No, this will not mean more Mac ports. If anything it may mean fewer.
It depends what you mean by a Mac port; for 99% of the world, it doesn't mean what you mean.
I work on a program that was Mac-only to the mid-90s. We then used a Mac-on-Windows API to build a Windows version. We never heard any complaints that it wasn't a Windows version, because to the user it was; it used Windows file open dialogs, menu styles, buttons, etc. People do not judge programs based on API layers that they don't even see. They judge based on whether when they install it and run it, it looks and acts like a program for that OS should look like. For games, this is even less of an issue, as many run in full-screen and have few if any visible platform-specific features.
The only reason to run inward-facing firewalls like that is if you can't trust the software you run. Obviously, this is not a huge issue on linux, but is on windows.
It's an issue on Linux too. Remember the Firefox plug-in that steals CC numbers? It runs happily on Linux. I download plenty of free binaries I haven't vetted. I generally trust commercial software (because they want to keep getting my money), and major market open source (because they want to keep their reputation.) But that ebay sniping Java program I got just *might* steal my ebay ID/password.
Also, the "per-application" thing is just plain silly.
Not at all. I've had situations where my wife notices her download speed on one computer drops to near-zero when I've run some bandwidth-hogging app on another. I would have been happy to throttle down the hog if I could have. And VoIP apps should get priority on networking.
I can't install the game on the Hard drive for performance boosts (not all games and systems get it but leave it an option, maybe even allow me to install the game and then use the game as a boot disc but the game must remain in the system)
Keep people from "installing" the game on all of their friends consoles.
If you read a little more carefully, you'll see he would accept a system that requires the game disc to be inserted each time; it's just having a large internal drive that caches the disc data, so you don't have to wait for it to read everything off the much slower DVD. So even if you loaded it on a friend's system, they'd still need the game disc to play it. Cartridge games load much faster, it just got too expensive for complex games, but they do have nice boot times. With flash memory prices dropping, perhaps we'll see cartridge games again at some point.
In the U.S., you pay $25 for the wedding, and get a female that you refer to as "wife". After a few years she empties out your bank accounts via divorce and goes back to mother, rather than Mother Russia. Pretty similar, really.
An interesting modern example of this aging, by the way, is the story of an Afghan girl who was on the cover of National Geographic some twenty years ago.
I had a Christian friend tell me that they are forbidden in Christianity because they are bottom dwellers.
Crabs and other shellfish, as well as fish without scales, are not kosher as defined in Leviticus, which is a book in the Old Testament and thus the Bible. Christians generally don't follow the rules of Leviticus, but Jews do to varying degrees.
[...]if the New York Times then had the same cavalier attitude they have now, they probably would have published the location and planned route of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) during the summer of 1945.
If so, perhaps 700+ of the crew of the Indianapolis wouldn't have been eaten by sharks.
Gads, an actual long-running discussion on/. What a concept.
Ok, I'm about as green as they come without having to have a lobotomy, but, if you've got a nuke plant . ..why?
Me personally? No. My assumption is that we're discussing what an average homeowner can do to go green without major lifestyle changes and without going broke. Ideally, we're hoping that we can spend a bit more up-front but actually save money in the long-run. As such, I assume that I'm not going to change the grid overnight, and that I plan to stay connected to it unless that really pays off.
Based on that assumption, I can use The Grid as a battery, selling excess power back to the power company. It makes a lot more economic sense than to try to rig up my own storage system.
So yeah, in the end what we're really arguing about is whether the amortized cost of a solar panel system could be as low or lower than the reduction in my electric bill. I think we'll just have to wait and see. One of the thin-film approaches may achieve the up-front cost lowering, or perhaps a cheaper doping process will appear. If it does, solar could be cost-effective even you're as environmentally conscious as the average Hummer driver.
One could even create a spreadsheet or little app to compute the crossover point based on assumptions about inflation, investment returns, cost/watt installed, local solar levels, and local grid energy costs.
And by the way, your solar panel is nearly useless. You're going to need more stuff if you actually want it to keep the light in your house on at night.
That's for the nuke plant to handle, or utility-run reservior "batteries" (raise the water when you have excess, drive a gravity turbine when you need more), or even some coal. I'm not trying to escape the grid, just trying to turn the solar energy hitting my roof into useful energy and reduce coal usage.
And even with these shortages of polysilicon, 120 watt panels are $600. They don't have to go down that much to become cost-effective, esp. with my local utility planning a 75% rate increase. If average power need of a house is on the order of 1000 Watts, that's 8 of those panels; if they drop to $300, that sounds quite affordable if installation and wiring doesn't vastly increase the cost.
Chemically, sure. In practical terms, however, they're both generally made with high-temperature smelters. And I think you missed my point: iron, steel, and aluminum, despite needing these high-temperature industrial processes, are all fairly cheap. They need energy, but that energy doesn't increase the price that much. And raw silicon metal? Less than a dollar per pound. ( http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/s ilicon/760397.pdf ) The cost of the silicon in a 120 watt solar cell is probably less than $20. (Evergreen's $600 model weighs 28 lbs. ( http://www.affordable-solar.com/evergreen.ec.120.g d.120.watt.cedar.solar.panel.htm )
So if it's not the raw metal, and clearly it isn't, what stage(s) of turning sand, etc. into a solar cell are expensive? *That's* what I'm trying to figure out. It doesn't seem you know specifically either; your (reasonable) point is generally "if it could be made cheaper, it would have already." And you may be right, I'd just like to know what in the process is the tough point or points.
Well hey, you try turning sand into a semiconductor and not spend a lot of money in the process.
Iron ore into steel and bauxite into aluminum takes a lot of energy, but those metals aren't particularly expensive. Is making silicon from sand that much more energy intensive? Look at one of those linked articles, and what does it say?
"Photovoltaics are expensive to produce because of the high cost of semiconducting materials. Cost reductions can be achieved by reducing manufacturing costs. As manufacturing capacity increases, costs of manufacturing decrease."
I.e., from that last sentence, it is at least in part a matter of relatively small production lines.
You need fairly pure silicon, but nowhere near the purity needed for IC production. You have to dope the materials, but again, no ultraclean room needed.
As for oil to produce solar, that's because solar cells are expensive; but that's circular logic. "They're expensive because they're expensive."
We already make photovoltaics at or near the limits of economies of scale. They are just . ..plain . ..expensive to make. Innately.
What makes them expensive to make?
Seriously. I assume they're not hand-crafted. Is it the raw materials? The manufacturing? Silicon is cheap, pure silicon probably much less so, but still tolerable; what makes solar cells expensive to make?
Be careful in your analysis. EVs aren't *at all* general purpose replacements for cars. They don't do what most consumers want cars to do. If you have only 1 car, even if an EV would be a suitable replacement for 90% of your driving it still does you no good because of the other 10%.
If you only have sporadic long trips (I drove 500+ miles this weekend, but only do that a few times a year), a rental vehicle may suffice for your remaining drive times.
BTW, ignore my recent response to one of your Friday postings, someone else made the same points in responses in this article.
I think you're misreading those charts. We may use 28 EJ of oil-based power, but we only get 5.6 EJ delivered. The CO2 produced per useful unit of energy is actually slightly better for coal (1.9Gt/6.33EJ) than for oil (1.8Gt/5.6EJ).
Look at them again and see if you disagree with me.
At least you can't have the standard GW step 3 aka buy tons of figurines at high cost.
Ebay is your friend here. Buy them, then sell them back on ebay when you're no longer interested for a similar price, even possibly a profit if you're a decent painter. Also, OOP figures often go for cheaper than the latest stuff.
I bought a bunch of current model figs the other day, including $125 (list) in stuff still sealed in shrink wrap, and 50-60 other miniatures (mostly metal) for $100 including shipping. And a chariot just arrived today, $10 including the shipping.
Check advice sites for when to buy ebay stuff. I won the big lot I just mentioned in an auction that ended after 1 am EST. Sniper programs are also handy.
Yes, but as we've said the concern is an explosive with an RFID reader, that blows up when there are (enough) Americans, Brits, Australians, Indians, Russians, or whoever is a hated group, in a given area.
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a quad SLI system is still cheaper than a tricked out Honda Civic or home theater.
Except now I have to figure out how to project 2560x1600 from this quad SLI system in my home theater...
No, this will not mean more Mac ports. If anything it may mean fewer.
It depends what you mean by a Mac port; for 99% of the world, it doesn't mean what you mean.
I work on a program that was Mac-only to the mid-90s. We then used a Mac-on-Windows API to build a Windows version. We never heard any complaints that it wasn't a Windows version, because to the user it was; it used Windows file open dialogs, menu styles, buttons, etc. People do not judge programs based on API layers that they don't even see. They judge based on whether when they install it and run it, it looks and acts like a program for that OS should look like. For games, this is even less of an issue, as many run in full-screen and have few if any visible platform-specific features.
The only reason to run inward-facing firewalls like that is if you can't trust the software you run. Obviously, this is not a huge issue on linux, but is on windows.
It's an issue on Linux too. Remember the Firefox plug-in that steals CC numbers? It runs happily on Linux. I download plenty of free binaries I haven't vetted. I generally trust commercial software (because they want to keep getting my money), and major market open source (because they want to keep their reputation.) But that ebay sniping Java program I got just *might* steal my ebay ID/password.
Also, the "per-application" thing is just plain silly.
Not at all. I've had situations where my wife notices her download speed on one computer drops to near-zero when I've run some bandwidth-hogging app on another. I would have been happy to throttle down the hog if I could have. And VoIP apps should get priority on networking.
That was meant to be $25K, though of course weddings go up from there.
I can't install the game on the Hard drive for performance boosts (not all games and systems get it but leave it an option, maybe even allow me to install the game and then use the game as a boot disc but the game must remain in the system)
Keep people from "installing" the game on all of their friends consoles.
If you read a little more carefully, you'll see he would accept a system that requires the game disc to be inserted each time; it's just having a large internal drive that caches the disc data, so you don't have to wait for it to read everything off the much slower DVD. So even if you loaded it on a friend's system, they'd still need the game disc to play it. Cartridge games load much faster, it just got too expensive for complex games, but they do have nice boot times. With flash memory prices dropping, perhaps we'll see cartridge games again at some point.
It was meant to be funny, which is why it's amusing that it's modded up as interesting and insightful...
In the U.S., you pay $25 for the wedding, and get a female that you refer to as "wife". After a few years she empties out your bank accounts via divorce and goes back to mother, rather than Mother Russia. Pretty similar, really.
From The Economist:
Finland:
Government consumption (% of GDP) 21.90
USA:
Government consumption (% of GDP) 18.72
The real way to compare effective overall tax rates is by using that statistic.
An interesting modern example of this aging, by the way, is the story of an Afghan girl who was on the cover of National Geographic some twenty years ago.
I had a Christian friend tell me that they are forbidden in Christianity because they are bottom dwellers.
Crabs and other shellfish, as well as fish without scales, are not kosher as defined in Leviticus, which is a book in the Old Testament and thus the Bible. Christians generally don't follow the rules of Leviticus, but Jews do to varying degrees.
I don't see how stem cell research supports the military.
You don't think the military has an interest in healing its wounded? Modern medicine can't yet cure a lost limb.
[...]if the New York Times then had the same cavalier attitude they have now, they probably would have published the location and planned route of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) during the summer of 1945.
If so, perhaps 700+ of the crew of the Indianapolis wouldn't have been eaten by sharks.
Online gaming, for example, would all but die, surviving only in tight[k]nit local groups.
So I really could go out and smack that griefer? Sounds like a good thing, actually.
Gads, an actual long-running discussion on /. What a concept.
.why?
Ok, I'm about as green as they come without having to have a lobotomy, but, if you've got a nuke plant . .
Me personally? No. My assumption is that we're discussing what an average homeowner can do to go green without major lifestyle changes and without going broke. Ideally, we're hoping that we can spend a bit more up-front but actually save money in the long-run. As such, I assume that I'm not going to change the grid overnight, and that I plan to stay connected to it unless that really pays off.
Based on that assumption, I can use The Grid as a battery, selling excess power back to the power company. It makes a lot more economic sense than to try to rig up my own storage system.
So yeah, in the end what we're really arguing about is whether the amortized cost of a solar panel system could be as low or lower than the reduction in my electric bill. I think we'll just have to wait and see. One of the thin-film approaches may achieve the up-front cost lowering, or perhaps a cheaper doping process will appear. If it does, solar could be cost-effective even you're as environmentally conscious as the average Hummer driver.
One could even create a spreadsheet or little app to compute the crossover point based on assumptions about inflation, investment returns, cost/watt installed, local solar levels, and local grid energy costs.
And by the way, your solar panel is nearly useless. You're going to need more stuff if you actually want it to keep the light in your house on at night.
That's for the nuke plant to handle, or utility-run reservior "batteries" (raise the water when you have excess, drive a gravity turbine when you need more), or even some coal. I'm not trying to escape the grid, just trying to turn the solar energy hitting my roof into useful energy and reduce coal usage.
And even with these shortages of polysilicon, 120 watt panels are $600. They don't have to go down that much to become cost-effective, esp. with my local utility planning a 75% rate increase. If average power need of a house is on the order of 1000 Watts, that's 8 of those panels; if they drop to $300, that sounds quite affordable if installation and wiring doesn't vastly increase the cost.
Steel and aluminum are not equivalents.
s ilicon/760397.pdf ) The cost of the silicon in a 120 watt solar cell is probably less than $20. (Evergreen's $600 model weighs 28 lbs. ( http://www.affordable-solar.com/evergreen.ec.120.g d.120.watt.cedar.solar.panel.htm )
Chemically, sure. In practical terms, however, they're both generally made with high-temperature smelters. And I think you missed my point: iron, steel, and aluminum, despite needing these high-temperature industrial processes, are all fairly cheap. They need energy, but that energy doesn't increase the price that much. And raw silicon metal? Less than a dollar per pound. ( http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/
So if it's not the raw metal, and clearly it isn't, what stage(s) of turning sand, etc. into a solar cell are expensive? *That's* what I'm trying to figure out. It doesn't seem you know specifically either; your (reasonable) point is generally "if it could be made cheaper, it would have already." And you may be right, I'd just like to know what in the process is the tough point or points.
It looks and sounds much like kludge, a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.
Well hey, you try turning sand into a semiconductor and not spend a lot of money in the process.
Iron ore into steel and bauxite into aluminum takes a lot of energy, but those metals aren't particularly expensive. Is making silicon from sand that much more energy intensive? Look at one of those linked articles, and what does it say?
"Photovoltaics are expensive to produce because of the high cost of semiconducting materials. Cost reductions can be achieved by reducing manufacturing costs. As manufacturing capacity increases, costs of manufacturing decrease."
I.e., from that last sentence, it is at least in part a matter of relatively small production lines.
You need fairly pure silicon, but nowhere near the purity needed for IC production. You have to dope the materials, but again, no ultraclean room needed.
As for oil to produce solar, that's because solar cells are expensive; but that's circular logic. "They're expensive because they're expensive."
We already make photovoltaics at or near the limits of economies of scale. They are just . . .plain . . .expensive to make. Innately.
What makes them expensive to make?
Seriously. I assume they're not hand-crafted. Is it the raw materials? The manufacturing? Silicon is cheap, pure silicon probably much less so, but still tolerable; what makes solar cells expensive to make?
Unfortunately feeding back into the grid doesn't give the same value of credit as your usage from it.
Our assumption, though, is it is better than trying to set up your own energy storage, which would add significantly to costs and complexity.
Be careful in your analysis. EVs aren't *at all* general purpose replacements for cars. They don't do what most consumers want cars to do. If you have only 1 car, even if an EV would be a suitable replacement for 90% of your driving it still does you no good because of the other 10%.
If you only have sporadic long trips (I drove 500+ miles this weekend, but only do that a few times a year), a rental vehicle may suffice for your remaining drive times.
BTW, ignore my recent response to one of your Friday postings, someone else made the same points in responses in this article.
I think you're misreading those charts. We may use 28 EJ of oil-based power, but we only get 5.6 EJ delivered. The CO2 produced per useful unit of energy is actually slightly better for coal (1.9Gt/6.33EJ) than for oil (1.8Gt/5.6EJ).
Look at them again and see if you disagree with me.
At least you can't have the standard GW step 3 aka buy tons of figurines at high cost.
Ebay is your friend here. Buy them, then sell them back on ebay when you're no longer interested for a similar price, even possibly a profit if you're a decent painter. Also, OOP figures often go for cheaper than the latest stuff.
I bought a bunch of current model figs the other day, including $125 (list) in stuff still sealed in shrink wrap, and 50-60 other miniatures (mostly metal) for $100 including shipping. And a chariot just arrived today, $10 including the shipping.
Check advice sites for when to buy ebay stuff. I won the big lot I just mentioned in an auction that ended after 1 am EST. Sniper programs are also handy.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
So he wouldn't have climbed it if it had been somewhere else?
Yes, but as we've said the concern is an explosive with an RFID reader, that blows up when there are (enough) Americans, Brits, Australians, Indians, Russians, or whoever is a hated group, in a given area.