Well, I'm with you. but there's an obvious explanation: like it or not (I sure don't) guns and ammunition are protected by the second amendment and (for some reason) have a special place in American culture.
I'm with you there, except for the bit about the second amendment. Read the first part of the sentence never quoted by the NRA some day. And then let me know when the rednecks have formed a "well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State".
"The rich will get new laws passed to make it legal for automatic cars to go much, much faster than human-driven vehicles", and then will hopefully die in large numbers of asplody fireballs. Win-win!
Why would a Unix application ever see the:60? Any time someone checks the clock, the time should be derived from Unix time (seconds since the epoch) which doesn't account for leap seconds. So to an application it should appear as a duplicate:00 or:59.
localtime(3) tells me that
tm_sec The number of seconds after the minute, normally in the range
0 to 59, but can be up to 60 to allow for leap seconds.
The problem is that the epoch returned by time(2) defined by POSIX is idiotic:
POSIX.1 defines seconds since the Epoch as a value to be interpreted as
the number of seconds between a specified time and the Epoch, according
to a formula for conversion from UTC equivalent to conversion on the
naive basis that leap seconds are ignored and all years divisible by 4
are leap years. This value is not the same as the actual number of
seconds between the time and the Epoch, because of leap seconds and
because clocks are not required to be synchronized to a standard referâ
ence.
The correct thing to do would have been to define time() to return TAI or the like. Monotonic. Calculations involving deltas of time should just be deltas of that epoch value in seconds. Easy. If you find yourself trying to manipulate individual components of datetime stamps for purposes other than display and input, You're Doing Things Wrong. The only thing that would care about seconds being 60 would be the presentation layer. localtime() return tm_sec 60, so display 60. No need to "sanity check" (wrongly) the value returned by system libraries to be between 0 and 59 - they should be written by people smarter than yourself usually and they surely know about leap seconds, right? Right?
But unfortunately, idiocy was encoded into the standards, so further idiocy is required to work around the original idiocy. Before long, the world is being run by idiots. And it becomes even harder to undo the idiocy in higher layers even if you're competent and know what you are doing.
Get nagios to monitor each VM, and each host (meh, not so important - only for esxi host logfiles), compared to the ntp server(s), and compare the server against a smattering of external hosts (perhaps including your country's official time standard if you're a government organisation). We're monitoring 250 VMs here, and none of them have ever been more than 0.1seconds out.
I forgot to say: monitor against external ntp providers (asking Networks to punch holes through firewalls for your monitoring host(s) appropriately) even (especially) when using super expensive GPS clocks as your stratum 1 source. You have to remember that GPS receivers are manufactured by cheapest bidder incompetent fools who don't even understand how TAI-UTC works, hence why they're lobbying to abolish UTC time. Symmetricom, I'm looking at you. Good thing leap seconds are updated in the ephemerides at UTC=0, so on the east coast of Australia, are applied erroneously 3 months early when optical telescopes aren't observing the sky.
Don't virtualize anything requiring tight scheduling or a reliable clock, such as a software PBX system performing transcoding or conferencing.
Pffft. We're running cisco's voip stuff one one of their cisco UCS chassis here. Not a problem, and entirely supported.
NTP hasn't been a problem for years, so long as you read and understand the VMware document and have some reasonable knowledge of NTP (more knowledge than the people packaging ntp for redhat, is unfortunately required).
Don't *ever* fallback to local disciplining perhaps except for a single master ntp server for your organisation (if you expect to have an unreliable network to the outside world). Why the fecking hell did Redhat decide that workstations and non-ntp servers would fallback to local disciplining?
Set 'tinker panic 0' in ntp.conf
Get nagios to monitor each VM, and each host (meh, not so important - only for esxi host logfiles), compared to the ntp server(s), and compare the server against a smattering of external hosts (perhaps including your country's official time standard if you're a government organisation). We're monitoring 250 VMs here, and none of them have ever been more than 0.1seconds out.
I've seen some really screwy ntp and time configurations out there (including using cron to rdate to a local server) - it's a pity that competent ntp knowledge isn't a requirement of law. Maybe it's something North Carolina should persue after they've finished passing the sea-level-isn't-really-rising-all-that-much legislation.
I could be off-base about the above assumptions, but they are what I've gathered from reading the various articles I could find actually discussing the patents technically and from reading the patent description itself. I'm not a radiophysicist/engineer, so I could be missing something which would be obvious to one.
Knowing the work that these guys do and have been doing for decades now (I was doing radio astrophysics), but not having read the patent, I strongly suspect it relates to the interferometry work they have been doing for the Australia Telescope Compact Array national facility. Interferometry allows (extremely) directional signal detection from omnidirectional antennae, and simularly directional radio frequency interference mitigation.
A crucial part of radio interferometry is doing Fourier transforms. Getting large amounts of bandwidth necessitates doing this in hardware, in parallel. The precursor projects for the Square Kilometre Array mean these parallel calculations needs to be done quickly (realtime), large bandwidth (the frequency range from the sky would ideally be spread over many gigahertz), and massively parallel (terrahertz digital signals prior to data reduction). So need to be done cheaply and in hardware.
The mathematical techniques are highly non-obvious (and extremely neat). These guys pioneered the mass production of the miniaturised supercheap hardware involved. Yes, they outsourced it, but they most certainly did design it all. This all took quite a lot of investment and innovation. The real point of patents.
> They are the kind of company that makes me cringe because I know there are real, legitimate, marketers out there that do use email to engage clients and keep them up-to-date
There are actually clients out there that want to be "engaged"? All the marketing bullcrap I get from Oracle, Sun, Veritas, VMWare etc is because we have a "relationship" with them. Do I want to be engaged? Hell no. Marketers are all just a waste of time. Pity they think they're being useful. All they're doing is clogging up my procmail rules.
Good value! With Internode, on copper ADSL2+ (24 down, 1.5 up), 150GB monthly quota, all for... $50!
I'll let the early adopters adopt this one. (on the other hand, those poor sods that hadn't heard that you didn't need to use Telstra would probably consider this a good deal).
I hope the Plank Constant is not found to vary over the life of the universe, as alpha has been conjectured to.
I am a little surprised that the several spheres of silicon scattered around the world hadn't already redefined kg standard. I saw one of those balls 10 years ago, and understood then that the work was almost complete - the deviations from a perfect sphere were negligible, radius well determined, and purity excellent.
I'm also a little surprised that these versions of the kg standard need exist at all. I thought it was exactly 1L of water. Which is exactly 10cm*10cm*10cm of water. And a metre is exactly the distance light travels in 1299,792,458 of a second (it had formerly been 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2p10 and 5d5 quantum levels of the krypton-86 atom).
I guess "water" isn't sufficiently well defined or reproducible.
'Kandlbauer "accepted his fate in a manner that commanded great respect from all of us'. What? It's not fate when it was his own stupid choice to climb a high voltage pylon.
Why was he allowed to drive despite his arms being controlled by an unreliable experimental medical/machine technique? His motto was "Don't live for others, live for yourself!". Meanwhile, he was always far more likely to contribute to other peoples deaths because he was allowed to drive.
I just hope he didn't hurt or kill anyone else when he crashed.
No, the youths are turned off crappy classical muzak played through shitty speakers. I hate it to. I always know when I'm in the far eastern suburbs of Melbourne when they play some horribly piped noise through horn speakers designed to mangle train announcements and not for high fidelity.
When shops play similar, I make it my aim to get the hell away from such places. I assume they didn't want to sell me anything.
The great thing about a serial console is that it doesn't take long to figure it out. And you only need 3 wires to get there. Another nice thing about it is that it's point-to-point, so you don't have to worry about your signals getting lost.
Heck, you can create a serial interface from discrete components if you're really into fun.
Wow. Miss the point completely. In the datacentre, trying to configure my SAN, I don't give a flying rats about whether my cable only needs 3 conductors and I can build a device using only discrete components. I'm not building devices and the cable came in the box with the device. I want to plug my special magical cable somewhere into a special magical and standard port somewhere on my laptop (ie, not a serial port), and have it talk to a special magical port somewhere on my device. I'd rather it be error detected and corrected just so that when partitioning my device, it didn't interpret "create new partition" as "wipe all partitions".
I strongly suspect a pl2302 or similar usb-serial chip that has linux drivers only costs a few cents, and the USB communications are error corrected (and the signal lines from the converter chip to the internals are all done within the metal enclosure of the device I'm configuring, so should be fairly resistant to errors). So if these devices were built included as standard instead, I'd have a much better chance of getting my data onto the device error free for some time in to the future until USB has been superseded. I've got devices at work that were advertised as containing "USB interface", which instead came with USB serial converters. They work fine. Just add udev rules to match the device and create a symlink somewhere in/dev, then configure minicom to talk to that location.
Of course, I'd be equally happy with ethernet (unencrypted telnet talking on some random private IP would be fine, this port need not be plugged into the network) - I'd configure my laptop to send all private subnet ranges to the ethernet port that was plugged directly into my device (if the laptop needed network access, have a second port or wireless).
"Lies, damn lies and statistics" is all you need to know about statistics.
If you get fooled by politicians who lie by abusing statistics, then that's a pretty good sign you don't undestand statistics and need to learn more about it.
Because firefox is buggy pile of crap. Where all of the major usability bugs I've cared about[1][2][3][4][5] were left open for 6 years before I finally discovered opera. Trying to look into the code myself to see whether I could fix anything, and I think I came to the conclusion none of the bugs had been fixed because it's unmaintainable crap.
Don't write shit code, people.
[1] Mozilla started out life on unix. And then forgot its roots, and now everything is click-to-focus running on Windows[TM], obviously. [2] some homespun database that wrote the entire database out to file every single time a line was added or deleted (I verifed this with strace)? Ie, n**2 purging of the entire history cache? Does sqlite suck any less yet? [3] A 2MB animated gif could cause an OOM after trying to chew through a GB of memory? WTF? Why on earth would you want to allocate a pixmap for every single freaking frame of a movie? [4] Memory leaks everywhere else. [5] Ah crap, I've supressed the memory of the rest of them.
But WHY? What on earth do they aim to achieve? I am honestly baffled by this.
Apart from not being convinced that fuel usage is actually going down per kilometer (maybe it is in the US, but it certainly isn't in Australia, where we liked bigger cars up until last year), if you are getting less income through fuel tax, increase the tax. Since they are presumably wanting to
1) earn tax revenues 2) perhaps, if they're really enlightened, discourage CO2 emission
both of those can be achieved by increasing the tax rate on the fuel (km is only a loose proxy for CO2 emission, whereas fuel usage is directly proportional to CO2 emission and *very easily measured* and *already taken care of, dammit*, and not a flat rate charge that discourages people from driving lighter more fuel efficient vehicles.
"The Chevrolet Volt won't pay a penny of fuel tax," Rahn said of the electric car that will make its debut next year.
Yeah, but it will pay a carbon tax if the car is charged up from a typical power source. Which, in a sensible world, would actually be a non-negligible amount of money.
"If you're committed to the system being improved then it was a no-brainer," he said. Clearly. The stupidity. It hurts!
Problem is, the warehouse, if it is holding goods belonging to others, probably isn't insured for this. The insurer will claim Act of God. (And if "Act of God" is to mean anything in an insurance contract, it probably means a meteor). The warehouse owner will say "these goods not destroyed by a meteor - they were destroyed by fire, and we're insured for that".
The insurer will say "hell no; we're not paying." And off to court this will go.
Were the goods destroyed by a fire - or by a meteor? Because either way, the bailee is on the hook.
The resulting litigation answering that question will go down in the history books - and be subsequently learned by every law student in the common law world in their second month of law school - for the next several centuries.
What part of that involved both the lawyers and insurance companies being lined up against the wall and have meteorites pounded against them?
I was under the impression that if everyone was to start using uranium now, then it wasn't on the timescale of our great grand children that we need to worry. 50 years max? Only our grandchildren. And our children will have uncomfortable latter years.
Who said that just because something costs 10 times as much it must need 10 times as much energy to produce? The bulbs cost more because the materials and gases used to make them are more exotic than the low tech incandesent bulb
Yes indeed. More exotic == more energy to produce/extract.
Costs will continue to come down with increased volume... and tolerance of shorter cycles will improve.
But, in the meantime, because there may not the economy of scale yet (there is definitely already to a small extent, and compact flouros/are/ a lot more complex than a resistor in argon, and as such, won't ever be anywhere near as cheap as bulbs), the production mechanisms are still rather innefficient, and.... use more energy.
That would be like claiming that a Hybrid is a net energy loser compared to its ICE brethren just because it tends to cost more... completely ignoring the actual energy saved over it's useful life.
I'm not arguing that. But at the current time, given the manufacturing innefficiencies of small scale production of a niche car that hasn't made it big time in the market yet (and is rather immature technology), the prius/does/ take more energy to produce. Do you think you will save $30,000 in petrol (and electricity) in the forseeable future (before the batteries fade, or the electronics die) with your prius?
I certainly couldn't, but then again, it's been over a year since I drove:)
I don't know where you got the idea that manufacturing energy-efficient bulbs costs $10 for a single one.
I never said I was paying US dollars:)
We pay $10AU for 1 bulb, from the shop, and $0.50 or so for a normal bulb. That $10 includes shipping and profits. They roughly approximate the energy costs associated with the transport and staff, so we care about the cost it costs you, rather than the manufacturing costs (I know I said manufacturing).
And your 10000 hours is in the ideal case with a clean electricity supply. Most of mine, as I said, died a lot earlier -- as in of the order of only 1000 hours. I suggest they are/rather/ fragile.
So if all your energy saving bulbs last 10,000 hours, then good luck to you. But I find they are only useful for one or two of my rooms (kitchen is one example where I've got normal flouros -- they seem to last *forever*)
P.S. Living in Australia, we rarely care for extra waste heat. I thought we had finally gotten rid of summer (at least down here in the south), but alas, today and tomorrow are both quite warm again.
Er, coal is basically solidified dinosaur food juice:)
I dunno that electric or hydrogen cars are ever going to much of a solution at all. To me it just seems as an easy cop out for the current politicians.
Guess where electricity and hydrogen cars get their energy? From the current energy sources, of which fossil fuels are one (all fossil fuels are on their way out). Then there's nuclear, wind, hydro, etc.
Wind only works when used in conjunction with gas fired stations, since you need something to take up the slack when the wind varies on the timescales of seconds (and gas is about the only thing that can also vary power on the timescales of seconds). Solar has typically taken more energy to construct the solar cells than they will/ever/ recover in their entire ~15 year lifetime -- silicon and glass take quite a bit of refining, you know?). Nuclear has been claimed that there is a huge hidden energy subsidy (you need to perform triple bottom line analysis to work out how much it costs to extract uranium 235 in *real* terms).
Fusion apparently suffers stability problems at the higher energy densities needed to break even, and it turns out you simply can't just scale up the reactor as was once thought.
Hydro dams always silt up within half a century, requiring you to build new ones elsewhere. That doesn't seem like a policy that will keep us going long.
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Well, I'm with you. but there's an obvious explanation: like it or not (I sure don't) guns and ammunition are protected by the second amendment and (for some reason) have a special place in American culture.
I'm with you there, except for the bit about the second amendment. Read the first part of the sentence never quoted by the NRA some day. And then let me know when the rednecks have formed a "well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State".
"The rich will get new laws passed to make it legal for automatic cars to go much, much faster than human-driven vehicles", and then will hopefully die in large numbers of asplody fireballs. Win-win!
localtime(3) tells me that
tm_sec The number of seconds after the minute, normally in the range
0 to 59, but can be up to 60 to allow for leap seconds.
The problem is that the epoch returned by time(2) defined by POSIX is idiotic:
POSIX.1 defines seconds since the Epoch as a value to be interpreted as
the number of seconds between a specified time and the Epoch, according
to a formula for conversion from UTC equivalent to conversion on the
naive basis that leap seconds are ignored and all years divisible by 4
are leap years. This value is not the same as the actual number of
seconds between the time and the Epoch, because of leap seconds and
because clocks are not required to be synchronized to a standard referâ
ence.
The correct thing to do would have been to define time() to return TAI or the like. Monotonic. Calculations involving deltas of time should just be deltas of that epoch value in seconds. Easy. If you find yourself trying to manipulate individual components of datetime stamps for purposes other than display and input, You're Doing Things Wrong. The only thing that would care about seconds being 60 would be the presentation layer. localtime() return tm_sec 60, so display 60. No need to "sanity check" (wrongly) the value returned by system libraries to be between 0 and 59 - they should be written by people smarter than yourself usually and they surely know about leap seconds, right? Right?
But unfortunately, idiocy was encoded into the standards, so further idiocy is required to work around the original idiocy. Before long, the world is being run by idiots. And it becomes even harder to undo the idiocy in higher layers even if you're competent and know what you are doing.
Human deletes code. Robohand lose.
Robohand deletes human. Robohand always wins. DELETE! DELETE!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
Get nagios to monitor each VM, and each host (meh, not so important - only for esxi host logfiles), compared to the ntp server(s), and compare the server against a smattering of external hosts (perhaps including your country's official time standard if you're a government organisation). We're monitoring 250 VMs here, and none of them have ever been more than 0.1seconds out.
I forgot to say: monitor against external ntp providers (asking Networks to punch holes through firewalls for your monitoring host(s) appropriately) even (especially) when using super expensive GPS clocks as your stratum 1 source. You have to remember that GPS receivers are manufactured by cheapest bidder incompetent fools who don't even understand how TAI-UTC works, hence why they're lobbying to abolish UTC time. Symmetricom, I'm looking at you. Good thing leap seconds are updated in the ephemerides at UTC=0, so on the east coast of Australia, are applied erroneously 3 months early when optical telescopes aren't observing the sky.
Don't virtualize anything requiring tight scheduling or a reliable clock, such as a software PBX system performing transcoding or conferencing.
Pffft. We're running cisco's voip stuff one one of their cisco UCS chassis here. Not a problem, and entirely supported.
NTP hasn't been a problem for years, so long as you read and understand the VMware document and have some reasonable knowledge of NTP (more knowledge than the people packaging ntp for redhat, is unfortunately required).
Don't *ever* fallback to local disciplining perhaps except for a single master ntp server for your organisation (if you expect to have an unreliable network to the outside world). Why the fecking hell did Redhat decide that workstations and non-ntp servers would fallback to local disciplining?
Set 'tinker panic 0' in ntp.conf
Get nagios to monitor each VM, and each host (meh, not so important - only for esxi host logfiles), compared to the ntp server(s), and compare the server against a smattering of external hosts (perhaps including your country's official time standard if you're a government organisation). We're monitoring 250 VMs here, and none of them have ever been more than 0.1seconds out.
I've seen some really screwy ntp and time configurations out there (including using cron to rdate to a local server) - it's a pity that competent ntp knowledge isn't a requirement of law. Maybe it's something North Carolina should persue after they've finished passing the sea-level-isn't-really-rising-all-that-much legislation.
Hope so! And that his crumple zone is the boulder lying in the middle of the road instead of a prius.
Google might get a huge kick in the junk over Dalvik, Oracle might get a huge kick in the junk over whether or not...
Could you please stop using the word "junk"? It's stupid.
I could be off-base about the above assumptions, but they are what I've gathered from reading the various articles I could find actually discussing the patents technically and from reading the patent description itself. I'm not a radiophysicist/engineer, so I could be missing something which would be obvious to one.
Knowing the work that these guys do and have been doing for decades now (I was doing radio astrophysics), but not having read the patent, I strongly suspect it relates to the interferometry work they have been doing for the Australia Telescope Compact Array national facility. Interferometry allows (extremely) directional signal detection from omnidirectional antennae, and simularly directional radio frequency interference mitigation.
A crucial part of radio interferometry is doing Fourier transforms. Getting large amounts of bandwidth necessitates doing this in hardware, in parallel. The precursor projects for the Square Kilometre Array mean these parallel calculations needs to be done quickly (realtime), large bandwidth (the frequency range from the sky would ideally be spread over many gigahertz), and massively parallel (terrahertz digital signals prior to data reduction). So need to be done cheaply and in hardware.
The mathematical techniques are highly non-obvious (and extremely neat). These guys pioneered the mass production of the miniaturised supercheap hardware involved. Yes, they outsourced it, but they most certainly did design it all. This all took quite a lot of investment and innovation. The real point of patents.
> They are the kind of company that makes me cringe because I know there are real, legitimate, marketers out there that do use email to engage clients and keep them up-to-date
There are actually clients out there that want to be "engaged"? All the marketing bullcrap I get from Oracle, Sun, Veritas, VMWare etc is because we have a "relationship" with them. Do I want to be engaged? Hell no. Marketers are all just a waste of time. Pity they think they're being useful. All they're doing is clogging up my procmail rules.
Good value! With Internode, on copper ADSL2+ (24 down, 1.5 up), 150GB monthly quota, all for... $50!
I'll let the early adopters adopt this one. (on the other hand, those poor sods that hadn't heard that you didn't need to use Telstra would probably consider this a good deal).
I hope the Plank Constant is not found to vary over the life of the universe, as alpha has been conjectured to.
I am a little surprised that the several spheres of silicon scattered around the world hadn't already redefined kg standard. I saw one of those balls 10 years ago, and understood then that the work was almost complete - the deviations from a perfect sphere were negligible, radius well determined, and purity excellent.
I'm also a little surprised that these versions of the kg standard need exist at all. I thought it was exactly 1L of water. Which is exactly 10cm*10cm*10cm of water. And a metre is exactly the distance light travels in 1299,792,458 of a second (it had formerly been 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2p10 and 5d5 quantum levels of the krypton-86 atom).
I guess "water" isn't sufficiently well defined or reproducible.
'Kandlbauer "accepted his fate in a manner that commanded great respect from all of us'. What? It's not fate when it was his own stupid choice to climb a high voltage pylon.
Why was he allowed to drive despite his arms being controlled by an unreliable experimental medical/machine technique? His motto was "Don't live for others, live for yourself!". Meanwhile, he was always far more likely to contribute to other peoples deaths because he was allowed to drive.
I just hope he didn't hurt or kill anyone else when he crashed.
No, the youths are turned off crappy classical muzak played through shitty speakers. I hate it to. I always know when I'm in the far eastern suburbs of Melbourne when they play some horribly piped noise through horn speakers designed to mangle train announcements and not for high fidelity.
When shops play similar, I make it my aim to get the hell away from such places. I assume they didn't want to sell me anything.
The great thing about a serial console is that it doesn't take long to figure it out. And you only need 3 wires to get there.
Another nice thing about it is that it's point-to-point, so you don't have to worry about your signals getting lost.
Heck, you can create a serial interface from discrete components if you're really into fun.
Wow. Miss the point completely. In the datacentre, trying to configure my SAN, I don't give a flying rats about whether my cable only needs 3 conductors and I can build a device using only discrete components. I'm not building devices and the cable came in the box with the device. I want to plug my special magical cable somewhere into a special magical and standard port somewhere on my laptop (ie, not a serial port), and have it talk to a special magical port somewhere on my device. I'd rather it be error detected and corrected just so that when partitioning my device, it didn't interpret "create new partition" as "wipe all partitions".
I strongly suspect a pl2302 or similar usb-serial chip that has linux drivers only costs a few cents, and the USB communications are error corrected (and the signal lines from the converter chip to the internals are all done within the metal enclosure of the device I'm configuring, so should be fairly resistant to errors). So if these devices were built included as standard instead, I'd have a much better chance of getting my data onto the device error free for some time in to the future until USB has been superseded. I've got devices at work that were advertised as containing "USB interface", which instead came with USB serial converters. They work fine. Just add udev rules to match the device and create a symlink somewhere in /dev, then configure minicom to talk to that location.
Of course, I'd be equally happy with ethernet (unencrypted telnet talking on some random private IP would be fine, this port need not be plugged into the network) - I'd configure my laptop to send all private subnet ranges to the ethernet port that was plugged directly into my device (if the laptop needed network access, have a second port or wireless).
"Lies, damn lies and statistics" is all you need to know about statistics.
If you get fooled by politicians who lie by abusing statistics, then that's a pretty good sign you don't undestand statistics and need to learn more about it.
Because firefox is buggy pile of crap. Where all of the major usability bugs I've cared about[1][2][3][4][5] were left open for 6 years before I finally discovered opera. Trying to look into the code myself to see whether I could fix anything, and I think I came to the conclusion none of the bugs had been fixed because it's unmaintainable crap.
Don't write shit code, people.
[1] Mozilla started out life on unix. And then forgot its roots, and now everything is click-to-focus running on Windows[TM], obviously.
[2] some homespun database that wrote the entire database out to file every single time a line was added or deleted (I verifed this with strace)? Ie, n**2 purging of the entire history cache? Does sqlite suck any less yet?
[3] A 2MB animated gif could cause an OOM after trying to chew through a GB of memory? WTF? Why on earth would you want to allocate a pixmap for every single freaking frame of a movie?
[4] Memory leaks everywhere else.
[5] Ah crap, I've supressed the memory of the rest of them.
Set up a home bugzilla server. Every complain she has she can log into bugzilla, from household repairs to you forgetting the anniversary.
Then you can ignore the bugs, or file WONTFIX responses saying "that's a feature, you dumbass".
But WHY? What on earth do they aim to achieve? I am honestly baffled by this.
Apart from not being convinced that fuel usage is actually going down per kilometer (maybe it is in the US, but it certainly isn't in Australia, where we liked bigger cars up until last year), if you are getting less income through fuel tax, increase the tax. Since they are presumably wanting to
1) earn tax revenues
2) perhaps, if they're really enlightened, discourage CO2 emission
both of those can be achieved by increasing the tax rate on the fuel (km is only a loose proxy for CO2 emission, whereas fuel usage is directly proportional to CO2 emission and *very easily measured* and *already taken care of, dammit*, and not a flat rate charge that discourages people from driving lighter more fuel efficient vehicles.
"The Chevrolet Volt won't pay a penny of fuel tax," Rahn said of the electric car that will make its debut next year.
Yeah, but it will pay a carbon tax if the car is charged up from a typical power source. Which, in a sensible world, would actually be a non-negligible amount of money.
"If you're committed to the system being improved then it was a no-brainer," he said.
Clearly. The stupidity. It hurts!
What part of that involved both the lawyers and insurance companies being lined up against the wall and have meteorites pounded against them?
I was under the impression that if everyone was to start using uranium now, then it wasn't on the timescale of our great grand children that we need to worry. 50 years max? Only our grandchildren. And our children will have uncomfortable latter years.
Me, I plan to be dead by then...
Who said that just because something costs 10 times as much it must need 10 times as much energy to produce? The bulbs cost more because the materials and gases used to make them are more exotic than the low tech incandesent bulb
/are/ a lot more complex than a resistor in argon, and as such, won't ever be anywhere near as cheap as bulbs), the production mechanisms are still rather innefficient, and.... use more energy.
/does/ take more energy to produce. Do you think you will save $30,000 in petrol (and electricity) in the forseeable future (before the batteries fade, or the electronics die) with your prius?
:)
Yes indeed. More exotic == more energy to produce/extract.
Costs will continue to come down with increased volume... and tolerance of shorter cycles will improve.
But, in the meantime, because there may not the economy of scale yet (there is definitely already to a small extent, and compact flouros
That would be like claiming that a Hybrid is a net energy loser compared to its ICE brethren just because it tends to cost more... completely ignoring the actual energy saved over it's useful life.
I'm not arguing that. But at the current time, given the manufacturing innefficiencies of small scale production of a niche car that hasn't made it big time in the market yet (and is rather immature technology), the prius
I certainly couldn't, but then again, it's been over a year since I drove
I don't know where you got the idea that manufacturing energy-efficient bulbs costs $10 for a single one.
:)
/rather/ fragile.
I never said I was paying US dollars
We pay $10AU for 1 bulb, from the shop, and $0.50 or so for a normal bulb. That $10 includes shipping and profits. They roughly approximate the energy costs associated with the transport and staff, so we care about the cost it costs you, rather than the manufacturing costs (I know I said manufacturing).
And your 10000 hours is in the ideal case with a clean electricity supply. Most of mine, as I said, died a lot earlier -- as in of the order of only 1000 hours. I suggest they are
So if all your energy saving bulbs last 10,000 hours, then good luck to you. But I find they are only useful for one or two of my rooms (kitchen is one example where I've got normal flouros -- they seem to last *forever*)
P.S. Living in Australia, we rarely care for extra waste heat. I thought we had finally gotten rid of summer (at least down here in the south), but alas, today and tomorrow are both quite warm again.
Er, coal is basically solidified dinosaur food juice :)
/ever/ recover in their entire ~15 year lifetime -- silicon and glass take quite a bit of refining, you know?). Nuclear has been claimed that there is a huge hidden energy subsidy (you need to perform triple bottom line analysis to work out how much it costs to extract uranium 235 in *real* terms).
I dunno that electric or hydrogen cars are ever going to much of a solution at all. To me it just seems as an easy cop out for the current politicians.
Guess where electricity and hydrogen cars get their energy? From the current energy sources, of which fossil fuels are one (all fossil fuels are on their way out). Then there's nuclear, wind, hydro, etc.
Wind only works when used in conjunction with gas fired stations, since you need something to take up the slack when the wind varies on the timescales of seconds (and gas is about the only thing that can also vary power on the timescales of seconds). Solar has typically taken more energy to construct the solar cells than they will
Fusion apparently suffers stability problems at the higher energy densities needed to break even, and it turns out you simply can't just scale up the reactor as was once thought.
Hydro dams always silt up within half a century, requiring you to build new ones elsewhere. That doesn't seem like a policy that will keep us going long.
Basicallt, it appears to me, that we are fucked.