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.
I am very happy with the XPS 1330m laptop. I don't know if they still make it anymore, but I bought it with ubuntu pre-installed and it has been fantastic.
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.
Apple's not really targetting netbooks - I mean, they might release one of their own, but they really aren't interested in calling up Dell and saying "Hey, let's cut a deal to install OSX on your next-gen netbook." So it's not strictly a fair comparison.
That said, yeah, it seems like Ubuntu is moving really swiftly these days. Swifter than Apple even, but let's not forget that only a year ago, people were complimenting Apple for being so swift-moving when compared to Microsoft.
I think the point of that comment was to say: "Netbooks are really popular. Apple is ignoring this while Ubuntu is embracing it. This is making Ubuntu popular, while Apple has pretty much maxed out its popularity."
Where's the proof that their popularity is maxed out? Their market share's grown steadily every quarter, they own the hottest phone on the planet, and their advertising's everywhere.
I don't have numbers on this and I haven't researched this, but I'd rather bet that Apple's increasing at a faster pace than Ubuntu. Or am I missing something?
Apple was well aware of the netbook segment -- they chose to ignore it. Their "competitor" to the netbooks, the iPod/iPhone line, has been doing extremely well. Ubuntu hasn't succeeded in gaining traction in the portable device market, but you don't consider that a failure.
People like taking potshots at Apple by ignoring what Apple actually does, and perhaps that's deserved because Apple has a reputation for unflagging arrogance. It bugs me, though, when people make statements like the OP, because Apple and Ubuntu aren't doing the same thing whatsoever. Ubuntu has its goals, which include netbooks. Apple has said again and again: they understand it's an open market, but they don't want to release a product until they're certain they can make something of their accepted quality level. Meanwhile, they've made the iPhone into a miniature netbook with the App Store, and a lot of people are using it as such.
In the end, it's all very silly. The people who think that Ubuntu is cutting edge conflict with the Apple users who think the same, because we two camps use different definitions of "cutting edge". Can we stop bickering about it now? There's room enough for us all to hold hands, kiss, make up, and go back to tormenting the Windows users. (Joke! Don't shoot me.)
It's a different kind of database. If you think wikipedia is not a complex database then you're sorely mistaken. The SQL schema may not be complex, but everyone knows that wikipedia is made from a wiki -- a different type of database.
>>> issubclass(wiki, database)
True
>>>
"""Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work"."""
The SQL is just the datastore. The wiki is the real database. Now to show that the wiki is a complex database, you would show a diagram of all the hyperlinks between pages... and the many other ways the data is linked (categories, tags etc)
What does that have to do with an SQL database schema? And what's the significance of the link structure? It's not so dissimilar from other websites or the web itself. Sure, it would probably make for a cool looking graph, but it has no bearing on the underlying storage method in this particular case. If it was necessary to understand or perform some kind of analysis on the relationships between objects like social networks and search engines do, they would probably have a more interesting storage mechanism to look at.
Personally, what I find surprising about this whole thing is that people are so amazed at the simplicity of the schema. A wiki is a fairly simple application. Think about it. If you were going to build one it's not much more than a basic CRUD application. You really only have articles (with versioning), user accounts, images/media and whatever other oddball features you want to have like statistics and IP restrictions. Hell, I remember seeing some beginning Ruby on Rails book that used a wiki as the tutorial application. This is pretty basic stuff.
The wiki is the database, built on top of another database. It uses link structure and other document attributes to form different relations.
The relations(links) are like the relations in an SQL database. The relations in the wikitext are like database relations.
Much of the logic is built into the document attributes(wikitext), coded in the php layer. Mediawiki is a very big, and complex database. 1.5 million LOC. Which is fairly small compared to other databases.
Anyway... I guess my point is that mediawiki is a database, and that it's relations are not in the SQL - but in the wikitext.
I understand the part where you said a wiki is a database. I guess it could fit some loose definition of a database. But what does that have to do with anything? The whole point of the article was the simplicity of the SQL schema. The link structure of a wiki has nothing to do with it.
Being a monopoly isnt illegal. Making an excellent product isnt illegal. The problem is using that monopoly for anticompetitive ends, eg pushing competitors out of other markets (Netscape).
Yahoo and MS won’t give you enough traffic. And I am not saying "they won’t give you same traffic for same money". No, they simply don’t have enough searches, in my experience.
