Down at the bottom of Reactor 1, they have a melted core. It's not surprising that they have a criticality event once in a while. Nobody seems to have a clue how to get in there, remove the core bit by bit, and transport the mess in small pieces to some disposal location. TEPCO is saying that in 10 years, they might be able to start on that. Meanwhile, they have to continuously remove about 2MW of heat or things get worse.
One bright spot in this is that the plant is built on bedrock, and the containment vessel seems to have held. It needs to hold for another decade or two.
"The update means links featured in comments will also enhance websites' standing.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social. Every attempt by a major search engine to use social signals has been heavily spammed. Social spamming is cheaper and easier than creating link farms - the social sites host the spam for free.
Google Places was hit hard starting in October 2010, when Places results were mixed in with web search results. It happened fast - within two months, Google Places was choked with spam, with both phony locations and phony reviews. This was so bad that the mainstream press picked up on it, and Google had to deemphasize "places" results. You don't hear Google talking about "local" as much as they did a year ago.
Using social signals for search has reduced search quality and jammed social sites with junk that's only read by search spiders. Facebook (which has to allow Google to do this) just set themselves up for an influx of junk. And Google just reduced their search quality again.
Also I'd love to shove the guy who keeps pushing the term "Maker" in a locker.
Agreed. The "Maker movement" is a product of O'Reilly Media, Inc, the people who run overpriced tech conventions. They run the various Maker Faire shows and Make magazine. They seem to be trying to own the do-it-yourself industry. The original article reads like a Maker Faire ad. I've shown at one Maker Faire, and will not do so again. You're unpaid entertainment for a flea market.
Autodesk has a straightforward motivation - they sell pro tools for designing real world stuff, and the more people who know how to use those tools, the more they can sell. They're trying to get kids and amateurs to think like design engineers.
Their big effort in this area is Autodesk 123D, which is a free subset of Autodesk Inventor with a simpler interface. It connects to laser cutters and 3D printers, so you can fabricate the parts you design. It's a useful intro to 3D design, and a way to teach kids the mindset needed to design something with working parts. (That's harder than learning to use the software.)
The White House petition site is barely working. I'm in some limbo state there where the "sign petition" page wants me to log in, and clicking on the "log in" link gets a popup which offers me only the option of logging out. Clicking on the the "Sign Out" link comes back with "Gateway Timeout
The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server. Reference #1.c8e8dfad.1320178618.b97d68 "
Looking at the page source, it uses Drupal. Badly. In the middle of the document, the page starts over, in the middle of the BODY section, with a new DOCTYPE element and a new HEAD section. The W3C validator finds 41 errors.
All this was known previously, but you had to read through long reports to get the whole picture. This is a more dramatic summary.
The real issue with Fukushima is that the reactors survived the earthquake and tsunami. What caused the meltdown was loss of electrical power to reactors that required active pumped water cooling and valve control.
One of the neat features of Polaroid's SX-70 and later films is that there's an upper layer which becomes opaque when the film is ejected from the camera, and gradually clears after development finishes. Your web site says you have to eject the film into a dark place to avoid light leaking through during development. Why is your opaque layer not working as well as the original?
I found it odd that the author didn't cover mask work rights in the United States.
Nobody bothers with mask work rights any more. Today, if you want to duplicate an IC, you extract the wiring diagram, convert to VHDL, and run it through the tool chain to make a new mask for the process you're using.
The distinction between a CPU program, an FPGA program, and an IC layout today is somewhat arbitrary. The logic for a video decoder can, and is, written and then compiled to all of those forms. Most complex ICs today pass through a debug stage where they're running as a C program on a farm of computers.
I looked at this problem once, in the context of distributed file systems. I'd divide files into the following categories, with slightly different semantics for each. This can be fitted into the standard UNIX/DOS/Windows model, but it resolves some issues that result in programs doing elaborate workarounds to get correct file semantics.
Unit files A unit file is only meaningful once it has been completely written and closed. Once closed, it will never be rewritten, only replaced. Most files are unit files. The file system should guarantee that 1) unit file replacement by a new version is an atomic operation, 2) unit files not properly closed do not replace old versions, so that when a program fails while writing a unit file, the old version remains undamaged, and 3) a unit file being written is not visible to other processes until closed.. This was a feature of some mainframe operating systems. Because the UNIX file system concept doesn't have this, there's much fussing around with ".part" files and renaming strategies to achieve unit file semantics.
The file system could unduplicate unit files based on their content. One approach would be that the real name of a unit file is its cryptographic hash; any other name it has is an alias. Backup programs can usefully use such information.
The ability to close and commit a group of unit files as an atomic operation would be useful. This should be the last step of an "install", so that if anything goes wrong, the install is automatically backed out, like a database rollback.
This is the default form of file.
Log files Log files are written sequentially. Writing can only be done at the end. The file system should guarantee that 1) writing must be sequential, 2) in the event of a crash and restart, the file may not be complete but will be correct up to the end position of the file, which will be at the end of a single write operation, and 3) multiple processes can write to one log file, but all processes append, never overwriting each other.
This is how UNIX/Linux files ought to work in "append" mode.
Managed files Managed files are written and read in a random access fashion, but only by programs which understand their format. Managed files typically contain databases of some type. The file system should guarantee that 1) managed files can be opened for full or partial exclusive use, and 2) additional functions for insuring that file writes are flushed from cache to disk are available.
Managed files have the most complex semantics, but not many programs use them. The ones that do typically go to a lot of trouble to get the file semantics right, to maintain database integrity. Read what SQLite needs from a file system to get a sense of how managed files need to work.
Scratch files Scratch files do not outlive the process group that created them, and are invisible outside that process group. They can be read and written freely, but do not have permanent existence in the file system. The file system should guarantee that when the process group goes away, so does its scratch files, so as not to clutter up the file system. This would stop the accumulation of abandoned temporary files.
This is how UNIX and Linux should have worked. Today, programs struggle to get those semantics across platforms, but don't always succeed, leaving behind truncated files, partial failed installations, junk files, and database disasters where two programs accessed the same managed file.
As for metadata, the original MacOS "resource fork" concept was a good one. But the original implementation was botched. The resource fork was a badly implemented tree-type database store, one that was corrupted if a program failed to close the file properly. If the resource fork had been implemented so that at the end of each write, the resource fork was guaranteed to be in a usable state, the whole concept might have been more successful. It took a long time for Apple to fix this; the phrase "damaged resource fork" appears tens of thousands of times in Google until 2006.
The article linked sounds like whining from CMU. Whittaker never really got over losing.
The Stanford team was mostly funded by Mohr Davidson Ventures and Volkswagen. Volkswagen did all the automotive parts of the project with their own people.
As for Stanford's relationship with Google, there' s no problem there. Google is a spinoff from Stanford, and Stanford owns a big chunk of stock in Google. Stanford University has a business unit, the Stanford Management Company, which runs the endowment and, among other things, does venture capital deals. (Arguably, Stanford is a investment firm which runs a school on the side for the tax break.) The Stanford Management Company has working relationships with all the major venture capital firms, and I expect that some mutually profitable arrangement will be worked out.
Slick is just fine. Slick done well is great. Unity sucks out loud.
What typically happens when somebody tries to make Linux look "slick" is that they paste some kind of one-way GUI on top of command line programs. So when anything goes wrong, you have to peel off the wallpaper and look at text messages generated by some program.
(The biggest design mistake in UNIX was that programs take an array of strings and a set of name/value pairs (the "environment") as input, but output only a return code. If programs, upon exiting, returned output as well defined as their input, programs as components would have been far more successful.)
It's like reading a dumbed down version of "Make" magazine. "How to Make Really Crappy Lenses with a 3D Printer". "How to Make a Submarine Out of Plastic Irrigation Pipe". A simple USB to something interface board. Plus a whiney "Open Hardware Needs Your Help" section, and a long rant on the right to modify stuff.
Compare "Home Shop Machinist", "Fine Woodworking", "Nuts and Volts", or "Servo". There are far better DIY magazines.
Petman doesn't have a standalone power requirement. It's partly for equipment testing and partly a technology testbed. BigDog is powered by a small gasoline engine, and AlphaDog will be Diesel-powered.
MREs aren't all that bad if you can heat the entree. If not, they're not much fun.
Go for the chicken-based entrees. "Pasta with Vegetables in Tomato Sauce" (discontinued in 2006), not so good. There are 24 different MREs in each year, and each case contains a semi-random selection. They're reliable survival food. Everyone should have a case or two around, just in case.
The packaging is very tough. They can be dropped from an aircraft without a parachute, and at least 80% of the units should survive.
Typical high-density data center power consumption: 500w/m^2 for entire building, per floor.
Max solar flux in NC about 1000w/m^2. But only for 6 hours a day on average. At 12% efficiency, that's 30 watts per square meter average. So the solar farm has to be 16x the size of the data center.
We'll be able to see from the aerial photos whether they put in enough panels that it matters.
Good point. Their site reads "Did you know that you could possibly get your UAV funded through the DHS?"
DHS needs a budget cut. The US is doing quite well against terrorism, no thanks to DHS. What's left of al-Queda is living in fear of suddenly facing either a Predator or a SEAL team. The most recent "terrorist" (more like a wannabe) taken down in the US was found by the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police, and he's on trial in Boston.
take out the screw drive and use direct or geared drive, and throw a fat capacitor in the system to soak up the back-emf current and supply it back to the motor, and voila, electro-spring. or just fake it with extra power from the power supply and some motion-control software.
It's hard to build a back-driveable linear actuator that can handle a shock load. Gear trains break teeth on shock loads unless built oversized, which gets bulky for legged robots. Harmonic drive, forget it. I looked into an approach involving opposed spiral springs, which resulted in a more compact design than one I'd seen with linear springs, cables, and pulleys.
Years ago I had hopes for Aura linear motors. They had a nice technology which was approaching the power ranges of hydraulics. But they gave up on industrial applications and ended up in the subwoofer business.
The "series elastic actuator" guys do in fact fake it. The initial shock load is taken up by the short stiff spring, giving the drive motor time to accelerate before the spring travel runs out. Some MIT research robots use that technology.
Pneumatics do this very well. If the valves are close to the cylinder, precise position control with pneumatics is possible. But you need an air compressor, and bigger lines and valves than with hydraulics.
The mechanics of the thing are nice. They have variable compliance in the legs, like real muscles. A muscle can be thought of as a spring/damper system where the spring constant and zero point of the spring are adjustable. This provides energy recovery from stride to stride. Humans get about 70% of the energy back from stride to stride when running efficiently. Cheetahs, 90%.
This is a nice model for force control, but hard to realize with real machinery.
I've seen this done mechanically (the design was bulky, complex, and had way too many cables and pulleys) and pneumatically (at CWRU, a nice design, but needs external air power). Pneumatics are nice for this; with a cylinder you can pressurize from both ends, you really can create a spring with a settable spring constant and zero point.
There's a way to fake it with electric motors called "series elastic actuators", with a stiff spring in series with a fast electric-powered leadscrew, but there's no energy recovery. Hydraulic systems tend not to have energy recovery, although there are things you can do with hydraulic accumulators. The original BIgDog has almost no elastic energy recovery; there is a hydraulic accumulator in the system, but it's just to smooth out noise from the pump lobes.
This is really more of an OS-level problem. CPU scheduling on multiprocessors needs some awareness of the costs of an interprocessor context switch. In general, it's faster to restart a thread on the same processor it previously ran on, because the caches will have the data that thread needs. If the thread has lost control for a while, though, it doesn't matter. This is a standard topic in operating system courses. An informal discussion of how Windows 7 does it is useful.
Windows 7 generally prefers to run a thread on the same CPU it previously ran on. But if you have a lot of threads that are frequently blocking, you may get excessive inter-CPU switching.
On top of this, the Bulldozer CPU adjusts the CPU clock rate to control power consumption and heat dissipation. If some cores can be stopped, the others can go slightly faster. This improves performance for sequential programs, but complicates scheduling.
Manually setting processor affinity is a workaround, not a fix.
That's pretty mild as riders go. I used to have a girlfriend who was a roadie for heavy metal groups, and I've seen far more elaborate tour riders. If you live on the road and don't do that, you will be jerked around. Guaranteed.
The "no brown M&M" thing has a reason. One band did that as a quick check that their requirements were being met. They had a long list of technical requirements regarding stage equipment. If they showed up and there the M&M requirement had been botched, that usually meant something more important had also been botched.
Intelligent HVAC systems are common. But this is doing it wrong.
First, you need a return air duct temperature/humidity/carbon dioxide sensor. You need a similar sensor outside, to tell your control system what the outside weather is like. Then you need the ability to run the heating/AC fans without running the heating or compressor. That's the minimum. You'd also like to have a damper which can either take outside air or recirculate inside air, and a spray humidifier in the heating/cooling air duct.
Now you're ready to control the internal environment efficiently. The carbon dioxide sensor tells you the level of house occupancy. With nobody home, it will drop to the ambient atmospheric level, and air movement can be cut to a minimum. If CO2 starts to climb, there are people at home, and you can tell roughly how many. You crank up the fans even if heat isn't needed. Normal CO2 concentration is about 0.04%. Near 0.10%, people start to get headaches. Getting this under control is important if you have a modern near-airtight house.
Whether you recirculate or take in make-up air from outside depends on the difference between inside and outside conditions. If you have automatic control over make-up air, you tend to use far less air conditioning.
This will make everyone far more comfortable than messing with a thermostat.
Slashdot Mirror
Down at the bottom of Reactor 1, they have a melted core. It's not surprising that they have a criticality event once in a while. Nobody seems to have a clue how to get in there, remove the core bit by bit, and transport the mess in small pieces to some disposal location. TEPCO is saying that in 10 years, they might be able to start on that. Meanwhile, they have to continuously remove about 2MW of heat or things get worse.
One bright spot in this is that the plant is built on bedrock, and the containment vessel seems to have held. It needs to hold for another decade or two.
"Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child..."
Not the brains. The mouth.
From the article:
"The update means links featured in comments will also enhance websites' standing.
Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social. Every attempt by a major search engine to use social signals has been heavily spammed. Social spamming is cheaper and easier than creating link farms - the social sites host the spam for free.
Google Places was hit hard starting in October 2010, when Places results were mixed in with web search results. It happened fast - within two months, Google Places was choked with spam, with both phony locations and phony reviews. This was so bad that the mainstream press picked up on it, and Google had to deemphasize "places" results. You don't hear Google talking about "local" as much as they did a year ago.
Citysearch and Yelp are choked with spam reviews. Google +"1"s are for sale for about $0.15 to $0.25 each. Facebook fans cost about $0-05 each. Google's "real names" policy was an attempt to crack down on phony accounts, but it didn't work. You can buy phone and email verified Google accounts in bulk. There are rogue phone services that help with the fake phone numbers.
Using social signals for search has reduced search quality and jammed social sites with junk that's only read by search spiders. Facebook (which has to allow Google to do this) just set themselves up for an influx of junk. And Google just reduced their search quality again.
There are useful social signals for search, but they come from systems that see transactions and actually know who bought something, like Amazon, eBay, and Visa International. Even those can be spammed; you can buy an old eBay account, change the name, and inherit the old reputation.
From another post:
Also I'd love to shove the guy who keeps pushing the term "Maker" in a locker.
Agreed. The "Maker movement" is a product of O'Reilly Media, Inc, the people who run overpriced tech conventions. They run the various Maker Faire shows and Make magazine. They seem to be trying to own the do-it-yourself industry. The original article reads like a Maker Faire ad. I've shown at one Maker Faire, and will not do so again. You're unpaid entertainment for a flea market.
Autodesk has a straightforward motivation - they sell pro tools for designing real world stuff, and the more people who know how to use those tools, the more they can sell. They're trying to get kids and amateurs to think like design engineers.
Their big effort in this area is Autodesk 123D, which is a free subset of Autodesk Inventor with a simpler interface. It connects to laser cutters and 3D printers, so you can fabricate the parts you design. It's a useful intro to 3D design, and a way to teach kids the mindset needed to design something with working parts. (That's harder than learning to use the software.)
The White House petition site is barely working. I'm in some limbo state there where the "sign petition" page wants me to log in, and clicking on the "log in" link gets a popup which offers me only the option of logging out. Clicking on the the "Sign Out" link comes back with "Gateway Timeout The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server. Reference #1.c8e8dfad.1320178618.b97d68 "
Looking at the page source, it uses Drupal. Badly. In the middle of the document, the page starts over, in the middle of the BODY section, with a new DOCTYPE element and a new HEAD section. The W3C validator finds 41 errors.
Lame.
All this was known previously, but you had to read through long reports to get the whole picture. This is a more dramatic summary.
The real issue with Fukushima is that the reactors survived the earthquake and tsunami. What caused the meltdown was loss of electrical power to reactors that required active pumped water cooling and valve control.
One of the neat features of Polaroid's SX-70 and later films is that there's an upper layer which becomes opaque when the film is ejected from the camera, and gradually clears after development finishes. Your web site says you have to eject the film into a dark place to avoid light leaking through during development. Why is your opaque layer not working as well as the original?
That's up to Congress, not the Executive Branch.
I found it odd that the author didn't cover mask work rights in the United States.
Nobody bothers with mask work rights any more. Today, if you want to duplicate an IC, you extract the wiring diagram, convert to VHDL, and run it through the tool chain to make a new mask for the process you're using.
The distinction between a CPU program, an FPGA program, and an IC layout today is somewhat arbitrary. The logic for a video decoder can, and is, written and then compiled to all of those forms. Most complex ICs today pass through a debug stage where they're running as a C program on a farm of computers.
I looked at this problem once, in the context of distributed file systems. I'd divide files into the following categories, with slightly different semantics for each. This can be fitted into the standard UNIX/DOS/Windows model, but it resolves some issues that result in programs doing elaborate workarounds to get correct file semantics.
The file system could unduplicate unit files based on their content. One approach would be that the real name of a unit file is its cryptographic hash; any other name it has is an alias. Backup programs can usefully use such information.
The ability to close and commit a group of unit files as an atomic operation would be useful. This should be the last step of an "install", so that if anything goes wrong, the install is automatically backed out, like a database rollback.
This is the default form of file.
This is how UNIX/Linux files ought to work in "append" mode.
Managed files have the most complex semantics, but not many programs use them. The ones that do typically go to a lot of trouble to get the file semantics right, to maintain database integrity. Read what SQLite needs from a file system to get a sense of how managed files need to work.
Scratch files Scratch files do not outlive the process group that created them, and are invisible outside that process group. They can be read and written freely, but do not have permanent existence in the file system. The file system should guarantee that when the process group goes away, so does its scratch files, so as not to clutter up the file system. This would stop the accumulation of abandoned temporary files.
This is how UNIX and Linux should have worked. Today, programs struggle to get those semantics across platforms, but don't always succeed, leaving behind truncated files, partial failed installations, junk files, and database disasters where two programs accessed the same managed file.
As for metadata, the original MacOS "resource fork" concept was a good one. But the original implementation was botched. The resource fork was a badly implemented tree-type database store, one that was corrupted if a program failed to close the file properly. If the resource fork had been implemented so that at the end of each write, the resource fork was guaranteed to be in a usable state, the whole concept might have been more successful. It took a long time for Apple to fix this; the phrase "damaged resource fork" appears tens of thousands of times in Google until 2006.
The article linked sounds like whining from CMU. Whittaker never really got over losing.
The Stanford team was mostly funded by Mohr Davidson Ventures and Volkswagen. Volkswagen did all the automotive parts of the project with their own people.
As for Stanford's relationship with Google, there' s no problem there. Google is a spinoff from Stanford, and Stanford owns a big chunk of stock in Google. Stanford University has a business unit, the Stanford Management Company, which runs the endowment and, among other things, does venture capital deals. (Arguably, Stanford is a investment firm which runs a school on the side for the tax break.) The Stanford Management Company has working relationships with all the major venture capital firms, and I expect that some mutually profitable arrangement will be worked out.
Slick is just fine. Slick done well is great. Unity sucks out loud.
What typically happens when somebody tries to make Linux look "slick" is that they paste some kind of one-way GUI on top of command line programs. So when anything goes wrong, you have to peel off the wallpaper and look at text messages generated by some program.
(The biggest design mistake in UNIX was that programs take an array of strings and a set of name/value pairs (the "environment") as input, but output only a return code. If programs, upon exiting, returned output as well defined as their input, programs as components would have been far more successful.)
It's like reading a dumbed down version of "Make" magazine. "How to Make Really Crappy Lenses with a 3D Printer". "How to Make a Submarine Out of Plastic Irrigation Pipe". A simple USB to something interface board. Plus a whiney "Open Hardware Needs Your Help" section, and a long rant on the right to modify stuff.
Compare "Home Shop Machinist", "Fine Woodworking", "Nuts and Volts", or "Servo". There are far better DIY magazines.
Petman doesn't have a standalone power requirement. It's partly for equipment testing and partly a technology testbed. BigDog is powered by a small gasoline engine, and AlphaDog will be Diesel-powered.
MREs aren't all that bad if you can heat the entree. If not, they're not much fun.
Go for the chicken-based entrees. "Pasta with Vegetables in Tomato Sauce" (discontinued in 2006), not so good. There are 24 different MREs in each year, and each case contains a semi-random selection. They're reliable survival food. Everyone should have a case or two around, just in case.
The packaging is very tough. They can be dropped from an aircraft without a parachute, and at least 80% of the units should survive.
Canonical previously announced that their distro was being preloaded on three ASUS netbooks. That was in August. Didn't happen.
Canonical issued that Linux press release, but Asus never said they were going to ship those machines with Linux. Canonical has no credibility.
Did you take into account the effect the solar panels (on the roof) will have on the temperature in the data center?
They have a white roof now. Dark solar panels will increase the heat load.
Typical high-density data center power consumption: 500w/m^2 for entire building, per floor.
Max solar flux in NC about 1000w/m^2. But only for 6 hours a day on average. At 12% efficiency, that's 30 watts per square meter average. So the solar farm has to be 16x the size of the data center.
We'll be able to see from the aerial photos whether they put in enough panels that it matters.
Good point. Their site reads "Did you know that you could possibly get your UAV funded through the DHS?"
DHS needs a budget cut. The US is doing quite well against terrorism, no thanks to DHS. What's left of al-Queda is living in fear of suddenly facing either a Predator or a SEAL team. The most recent "terrorist" (more like a wannabe) taken down in the US was found by the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police, and he's on trial in Boston.
take out the screw drive and use direct or geared drive, and throw a fat capacitor in the system to soak up the back-emf current and supply it back to the motor, and voila, electro-spring. or just fake it with extra power from the power supply and some motion-control software.
It's hard to build a back-driveable linear actuator that can handle a shock load. Gear trains break teeth on shock loads unless built oversized, which gets bulky for legged robots. Harmonic drive, forget it. I looked into an approach involving opposed spiral springs, which resulted in a more compact design than one I'd seen with linear springs, cables, and pulleys.
Years ago I had hopes for Aura linear motors. They had a nice technology which was approaching the power ranges of hydraulics. But they gave up on industrial applications and ended up in the subwoofer business.
The "series elastic actuator" guys do in fact fake it. The initial shock load is taken up by the short stiff spring, giving the drive motor time to accelerate before the spring travel runs out. Some MIT research robots use that technology.
Pneumatics do this very well. If the valves are close to the cylinder, precise position control with pneumatics is possible. But you need an air compressor, and bigger lines and valves than with hydraulics.
The mechanics of the thing are nice. They have variable compliance in the legs, like real muscles. A muscle can be thought of as a spring/damper system where the spring constant and zero point of the spring are adjustable. This provides energy recovery from stride to stride. Humans get about 70% of the energy back from stride to stride when running efficiently. Cheetahs, 90%. This is a nice model for force control, but hard to realize with real machinery.
I've seen this done mechanically (the design was bulky, complex, and had way too many cables and pulleys) and pneumatically (at CWRU, a nice design, but needs external air power). Pneumatics are nice for this; with a cylinder you can pressurize from both ends, you really can create a spring with a settable spring constant and zero point.
There's a way to fake it with electric motors called "series elastic actuators", with a stiff spring in series with a fast electric-powered leadscrew, but there's no energy recovery. Hydraulic systems tend not to have energy recovery, although there are things you can do with hydraulic accumulators. The original BIgDog has almost no elastic energy recovery; there is a hydraulic accumulator in the system, but it's just to smooth out noise from the pump lobes.
I look forward to seeing more detail on this.
This is really more of an OS-level problem. CPU scheduling on multiprocessors needs some awareness of the costs of an interprocessor context switch. In general, it's faster to restart a thread on the same processor it previously ran on, because the caches will have the data that thread needs. If the thread has lost control for a while, though, it doesn't matter. This is a standard topic in operating system courses. An informal discussion of how Windows 7 does it is useful.
Windows 7 generally prefers to run a thread on the same CPU it previously ran on. But if you have a lot of threads that are frequently blocking, you may get excessive inter-CPU switching.
On top of this, the Bulldozer CPU adjusts the CPU clock rate to control power consumption and heat dissipation. If some cores can be stopped, the others can go slightly faster. This improves performance for sequential programs, but complicates scheduling.
Manually setting processor affinity is a workaround, not a fix.
Look at the picture. For the amount of work they put in, it's a really ugly design. Couldn't they find a decent artist?
That's pretty mild as riders go. I used to have a girlfriend who was a roadie for heavy metal groups, and I've seen far more elaborate tour riders. If you live on the road and don't do that, you will be jerked around. Guaranteed.
The "no brown M&M" thing has a reason. One band did that as a quick check that their requirements were being met. They had a long list of technical requirements regarding stage equipment. If they showed up and there the M&M requirement had been botched, that usually meant something more important had also been botched.
Intelligent HVAC systems are common. But this is doing it wrong.
First, you need a return air duct temperature/humidity/carbon dioxide sensor. You need a similar sensor outside, to tell your control system what the outside weather is like. Then you need the ability to run the heating/AC fans without running the heating or compressor. That's the minimum. You'd also like to have a damper which can either take outside air or recirculate inside air, and a spray humidifier in the heating/cooling air duct.
Now you're ready to control the internal environment efficiently. The carbon dioxide sensor tells you the level of house occupancy. With nobody home, it will drop to the ambient atmospheric level, and air movement can be cut to a minimum. If CO2 starts to climb, there are people at home, and you can tell roughly how many. You crank up the fans even if heat isn't needed. Normal CO2 concentration is about 0.04%. Near 0.10%, people start to get headaches. Getting this under control is important if you have a modern near-airtight house.
Whether you recirculate or take in make-up air from outside depends on the difference between inside and outside conditions. If you have automatic control over make-up air, you tend to use far less air conditioning.
This will make everyone far more comfortable than messing with a thermostat.