I have a Radeon 9200 and I get 3D acceleration with the reverse engineered drivers that are in X out of the box. Compiz ran fine. It even plays the proprietary games that I bought before I dumped Windows ( Warcraft III under wine, Neverwinter Nights with the native client, etc... ). I never got ATI's binary driver to work however...
On my Laptop the Intel card works just fine except for using dual screens with different aspect ratio. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the card, driver or something else.
I had a Geforce as well earlier. 2D worked out of the box with the free driver, and 3D worked with the proprietary one. Ditched it for the ATI one due to the existence of free drivers for the radeon however ( nVidia's blob may work, but it has a tendency to break kernel updates and I prefer the free ones ).
Again, works for me doesn't mean it will for you, but from my experience it seems that if you want something working out of the box with as few proprietary blobs as possible then Intel is your best bet. Will be interesting to see what will happen with AMD and ATI.
A)There is almost certainly code in Linux that Microsoft has patents to. The simple reason being that software patents are so inane and ambiguous that there's certainly code in ANY large piece of software that Microsoft has patents to.
B)It would only affect jurisdictions that recognize software patents.
C)It would be a very high-risk way to achieve your goals since you have to trust a third party which could potentially reveal your clandestine operations, if Microsoft wanted to do this it would be easier to make the contribution as a random individual, thus making it harder to track it back to Microsoft.
D)Hurting Linux would hurt Novell eventually. They may have been stupid to sign that agreement with Microsoft, but they do know VERY well what happened to SCO. Since the patents would only gain them anything in countries that recognize them, and as they have a potential to lose their business everywhere that does not, it would be an extremely high risk move.
E)IBM, RedHat etc doesn't need to prove Microsoft was behind the scheme to retaliate. Should Microsoft use software patents against Linux, either directly or by proxy, they could sue Microsoft over other patents ( and as per "A" they certainly do have the means to do so ). It would be enough that they strongly suspect Microsoft is in the background to trigger mutually assured destruction, and Microsoft knows this.
Essentially, the day Microsoft decides to use software patents against Linux is the day you know they are so desperate they have nothing left to lose. So far they are mainly using patent FUD, but when the empire eventually does crumble they will certainly try, other companies will retaliate, and the collateral damage will be huge.
While this may delay the inevitable by a few years, eventually this will grind its way through the court system. Microsoft's little game with the EC following their previous court case means Europe has an axe to grind, and here we are looking at good evidence that Microsoft has not only abused their monopoly, but that they have outright tried to destroy a worldwide standards organization in order to prevent competition. That OOXML is useless as a standard could very well be interpreted as a violation of the EU's earlier order to Microsoft to share their APIs and similar information, and teh fact that they have gone ot such lengths to achieve it is even more damning. That Microsoft is doing this despite the fact that it will cost them A LOT of goodwill from governments, courts, industry etc.. shows just how desperate they are about it, and gives a hint about just how screwed they are going to be if free software and open source products would become a viable alternative to Office.
In other words, improve Open Office, Koffice etc. to the point where they not only equal, but greatly exceed MS Office in functionality and quality, and Redmond will be in deep shit. Stacked standards committees or not.
The EU is already investigating their influence on the OSI process, countless of companies are pissed that their voices were not heard due to Microsoft bribes and whatnot, the media will love this one. I seriously think Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot here. Big time.
Big deal, they have plenty of water to cool it with being an Island and everything. Point about putting a data center there is cheap electricity due to abundant renewable energy, such as geysers and hydroelectrics.
Actually you can conclude with good certainty that it is all bogus. The reason is that hadrons of the same energies are constantly created as cosmic rays destroy nuclei in the atmosphere. If there was even a remote possibility of the LHC destroying the world, then cosmic rays should have done so already.
No, but if I were to try I would use low-burnup thermal reactors on PUREX reprocessing rather than ultra high burnup fast breeders with full actinide recovery heavily spiked with transuranics that have high rates of spontaneous fission. Alternatively I'd go for highly enriched uranium.
Seriously thou, modifying the reprocessing cycle for a fast breeder and then use the very low grade plutonium to produce a nuclear weapon would be so unpractical that it would probably be easier to just start a uranium based weapons program from scratch. Simply separating the plutonium from traces of very troublesome elements with high spontaneous fission rates ( think californium, einsteinium... ) would require a reprocessing plant unlike anything ever constructed or proposed. Building a nuclear device out of the recovered plutonium ( which would have a much less suitable isotopic composition than traditional reactors ) would require groundbreaking research into nuclear weapon design, and probably a number of tests.
At the end of the day the effort involved would likely surpass that needed to build a more traditional graphite moderated reactor and extract the plutonium from that. I.e, even if somebody was to give you the reprocessing plant for a fast breeder with actinide recycling, as well as the spent fuel, you would probably have an easier time trying to do it the old fashion way. In addition it is hardly as if a rogue nation with the necessary economics would not be capable of building a nuclear weapon anyway. The technology is more than 6 decades old.
Because the fission products decay by beta emission, which generates about 1/2000 times the energy of fission, which means that if you do this at the back end will add a pathetic 0.05% to your energy output, and you could get the same effect by just using the heat from the radioactive decay for district heating or some other much easier to implement heat-conservation scheme.
Also, I would think that that waste material would be producing at the lower figure, but for a much longer period of time.
Doesn't matter, you get 200 MeV per fission,and about 5MeV per alpha decay, if those events happen instantaneously or over the course of millions of years make little difference, fissioning a nucleus simply emits more energy than radioactive decay. The amount of energy that can be extracted from a given number of nuclei when they fission is simply greater than the energy that can be extracted when the same number of nuclei decay through alpha emission.
Also, the quantity of spent nuclear fuel is much lower than most people seem to think. A nuclear reactor refuels only about once a year or every few years. So running it for 60 years will produce at worst 60 cores worth of material, 95% of which is still uranium. The fission products only make up some 4% of the waste. If you take it even further and assume you use fast breeder reactors, then you could essentially run a reactor on the initial uranium load for several decades, and the fission products produced would be in comparable quantity to the uranium you suplied.
Also, note that my figures were for alpha emitters, the most energetic of radioactive decay. In reality the fission products are either beta-emitters or nonradioactive (and virtually all the alpha emitters are heavy nuclei that can be used as fission fuel instead ), so the numbers are easily an order of magnitude worse still. This also ignores the fact that the energy could be recovered in other ways. You could as an example just recover the energy from the decay as heat, which would essentially just require that you put the waste in a seal container that you cool with the water you want to heat.
Simply put, the main advantage of this form of energy generation is that you can circumvent the carnot limit since you never convert the energy to heat. However, since modern developments of heat engines have pushed the achievable temperatures up to the point where 40%-50% efficiency is feasible, you could at best double the efficiency and I really doubt it would be worth the effort. Increasing the temperatures at which our heat engines can operate ( thus improving their efficiency further ) seems like a more realistic solution.
Beyond that, retrofitting existing reactors with auxiliary power generation stations that use what is now considered "spent" fuel would eventually supply as much power as the current reactors do, and they'd keep doing it for thousands of years with the same fuel (you'd have to do maintenance, of course).
Let me put things into perspective for you. Sweden's current fleet of nuclear reactors provide 25% of it's energy demand. If operated for about 60 years they will produce enough spent fuel to fit in a 10m cube. If this waste is recycled in fast reactors, the fissioning of the uranium still in it could power Sweden's present energy consumption for more than a thousand years.
Essentially, neither space nor resource availability is an issue for nuclear power stations. The vast share of the cost lies in their construction so the only way this could possibly outdo present plants would be if they could achieve better than about 40% efficiency with less material investments. This is when you get issues. To circumvent the limits set by the second law of thermodynamics you must capture the energy before it is transformed into heat, which effectively means you need to embed the fuel into the transforming material, and this in essence means you need as much of this material as the fuel you are extracting energy from. Thus not only do you need more than thousands of times as much material as for a fission plant, you also need the corresponding quantity of material capable of converting the radiation into electricity. Simply sticking all the radioactive material in the center and have the conversion outside of it won't work since much of the radiation will be lost as heat if it passes as much as a millimeter of other material ( in contrast to x-rays and neutrons, the most energetic part of the radioactive decay comes from alpha and beta decays, and alpha/beta radiation is blocked by even thin foils of metal.).
Simply put, by the time we have the technology to make this even a plausible replacement of nuclear power stations, we will likely have technology that makes the construction of a nuclear power station substantially cheaper than it is today, thus greatly offsetting the benefit.
However, it's useless because it's no longer fissile and hence can't be used in a nuclear power plant.
Not true, spent fuel is discharged not because it is depleted of fissile material but because other elements generated in it absorb neutrons. If you remove those elements chemically the fuel can be re-used, and with some fast reactor designs you can even ensure that they produce the same amount of fissile material as they consume ( by converting U-238 into plutonium ). The end result is about 100 times better uranium utilization and nuclear waste which decays to uranium levels of radioactivity within 300 years or so.
If this works, imagine being able to generate electricity not just from nuclear power plants themselves, but from the nuclear waste storage facility?
Let's consider that for a moment. Nuclear fission releases about 200 MeV per nucleus, while radioactive decay releases about 5MeV per nucleus( assuming alpha emission ). Thus even assuming 100% efficiency for this tech, and only 30% efficiency for existing reactors, fission gives you more than 13 times more energy than the radioactive decay, and this is assuming that you have enough time to wait for all nuclei to decay. In practice, because most of the alpha-emitters have half lives measured in thousands of years, the total amount of energy that could be generated by this tech per year would be thousands of times smaller than that from fission, so you're better of just building a second reactor.
I dunno, presumably the tubes with a different chirality has uses for other applications, so could you not just sort the lot rather than throwing away a bunch of them ?
Dual screens is fairly low on my priority list. Right now I'd like something like the following
*Battery life measured in days, not hours *Stable and mobile wireless, I'm guessing 3G or whatever comes after that will solve this one eventually. *Completely solid state low-noise components ( sort of available already, albeit at a very high price ) *Improved keyboards. Few laptops have a decent one and I can't imagine a touchscreen will make it better.
The only major advantage I can see with using a touch-screen as a keyboard is that it would allow you to use the entire keyboard area as a touch pad when you're not typing.
I still prefer to obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Also, radiation won't kill you if you just make sure it is absorbed in something that isn't alive. Like 3-4 meters of boron and uranium spiked concrete.
Of course, on Ubuntu simply clicking it won't execute it, and certainly not with root privileges, and the process of actually executing something that isn't installed with the package manager is so different from your everyday use of the system that it will set of alarm bells among many users, even non-technical ones. This is one of the issues with Windows. Microsoft has basically taught a number of people that the best way to get things working is to download a binary from an untrusted webpage and run it with full system privileges. On Windows installing software the right way is hard, on Linux it takes effort to do it the wrong way.
You know the whole DU thing sort of gets to me for two reasons.
a)Lead, which is used in every single bullet except armor piercing rounds is not exactly a pleasant substance to ingest either.
b)Whatever the risk of radiological contamination from DU is, it does feel a bit silly to argue about weather an armor piercing round design to explode and burn everything at the point of impact is likely to hurt somebody. I guess this is more of a general problem with international law, where if you have enemy positions close to a civilian area it is acceptable to bombard it with unreliable grenades, but using tear gas to scatter people from the location is not. Not saying I'm a particular fan of tear gas, but it sure is better than effectively mining a civilian area with unexploded grenades.
Not that this excuses government manipulation of the scientific process of course, but it hardly tops the list of things that are wrong with how conflicts are handled...
As I understand it CANDU reactors don't even use a pressure vessel as such, but instead uses an assembly of pressurized tubes. One for each fuel bundle. This design was chosen precisely because it eliminated the need for this type of technological bottleneck and it is still in use today. I think tfa neglects to mention that there are several reactor designs that aren't dependent on this particular company.
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I have a Radeon 9200 and I get 3D acceleration with the reverse engineered drivers that are in X out of the box. Compiz ran fine. It even plays the proprietary games that I bought before I dumped Windows ( Warcraft III under wine, Neverwinter Nights with the native client, etc... ). I never got ATI's binary driver to work however...
On my Laptop the Intel card works just fine except for using dual screens with different aspect ratio. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the card, driver or something else.
I had a Geforce as well earlier. 2D worked out of the box with the free driver, and 3D worked with the proprietary one. Ditched it for the ATI one due to the existence of free drivers for the radeon however ( nVidia's blob may work, but it has a tendency to break kernel updates and I prefer the free ones ).
Again, works for me doesn't mean it will for you, but from my experience it seems that if you want something working out of the box with as few proprietary blobs as possible then Intel is your best bet. Will be interesting to see what will happen with AMD and ATI.
A)There is almost certainly code in Linux that Microsoft has patents to. The simple reason being that software patents are so inane and ambiguous that there's certainly code in ANY large piece of software that Microsoft has patents to.
B)It would only affect jurisdictions that recognize software patents.
C)It would be a very high-risk way to achieve your goals since you have to trust a third party which could potentially reveal your clandestine operations, if Microsoft wanted to do this it would be easier to make the contribution as a random individual, thus making it harder to track it back to Microsoft.
D)Hurting Linux would hurt Novell eventually. They may have been stupid to sign that agreement with Microsoft, but they do know VERY well what happened to SCO. Since the patents would only gain them anything in countries that recognize them, and as they have a potential to lose their business everywhere that does not, it would be an extremely high risk move.
E)IBM, RedHat etc doesn't need to prove Microsoft was behind the scheme to retaliate. Should Microsoft use software patents against Linux, either directly or by proxy, they could sue Microsoft over other patents ( and as per "A" they certainly do have the means to do so ). It would be enough that they strongly suspect Microsoft is in the background to trigger mutually assured destruction, and Microsoft knows this.
Essentially, the day Microsoft decides to use software patents against Linux is the day you know they are so desperate they have nothing left to lose. So far they are mainly using patent FUD, but when the empire eventually does crumble they will certainly try, other companies will retaliate, and the collateral damage will be huge.
While this may delay the inevitable by a few years, eventually this will grind its way through the court system. Microsoft's little game with the EC following their previous court case means Europe has an axe to grind, and here we are looking at good evidence that Microsoft has not only abused their monopoly, but that they have outright tried to destroy a worldwide standards organization in order to prevent competition. That OOXML is useless as a standard could very well be interpreted as a violation of the EU's earlier order to Microsoft to share their APIs and similar information, and teh fact that they have gone ot such lengths to achieve it is even more damning. That Microsoft is doing this despite the fact that it will cost them A LOT of goodwill from governments, courts, industry etc.. shows just how desperate they are about it, and gives a hint about just how screwed they are going to be if free software and open source products would become a viable alternative to Office.
In other words, improve Open Office, Koffice etc. to the point where they not only equal, but greatly exceed MS Office in functionality and quality, and Redmond will be in deep shit. Stacked standards committees or not.
That was of course supposed to read "ISO process" ... oh well, +5 interesting anyway :P
The EU is already investigating their influence on the OSI process, countless of companies are pissed that their voices were not heard due to Microsoft bribes and whatnot, the media will love this one. I seriously think Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot here. Big time.
Big deal, they have plenty of water to cool it with being an Island and everything. Point about putting a data center there is cheap electricity due to abundant renewable energy, such as geysers and hydroelectrics.
Actually you can conclude with good certainty that it is all bogus. The reason is that hadrons of the same energies are constantly created as cosmic rays destroy nuclei in the atmosphere. If there was even a remote possibility of the LHC destroying the world, then cosmic rays should have done so already.
You make it sound as if prior art was an obstacle to getting things patented...
No there isn't. Don't make me post the form at you...
Seriously, maybe a protest with loads of people wearing his fingerprint on a T-shirt would get the message across ...
Simple. You just give permission on the criteria that works that implement the patent will be licensed under the GPLv3 or another similar license.
No, but if I were to try I would use low-burnup thermal reactors on PUREX reprocessing rather than ultra high burnup fast breeders with full actinide recovery heavily spiked with transuranics that have high rates of spontaneous fission. Alternatively I'd go for highly enriched uranium.
... ) would require a reprocessing plant unlike anything ever constructed or proposed. Building a nuclear device out of the recovered plutonium ( which would have a much less suitable isotopic composition than traditional reactors ) would require groundbreaking research into nuclear weapon design, and probably a number of tests.
Seriously thou, modifying the reprocessing cycle for a fast breeder and then use the very low grade plutonium to produce a nuclear weapon would be so unpractical that it would probably be easier to just start a uranium based weapons program from scratch. Simply separating the plutonium from traces of very troublesome elements with high spontaneous fission rates ( think californium, einsteinium
At the end of the day the effort involved would likely surpass that needed to build a more traditional graphite moderated reactor and extract the plutonium from that. I.e, even if somebody was to give you the reprocessing plant for a fast breeder with actinide recycling, as well as the spent fuel, you would probably have an easier time trying to do it the old fashion way. In addition it is hardly as if a rogue nation with the necessary economics would not be capable of building a nuclear weapon anyway. The technology is more than 6 decades old.
Because the fission products decay by beta emission, which generates about 1/2000 times the energy of fission, which means that if you do this at the back end will add a pathetic 0.05% to your energy output, and you could get the same effect by just using the heat from the radioactive decay for district heating or some other much easier to implement heat-conservation scheme.
Doesn't matter, you get 200 MeV per fission
Also, the quantity of spent nuclear fuel is much lower than most people seem to think. A nuclear reactor refuels only about once a year or every few years. So running it for 60 years will produce at worst 60 cores worth of material, 95% of which is still uranium. The fission products only make up some 4% of the waste. If you take it even further and assume you use fast breeder reactors, then you could essentially run a reactor on the initial uranium load for several decades, and the fission products produced would be in comparable quantity to the uranium you suplied.
Also, note that my figures were for alpha emitters, the most energetic of radioactive decay. In reality the fission products are either beta-emitters or nonradioactive (and virtually all the alpha emitters are heavy nuclei that can be used as fission fuel instead ), so the numbers are easily an order of magnitude worse still. This also ignores the fact that the energy could be recovered in other ways. You could as an example just recover the energy from the decay as heat, which would essentially just require that you put the waste in a seal container that you cool with the water you want to heat.
Simply put, the main advantage of this form of energy generation is that you can circumvent the carnot limit since you never convert the energy to heat. However, since modern developments of heat engines have pushed the achievable temperatures up to the point where 40%-50% efficiency is feasible, you could at best double the efficiency and I really doubt it would be worth the effort. Increasing the temperatures at which our heat engines can operate ( thus improving their efficiency further ) seems like a more realistic solution.
Beyond that, retrofitting existing reactors with auxiliary power generation stations that use what is now considered "spent" fuel would eventually supply as much power as the current reactors do, and they'd keep doing it for thousands of years with the same fuel (you'd have to do maintenance, of course).
Let me put things into perspective for you. Sweden's current fleet of nuclear reactors provide 25% of it's energy demand. If operated for about 60 years they will produce enough spent fuel to fit in a 10m cube. If this waste is recycled in fast reactors, the fissioning of the uranium still in it could power Sweden's present energy consumption for more than a thousand years.
Essentially, neither space nor resource availability is an issue for nuclear power stations. The vast share of the cost lies in their construction so the only way this could possibly outdo present plants would be if they could achieve better than about 40% efficiency with less material investments. This is when you get issues. To circumvent the limits set by the second law of thermodynamics you must capture the energy before it is transformed into heat, which effectively means you need to embed the fuel into the transforming material, and this in essence means you need as much of this material as the fuel you are extracting energy from. Thus not only do you need more than thousands of times as much material as for a fission plant, you also need the corresponding quantity of material capable of converting the radiation into electricity. Simply sticking all the radioactive material in the center and have the conversion outside of it won't work since much of the radiation will be lost as heat if it passes as much as a millimeter of other material ( in contrast to x-rays and neutrons, the most energetic part of the radioactive decay comes from alpha and beta decays, and alpha/beta radiation is blocked by even thin foils of metal.).
Simply put, by the time we have the technology to make this even a plausible replacement of nuclear power stations, we will likely have technology that makes the construction of a nuclear power station substantially cheaper than it is today, thus greatly offsetting the benefit.
Not true, spent fuel is discharged not because it is depleted of fissile material but because other elements generated in it absorb neutrons. If you remove those elements chemically the fuel can be re-used, and with some fast reactor designs you can even ensure that they produce the same amount of fissile material as they consume ( by converting U-238 into plutonium ). The end result is about 100 times better uranium utilization and nuclear waste which decays to uranium levels of radioactivity within 300 years or so.
Let's consider that for a moment. Nuclear fission releases about 200 MeV per nucleus, while radioactive decay releases about 5MeV per nucleus( assuming alpha emission ). Thus even assuming 100% efficiency for this tech, and only 30% efficiency for existing reactors, fission gives you more than 13 times more energy than the radioactive decay, and this is assuming that you have enough time to wait for all nuclei to decay. In practice, because most of the alpha-emitters have half lives measured in thousands of years, the total amount of energy that could be generated by this tech per year would be thousands of times smaller than that from fission, so you're better of just building a second reactor.
I dunno, presumably the tubes with a different chirality has uses for other applications, so could you not just sort the lot rather than throwing away a bunch of them ?
Dual screens is fairly low on my priority list. Right now I'd like something like the following
*Battery life measured in days, not hours
*Stable and mobile wireless, I'm guessing 3G or whatever comes after that will solve this one eventually.
*Completely solid state low-noise components ( sort of available already, albeit at a very high price )
*Improved keyboards. Few laptops have a decent one and I can't imagine a touchscreen will make it better.
The only major advantage I can see with using a touch-screen as a keyboard is that it would allow you to use the entire keyboard area as a touch pad when you're not typing.
Precisely. To do that you would have to be a skilled phycisist, and we certainly don't know what we're talking about. ; )
I still prefer to obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Also, radiation won't kill you if you just make sure it is absorbed in something that isn't alive. Like 3-4 meters of boron and uranium spiked concrete.
Here's the encrypted key to one of my documents. It is stored in the document itself:
$2$gJT/A1qk$CyM4Z4UleBaoMyruOx9Ku
Now you may start to guess what pass phrase to use to recover the plain text. Have fun...
Of course, on Ubuntu simply clicking it won't execute it, and certainly not with root privileges, and the process of actually executing something that isn't installed with the package manager is so different from your everyday use of the system that it will set of alarm bells among many users, even non-technical ones. This is one of the issues with Windows. Microsoft has basically taught a number of people that the best way to get things working is to download a binary from an untrusted webpage and run it with full system privileges. On Windows installing software the right way is hard, on Linux it takes effort to do it the wrong way.
You know the whole DU thing sort of gets to me for two reasons.
a)Lead, which is used in every single bullet except armor piercing rounds is not exactly a pleasant substance to ingest either.
b)Whatever the risk of radiological contamination from DU is, it does feel a bit silly to argue about weather an armor piercing round design to explode and burn everything at the point of impact is likely to hurt somebody. I guess this is more of a general problem with international law, where if you have enemy positions close to a civilian area it is acceptable to bombard it with unreliable grenades, but using tear gas to scatter people from the location is not. Not saying I'm a particular fan of tear gas, but it sure is better than effectively mining a civilian area with unexploded grenades.
Not that this excuses government manipulation of the scientific process of course, but it hardly tops the list of things that are wrong with how conflicts are handled...
As I understand it CANDU reactors don't even use a pressure vessel as such, but instead uses an assembly of pressurized tubes. One for each fuel bundle. This design was chosen precisely because it eliminated the need for this type of technological bottleneck and it is still in use today. I think tfa neglects to mention that there are several reactor designs that aren't dependent on this particular company.