OS X mounts them as R/O, which I always thought was lame, but that's another rant.
Nobody should ever be using ftp anyway. You have the ssh solution, which is great. But there are folks who insist on using the ftp thing. I've got to plug for MacFusion, which tosses a GUI at FUSE and sshfs. It makes OSX use ssh mounted volumes transparently. For those with more hosted disk space than $DEITY (I'm looking at you, Dreamhost), this is a great way to do offline file storage for people who are more of the "drag and drop" type than the "learn how to use fsync" type.
It's still a retarded way of looking at things. If people looked at machines as machines instead of as if they were human beings, they would probably understand them better and get less frustrated by their workings.
In college, I had a 486/66 with "personality". I named her ("Talena" for you Gor fans out there), and talked with her. I got occasional strange looks, but nothing ever was harmed. She would periodically stop booting and I'd need to reseat all her cards and memory. You see, the dorm was a very dusty place and the temperatures were not that well regulated, and she was pretty cheaply made -- I couldn't afford much. I knew full well the physics of thermal cycles and the electrical properties that our dust had, but my math major roommate's eyes glossed over with that stuff until I said, "She's a girl, she needs me to pay attention to her once in a while". He understood my meaning, and appreciated the distilling of "the truth" into "easy to understand". She had a few other quirks that were related to the fact that no two components came from the same vendor, and that all were found in the back of my 15 pound Computer Shopper, and those piled up into choosing her name.
Anthropomorphism isn't about thinking things are really like people, it's about approximating real truths into things that allow our social brains to remember and interact with.
I think you should encourage him the same way my dad encouraged me. He left plenty of Basic books around and left me alone with the thing.
Eventually, when I was about to become an Eagle Scout, in 1991 or so, my father told me he wanted to get me a really special gift, but didn't know what to get me. I told him I wanted something more adult than Basic; was "Fortran good for making graphics?" My father did something that was incredible at the time; we didn't have much money, but we did have a 10 year old IBM PC. He bought me Borland C++. It had a compiler, profiler, debugger, an integrated IDE, all the bells and whistles. Only I wanted to use the compiler and nothing else. I learned an incredible amount from just following the book examples. My mother laughed every time she saw me in front of the television just reading the book that had the listing of the available commands. It felt like I was reading a catalog with someone else's credit card.
Give the boy the means and the time. Provide a few trips to the local used book store for some examples to just type in and make minor variations. In my experience, that's the best recipe to success for continued interest. Any more involvement and you'll end up with a football player or cheerleader.
The big thing that I know nothing about current GNU compilers, which is the only thing I'd expect a kernel hacker to provide, is that I don't know about graphics libraries. Motif, GTK and the like are far too much. Just something to draw a pixel or a line is what a growing boy needs.
The firmware needs to be patched to support 1400x1050, which is very common on laptops. In Linux, we usually accomplish that with 915resolution, although I've heard newer versions of Xorg build the workaround right in.
Finally, a Nuke guy who understands what he's talking about. Please understand that I don't think we can go 100% renewable inside of 25 or even 50 years, and please don't mistake me for someone who thinks that nuclear has no redeeming qualities. I pretty much favor anything that gets us off coal ASAP and oil as the next priority. Nuclear can be a big part of that, but I don't think it's necessary to count on nuclear in the >50 year time frame. Distributed infrastructure is a really smart way to go and catastrophic accidents happen, no matter how smart you think you are. If you accept that, and history seems to support it, the nuclear has the worst possible worst case scenarios -- any time you concentrate that much power in one place, the risks are high.
1. They might be 'hard' but France has been operating one for years. I'd argue that we've made more progress with them than we have for economic solar.
Let's talk about the political will to walk into Nevada and clear through the back stock of nuclear waste and create viable fuel. They're hard and tricky, but not impossible. Politically speaking, they're death for anyone who proposes them.
2a. The amount of water needed can be varied. In any case, the 'huge' amounts water used is generally put right back into the source, just maybe downstream less than a mile, and the only difference is that it's slightly warmer. A larger flow allows more cooling, increasing efficiency, while putting the water back at even less of a difference. It becomes a matter of - as long as we have the water, might as well use it.
That's not going to cut it in any area that's going through a drought more than once a decade. With population growing as it is, we need more closed systems, and I don't see it happening; I have no idea why.
2b. Coal powersuffers from the same problem, normally using loads of water as well.
You'll get nothing but agreement from me that coal is a terrible solution and causes more problems than any other solution. It's the cigarette of the power industry.
3. No research necessary, the steam techniques for nuclear and coal power are identical - just more expensive than having a convienent river or lake. Even ocean, though the salt presents it's own problems.
If there's no research necessary, then why isn't it done? Why isn't it in place? Why do plants have to shut down in droughts? I'm betting there are solvable problems that nobody has gone to the effort of doing yet.
4. Newer plant designs, possibly prototyped in India or China are much cheaper, and at least the current administration is working on streamlining/reducing the regulatory costs. As for the plebes - well, most don't actively remember Chernobyl, much less TMI. With the environmental concerns, I see resistance to nuclear power weakening. If they get smart and use the nuclear plant in a cogeneration/trigeneration fashion to support some industry(such as ethanol, depolymerization, oil sand/shale processing or hydrogen), you can get your load balancing and increase the efficiency of the plant by a great deal.
All you need are some bored college students with greenpeace bumper stickers to put on a protest and get some time on the evening news to remind people about all the people who died in TMI (omit "0") and about the deadzone around Chernobyl to rile up the populace (omit the blossoming wildlife).
5. I don't see how Wind&Solar can cover our needs economically - and safety wise nuclear power is so safe that I wouldn't be surprise
If energy storage is the only problem for you, then you don't know how thermal solar works. Solar concentrators heat liquid sodium to 1000F or so, then that is what's stored. The liquid sodium is used to heat water to steam in a closed system and run a turbine. Depending on the design goals, your liquid sodium stores can last 2-22 hours after sundown. Like you say, you have to plan on providing for demand, and that's going to vary on the location, needs and integration with the grid to average out local variables in wind and sun.
Now, if you said your only problem with thermal solar was that it hadn't been commercially implemented and proven to work, then I could agree with you and we'd both be looking forward to the next 5 years when the current plants under construction will be running.
I am really excited by upcoming renewable energy sources and the upcoming explosion in energy storage.
I've recently converted from being a nuclear enthusiast. Nuclear has many bad points (fewer than coal, make no mistake). These include that breeder reactors are "hard" (not perfected and political suicide for a long time for any politician who would otherwise support them) and reactors use a whole assload of water. Many municipalities that could use a nuke plant don't have the water on hand to generate the steam to run the turbines. Maybe we could research a closed system to recover the steam (heck, run a Rankine Cycle engine and get more power during the recovery?), but that's not current technology. Nuke plants are also insanely expensive to build, partially due to public paranoia (who can blame the plebes who can't tell the difference between an RBMK and a pebble bed reactor?).
Wind and solar can cover a whole of our needs with lower risks. Thermal solar solutions don't even need any difficult to find materials and can be designed to make power for short cloudy periods and even at night. This will make grid power far less than 20 cents per KWh. Combine this with variable rate billing and some smart thermostats to take advantage of power when it's plentiful and their shortcomings become easier to swallow. Then if Eestor and some of the next gen capacitor and battery folks come through, they can help even out some of the transients too.
I took my two kids, aged 4 and 1 (well, 22 months old) on the opening Saturday at 9:30. They both were entranced. Visually speaking, it was enough constant motion and humor and bouncing around for the 1 year old to love it. The 4 year old immediately bonded with the main character, Wall-E, and his interest, Eve.
Sure, it might be a bit heavy for kids, but they're just going to miss all the heavy stuff anyway. Pixar wasn't shooting for social commentary, they've come out and said they were working on these concepts since 1993. If you put on your rose colored glasses and pretend Clinton was president, a lot of the issues we read into a modern movie aren't present. "Using up the planet" today implies fossil fuels, but then, it was just about recycling so we had smaller landfills. The whole "obesity" thing wasn't an issue -- but we were talking about building a space station and the impact of prolonged exposure to low-Gs and space travel.
1) If you have a Mac, and want to be mischevious and blow your cover, the "say" command may be entertaining for a while.
2) If you are able to scan wireless networks, there are some services out there that will give you a rough geolocation (Skyhook, for starters). Once you have an idea, a little wardriving may help you zero in without getting warrants. Then either you can handle the situation mano-a-mano or you can visit the local police with what you know.
Also, as a joker pointed out earlier, since they don't work at night, you need batteries...our battery technology is also fairly heavy on the heavy metals right now. These also wear out, often faster than the cells do.
Thermal solar power works by heating something like liquid sodium and then using that to heat steam to 1000F, which is a very efficient temperature to run a steam turbine. As such, they work at night, for between 2-20 hours after sundown (can even out a partially cloudy day, for example).
Thermal solar doesn't need batteries, and you don't use batteries for a grid intertie solar plant. Most energy is needed during the day, when the sun is brightest, so honestly, the big point is taking peak needs off the coal plants -- which is how you have to size them and where you pay most of your money. Photovoltaics can feed into the grid and provide this peak pretty well, although it's yet to be seen if thermal solar can beat them for efficiency.
No, you're horrible, HORRIBLY incorrect. 1000 watts used constantly is around (24*30=)720 kilowatt-hours per month. This is a very reasonable amount of usage for an average household. Go check the usage on an electricity bill if you don't believe me.
For interest's sake, my house reliably uses ~350KWh during the winter (gas heat, 2 adults, 2 kids, Austin, TX), seemingly independent of house size (1800 square feet or 2200 square feet). In the summer, we used 1200 KWh in a 1800 square feet house and as much as 1500 KWh in a 2200 square foot house with a pair of 1 year old air conditioners (15.5 SEER and 16.5 SEER, 2 and 3 ton, respectively).
I've got to put the kill-a-watt on our new 24" nVidia iMacs, which are sure to gobble more power than the powerbooks they replaced to estimate how much our power consumption will go up this year.
From what I've heard (I'm no expert), these processors are good at certain types of calculations, but horrible at others. Ask a Cell to run Folding@Home, and it'll be blazing. Ask it to do general-purpose computing, though, and you'll quickly see the strength of other processors.
You're precisely correct. Cell's strength is in very predictable workloads (ones it can perform without branch mispredict penalties), very parallelizable workloads (ones that can be distributed over 6-8 SPU's / SPC's) that fit within 256 KB of local storage per SPU (manually managed cache, mapped to main memory). The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads. Roadrunner's Cell-DP eliminates that last limitation. While video games, encryption, nuke simulations and anything else that involves matrix manipulation can really stretch their legs on such a beast, general purpose computing won't find a benefit.
I've got to echo the DLink recommendation -- but I've had the 4100 for about a year. They call their QOS stuff "Game Fuel" (there were a few slashdot stories about it when they started hyping it up).
I've been very happy with mine, including being able to torrent like a freak and still use the Vonage box to make VOIP calls. I know the torrents are being throttled by my little box, but I can't see a big impact on transfer speeds. As a bonus, the DLink is much faster than the NAT firewall it replaced-- my maximum throughputs are higher.
Setup is as easy as configuring a normal NAT device. Of course, if you want to play with port forwarding, that's there too, and if you want your QOS to be a little more sophisticated than the default (which you should really try and see if you're happy with it), there are a plethora of configuration options.
I was in the unfortunate position of recovering some passwords a few years ago -- the circumstances were different as natural causes were clear -- but the concept of the next of kin inheriting the accounts was very clear to me.
First, boot the Linux box in single user mode, or off a USB key or CD. If you have the resources, back up the hard drive before you do anything. Second, change the password of the user account to something you know and can share with the family. Third, open Firefox, and if Password Exporter isn't installed, install it. Fourth, hope that the deceased used Firefox and had it remember every password.
Having gone through this, I would worry that places like Google and Myspace would simply close the account if they found out someone was dead (and had proof like a death certificate) and not a court order to keep it open. Often they say the account and all associated IP is theirs anyway, so there's nothing to "inherit", although that's not a line of thinking I agree with. Some firms are very opposed to allowing their [property|products] cross generational lines like that. Credit cards are the most understandable example.
Seven year olds love secrets and hiding places. Write the secret password on a piece of paper and ask the user to hide it in a very safe location. As long as the parents have the Administrator or root password to perform parental system audits (possibly only after bedtime), system management and password resets, I see no problem with the parents not knowing what the password is. All this, of course, assumes the parents are able to supervise use according to their parenting style and the child's needs.
There are many cleaner ways to generate electricity than nuclear. Hydro, geothermal, tidal and wave, wind and solar energy are all cleaner.
I'm far too late to the conversation to add much, but why do you think hydro is cleaner? Dam up a river and suddenly you have lots of rotting material in your new pond, plus the change to the surrounding ecosystems. Tidal and wave, again, you're changing ecosystems, and without careful analysis, you're harming local populations of potentially endangered species. Wind is nice, but it takes a whole lot of space and doesn't produce much electricity (cost per KWh is approaching coal, I know) and current solar technology is way too expensive to be practical in most circumstances, to say nothing of being a very cyclical source. Geothermal scares me because I don't know how the earth can replenish its internal heat if it's surrounded with so much water and air that's rarely above 100F.
Then there's nuclear. By itself, it consumes precious little real estate, the only output is steam (with an adequate capture system, you could cool it to ambient and replenish local supplies or even groundwater) and the radiation output is a fraction of coal. If you toss in breeder reactors, or reprocessing of spent fuel, then you end up throwing out the whole Yucca Mountain problem and are left with a 100 year half life problem to deal with (relatively easy in the grand scheme of things) and more power than mankind can calculate using any time soon. All this benefit, and it's a constant supply of power, too.
Nuclear is here, it's clean and it's safer than burning coal. There's plenty of research to do to add to its benefits, but its downsides are very well known (and overblown). Nuclear is the only long term solution that doesn't involve asking people to change their behaviors in order to change the world for the better.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
Seems to me that modern economic theory is all about finding the spot where supply = demand. Those who provide the biggest benefit to society are rewarded the most and therefore have access to more expensive stuff. If you underprice because you're "nice" at the holidays, you're creating excess demand, which only peeves people off who can afford it, but can't find it. It's not about taking from others, it's about finding a price point where everybody thinks is fair (and if someone is willing to pay it, it's "fair" as long as nobody is forcing him/her).
Can you name one sovereign nation that US has ever taken over in order to expand its borders and impose its laws over?
Vermont. Also, the first sovereign nation to prohibit slavery in their constitution. If you want to debate if Vermont was a sovereign nation, whom would you claim owned it? The British, the US, New York or New Hampshire, all of which claimed Vermont was within its borders, and how would you reconcile that against knowing that Vermont had an army that fought off any claims of annexation?
And $100 million per track mile is very optimistic considering the Japanese Linimo HSST cost some $100 million per kilometer, or rougly 0.62 miles.
I've had a fascination with maglevs since Popular Mechanics did an article in the early 1990s or late 1980s. Finally, I made it to the World Fair in Aichi in 2005 and saw the Linmo ("Linear Motor"). Actually, I rode it. It was awesome. Not the "awesome" that kids use when they do well on a test, but the "awesome" from waiting for something and then unexpectedly being able to do it after 15 years. The ride was smooth as silk (vertically speaking); the starts and stops were a little sudden, and there seemed to be discrete speed steps. With that said, I have a hard time imagining that $100 million was spent wisely. A rail car could have done the same job for far less. If moving a person costs (installation) + (operating expenses), a maglev has to move a whole lot of people at lower (operating expenses) to make up for the phenomenal (installation).
Between the maglev and the walking robots from Honda playing Louisiana style jazz, the whole hot, crowded, noisy, expensive trip was well worth it.
I always default to native formats, and export to MS if necessary.
There used to (and may still) be a bug in the OOo spreadsheet, Calc, when it exported to.xls. If I had a cell that calculated a value from another tab that was itself a calculated value that referred to another cell (on any tab, even the current one), that would not export cleanly. When the xls file launched in Excel, it would show "!ERR" or something. If you clicked on the cell, then its equation and hit enter, it would evaluate correctly. It was as if this certain situation was unable to export an initial value for whatever reason. My solution was very inconvenient. I ended up exporting to PDF to get through a meeting, then opening it in Excel and re-executing every affected cell in order to sanitize it for management to be able to dink with the inputs. If I had defaulted to saving in.xls, I would not have been able to take the fast export to PDF to get through that meeting.
The transfer time between the SPEs and main memory is many orders of magnitude smaller than between main memory and disk. Further, communication between SPEs and main memory can be overlapped with computation, completely covering the latency.
Of course. My contention is that if your algorithm can hide the latency of main memory, it can also do a decent job of hiding hard drive latency -- most of the time. If you can prefetch from main memory, you can usually prefetch from the hard drive or the network.
Keep in mind that the SPE's local storage is basically a software managed cache. So your argument of "churning on itself within 256kb" would also apply to an L1 or L2 cache.
Agreed. As such, I was intending to suggest that if you couldn't fit within 256KB, there are other processors with 512KB of L2, or even into the megabyte range, up to 12MB for consumer-ish parts. If it's that important to you, Power6 has 32MB of L3, if I recall correctly. If the workload doesn't fit within 256KB of cache and essentially has to run out of main memory (like SETI, to call upon a common workload that a lot of us are tangentially familiar with), you will likely do better finding a processor without the SPEs (or SPUs or SPCs, depending on who you are, or even APUs if you swing that way). One high performance general purpose Intel chip can gobble up a workload that fits in its cache far better than Cell can slog through a workload that must reside in main memory.
Let me reiterate. I believe Cell is an incredibly high performance implementation for workloads that are easily parallelizable, fit within 256KB, and are exclusively integer and single precision floats. Straying from any of those is where it gets competition.
I just hope we see the enhanced double precision floating point version of Cell.
256k of local storage for each SPE is a problem, but you can code around it. (It's not trivial, but it can be done.) You can't code around having a small amount of RAM and still maintain high performance.
Let me see if I get this straight, you can imagine a piece of code that doesn't mind churning on itself within 256KB, but you can't imagine having to keep 256MB of main memory fed from a network or disk? In my experience, any piece of code that can both benefit from extreme parallelism and fit both the code and enough data to be worth working on within 256KB can handle a few reads from a disk or the network once in a while. If it can't, then 256KB of memory isn't enough to keep the (sub)processor fed, and you need a machine with more on-die memory (many of which can be found).
Cell is very good at integers and single precision floats for workloads that are parallelizable and fit within 256KB. If you stray from any of that, there are plenty of interesting competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody should ever be using ftp anyway. You have the ssh solution, which is great. But there are folks who insist on using the ftp thing. I've got to plug for MacFusion, which tosses a GUI at FUSE and sshfs. It makes OSX use ssh mounted volumes transparently. For those with more hosted disk space than $DEITY (I'm looking at you, Dreamhost), this is a great way to do offline file storage for people who are more of the "drag and drop" type than the "learn how to use fsync" type.
In college, I had a 486/66 with "personality". I named her ("Talena" for you Gor fans out there), and talked with her. I got occasional strange looks, but nothing ever was harmed. She would periodically stop booting and I'd need to reseat all her cards and memory. You see, the dorm was a very dusty place and the temperatures were not that well regulated, and she was pretty cheaply made -- I couldn't afford much. I knew full well the physics of thermal cycles and the electrical properties that our dust had, but my math major roommate's eyes glossed over with that stuff until I said, "She's a girl, she needs me to pay attention to her once in a while". He understood my meaning, and appreciated the distilling of "the truth" into "easy to understand". She had a few other quirks that were related to the fact that no two components came from the same vendor, and that all were found in the back of my 15 pound Computer Shopper, and those piled up into choosing her name.
Anthropomorphism isn't about thinking things are really like people, it's about approximating real truths into things that allow our social brains to remember and interact with.
I think you should encourage him the same way my dad encouraged me. He left plenty of Basic books around and left me alone with the thing.
Eventually, when I was about to become an Eagle Scout, in 1991 or so, my father told me he wanted to get me a really special gift, but didn't know what to get me. I told him I wanted something more adult than Basic; was "Fortran good for making graphics?" My father did something that was incredible at the time; we didn't have much money, but we did have a 10 year old IBM PC. He bought me Borland C++. It had a compiler, profiler, debugger, an integrated IDE, all the bells and whistles. Only I wanted to use the compiler and nothing else. I learned an incredible amount from just following the book examples. My mother laughed every time she saw me in front of the television just reading the book that had the listing of the available commands. It felt like I was reading a catalog with someone else's credit card.
Give the boy the means and the time. Provide a few trips to the local used book store for some examples to just type in and make minor variations. In my experience, that's the best recipe to success for continued interest. Any more involvement and you'll end up with a football player or cheerleader.
The big thing that I know nothing about current GNU compilers, which is the only thing I'd expect a kernel hacker to provide, is that I don't know about graphics libraries. Motif, GTK and the like are far too much. Just something to draw a pixel or a line is what a growing boy needs.
The firmware needs to be patched to support 1400x1050, which is very common on laptops. In Linux, we usually accomplish that with 915resolution, although I've heard newer versions of Xorg build the workaround right in.
Finally, a Nuke guy who understands what he's talking about. Please understand that I don't think we can go 100% renewable inside of 25 or even 50 years, and please don't mistake me for someone who thinks that nuclear has no redeeming qualities. I pretty much favor anything that gets us off coal ASAP and oil as the next priority. Nuclear can be a big part of that, but I don't think it's necessary to count on nuclear in the >50 year time frame. Distributed infrastructure is a really smart way to go and catastrophic accidents happen, no matter how smart you think you are. If you accept that, and history seems to support it, the nuclear has the worst possible worst case scenarios -- any time you concentrate that much power in one place, the risks are high.
1. They might be 'hard' but France has been operating one for years. I'd argue that we've made more progress with them than we have for economic solar.
Let's talk about the political will to walk into Nevada and clear through the back stock of nuclear waste and create viable fuel. They're hard and tricky, but not impossible. Politically speaking, they're death for anyone who proposes them.
2a. The amount of water needed can be varied. In any case, the 'huge' amounts water used is generally put right back into the source, just maybe downstream less than a mile, and the only difference is that it's slightly warmer. A larger flow allows more cooling, increasing efficiency, while putting the water back at even less of a difference. It becomes a matter of - as long as we have the water, might as well use it.
That's not going to cut it in any area that's going through a drought more than once a decade. With population growing as it is, we need more closed systems, and I don't see it happening; I have no idea why.
2b. Coal power suffers from the same problem, normally using loads of water as well.
You'll get nothing but agreement from me that coal is a terrible solution and causes more problems than any other solution. It's the cigarette of the power industry.
3. No research necessary, the steam techniques for nuclear and coal power are identical - just more expensive than having a convienent river or lake. Even ocean, though the salt presents it's own problems.
If there's no research necessary, then why isn't it done? Why isn't it in place? Why do plants have to shut down in droughts? I'm betting there are solvable problems that nobody has gone to the effort of doing yet.
4. Newer plant designs, possibly prototyped in India or China are much cheaper, and at least the current administration is working on streamlining/reducing the regulatory costs. As for the plebes - well, most don't actively remember Chernobyl, much less TMI. With the environmental concerns, I see resistance to nuclear power weakening. If they get smart and use the nuclear plant in a cogeneration/trigeneration fashion to support some industry(such as ethanol, depolymerization, oil sand/shale processing or hydrogen), you can get your load balancing and increase the efficiency of the plant by a great deal.
All you need are some bored college students with greenpeace bumper stickers to put on a protest and get some time on the evening news to remind people about all the people who died in TMI (omit "0") and about the deadzone around Chernobyl to rile up the populace (omit the blossoming wildlife).
5. I don't see how Wind&Solar can cover our needs economically - and safety wise nuclear power is so safe that I wouldn't be surprise
If energy storage is the only problem for you, then you don't know how thermal solar works. Solar concentrators heat liquid sodium to 1000F or so, then that is what's stored. The liquid sodium is used to heat water to steam in a closed system and run a turbine. Depending on the design goals, your liquid sodium stores can last 2-22 hours after sundown. Like you say, you have to plan on providing for demand, and that's going to vary on the location, needs and integration with the grid to average out local variables in wind and sun.
Now, if you said your only problem with thermal solar was that it hadn't been commercially implemented and proven to work, then I could agree with you and we'd both be looking forward to the next 5 years when the current plants under construction will be running.
I am really excited by upcoming renewable energy sources and the upcoming explosion in energy storage.
I've recently converted from being a nuclear enthusiast. Nuclear has many bad points (fewer than coal, make no mistake). These include that breeder reactors are "hard" (not perfected and political suicide for a long time for any politician who would otherwise support them) and reactors use a whole assload of water. Many municipalities that could use a nuke plant don't have the water on hand to generate the steam to run the turbines. Maybe we could research a closed system to recover the steam (heck, run a Rankine Cycle engine and get more power during the recovery?), but that's not current technology. Nuke plants are also insanely expensive to build, partially due to public paranoia (who can blame the plebes who can't tell the difference between an RBMK and a pebble bed reactor?).
Wind and solar can cover a whole of our needs with lower risks. Thermal solar solutions don't even need any difficult to find materials and can be designed to make power for short cloudy periods and even at night. This will make grid power far less than 20 cents per KWh. Combine this with variable rate billing and some smart thermostats to take advantage of power when it's plentiful and their shortcomings become easier to swallow. Then if Eestor and some of the next gen capacitor and battery folks come through, they can help even out some of the transients too.
I took my two kids, aged 4 and 1 (well, 22 months old) on the opening Saturday at 9:30. They both were entranced. Visually speaking, it was enough constant motion and humor and bouncing around for the 1 year old to love it. The 4 year old immediately bonded with the main character, Wall-E, and his interest, Eve.
Sure, it might be a bit heavy for kids, but they're just going to miss all the heavy stuff anyway. Pixar wasn't shooting for social commentary, they've come out and said they were working on these concepts since 1993. If you put on your rose colored glasses and pretend Clinton was president, a lot of the issues we read into a modern movie aren't present. "Using up the planet" today implies fossil fuels, but then, it was just about recycling so we had smaller landfills. The whole "obesity" thing wasn't an issue -- but we were talking about building a space station and the impact of prolonged exposure to low-Gs and space travel.
If you're interested, Terri Gross interviewed Andrew Stanton a few weeks ago and they touched on this kind of misinterpretation / reinterpretation. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92400669
1) If you have a Mac, and want to be mischevious and blow your cover, the "say" command may be entertaining for a while.
2) If you are able to scan wireless networks, there are some services out there that will give you a rough geolocation (Skyhook, for starters). Once you have an idea, a little wardriving may help you zero in without getting warrants. Then either you can handle the situation mano-a-mano or you can visit the local police with what you know.
Thermal solar power works by heating something like liquid sodium and then using that to heat steam to 1000F, which is a very efficient temperature to run a steam turbine. As such, they work at night, for between 2-20 hours after sundown (can even out a partially cloudy day, for example).
Thermal solar doesn't need batteries, and you don't use batteries for a grid intertie solar plant. Most energy is needed during the day, when the sun is brightest, so honestly, the big point is taking peak needs off the coal plants -- which is how you have to size them and where you pay most of your money. Photovoltaics can feed into the grid and provide this peak pretty well, although it's yet to be seen if thermal solar can beat them for efficiency.
For interest's sake, my house reliably uses ~350KWh during the winter (gas heat, 2 adults, 2 kids, Austin, TX), seemingly independent of house size (1800 square feet or 2200 square feet). In the summer, we used 1200 KWh in a 1800 square feet house and as much as 1500 KWh in a 2200 square foot house with a pair of 1 year old air conditioners (15.5 SEER and 16.5 SEER, 2 and 3 ton, respectively).
I've got to put the kill-a-watt on our new 24" nVidia iMacs, which are sure to gobble more power than the powerbooks they replaced to estimate how much our power consumption will go up this year.
You're precisely correct. Cell's strength is in very predictable workloads (ones it can perform without branch mispredict penalties), very parallelizable workloads (ones that can be distributed over 6-8 SPU's / SPC's) that fit within 256 KB of local storage per SPU (manually managed cache, mapped to main memory). The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads. Roadrunner's Cell-DP eliminates that last limitation. While video games, encryption, nuke simulations and anything else that involves matrix manipulation can really stretch their legs on such a beast, general purpose computing won't find a benefit.
Looks like I'm in trouble the first time they charge my wife for a second suitcase.
I've got to echo the DLink recommendation -- but I've had the 4100 for about a year. They call their QOS stuff "Game Fuel" (there were a few slashdot stories about it when they started hyping it up).
I've been very happy with mine, including being able to torrent like a freak and still use the Vonage box to make VOIP calls. I know the torrents are being throttled by my little box, but I can't see a big impact on transfer speeds. As a bonus, the DLink is much faster than the NAT firewall it replaced-- my maximum throughputs are higher.
Setup is as easy as configuring a normal NAT device. Of course, if you want to play with port forwarding, that's there too, and if you want your QOS to be a little more sophisticated than the default (which you should really try and see if you're happy with it), there are a plethora of configuration options.
I was in the unfortunate position of recovering some passwords a few years ago -- the circumstances were different as natural causes were clear -- but the concept of the next of kin inheriting the accounts was very clear to me.
First, boot the Linux box in single user mode, or off a USB key or CD. If you have the resources, back up the hard drive before you do anything. Second, change the password of the user account to something you know and can share with the family. Third, open Firefox, and if Password Exporter isn't installed, install it. Fourth, hope that the deceased used Firefox and had it remember every password.
Having gone through this, I would worry that places like Google and Myspace would simply close the account if they found out someone was dead (and had proof like a death certificate) and not a court order to keep it open. Often they say the account and all associated IP is theirs anyway, so there's nothing to "inherit", although that's not a line of thinking I agree with. Some firms are very opposed to allowing their [property|products] cross generational lines like that. Credit cards are the most understandable example.
Seven year olds love secrets and hiding places. Write the secret password on a piece of paper and ask the user to hide it in a very safe location. As long as the parents have the Administrator or root password to perform parental system audits (possibly only after bedtime), system management and password resets, I see no problem with the parents not knowing what the password is. All this, of course, assumes the parents are able to supervise use according to their parenting style and the child's needs.
Thank you. Sincerely, Your Southern Neighbors
I'm far too late to the conversation to add much, but why do you think hydro is cleaner? Dam up a river and suddenly you have lots of rotting material in your new pond, plus the change to the surrounding ecosystems. Tidal and wave, again, you're changing ecosystems, and without careful analysis, you're harming local populations of potentially endangered species. Wind is nice, but it takes a whole lot of space and doesn't produce much electricity (cost per KWh is approaching coal, I know) and current solar technology is way too expensive to be practical in most circumstances, to say nothing of being a very cyclical source. Geothermal scares me because I don't know how the earth can replenish its internal heat if it's surrounded with so much water and air that's rarely above 100F.
Then there's nuclear. By itself, it consumes precious little real estate, the only output is steam (with an adequate capture system, you could cool it to ambient and replenish local supplies or even groundwater) and the radiation output is a fraction of coal. If you toss in breeder reactors, or reprocessing of spent fuel, then you end up throwing out the whole Yucca Mountain problem and are left with a 100 year half life problem to deal with (relatively easy in the grand scheme of things) and more power than mankind can calculate using any time soon. All this benefit, and it's a constant supply of power, too.
Nuclear is here, it's clean and it's safer than burning coal. There's plenty of research to do to add to its benefits, but its downsides are very well known (and overblown). Nuclear is the only long term solution that doesn't involve asking people to change their behaviors in order to change the world for the better.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. H. L. Mencken
Seems to me that modern economic theory is all about finding the spot where supply = demand. Those who provide the biggest benefit to society are rewarded the most and therefore have access to more expensive stuff. If you underprice because you're "nice" at the holidays, you're creating excess demand, which only peeves people off who can afford it, but can't find it. It's not about taking from others, it's about finding a price point where everybody thinks is fair (and if someone is willing to pay it, it's "fair" as long as nobody is forcing him/her).
Guess y'all can't get everything right.
Vermont. Also, the first sovereign nation to prohibit slavery in their constitution. If you want to debate if Vermont was a sovereign nation, whom would you claim owned it? The British, the US, New York or New Hampshire, all of which claimed Vermont was within its borders, and how would you reconcile that against knowing that Vermont had an army that fought off any claims of annexation?
I've had a fascination with maglevs since Popular Mechanics did an article in the early 1990s or late 1980s. Finally, I made it to the World Fair in Aichi in 2005 and saw the Linmo ("Linear Motor"). Actually, I rode it. It was awesome. Not the "awesome" that kids use when they do well on a test, but the "awesome" from waiting for something and then unexpectedly being able to do it after 15 years. The ride was smooth as silk (vertically speaking); the starts and stops were a little sudden, and there seemed to be discrete speed steps. With that said, I have a hard time imagining that $100 million was spent wisely. A rail car could have done the same job for far less. If moving a person costs (installation) + (operating expenses), a maglev has to move a whole lot of people at lower (operating expenses) to make up for the phenomenal (installation).
Between the maglev and the walking robots from Honda playing Louisiana style jazz, the whole hot, crowded, noisy, expensive trip was well worth it.
I always default to native formats, and export to MS if necessary.
There used to (and may still) be a bug in the OOo spreadsheet, Calc, when it exported to .xls. If I had a cell that calculated a value from another tab that was itself a calculated value that referred to another cell (on any tab, even the current one), that would not export cleanly. When the xls file launched in Excel, it would show "!ERR" or something. If you clicked on the cell, then its equation and hit enter, it would evaluate correctly. It was as if this certain situation was unable to export an initial value for whatever reason. My solution was very inconvenient. I ended up exporting to PDF to get through a meeting, then opening it in Excel and re-executing every affected cell in order to sanitize it for management to be able to dink with the inputs. If I had defaulted to saving in .xls, I would not have been able to take the fast export to PDF to get through that meeting.
Of course. My contention is that if your algorithm can hide the latency of main memory, it can also do a decent job of hiding hard drive latency -- most of the time. If you can prefetch from main memory, you can usually prefetch from the hard drive or the network.
Agreed. As such, I was intending to suggest that if you couldn't fit within 256KB, there are other processors with 512KB of L2, or even into the megabyte range, up to 12MB for consumer-ish parts. If it's that important to you, Power6 has 32MB of L3, if I recall correctly. If the workload doesn't fit within 256KB of cache and essentially has to run out of main memory (like SETI, to call upon a common workload that a lot of us are tangentially familiar with), you will likely do better finding a processor without the SPEs (or SPUs or SPCs, depending on who you are, or even APUs if you swing that way). One high performance general purpose Intel chip can gobble up a workload that fits in its cache far better than Cell can slog through a workload that must reside in main memory.
Let me reiterate. I believe Cell is an incredibly high performance implementation for workloads that are easily parallelizable, fit within 256KB, and are exclusively integer and single precision floats. Straying from any of those is where it gets competition.
I just hope we see the enhanced double precision floating point version of Cell.
Let me see if I get this straight, you can imagine a piece of code that doesn't mind churning on itself within 256KB, but you can't imagine having to keep 256MB of main memory fed from a network or disk? In my experience, any piece of code that can both benefit from extreme parallelism and fit both the code and enough data to be worth working on within 256KB can handle a few reads from a disk or the network once in a while. If it can't, then 256KB of memory isn't enough to keep the (sub)processor fed, and you need a machine with more on-die memory (many of which can be found).
Cell is very good at integers and single precision floats for workloads that are parallelizable and fit within 256KB. If you stray from any of that, there are plenty of interesting competitors.