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Comment Everything has software (Score 4, Informative) 352

By this logic, even your computer has multiple operating systems. The chipset on your motherboard is not pure hardware - there are small cores in there running embedded software that you never see. I am not talking about BIOS, which is another type of firmware, that is visible to the user.

EVERYTHING these days has software. Shipping a software patch is cheaper than a recall. This goes back to the old joke - the mechanical engineer thinks it is an electrical problem, the electrical engineer thinks it is a mechanical problem, but they both agree that it should be fixed in software.

This story reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Kent Brockman breaks a story about the government training people to kill on an industrial scale. "They call it the 'Army', but I have a better name - Killbot Factory".

Comment Re:Economic Reasons (Score 2) 270

New designs come from improvements on old designs and from the experiences of the engineers and workers who work on them. If the reactors are shut down and the best of the workers find gainful employment in another industry, we will not have a good starting point for the improvement process. There will be a few old coots who hung around and a bunch of new kids with book smarts and no practical experience.

Hardly a recipe for success.

Comment Re:3, 2, 1 (Score 1) 203

Monty made some money for himself - why shouldn't he do this, particularly when the sale of the product would not have any material long term impact to the availability of the product.

Sun paid him off, and now he is doing the exact same thing, in open source, he gets to keep his money, and Oracle now has zero influence over this open source project.

Win, win, win, win(unless you are Oracle)!

Maybe he can do this every 10 years and buy a new boat. Good for him. It will also help get the message across that you really cannot buy Open Source software.

Comment Re:Mexico! (Score 1) 149

Not pure silicon. They are doped with various materials, often rare earths, in order to get the properties needed for the application.

If I recall, a PV is essentially a diode with the junction exposed to sunlight. The light hitting the cell creates a electron/hole pair, which accumulate to become the voltage that can be sent to a load.

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