I agree that XP has a number of limitations. Actually, Bioshock Infinite was my main reason to build a new PC with Windows 7 (and two 6core CPUs). Having 32GB RAM is also nice. I use a 15kRPM HDD and not a SSD (as I did in my XP PC), so I do not care about TRIM.
However, for a lot of uses, XP is still good enough. For example, reading/writing MS Word documents, browsing the web works just as well on XP as it does on 7. If it wasn't for the games, I think I would have continues to use my XP PC for a couple of years. Now I had to build a new PC without waiting for the new CPUs to come out and this may bite me in the future (I do not want to reinstall Windows (no matter which version), so now I am stuck with this PC until 7 becomes the new XP or maybe even longer if the newer versions of Windows are crap). Maybe it is possible to just move the system hard drive to a new PC, but I would have to somehow try that without actually building the new PC (if I build it and it turns out I can't move my installation, then what?).
Actually, I continue to use XP on my Viliv N5 and my laptop, because both devices do not have a lot of memory so XP works better there and I am not planning on playing DX10/11 games on those devices.
7 (the 64bit version anyway) also has a very annoying security feature - the requirement that all drivers have to be signed. I had to spend some time to make my TV input card work and may have similar problems in the future. At least I could turn off this "feature" in older (and 32bit) versions of Windows.
ClasicShell (= normal Start menu) makes Windows 8 usable. However, to me the theme just looks bad with the borderless windows. I prefer the XP look (with a custom red color scheme) as that's what I used for the past 10 years or the 9x/2k look (what I am using on my new Windows7 PC). Windows 8 no longer has that, I guess it would make it look more like a PC and less like a tablet.
Windows 7 is better than XP, but not by a lot. That is, it is not worth the pain to reinstall Windows on the same PC (like it was upgrading from 98 and especially ME to XP).
Of course, when I built a new PC a couple of months ago I installed Windows 7 on it (8 just looks awful, even with ClassicShell).
www.coinwarz.com - you input your hashrate and it will calculate which crypto is currently the most profitable (of course, as with everything, you have to use caution).
I managed to earn ~1.8BTC by mining Unobtanium right after it was introduced for a few days. I probably would have mined 0.1BTC in that time. So, I mined UNO, then sold some when an exchange started accepting them, sold some more when the price rose and still have about 100 left (the price should rise again after the block reward halves).
Some cryptos have difficulty that fluctuates wildly. You can write a script that switches your miners to it when the difficulty gets low enough, then switch back to BTC once it rises enough to be less profitable than BTC.
OTOH, Gold is difficult to divide and verify the amount. For example, if would be difficult to pay $1 worth of gold (that amounts to,what, 25mg?) both i actually cutting such a small amount from a larger block and weighing it to see if it's really $1 and not $0.9. Ohand the seller would then need to melt the received gold back into a larger block (because if he had lots of dust each particle weighing 25mg, then one sneeze would result in a huge loss).
OTOH, you can send 1uBTC as well as 1MBTC just as easily.
They can mine any crypto that uses SHA256, so, not only BTC. Also, it still may be possible to earn profit from some devices, it all depends on price/GH/s, power/GH/s and delivery time.
and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC, and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable.
Divisibility can be changed - 1e-8 is good for now and the near future, but if it is needed, the protocol can be updated to divide into as many decimal places as you want. The "small" transaction fee can be changed. Besides, you can send transactions without the fee, they will just take a bit longer to first confirmation. Though some sort of minimum fee will probably be imposed - 0.1% of the transaction value for example.
That's why I usually turn off write caching. The worst I have seen happening is when power fails while the HDD is writing a sector. It does not complete the write and as a result can no longer read the sector back and I get a bad sector. Writing something to it restores it (since there wasn't any actual fault in the medium) or it can be remapped. The hard drives with bigger sectors can be a problem, but not a large one - by default NTFS uses 4KB clusters and that happens to match the sector size on new HDDs (and a cluster with a bad sector in it is just as unusable).
OTOH, if you remove power while an SSD is writing, it may actually brick the SSD.
Nah, I think a better way would be to restrain him and force him to listen to his spam piped trough text-to-speech software for a day or more. The restraining part is required so he does not poke his own ears out.
The point of integrating the battery to the PSU would be to have better efficiency and avoid double conversion (DC-AC-DC). Placing a socket on the back would require having AC output and a big heavy transformer. It would essentially become a PSU with a slightly more efficient UPS glued to its side.
So, such a device would not be in any way better than having a separate UPS (that can have big batteries, so the efficiency does not matter as much), but would be more expensive.
Prison should be a place where you do not want to be in. If you somehow get put in prison and later released, the conditions there should be so that now you will not want to return there.
Instead of, you know, giving the criminals better living conditions than the poor have, conditions in prison should be bad and the criminals should be forced to do manual labor for free (as part of the sentence), like they did in the USSR.
The inexpensive PSUs are usually the "example" circuit for the control chip (TL494 or whatever) and usually don't have input filters for EMI. I have a few Corsair PSUs - I use them where I do not want to have downtime.
Though I stopped buying the really cheap PSUs - but I still have a few of them (some still working, some I have repaired). I will grab (with permission) any higher power failed PSU from work - this way I can get a rather good quality PSU for cheap.
sure some use a UPS so that they can keep using the computer when the power goes out, but the primary reason is to allow the computer to shut down gracefully...that's more the use-case I was suggesting.
Well, you need to save your work before shutting the computer down and not all software may be able to do it automatically on the signal from the OS or the UPS monitoring software. Having a working monitor helps.
I considered using a SSD for my new PC. My idea about the power was to use a small 6V battery and two voltage regulators - one to provide the charging voltage and another to provide 5V to the SSD (and it all should fit in a 5.25" slot). The battery should provide power for long enough to keep the SSD always on when I turn the PC off for brief periods of time (or when the power fails for long enough for the UPS to completely discharge.
But then I changed my mind and bought a 15kRPM HDD.
I have rather good desoldering and soldering irons, there is no problem whatsoever in removing or soldering the caps (even on PC motherboards - now there the joints have huge thermal mass). My time does not really cost anything (it's not like I can work for a few more hours and get paid more - I do sometimes have to work overtime (and get paid for it), but it is when there is some big problem with a server or whatever, not when I have nothing else to do.
Also, a relatively good new PSU (~$40) costs me about one days worth of my salary. I can replace more than just the caps in that time.
In addition to that, if the problem is only the caps, I can fix the PSU quickly (as I always keep some spare caps around - when I need to, I buy more caps than I need at the moment and the caps are cheaper than buying spare PSUs, even if its night or a national holiday. And I do not have to go to the store or order the PSU then wait for the next day for it to be delivered. So, replacing caps usually saves me time and money.
Because the standard PSU has to fit in a standard hole and batteries are big, heavy and expensive?
There would be very limited market for such PSUs. Most people either do not care about power loss or already have a UPS (and you can connect a monitor to it too, so that you can still use the PC when the power is out). A PSU with a battery would be more efficient (and at least Google is using them), but then I would need to add a battery to my monitor and switches and the fiber-to-copper converter. And the external hard drives. And the tape drives.
It depends. Sometimes buying a cheap PSU then replacing the capacitors when the warranty expires can be cheaper (in total) than buying a PSU that already has good caps.
Also, usually the good power supplies usually have active PFC which can cause the PSU to blow up (seen it happen twice: high voltage cap fails -> voltage rises to 800V or more -gt; some transistor or chip explodes or shorts - the second time I got an almost free PSU - I just had to replacement parts for it) unless the PSU is really good (good quality high voltage cap is crucial) and may not work with UPSs that have square or modified sine outputs. So, if I want passive PFC (or nor PFC at all) I have to buy a low quality PSU and replace the caps.
Not graphical admin interface (though it is useful, for example, I usually prefer the Web UI of D-Link switches rather than CLI - unless I want to paste a bunch of commands - then CLI wins), but graphical software.
Like uTorrent for example. Or some other Windows app.
Yes, it is possible to run X over network, though currently I do not know how to switch an app between local and network displays without restarting it (if I start it on the local console then it's there, if I ssh into the machine and start the app from ssh it's displayed over the network, though I do not now how to make the app that was started locally, be displayed over network or just display the entire desktop over network - essentially what VNC does but faster). Oh and it has to be compatible with my Windows main PC.
As was explained to me earlier, yes, it would increase the life of a regular bulb, but halogens have to work at high temperature for the halogen cycle to work (and deposit material back on the filament). Lowering the temperature of the bulb may interfere with that cycle and make the bulb fail sooner.
While a regular bulb maybe large, the filament (the part of the bulb that actually produces the light) is rather small. If the bulb has clear glass, then the effective volume that produces light is lower.
Though yes, a lightbulb with many LEDs would be similar to a regular lightbulb with frosted glass.
hmm.. because I like it? I like it enough to pay a few dollars for it (a 40W lightbulb on half a day uses about $3 of electricity a month. So, yea, I am prepared to pay the difference between the $3/month and however much a more efficient light would cost to have clearly defined shadows and low color temperature.
That would create the equivalent of a incandescent lightbulb with frosted glass. I want the equivalent of an incandescent lightbulb with clear glass.
The only option other than stockpiling lightbulbs is using halogen bulbs with a resistor in series to reduce the color temperature (even though it would shorten the life of the bulb).
Oh, OK, as long as there are LEDs that have the same color as an incandescent lightbulb and manage to radiate in all directions (not just forward), then that may be good. No, a lightbulb made of many LEDs is not suitable - it is not a point source of light and creates hazy/multiple shadows.
What's the point of massively inconveniencing yourself with the storage of fragile items only to pay higher electric bills.
I like the light produced by incandescent lightbulbs. Low color temperature (even lower on the long life incandescent bulbs), spectrum well approximates black body radiation and the bulb is a point source of light (a clear bulb anyway). Halogens are almost as good, but their color temperature is too high for me.
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I agree that XP has a number of limitations. Actually, Bioshock Infinite was my main reason to build a new PC with Windows 7 (and two 6core CPUs). Having 32GB RAM is also nice. I use a 15kRPM HDD and not a SSD (as I did in my XP PC), so I do not care about TRIM.
However, for a lot of uses, XP is still good enough. For example, reading/writing MS Word documents, browsing the web works just as well on XP as it does on 7. If it wasn't for the games, I think I would have continues to use my XP PC for a couple of years. Now I had to build a new PC without waiting for the new CPUs to come out and this may bite me in the future (I do not want to reinstall Windows (no matter which version), so now I am stuck with this PC until 7 becomes the new XP or maybe even longer if the newer versions of Windows are crap). Maybe it is possible to just move the system hard drive to a new PC, but I would have to somehow try that without actually building the new PC (if I build it and it turns out I can't move my installation, then what?).
Actually, I continue to use XP on my Viliv N5 and my laptop, because both devices do not have a lot of memory so XP works better there and I am not planning on playing DX10/11 games on those devices.
7 (the 64bit version anyway) also has a very annoying security feature - the requirement that all drivers have to be signed. I had to spend some time to make my TV input card work and may have similar problems in the future. At least I could turn off this "feature" in older (and 32bit) versions of Windows.
ClasicShell (= normal Start menu) makes Windows 8 usable. However, to me the theme just looks bad with the borderless windows. I prefer the XP look (with a custom red color scheme) as that's what I used for the past 10 years or the 9x/2k look (what I am using on my new Windows7 PC). Windows 8 no longer has that, I guess it would make it look more like a PC and less like a tablet.
Windows 7 is better than XP, but not by a lot. That is, it is not worth the pain to reinstall Windows on the same PC (like it was upgrading from 98 and especially ME to XP).
Of course, when I built a new PC a couple of months ago I installed Windows 7 on it (8 just looks awful, even with ClassicShell).
www.coinwarz.com - you input your hashrate and it will calculate which crypto is currently the most profitable (of course, as with everything, you have to use caution).
I managed to earn ~1.8BTC by mining Unobtanium right after it was introduced for a few days. I probably would have mined 0.1BTC in that time. So, I mined UNO, then sold some when an exchange started accepting them, sold some more when the price rose and still have about 100 left (the price should rise again after the block reward halves).
Some cryptos have difficulty that fluctuates wildly. You can write a script that switches your miners to it when the difficulty gets low enough, then switch back to BTC once it rises enough to be less profitable than BTC.
OTOH, Gold is difficult to divide and verify the amount. For example, if would be difficult to pay $1 worth of gold (that amounts to,what, 25mg?) both i actually cutting such a small amount from a larger block and weighing it to see if it's really $1 and not $0.9. Ohand the seller would then need to melt the received gold back into a larger block (because if he had lots of dust each particle weighing 25mg, then one sneeze would result in a huge loss).
OTOH, you can send 1uBTC as well as 1MBTC just as easily.
They can mine any crypto that uses SHA256, so, not only BTC.
Also, it still may be possible to earn profit from some devices, it all depends on price/GH/s, power/GH/s and delivery time.
and you'd run out of divisibility of BTC, and the "small" payment fee would be unaffordable.
Divisibility can be changed - 1e-8 is good for now and the near future, but if it is needed, the protocol can be updated to divide into as many decimal places as you want.
The "small" transaction fee can be changed. Besides, you can send transactions without the fee, they will just take a bit longer to first confirmation. Though some sort of minimum fee will probably be imposed - 0.1% of the transaction value for example.
That's why I usually turn off write caching. The worst I have seen happening is when power fails while the HDD is writing a sector. It does not complete the write and as a result can no longer read the sector back and I get a bad sector. Writing something to it restores it (since there wasn't any actual fault in the medium) or it can be remapped. The hard drives with bigger sectors can be a problem, but not a large one - by default NTFS uses 4KB clusters and that happens to match the sector size on new HDDs (and a cluster with a bad sector in it is just as unusable).
OTOH, if you remove power while an SSD is writing, it may actually brick the SSD.
Less than a year to go.
Not anymore...
Nah, I think a better way would be to restrain him and force him to listen to his spam piped trough text-to-speech software for a day or more. The restraining part is required so he does not poke his own ears out.
The point of integrating the battery to the PSU would be to have better efficiency and avoid double conversion (DC-AC-DC). Placing a socket on the back would require having AC output and a big heavy transformer. It would essentially become a PSU with a slightly more efficient UPS glued to its side.
So, such a device would not be in any way better than having a separate UPS (that can have big batteries, so the efficiency does not matter as much), but would be more expensive.
Prison should be a place where you do not want to be in. If you somehow get put in prison and later released, the conditions there should be so that now you will not want to return there.
Instead of, you know, giving the criminals better living conditions than the poor have, conditions in prison should be bad and the criminals should be forced to do manual labor for free (as part of the sentence), like they did in the USSR.
The inexpensive PSUs are usually the "example" circuit for the control chip (TL494 or whatever) and usually don't have input filters for EMI. I have a few Corsair PSUs - I use them where I do not want to have downtime.
Though I stopped buying the really cheap PSUs - but I still have a few of them (some still working, some I have repaired). I will grab (with permission) any higher power failed PSU from work - this way I can get a rather good quality PSU for cheap.
sure some use a UPS so that they can keep using the computer when the power goes out, but the primary reason is to allow the computer to shut down gracefully...that's more the use-case I was suggesting.
Well, you need to save your work before shutting the computer down and not all software may be able to do it automatically on the signal from the OS or the UPS monitoring software. Having a working monitor helps.
I considered using a SSD for my new PC. My idea about the power was to use a small 6V battery and two voltage regulators - one to provide the charging voltage and another to provide 5V to the SSD (and it all should fit in a 5.25" slot). The battery should provide power for long enough to keep the SSD always on when I turn the PC off for brief periods of time (or when the power fails for long enough for the UPS to completely discharge.
But then I changed my mind and bought a 15kRPM HDD.
I have rather good desoldering and soldering irons, there is no problem whatsoever in removing or soldering the caps (even on PC motherboards - now there the joints have huge thermal mass). My time does not really cost anything (it's not like I can work for a few more hours and get paid more - I do sometimes have to work overtime (and get paid for it), but it is when there is some big problem with a server or whatever, not when I have nothing else to do.
Also, a relatively good new PSU (~$40) costs me about one days worth of my salary. I can replace more than just the caps in that time.
In addition to that, if the problem is only the caps, I can fix the PSU quickly (as I always keep some spare caps around - when I need to, I buy more caps than I need at the moment and the caps are cheaper than buying spare PSUs, even if its night or a national holiday. And I do not have to go to the store or order the PSU then wait for the next day for it to be delivered. So, replacing caps usually saves me time and money.
Because the standard PSU has to fit in a standard hole and batteries are big, heavy and expensive?
There would be very limited market for such PSUs. Most people either do not care about power loss or already have a UPS (and you can connect a monitor to it too, so that you can still use the PC when the power is out). A PSU with a battery would be more efficient (and at least Google is using them), but then I would need to add a battery to my monitor and switches and the fiber-to-copper converter. And the external hard drives. And the tape drives.
It depends. Sometimes buying a cheap PSU then replacing the capacitors when the warranty expires can be cheaper (in total) than buying a PSU that already has good caps.
Also, usually the good power supplies usually have active PFC which can cause the PSU to blow up (seen it happen twice: high voltage cap fails -> voltage rises to 800V or more -gt; some transistor or chip explodes or shorts - the second time I got an almost free PSU - I just had to replacement parts for it) unless the PSU is really good (good quality high voltage cap is crucial) and may not work with UPSs that have square or modified sine outputs. So, if I want passive PFC (or nor PFC at all) I have to buy a low quality PSU and replace the caps.
UPS works the same regardless if it's night, foggy, raining or snowing outside.
Not graphical admin interface (though it is useful, for example, I usually prefer the Web UI of D-Link switches rather than CLI - unless I want to paste a bunch of commands - then CLI wins), but graphical software.
Like uTorrent for example. Or some other Windows app.
Yes, it is possible to run X over network, though currently I do not know how to switch an app between local and network displays without restarting it (if I start it on the local console then it's there, if I ssh into the machine and start the app from ssh it's displayed over the network, though I do not now how to make the app that was started locally, be displayed over network or just display the entire desktop over network - essentially what VNC does but faster). Oh and it has to be compatible with my Windows main PC.
As was explained to me earlier, yes, it would increase the life of a regular bulb, but halogens have to work at high temperature for the halogen cycle to work (and deposit material back on the filament). Lowering the temperature of the bulb may interfere with that cycle and make the bulb fail sooner.
While a regular bulb maybe large, the filament (the part of the bulb that actually produces the light) is rather small. If the bulb has clear glass, then the effective volume that produces light is lower.
Though yes, a lightbulb with many LEDs would be similar to a regular lightbulb with frosted glass.
hmm.. because I like it? I like it enough to pay a few dollars for it (a 40W lightbulb on half a day uses about $3 of electricity a month. So, yea, I am prepared to pay the difference between the $3/month and however much a more efficient light would cost to have clearly defined shadows and low color temperature.
That would create the equivalent of a incandescent lightbulb with frosted glass. I want the equivalent of an incandescent lightbulb with clear glass.
The only option other than stockpiling lightbulbs is using halogen bulbs with a resistor in series to reduce the color temperature (even though it would shorten the life of the bulb).
Oh, OK, as long as there are LEDs that have the same color as an incandescent lightbulb and manage to radiate in all directions (not just forward), then that may be good. No, a lightbulb made of many LEDs is not suitable - it is not a point source of light and creates hazy/multiple shadows.
What's the point of massively inconveniencing yourself with the storage of fragile items only to pay higher electric bills.
I like the light produced by incandescent lightbulbs. Low color temperature (even lower on the long life incandescent bulbs), spectrum well approximates black body radiation and the bulb is a point source of light (a clear bulb anyway). Halogens are almost as good, but their color temperature is too high for me.