Makes you think. I mean, those people are supposedly being voted into office by the majority, supposedly working for their interests. Why the hush-hush-rush-rush?
Conspiracy theory: certain agencies are bribing or otherwise pressurizing officials in many countries to introduce this kind of legislation, as it gives them indirect access to wanted information (most countries pass on sensitive information about their own citizens to the CIA etc. more liberally than they could use it in court themselves). If lobbyists can get ridiculous (anti-piracy) laws passed, why shouldn't "law enforcement" agencies? Corruption is the biggest problem in european politics, so it's a rather straightforward thing to do...
the margin for OS licenses sold with PCs has been slim for a while, now it's dropping sharply for laptops as well.
It's not unlikely that major vendors will now put some effort into a user-friendly Linux, something that the volunteer crowd has failed at terribly in the past 10 years.
Nvidia offers an external GPU solution specifically for "deskside supercomputing", the Tesla D870. It has only 2 cores with 1.35GHz each, apart from it being a bit more expensive, I wonder how it compares (you can connect several to a PC).
Wikpedia: Microwulf, a low cost desktop Beowulf cluster of 4 dual core Athlon 64 x2 3800+ computers, runs at 58 MFLOPS/Watt.
BOINC does about 1200 TFLOPS (= 1,200,000,000 MFLOPS) atm.
=> BOINC probably burns around 20MW (assuming that the power used is directly proportional to the CPU time used even if it isn't 100%, which is wrong but an upper bound and probably not very far off).
1 KWh electricity = 0.43Kg CO2
=> BOINC generates 8.6 tons CO2 per hour or about 3100 tons/year (correct me if I'm wrong, I might be a few orders of magnitude off). That isn't very much compared to the 6b tons emitted by the USA anually, but still a waste...
That's the right way really... build more power plants (preferably solar power plants), then if there is spare energy at peak production times, we may use it to trigger some grid computing by otherwise idle processors. Nothing wasted that way...
how about calling it "red computing" to remind people of how much energy it'll cost them. On modern computers, you have roughly 20-100W difference between idle/working CPUs.
... for the rest of us who think that giving all your private and/or business e-mails to Google (or any other company that tries to earn money with your free e-mail service) isn't such a bright idea?
SquirrelMail and Horde left much to be desired last time I checked (esp. UI-wise). Zimbra is like buying a taxi corporation when you just need a car (I don't need an Outlook clone in JS, thank you). Anything I missed?
looks fishy to me... Most passively cooled northbridges on current mainboards generate more heat, so what's wrong with that CPU? The heatsink seems huge and it still has or needs a fan...
Because getting a fundamentally new common runtime environment and/or protocol to all people is f'ing hard. Especially now that the 'net has matured. With maturity comes momentum and inertia. Sorry, I don't get this. Java has been succesful at this (as well as other languages that can run on top of the JavaVM), Flash has been succesful, heck, even Linux and stuff like MAME is spreading all over with some effort.
Let's not talk about enabling things in different ways, let's talk instead about how, after all these years with ever-increasing hardware performance, we're building layers upon layers of inefficient software so we can have crappy application performance all over again. Trying to run applications with Javascript in a browser on a mobile phone, can it get more wasteful than that?
Use Java, it's not perfect, but it's widespread, it gets the job done and is reasonably fast. Until we have a less bloated and equally widespread language, that is...
You just missed out on your first chance to recruit people from slashdot, I'd say it's hopeless unless you start thinking in more practical terms. If the project is interesting enough for some people to devote their free time to, all you need is exposure, so stop crying about your server bandwidth / find a practical solution to that problem (Google cache or whatever).
While the e-ink technology looks good and certainly has some interesting uses, an e-book reader is not appealing to me for several reasons:
it uses electricity, is not very resilient and much more complex (= buggy, prone to failure) than a book
I don't want to buy DRM-infested books
the makers of such products seem to consider them glorified PDAs, I don't want stylus input and other such crap (unless I can scribble all over the pages wherever I want). My mobile phone covers all my PDA needs.
Of course I grew up and studied with paper books and reading from monitors, if I went to uni now and had to use an e-book reader from the beginning with all the course material on it, I'd possibly have a different opinion about them...
You can already purchase software (yes, legally - from dlgamer) and download it through Bittorrent, as long as the client supports the necessary authentication method.
Bittorrent has long grown up and has many legal uses, it just takes a while for people to realize (even slashdot users it seems).
If software vendors hadn't tried to get away with selling broken, overpriced products "without warranty of any kind" for decades, a healthy market might have been possible. FOSS is the logical consequence of software that costs something but claims to be worth nothing.
Is "enhancing virtual reality" really an important engineering goal? Did Larry Page actually vote for stuff like this?
Here are some suggestions:
reverse-engineer the human body and develop robotic surgery at the required level of precision to replace arbitrary defective parts (so basically we will only die from virus infections, complete annihilation of the body e.g. in a car crash, and bluescreens)
alternative, clean power sources are already available and being worked on, this isn't a huge engineering challence, just a political/social one. If we could use solar energy exclusively at +50% the cost and actually had to, then we would. Why does it have to be cheaper to replace e.g. nuclear energy? Is the price really the only thing that matters? In that case we'd better develop muscle-powered devices instead...
teleportation, replication, complete disassembling and recycling at molecular level - if we're talking about the whole century, I'd expect some progress here.
space travel, moon colonization.
self-steering vehicles - still not solved
nutrition: robotic kitchen orders food, cooks etc. based on someone's specific nutritional needs. We all know that we eat the wrong stuff, why not optimize it? (we can still refuse)
minor issue: get rid of the damn keyboard/mouse/monitor/headphones as UI and replace with something more practical (small, always available - implant?)
I don't see political goals like "preventing nuclear terrorism" as engineering goals. They would only become engineering goals if instead of taking care to have sane and educated political leaders, we choose to go down the path of totalitarianism and expect the government to protect us from everything using continuous surveillance and perhaps bio-engineering (further developed "electronic monitoring / tagging").
that leaves a lot of room for some of you people to sue TPB as well after recording a crappy song and uploading it... if you wanted to get some tabloid attention, now is the time!
Maturity isn't the problem - even the most skeptical people would tend to say that society has matured since 2000 years ago. But as long as people fear death, they will be controlled by others who employ that fear for their agendas. It's this fear that drives educated people in the UK and elsewhere to support absurd legislation and absymal politicians like Blair.
Perhaps they will stop putting HTTP-URLs in standardized tags now... Also, enjoy life as a web content provider who spends many hours per week blocking Referers (nice typo in the original RFC!) and dealing with broken clients, something that the W3C never spent much time pondering about.
Slashdot Mirror
But I guess in this case, more publicity is actually doing good.
Conspiracy theory: certain agencies are bribing or otherwise pressurizing officials in many countries to introduce this kind of legislation, as it gives them indirect access to wanted information (most countries pass on sensitive information about their own citizens to the CIA etc. more liberally than they could use it in court themselves). If lobbyists can get ridiculous (anti-piracy) laws passed, why shouldn't "law enforcement" agencies? Corruption is the biggest problem in european politics, so it's a rather straightforward thing to do...
then sell it / blackmail people. ;-)
It's not unlikely that major vendors will now put some effort into a user-friendly Linux, something that the volunteer crowd has failed at terribly in the past 10 years.
Nvidia offers an external GPU solution specifically for "deskside supercomputing", the Tesla D870. It has only 2 cores with 1.35GHz each, apart from it being a bit more expensive, I wonder how it compares (you can connect several to a PC).
BOINC does about 1200 TFLOPS (= 1,200,000,000 MFLOPS) atm.
=> BOINC probably burns around 20MW (assuming that the power used is directly proportional to the CPU time used even if it isn't 100%, which is wrong but an upper bound and probably not very far off).
1 KWh electricity = 0.43Kg CO2
=> BOINC generates 8.6 tons CO2 per hour or about 3100 tons/year (correct me if I'm wrong, I might be a few orders of magnitude off). That isn't very much compared to the 6b tons emitted by the USA anually, but still a waste...
Some people say it's because they haven't found those computers in the basement yet to turn them off...
That's the right way really... build more power plants (preferably solar power plants), then if there is spare energy at peak production times, we may use it to trigger some grid computing by otherwise idle processors. Nothing wasted that way...
how about calling it "red computing" to remind people of how much energy it'll cost them. On modern computers, you have roughly 20-100W difference between idle/working CPUs.
SquirrelMail and Horde left much to be desired last time I checked (esp. UI-wise). Zimbra is like buying a taxi corporation when you just need a car (I don't need an Outlook clone in JS, thank you). Anything I missed?
At a first glance, this seems to be what several available subnotebooks are based on: Belinea s.book Packard Bell EasyNote XS20
Let's not talk about enabling things in different ways, let's talk instead about how, after all these years with ever-increasing hardware performance, we're building layers upon layers of inefficient software so we can have crappy application performance all over again. Trying to run applications with Javascript in a browser on a mobile phone, can it get more wasteful than that?
Use Java, it's not perfect, but it's widespread, it gets the job done and is reasonably fast. Until we have a less bloated and equally widespread language, that is...
- it uses electricity, is not very resilient and much more complex (= buggy, prone to failure) than a book
- I don't want to buy DRM-infested books
- the makers of such products seem to consider them glorified PDAs, I don't want stylus input and other such crap (unless I can scribble all over the pages wherever I want). My mobile phone covers all my PDA needs.
Of course I grew up and studied with paper books and reading from monitors, if I went to uni now and had to use an e-book reader from the beginning with all the course material on it, I'd possibly have a different opinion about them...You can already purchase software (yes, legally - from dlgamer) and download it through Bittorrent, as long as the client supports the necessary authentication method. Bittorrent has long grown up and has many legal uses, it just takes a while for people to realize (even slashdot users it seems).
Here are some suggestions:
I don't see political goals like "preventing nuclear terrorism" as engineering goals. They would only become engineering goals if instead of taking care to have sane and educated political leaders, we choose to go down the path of totalitarianism and expect the government to protect us from everything using continuous surveillance and perhaps bio-engineering (further developed "electronic monitoring / tagging").
Perhaps they will stop putting HTTP-URLs in standardized tags now... Also, enjoy life as a web content provider who spends many hours per week blocking Referers (nice typo in the original RFC!) and dealing with broken clients, something that the W3C never spent much time pondering about.