per square foot in the data center, they are hard to beat these days.
I really don't believe you are right about that. The core density of mainframes is rather sad compared to Google-style densely packed rack mounts. You can only fit about 100 user accessible processors in one mainframe, which gives you around 600 cores. You can easily fit 800 x86 cores in a standard 42U rack, even with bog-standard 1U servers while leaving room for switches and cooling, and you can more than double that if footprint is your main concern. In contrast, that mainframe won't fit in a standard 19" rack footprint AND it requires separate space for the management console.
If you are mainly running batch jobs, the lack of CPU performance of the mainframe likely won't matter and the enormous I/O capacity is very difficult to achieve in the x86 space. In that case you may well be right that the mainframe wins on performance per square foot.
You can't do specialty chips and win for the workstation market today. You would need to sell millions just to pay for the first batch of chips, and that just isn't going to happen. Alternatively you need to aim for a $100k target price, and "only" sell hundreds of thousands. Not much better.
You can go for specialty server chips like POWER or... well, you could go for POWER. Good luck with that.
How do you notice that the desktop has been replaced with a tablet? You'll obviously still be using your keyboard and a proper screen. All it will mean is a bit more space under the desk.
But yes, the high end PC's will persist for a long time. You can still buy a Mini or an OpenVMS server. They just offer completely crap value for money compared to the mainstream. You cannot actually buy a Unix workstation it seems (at least I couldn't find any from HP or Oracle). A high end CAD workstation today is simply a PC with a powerful CPU and high-end gaming card + different firmware and extra graphics memory. Once the high-end PC gaming cards and the high-end PC CPU's disappear, CAD workstations will need to find something else to build on. Luckily tablet CPU/GPU's look like they will become quite usable for the purpose. If you really need the power, you can run them in parallel. Single-thread CPU performance will still suck.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit of googling tells me that, in a year, the sun puts out 150 EJ.
Yes, that is Wikipedia being wrong. I'm getting a bit tired of that number, I keep correcting Slashdot posts based on it. Perhaps I should get myself a Wikipedia account. As Chris Mattern points out, you are out by more than 6 orders of magnitude.
You could have discovered rather easily, by the way. The total food consumption of all animals must surely be at least an order of magnitude higher than what humans alone consume. More food is therefore consumed than total insolation. This is obviously nonsense.
Wind turbines produce way more than 12% of their nameplate rating, unless you're talking silly ones for home use. The rest of your conspirational garbage is just not worth reading.
A quote from the article: "corporate cronyism that preyed upon public ignorance of earth science to create a crisis — global warming — to exploit and loot the Treasury."
What about the situations when one has actual evidence of real conspiracy that involves mass murder and terrible horrific stuff? How about solid evidence of other, less-serious stuff. For example, what would you do if you had, in your possession, detailed memoranda from big-name people describing the particulars of how they conducted [successful] election fraud?
It is not a conspiracy if it is true. There are plenty of things which the general public just don't get and/or care about. You can try to educate people, but eventually you just have to pick your battles.
I.e. how many people keep track of U.S. drone strikes or even know that they happen? Believing in them does not make you a conspiracy theorist, it just means that you are better informed than most.
According to the Bible, the Romans didn't particularly care about that minor troublemaker. Instead it was the local population incited by people with power who asked the governing Romans to get rid of him. I would say that it worked out pretty well for the Romans, there certainly was no mass insurrection at the time.
There are practically no references to any of this outside the Bible, which implies that the Roman Empire basically had no idea that he existed.
The reason "free-market" types totally lose it when discussing solutions to climate change is that the main solution proposed is a blasphemously fake free-market in CO2. Carbon markets are anethema to those who believe in free markets, they're more or less a free anti-market that governs the non-production of something instead of the production of it.
Actually the main solution proposed was simply taxing CO2 pollution. The idiotic CO2 market was an attempt to get USA to agree to the Kyoto accord. Since that failed anyway, the sensible thing to do would be to say "stuff it" and go back to taxing CO2. Alas, once enough effort has been put into inventing something bad, it is very difficult for humanity to just go back and say oops, that was stupid, let us forget that idea.
The solution I favor, and that I believe will be the successful one, is the natural move to alternative forms of energy. I think that advances in alternative energy (both lowering cost and increasing efficiency) will lead to clean electricity generation, and that electric vehicles (and/or hybrids) will be the norm in the next 20-30 years. I think all of this can happen without the burden of a carbon market.
A lot of the fossil fuels available can be dug out of the ground for the equivalent of USD 50 per barrel of oil or less. We can hope that clean energy sources manage to get cheaper than that in 20 years, but it seems like quite a large gamble. Even at energy prices equivalent to USD 25 per barrel of oil, quite a lot of fossil fuels are worth digging up, and that seems like an impossible 20-year target right now. Also, that price would make consumption skyrocket, so it is likely that manufacture of solar panels and so on would not be able to keep up with demand, even if the cost of production was low enough.
What do you propose to do if the problem does not happen to solve itself?
The article is total crap, every disk supports NCQ as half the world's population has pointed out in the comments.
The problems are elsewhere: When a disk suddenly loses power while it is writing, there is a risk of various interesting errors. The disk may a) write nulls instead of the correct data, b) write garbage instead of the correct data, c) fail in the middle of a Read-Modify-Write operation and therefore destroy data in files which weren't written to at all, d) write good data to the wrong place on the disk, e) write garbage to a random spot on the disk. Sometimes you are lucky and the errors result in bad hardware checksums so you know you have lost data, at other times the wrong data gets the correct checksum.
In practice, very few desktop/notebook/whatever users will see these problems. No reviews test for these types of errors, so you cannot try to buy drives which fail in less harmful ways. If you care enough, you will use file systems with checksumming designed to catch all the above errors and more (Btrfs and ZFS come to mind). They will at least notify you that it happened, and depending on the redundancy settings they may be able to rescue the destroyed data.
If you want to see basically all the current graphical data available on sea ice in Arctis, you want Arctic sea ice graphs. Take a look!
So is quarantining people infected with Ebola infringing on their free speech then?
Of course it is, assuming they don't get to communicate (most are probably too busy trying not to die though).
Sometimes infringing on free speech is necessary. The question is simply where the line is.
The problem is that detecting infected computers invariably requires some level of privacy intrusion, and possibly committing numerous felonies to probe the machine.
In many cases it doesn't. Sometimes it just requires noticing that one customer is responsible for 30% of all traffic flows in a particular core router. You can call that privacy intrusion, but in most of Europe doing flow monitoring is mandated by law, so you might as well run statistics.
And yes, the ISP I work for has in a few cases blocked customer traffic from infected machines. It is a medium-sized ISP, so that can be done without angering the infected customers. It can be difficult to get hold of the right people at the customer, and the large ISP's probably only have billing contacts for most customers.
For a more natural solution, goldfish would probably work. Of course there are challenges to bringing fish camping, but not unsurmountable ones.
After April 2014, when Microsoft stops publishing patches to correct security defects in Windows XP, expect computer criminals to discover a way to 0wn all XP boxes on the net.
I highly doubt that. Perhaps all XP boxes connected without a hardware firewall in front, but by 2014 we will be out of IPv4-addresses, so almost everyone will be behind some kind of gateway which will cause trouble for incoming connections. Not much security, but probably enough to keep a passive XP box from being compromised.
Browsing on XP will likely be fraught with dangers, but for a game machine that is not much of a concern. Outside of exploits in the games themselves (they strangely haven't been much of a target yet), running XP for games should be just fine.
It'll hardly be the first time that a scientifically observed phenomenon has no current theoretical explanation.
However, most of them turn out to just be false observation.
There are many more cold fusions and Pioneer anomalies and FTL neutrinos than there are observations leading to actual new physics. It is certainly important that these observations are being tested independently, but it is also almost certain that there will be funding and interest in doing so.
Over-hyping the current observations is likely to result in the public getting this message: "scientists are wrong, again".
How about, "DDT might be harmful to birds' eggs?"
How about, "DDT is causing birth defects in Greenland"? (And no, Greenland doesn't use DDT itself)
Since there are fewer people on Greenland than people who suffer from malaria, it is still worth it to use DDT. Don't say that causing one baby in Greenland to live with deformity in order to save a hundred babies in Africa is a morally easy choice to make. Pure utilitarianism is scary.
They changed in Europe, as little as 3 generations ago. They will change in Africa too, for the same reason.
Religion rarely beats prosperity, except in a minority of the population.
I don't think the Brits had much interest in improving the lot of Australians, but their colonization eventually had that effect.
Did it though? Are there even any left?
Gifts with strings attached are part of what made Africa the mess that (som of it) is.
Maybe a bit overdramatic - but the truth is that overpopulation is every bit as much of a problem as climate change - if not more so.
World population is growing at 1% a year, and the rate is slowing down. Overpopulation is a solved problem. Population density in Africa is very low on average.
Climate change on the other hand is far from a solved problem, and killing people is unlikely to help anything. The people who die are the people who do not contribute to the climate change.
Improvements in child mortality lead to falling birth rates. Also, most of Africa is very sparsely populated. Africa could feed 10 times the current population if they industrialized to the level of China or India.
Yes, but ATI didn't develop open drivers after all. Intel did.
Absolutely, I am not saying that mainframes don't have a role or that people are stupid for buying them. Mainframes are great at what they do, and almost every time high-end Unix boxes "steal" a reliability or I/O-performance feature from mainframes, the mainframe people seem to invent a new one.
I am only saying that if your primary need is a lot of CPU in a small amount of space, without requiring I/O or reliability or the other benefits of a mainframe, you should not buy a mainframe. However, the number of people who impulse buy a mainframe based on what they read in a Slashdot post is likely low.
Mainframes are probably one of the most underutilized tools out there. However, for performance per square foot in the data center, they are hard to beat these days.
I really don't believe you are right about that. The core density of mainframes is rather sad compared to Google-style densely packed rack mounts. You can only fit about 100 user accessible processors in one mainframe, which gives you around 600 cores. You can easily fit 800 x86 cores in a standard 42U rack, even with bog-standard 1U servers while leaving room for switches and cooling, and you can more than double that if footprint is your main concern. In contrast, that mainframe won't fit in a standard 19" rack footprint AND it requires separate space for the management console.
If you are mainly running batch jobs, the lack of CPU performance of the mainframe likely won't matter and the enormous I/O capacity is very difficult to achieve in the x86 space. In that case you may well be right that the mainframe wins on performance per square foot.
You can't do specialty chips and win for the workstation market today. You would need to sell millions just to pay for the first batch of chips, and that just isn't going to happen. Alternatively you need to aim for a $100k target price, and "only" sell hundreds of thousands. Not much better.
You can go for specialty server chips like POWER or... well, you could go for POWER. Good luck with that.
I was going to use Alan Cox as the counterexample, but I cannot find anywhere that says he finished his dissertation.
How do you notice that the desktop has been replaced with a tablet? You'll obviously still be using your keyboard and a proper screen. All it will mean is a bit more space under the desk.
But yes, the high end PC's will persist for a long time. You can still buy a Mini or an OpenVMS server. They just offer completely crap value for money compared to the mainstream. You cannot actually buy a Unix workstation it seems (at least I couldn't find any from HP or Oracle). A high end CAD workstation today is simply a PC with a powerful CPU and high-end gaming card + different firmware and extra graphics memory. Once the high-end PC gaming cards and the high-end PC CPU's disappear, CAD workstations will need to find something else to build on. Luckily tablet CPU/GPU's look like they will become quite usable for the purpose. If you really need the power, you can run them in parallel. Single-thread CPU performance will still suck.
It is highly unlikely that you will be unable to buy a bunch of screens and a keyboard.
Also, the reference to kids is a bit amusing.