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Comment Re:I'm a climate sceptic, but not how you think... (Score 1) 822

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you might not have considered some of the impact of the rising temperatures. Since you seem like you're being fairly open-minded about this, and since I agree with some of your conclusions (particularly about technology), I don't mind pointing this out. In a lot of places a few more degrees would be nice. Unfortunately, humans tend to like water. They settle on rivers, floodplains, and low-lying coastal areas. Even more unfortunately, these also tend to be high-density, low-income regions. For instance, the nation of Bangladesh, which has 140 million people generally living in poverty is mostly <10m above sea level. (http://countrystudies.us/bangladesh/23.htm). Worse, the entire coastal area is essentially at sea level. A small increase in temperature would cause a small increase in sea levels, which would immediately displace millions of indigent people. Of course, this is only one small country. While not every country will have nearly the same scale of problems, it's clear that the human toll in some areas at least could be severe.

The environmental impact on wildlife is also actually rather interesting. I don't have any links or handy info available, but there have been a number of fascinating studies done on how life is adjusting or not adjusting to these issues. The warming that's happened so far has illuminated some interesting things that we might not have discovered otherwise. We stand to lose a great deal of biodiversity, however, at least in the short term (geologically speaking of course).

So, not all change is bad, man-made change can sometimes be really good...but I don't think that's the case on balance here. YMMV, though. Did you have anything concrete that you'd like to point out to support what you were saying? I would be interested to hear it (and not just as a rhetorical point, either).

Comment Re:Well, obviously... (Score -1, Offtopic) 232

I hope you're not implying that Goldman Sachs are a bunch of scammers. They're pretty much the only major financial institution to make it through this crisis without falling for the scams and without needing government money. In fact, they were forced to take it by the government so that people wouldn't single out companies receiving bailout money as being failures, not because it was necessary for Goldman. I'm getting really sick of this meme - if you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk about it.

Comment Re:those are some awfully dry pipes you have there (Score 1) 239

No, I'm sure that Flash is the bottleneck here. I bet it's really hogging the CPU. For example mplayer/ffdshow decoders play Flash video faster and smoother than Flash. And that's on Windows.

Yes, sure. Flash is the bottleneck. I agree completely. However, that means that it's not the pipes, it's the processor running bloated unoptimized software. So my point stands - the hardware is the bottleneck rather than the internet, even if it's not really the hardware's fault. This is a consistent experience for me. It used to be, downloading was slow but once it got to my computer, it was fast. Now, downloading is fast, but my computer can't take it. This may be because I'm getting the most expensive internet-only cable package offered, but it's a significant reversal from the mid 90's when I got the Internet. The old argument about the pipes being the bottleneck might still be true for a lot of things, but for the home internet user, it's not necessarily true anymore. And for 3D acceleration, I can almost guarantee that more often than not, it will still be the hardware.

Comment Re:Teenagers? (Score 5, Insightful) 397

Just because society expected teenagers to work in the past doesn't mean that there aren't significant mental (physical brain) changes going on during that timeframe.

And resources contracting back to a "solar economy"? Turn in your geek card - geeks believe in the power of technology to improve lives. There's no reason to expect that that won't continue.
Data Storage

Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development? 480

hackingbear writes "I'm considering buying a current-generation SSD to replace my external hard disk drive for use in my day-to-day software development, especially to boost the IDE's performance. Size is not a great concern: 120GB is enough for me. Price is not much of a concern either, as my boss will pay. I do have concerns on the limitations of write cycles as well as write speeds. As I understand, the current SSDs overcome it by heuristically placing the writes randomly. That would be good enough for regular users, but in software development, one may have to update 10-30% of the source files from Subversion and recompile the whole project, several times a day. I wonder how SSDs will do in this usage pattern. What's your experience developing on SSDs?"
Data Storage

Submission + - Distributed Backup Solution For Personal Data?

Rozine writes: Recently, a friend and I bought some components to build a backup server system for our personal data (as well as that of some non-programmer but engineer parents). We'll have two nearly identical servers 350 miles apart. Storage is 3 1TB drives each, although we'd like the ability to add more drives as we need to. The OS (Linux) will run off a 4GB USB flash drive. The hardware will do its job, but we're looking for good software to handle our needs. Google has no shortage of suggestions, but we'd like to see if anyone on Slashdot has experience with this — what works and what doesn't. We trust each other completely, and don't mind sending unencrypted data to the counterpart server (as long as it's encrypted along the way via something like SSH), but we want the actual stored data to be encrypted, and no keys stored on the server itself — the key should be sent from the client computer if encryption is handled by the server. We also would like two modes: one where we can manually load files into the backup system and have them persist, and one where entire directories are backed up automatically and transparently. We'd also like to use the stored files regularly — this isn't a store-and-forget system. This would have to support client computers running Windows (XP mostly, although 98-2000 would also be helpful), several flavors of Linux, and an early Mac OS X system (10.2, PPC). Some versioning for backed-up files would be helpful as well — we really want to avoid having an accidental delete propagate throughout the backup servers — that's not much of a backup. Since we have some non-techies using the system, it would be very nice if it could be simple and transparent to use. Requiring some expertise to set up is ok, since we're both *NIX programmers in our day jobs. Does such a software package exist, and is it free (gratis) and/or free (libre)?

Also, do you recommend RAID 5 for our situation? We don't want to lose data, but the system is distributed, meaning we'd have to lose the same drive on both systems to lose data. Sacrificing 1/3 of the storage is unpleasant, but if necessary we can do it.

Other suggestions are also welcome, especially if it's something that we might not have considered.
Red Hat Software

Alan Cox Leaves Red Hat 163

ruphus13 writes "Alan Cox — one of the lead Linux kernel developers at Red Hat — is leaving the company after 10 years and is heading to Intel, where he can focus on more low-level development tasks. Some are speculating whether this is indicative of a shift to a more 'application-centric' vision at Red Hat. From the article: 'Red Hat is integrating more application related, user- and enterprise-centric tools into its well-established "low-level," "core" development and support tools. It'd be more worrisome if Red Hat neglected to strike out in this direction. Cox was with Red Hat for ten years, and regardless of any suspected change of course within the company, that's a fair amount of time.'"
Space

New Photos of SpaceX's Falcon 9 Assembly 122

RobGoldsmith writes "New images are now available of SpaceX's Falcon 9 being assembled. The images are accompanied with a small update from SpaceX. If there are no unexpected delays, it's possible Falcon 9 will be completely integrated by the end of the year. This update shows real flight hardware and really brings the rocket alive. View images of the Falcon 9 nearing completion now!"

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