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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 :)
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.