Or if you feel that a 100W system simply has too much of an impact on your electricity bill.
I have the particular $50 P4 system in question, and it idles at 41 WATTS, not close to 100. In fact that's lower than my ultra-efficient new system, due to the power-chomping high-speed northbridge.
My second suggestion, to repurpose an old smartphone, would get that energy footprint down to minscule proportions.
- devastatingly poor countries like Germany - you're talking upwards of $100 per year.
German voters made conscious decisions over several years to drive their electricity prices through the roof. Their electricity costs could be vastly lower, so I'm unsympathetic. It has nothing to do with how responsible they are, and more about how delusional.
I hope those questions are a joke. Geothermal wells don't go any where deep enough to reach the core. In fact they remain in the mantle, the top layer of the earth.
**facepalm**
I hope that response is a joke... Oh cruel irony. Lava monsters posting on/. now?
It is insane to think that solar in our current tech level with PV and storage will replace our current infrastructure.
Solar (whether thermal or PV) or Nuclear are the only technologies which can meet the increasing electrical demands projected out over 100 years from now. Nothing else will be able to meet our demand. Given that simple fact, there's no question where the bulk of research money should go. Anything else is short-term thinking.
Yet... nobody seems in a hurry to actually build any. That says much more than any number of blue ribbon studies and pie-in-the-sky web pages proclaiming how great geothermal could be.
Not true at all. Solar power plants were also extremely rare until very, very recently. If the return on investment is just a bit lower than the alternative, nobody is interested. If the skills needed are just slightly rare or slightly unusual, it represents expense and risk, and nobody is interested. Breaking out of a rut, and into new technologies takes a lot of effort, and so requires a lot of upside, to get things bootstrapped.
Everybody has a smartphone. If you want to do something useful, make a watch that is just a low power, dumb, bluetooth receiver and remote control. Using the buttons on your watch to skip to the next song would actually be useful. Having a display on your wrist which can alternate between, say, 4 sources of information streamed from your phone would also be useful (next appointment... Last text/email... Etc).
Having a computer with a horrid interface, painful specs, and horrible battery life, isn't useful, nor necessary.
I guess I just want a "decent" web browsing capability instead
Then why bother with this thing at all? A refurb Pentium4 PC goes for $50 shipped. This thing only makes sense if you need a super-small form factor, and even then, rooting and flashing an older Android smartphone seems like a better option to me.
Since when is a house supposed to be an investment and not just a place to live in?
It has always been that way. If houses weren't a good investment, practically nobody would buy one, because renting for 20 years is cheaper... You also wouldn't be able to get a loan at any rate, with anything less than absolutely perfect credit, if the banks didn't expect to be able to recoup the cost by selling the house if you default.
However, the idea of houses being a good investment is actually in jeopardy as never before. Across the developed world, population rates are stable, if not declining. With fewer people, demand for houses and property in general declines rather than the normal cycle of increasing demand. It's quite possible houses are no longer a good investment in developed countries, and you merely hope they won't depreciate in value too much, so you can recoup a good fraction of the money you've sunk in, and after years of not paying rent, you come out ahead.
You wouldn't believe how much I agree with you about Google's features being a seriously irritating downgrade. But switching to bing is like driving around in a dump truck because your car rattles a little bit...
I discovered Google early, and jumped on it instantly, converting everyone I knew. Google seriously raised the bar from the cespool of lousy search engines, and I'll be forever greatful for that.
However, google undeniably values quantity over quality, so they've serious deprioritized the sites you're likely to want, and instead return a lot of massive forum pages where your keywords were repeated numerous times. And if you want to search on a term that is used in many different contexts, forget about it, you'll be overwhelmed, and Google's feeble attempts at one or two categories falls flat.
The first alternative was Visvismo, then Clusty for some time. Search results were almost as good, but more importantly, it gave you a list of categories on the side, and you could quickly see how many results for each, and chose the one the fits. I preferred it to Google for many years, right up until it was sold off to some church, and became Yippy, with an incredibly heavy-handed blocking of all non child-friendly results. Its other big problem was that it was terrible at literal string searches, or anything where word proximity matters. Searching for a snippet for lyrics will turn up anything but what you want, as will searching for, eg. Software error messages. But fortunately, DuckDuckGo came along before Clusty died...
DuckDuckGo is missing the categorization, and the results are again a bit interspersed with disparate topics as results, but it keeps its scope smaller, so it's easier to find the result you likely want, and goes to pains to include the handful of links you likely want at the top. It does literal searches just fine. It greatly prefers the use of SSL, and the proprietor swears up and down that they do NO TRACKING nor targeted search results. But importantly, while giving good results, the interface is super-sleek and clean. It works amazingly well in Links (text-mode) as Google used-to. It's much more usable on other constrained devices as well, such as smartphones, where the DuckDuckGo app is a huge upgrade. And if nothing else, it's nice that I can diversify where my privacy is concerned. Sure Gmail has my emails, which is a concern, but they can't correlate that with my search activity, giving me a bit more control.
I'm "over 39" and have specific tech skills that date back to the early 80s. Those are worthless.
Your story couldn't be more different than mine...
I recently found myself signing on with a big company, expecting a bumpy transition onto the cutting edge of everyhting tech, only to very quickly find myself standing in front of racks of Epson dot-matrix printers, endless rows of dumb terminals, working with terminal servers connected to the same, ancient proprietary servers, MS-DOS PCs, etc. You can imagine I quickly worked out all kinds of alternatives, but after a handful of demos, there was no motivation at all to spend any money to replace those decrepit systems, with their nominal operating costs.
I can't imagine what your tech skills from the 80s are that NOBODY needs anymore...
After three or for stores with 500+ comments it really is hard to say that people who post on Slashdot don't want Apple stories posted.
There you go again, organizing around profits rather than products... Has this story taught you nothing?/.ers only THINK they want Apple stories. We know better than them what they really want...
I don't begrudge companies changing their product offerings by any means, but what does irritate me to no end is that companies will ADVERTISE what a good deal their service is, right up until the moment they actually change it. That strikes me as borderline false advertising... Sign-up the day you see the commercial, and get the advertised deal, or wait until a few days a find there's no "there" there... What's the legal limit of how long they have to honor their advertised service levels?
Personally, I'm not too concerned about the caps. WiFi is all over the civilized world, so that covers 95% of my Internet usage. Where there isn't WiFi, hell, be a little frugal, and cut out the videos and you should be pretty safe. I'd go for dial-up speed access if the price was right, just as I'm immensely happy with 3G and don't give a damn about paying through the nose for a 4G speed boost.
There's a world of difference between having SOME internet connection, and no internet connection, and that's really all I want when on the move, or in the middle of nowhere. After that, we just need the overage fees to be reasonable. Best to go with pre-paid cell phone service there, since they pretty well have to advertise that up-front, and can't hide it, or any other fees, in the tiny print in the contract... Billing is simple, and the rates are usually the best you can get. $40/mo (after a year or so) for Boost Mobile unlimited everything with a smartphone, etc. $35/mo for Virgin Mobile's low-end plan, with decent overage fees, and no long-term contract hassle.
The human brain processes male and female voices differently, so it actually takes more effort to comprehend what a female voice is saying.
The place I notice this the most (other than the obvious) is with the news. There's no question, across the board, it's easier to comprehend 30 minutes of info-packed news reports from a male anchor than from a female, even with all else being equal (same show, different day). Obviously this would be a bit politically incorrect to talk about, and make decisions based upon.
To me, that sounds like it takes 5 hours after compiling the code in parallel. So if it was a single threaded compilation job, in theory, the task would take much much longer.
Yes, it does SOUND that way... It's very "truthy" that way...
Relying on/. summaries just makes you look like an idiot, when you're just one quick and easy click away from the source. Surely, if you cant be bothered to put that much effort in, then you must not have enough time to write-up a response, either...
Verbatim quote from TFA:
"5+ hours of CPU time for a single build, 25+ minutes of wall time"
yes, simple possession of pictures of children in sexually suggestive ways is pretty much an atavistic, primal declaration of war on the integrity of the reproduction of homo sapiens.
Couldn't you say the same thing about homosexuality?
And wouldn't possession of eg. movies containing violence also count as a declaration of war on society, and social laws?
not sure how it will be marketed to education and gaming though,
If you can boast an OS that doesn't lag while multitasking (eg. Music over bluetooth in the background) while doing other stuff (education, games, whatever) and furthermore that it'll keep running demanding workloads for months without becoming unstable or crashing, I think you'll be able to get pretty broad interest in the platform.
The landscape slider is the best layout possible for a phone IMO
Nope. You need to go look up the Psion Revo. About the same size a the largest-screen smartphones out there, yet all but the most fat-fingered can damn well touch-type, 10-fingered, on that tiny flip-out keyboard. The 5MX was a bit larger still. Both superwide-screen.
(Sorry, but that's what ever mobile story feels like to me!)
As a heavy Psion 5MX user (REAL KEYBOARD! NOT A SLIDER!) I felt the same way from the very start of the smart phone era... Sure, you had to tether your PDA to your phone, but otherwise, the ancient Psion still has many great productivity qualities and othe features phones have yet to match.
Privoxy has had SSL support from the start, some 6+ years ago. In addition, I heard the same thing about ftp, but it's simply a matter of telling privoxy to strip out all medias from an ftp url... Similar could be done for ssl
Privoxy can replace Adblock, we need something like that for NoScript.
We have it already. It's called.... Privoxy. Surprise!
In addition to blocking images, it can also block, say,.js files, and also has a regex filter system, which allows you to filter out absolutely any text you want. A global substitution of "script" for "s-c-r-i-p-t" will quite effectively strip all javascript from all pages, and can be selectively turned off. The interface just isn't as friendly.
People who refuse to travel at least at the speed limit will be run over by the wall of Tahoe - thus eliminating gridlock.
I have no problem with people driving below the speed limit, and neither should any decent drivers. The only problem is that they should strictly STAY RIGHT. No, the fact that you feel like driving 1/4 of a MPH faster than the guy in front of you is NOT a reason to get out of the slow lane and block 100 cars that want to go much faster than you. And no, that fact that there's less traffic and better flow in the fast lane isn't an excuse for you to be a left lane bandit, and REALLY cause MAJOR congestion.
In some states, drive-right laws are in-force and enforced by the police across the board.
Diet is overwhelmingly why we live longer and healthier than our dark-ages counterparts. The idea that diet is unimportant is massively wrong, and based in overwhelming ignorance.
If you want an example canonical case, look up scurvy, and just how many people were horribly afflicted by it, until it was discovered exactly what dietary supplement was missing.
Never smoked, always ate healthy.
What we believe is a "healthy" diet, changes every decade. For all you our I know, one of those healthy things he was eating contributed to him getting those diseases later in life. Hell, there's some controversy about the pesticides used on crops, which transfers to humans in trace amounts, and may have health effects of its own. Eat healthy all you want, but maybe that lettuce from farm A will slowly poison you, while similar lettuce from farm B will leave you healthy. Unless we know exactly what triggers these diseases, across the board, we can't trace it back to the billions or variables in our food, to decide what "eating healthy" needs to include and exclude.
Environmental exposure is important as well. If you simply live in an area with serious pollution, no diet is going to save you from the health effects of pollutants. What's more, there's no question that air pollution is a cause of several cancers, and other disorders. Local environmental pollutants can be even worse. The simplest of objects like wood can outgas toxic chemicals like formaldehyde. Here in California, you can't buy a sheet of plywood without a warning label that it contains chemicals known to cause cancer...
What else can I say? A healthy diet and lifestyle won't help if you get shot, or hit by a bus either, but that sure as hell doesn't mean they don't in fact have a huge effect on your health.
Trying to charge a 5V device from a 12V battery? Wire two microusb plugs together in series. The end. 100% efficient 6V power, basically free. Hook as many sets of 2x cables to the battery at the same time. Only restriction is that you must always charge devices in pairs, but the cost and efficiency should completely make up for it.
Another potential solution is to have someone park a car nearby and keep it running with a 20foot extension cord attached to the accessory plug. P
The difficulty people really don't seem to be getting, here, is that they need something the police aren't going to shut down. Sure, a $100 generator from Harbor Freight is easy, but when that noisy thing starts, expect the cops to find a law against having it on the sidewalk, and get it taken away. Ditto for big solar arrays, wind turbines, and a car idling with cables running across the street... A bicycle seems much safer to bet on. I only wonder why we always see full-sized bikes, and not a folding set of pedal + seat + dynamo which could fold up and be stashed in a briefcase for portability.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it does. You can make a good case that as soon as you factor the monitor in, a $125 EEE PC would be cheaper and lower power.
I have the particular $50 P4 system in question, and it idles at 41 WATTS, not close to 100. In fact that's lower than my ultra-efficient new system, due to the power-chomping high-speed northbridge.
My second suggestion, to repurpose an old smartphone, would get that energy footprint down to minscule proportions.
German voters made conscious decisions over several years to drive their electricity prices through the roof. Their electricity costs could be vastly lower, so I'm unsympathetic. It has nothing to do with how responsible they are, and more about how delusional.
**facepalm**
I hope that response is a joke... /. now?
Oh cruel irony.
Lava monsters posting on
Solar (whether thermal or PV) or Nuclear are the only technologies which can meet the increasing electrical demands projected out over 100 years from now. Nothing else will be able to meet our demand. Given that simple fact, there's no question where the bulk of research money should go. Anything else is short-term thinking.
Not true at all. Solar power plants were also extremely rare until very, very recently. If the return on investment is just a bit lower than the alternative, nobody is interested. If the skills needed are just slightly rare or slightly unusual, it represents expense and risk, and nobody is interested. Breaking out of a rut, and into new technologies takes a lot of effort, and so requires a lot of upside, to get things bootstrapped.
Everybody has a smartphone. If you want to do something useful, make a watch that is just a low power, dumb, bluetooth receiver and remote control. Using the buttons on your watch to skip to the next song would actually be useful. Having a display on your wrist which can alternate between, say, 4 sources of information streamed from your phone would also be useful (next appointment... Last text/email... Etc).
Having a computer with a horrid interface, painful specs, and horrible battery life, isn't useful, nor necessary.
Then why bother with this thing at all? A refurb Pentium4 PC goes for $50 shipped. This thing only makes sense if you need a super-small form factor, and even then, rooting and flashing an older Android smartphone seems like a better option to me.
It has always been that way. If houses weren't a good investment, practically nobody would buy one, because renting for 20 years is cheaper... You also wouldn't be able to get a loan at any rate, with anything less than absolutely perfect credit, if the banks didn't expect to be able to recoup the cost by selling the house if you default.
However, the idea of houses being a good investment is actually in jeopardy as never before. Across the developed world, population rates are stable, if not declining. With fewer people, demand for houses and property in general declines rather than the normal cycle of increasing demand. It's quite possible houses are no longer a good investment in developed countries, and you merely hope they won't depreciate in value too much, so you can recoup a good fraction of the money you've sunk in, and after years of not paying rent, you come out ahead.
You wouldn't believe how much I agree with you about Google's features being a seriously irritating downgrade. But switching to bing is like driving around in a dump truck because your car rattles a little bit...
I discovered Google early, and jumped on it instantly, converting everyone I knew. Google seriously raised the bar from the cespool of lousy search engines, and I'll be forever greatful for that.
However, google undeniably values quantity over quality, so they've serious deprioritized the sites you're likely to want, and instead return a lot of massive forum pages where your keywords were repeated numerous times. And if you want to search on a term that is used in many different contexts, forget about it, you'll be overwhelmed, and Google's feeble attempts at one or two categories falls flat.
The first alternative was Visvismo, then Clusty for some time. Search results were almost as good, but more importantly, it gave you a list of categories on the side, and you could quickly see how many results for each, and chose the one the fits. I preferred it to Google for many years, right up until it was sold off to some church, and became Yippy, with an incredibly heavy-handed blocking of all non child-friendly results. Its other big problem was that it was terrible at literal string searches, or anything where word proximity matters. Searching for a snippet for lyrics will turn up anything but what you want, as will searching for, eg. Software error messages. But fortunately, DuckDuckGo came along before Clusty died...
DuckDuckGo is missing the categorization, and the results are again a bit interspersed with disparate topics as results, but it keeps its scope smaller, so it's easier to find the result you likely want, and goes to pains to include the handful of links you likely want at the top. It does literal searches just fine. It greatly prefers the use of SSL, and the proprietor swears up and down that they do NO TRACKING nor targeted search results. But importantly, while giving good results, the interface is super-sleek and clean. It works amazingly well in Links (text-mode) as Google used-to. It's much more usable on other constrained devices as well, such as smartphones, where the DuckDuckGo app is a huge upgrade. And if nothing else, it's nice that I can diversify where my privacy is concerned. Sure Gmail has my emails, which is a concern, but they can't correlate that with my search activity, giving me a bit more control.
Your story couldn't be more different than mine...
I recently found myself signing on with a big company, expecting a bumpy transition onto the cutting edge of everyhting tech, only to very quickly find myself standing in front of racks of Epson dot-matrix printers, endless rows of dumb terminals, working with terminal servers connected to the same, ancient proprietary servers, MS-DOS PCs, etc. You can imagine I quickly worked out all kinds of alternatives, but after a handful of demos, there was no motivation at all to spend any money to replace those decrepit systems, with their nominal operating costs.
I can't imagine what your tech skills from the 80s are that NOBODY needs anymore...
There you go again, organizing around profits rather than products... Has this story taught you nothing? /.ers only THINK they want Apple stories. We know better than them what they really want...
I don't begrudge companies changing their product offerings by any means, but what does irritate me to no end is that companies will ADVERTISE what a good deal their service is, right up until the moment they actually change it. That strikes me as borderline false advertising... Sign-up the day you see the commercial, and get the advertised deal, or wait until a few days a find there's no "there" there... What's the legal limit of how long they have to honor their advertised service levels?
Personally, I'm not too concerned about the caps. WiFi is all over the civilized world, so that covers 95% of my Internet usage. Where there isn't WiFi, hell, be a little frugal, and cut out the videos and you should be pretty safe. I'd go for dial-up speed access if the price was right, just as I'm immensely happy with 3G and don't give a damn about paying through the nose for a 4G speed boost.
There's a world of difference between having SOME internet connection, and no internet connection, and that's really all I want when on the move, or in the middle of nowhere. After that, we just need the overage fees to be reasonable. Best to go with pre-paid cell phone service there, since they pretty well have to advertise that up-front, and can't hide it, or any other fees, in the tiny print in the contract... Billing is simple, and the rates are usually the best you can get. $40/mo (after a year or so) for Boost Mobile unlimited everything with a smartphone, etc. $35/mo for Virgin Mobile's low-end plan, with decent overage fees, and no long-term contract hassle.
Your question is answered, and your theory doesn't quite fit:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_1428081.htm
There's a corollary to this, though...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_1428081.htm
The human brain processes male and female voices differently, so it actually takes more effort to comprehend what a female voice is saying.
The place I notice this the most (other than the obvious) is with the news. There's no question, across the board, it's easier to comprehend 30 minutes of info-packed news reports from a male anchor than from a female, even with all else being equal (same show, different day). Obviously this would be a bit politically incorrect to talk about, and make decisions based upon.
Yes, it does SOUND that way... It's very "truthy" that way...
Relying on /. summaries just makes you look like an idiot, when you're just one quick and easy click away from the source. Surely, if you cant be bothered to put that much effort in, then you must not have enough time to write-up a response, either...
Verbatim quote from TFA:
"5+ hours of CPU time for a single build, 25+ minutes of wall time"
Couldn't you say the same thing about homosexuality?
And wouldn't possession of eg. movies containing violence also count as a declaration of war on society, and social laws?
If you can boast an OS that doesn't lag while multitasking (eg. Music over bluetooth in the background) while doing other stuff (education, games, whatever) and furthermore that it'll keep running demanding workloads for months without becoming unstable or crashing, I think you'll be able to get pretty broad interest in the platform.
Nope. You need to go look up the Psion Revo. About the same size a the largest-screen smartphones out there, yet all but the most fat-fingered can damn well touch-type, 10-fingered, on that tiny flip-out keyboard. The 5MX was a bit larger still. Both superwide-screen.
As a heavy Psion 5MX user (REAL KEYBOARD! NOT A SLIDER!) I felt the same way from the very start of the smart phone era... Sure, you had to tether your PDA to your phone, but otherwise, the ancient Psion still has many great productivity qualities and othe features phones have yet to match.
Privoxy has had SSL support from the start, some 6+ years ago. In addition, I heard the same thing about ftp, but it's simply a matter of telling privoxy to strip out all medias from an ftp url... Similar could be done for ssl
We have it already. It's called.... Privoxy. Surprise!
In addition to blocking images, it can also block, say, .js files, and also has a regex filter system, which allows you to filter out absolutely any text you want. A global substitution of "script" for "s-c-r-i-p-t" will quite effectively strip all javascript from all pages, and can be selectively turned off. The interface just isn't as friendly.
You're STARTING at 80? That's ridiculous. I'm sure that's one hell of a bathtub curve there.
I have no problem with people driving below the speed limit, and neither should any decent drivers. The only problem is that they should strictly STAY RIGHT. No, the fact that you feel like driving 1/4 of a MPH faster than the guy in front of you is NOT a reason to get out of the slow lane and block 100 cars that want to go much faster than you. And no, that fact that there's less traffic and better flow in the fast lane isn't an excuse for you to be a left lane bandit, and REALLY cause MAJOR congestion.
In some states, drive-right laws are in-force and enforced by the police across the board.
Diet is overwhelmingly why we live longer and healthier than our dark-ages counterparts. The idea that diet is unimportant is massively wrong, and based in overwhelming ignorance.
If you want an example canonical case, look up scurvy, and just how many people were horribly afflicted by it, until it was discovered exactly what dietary supplement was missing.
What we believe is a "healthy" diet, changes every decade. For all you our I know, one of those healthy things he was eating contributed to him getting those diseases later in life. Hell, there's some controversy about the pesticides used on crops, which transfers to humans in trace amounts, and may have health effects of its own. Eat healthy all you want, but maybe that lettuce from farm A will slowly poison you, while similar lettuce from farm B will leave you healthy. Unless we know exactly what triggers these diseases, across the board, we can't trace it back to the billions or variables in our food, to decide what "eating healthy" needs to include and exclude.
Environmental exposure is important as well. If you simply live in an area with serious pollution, no diet is going to save you from the health effects of pollutants. What's more, there's no question that air pollution is a cause of several cancers, and other disorders. Local environmental pollutants can be even worse. The simplest of objects like wood can outgas toxic chemicals like formaldehyde. Here in California, you can't buy a sheet of plywood without a warning label that it contains chemicals known to cause cancer...
What else can I say? A healthy diet and lifestyle won't help if you get shot, or hit by a bus either, but that sure as hell doesn't mean they don't in fact have a huge effect on your health.
I can do far better without really trying...
Trying to charge a 5V device from a 12V battery? Wire two microusb plugs together in series. The end. 100% efficient 6V power, basically free. Hook as many sets of 2x cables to the battery at the same time. Only restriction is that you must always charge devices in pairs, but the cost and efficiency should completely make up for it.
The difficulty people really don't seem to be getting, here, is that they need something the police aren't going to shut down. Sure, a $100 generator from Harbor Freight is easy, but when that noisy thing starts, expect the cops to find a law against having it on the sidewalk, and get it taken away. Ditto for big solar arrays, wind turbines, and a car idling with cables running across the street... A bicycle seems much safer to bet on. I only wonder why we always see full-sized bikes, and not a folding set of pedal + seat + dynamo which could fold up and be stashed in a briefcase for portability.