There's always the perennial objection that Wikipedia lacks credibility, but stories like this should show the skeptics how an open system like this actually works. In time, the thousands of eyes approach weeds out questionable content, leaving only publication quality articles.
Nonsense. The ability to weed out the obviously absurd was never in question.
Of course if the Sun admins are going by what the www.sun.com webpage says, they're probably just as confused as I am about when the real version of Solaris 10 is coming, why they had a "release event" without releasing the actual product, why all those "Solaris 10" links go to Solaris Express beta downloads, and so on.
Of course Interix or whoever MS bought the thing from probably paid the piper already, but knowing SCO's proclivity for lawsuits, I don't blame MS for doing it again.
This is what we refer to as basic math, and it can be helpful.
Yes. It's so helpful, let's talk about it a little more...
Compare a windmill that produces a few kilowatts against a nuclear waste facility that services several terrawatt years of nuclear energy.
Terrawatt/years! There's a unit of measurement you don't see every day. It's probably a really useful unit of measurement, too, so let's examine it.
All of the nuclear plants, combined, in the US have a peak output of 99 gigawatts. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reac tors/operational.xls That's pretty paltry! In fact, you'd need a whole fucking decade of peak output from these plants to get the "terrawatt/year" you're talkling about.
So how many windmills would it take to equal the 99 gigawatts of peak output from our nuclear plants? GE has a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine now. You'd need 66000 windmills to get an equal peak amount of output from those wind turbines. Several very large windfarms in each state.
In order to provide for all our energy needs, we'd need something like a billion windmills (simple math will confirm this)
That turns out to be, well, completely wrong. The output of the latest turbines has really jumped, though, so we'll forgive you. If I've calculated this right, you were only off by a factor of about... fifteen thousand.
All that said, I'd love to see working fusion, too, and have nothing against well-run fission plants-- but why not put windmills on farmland or desert? Or even housing editions in the suburbs? The space is there, and adding windmills to the average middle-of-nowhere midwestern farm does very little to its farming output.
It could add a lot of redundancy to a well-designed power grid, too, in case of war or sabotage, not to mention natural disasters. Even assuming that everything works out perfectly in fusion research, having a few huge fusion plants produce all our power seems kind of risky in terms of civil defense.
Windmills (unless they are the Dutch Variety:P) spoil the view.
That's a matter of perception. People hated the Eiffel Tower at first, too. (not a great analogy, but still) If people can adapt to living next to a nasty coal plant, they can adapt to windmills, too.
That's the Mojave Desert. It's the cheapest land in California, it's the windiest land in California, and that "parking lot/graveyard" is the place that they launched SpaceShipOne from.
Should it have been built in the middle of San Franciso, even though it would cost a hundred times as much and would produce a quarter of the power?
There are a bunch of windmills just east of Walnut Creek, sort of in the central valley I guess. Less than 20 miles from San Francisco IIRC.
That might be a good theory if the aim was to start using renewable energy as quickly as possible. However, that is not the main objective. Environmentalists want to transfer to green energy before we pump too much more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And, well, hello, it would be nice if we made the switch away from buring up oil before the cost of petrochemicals in general becomes ten times higher than it already is. Not just petrochemicals that we burn up, but stuff like, you know, plastics.
Petroleum is nifty and cool enough that burning it and driving up the price is kind of a waste, even if you're not worried about the greenhouse effect. Switching away from burning up all the easily accessible oil before economic forces force the change on us would be nice, since it would mean we'd have much cheaper petrochemicals for centuries. But it's the kind of very long term payout that people don't typically worry about.
The problems in Fernald aren't related to civilian power plants, power lines, garbage dumps, or cheese factories.
Sure they are. (related to civilian plants, that is... not sure why you thought the other stuff was funny) The point is (in short) that if even the military and DOE can't handle nuclear material responsibly, we've got a big problem. It's obviously not the only example in Ohio, either.
If you insist on a civilian example of human factor problems with fission, there's the recent and ongoing problems with the reactor in Perry, Ohio. The point is that it's not the technology that is the problem, but the technology ends up being dangerous because of the human factor.
Military production of Uranium. They didn't understand the risks of radiation for the first decade of the plant's life, and then some.
The problems in Fernauld existed well after the problems were understood by the scientific community at large, due to the human factor issues I'm talking about.
I wonder if they ever consider that the reason they find more cancer around power plants, power lines, garbage dumps, cheese factories, is because they are looking harder there.
That's just a simple problem of the quality of the statistics work being done, which obviously varies. However, I had some pretty specific examples in mind, like Fernauld, Ohio. The stuff that went on there isn't proof of some inherent problem with fission or nuclear weapons or anything, just an example human problems or poor training killing people. But still. The big part in bringing back fission in a big way isn't the technology, it's correcting the human and bureaucratic problems and then convincing the public that we've done so. I don't have a lot of faith that that will happen.
I completely agree with you , but try telling that to the kneejerk reaction anti nuclear fanatics who can't see the wood for their own foolishly planted trees. Mind you, I've met some of these people and half of them couldn't even spell "radioactivity" never mind tell you what it was.
I always end up taking the devil's advocate position here, even though I very much support fission energy use in principle. Look, if the military and civilian workers involved in fission energy production and nuclear material processing here in Ohio provide any example, the people responsible for operating nuclear plants safely are doing that job because they couldn't get jobs at the phone company. Think Homer Simpson. It doesn't impress people when you explain to them that the dramatic increase in cancer rates in their town isn't due to some inherent flaw in fission energy or nuclear materials handling, it's just that they've been hiring idiots lately.
Instead of being snobs about the opponents to nuclear power, our government will need to convince ordinary people that the plants can be operated safely if we start building them again, which is primarily a human problem. Blathering on about the inherent greatness of fission or the dumbness of its opponents ends up being quite counterproductive. Why don't people understand this?
Japan, after all, isn't allowed to arm itself since being on the losing side in WWII.
One of the most potentially entertaining side-effects of "freedom" being on the march in the middle east is that Article 9 of Japan's constitution is in greater and greater jeopardy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4078815. st m http://www.asahi.com/english/opinion/TKY2004120 801 19.html
It's not that there is anything wrong with your reading of their constitution but they are armed, nevertheless. Not to worry, I'm sure they'd never do anything rash.
I'm a Wikipedia contributor, but I find the automatic response of "You're criticising a Wiki? How DARE you...stop whining and fix it yourself!" to be very irritating.
It's the same attitude that Open Source robots tend to take when someone criticizes their work, too. Often it's a pathetic way to rationalize shoddy work, born from an inability to accept criticism gracefully.
Just because they are Microsoft and therefor inherently evil doesn't mean they can't be incompetent as well.
That's where I disagree. There's nothing "evil" about what they're trying to do. Insofar as Microsoft has helped bring technology to people who didn't have it, they're generally doing good. Their "evilness" has always been limited to contract law and the way they relate to other companies, which isn't relevant here and is a pretty mild form of evilness, in the scheme of things.
We can measure the "evilness" of energy companies, mining companies, industrial, or whatnot, in terms of bodycount. Microsoft's evilness seems to involve making life a little more difficult for competing software companies, while bringing largely unoriginal but effective solutions to consumers. You have to have a really myopic view of the world to view that as "evil."
If you view the long term in those terms (which I'm not sure are valid), and AMD and Microsoft are successful in helping to improve those third-world economies to the point where people in those countries can afford higher-margin products... more power to them. Let them have their (very) long-term profits.
If some company with a Linux-based solution wants to compete in the "selling super-cheap computer stuff to third world countries" market, more power to them, too. It seems like a natural niche for Linux, but so far nobody is making it happen on the scale AMD and Microsoft are trying to do.
Quit your whining, you big baby. They don't owe you anything you didn't pay for.
Which was never my point. Believe it or not I'm actually among the 0.005% of Linux users who actually buys the occasional Linux distribution.
Other than the binary RPM already being compiled, what's the difference?
When I compared the various RHEL clones I found some variation. It is apparently because of the build environment used to build the individual packages (and perhaps more). The tools included with RHEL are not always the tools used to build a given package - this is why making CentOS 3 self-hosting was actually sort of an undertaking. Taolinux takes the opposite approach of making packages as similar to RHEL as possible. The Taolinux docs claim that some of the initial RHEL packages were built on RH9, and they build some of their packages on RH9 to match.
All of which is beside the point you were getting all hot and bothered about, which is that nobody would pay for Redhat's crap if they didn't have to... which is why they force people to do it by witholding binary updates. I don't really care one way or the other about whether Redhat does this, and they aren't the only ones, I was only stating the obvious, which is why your response is so amusing to me. Please continue.
Consider it a teaser or loss leader. The first one is free...
Right. Becuase once they're hooked, those sub-Saharan Africans will be ready to shell out the big bucks for all sorts of software and electronics. AMD and Microsoft will have them right where they want them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. The ability to weed out the obviously absurd was never in question.
The t is silent, you ignoramus.
Ha. I had Microsoft > Sun in the subject but slashcode nerfed it. I'm sure there's a good reason why.
At least in the "eating your own dogfood" department:e orgewbushcom_switches_to_selfhosted_freebsd_server _wwwsuncom_upgrades_to_solaris_9_not_10.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/12/11/wwwg
Of course if the Sun admins are going by what the www.sun.com webpage says, they're probably just as confused as I am about when the real version of Solaris 10 is coming, why they had a "release event" without releasing the actual product, why all those "Solaris 10" links go to Solaris Express beta downloads, and so on.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/
Of course Interix or whoever MS bought the thing from probably paid the piper already, but knowing SCO's proclivity for lawsuits, I don't blame MS for doing it again.
Yes. It's so helpful, let's talk about it a little more...
Terrawatt/years! There's a unit of measurement you don't see every day. It's probably a really useful unit of measurement, too, so let's examine it.
All of the nuclear plants, combined, in the US have a peak output of 99 gigawatts. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_rea
So how many windmills would it take to equal the 99 gigawatts of peak output from our nuclear plants? GE has a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine now. You'd need 66000 windmills to get an equal peak amount of output from those wind turbines. Several very large windfarms in each state.
That turns out to be, well, completely wrong. The output of the latest turbines has really jumped, though, so we'll forgive you. If I've calculated this right, you were only off by a factor of about... fifteen thousand.
Yeah, since the remaining soil is so fertile.
No one important, anyway.
It could add a lot of redundancy to a well-designed power grid, too, in case of war or sabotage, not to mention natural disasters. Even assuming that everything works out perfectly in fusion research, having a few huge fusion plants produce all our power seems kind of risky in terms of civil defense.
That's a matter of perception. People hated the Eiffel Tower at first, too. (not a great analogy, but still) If people can adapt to living next to a nasty coal plant, they can adapt to windmills, too.
There are a bunch of windmills just east of Walnut Creek, sort of in the central valley I guess. Less than 20 miles from San Francisco IIRC.
And, well, hello, it would be nice if we made the switch away from buring up oil before the cost of petrochemicals in general becomes ten times higher than it already is. Not just petrochemicals that we burn up, but stuff like, you know, plastics.
Petroleum is nifty and cool enough that burning it and driving up the price is kind of a waste, even if you're not worried about the greenhouse effect. Switching away from burning up all the easily accessible oil before economic forces force the change on us would be nice, since it would mean we'd have much cheaper petrochemicals for centuries. But it's the kind of very long term payout that people don't typically worry about.
Sure they are. (related to civilian plants, that is... not sure why you thought the other stuff was funny) The point is (in short) that if even the military and DOE can't handle nuclear material responsibly, we've got a big problem. It's obviously not the only example in Ohio, either.
If you insist on a civilian example of human factor problems with fission, there's the recent and ongoing problems with the reactor in Perry, Ohio. The point is that it's not the technology that is the problem, but the technology ends up being dangerous because of the human factor.
The problems in Fernauld existed well after the problems were understood by the scientific community at large, due to the human factor issues I'm talking about.
That's just a simple problem of the quality of the statistics work being done, which obviously varies. However, I had some pretty specific examples in mind, like Fernauld, Ohio. The stuff that went on there isn't proof of some inherent problem with fission or nuclear weapons or anything, just an example human problems or poor training killing people. But still. The big part in bringing back fission in a big way isn't the technology, it's correcting the human and bureaucratic problems and then convincing the public that we've done so. I don't have a lot of faith that that will happen.
Ah, we're in agreement then. :)
I always end up taking the devil's advocate position here, even though I very much support fission energy use in principle. Look, if the military and civilian workers involved in fission energy production and nuclear material processing here in Ohio provide any example, the people responsible for operating nuclear plants safely are doing that job because they couldn't get jobs at the phone company. Think Homer Simpson. It doesn't impress people when you explain to them that the dramatic increase in cancer rates in their town isn't due to some inherent flaw in fission energy or nuclear materials handling, it's just that they've been hiring idiots lately.
Instead of being snobs about the opponents to nuclear power, our government will need to convince ordinary people that the plants can be operated safely if we start building them again, which is primarily a human problem. Blathering on about the inherent greatness of fission or the dumbness of its opponents ends up being quite counterproductive. Why don't people understand this?
Which is a neat trick, since the hot game consoles are available in Japan first.
One of the most potentially entertaining side-effects of "freedom" being on the march in the middle east is that Article 9 of Japan's constitution is in greater and greater jeopardy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4078815
http://www.asahi.com/english/opinion/TKY200412
It's not that there is anything wrong with your reading of their constitution but they are armed, nevertheless. Not to worry, I'm sure they'd never do anything rash.
You're thinking of the version with the V-chip.
It's the same attitude that Open Source robots tend to take when someone criticizes their work, too. Often it's a pathetic way to rationalize shoddy work, born from an inability to accept criticism gracefully.
That's where I disagree. There's nothing "evil" about what they're trying to do. Insofar as Microsoft has helped bring technology to people who didn't have it, they're generally doing good. Their "evilness" has always been limited to contract law and the way they relate to other companies, which isn't relevant here and is a pretty mild form of evilness, in the scheme of things.
We can measure the "evilness" of energy companies, mining companies, industrial, or whatnot, in terms of bodycount. Microsoft's evilness seems to involve making life a little more difficult for competing software companies, while bringing largely unoriginal but effective solutions to consumers. You have to have a really myopic view of the world to view that as "evil."
If you view the long term in those terms (which I'm not sure are valid), and AMD and Microsoft are successful in helping to improve those third-world economies to the point where people in those countries can afford higher-margin products... more power to them. Let them have their (very) long-term profits.
If some company with a Linux-based solution wants to compete in the "selling super-cheap computer stuff to third world countries" market, more power to them, too. It seems like a natural niche for Linux, but so far nobody is making it happen on the scale AMD and Microsoft are trying to do.
Which was never my point. Believe it or not I'm actually among the 0.005% of Linux users who actually buys the occasional Linux distribution.
When I compared the various RHEL clones I found some variation. It is apparently because of the build environment used to build the individual packages (and perhaps more). The tools included with RHEL are not always the tools used to build a given package - this is why making CentOS 3 self-hosting was actually sort of an undertaking. Taolinux takes the opposite approach of making packages as similar to RHEL as possible. The Taolinux docs claim that some of the initial RHEL packages were built on RH9, and they build some of their packages on RH9 to match.
All of which is beside the point you were getting all hot and bothered about, which is that nobody would pay for Redhat's crap if they didn't have to... which is why they force people to do it by witholding binary updates. I don't really care one way or the other about whether Redhat does this, and they aren't the only ones, I was only stating the obvious, which is why your response is so amusing to me. Please continue.
Right. Becuase once they're hooked, those sub-Saharan Africans will be ready to shell out the big bucks for all sorts of software and electronics. AMD and Microsoft will have them right where they want them.
Come on.
Those aren't updates. They are source code for the updates paying customers get. Thanks, please come again.
Yes, and the notion of doing that thrills me.
Where do you get these figures? What could they possibly be losing European market share to? I don't believe it's Redhat for a minute.