I couldn't agree more: you can't just order people around about what to do. There is an element of personal responsibility, but that's up to the individual. I don't think that there's any harm in reminding people that they're using energy excessively though, although I wouldn't want it to become hostile in any way. As you suggest, I think the best way is to increasingly tax carbon-based fuel and electricity. Money is really the only way to get the large majority to change their behaviours. It also means you have a choice - if you choose to be more environmentally friendly you get a pay-off and more polluting peoples tax dollars go to pay for your public services. As a final payoff, it makes sustainable energy sources more relatively affordable (provided they have tax breaks).
The point is that the amount of CO2 that can be produced without making Global warming worse is limited. That means that we have to share that 'carbon budget' amongst everyone on the planet. In short though - we don't.
I live in Britain, and we're not the best, but we're about twice as efficient per capita as the US and we're one of the few countries on course to meet it's Kyoto targets.
And I do personally try to make a difference. I've fitted low energy light bulbs to about 3/4 of the lights, I've got roof insulation and double glazing, I don't own a car (my girlfriend does, but it's only got a 1.0 litre engine). I shower rather than have baths (mostly) and I don't leave the tap on and I recycle most of my household rubbish (which reduces methane emissions from landfill). I'm not some kind of eco-nut either.
I realize that most people aren't going to even do these minimal things, but don't try and tell me I can't suggest that other people don't go and produce vast amounts of CO2 without any good need just because my lifestyle produces _any_ carbon dioxide. Heck, breathing produces CO2, even dying produces CO2. The point is to minimize unnecessary production.
I have to say their article about the speed of the read from GPU memory by each processing element was pretty misleading. I did a bit of research and that indicated that real software will virtually never read from the GPU and even if it does, there is a workaround of going through main memory. While it is obvious that there have been big problems getting the PS3 up and running, I think we should wait for the hardware. These things have a habit of all coming together. We've already heard that the supposedly awful yeilds on the Cell are not as bad as thought. It's the cost issue that'll screw Sony if they don't budge. People are used to $20 DVD players and aren't going to place the extra value on a Blu-ray player that Sony seem to think. There's no way I'm paying 400UKP for a console, especially now they've lost exclusivity on GTA. It just isn't going to happen.
I've never understood why people are willing to put up with such a crazy layout as modern 102/103/105 key keyboards anyway. Why doesn't anybody offer a keyboard that has a normal layout in terms of the main keys but with some sensible changes:
* Function keys are rarely used - you need them (I use Eclipse too!), but they can be de-emphasised. * The numeric keypad is stupid. There should be space, tab and comma keys on it so that it might actually be useful for one-handed data entry! * Get rid of the stupid windows keys. Most people don't even know what they do anyway. * Why are there no keys for multiplication, division symbol, bullet point, and a ton of other common symbols? It's like we're still being limited by baudot code or something. * PrtScn/SysRq, Scroll-lock, Pause/Break and Num-lock are virtually never touched. What is the point of num-lock now that there's an inverted T cursor cluster and related keys. * Alt Gr - don't even get me started... * What the hell is that back-tick key doing up in the top left anyway? And why does it look so odd paired with a normal quote? * As for putting control back where it belongs (I think this one depends on what you first used), the best argument I've heard for not putting it where caps-lock is now is that it belomes very easy to in one stroke hit CTRL-A (often 'Select All') with the following keystroke replacing your entire document with that character. I know Linux doesn't have this problem so much, but since most of the world is using Windows at the moment, it is a consideration.
The problem with most of the solutions given here is that they are illegal. What you really need is a way to demonstrate to your local council's (I'm assuming that you're in the UK) Environmental Health department. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/support/noisyneighbours .shtml for more details. The key thing though, is to get a device to frequency-shift the sound - the sort of thing used to listen to ultrasonic bat calls or to change the pitch of someone's voice on the phone. This way you can show those older investigators how annoying the sound is - or you could always ask for them to send their youngest officers...
NASA is caught in a trap. It has the ISS, which has to be the biggest white elephant of all time. It was going to be a dubiously useful space lab at one point, but since it has been down-scaled it has no point at all. It can only house a few crew now who must spend almost all their time on maintenance. The ISS has cost something like $50 billion. And for what? Just ask yourself - what does it DO for $50 billion. Not much.
Then there is the other piece of 'white' hardware, the Shuttle: why are we still bothering with it given.
Well, the reason is the I in ISS. The US is committed to launching the components of the ISS built by international partners. This commitment is bound by international treaties. So NASA can't cancel it. Only the government could ever do that. However, both the Shuttle AND the ISS should be cancelled now rather than throwing more good money after bad.
Normally I wouldn't care about money being wasted on such things. I am not a US citizen, so I don't really have any right commenting on what you do with your own money. But the problem is that it is now affecting science missions in a BIG way, and I do care about that. NASA has worked out that they basically have this situation:
1) ISS + Shuttle. 2) Moon and Mars as human destinations, need new hardware (CEV etc). 3) Science missions (robotic probes, telescopes, etc).
Choose two.
They HAVE to choose 1+2 because they are bound to persue these by the US government - 1 because of international treaties and 2) because the President said so.
So it's up to American Citizens to let their representitives know that the real priorities should be (in my humble opinion):
3) and a new one: get the cheapest way to earth orbit - fund EXTERNAL research into space elevators, SSTO, TSTO, disposable launchers (SpaceX stuff) projects etc. Don't stop 'til you can launch people to LEO for $1million.
The only problem with this is that it would leave the US without access to orbit for longer which may be politically unacceptable - but it's no different from the current situation anyway.
Just my thoughts.
PS. I am referring to it as 'white' hardware purely because NASA human flight stuff always seems to be white. Oh yeah, and why did the first shuttle launch have a white fuel tank and later ones have an orange one?
I don't think some of the readers have a grasp on just how difficult space travel is. Its all very well bandying around "We could do it in X years", but has anyone actually thought about this: NASA can barely hit the damn planet with a piece of junk reliably. What makes anyone think that a manned mission of such unprecendented length will go off without a hitch?
If we do go we will need:
some form of artificial gravity. I don't see the big deal here - just spin the damn space craft. I've heard some comments that there are problems controling two body systems in a stable way, but there must be some way around it (rigidity, three-body systems, active feedback...?). All this endless talk about overcoming weightlessness (sp?) is stupid when such an obvious solution is at hand.
Lots of redundency. We can't, for example rely on having a single ship (fueled by one of these proposed fuel `factories') at the other end ready to come back. It is too large a single point of failure. We'll need to send at least two of everything and three of some things.
Size. The space craft will need to be large enough that the crew don't go mad and actually are comfortable. No spacecraft to date has been comfortable. NASA's approach seems to be: design something just big enough that the crew don't rip each others bodies apart inside a month and call it a success. It all seems motivated by wanting to fit the whole craft on a single, Saturn 5 style, launcher. Why? Surely a ship can be assembled in earth orbit.
Cost. Its going to be expensive. It'll cost at least $150 bn and probably more like $1 trillion. All this stuff about Mars on a shoe string is balls. It might be possible, but it won't be safe and nothing good would come of it. The crew would be miserable and in constant danger. Mars rather than a tax cut anyone?
Propulsion. It'll need to be done as quickly as possible, which means propulsion. This in turn means Nuclear (either directly or more likely powering a plasma drive or something). Nuclear means hard time winning over the public (even though it is so obviously the only choice and I am not generally a supporter of nuclear fission)
None of this is in place. No propulsion system, no power systems, no space suits, no large ships (could we just fit out the ISS and actually make it useful?), no reliable food source (what if crops fail?) and heres the crux of it: NO MONEY.
It will happen when there is cheaper access to low earth orbit and all these technologies are more mature. Perhaps I'm too young to remember Apollo, but that was a series of (remarkably lucky and I mean no disrespect to the people who worked on making it as safe as it was) week long outings. This is an eighteen month voyage.
It is like assuming you can stay under water for two hours just because you managed to hold your breath for two minutes.
The solution: make the OS expensive on PCs
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
This way, folks who really want OS X on PCs can have it, Jobs makes a fortune on each copy sold which should more than make up for any drop in hardware sales. Simply price it at > Apples average profit on hardware.
This wouldn't be popular with the free software brigade, but its the only way its ever going to happen. Jobs isn't stupid enough to lead apple down the `open' road again. Last time it nearly finished Apple for good...
The U.S. is still pretty much unparalleled in the civil rights it offers its people. As a United Kingdom citizen, I enjoy most of those same rights through my countries adoption of the European convention on Human rights. Ironically, dispite how popular paranoia about the intellegence services (particularly the NSA (UKUSA et al.) and the CIA) is in the States, you have wide far more wide ranging rights over the access of civilians to military and intelligence data than almost anywhere in the world.
As I see it the United States is plagued by two main problems. Firstly it is fundamentally corrupt. Lobbying and external payment for political parties appropriation of capaign funds means that U.S. politics is riddled with an excess of influence by big corporations. Just because the system is open about this influence doesn't make it any less corrupt. In this area other contries (the UK included) are way ahead - controlling businesses involvement leads to a stronger democracy. I just hope my contry will do more to back this up with stronger civil rights than they have been doing up until now.
This is just my opinion of course. I hope I haven't offended anyone.
Jim Moores
Why are people so impatient!! I've just read through all the comments and there are so many that seem to be asking for stability and other OS's. One thing at a time! It's only just running Win95 and already everyone wants it to do everything, and be stable to boot (pun not intended). I think we should really hand it to the plex86 guys. Anyone who has read their paper on virtualisation will see it looks like a complete nightmare. I'm hugely impressed they've got this far so fast. Of course we'll all look forward to the day that it runs Win2k/Win* with all the bells and whistles (or perhaps many slashdot readers won't...:), but that is for the future.
I love Nokia's phones, but they don't seem so good at Digital TV set top boxes.
I unfortunately opted for a Nokia STB with my OnDigital subscription (UK terrestrial digital TV), purely on the basis of the quality of their phones. Since then I have had to reboot the machine every day or so, although some software updates seem to fix things for a while - until they add some new feature, and the whole thing becomes unstable.
I would blame OnDigital, but I heard that the much-delayed Digital Teletext service worked for ages on Philips and other makes of decoder before some hacky software work-around for all the hardware bugs was hammered out for the Nokia boxes (although I have little firm evidence for this).
I hate to think of the combination of this with the (in)famous stability of Mozilla.
I thought I might get on someone's nerves. Just a couple of comments. If the compilers at the school were not available, then how can you have reasonably been expected to complete any assignments. I know some places can be difficult, but... As regards to working at home. If you want to be able to work at home, then fine, use Linux or whatever, but make sure the work you hand in works on the compiler you were supposed to use. The marker should not be able to tell that you used Linux.
As far as `learning a new environment' being `crap' because you already know and hate it (VC++ in this case). Most work requires you to work in an environment you aren't particularly fond of.
It's supposed to be _you_ convicing _them_ to give you a qualification after all.
What I'm really saying is that comp. sci. isn't about what platform you work on. A good developer/programmer/comp. scientist should be able to work with just about any platform (except perhaps the VxWorks NT simulator;).
Lastly: do you people still use disks? Don't you guys have any networked storage?
Slashdot Mirror
tru dat.
I couldn't agree more: you can't just order people around about what to do. There is an element of personal responsibility, but that's up to the individual. I don't think that there's any harm in reminding people that they're using energy excessively though, although I wouldn't want it to become hostile in any way. As you suggest, I think the best way is to increasingly tax carbon-based fuel and electricity. Money is really the only way to get the large majority to change their behaviours. It also means you have a choice - if you choose to be more environmentally friendly you get a pay-off and more polluting peoples tax dollars go to pay for your public services. As a final payoff, it makes sustainable energy sources more relatively affordable (provided they have tax breaks).
The point is that the amount of CO2 that can be produced without making Global warming worse is limited. That means that we have to share that 'carbon budget' amongst everyone on the planet. In short though - we don't.
I live in Britain, and we're not the best, but we're about twice as efficient per capita as the US and we're one of the few countries on course to meet it's Kyoto targets.
And I do personally try to make a difference. I've fitted low energy light bulbs to about 3/4 of the lights, I've got roof insulation and double glazing, I don't own a car (my girlfriend does, but it's only got a 1.0 litre engine). I shower rather than have baths (mostly) and I don't leave the tap on and I recycle most of my household rubbish (which reduces methane emissions from landfill). I'm not some kind of eco-nut either.
I realize that most people aren't going to even do these minimal things, but don't try and tell me I can't suggest that other people don't go and produce vast amounts of CO2 without any good need just because my lifestyle produces _any_ carbon dioxide. Heck, breathing produces CO2, even dying produces CO2. The point is to minimize unnecessary production.
At a time when global warming is ruining our climate, this is obscene.
I have to say their article about the speed of the read from GPU memory by each processing element was pretty misleading. I did a bit of research and that indicated that real software will virtually never read from the GPU and even if it does, there is a workaround of going through main memory. While it is obvious that there have been big problems getting the PS3 up and running, I think we should wait for the hardware. These things have a habit of all coming together. We've already heard that the supposedly awful yeilds on the Cell are not as bad as thought. It's the cost issue that'll screw Sony if they don't budge. People are used to $20 DVD players and aren't going to place the extra value on a Blu-ray player that Sony seem to think. There's no way I'm paying 400UKP for a console, especially now they've lost exclusivity on GTA. It just isn't going to happen.
Jim
I've never understood why people are willing to put up with such a crazy layout as modern 102/103/105 key keyboards anyway. Why doesn't anybody offer a keyboard that has a normal layout in terms of the main keys but with some sensible changes:
* Function keys are rarely used - you need them (I use Eclipse too!), but they can be de-emphasised.
* The numeric keypad is stupid. There should be space, tab and comma keys on it so that it might actually be useful for one-handed data entry!
* Get rid of the stupid windows keys. Most people don't even know what they do anyway.
* Why are there no keys for multiplication, division symbol, bullet point, and a ton of other common symbols? It's like we're still being limited by baudot code or something.
* PrtScn/SysRq, Scroll-lock, Pause/Break and Num-lock are virtually never touched. What is the point of num-lock now that there's an inverted T cursor cluster and related keys.
* Alt Gr - don't even get me started...
* What the hell is that back-tick key doing up in the top left anyway? And why does it look so odd paired with a normal quote?
* As for putting control back where it belongs (I think this one depends on what you first used), the best argument I've heard for not putting it where caps-lock is now is that it belomes very easy to in one stroke hit CTRL-A (often 'Select All') with the following keystroke replacing your entire document with that character. I know Linux doesn't have this problem so much, but since most of the world is using Windows at the moment, it is a consideration.
The problem with most of the solutions given here is that they are illegal. What you really need is a way to demonstrate to your local council's (I'm assuming that you're in the UK) Environmental Health department. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/support/noisyneighbours .shtml for more details. The key thing though, is to get a device to frequency-shift the sound - the sort of thing used to listen to ultrasonic bat calls or to change the pitch of someone's voice on the phone. This way you can show those older investigators how annoying the sound is - or you could always ask for them to send their youngest officers...
NASA is caught in a trap. It has the ISS, which has to be the biggest white elephant of all time. It was going to be a dubiously useful space lab at one point, but since it has been down-scaled it has no point at all. It can only house a few crew now who must spend almost all their time on maintenance. The ISS has cost something like $50 billion. And for what? Just ask yourself - what does it DO for $50 billion. Not much.
Then there is the other piece of 'white' hardware, the Shuttle: why are we still bothering with it given.
1) It's enormous per-launch expense (~$1bn).
2) It's now dubious safety.
Well, the reason is the I in ISS. The US is committed to launching the components of the ISS built by international partners. This commitment is bound by international treaties. So NASA can't cancel it. Only the government could ever do that. However, both the Shuttle AND the ISS should be cancelled now rather than throwing more good money after bad.
Normally I wouldn't care about money being wasted on such things. I am not a US citizen, so I don't really have any right commenting on what you do with your own money. But the problem is that it is now affecting science missions in a BIG way, and I do care about that. NASA has worked out that they basically have this situation:
1) ISS + Shuttle.
2) Moon and Mars as human destinations, need new hardware (CEV etc).
3) Science missions (robotic probes, telescopes, etc).
Choose two.
They HAVE to choose 1+2 because they are bound to persue these by the US government - 1 because of international treaties and 2) because the President said so.
So it's up to American Citizens to let their representitives know that the real priorities should be (in my humble opinion):
3) and a new one: get the cheapest way to earth orbit - fund EXTERNAL research into space elevators, SSTO, TSTO, disposable launchers (SpaceX stuff) projects etc. Don't stop 'til you can launch people to LEO for $1million.
The only problem with this is that it would leave the US without access to orbit for longer which may be politically unacceptable - but it's no different from the current situation anyway.
Just my thoughts.
PS. I am referring to it as 'white' hardware purely because NASA human flight stuff always seems to be white. Oh yeah, and why did the first shuttle launch have a white fuel tank and later ones have an orange one?
If we do go we will need:
-
some form of artificial gravity. I don't see the big deal here - just spin the damn space craft. I've heard some comments that there are problems controling two body systems in a stable way, but there must be some way around it (rigidity, three-body systems, active feedback...?). All this endless talk about overcoming weightlessness (sp?) is stupid when such an obvious solution is at hand.
- Lots of redundency. We can't, for example rely on having a single ship (fueled by one of these proposed fuel `factories') at the other end ready to come back. It is too large a single point of failure. We'll need to send at least two of everything and three of some things.
- Size. The space craft will need to be large enough that the crew don't go mad and actually are comfortable. No spacecraft to date has been comfortable. NASA's approach seems to be: design something just big enough that the crew don't rip each others bodies apart inside a month and call it a success. It all seems motivated by wanting to fit the whole craft on a single, Saturn 5 style, launcher. Why? Surely a ship can be assembled in earth orbit.
- Cost. Its going to be expensive. It'll cost at least $150 bn and probably more like $1 trillion. All this stuff about Mars on a shoe string is balls. It might be possible, but it won't be safe and nothing good would come of it. The crew would be miserable and in constant danger. Mars rather than a tax cut anyone?
- Propulsion. It'll need to be done as quickly as possible, which means propulsion. This in turn means Nuclear (either directly or more likely powering a plasma drive or something). Nuclear means hard time winning over the public (even though it is so obviously the only choice and I am not generally a supporter of nuclear fission)
None of this is in place. No propulsion system, no power systems, no space suits, no large ships (could we just fit out the ISS and actually make it useful?), no reliable food source (what if crops fail?) and heres the crux of it: NO MONEY. It will happen when there is cheaper access to low earth orbit and all these technologies are more mature. Perhaps I'm too young to remember Apollo, but that was a series of (remarkably lucky and I mean no disrespect to the people who worked on making it as safe as it was) week long outings. This is an eighteen month voyage. It is like assuming you can stay under water for two hours just because you managed to hold your breath for two minutes.This wouldn't be popular with the free software brigade, but its the only way its ever going to happen. Jobs isn't stupid enough to lead apple down the `open' road again. Last time it nearly finished Apple for good...
The U.S. is still pretty much unparalleled in the civil rights it offers its people. As a United Kingdom citizen, I enjoy most of those same rights through my countries adoption of the European convention on Human rights. Ironically, dispite how popular paranoia about the intellegence services (particularly the NSA (UKUSA et al.) and the CIA) is in the States, you have wide far more wide ranging rights over the access of civilians to military and intelligence data than almost anywhere in the world. As I see it the United States is plagued by two main problems. Firstly it is fundamentally corrupt. Lobbying and external payment for political parties appropriation of capaign funds means that U.S. politics is riddled with an excess of influence by big corporations. Just because the system is open about this influence doesn't make it any less corrupt. In this area other contries (the UK included) are way ahead - controlling businesses involvement leads to a stronger democracy. I just hope my contry will do more to back this up with stronger civil rights than they have been doing up until now. This is just my opinion of course. I hope I haven't offended anyone. Jim Moores
Why are people so impatient!! I've just read through all the comments and there are so many that seem to be asking for stability and other OS's. One thing at a time! It's only just running Win95 and already everyone wants it to do everything, and be stable to boot (pun not intended). I think we should really hand it to the plex86 guys. Anyone who has read their paper on virtualisation will see it looks like a complete nightmare. I'm hugely impressed they've got this far so fast. Of course we'll all look forward to the day that it runs Win2k/Win* with all the bells and whistles (or perhaps many slashdot readers won't...:), but that is for the future.
For now, congratulations guys!
I love Nokia's phones, but they don't seem so good at Digital TV set top boxes.
I unfortunately opted for a Nokia STB with my OnDigital subscription (UK terrestrial digital TV), purely on the basis of the quality of their phones. Since then I have had to reboot the machine every day or so, although some software updates seem to fix things for a while - until they add some new feature, and the whole thing becomes unstable.
I would blame OnDigital, but I heard that the much-delayed Digital Teletext service worked for ages on Philips and other makes of decoder before some hacky software work-around for all the hardware bugs was hammered out for the Nokia boxes (although I have little firm evidence for this).
I hate to think of the combination of this with the (in)famous stability of Mozilla.
I thought I might get on someone's nerves. Just a couple of comments. If the compilers at the school were not available, then how can you have reasonably been expected to complete any assignments. I know some places can be difficult, but... As regards to working at home. If you want to be able to work at home, then fine, use Linux or whatever, but make sure the work you hand in works on the compiler you were supposed to use. The marker should not be able to tell that you used Linux.
;).
As far as `learning a new environment' being `crap' because you already know and hate it (VC++ in this case). Most work requires you to work in an environment you aren't particularly fond of.
It's supposed to be _you_ convicing _them_ to give you a qualification after all.
What I'm really saying is that comp. sci. isn't about what platform you work on. A good developer/programmer/comp. scientist should be able to work with just about any platform (except perhaps the VxWorks NT simulator
Lastly: do you people still use disks? Don't you guys have any networked storage?