Yeah, I realize the starting point was horribly bad, so I realize there's room for a few generations of 80-100% improvements, but it would seem like, at some point, you've found all the 'easy' optimizations, and it should start to get very hard to improve it further.
Instead of thinking about TIME, let us think, for a moment, about OPERATIONS. A 100% performance improvement means that, in the same time, you do twice as many operations. So, you start out doing 1E6 operations/sec. You double that and you're doing 2E6 operations. double that again and you're doing 4E6 operations. There comes a point, sometime, where the code is about to 'native' performance, and can't possibly run any faster - because the processor can only do so many operations per second.
There's also the issue that, processor speed isn't the *only* thing that can potentially slow JavaScript down - there might be network I/O (if you're doing some sort of AJAX-y type thing with a remote server), disk I/O, graphics/rendering lag, etc.
At some point, a faster JavaScript engine becomes somewhat academic because even if it's true, the JavaScript has to wait on the browser to render HTML, images, play sound, load remote content, etc.
I realize that, from the baseline starting point of JavaScript interpreters in past years, there was a lot of room for improving the performance of JavaScript. But, when Chrome was first released, it boasted huge improvement in JS performance vs. other browsers, and it seems like every release since then has had these huge jumps in performance. . .
Shouldn't we be nearing some sort of point of 'it's about as optimized as it can possibly be and still give correct results'? If it's true, it's great, but getting 80%+ jumps in performance every major browser release doesn't seem like it could possibly continue for too many iterations.
I mean, how it is *remotely possible* that an article with only 1 technical fact (TV frequencies can be used for long-distance communication relatively cheaply), and a bunch of complete *bullshit* (High Speed Internet a "basic human right", Internet as an analog signal, no decrease in speed with increase in users), make it through the editorial screening for the "News For Nerds" site, but I *know* that other articles with much greater merit get completely ignored?
No, I'm not new here, but man, it's like they just don't give a shit about *pretending* to give a shit about doing their job anymore.
The problem with that idea is that, yeah, the person in the hinterlands can hear the tower, but the tower most likely can't hear the response back from that person. The Internet depends on two-way communications. I suppose you could do something like the early satellite internet, where it uses a dialup modem for the 'upstream' bandwidth, and uses the RF signal for the highspeed 'download'. That's a very limiting model, but is better than dialup both directions, I suppose.
Anyone know if this thing is going to have even limited support for USB peripherals/drives? With the browser being the OS (at least it sounds like), would you even be able to load up photos from a camera hooked up via a USB cable, to view on the (relatively) larger screen of the netbook? Will you be able to do any sort of printing to a USB or network printer? Will it support reading and writing files from/to USB flash drives, SD cards (i.e. the types used in most cameras and phones)? I wouldn't expect to run a full-blown photoshop-like program, or even Picassa, on ChromeOS, but will it come with some sort of basic photo editing software (e.g. brightness/contrast/color, resizing, remove red-eye, crop, convert file format, sharp/blur, etc)? Will it have a PDF reader and e-book reader? Will it have a media player app (I suppose, if the Chrome browser bundled in to the ChromeOS supports HTML5 and Flash, they could use one of those two technologies to implement a media player, and I would guess ChromeOS will support Flash)?
For a netbook, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to have a full-featured OS, but I would expect ChromeOS to be able to do some of these fairly basic tasks. I suppose it might be possible to implement almost all of those features as web-apps (not sure about photo-editting, but perhaps some javascript + html5 could take care of that). Printing and storage device management would require native OS/driver support, and perhaps extensions to JavaScript APIs to expose that functionality to web-apps.
Well, in mentioning radiation sickness, I was including that because, you'd probably have millions die immediately in the cities from the direct, immediate consequences of the nuclear blast, then over the next few weeks, you'd get people in outskirts near the cities but not close enough to the centers to be killed by the blast itself, die from radiation (this happened in Japan after the bombings there - of course, not everyone near the cities died from radiation, but many certainly did).
But, I think long term, the real big killers, which would kill billions of people would be disease (I think health/sanitation conditions would deteriorate very quickly in the months after a large scale nuclear exchange), human violence (people getting desperate may turn to desperate measures to try to survive), and of course, eventually starvation. I agree that radiation wouldn't be the major killer, but it would have an effect in areas close enough to where the bombs fell.
Even if mankind isn't made completely extinct, I would still view such an event as 'the end of the world', metaphorically speaking, wouldn't you? It's sure something I wish to avoid at all costs.
I'm confused. . . what is the compelling public interest that requires the Federal Government to 'free up cell phone networks'? Why should my taxpayer money be used to offload traffic from the cell phone networks, when people are already paying the cell providers for service? Let the cell providers ensure they have enough coverage and backhaul to fulfill the service they have sold to customers, and if they don't/can't, then haul them into court on breach of contract, false advertising, etc.
If this move would seriously save the government *money* by using its own Wifi APs and Internet connections instead of contracting out to cell providers for data services that the government itself needs, hey, I'd be all for that, but I somehow doubt that wiring *every* Federal building is going to actually *save money*.
I've always heard that a major nuclear war, while it wouldn't kill off everything directly in the nuclear blasts, would kick up so much dust and ash that it would create a 'nuclear winter', with lack of sunlight killing off most of the plant life, with most of the animal life (including humans) dieing of radiation sickness and subsequent starvation. I suppose no one knows for sure, but I for one would rather not test the hypothesis on ourselves, to see who's right.
For what it's worth, I agree - I think the economics of solar *will* improve over time (I also think the economics of nuclear will improve over time). I also think that there are places in this world, like that Sahara project you mention, and places like Texas, Arizona, NV, CA, etc. where solar makes sense (once the tech is cheap enough). I also often see solar proponents making sort of ridiculous suggestions - like, for example, I live in the Great State of Ohio. As far as I know, the economics of solar don't really make sense for places like Ohio, but because of government "incentives" (read, "subsidies"), there are solar farms popping up around Ohio. We'll see if long term those actually make sense, but my understanding of the economics of solar energy leads me to believe it'll just end up being unreliable, expensive power and largely a waste of taxpayer money.
I'm not radily ideologically opposed to solar power. I just think that *right now*, the economics of it currently don't make sense. Also, Solar generally needs very large land-use (although, I think I've seen somewhere that you can do things like graze livestock on land with solar panels (or mirrors in the case of solar thermal), if you raise the panels/mirrors up high enough. People like to make the claim that nuclear is 'too expensive', but on a per-unit basis, the figures I've seen show solar to be 2-3x more expensive than nuclear.
Err, perhaps I wasn't clear. I agree that Fast Reactor technology is going to start in more developed places - China and India, I believe, already have plans to build some, here in the U.S. GE-Hitachi recently announced they have reached an agreement with the DoE to build a prototype PRISM plant (PRISM is the commercialized version of IFR, from what I understand).
When I made the statement, "I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all 'environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs'", I wasn't referring to IFR or other "Gen IV" reactors - I was talking about the Gen III plants being proposed for these small developing nations - things like the ABWR, EBWR, AP-1xxx, EPR, etc.
Perhaps, it's because, the more nations get nuclear weapons, the more likely that an incident will happen which escalates into the end of the world? Everyone on Earth should be worried about nuclear proliferation, not just the U.S. I don't want to debate whether the U.S. was right or wrong to use nuclear weapons to end WWII, because as a rule, I generally like to not take responsibility for the decisions of past generations, or to re-fight old wars. But, as a practical note, I will say this - when only one country, which only used nuclear weapons in a very bad situation, there was no chance for M.A.D. of pretty much all life on Earth. We live in a different world today. Potentially, anyone like N. Korea or Iran could start the war which truly ends all wars (along with 99% of life on the planet).
As for the U.S., we've been reducing our stockpiles. Many of us would love to see a nuclear-weapons free world, but from a practical standpoint, that's probably not going to happen. I would, at least, like to see as little additional weapons being built as possible.
Finally, if someone has to have nuclear weapons, I'd rather see them in the hands of countries which seem like they are run by people who are rational *enough* that they probably won't try to start the nuclear world war (yea, sometimes politics in the U.S. can be a bit irrational, but I don't think *anyone* in the U.S. really wants to see us use nuclear weapons ever again if we don't absolutely have to). I truly worry that Iran with Nuclear Weapons will use them (or at least the threat of them) aggressively instead of defensively - e.g. invade their neighbors and threaten nuclear reprisal if any allies try to come to the defensive aid of the neighboring State.
And what do you do during the evening, night, and early morning when there's no or too little sunlight? Oh, right, you burn natural gas. I suppose that's not the worst outcome in the world. I suppose it's better to burn natural gas part of the time, than to burn coal all of the time.
I suppose you could also supplement solar with wind - sun doesn't shine at night, but the wind often blows, so you might be able, with the combination, to get enough power, but it will be expensive power with current technology. Nuclear, even though the plants are expensive (but getting cheaper, at least outside the U.S. and Europe), just provides *so much* power that when you break it down to a per-unit-energy basis, it's actually the least-expensive alternative.
Nice to see the fine slashdot tradition of making bold, unsupported statements, declared as absolute truth, is still alive and well.
"to what is essentially a very expensive environment-ruining nuclear-timebomb"
Oh, really? Please, do, provide some actual *science and engineering* based source for this assertion. Before you trot out the old "Chernobyl", do note that *nobody*, except *nobody* is building any plants that are similar to the Chernobyl design, and that modern designs have multiple layers of safety in their designs that Chernobyl lacked. If Nuclear Reactors are so dangerous, so environment ruining, such ticking timebombs, how come in 60 years of nuclear plant operation, Chernobyl is the *one and only* accident which released any significant radioactive material into the environment? Modern plant designs are very safe, and even in the very unlikely event of a meltdown accident, are extremely unlikely to release any significant radioactivity into the environment.
Unlike you, I'll provide a source for my assertions: Ted Rockwell's Nuclear Facts Report. Now, that report is very long, but it's also well supported with bibliography references to many sources, including peer-reviewed studies by professional engineers and scientists.
You might bring up Three Mile Island, or Davis-Besse. Three Mile Island was unfortunate, but was only a disaster for the investors who payed for it. It got worse than it should have, but even in that situation, only a very small amount of slightly radioactive (very slightly) steam was released from the plant, but no other radioactive materials or radiation was released. TMI had an actual meltdown, and it wasn't an environmental or public safety disaster.
In the meantime, the nuclear plants being built now have been built with better safety designs than older generation II plants - a TMI type incident, although we can't call it completely impossible, is much more unlikely than it was with the TMI design. The Nuclear Industry has spent many Billions of dollars on R&D to design new, safer plants, and shepherd those new designs through strict regulatory oversight bodies like the NRC to get them approved.
I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all "environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs".
About the waste - the truth is, we should be recycling the spent fuel. The only proper, responsible final 'disposal' for spent nuclear fuel is to seperate out the short lived 'true waste' products from the rest of the fuel, and keep re-using the fuel until it's all converted to short lived waste. We *have* the technology to turn our current nuclear waste, which is radioactive for 100,000+ years into short-lived waste which essentially becomes non-radioactive after about 200 years - I think we *can* safely store the waste for 200 years, but I've never heard anyone who thought we could really store it for 100k+ years.
Sometime, try googling for "Integral Fast Reactor" - it's a fascinating read.
Finally, on your comment, "They should just give them free photovoltaics - you can just set a mini-plant in any of the villages". Really, do you really think a few PV panels in a village is going to provide enough power? For what? Each household can run one or two LED or CFL lights? What if that village needs power for running a water treatment plant, or a desalination plant? What if they want to have businesses and small industry which need enough power to run machinery, commercial refrigeration units, etc? What if the villagers want heat, hot water, and electric stoves in their homes, instead of burning wood or coal for those needs? You think a few PV panels in town and on the roof will provide enough power for all that? What about the big cities? Even the most undeveloped countries usually have at least a Capital city, if not a few others? What about future growth? That small village, as it gets access to clean water and power, might start to
I would think you'd have to cover up a huge, huge area of the Sahara for it to be a problem? In any case, it would, if anything, probably reduce global warming. Can't see how that'd be a bad outcome?
Well, the alternative is to allow it be blown up at a time NOT of your choosing.
Police can evacuate the area, make sure no one will get hurt, then blow up it, so it does minimal damage - maybe it damages some structures, but no one gets hurt.
If they try to inspect the device, to figure it out, and try to disarm it, well, it might just blow up in the bomb squads face, so remote detonation minimizes human casualties.
At least, that's how I've always understood it - I'm no expert and don't pretend to be one.
I work for a somewhat small software company (about 100 employees), I know we have at least 10 or 20 'server-level' hostnames, all of which are part of our main domain, so that at least 10 server names are served by that single name server. Again, we are a small company - I wouldn't be surprised if some of the bigger organizations in the world have hundreds, maybe in some cases thousands, of hostnames all served under a single domain. Most large univeristies will have hundreds or thousands of servers spread across multiple colleges/departments, where sometimes the colleges, and in a few cases even departments, have their own sub-domain.
Hierarchies don't have to be 'deep' to help reduce the load pretty significantly. Because of different ccTlds, and the different 'standard' tlds, and because of what I mention above about a single domain-level server handling many servers inside that domain, I'm pretty sure the namespace is cut down quite a bit from the 'worst-case' scenario of a completely flat naming system. I also do believe the parent in that there's probably a lot of very big servers, connected to very big Internet connections, serving the.com domain.
Yeah, I have to agree, leaks can only be tolerated when they do more good than harm to the public. I don't see how releasing all this diplomatic records does anything but simply put a chilling effect on necessary diplomatic relations.
I could kind of back WikiLeaks when they were leaking war documents which showed ways in which the governments involved in the war might be lying to the public, and/or covering up corruption, etc. But I'm having a hard time seeing how this latest WikiLeaks dump isn't just putting *everyone* in the world in greater danger.
My first question would be, how is my 'domain' secured in this system so it can't be easily hijacked? If it does get hijacked, how do I ever get control of it again? How do I know a domain I am visiting wasn't hijacked?
These are issues facing the 'official' DNS system too, but generally, with the official DNS system, because of a fairly centralized control regime, it's at least difficult, usually, to hijack a domain, because you have to convince one of the levels of other servers to delegate authority over that domain to your servers. With a distributed system, how do you ensure that all the nodes give the same answer to a query? What's to stop a node from just lying? How do you detect if it's lying (some sort of cryptographic system would probably be needed)?
With the 'official' DNS, if my domain is hijacked, there are legal processes I can follow to try to prove that the domain should be rightly mine, and to have control restored if it's hijacked. Will there be any either technical or legal remedy for having your domain 'jacked in the P2P-DNS?
I've always understood that the reason the DNS is hierarchical isn't that programmers just thought it would be great for no other reason than that they like trees. My understanding is it is the very foundation of breaking up the DNS into smaller chunks that can be stored (and resolved) on multiple servers. DNS is *already* distributed, sort of, in its design. The issue is that there are central root and tld servers.
So, if I want to check email, and my mail client needs to contact mail.myisp.net, it first asks the root servers for the.net server, it asks the.net server for the myisp.net server, then it asks the myisp.net server for mail.myisp.net - that way, all the higher level servers can just answers to a small 'chunk' of the total dns namespace.
One way or another, any DNS system is going to need to splitup the namespace *somehow*, so if it isn't a tree, then what's it gonna be?
In general, I agree with the idea that it's better when we can buy things closer to the point of production, and buy less stuff from overseas. However, there will likely always be at least some need for overseas transport involving very large cargo ships.
This might sound like a really crazy bad idea, but many ideas when they are first considered, seem crazy bad, until people figure out how to make them NOT be bad, but. . .
Perhaps it's time we revisited the idea of the commercial nuclear ship? For small boats, you'll likely never be able to safely power them with nuclear power, but it seems to me that very large cargo ships would be almost ideal candidates for nuclear propulsion. The question, really, is can we make nuclear propulsion systems that a) are extremely safe during normal operation, b) don't become dangerous in an accident/ship sinking scenario or a bombing, etc [wouldn't want to pollute any ports or the ocean at large, with radioactive material, and c) are highly resistant to having fuel 'diverted' for nefarious purposes?
I'm no expert, so I don't know if it would be possible to create a 'completely safe' nuclear propulsion system for commercial use or not, but it sure seems like it would be worth spending some money on R&D to try to figure it out - nuclear would seem to be the only energy source which at least *possibly* might be able to be virtually 'air/water pollution free'.
I got to thinking about this because I recently came across the website for a guy proposing an approach to nuclear propulsion for ships which he thinks is safe enough for civilian commercial use - basically, if I understand his site correctly, he wants to use PBMRs (Pebble Bed Modular Reactors) to heat inert nitrogen gas (you know, nitrogen which is 78% of what air is made of), and use the pressure of the heated nitrogen gas to drive a gas turbine to provide propulsion and electricity generation. PBMRs seem like they might be a safe enough design to perhaps consider for use in civilian applications like large ships.
The site is Adams Atomic Engines. I have no affiliation with Adams Atomic Engines - I just thought it looked like an interesting concept, and could perhaps really clean up commercial cargo ships.
"Planes, recreational boats, and even lawn mowers. . . make significant contributions to air pollution."
Citation, please? Since you are the one who made that assertion, I would like you to provide at least *some* sort of source to back that up, please? Because, I'd be *very* surprised if lawnmowers, recreational boats, and small airplanes (your statement, I grant, might also allow for the inclusion of large commercial aircraft, but that seems to be in such a completely different category than the other items - lawnmowers and boats - that I assume you weren't including commercial aviation in that, but were rather referring to small, general aviation planes) come anywhere close to polluting as much as cars and trucks would if they didn't have emissions controls.
Perhaps people are more worried about cars than lawnmowers and boats because people use their cars a lot more than lawnmowers and boats? Many people drive their cars every day, perhaps 1-5 hours a day, thousands of miles per year. Most people might operate their lawn mowers once every week or two, for maybe 1/2 hour or perhaps 2-3 hours if you have a really big lawn, and during the time it's operating, it's not burning fuel at anywhere near the scale that cars/trucks do. Boats might get taken out once or twice a week for a few months a year, then not used the rest of the year.
I really don't have a source of statistics to prove the following, but I'd be highly surprised if boat *or* lawnmower ownership is anywhere near as high on a per-capita basis, in the U.S. as car ownership. I presume that almost anyone who owns a house with a yard, probably has a lawnmower. I live in a multi-tennant apartment building, as do millions of Americans. I don't own a lawnmower. My landlord does, but he owns several different buildings, and I think only owns one lawnmower for keeping the grounds at the multiple buildings, each of which have fairly small 'yards'. I think a lot of apartment dwellers own cars, but probably none of them owns a lawnmower. As for boats, those tend to be a bit of a luxury item - sure, people with middle class incomes can afford a small boat, but in my experience, maybe 1 in 20 or 1 inn 50 households owns a boat? I'm not sure what the exact numbers are, but I'm pretty sure that most households in the U.S. own at least one car, but not everyone owns a boat. I believe plane ownership would be even much lower than boat ownership.
So, when trying to solve a problem, do you worry about sources which are (combined) a tiny fraction of the problem, or do you look at the sources that comprise the vast majority of the problem (commercial aviation, commercial boats, commercial trucks, and small cars and trucks)?
As I said, if you agree to pay a cheaper rate, in exchange for slower service, as a consumer that is an option that should be available to you. As I stated, you should get *at least* the service you have payed for. So, if you pay for slow 768k DSL Internet, and only have to pay like $20/mo, then you are only paying for 768k service. You should *definitely*, absolutely be getting the service you payed for, but what I'm saying is that if "Disney" or whoever wants to pay to subsidized *your* internet connection, by getting you *faster than* 768k downloads when you download/stream from their site (or upload for that matter), I could totally be down with the content provider paying a small fee to your ISP to 'upgrade' your Internet service.
The situation I describe, however, sadly, is not really what the 'net neutrality' debate is about - mostly it seems to be about ISP's advertising and selling "unlimited" Internet at very high speeds, then not wanting to provision enough 'backbone' bandwidth on their network to actually give customers the speeds they payed for. In that, I agree with you: if you've payed for bandwidth, you should be able to enjoy that bandwidth with any other address on the internet, and I do support net neutrality in that regard. I'm just saying that we perhaps have to be careful about how we write the Net Neutrality rules, to allow for other types of business arrangements which actually *benefit* consumers.
You know, I never liked the way the SCO lawsuits played out. Being stopped by Novell as copyright/patent holder never gave a 'final resolution' to the issue. All it did was said "For today, Novell declines to sue". It's been pretty apparent for a long time that Novell is somewhat past its glory days, and would probably end up for sale at some point. I've been expecting Novell to go on the block, and have been wondering who would buy it, and if they'd restart the lawsuits.
I think SCO made a big mistake in initially suing IBM, who was big enough, and making enough money off of Linux, to vigorously defend against SCO. I've sometimes wondered if the whole Novell intervention wasn't a way for SCO to end the lawsuit without actually having any rulings/judgements made in the IBM case. Then, someone else could restart litigation, against 'softer' targets than IBM, and perhaps start to get precedents set against companies and individuals who aren't rich enough to make a vigorous, long-lasting defense.
I've gone back and forth on this issue. I do think ISPs who have monopolies to run cable to the home do warrant some regulation from the FCC, because of their monopolies. On the other hand, I also realize that in the end, customers have to pay for their access and it might not be completely unreasonable to have 'tiers' of service. If someone can't afford a more 'premium' connection, it doesn't seem out of hand to do things like throttling that customers bandwidth, but then also striking deals with content providers to open up the bandwidth for their traffic to those limited customers. So, maybe I get the cheapo internet connection, but when I download content I pay for from places like Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc, I get faster download and no cap on the traffic, because the content providers setup a deal with the ISP.
Now, I don't think it's reasonable for them to completely block any (legal) traffic, but I do think it reasonable to allow them to setup tiered service and tiered pricing. The key is that they should fully disclose in their advertising and customer agreements, just exactly what it is the customer is paying for. If a customer buys "10Mb/s UNLIMITED Internet", then they shouldn't throttle any traffic, because the customer was sold unlimited service at up to 10Mb/s. If the customer only wants to pay for 768Kb/s, but a content provider has worked out a deal to actually send their content at *faster* than that 768Kb/s, I could totally see something like that.
Of course, I realize that's not what the big ISPs are trying to do, but I'm just saying, as a general principle, as long as the customer gets what they payed for and what was advertised, I'm kind of ok with some allowance of tiered service and agreements with content providers to enable a better experience.
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Yeah, I realize the starting point was horribly bad, so I realize there's room for a few generations of 80-100% improvements, but it would seem like, at some point, you've found all the 'easy' optimizations, and it should start to get very hard to improve it further.
Instead of thinking about TIME, let us think, for a moment, about OPERATIONS. A 100% performance improvement means that, in the same time, you do twice as many operations. So, you start out doing 1E6 operations/sec. You double that and you're doing 2E6 operations. double that again and you're doing 4E6 operations. There comes a point, sometime, where the code is about to 'native' performance, and can't possibly run any faster - because the processor can only do so many operations per second.
There's also the issue that, processor speed isn't the *only* thing that can potentially slow JavaScript down - there might be network I/O (if you're doing some sort of AJAX-y type thing with a remote server), disk I/O, graphics/rendering lag, etc.
At some point, a faster JavaScript engine becomes somewhat academic because even if it's true, the JavaScript has to wait on the browser to render HTML, images, play sound, load remote content, etc.
I realize that, from the baseline starting point of JavaScript interpreters in past years, there was a lot of room for improving the performance of JavaScript. But, when Chrome was first released, it boasted huge improvement in JS performance vs. other browsers, and it seems like every release since then has had these huge jumps in performance. . .
Shouldn't we be nearing some sort of point of 'it's about as optimized as it can possibly be and still give correct results'? If it's true, it's great, but getting 80%+ jumps in performance every major browser release doesn't seem like it could possibly continue for too many iterations.
I mean, how it is *remotely possible* that an article with only 1 technical fact (TV frequencies can be used for long-distance communication relatively cheaply), and a bunch of complete *bullshit* (High Speed Internet a "basic human right", Internet as an analog signal, no decrease in speed with increase in users), make it through the editorial screening for the "News For Nerds" site, but I *know* that other articles with much greater merit get completely ignored?
No, I'm not new here, but man, it's like they just don't give a shit about *pretending* to give a shit about doing their job anymore.
The problem with that idea is that, yeah, the person in the hinterlands can hear the tower, but the tower most likely can't hear the response back from that person. The Internet depends on two-way communications. I suppose you could do something like the early satellite internet, where it uses a dialup modem for the 'upstream' bandwidth, and uses the RF signal for the highspeed 'download'. That's a very limiting model, but is better than dialup both directions, I suppose.
Anyone know if this thing is going to have even limited support for USB peripherals/drives? With the browser being the OS (at least it sounds like), would you even be able to load up photos from a camera hooked up via a USB cable, to view on the (relatively) larger screen of the netbook? Will you be able to do any sort of printing to a USB or network printer? Will it support reading and writing files from/to USB flash drives, SD cards (i.e. the types used in most cameras and phones)? I wouldn't expect to run a full-blown photoshop-like program, or even Picassa, on ChromeOS, but will it come with some sort of basic photo editing software (e.g. brightness/contrast/color, resizing, remove red-eye, crop, convert file format, sharp/blur, etc)? Will it have a PDF reader and e-book reader? Will it have a media player app (I suppose, if the Chrome browser bundled in to the ChromeOS supports HTML5 and Flash, they could use one of those two technologies to implement a media player, and I would guess ChromeOS will support Flash)?
For a netbook, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to have a full-featured OS, but I would expect ChromeOS to be able to do some of these fairly basic tasks. I suppose it might be possible to implement almost all of those features as web-apps (not sure about photo-editting, but perhaps some javascript + html5 could take care of that). Printing and storage device management would require native OS/driver support, and perhaps extensions to JavaScript APIs to expose that functionality to web-apps.
Well, in mentioning radiation sickness, I was including that because, you'd probably have millions die immediately in the cities from the direct, immediate consequences of the nuclear blast, then over the next few weeks, you'd get people in outskirts near the cities but not close enough to the centers to be killed by the blast itself, die from radiation (this happened in Japan after the bombings there - of course, not everyone near the cities died from radiation, but many certainly did).
But, I think long term, the real big killers, which would kill billions of people would be disease (I think health/sanitation conditions would deteriorate very quickly in the months after a large scale nuclear exchange), human violence (people getting desperate may turn to desperate measures to try to survive), and of course, eventually starvation. I agree that radiation wouldn't be the major killer, but it would have an effect in areas close enough to where the bombs fell.
Even if mankind isn't made completely extinct, I would still view such an event as 'the end of the world', metaphorically speaking, wouldn't you? It's sure something I wish to avoid at all costs.
I'm confused. . . what is the compelling public interest that requires the Federal Government to 'free up cell phone networks'? Why should my taxpayer money be used to offload traffic from the cell phone networks, when people are already paying the cell providers for service? Let the cell providers ensure they have enough coverage and backhaul to fulfill the service they have sold to customers, and if they don't/can't, then haul them into court on breach of contract, false advertising, etc.
If this move would seriously save the government *money* by using its own Wifi APs and Internet connections instead of contracting out to cell providers for data services that the government itself needs, hey, I'd be all for that, but I somehow doubt that wiring *every* Federal building is going to actually *save money*.
I've always heard that a major nuclear war, while it wouldn't kill off everything directly in the nuclear blasts, would kick up so much dust and ash that it would create a 'nuclear winter', with lack of sunlight killing off most of the plant life, with most of the animal life (including humans) dieing of radiation sickness and subsequent starvation. I suppose no one knows for sure, but I for one would rather not test the hypothesis on ourselves, to see who's right.
For what it's worth, I agree - I think the economics of solar *will* improve over time (I also think the economics of nuclear will improve over time). I also think that there are places in this world, like that Sahara project you mention, and places like Texas, Arizona, NV, CA, etc. where solar makes sense (once the tech is cheap enough). I also often see solar proponents making sort of ridiculous suggestions - like, for example, I live in the Great State of Ohio. As far as I know, the economics of solar don't really make sense for places like Ohio, but because of government "incentives" (read, "subsidies"), there are solar farms popping up around Ohio. We'll see if long term those actually make sense, but my understanding of the economics of solar energy leads me to believe it'll just end up being unreliable, expensive power and largely a waste of taxpayer money.
I'm not radily ideologically opposed to solar power. I just think that *right now*, the economics of it currently don't make sense. Also, Solar generally needs very large land-use (although, I think I've seen somewhere that you can do things like graze livestock on land with solar panels (or mirrors in the case of solar thermal), if you raise the panels/mirrors up high enough. People like to make the claim that nuclear is 'too expensive', but on a per-unit basis, the figures I've seen show solar to be 2-3x more expensive than nuclear.
Err, perhaps I wasn't clear. I agree that Fast Reactor technology is going to start in more developed places - China and India, I believe, already have plans to build some, here in the U.S. GE-Hitachi recently announced they have reached an agreement with the DoE to build a prototype PRISM plant (PRISM is the commercialized version of IFR, from what I understand).
When I made the statement, "I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all 'environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs'", I wasn't referring to IFR or other "Gen IV" reactors - I was talking about the Gen III plants being proposed for these small developing nations - things like the ABWR, EBWR, AP-1xxx, EPR, etc.
Perhaps, it's because, the more nations get nuclear weapons, the more likely that an incident will happen which escalates into the end of the world? Everyone on Earth should be worried about nuclear proliferation, not just the U.S. I don't want to debate whether the U.S. was right or wrong to use nuclear weapons to end WWII, because as a rule, I generally like to not take responsibility for the decisions of past generations, or to re-fight old wars. But, as a practical note, I will say this - when only one country, which only used nuclear weapons in a very bad situation, there was no chance for M.A.D. of pretty much all life on Earth. We live in a different world today. Potentially, anyone like N. Korea or Iran could start the war which truly ends all wars (along with 99% of life on the planet).
As for the U.S., we've been reducing our stockpiles. Many of us would love to see a nuclear-weapons free world, but from a practical standpoint, that's probably not going to happen. I would, at least, like to see as little additional weapons being built as possible.
Finally, if someone has to have nuclear weapons, I'd rather see them in the hands of countries which seem like they are run by people who are rational *enough* that they probably won't try to start the nuclear world war (yea, sometimes politics in the U.S. can be a bit irrational, but I don't think *anyone* in the U.S. really wants to see us use nuclear weapons ever again if we don't absolutely have to). I truly worry that Iran with Nuclear Weapons will use them (or at least the threat of them) aggressively instead of defensively - e.g. invade their neighbors and threaten nuclear reprisal if any allies try to come to the defensive aid of the neighboring State.
And what do you do during the evening, night, and early morning when there's no or too little sunlight? Oh, right, you burn natural gas. I suppose that's not the worst outcome in the world. I suppose it's better to burn natural gas part of the time, than to burn coal all of the time.
I suppose you could also supplement solar with wind - sun doesn't shine at night, but the wind often blows, so you might be able, with the combination, to get enough power, but it will be expensive power with current technology. Nuclear, even though the plants are expensive (but getting cheaper, at least outside the U.S. and Europe), just provides *so much* power that when you break it down to a per-unit-energy basis, it's actually the least-expensive alternative.
Nice to see the fine slashdot tradition of making bold, unsupported statements, declared as absolute truth, is still alive and well.
"to what is essentially a very expensive environment-ruining nuclear-timebomb"
Oh, really? Please, do, provide some actual *science and engineering* based source for this assertion. Before you trot out the old "Chernobyl", do note that *nobody*, except *nobody* is building any plants that are similar to the Chernobyl design, and that modern designs have multiple layers of safety in their designs that Chernobyl lacked. If Nuclear Reactors are so dangerous, so environment ruining, such ticking timebombs, how come in 60 years of nuclear plant operation, Chernobyl is the *one and only* accident which released any significant radioactive material into the environment? Modern plant designs are very safe, and even in the very unlikely event of a meltdown accident, are extremely unlikely to release any significant radioactivity into the environment.
Unlike you, I'll provide a source for my assertions: Ted Rockwell's Nuclear Facts Report. Now, that report is very long, but it's also well supported with bibliography references to many sources, including peer-reviewed studies by professional engineers and scientists.
You might bring up Three Mile Island, or Davis-Besse. Three Mile Island was unfortunate, but was only a disaster for the investors who payed for it. It got worse than it should have, but even in that situation, only a very small amount of slightly radioactive (very slightly) steam was released from the plant, but no other radioactive materials or radiation was released. TMI had an actual meltdown, and it wasn't an environmental or public safety disaster.
In the meantime, the nuclear plants being built now have been built with better safety designs than older generation II plants - a TMI type incident, although we can't call it completely impossible, is much more unlikely than it was with the TMI design. The Nuclear Industry has spent many Billions of dollars on R&D to design new, safer plants, and shepherd those new designs through strict regulatory oversight bodies like the NRC to get them approved.
I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all "environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs".
About the waste - the truth is, we should be recycling the spent fuel. The only proper, responsible final 'disposal' for spent nuclear fuel is to seperate out the short lived 'true waste' products from the rest of the fuel, and keep re-using the fuel until it's all converted to short lived waste. We *have* the technology to turn our current nuclear waste, which is radioactive for 100,000+ years into short-lived waste which essentially becomes non-radioactive after about 200 years - I think we *can* safely store the waste for 200 years, but I've never heard anyone who thought we could really store it for 100k+ years.
Sometime, try googling for "Integral Fast Reactor" - it's a fascinating read.
Finally, on your comment, "They should just give them free photovoltaics - you can just set a mini-plant in any of the villages". Really, do you really think a few PV panels in a village is going to provide enough power? For what? Each household can run one or two LED or CFL lights? What if that village needs power for running a water treatment plant, or a desalination plant? What if they want to have businesses and small industry which need enough power to run machinery, commercial refrigeration units, etc? What if the villagers want heat, hot water, and electric stoves in their homes, instead of burning wood or coal for those needs? You think a few PV panels in town and on the roof will provide enough power for all that? What about the big cities? Even the most undeveloped countries usually have at least a Capital city, if not a few others? What about future growth? That small village, as it gets access to clean water and power, might start to
I would think you'd have to cover up a huge, huge area of the Sahara for it to be a problem? In any case, it would, if anything, probably reduce global warming. Can't see how that'd be a bad outcome?
Well, the alternative is to allow it be blown up at a time NOT of your choosing.
Police can evacuate the area, make sure no one will get hurt, then blow up it, so it does minimal damage - maybe it damages some structures, but no one gets hurt.
If they try to inspect the device, to figure it out, and try to disarm it, well, it might just blow up in the bomb squads face, so remote detonation minimizes human casualties.
At least, that's how I've always understood it - I'm no expert and don't pretend to be one.
I work for a somewhat small software company (about 100 employees), I know we have at least 10 or 20 'server-level' hostnames, all of which are part of our main domain, so that at least 10 server names are served by that single name server. Again, we are a small company - I wouldn't be surprised if some of the bigger organizations in the world have hundreds, maybe in some cases thousands, of hostnames all served under a single domain. Most large univeristies will have hundreds or thousands of servers spread across multiple colleges/departments, where sometimes the colleges, and in a few cases even departments, have their own sub-domain.
Hierarchies don't have to be 'deep' to help reduce the load pretty significantly. Because of different ccTlds, and the different 'standard' tlds, and because of what I mention above about a single domain-level server handling many servers inside that domain, I'm pretty sure the namespace is cut down quite a bit from the 'worst-case' scenario of a completely flat naming system. I also do believe the parent in that there's probably a lot of very big servers, connected to very big Internet connections, serving the .com domain.
Yeah, I have to agree, leaks can only be tolerated when they do more good than harm to the public. I don't see how releasing all this diplomatic records does anything but simply put a chilling effect on necessary diplomatic relations.
I could kind of back WikiLeaks when they were leaking war documents which showed ways in which the governments involved in the war might be lying to the public, and/or covering up corruption, etc. But I'm having a hard time seeing how this latest WikiLeaks dump isn't just putting *everyone* in the world in greater danger.
My first question would be, how is my 'domain' secured in this system so it can't be easily hijacked? If it does get hijacked, how do I ever get control of it again? How do I know a domain I am visiting wasn't hijacked?
These are issues facing the 'official' DNS system too, but generally, with the official DNS system, because of a fairly centralized control regime, it's at least difficult, usually, to hijack a domain, because you have to convince one of the levels of other servers to delegate authority over that domain to your servers. With a distributed system, how do you ensure that all the nodes give the same answer to a query? What's to stop a node from just lying? How do you detect if it's lying (some sort of cryptographic system would probably be needed)?
With the 'official' DNS, if my domain is hijacked, there are legal processes I can follow to try to prove that the domain should be rightly mine, and to have control restored if it's hijacked. Will there be any either technical or legal remedy for having your domain 'jacked in the P2P-DNS?
I've always understood that the reason the DNS is hierarchical isn't that programmers just thought it would be great for no other reason than that they like trees. My understanding is it is the very foundation of breaking up the DNS into smaller chunks that can be stored (and resolved) on multiple servers. DNS is *already* distributed, sort of, in its design. The issue is that there are central root and tld servers.
So, if I want to check email, and my mail client needs to contact mail.myisp.net, it first asks the root servers for the .net server, it asks the .net server for the myisp.net server, then it asks the myisp.net server for mail.myisp.net - that way, all the higher level servers can just answers to a small 'chunk' of the total dns namespace.
One way or another, any DNS system is going to need to splitup the namespace *somehow*, so if it isn't a tree, then what's it gonna be?
In general, I agree with the idea that it's better when we can buy things closer to the point of production, and buy less stuff from overseas. However, there will likely always be at least some need for overseas transport involving very large cargo ships.
This might sound like a really crazy bad idea, but many ideas when they are first considered, seem crazy bad, until people figure out how to make them NOT be bad, but. . .
Perhaps it's time we revisited the idea of the commercial nuclear ship? For small boats, you'll likely never be able to safely power them with nuclear power, but it seems to me that very large cargo ships would be almost ideal candidates for nuclear propulsion. The question, really, is can we make nuclear propulsion systems that a) are extremely safe during normal operation, b) don't become dangerous in an accident/ship sinking scenario or a bombing, etc [wouldn't want to pollute any ports or the ocean at large, with radioactive material, and c) are highly resistant to having fuel 'diverted' for nefarious purposes?
I'm no expert, so I don't know if it would be possible to create a 'completely safe' nuclear propulsion system for commercial use or not, but it sure seems like it would be worth spending some money on R&D to try to figure it out - nuclear would seem to be the only energy source which at least *possibly* might be able to be virtually 'air/water pollution free'.
I got to thinking about this because I recently came across the website for a guy proposing an approach to nuclear propulsion for ships which he thinks is safe enough for civilian commercial use - basically, if I understand his site correctly, he wants to use PBMRs (Pebble Bed Modular Reactors) to heat inert nitrogen gas (you know, nitrogen which is 78% of what air is made of), and use the pressure of the heated nitrogen gas to drive a gas turbine to provide propulsion and electricity generation. PBMRs seem like they might be a safe enough design to perhaps consider for use in civilian applications like large ships.
The site is Adams Atomic Engines. I have no affiliation with Adams Atomic Engines - I just thought it looked like an interesting concept, and could perhaps really clean up commercial cargo ships.
"Planes, recreational boats, and even lawn mowers. . . make significant contributions to air pollution."
Citation, please? Since you are the one who made that assertion, I would like you to provide at least *some* sort of source to back that up, please? Because, I'd be *very* surprised if lawnmowers, recreational boats, and small airplanes (your statement, I grant, might also allow for the inclusion of large commercial aircraft, but that seems to be in such a completely different category than the other items - lawnmowers and boats - that I assume you weren't including commercial aviation in that, but were rather referring to small, general aviation planes) come anywhere close to polluting as much as cars and trucks would if they didn't have emissions controls.
Perhaps people are more worried about cars than lawnmowers and boats because people use their cars a lot more than lawnmowers and boats? Many people drive their cars every day, perhaps 1-5 hours a day, thousands of miles per year. Most people might operate their lawn mowers once every week or two, for maybe 1/2 hour or perhaps 2-3 hours if you have a really big lawn, and during the time it's operating, it's not burning fuel at anywhere near the scale that cars/trucks do. Boats might get taken out once or twice a week for a few months a year, then not used the rest of the year.
I really don't have a source of statistics to prove the following, but I'd be highly surprised if boat *or* lawnmower ownership is anywhere near as high on a per-capita basis, in the U.S. as car ownership. I presume that almost anyone who owns a house with a yard, probably has a lawnmower. I live in a multi-tennant apartment building, as do millions of Americans. I don't own a lawnmower. My landlord does, but he owns several different buildings, and I think only owns one lawnmower for keeping the grounds at the multiple buildings, each of which have fairly small 'yards'. I think a lot of apartment dwellers own cars, but probably none of them owns a lawnmower. As for boats, those tend to be a bit of a luxury item - sure, people with middle class incomes can afford a small boat, but in my experience, maybe 1 in 20 or 1 inn 50 households owns a boat? I'm not sure what the exact numbers are, but I'm pretty sure that most households in the U.S. own at least one car, but not everyone owns a boat. I believe plane ownership would be even much lower than boat ownership.
So, when trying to solve a problem, do you worry about sources which are (combined) a tiny fraction of the problem, or do you look at the sources that comprise the vast majority of the problem (commercial aviation, commercial boats, commercial trucks, and small cars and trucks)?
"Uh, you have COMPLETELY failed to get it."
Right back at'cha.
As I said, if you agree to pay a cheaper rate, in exchange for slower service, as a consumer that is an option that should be available to you. As I stated, you should get *at least* the service you have payed for. So, if you pay for slow 768k DSL Internet, and only have to pay like $20/mo, then you are only paying for 768k service. You should *definitely*, absolutely be getting the service you payed for, but what I'm saying is that if "Disney" or whoever wants to pay to subsidized *your* internet connection, by getting you *faster than* 768k downloads when you download/stream from their site (or upload for that matter), I could totally be down with the content provider paying a small fee to your ISP to 'upgrade' your Internet service.
The situation I describe, however, sadly, is not really what the 'net neutrality' debate is about - mostly it seems to be about ISP's advertising and selling "unlimited" Internet at very high speeds, then not wanting to provision enough 'backbone' bandwidth on their network to actually give customers the speeds they payed for. In that, I agree with you: if you've payed for bandwidth, you should be able to enjoy that bandwidth with any other address on the internet, and I do support net neutrality in that regard. I'm just saying that we perhaps have to be careful about how we write the Net Neutrality rules, to allow for other types of business arrangements which actually *benefit* consumers.
You know, I never liked the way the SCO lawsuits played out. Being stopped by Novell as copyright/patent holder never gave a 'final resolution' to the issue. All it did was said "For today, Novell declines to sue". It's been pretty apparent for a long time that Novell is somewhat past its glory days, and would probably end up for sale at some point. I've been expecting Novell to go on the block, and have been wondering who would buy it, and if they'd restart the lawsuits.
I think SCO made a big mistake in initially suing IBM, who was big enough, and making enough money off of Linux, to vigorously defend against SCO. I've sometimes wondered if the whole Novell intervention wasn't a way for SCO to end the lawsuit without actually having any rulings/judgements made in the IBM case. Then, someone else could restart litigation, against 'softer' targets than IBM, and perhaps start to get precedents set against companies and individuals who aren't rich enough to make a vigorous, long-lasting defense.
I've gone back and forth on this issue. I do think ISPs who have monopolies to run cable to the home do warrant some regulation from the FCC, because of their monopolies. On the other hand, I also realize that in the end, customers have to pay for their access and it might not be completely unreasonable to have 'tiers' of service. If someone can't afford a more 'premium' connection, it doesn't seem out of hand to do things like throttling that customers bandwidth, but then also striking deals with content providers to open up the bandwidth for their traffic to those limited customers. So, maybe I get the cheapo internet connection, but when I download content I pay for from places like Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc, I get faster download and no cap on the traffic, because the content providers setup a deal with the ISP.
Now, I don't think it's reasonable for them to completely block any (legal) traffic, but I do think it reasonable to allow them to setup tiered service and tiered pricing. The key is that they should fully disclose in their advertising and customer agreements, just exactly what it is the customer is paying for. If a customer buys "10Mb/s UNLIMITED Internet", then they shouldn't throttle any traffic, because the customer was sold unlimited service at up to 10Mb/s. If the customer only wants to pay for 768Kb/s, but a content provider has worked out a deal to actually send their content at *faster* than that 768Kb/s, I could totally see something like that.
Of course, I realize that's not what the big ISPs are trying to do, but I'm just saying, as a general principle, as long as the customer gets what they payed for and what was advertised, I'm kind of ok with some allowance of tiered service and agreements with content providers to enable a better experience.