illume

insider

Yeah, you are right. There are many variables that need to be defined first.

How much does it cost to put nuclear power generation in a house? You can't. So therefore wind power is infinitely cheaper than nuclear.

If you put a wind turbine on the side of a building where that side forms a wind tunnel, then you can generate power very cheaply - if you only count the cost of the generator and the batteries. If you count the cost of the building that makes the natural wind tunnel and repairs it is more.

Same with nuclear - you need to count other costs. The cost of a rare accident is billions or trillions. The cost of cleanup, ruined nearby industries ( and even not so nearby industries (Wales farmers)) can be massive.

Wind power can be used without storage depending on what needs to use the wind power. Like the article mentions, car batteries are quite useful to store the power in. There are many uses for electricity that do not require continuous electricity. Likewise it can be used as a complementary source of renewable energy. There are communities that generate 100% of their energy from renewable sources, and part of that is from wind.

Wind is also a cheaper investment. Nuclear costs a lot of money initially, and on an ongoing basis. At a small scale, I can buy a portable wind generator for my ipod for under $30. At a large scale, some communities have farms that generate 5 gigawatt hours a year.

How do you price the cost to the environment of wind farms? Noise pollution, and visual pollution. The cost of safety - that is damage to human and animal life. Wind power causes the lowest amounts of death to humans, but apparently causes bird deaths.

It's all very complicated, but wind power does have some clear cost advantages. From scale of investment required, to safety cost advantages, to reduced environmental cleanup costs, to reduced tourism and land price effects.

Most people create content. See facebook, and email as proof if you are skeptical.

Heh. That's up there with the university once known as the Cassurina University of Northern Territory. They changed their name pretty quickly.

Dell have good support. They have some deal with canonical, so it seems most of their laptops work great.

Also, ASUS ones run quite well. ASUS even ship linux on their netbooks. My girl friends netbook runs for ages on it. So much that it has never run out of battery on us.

Sent from my Ubuntu Dell.

He mentions someone from the 1300s he considers a hacker. I think he was referring to the term Hack.

Ubuntu is really moving ahead now. It is a far superiour system compared to osx. osx has packaged up 2 year old stuff, and ubuntu is within 0 months to 6 month old wares.

Apple missed out on netbooks -- where ubuntu is ahead again. Looks like they'll hop onto cloud computing before Apple too.

Ubuntu is just much more agile, compared to Apple... which seems to be a bit stagnant.

Guru fight! Which one is right? Neither!

A diagram of hyperlinks would show it's complexity.

A friend of mine was kicked off google ads. Now he can't find anyone else to replace them with.

Monopoly.

The author needs needs to get some exercise... like a lot of Americans.

Related to this is http://www.ludumdare.com -- a game design orientated competition that has been running since 2002.

You get 48 hours to make a game from scratch (art, code, everything) to a theme voted on weeks before, and chosen 0 minutes before the competition starts. These are the same elements which the Experimental Gameplay project copied.

There you can see a journal from all the entrants, as well as source code -- so you can learn how the better game makers approach it.

Many game developers use it as a chance to prototype games, and get immediate feedback as you develop. Also to help you refine your skills to allow you to make games more rapidly.

It's a real buzz to enter the competition, as there's often 100 or so people working on their games at the same time.

Since it's from scratch, you are forced to finish things up, rather than working on engines(for you web dev people engines are the frameworks of game development).

If you're into making games I highly recommend you join in on one of these competitions :)

No one ever owns ideas. It's true, look it up.

hg is easier to type than git. That's 33% better at least(with integer percentages, it's event better with float percentages... and even better with fractions).

Imagine typing git 20 times? Well can you see it now? Good.

NOW, imagine typing hg 20 times, that is 60 keys pressed, VS only 40 keys. You'll probably make less errors with 2 keys too.

git didn't bring anything new to version control... with it's 3 key system. svn had 3 letters, cvs even had 3 letters. However hg has brought a 33% improvement to version control -- with it's revolutionary 2 letter system.

Obviously a break through. Obviously fucking cool.

Not so seemless. Things need to be serialised to transfer them. You need to specially craft code so that it is pickle safe... things don't just work automatically.

Also serialising 100MB or so worth of objects around is really slow. So the process module is not good for many cases of use.

This is great because it allows you to create algorithms at runtime for your data.

So rather than doing...

def doit(option1, data): for x in data: if option1: x += 7

You can create a function that doesn't include the "if option1" part. This is great if you have many different options... and instead of bloating your code for many different optimized function, or one slower generic function, you can create the optimized functions at run time.

Looks very nice. I just wish it had support for 3dnow, and windows :)

Wow, that sucks :(

I'm going right now to back up all my google stuff!

Oh wait a minute... there's no backup button.

This is typical innovation... mixing two things together to make a third thing.

Next physics invaders... + [add your own mix]. I choose +pony.

You'll notice the usual benchmark section is missing from there. The one that tells you python 2.6 is XXX% faster than python2.5

This is because often 2.6 is slower than 2.5. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-September/0...

Some things are faster, and some are slower. But for the normal benchmarks mentioned in the release notes (for 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5), it's slower overall.

python 2.5 works fine with win95 and win98.

We're talking at least 1%-3%1 of machines on the internet here. That's a sizable chunk of people.

based on wc3 stats... which aren't all that representative.

It also doesn't work on FreeBSD/OpenBSD. Though they plan to fix that at least.

If you make applications for windows, then you would understand that people either can't upgrade or won't. Their old machines don't work with newer versions of the OS's.

For web developers this is fine, since they don't need to install programs. However for those of us that need to install programs, it's going to be sticking with python2.5 (or even 2.3 if you want better compatibility).

It drops support for 'older' versions of windows...

Including older versions of win2k, winme, win98 etc. They're not only not supporting it, but they've removed code for older versions of windows.

So if you want to distribute portable apps, don't use 2.6+

It's a webpage that's supposed to evoke feelings of 'what is this', draw attention, and also to provide a slight grin feeling -- for ninja appreciators.

Often test suites are distributed with the source to the package.

This is about including them in the binary distribution. So they are available in programs people distribute, and also in binaries for mac/windows/ubuntu etc.

Automate as much as possible. Reduce the time you need per customer, so if you record how much time you need for current customers -- then multiply that out. If you had 2x the customers would you be able to support them properly? How about 10-50x?

Is there anything you can do to make the existing customers happy? If you keep concentrating on them, more will follow.

Just take it slowly... don't do massive advertising/marketing spends all at once. Control the rate of new customers you get.

Each time you grow you'll probably find issues, so best to do it slowly... otherwise everything could fuck up.

It's tempting to go 'oh things are working now, let's throw $20-80k at advertising tomorrow and see what happens!'

Nothing worse than having 20,000 angry customers.

these are bad: - relevance of search results - colors - layout of search results - specialisation for different types of search results is no where near where google is. - some searches for things I know about returned 0 results.

Also... frames?

If they think google hasn't been updating their search engine for ages they are kidding themselves. Google has done very well to keep the design consistent for about a decade, but things are changing all the time.

The search results suck.

oh wow.

A pretty cool idea. I wonder how the compressed air is generated. I know that there are some < $100 compressed air generators that run off many other types of power(electricity, petrol etc). I wonder how energy efficient it is in terms of power. I mean, the energy use has just moved from the car to the compressed air generation plants.

It seems they have optimized the car for use in urban areas by making it as lightweight as possible. I wonder if it would pass safety tests in other countries -- with the car being held together with glue, and relying on wireless technology (zigbee maybe)?

Great ideas... it seems to have used a whole bunch of new technologies.