It might be an interesting exercise to feed your favorite version and the original goto'ed version to gcc and see what it actually makes out of either on the machine level. I have found the results often to be surprising (and often more optimal than what I would have done by hand).
If there system was unstable it was probably their system design and not the OS.
Exactly - and that's why it makes sense for them to switch to something like AIX that actually has a "system design". Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS. Any one PC may or may not work with Linux. And may or may not stop working tomorrow for any of a thousand reasons.
When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks. Posting a bug report at freshmeat doesn't quite cut it when you have planes grounded...
I don't know, why do people who have never learned elementary politeness post so much on slashdot?
You mean people like yourself, who find nothing inappropriate about puking lies and ignorant insults at those who've actually taken the time to do their homework? You tell me.
Why do they make irrational assumptions about other people's credentials
Only mentally retarded morons like yourself give a hoot about credentials. I, for one, couldn't care less about credentials. Qualification (and the lack thereof) are something that is easily communicated in everything someone writes, though.
Let's rephrase that a little. As recently as eight years ago, the consensus among the international community wouldn't require that exception.
No, let's not rephrase anything, because your claim is false. Plain, simple false. It has been understood since the 1930ies that the main-sequence life time of a solar-mass star is governed by pp-chain reactions. Exquisite math was developed to make stellar models before the advent of the computer, and the early computerized models of the 50ies and early 60ies laid to rest any possibly lingering doubt. C, N and O do not play a role in the lifetime of a star of one solar mass and nothing whatsoever about this statement has changed in at least 50 years. At sufficiently higher mass, you get catalytic CNO-cycle reactions and may have room to haggle over the influence of oxygen abundance - that was worked out by people like von Weizsaecker and Bethe, again back in the 30ies.
Any astronomy book of 1950 could have told you all this. For a star of one solar mass, metallicity has no particular effect on pretty much anything - if it did, it would be much easier to measure it. At higher masses processes become more dominant that rely on heavier elements. There's nothing "current" or "recently revised" about it.
But of course you have no idea of even the most basic, trivialities of astronomy; so you did a web-search, got misled by some phrase like "time to onset of supernova" (which incidentily has nothing whatsoever to do with the main-sequence lifetime of a star), stumbled over some random paper from the late nineties and imagine you can make some kind of statement about things that are many many orders of magnitude more basic and straightforward than the lightcurves of supernovae (which also have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the main sequence lifetime of a star).
I do not care about your "credentials" because you are proving conclusively that you are lacking any kind of qualification.
I answered a few questions honestly.
No, you did not. Because the only honest answer you can possibly give about any of this is "I have not the faintest clue". You find it entirely acceptable to make all kinds of objectively false claims based on complete ignorance of even the introductory thought processes of a subject matter while insulting every single honest person in the universe who's actually taken the time and put in the effort to make sure they understand what they're talking about before they open their mouth.
have never taken history of science 101, or read Kuhn or even Popper
Contrary to you, I have read both. Contrary to you, I understand what they're talking about. Contrary to you, I am qualified to have an opinion about their views.
Anyway, the sun may be less far along it's lifespan than we thought, possibly farther from the Helium Flash/red giant stage. (It still just about has to be about 5 billion years old, because independant geologic evidence suggests the earth is about 4.5 billion years old itself). So if the sun, and presumably related stars age more slowly than thought,[...]
Why do laymen who have never even taken an introductory astro-101 class imagine they're qualified to second-guess the result of other poeple's life's work?
What you write up there is utter rubbish. Pop-II models do not age significantly different from Pop-I models even though they contain many orders of magnitude less oxygen. Because (surprise, surprise) the main-sequence life span of a star is governed by Hydrogen. Heavier elements do not figure in at all untill the very last phases after hydrogen has been exhausted except in the case of stars many times more massive than the sun.
As it turns out the sun is not many times more massive than the sun.
If the abundance of C, N or O had any particularly interesting effect on the main-sequence time of stellar models, then we could compare the models with the observations and derive the abundances from that. Because there's a metric shitload of main sequence stars out there. And one is right here close by, ready to be studied.
Where do people get the idea that a revision of the solar composition at the level of a percent-of-a-percent would have any particularly interesting effects on our stellar models? Especially if these values have always been known to be uncertain?
And this new value certainly isn't going to convince anybody to change the books. It's just yet-one-more in a pool of dozens, nay, probably hundreds of measurements; all of which when taken together and tested against each other and corroborated against the observational data produce something like a scientific consensus if and only if they manage to stand these tests.
The general consensus for decades has been that the solar interior and its basic nuclear chemistry was pretty well understood. This finding, if it holds up, will affect virtually all solar physics relative to our own solar system and much, perhaps most, of the physics we imagine going on in remote stars. For instance, the solar neutrino problem (not seeing enough of the right kinds of neutrinoes here on earth) may be strongly affected by this [...]
This is gibberish. Neutrinos in the sun come from pp and ppp chain reactions involving Hydrogen. and on the fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-percent level Helium. Oxygen doesn't even enter into it.
Meanwhile nobody has ever claimed any more precision than a factor of two or so when it comes to the abundance of such an absolutely rare (relatively abundant but absolutely rare) beast as Oxygen. Lang's "Astrophysical Formulae" quotes sources from the early seventies with a number of 8.79 (table 29) and then other sources employing other methods for a value of 8.85 (table 38). The difference between these numbers means one oxygen atom every 1412 Hydrogen atoms vs. 1 Oxygen atom every 1621 Hydrogen atoms.
We're futzing around in the percent-of-a-percent region of the solar composition here.
So there's a new article proclaiming they have some new measurement which gives the two results that span a range of 0.3dex from 8.63 to 8.93, conveniently bracketing these values that have been around for decades. And somehow that is supposed to change our understanding of the nuclear chemistry of the sun in some fundamental way?
Yes, there's a factor of two or so of uncertainty floating around that nobody ever denied when it comes to the abundance of an element that constitutes less than one tenth of a percent of the number of atoms in the sun.
And the Anonymous crackpots imagine this somehow indicates hubris on the part of the scientists? Because they are only sure about 99.9% of the sun and admit that there's uncertainty at the fourth friggin decimal?
Actually, the abstract is all I need to see - they employ two techniques that yield results that differ from each other by 0.3dex yet they claim confidence limits on their measurements of 0.1dex.
At that point we can file that under "some dudes PhD thesis" and forget about it.
Incidentily, the best measurement of local cosmic abundances comes from cosmic rays, not from observations of the sun. They are so sensitive, that we can see the difference in abundance between elements with even or odd numbers of nuclei (which are minutely different in stability if you throw enough quantum mechanics at it).
Here's from that very link that you posted here, section 1, second paragraph:
in North America the average insolation at ground level over an entire year (including nights and periods of cloudy weather) lies between 125 and 375 W/m^2 (3 to 9 kWh/m^2/day).
I had given and used an estimate of 250W/m^2, which is precisely in the middle of the range named there and I had mentioned that this is probably conservative as southern Arizona is probably more on the higher end of the range.
As I told the other dude: I have already done my homework. You have not.
You are hereby advised to stop posting about things you have never actually thought about.
This is no different from nay other situations. You need to give up all these rights to get on a plane. Try walk into a bank carrying a shotgun. Shout "This is a stick up" and then claim freedom of speach.
The difference with myspace etc is that these are clearly soap-boxing sites where people are encouraged and expected to express opinions.
All three examples of yours have in common that your rights end where they start infringing upon other people's right.
Abridgements of free-speech right in schools have generally been upheld where the student's speech in question was considered disruptive to the operation of the class or the school.
The operative question here is: was the myspace page in question intended or had the effect of disrupting the functioning of the school or any one particular class.
I have not seen the page in question - did the author ask students to refrain from doing classwork? Did he incite disobedience or unrest of some form? Or did he merely cuss out the principal (it sounds like the latter)?
Now imagine if all you classmates, with their celebrity loving subculture, had the same right to vote. Imagine what would happen if Madonna (Paris Hilton is too young) got into the White House.
And how exactly would that be different from Ronald Reagan becoming president? Why is a bad singer any less qualified than a bad actor?
The creative sectors in computing are in academia, start-ups, and the high-end of the hobbyist community.
Agreed.
These people define what we will be doing in 5-10 years.
If that was true, we'd all be running Linux by now.
The reality is that markets don't give a rat's ass what's "creative" or "useful" or "powerful" or any such thing - a market is about "what sells". And that's predictability. People don't like surprises, so they buy what they know - even if (and especially if) it is mediocre.
Are you fucking daft? There are many PSUs rated at 1kW. A single PSU. So, unless your energy consumption is oh, I don't know, your computer and your refrigerator (the traditional largest power consuming item in a residence), you may find your estimates to be off.
The rating of a PSU does not indicate in the slightest how much power that PSU draws. Not in the least. It indicated how much power it can deliver at the output side. If your PC consumes 100W then there's no difference in power draw between a 200W, 500W or 1000W power supply.
There are three computers in our house that are on 24/7. Two of them run DC clients. There's a large fridge, freezer, a microwave. Yes, we vacuum our capets and we illuminate about 2000 square feet of living space. All this together comes to a long-term, day-in day-out, annual consumption-average of 550W. I know that because I pay the bills.
If I simply used half our living ara as south-facing roof area (it's actually more than that because of the way the house is oriented and because it is slanted) then that would be 1000sq ft which is pretty much 100 sq meter which is 100kW of peak solar power irradiation. Let the average insolation during the average daytime hour be about 1/2 of that, and let the average insolation during a 24 hour period be 1/2 of that because half the time it's dark and you have 25kW average power availability. Let the average current solar cell have 25% conversion efficiency and I come out at >6.2kW average producable power. Even slicing off another 10 or 20% for various losses still leaves me with 10 time more production than consumption. (Every single number in here is conservative as I live in southern Arizona where all conditions are more favorable than what I wrote above).
And if the efficiency of the average solar cell doubled, I could over-produce our consumption twenty-fold. And it would be completely pointless. Good for nothing. "Efficiency" is the mindset of consumption of finite resources. Oil that is wasted today won't be available tomorrow; Solar power that is wasted today... will still be as abundant tomorrow as it was today, yesterday and the day before.
What I want is a solar cell that is maybe 5% efficient and dirt cheap, so that I can cover my roof for a couple bucks - which is all I need. Something like those organic cells that have been floating around for a while now, that comes in a big roll that I put on my roof, unroll, fasten at the corners and there's the solar installation. And if I have to rip it off and replace with a new roll every five years, it would not matter one whit.
[...] there's no need to just make shit up (e.g., 'I could overproduce my consumption by a factor of twenty.')
So why do you do it? I have done my homework. You haven't.
I don't think you've thought it through: both for people putting cells on their house and for large scale installations, available area is either an absolutely limited or often an expensive thing to add (the area required per unit output is already one of the major drawbacks to solar plants for large-scale generation.) Anything that reduces efficiency is a losing proposition.
If I cover only the south-facing parts of my roof with current Si solar cells, I can over-produce my own households consumption comfortably by a factor of ten or so. At, say, $5k or there abouts for the installation. If there were solar cells with twice the "efficiency", I could overproduce my consumption by a factor of twenty.
And why would I want that?
"Efficiency" is typical oil-industry brainwashing. Unambiguously the mindset of a consumer of a finite, limited resource. Sunlight is unlimited - "efficiency" doesn't play a role anywhere. I don't want, nor need solar cells that can squeeze a few percent more wattage out of a square foot of roof. I want cells that are cheap, period:
If the whole installation was $500 instead of $5000, then I wouldn't care if the whole thing breaks occasionally or if its efficiency drops over time or whether I have to replace the complete thing every 5 years. I simply don't care. The only reason people keep whining about these things is because they keep thinking in terms of dense, high-power, expensive hi-tech nano-gadgets. Once you think of them as something low-grade, cheap, and abundant, there's a thousand times more surface area available than you could possibly need.
A 2kW installation on each of 100million roofs in the US would cover the entire US electricity consumption right there. But let's say you can collect for really cheap - how about the surface area of not only all the highways, but the strip between the highways as well? Imagine a couple suare meter of cells on every single high-voltage transmission line tower - not for "generation" so much as for "regeneration"; supplying just as much as is lost in transmission between two of these towers. Suddenly the grid itself is a producer, and the larger it gets the less it matters whether there's actually any power plants plugged in anywhere. Heck, they're towers - why not have a little windmill on top of each one as well? As long as you're thinking "expensive equipment that needs to be serviced" that won't fly, but if you can swing it for cheap, low-efficiency it'll be worth it and you just won't care whether the one or other one breaks occasionally.
There's no energy crisis. There has never been one and there will never be one. There's more than enough energy to go around. All we have to do is start tapping into it. Turns out that that is difficult to do in such a way as to make some few people super-rich -- and that is why it isn't done...
I had been looking into that but decided against it since I'd need a HDD anyways for all the services the OP talks about - from receiving messages, through web-serving through torrenting - you name it. By the time you're actually using your server, there's always some kind of activity that wants the hard disks spun up at least once every 20 minutes or so - so if it is effectively always spinning, then I might as well pot/boot onto it as well and skip the whole memory-stick thing entirely.
However I really, truly do not need any kind of CPU power like even old systems have these days. My server is an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 GHz from 2000 and I have it deliberately underclocked by a factor if 2 to 600MHz because that is still plenty fast for the bit of I/O it has to perform even at extreme times. At this low speed it turns out that even at full utilization (that is: Prime95 torture test) the processor temperature never rises above ~55C when cooled passively with a big sink but without fans. I figure that shaves more watts off the system than I could save any other way...
I don't mind outsourcing in theory, I can handle the language barrier difference, but it's the sheer incompetence that pisses me off! I thought most call centres back home in the UK used to be incompetent but you don't realise how good you have it until it's too late and those jobs have been shipped abroad.
Outsourcing isn't monolithic - there's no such thing as "outsourcing in theory" that you can have (or not have) a problem with. Outsourcing a development lab is a completely different thing from outsourcing a call center. The latter is always, unmistakably, wrong. And here's why:
If you force your engineers to staff the phone support, they have an incentive to minimize the number of support calls. They will thus pay close attention to the things people call about and will do their best to eliminate those problems in the next generation product.
The moment you create a dedicated "call center", you're already going downhill: Now you have people who did not make the product trying to explain to people for whom it doesn't work, how to make it work. But the call-center staffers, at least, are employees and thus they're still motivated to pass on enough information to engineering to minimize future workload on them.
But when you now ship you call-center to india, you have now created a corporate entity that has no interest in minimizing call volumne. To the contrary - they get paid by the number of calls or the number of minutes spent on calls and thus it is in their best interest to have as many calls as possible. The survival of the call-center rests on there being as many service calls as possible. Thus no information is ever passed on to engineering about the main faults people keep finding (how convenient that engineering is on a different continent now) and if the customer hangs up irately then that just means they'll be calling right back tomorrow after noodling around trying to fix their stuff for another 24hours themselves.
I'm against outsourcing of call-centers even "in theory". And "in practice". And "in anything else I can think of". It's just a bad idea all around - the brand suffers, the customers suffer, the engineering suffers. All that happens is that a bunch of hobos in India get rich.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a lie.
You are a liar.Lessee:
dark matter - effects observed
phlogiston, aether - effects not observed
That wasn't no hard.
It might be an interesting exercise to feed your favorite version and the original goto'ed version to gcc and see what it actually makes out of either on the machine level. I have found the results often to be surprising (and often more optimal than what I would have done by hand).
Funniest. Sig. Of. The. Year.
Exactly - and that's why it makes sense for them to switch to something like AIX that actually has a "system design". Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS. Any one PC may or may not work with Linux. And may or may not stop working tomorrow for any of a thousand reasons.
When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks. Posting a bug report at freshmeat doesn't quite cut it when you have planes grounded...
You mean people like yourself, who find nothing inappropriate about puking lies and ignorant insults at those who've actually taken the time to do their homework? You tell me.
Why do they make irrational assumptions about other people's credentialsOnly mentally retarded morons like yourself give a hoot about credentials. I, for one, couldn't care less about credentials. Qualification (and the lack thereof) are something that is easily communicated in everything someone writes, though.
Let's rephrase that a little. As recently as eight years ago, the consensus among the international community wouldn't require that exception.No, let's not rephrase anything, because your claim is false. Plain, simple false. It has been understood since the 1930ies that the main-sequence life time of a solar-mass star is governed by pp-chain reactions. Exquisite math was developed to make stellar models before the advent of the computer, and the early computerized models of the 50ies and early 60ies laid to rest any possibly lingering doubt. C, N and O do not play a role in the lifetime of a star of one solar mass and nothing whatsoever about this statement has changed in at least 50 years. At sufficiently higher mass, you get catalytic CNO-cycle reactions and may have room to haggle over the influence of oxygen abundance - that was worked out by people like von Weizsaecker and Bethe, again back in the 30ies.
Any astronomy book of 1950 could have told you all this. For a star of one solar mass, metallicity has no particular effect on pretty much anything - if it did, it would be much easier to measure it. At higher masses processes become more dominant that rely on heavier elements. There's nothing "current" or "recently revised" about it.
But of course you have no idea of even the most basic, trivialities of astronomy; so you did a web-search, got misled by some phrase like "time to onset of supernova" (which incidentily has nothing whatsoever to do with the main-sequence lifetime of a star), stumbled over some random paper from the late nineties and imagine you can make some kind of statement about things that are many many orders of magnitude more basic and straightforward than the lightcurves of supernovae (which also have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the main sequence lifetime of a star).
I do not care about your "credentials" because you are proving conclusively that you are lacking any kind of qualification.
I answered a few questions honestly.No, you did not. Because the only honest answer you can possibly give about any of this is "I have not the faintest clue". You find it entirely acceptable to make all kinds of objectively false claims based on complete ignorance of even the introductory thought processes of a subject matter while insulting every single honest person in the universe who's actually taken the time and put in the effort to make sure they understand what they're talking about before they open their mouth.
have never taken history of science 101, or read Kuhn or even PopperContrary to you, I have read both. Contrary to you, I understand what they're talking about. Contrary to you, I am qualified to have an opinion about their views.
Why do laymen who have never even taken an introductory astro-101 class imagine they're qualified to second-guess the result of other poeple's life's work?
What you write up there is utter rubbish. Pop-II models do not age significantly different from Pop-I models even though they contain many orders of magnitude less oxygen. Because (surprise, surprise) the main-sequence life span of a star is governed by Hydrogen. Heavier elements do not figure in at all untill the very last phases after hydrogen has been exhausted except in the case of stars many times more massive than the sun.
As it turns out the sun is not many times more massive than the sun.
If the abundance of C, N or O had any particularly interesting effect on the main-sequence time of stellar models, then we could compare the models with the observations and derive the abundances from that. Because there's a metric shitload of main sequence stars out there. And one is right here close by, ready to be studied.
Where do people get the idea that a revision of the solar composition at the level of a percent-of-a-percent would have any particularly interesting effects on our stellar models? Especially if these values have always been known to be uncertain?
And this new value certainly isn't going to convince anybody to change the books. It's just yet-one-more in a pool of dozens, nay, probably hundreds of measurements; all of which when taken together and tested against each other and corroborated against the observational data produce something like a scientific consensus if and only if they manage to stand these tests.
This is gibberish. Neutrinos in the sun come from pp and ppp chain reactions involving Hydrogen. and on the fraction-of-a-fraction-of-a-percent level Helium. Oxygen doesn't even enter into it.
Meanwhile nobody has ever claimed any more precision than a factor of two or so when it comes to the abundance of such an absolutely rare (relatively abundant but absolutely rare) beast as Oxygen. Lang's "Astrophysical Formulae" quotes sources from the early seventies with a number of 8.79 (table 29) and then other sources employing other methods for a value of 8.85 (table 38). The difference between these numbers means one oxygen atom every 1412 Hydrogen atoms vs. 1 Oxygen atom every 1621 Hydrogen atoms.
We're futzing around in the percent-of-a-percent region of the solar composition here.
So there's a new article proclaiming they have some new measurement which gives the two results that span a range of 0.3dex from 8.63 to 8.93, conveniently bracketing these values that have been around for decades. And somehow that is supposed to change our understanding of the nuclear chemistry of the sun in some fundamental way?
Yes, there's a factor of two or so of uncertainty floating around that nobody ever denied when it comes to the abundance of an element that constitutes less than one tenth of a percent of the number of atoms in the sun.
And the Anonymous crackpots imagine this somehow indicates hubris on the part of the scientists? Because they are only sure about 99.9% of the sun and admit that there's uncertainty at the fourth friggin decimal?
Actually, the abstract is all I need to see - they employ two techniques that yield results that differ from each other by 0.3dex yet they claim confidence limits on their measurements of 0.1dex.
At that point we can file that under "some dudes PhD thesis" and forget about it.
Incidentily, the best measurement of local cosmic abundances comes from cosmic rays, not from observations of the sun. They are so sensitive, that we can see the difference in abundance between elements with even or odd numbers of nuclei (which are minutely different in stability if you throw enough quantum mechanics at it).
The net considers censorship as a defect.
The net was designed to route around defects.
No, you are stupid and/or lazy for forcing IE down everybody else's throat by writing web-pages that will not work in any other browser.
And your reading comprehension needs work too.
southern Arizona.
Fortunately the universe does not care what you or any other crackpot think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_powerHere's from that very link that you posted here, section 1, second paragraph:
in North America the average insolation at ground level over an entire year (including nights and periods of cloudy weather) lies between 125 and 375 W/m^2 (3 to 9 kWh/m^2/day).
I had given and used an estimate of 250W/m^2, which is precisely in the middle of the range named there and I had mentioned that this is probably conservative as southern Arizona is probably more on the higher end of the range.
As I told the other dude: I have already done my homework. You have not.
You are hereby advised to stop posting about things you have never actually thought about.
The difference with myspace etc is that these are clearly soap-boxing sites where people are encouraged and expected to express opinions.
All three examples of yours have in common that your rights end where they start infringing upon other people's right.
Abridgements of free-speech right in schools have generally been upheld where the student's speech in question was considered disruptive to the operation of the class or the school.
The operative question here is: was the myspace page in question intended or had the effect of disrupting the functioning of the school or any one particular class.
I have not seen the page in question - did the author ask students to refrain from doing classwork? Did he incite disobedience or unrest of some form? Or did he merely cuss out the principal (it sounds like the latter)?
And how exactly would that be different from Ronald Reagan becoming president? Why is a bad singer any less qualified than a bad actor?
Agreed.
These people define what we will be doing in 5-10 years.If that was true, we'd all be running Linux by now.
The reality is that markets don't give a rat's ass what's "creative" or "useful" or "powerful" or any such thing - a market is about "what sells". And that's predictability. People don't like surprises, so they buy what they know - even if (and especially if) it is mediocre.
The rating of a PSU does not indicate in the slightest how much power that PSU draws. Not in the least. It indicated how much power it can deliver at the output side. If your PC consumes 100W then there's no difference in power draw between a 200W, 500W or 1000W power supply.
There are three computers in our house that are on 24/7. Two of them run DC clients. There's a large fridge, freezer, a microwave. Yes, we vacuum our capets and we illuminate about 2000 square feet of living space. All this together comes to a long-term, day-in day-out, annual consumption-average of 550W. I know that because I pay the bills.
If I simply used half our living ara as south-facing roof area (it's actually more than that because of the way the house is oriented and because it is slanted) then that would be 1000sq ft which is pretty much 100 sq meter which is 100kW of peak solar power irradiation. Let the average insolation during the average daytime hour be about 1/2 of that, and let the average insolation during a 24 hour period be 1/2 of that because half the time it's dark and you have 25kW average power availability. Let the average current solar cell have 25% conversion efficiency and I come out at >6.2kW average producable power. Even slicing off another 10 or 20% for various losses still leaves me with 10 time more production than consumption. (Every single number in here is conservative as I live in southern Arizona where all conditions are more favorable than what I wrote above).
And if the efficiency of the average solar cell doubled, I could over-produce our consumption twenty-fold. And it would be completely pointless. Good for nothing. "Efficiency" is the mindset of consumption of finite resources. Oil that is wasted today won't be available tomorrow; Solar power that is wasted today ... will still be as abundant tomorrow as it was today, yesterday and the day before.
What I want is a solar cell that is maybe 5% efficient and dirt cheap, so that I can cover my roof for a couple bucks - which is all I need. Something like those organic cells that have been floating around for a while now, that comes in a big roll that I put on my roof, unroll, fasten at the corners and there's the solar installation. And if I have to rip it off and replace with a new roll every five years, it would not matter one whit.
[...] there's no need to just make shit up (e.g., 'I could overproduce my consumption by a factor of twenty.')So why do you do it? I have done my homework. You haven't.
If I cover only the south-facing parts of my roof with current Si solar cells, I can over-produce my own households consumption comfortably by a factor of ten or so. At, say, $5k or there abouts for the installation. If there were solar cells with twice the "efficiency", I could overproduce my consumption by a factor of twenty.
And why would I want that?
"Efficiency" is typical oil-industry brainwashing. Unambiguously the mindset of a consumer of a finite, limited resource. Sunlight is unlimited - "efficiency" doesn't play a role anywhere. I don't want, nor need solar cells that can squeeze a few percent more wattage out of a square foot of roof. I want cells that are cheap, period:
If the whole installation was $500 instead of $5000, then I wouldn't care if the whole thing breaks occasionally or if its efficiency drops over time or whether I have to replace the complete thing every 5 years. I simply don't care. The only reason people keep whining about these things is because they keep thinking in terms of dense, high-power, expensive hi-tech nano-gadgets. Once you think of them as something low-grade, cheap, and abundant, there's a thousand times more surface area available than you could possibly need.
A 2kW installation on each of 100million roofs in the US would cover the entire US electricity consumption right there. But let's say you can collect for really cheap - how about the surface area of not only all the highways, but the strip between the highways as well? Imagine a couple suare meter of cells on every single high-voltage transmission line tower - not for "generation" so much as for "regeneration"; supplying just as much as is lost in transmission between two of these towers. Suddenly the grid itself is a producer, and the larger it gets the less it matters whether there's actually any power plants plugged in anywhere. Heck, they're towers - why not have a little windmill on top of each one as well? As long as you're thinking "expensive equipment that needs to be serviced" that won't fly, but if you can swing it for cheap, low-efficiency it'll be worth it and you just won't care whether the one or other one breaks occasionally.
There's no energy crisis. There has never been one and there will never be one. There's more than enough energy to go around. All we have to do is start tapping into it. Turns out that that is difficult to do in such a way as to make some few people super-rich -- and that is why it isn't done...
I had been looking into that but decided against it since I'd need a HDD anyways for all the services the OP talks about - from receiving messages, through web-serving through torrenting - you name it. By the time you're actually using your server, there's always some kind of activity that wants the hard disks spun up at least once every 20 minutes or so - so if it is effectively always spinning, then I might as well pot /boot onto it as well and skip the whole memory-stick thing entirely.
However I really, truly do not need any kind of CPU power like even old systems have these days. My server is an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 GHz from 2000 and I have it deliberately underclocked by a factor if 2 to 600MHz because that is still plenty fast for the bit of I/O it has to perform even at extreme times. At this low speed it turns out that even at full utilization (that is: Prime95 torture test) the processor temperature never rises above ~55C when cooled passively with a big sink but without fans. I figure that shaves more watts off the system than I could save any other way...
Old jokes never die
They just ... get old ...
It's kinda like someone making an add-on to firefox to allow it to use IE as a render engine in a given tab.
Oh, wait...
Only 51% of physical scientists believe in any form of Darwinian evolution.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
Outsourcing isn't monolithic - there's no such thing as "outsourcing in theory" that you can have (or not have) a problem with. Outsourcing a development lab is a completely different thing from outsourcing a call center. The latter is always, unmistakably, wrong. And here's why:
If you force your engineers to staff the phone support, they have an incentive to minimize the number of support calls. They will thus pay close attention to the things people call about and will do their best to eliminate those problems in the next generation product.
The moment you create a dedicated "call center", you're already going downhill: Now you have people who did not make the product trying to explain to people for whom it doesn't work, how to make it work. But the call-center staffers, at least, are employees and thus they're still motivated to pass on enough information to engineering to minimize future workload on them.
But when you now ship you call-center to india, you have now created a corporate entity that has no interest in minimizing call volumne. To the contrary - they get paid by the number of calls or the number of minutes spent on calls and thus it is in their best interest to have as many calls as possible. The survival of the call-center rests on there being as many service calls as possible. Thus no information is ever passed on to engineering about the main faults people keep finding (how convenient that engineering is on a different continent now) and if the customer hangs up irately then that just means they'll be calling right back tomorrow after noodling around trying to fix their stuff for another 24hours themselves.
I'm against outsourcing of call-centers even "in theory". And "in practice". And "in anything else I can think of". It's just a bad idea all around - the brand suffers, the customers suffer, the engineering suffers. All that happens is that a bunch of hobos in India get rich.
Here's a simple test: provide us with a pointer to a couple aesthetically pleasing pages at myspace.
I'm open to the possibility that they exist.
Show me.
If you can't, then the "silly over-generalization and stereotype" is just simply the plain truth.
Beginning programmers realize that data can be code.
Expert programmers realize that all code is data.
Master programmers understand that all data is code.
Want to fix our education problems? Here's how. Teacher salaries need to literally double overnight, and ideally quadruple.
Yeah - let's replace incompetent retards with overpaid incompetent retards. That's the ticket.
By that logic, our politicians would perform better if we paid them better...