In theory, you could make bioethanol in a way that doesn't affect food crops (algae etc). BUT: with the laws of economics at work, farmers WILL make sure they'll grow the highest-profit crop. This will most likely be corn for bioethanol then.
I think that solar panels are not likely to become useful enough for heavy use. Solar concentration maybe, but you still need a lot of space for that. Wind energy is relatively easy but probably not economical yet. In the windy region where I live, they didn't build any new windmill, actually removed a windmill in the last two years. Coal and nuclear power are just cheaper, that's all that counts in the end.
I had the same issue as the ask slashdot poster: I have a prepaid flatrate on my cellphone and for international calls I use skype or other services. So in fact I didn't use my landline at all. My cellphone provider (O2 Germany) recently started a flatrate UMTS prepaid package: You put 25 euro on your prepaid account, they remove it on the day your flatrate starts and automatically prolong as long as you load 25 euro on your prepaid account each month. When you stop, your flatrate stops, and you can restart it anytime.
Even though I have plenty of DSL choices in my town, I now switch to UMTS only just because I will have no contract at all for my connectivity! Most other options are 2 year contracts, even though it's about 5 euro per month cheaper, in the long run it's more expensive if you ever want to get rid of it.
Only disadvantages are the lower speed, but that's hardly noticeable for my usage, and that above 10GB they switch to GPRS speeds (=slow). I called customer service once, to ask how I know how much I used. They couldn't tell me, just told me to use the program that came with the USB stick. I told them I don't use the program because it doesn't work on my linux EEE. I wonder if they really can check, from the other comments here I guess they can't. And then I wonder if maybe their connection software does the capping, which would be nasty but also easy to pass:p
Actually, what I see is that the bloat makes mainly *the rendering* of the pages slower, not so much retrieving the data. I tried UMTS which reaches about 2 Mb/s and can compare it with my DSL which should be close to 20 Mb/s. For most pages, there is no noticeable difference. It even doesn't matter if I use my EEE or load from a core 2 duo. Maybe it is because many pages load in content from different sites, making them horribly slow no matter what the connection is. This also counts for slashdot, it often gets stuck on me with pop-up "surveys" and some warnings from firefox about buggy scripts.
I use my DSL mostly for browsing the web. Based on my observations that speed of UMTS doesn't seem to affect my web-browsing experience, still allows skype, and the fact that now there are 25 EUR prepaid flatrates (no contract, amazing! but still shitty cap giving GPRS above 10 GB) in Germany, I decided to ditch my cable-bound connections.
If only the ping times would get down, that'd make it much better for keeping up ssh and other remote connections.
One German billionaire (worth about 18 billion euro) lost about a billion when his bet that Volkswagen stock would go downhill went wrong: porsche bought VW and the stock went up. Now he claimed that he cannot recover by himself, needs state help, or otherwise several thousands of jobs will be lost. He actually managed to get this working, in an indirect way (he gets a deposit from a state bank which itself had just been helped out of trouble). Really, what's the point of doing an effort of making a profit via well-balanced management and wise investments, if you can just screw up as you like and get rewarded for it.
According to the guy who used to make the dutch equivalent of the Forbes 500 list, of the 100 richest Dutchmen, only about 3 have made it to university. Those were IT guys, and probably they didn't finish, because they started their company during university. Most haven't even finished high-school, because they found more profitable priorities before finishing.
Really, high education might get you a decent chance to a certain level of wealth, but already the fact that you start university means that you aren't likely to have your priorities straight to become absurdly rich. Think about it: the time spent on thinking if you use "then" or "than" could also be used for working out ideas that will make you a profit.
Cool, thanks for checking. There is a small problem in Germany, they don't use charcoal but something that is apparently called "Lignite". According to these numbers (very nice link with numbers!!! sorry that it's german!), a Lignite based plant has 20% more CO2 exhaust than a charcoal plant (these numbers also have the 2.0 pound you mentioned for a charcoal plant).
Also, Tesla mentions a 86% efficiency for the charger and battery.
So the CO2 exhaust for the worst case in germany would be 1.20*1/0.86=1.40 times your value. In that way, the gas powered car still has more CO2 exhaust, but only 30%.
A calculation of the german version of the AAA, the ADAC, showed that the electric smart that is currently on the road, would actually create more CO2 per km than the combustion engine version, IF the power plant was solely coal based (which is a popular power plant in germany at the moment).
I also find if fascinating that the hydrogen for hydrogen production is currently produced by transforming oil into hydrogen and... CO2. It is the most efficient and economic process to do it like that. Sure, at one point in time you could do create hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But in the mean time, because money is an inevitable driving force, it will be made the CO2-producing way.
Or, how biofuels will end up competing the farming of food and might lead to difficult hunger problems. All in all, these are exciting times, and for every alternative the effects of the complete life circle on environment and society should be considered....
I encountered a few times in supercomputer seminars. Grids are mostly interesting for people developing grids. The idea is nice: you can have a binary everywhere within the part of the grid that you can access (read: some supercomputer within your network). In practice, you'll have to recompile the binary separately for each local cluster configuration anyway. In theory, there should be some program (java or whatever) that opens your access to the grid and from where you can start jobs and move data around. In practice, there is probably a zero gain in time compared to just using ssh and scp to start your jobs on a remote supercomputer.
I assume you are not a supercomputer user. First of all, the top 10 is short-lived and just for bragging rights.
Secondly, as a user, you don't really care. At no point any given user will be able to reach full capacity of the computer anyway. What counts is how many users are sharing the machine: if your program has to wait a week in the queue, you could have already done your calculation on a smaller machine. And how well the supercomputer is suited for your needs. IBM machines can score high in the Linpack without many problems, by just adding cpus. But since the performance per cpu is a bit lower, you are better off with a simple cluster if your application doesn't scale well. For shared memory applications they're pretty fine, though.
Thirdly, mentioned nowhere: the machine should be easy to configure and low on maintenance. The first thing you do when your supercomputers arrives is Linpack. Then, however, users start all their different applications, network issues occur, etc. The current cluster I use is shut down once a week (!). This means that you do a 72 hour job only once a week, the effective speed is crap, no matter how high it scores on the list (and yes, it was on the list last year).
I thought I had seen everything, but this really is damned crazy. Probably the best sold watch in the world. It's like using the fact that someone is wearing levi's as a warrant for arrest.
That is, if you only count the things that are, currently, legally considered a crime.
Knowingly inflating the market for worthless loans, up to the point where the world market collapses, and still managing to get off with a huge bonus might not be a legal crime, but it certainly is a crime in any other way. I wouldn't mind some fitting extensions to the law here.
You are so right, a virus scanner should never do more harm than the thing it protects from. I installed AVG on my wife's computer, but to reduce the load I have it do a virus check only once in a week, whereas it does try to upload the updates every day. This might actually save me from a lot of unnecessary work no,w I will now have to find out if it really is skipping the update.
Not only a lack of innovation, quality has been decreasing for a long time even. I was using yahoo groups with a group of people for a while, but its calendar notifications and complicated login structure became completely messy. I don't think any of us still knows how to log in there. A shame, because it was pretty good in the beginning.
As it seems from the ion drum website, these are actual electronic drums that you can also hook up to a drum computer (at least one of the same brand). I guess that makes more sense than buying a $250 guitar without snares.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, not everyone sailing with a ship called Argo becomes an Argonaut.
In theory, you could make bioethanol in a way that doesn't affect food crops (algae etc). BUT: with the laws of economics at work, farmers WILL make sure they'll grow the highest-profit crop. This will most likely be corn for bioethanol then.
I think that solar panels are not likely to become useful enough for heavy use. Solar concentration maybe, but you still need a lot of space for that. Wind energy is relatively easy but probably not economical yet. In the windy region where I live, they didn't build any new windmill, actually removed a windmill in the last two years. Coal and nuclear power are just cheaper, that's all that counts in the end.
I had the same issue as the ask slashdot poster: I have a prepaid flatrate on my cellphone and for international calls I use skype or other services. So in fact I didn't use my landline at all. My cellphone provider (O2 Germany) recently started a flatrate UMTS prepaid package: You put 25 euro on your prepaid account, they remove it on the day your flatrate starts and automatically prolong as long as you load 25 euro on your prepaid account each month. When you stop, your flatrate stops, and you can restart it anytime.
Even though I have plenty of DSL choices in my town, I now switch to UMTS only just because I will have no contract at all for my connectivity! Most other options are 2 year contracts, even though it's about 5 euro per month cheaper, in the long run it's more expensive if you ever want to get rid of it.
Only disadvantages are the lower speed, but that's hardly noticeable for my usage, and that above 10GB they switch to GPRS speeds (=slow). I called customer service once, to ask how I know how much I used. They couldn't tell me, just told me to use the program that came with the USB stick. I told them I don't use the program because it doesn't work on my linux EEE. I wonder if they really can check, from the other comments here I guess they can't. And then I wonder if maybe their connection software does the capping, which would be nasty but also easy to pass :p
Probably he realized that he'd loose most of any profit made at the next divorce anyway.
Actually, what I see is that the bloat makes mainly *the rendering* of the pages slower, not so much retrieving the data. I tried UMTS which reaches about 2 Mb/s and can compare it with my DSL which should be close to 20 Mb/s. For most pages, there is no noticeable difference. It even doesn't matter if I use my EEE or load from a core 2 duo. Maybe it is because many pages load in content from different sites, making them horribly slow no matter what the connection is. This also counts for slashdot, it often gets stuck on me with pop-up "surveys" and some warnings from firefox about buggy scripts.
I use my DSL mostly for browsing the web. Based on my observations that speed of UMTS doesn't seem to affect my web-browsing experience, still allows skype, and the fact that now there are 25 EUR prepaid flatrates (no contract, amazing! but still shitty cap giving GPRS above 10 GB) in Germany, I decided to ditch my cable-bound connections.
If only the ping times would get down, that'd make it much better for keeping up ssh and other remote connections.
someone beat you to it ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp1Ps6guOhk
maybe Jobs will introduce the first dangerous apple virus, the iVirus, on the next keynote.
One German billionaire (worth about 18 billion euro) lost about a billion when his bet that Volkswagen stock would go downhill went wrong: porsche bought VW and the stock went up. Now he claimed that he cannot recover by himself, needs state help, or otherwise several thousands of jobs will be lost. He actually managed to get this working, in an indirect way (he gets a deposit from a state bank which itself had just been helped out of trouble). Really, what's the point of doing an effort of making a profit via well-balanced management and wise investments, if you can just screw up as you like and get rewarded for it.
Yeah, the summary had several typos, it should have been:
"For most of MIT's history, MIT students have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew"
According to the guy who used to make the dutch equivalent of the Forbes 500 list, of the 100 richest Dutchmen, only about 3 have made it to university. Those were IT guys, and probably they didn't finish, because they started their company during university. Most haven't even finished high-school, because they found more profitable priorities before finishing.
Really, high education might get you a decent chance to a certain level of wealth, but already the fact that you start university means that you aren't likely to have your priorities straight to become absurdly rich. Think about it: the time spent on thinking if you use "then" or "than" could also be used for working out ideas that will make you a profit.
Cool, thanks for checking. There is a small problem in Germany, they don't use charcoal but something that is apparently called "Lignite". According to these numbers (very nice link with numbers!!! sorry that it's german!), a Lignite based plant has 20% more CO2 exhaust than a charcoal plant (these numbers also have the 2.0 pound you mentioned for a charcoal plant). Also, Tesla mentions a 86% efficiency for the charger and battery. So the CO2 exhaust for the worst case in germany would be 1.20*1/0.86=1.40 times your value. In that way, the gas powered car still has more CO2 exhaust, but only 30%.
They're just preparing for an age where no one knows math anymore, but where there will still a lot of lawyers around.
A calculation of the german version of the AAA, the ADAC, showed that the electric smart that is currently on the road, would actually create more CO2 per km than the combustion engine version, IF the power plant was solely coal based (which is a popular power plant in germany at the moment). I also find if fascinating that the hydrogen for hydrogen production is currently produced by transforming oil into hydrogen and ... CO2. It is the most efficient and economic process to do it like that. Sure, at one point in time you could do create hydrogen by electrolysis of water. But in the mean time, because money is an inevitable driving force, it will be made the CO2-producing way.
Or, how biofuels will end up competing the farming of food and might lead to difficult hunger problems. All in all, these are exciting times, and for every alternative the effects of the complete life circle on environment and society should be considered....
I encountered a few times in supercomputer seminars. Grids are mostly interesting for people developing grids. The idea is nice: you can have a binary everywhere within the part of the grid that you can access (read: some supercomputer within your network). In practice, you'll have to recompile the binary separately for each local cluster configuration anyway. In theory, there should be some program (java or whatever) that opens your access to the grid and from where you can start jobs and move data around. In practice, there is probably a zero gain in time compared to just using ssh and scp to start your jobs on a remote supercomputer.
are you suggesting that creating buggy software should be lethal?
Seeing how well the US version is doing, a chinese copy might indeed end up being better.
I assume you are not a supercomputer user. First of all, the top 10 is short-lived and just for bragging rights.
Secondly, as a user, you don't really care. At no point any given user will be able to reach full capacity of the computer anyway. What counts is how many users are sharing the machine: if your program has to wait a week in the queue, you could have already done your calculation on a smaller machine. And how well the supercomputer is suited for your needs. IBM machines can score high in the Linpack without many problems, by just adding cpus. But since the performance per cpu is a bit lower, you are better off with a simple cluster if your application doesn't scale well. For shared memory applications they're pretty fine, though.
Thirdly, mentioned nowhere: the machine should be easy to configure and low on maintenance. The first thing you do when your supercomputers arrives is Linpack. Then, however, users start all their different applications, network issues occur, etc. The current cluster I use is shut down once a week (!). This means that you do a 72 hour job only once a week, the effective speed is crap, no matter how high it scores on the list (and yes, it was on the list last year).
MEMO: Every new employee will be provided with his own Brita. Please clearly label your name on it.
I thought I had seen everything, but this really is damned crazy. Probably the best sold watch in the world. It's like using the fact that someone is wearing levi's as a warrant for arrest.
That is, if you only count the things that are, currently, legally considered a crime.
Knowingly inflating the market for worthless loans, up to the point where the world market collapses, and still managing to get off with a huge bonus might not be a legal crime, but it certainly is a crime in any other way. I wouldn't mind some fitting extensions to the law here.
You spelled "advantage" wrong ;)
You are so right, a virus scanner should never do more harm than the thing it protects from. I installed AVG on my wife's computer, but to reduce the load I have it do a virus check only once in a week, whereas it does try to upload the updates every day. This might actually save me from a lot of unnecessary work no,w I will now have to find out if it really is skipping the update.
According to this month's german ADAC automobil club magazine, 40% of all cars in 1901 where running on electric power.
Not only a lack of innovation, quality has been decreasing for a long time even. I was using yahoo groups with a group of people for a while, but its calendar notifications and complicated login structure became completely messy. I don't think any of us still knows how to log in there. A shame, because it was pretty good in the beginning.
As it seems from the ion drum website, these are actual electronic drums that you can also hook up to a drum computer (at least one of the same brand). I guess that makes more sense than buying a $250 guitar without snares.