http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Also, if you had any interest in actually looking, all the numbers you need to do the math are available on the Internet.

Raise your hand if you honestly think that Mickey Mouse as a trademark will enter the public domain in 2023. ....

Me neither.

The ability to network is a skill I've spent a significant amount of time to become adept at.

Nice to see *informed* input!

I would argue that the problem is the flat rate pricing of $/KWH. A KWH produced at 1 AM has far less value than one produced at 7:00 PM. Why are we charging them the same? Much of the issue you mention would largely vanish if electricity prices were negotiated more frequently. EG: hourly or 15 minute increments. If there really is a surplus of power between 10:00-2:00, as you state, then the price during that time of day would be low to accommodate. This would create an incentive to input power when there's matching demand, and let the utility company profit off the difference.

Yes, it's a significant cost to upgrade the power grid and contracts to work this way, but when has it been bad to connect buyers to sellers in a way that reflects an accurate use of resources?

For example, I read a study a while back that pointing solar panels West of due South resulted in a much better match between electricity use and demand

and this is EXACTLY what's wrong with programmers today!

I'd love to agree with you, there, but when I got started programming, VAXen were all the rage, and programmers were still taught to program as if CPU and memory were unlimited resources. Sorry, but this is one philosophy you can't blame on "programmers today."

Upon loading the site just now, I found I've been moved back to the classic slashdot system. I'd like to thank the admin responsible. It's nice to be able to read posts again.

P.S.

Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,

I am afraid that I must post an addendum to my previous call for assistance. The difficulty of the interface appears to be more considerable than I had initially realised.

Unfortunately, the interface does not load all comments on the page. In fact, only one comment is loaded on any given page, and the "load more comments" area / button provided, when pressed, does not in fact load anything. As such I am unable to determine whether my previous comment has been replied to, or indeed whether it has been posted at all. In short I can no longer see or read comments.

In the hope that this message will be seen, I will periodically attempt to post messages of aid in a scattering of stories. Whether these "post in a bottle" will reach you, or float at all, is something I can only hope for at this point.

In the meantime I shall see if the pieces of flat design driftwood can be lash togther into a makeshift civilisation of sorts. However this island appears quite desolate. The floating header follows whereever I go. Perhaps I will try to converse with it.

In any case I remain your hopeful servant,

A poster trapped in Beta

Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,

I regret making such an offtopic post, but I am afraid that I have found myself trapped on the "new" new Slashdot Beta site and I cannot seem to leave it.

The site features an extremely modern "flat" design. So modern in fact that there do not appear to be any visible links, menus, navigation bars, page divisions, or icons at all. A "slide out" option to move back to Slashdot classic pops up from time to time, only to disappear as I try to click it. I believe I may need to use a "charm" type gesture or spell in order to properly summon such advanced features, but I am not privy to the precise incantations.

As such I am currently stuck on the new Slashdot Beta with no way of returning to a more usable interface. I find this most unsatisfactory, somewhat frustrating, and feel I have little other option but to send this call for assistance.

I possess an advanced STEM degree and over 25 years expierience with technology, software and the web. I feel I can positively contribute to discussion on this site, but this new interface is making the site too difficult to use.

Yours

A user trapped on Beta

What I want to know is, what ever happened to fuse-based proms, and why we can't use similar technology to store important data? I have to believe that, with current technology, we could create proms with a density at least as high as current usb keys, and since they're just microscopic wires in a hermetically sealed package, they'd last basically forever.

You missed a word: "officially".

NSA officials were unable to find any evidence Snowden ever had.

This is essentially the "I do not recall" equivalent of paperwork investigations.

The essential question here is whether the NSA can conclusively deny that Snowden never raised concerns at the agency. Since if he did raise concerns, he probably would have raised them to people personally, a document search is not nessesarily going to uncover whether he did.

What will uncover this conclusively is a simple interview of NSA and affiliate company employees and especially supervisors who worked with Snowden. But since such a set of interviews would either a) reveal that he did raise concerns, b) involve people having to sign their names to untruths, or most unlikely c) reveal he really raised nothing, then I think it's easier for the NSA to just pretend that a half-assed email server word search constitutes an appropriate investigation.

Note that the reverse trend is happening. Thanks to the very low cost of production and distribution, there are many, many, many alternate "shows" out there that you can watch.

Have you missed youtube entirely? What rock have you been hiding under? Also, the place with the most interesting display of documentaries and "non-primary" content is NetFlix. There is a *ridiculous* amount of youtube channels with interesting content.

For example, as a violinist, I like Taylor Davis' work immensely - she mixes violin and many of the themes to movies and games I've loved....

Remember when MTV was a close as you could get to stuff like this?

I see the exact opposite trend. Netflix is growing by gangbusters, but is the epitome of having many shows that "you aren't paying for". It's not a la carte... at all! You pay a flat rate of $8/month and stream whatever you like.

If you combine horrible customer service, high prices, and synchronized broadcasting, and you have unhappy customers switching to clearly better alternatives. "Paying for channels you don't use" is a symptom. The real problem is that they are horrible companies offering a previous generation, substandard service at ridiculous prices that have risen much faster than inflation.

You don't know Microsoft very well, then. They've literally never done anything else!

1) They were late to the party with DOS. They ripped off QDOS and sold it to IBM. It was IBM who launched Microsoft, it was Microsoft's non-exclusive contract with IBM that allowed the IBM compatible market to begin. That had never been done before, and only happened because IBM didn't take the microcomputer seriously.

2) They were late to the party for GUI. Windows was quickly thrown together after trying to work together with IBM and deciding to be dicks to IBM and steal lots of their design work.

3) Windows '95 was a rebrand of "Windows". So was Windows CE ME NT, XP, Vista, Mobile, and RT. In a sense, Windows 7 is the first "debranding" of Windows back to its marketing roots.

4) Microsoft goes through a major change in structure every 2-5 years. It's always made the tech rags, all the way back to the 1980s.

5) Their now dominant office was a rebrand of their MS Word, Excel, and Power Point, which were sold separately.

6) Each of these Office products was a late comer in its field, in part winning due to strange incompatibilities encountered by the "other guys". Remember the phrase "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run". Lotus 123 was the leading spreadsheet at the time.

and so on.... Just don't pretend that this BS is anything *new*. Market conditions were right, and MS had a combination of luck and determination to make the best of it. The market conditions have changed remarkably.

Scrubbing doesn't thrash your CPU as much as it thrashes I/O. Remember that both I/O and CPU are part of your "load average". This would be expected; it's reading every block on every device in your system.

You're right about the memory; I've forgotten that detail since RAM is cheap. 1 GB per TB is the recommended amount, though I've worked with far less in practice in low/medium write load environments.