Anything that uses power. An LCD isn't vastly more efficient, it still draws half as much power as a CRT, and it certainly doesn't have any way to gently power-up (backlight is either off or on).
Anything and everything you power off the bus is going to cause substantial fluctuations in the line voltage, to the point that you really need to have a regulator in each device, and then you can just as easily run off of 42V DC. And yet you still need even higher voltage AC for most devices (appliances, lights, etc), so you gain next to nothing.
the technology that makes displays viable for the power on mobile devices will be prevalent in non mobile devices.
In a "mobile device" you have a very small circuit. It may be 20V at 2amp. No single device draws much power, AND everything is miniaturized to fit within a modest power envelope. Your nice big 36" TV isn't in the same class as your 12" notebook LCD.
It doesn't matter how many may have known. What matters is if it was ever used. And once it is, it doesn't take too long to track down where the hole in the security system is...
I cant see using USB for things like your TV of DVD player, so something a bit more robust might be in order.
1) Hook-up your multimeter and turn on your TV... Notice the voltage suddenly dropping a good 10 volts before coming back up? Not a big deal at 120/240V, but a 10V drop at 12V would be a hell of a thing.
2) Even car manufacturers have been trying for many years to get away from 12V DC because of the godawful huge wires needed, voltage drop, and overall lower power output. 42V DC is the next step. I'd rather go up an order of magnitude and get 120V, and convert down where necessary.
3) The conversion losses going from AC to DC is approximately 1.5%. A very, very, very tiny amount of power. You'll hardly notice.
In conclusion, there's good reason the world continues to use high voltage AC.
There's a reason you don't see many electric kettles in the U.S...
Yes, 1) Natural gas or Propane is considerably cheaper than electricity. 2) Americans don't drink remotely enough tea and the like to need a special device for it. 3) Americans have coffee makers, not electric kettles.
Nearly every decent piece of backup software already does incremental snapshots
Incremental doesn't cut it... Not even close. That's why anybody even knows a stupid term like "dedupe".
When a full backup is corrupted or deleted, the incrementals become useless. When one of the incrementals is corrupted or deleted, those following it similarly become (almost-)useless. Differentals would improve the situation, but then you're back to duplicating a large amount of data.
When you have linked snapshots ("deduped" backups), ALL are both full and incremental backups... if you delete the oldest, the data size shrinks, but the next-most-recent works just fine. You NEVER run a "full backup" over again, only ever incrementals, dramatically reducing time, network bandwidth usage, etc.
imo it makes a lot more sense for that functionality to be in the backup system than as part of the filesystem.
If you do it at the file-level, you're wasting a lot of space unnecessarily. If you do it at the application level... you're re-creating a "deduping" filesystem in higher-level software, with the overhead of being on top of an existing filesystem.
the time needed to update a large file (in that it would need to recopy the file over to another section of the disk in order to maintain the fact that there are two now-different copies)?
You're thinking of file-level "de-duplication". But this is block-level. So, if you make a small change, it doesn't have to write 500 blocks, just the one.
Everyone else already mentioned ZFS is CoW, so I'll leave it at that.
it's only really worth doing this you have a lot of block-level duplicate data. That might be the case if e.g. you have 30 VMs on the same machine
...or if you, I dunno, EVER BACK-UP YOUR DAMN SYSTEM!!!
Duplicate data is exactly what filesystem snapshots are all about. Try backing up your data every day, for 10 days, keeping all the changed versions of files... Gee, do I want to buy a HDD that is 10X as large as all the rest of my storage space combined, or to I want one that is 1.5X as large? Tough choice.
I've been doing this for a long time with rsync and hard links. I'm not sure how reliably and well-performing this is going to be built-in to the filesystem, and at the block level, but I'm damn sure happy to try it out... at home, at work, everywhere.
No it doesn't. The overhead is so high that you're losing performance all over the place. And for what? So you can more easily throw more hardware at the problem which DIDN'T NEED ANY MORE HARDWARE TO DO THE JOB WHEN YOU STARTED...
I use virtualization here and there... Mostly to stick 4 development machines on one physical PC. But to tell you the truth, I can't see missing it if it went away and we just had to stick 4 low-power mini-PCs in that space to do the job instead...
IMHO, VMWare exists for one reason... Windows sucks. On any form of Unix, jails, chrooting, et al, perform far better, without the overhead.
"Artificial intelligence" - what's keeping the spam out of YOUR inbox? How does Netflix decide what to recommend to you? Ever gotten directions from Google Maps?
All just (weighted) statistical analysis.
"Computer-aided software engineering" - tools like valgrind, findbugs, fuzzing tools for finding security problems.
You're simply redefining the term into something that exists... CASE is a program which takes your high-level specifications and writes working programs for you. None of these testing/debugging tools does anything remotely similar.
"Thin clients" - ever heard of a "Web Browser"?
A web browser is, by far, the FATTEST application running on my PC. For two orders of magnitude more CPU and memory usage, I can check my e-mails through a slow, lagging, and clumsy web interface, instead of running a small, fast, user-friendly MUA, as we all were 10, 20, 30+ years ago. What a time to be alive!
Besides, as always, internet apps continue to be gimmicks. Before anyone chimes-in, yes, Google Maps is okay, but (A) the interface doesn't work any faster or better than mapquest and (B) if someone, ANYONE would have provided a free mapping application which could be run locally, Google maps wouldn't have attracted any interest. Nobody got around to providing free (ad-supported) map applications before. And notice that Google Earth is a normal application and not web-based.
"Enterprise social media" - That really describes most of the Internet
No, "social media" describes most of the internet. "Enterprise social media" describes a very different product, which never caught on.
Or perhaps I should say: "Giant armored exploding cars" - That really describes most everything on the roads. Right??? Right???
In Australia for example, international bandwidth is extremely limited and very expensive, but local bandwidth, even between ISPs, is essentially unlimited, high-speed, and often free or 'unmetered'.
No bittorrent client picks one peer, and downloads everything from them... Instead, it connects to a large number of peers, and downloads from all of them.
If you can download from your neighbor 100X faster than you can download from someone across the planet... good. You'll get 100 chunks from your neighbor, for every 1 you get from the foreign country. No programming required.
What do you think is going to be faster: connecting to your neighbour through at the same fucking router, or some kid's home PC in Kazakhstan over 35 hops away?
There's ample opportunity for either to be equally fast. Crossing an ocean increase latency, but if the link isn't horribly oversubscribed, can provided speeds faster than you can handle. So, your neighbor might have 100 other people requesting the same torrent as you, for the same reasons, while the kid in Kazakhstan may have a great internet connection, which is barely being utilized, and this while international traffic is down. This is not international calling... you don't save money by not fully utilizing that transoceanic link.
Also, ISPs brought this on themselves. I've long advocated ISPs allowing unlimited speeds between subscribers, and only limiting the uplink speeds to whatever you've subscribed, but they almost never do. If they did, see above... any peer-to-peer protocol would naturally download almost everything from local sources, without any added intelligence on its part. You wouldn't have to write it in to every single app.
A reasonably competent programmer could implement this in an hour
You could implement it easily, if you're willing to restrict yourself to neighboring network addresses in lieu of all else. If you want some fancy weighting to decide how important locality is versus absolute speed, completeness, etc. then you're talking about a major project.
Besides that... A good network admin could do the job in an hour as well, with no need to rewrite any of the applications.
They're a group of developers who could, with an hours effort, reduce international bandwidth usage by double-digit percentages and improve torrent download speeds by an order of magnitude, but they just... don't.
Are you saying that the lower classes are overwhelmingly Republican? I'm sorry but I'm afraid I'll have to hit you with a much dreaded [citation needed]!
Yes. You need only look at the Red/Blue States. The red states (Republicans) are overwhelmingly those with the largest populations of poor people.
And that's just the simplest and easiest metric to look at... The actual voting statistics really do bear out the point.
Every time I'm in Europe I marvel at the huge number of slim women in their 30's and 40's. Try to find a 40 year old American woman with a decent body
The obesity epidemic in the US is only slightly worse than in the UK. Other parts of Europe aren't far behind, either. Once again, America is leading the way...
As to your actual question... NOBODY knows the answer, and anyone who claims to is a liar or a fool.
It is a major problem, and nobody, as of yet, has determined with any reasonable level of confidence the causes. It does appear to be entirely cultural, though the exact changes which got us here have yet to be pinned down.
Which yields weird and amusing behaviours from middle class nowhere-near-rich people. They're against taxes on the rich as if they ever were going to make it one day
I have no idea where you get this from. Voting records in the US indicate it is the upper and lower classes (ie. rich and poor) who make up the base of support for the Republicans, whose modus operandi is cutting taxes for the rich (and then some trivial bone for the poor).
The middle-class in the US overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, who, overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) opt to reduce taxes on the middle-class, and increase them on the rich. Obama being a good example.
The reason is that the poor breed like cockroaches. They're more likely to be short and fat. The well off take care of themselves and they also work so they're less likely to have kids or as many.
Flagrant ignorance on display in full-force.
First, studies have shown the WEALTHY, not the poor, produce more children. Additionally, those children are more likely to be wealthy and desirable, and therefore themselves produce more children.
Secondly, the working theory, and one based on solid evidence, is that shorter women have more children because men find smaller women more desirable. This appears to be because of deep-rooted instincts.
Time to start making people jog on the tread mill to earn those welfare checks.
Despite the media noise, something like 90% of food stamp recipients stay on the program less than a year, and then never again uses them.
How does avoiding the release of CO2 help prevent global cooling,
Okay, I'm game.
Let's see... It would prevent haphazard release of CO2 into the atmosphere during periods where it is not needed, and perhaps even destructive, and will be slowly be taken out of the environment by natural processes. Thus, allowing us the luxury of controlled release of the CO2 when it can be the most beneficial.
Environmentalism is all about stopping development of any kind. Has nothing to do with wind, solar, etc. You know those people can always come up with an excuse of some kind to stop the EEEEEEVIL developers.
You know, your whole reply is just PROVING my point.
You haven't shown "Environmentalism" has stopped anything, nor even attempted to explain away the facts in my reply.
Also, how is someone who believes in his views and tells them to the world a "shill"?
All shills say the same thing... Yours is not just a an informed opinion. You clearly have a stake in this.
If you try to do anything else on the 486, such as use the disk, then the machine will thrash.
Thrash has a very specific meaning, which you seem not to understand.
Remember, 486 machines predate the advent of DMA transfers, so you'll be sucking up all of your (already very limited) CPU just to manage disk activity.
It won't make a good file server, but that's about it. You're not going to be doing heavy multimedia, or running a major database server, so it's unlikely you'll be doing enough disk access that you'll care.
A 33MHz 486 is plenty fast enough for MP3 playback, image display, text web browsing (Links was GREAT in the days before CSS completely took over), e-mail, and probably decent document editing, if you can find yourself an old copy of some lightweight office tools (AbiWord1, etc.)
An AMD Socket 7 K6 is about the slowest machine I can tolerate, even with Blackbox.
You'd probably do a lot better if you knew how to optimize Linux system performance, as well as code.
Perhaps you missed the part where the submitter mentioned that the machine's display resolution was 640x480.
That's almost DVD resolution. It's not that bad.
The #1 reason people complain about screen resolution is because they can't figure out any way to change font and icon sizes... Set that, and maybe default scaling in your image viewer and possibly web browser, and you'll have to look close to notice.
You mentioned running out of RAM, but you forgot to consider video RAM (which is not easy to upgrade).
640x480@256 colors is just fine for the basics. Many apps have very good dithering, so you'll have to pay attention to really notice, even with images.
Besides, if you factor in either the extra time required for setting up and using such a slow machine (at minimum wage)
You're making an awful lot of false assumptions...
Even if you got it to boot, it would be too slow for a modern X, and nearly too slow even for a console.
That's nonsense. Boot times might not be fast (most services can be disabled) but there's no reason a 486 wouldn't smoke at the console.
X11 with a lightweight window manager like Blackbox would work just fine on an old CPU... The problem you may run into, though, if you use a stock build of a recent X11, is running out of RAM, and constantly swapping to disk. Still... avoid that, and you'll be fine. I've certainly got 128MBs of EVDO SIMMs lying around... And even 32MB would be managable if you go with something optimized for low-memory systems.
Energy costs are so high these days that buying a new low-power router machine is much cheaper than running a 486 even in the medium term (1-2 years), and the new machine will be much more capable and featureful. For $99 you can get a SheevaPlug which comes with Ubuntu and consumes 5 watts.
It'll take a good 4 years before the cost of electricity pays for your ShevaPlug.
My time is worth more to me than trying to fiddle with an underpowered secondhand PC.
Many people have a higher opinion of the value of their time than your employer. I, however, get paid well, often enough, precisely because I'm good at fiddling with underpowered secondhand PCs...
Sure, it takes a bit more time and effort to get a nice, clean, tuned and optimized installation, rather than instal and run at startup every bit of unnecessary crap software on the planet. But compare the cost of a used Pentium-2 PC in quantities, with bulk trucking rates, to that of a nice new system... (Hmm... $50 vs $300) and then multiply that across 1,000 stations. Then consider just how much horsepower you really need to run that terminal emulator and a couple simple business apps written 15 years ago...
Yes, at a quarter-million USD, the price difference is certainly enough to pay even a very highly-paid IT pro for a full YEAR of "tinkering". Never mind a small horde of PC Techs.
I was not able to find a browser that was new enough to actually work with my typical consumer home router and still run acceptably on the old system. I think I got Konqueror to work once--but it took something like an hour for it to start.
Dillo, Links2 (GUI), NetSurf, and finally, Konquer-Embedded.
The later of which is fully-featured, has been around for years, and requires just QT to work, not all of KDE. It's decent, I just find the PDA-interface much too limited to be used on a real PC.
You would need to build the solar collection portion of the plant over twice as large as the generator capacity dictates, because you only have 12 hours to collect the BTU's you need for all 24. That's also twice the land.
No, you would build the solar collector 1X as large, and your generator 1/2 as large, and generate the electricity more evenly around the clock.
If you want to build the solar collector twice as large, fine... you'll get twice as much out of it, but you certainly don't NEED to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything that uses power. An LCD isn't vastly more efficient, it still draws half as much power as a CRT, and it certainly doesn't have any way to gently power-up (backlight is either off or on).
Anything and everything you power off the bus is going to cause substantial fluctuations in the line voltage, to the point that you really need to have a regulator in each device, and then you can just as easily run off of 42V DC. And yet you still need even higher voltage AC for most devices (appliances, lights, etc), so you gain next to nothing.
In a "mobile device" you have a very small circuit. It may be 20V at 2amp. No single device draws much power, AND everything is miniaturized to fit within a modest power envelope. Your nice big 36" TV isn't in the same class as your 12" notebook LCD.
It doesn't matter how many may have known. What matters is if it was ever used. And once it is, it doesn't take too long to track down where the hole in the security system is...
1) Hook-up your multimeter and turn on your TV... Notice the voltage suddenly dropping a good 10 volts before coming back up? Not a big deal at 120/240V, but a 10V drop at 12V would be a hell of a thing.
2) Even car manufacturers have been trying for many years to get away from 12V DC because of the godawful huge wires needed, voltage drop, and overall lower power output. 42V DC is the next step. I'd rather go up an order of magnitude and get 120V, and convert down where necessary.
3) The conversion losses going from AC to DC is approximately 1.5%. A very, very, very tiny amount of power. You'll hardly notice.
In conclusion, there's good reason the world continues to use high voltage AC.
Yes,
1) Natural gas or Propane is considerably cheaper than electricity.
2) Americans don't drink remotely enough tea and the like to need a special device for it.
3) Americans have coffee makers, not electric kettles.
Incremental doesn't cut it... Not even close. That's why anybody even knows a stupid term like "dedupe".
When a full backup is corrupted or deleted, the incrementals become useless. When one of the incrementals is corrupted or deleted, those following it similarly become (almost-)useless. Differentals would improve the situation, but then you're back to duplicating a large amount of data.
When you have linked snapshots ("deduped" backups), ALL are both full and incremental backups... if you delete the oldest, the data size shrinks, but the next-most-recent works just fine. You NEVER run a "full backup" over again, only ever incrementals, dramatically reducing time, network bandwidth usage, etc.
If you do it at the file-level, you're wasting a lot of space unnecessarily. If you do it at the application level... you're re-creating a "deduping" filesystem in higher-level software, with the overhead of being on top of an existing filesystem.
You're thinking of file-level "de-duplication". But this is block-level. So, if you make a small change, it doesn't have to write 500 blocks, just the one.
Everyone else already mentioned ZFS is CoW, so I'll leave it at that.
Duplicate data is exactly what filesystem snapshots are all about. Try backing up your data every day, for 10 days, keeping all the changed versions of files... Gee, do I want to buy a HDD that is 10X as large as all the rest of my storage space combined, or to I want one that is 1.5X as large? Tough choice.
I've been doing this for a long time with rsync and hard links. I'm not sure how reliably and well-performing this is going to be built-in to the filesystem, and at the block level, but I'm damn sure happy to try it out... at home, at work, everywhere.
No it doesn't. The overhead is so high that you're losing performance all over the place. And for what? So you can more easily throw more hardware at the problem which DIDN'T NEED ANY MORE HARDWARE TO DO THE JOB WHEN YOU STARTED...
I use virtualization here and there... Mostly to stick 4 development machines on one physical PC. But to tell you the truth, I can't see missing it if it went away and we just had to stick 4 low-power mini-PCs in that space to do the job instead...
IMHO, VMWare exists for one reason... Windows sucks. On any form of Unix, jails, chrooting, et al, perform far better, without the overhead.
All just (weighted) statistical analysis.
You're simply redefining the term into something that exists... CASE is a program which takes your high-level specifications and writes working programs for you. None of these testing/debugging tools does anything remotely similar.
A web browser is, by far, the FATTEST application running on my PC. For two orders of magnitude more CPU and memory usage, I can check my e-mails through a slow, lagging, and clumsy web interface, instead of running a small, fast, user-friendly MUA, as we all were 10, 20, 30+ years ago. What a time to be alive!
Besides, as always, internet apps continue to be gimmicks. Before anyone chimes-in, yes, Google Maps is okay, but (A) the interface doesn't work any faster or better than mapquest and (B) if someone, ANYONE would have provided a free mapping application which could be run locally, Google maps wouldn't have attracted any interest. Nobody got around to providing free (ad-supported) map applications before. And notice that Google Earth is a normal application and not web-based.
No, "social media" describes most of the internet. "Enterprise social media" describes a very different product, which never caught on.
Or perhaps I should say:
"Giant armored exploding cars" - That really describes most everything on the roads. Right??? Right???
You have utterly and totally failed to understand the content of my reply. I suggest you try again.
No bittorrent client picks one peer, and downloads everything from them... Instead, it connects to a large number of peers, and downloads from all of them.
If you can download from your neighbor 100X faster than you can download from someone across the planet... good. You'll get 100 chunks from your neighbor, for every 1 you get from the foreign country. No programming required.
There's ample opportunity for either to be equally fast. Crossing an ocean increase latency, but if the link isn't horribly oversubscribed, can provided speeds faster than you can handle. So, your neighbor might have 100 other people requesting the same torrent as you, for the same reasons, while the kid in Kazakhstan may have a great internet connection, which is barely being utilized, and this while international traffic is down. This is not international calling... you don't save money by not fully utilizing that transoceanic link.
Also, ISPs brought this on themselves. I've long advocated ISPs allowing unlimited speeds between subscribers, and only limiting the uplink speeds to whatever you've subscribed, but they almost never do. If they did, see above... any peer-to-peer protocol would naturally download almost everything from local sources, without any added intelligence on its part. You wouldn't have to write it in to every single app.
You could implement it easily, if you're willing to restrict yourself to neighboring network addresses in lieu of all else. If you want some fancy weighting to decide how important locality is versus absolute speed, completeness, etc. then you're talking about a major project.
Besides that... A good network admin could do the job in an hour as well, with no need to rewrite any of the applications.
That's baseless and utterly ridiculous.
I'm not kidding. I'm responding to the OP's initial claim. Go argue with him.
Try again. EVERYBODY voted for Obama... He won in a landslide.
One presidential election does not translate into a trend.
I'm not here to convince you, and I'm certainly not here to do research for those who are too lazy to do so themselves.
By all means, prove that the poor vote Democratic. You made the assertion first, before I corrected you.
Yes. You need only look at the Red/Blue States. The red states (Republicans) are overwhelmingly those with the largest populations of poor people.
And that's just the simplest and easiest metric to look at... The actual voting statistics really do bear out the point.
The obesity epidemic in the US is only slightly worse than in the UK. Other parts of Europe aren't far behind, either. Once again, America is leading the way...
As to your actual question... NOBODY knows the answer, and anyone who claims to is a liar or a fool.
It is a major problem, and nobody, as of yet, has determined with any reasonable level of confidence the causes. It does appear to be entirely cultural, though the exact changes which got us here have yet to be pinned down.
I have no idea where you get this from. Voting records in the US indicate it is the upper and lower classes (ie. rich and poor) who make up the base of support for the Republicans, whose modus operandi is cutting taxes for the rich (and then some trivial bone for the poor).
The middle-class in the US overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, who, overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) opt to reduce taxes on the middle-class, and increase them on the rich. Obama being a good example.
Flagrant ignorance on display in full-force.
First, studies have shown the WEALTHY, not the poor, produce more children. Additionally, those children are more likely to be wealthy and desirable, and therefore themselves produce more children.
Secondly, the working theory, and one based on solid evidence, is that shorter women have more children because men find smaller women more desirable. This appears to be because of deep-rooted instincts.
Despite the media noise, something like 90% of food stamp recipients stay on the program less than a year, and then never again uses them.
Okay, I'm game.
Let's see... It would prevent haphazard release of CO2 into the atmosphere during periods where it is not needed, and perhaps even destructive, and will be slowly be taken out of the environment by natural processes. Thus, allowing us the luxury of controlled release of the CO2 when it can be the most beneficial.
You know, your whole reply is just PROVING my point.
You haven't shown "Environmentalism" has stopped anything, nor even attempted to explain away the facts in my reply.
All shills say the same thing... Yours is not just a an informed opinion. You clearly have a stake in this.
Thrash has a very specific meaning, which you seem not to understand.
It won't make a good file server, but that's about it. You're not going to be doing heavy multimedia, or running a major database server, so it's unlikely you'll be doing enough disk access that you'll care.
A 33MHz 486 is plenty fast enough for MP3 playback, image display, text web browsing (Links was GREAT in the days before CSS completely took over), e-mail, and probably decent document editing, if you can find yourself an old copy of some lightweight office tools (AbiWord1, etc.)
You'd probably do a lot better if you knew how to optimize Linux system performance, as well as code.
That's almost DVD resolution. It's not that bad.
The #1 reason people complain about screen resolution is because they can't figure out any way to change font and icon sizes... Set that, and maybe default scaling in your image viewer and possibly web browser, and you'll have to look close to notice.
640x480@256 colors is just fine for the basics. Many apps have very good dithering, so you'll have to pay attention to really notice, even with images.
You're making an awful lot of false assumptions...
That's nonsense. Boot times might not be fast (most services can be disabled) but there's no reason a 486 wouldn't smoke at the console.
X11 with a lightweight window manager like Blackbox would work just fine on an old CPU... The problem you may run into, though, if you use a stock build of a recent X11, is running out of RAM, and constantly swapping to disk. Still... avoid that, and you'll be fine. I've certainly got 128MBs of EVDO SIMMs lying around... And even 32MB would be managable if you go with something optimized for low-memory systems.
It'll take a good 4 years before the cost of electricity pays for your ShevaPlug.
Many people have a higher opinion of the value of their time than your employer. I, however, get paid well, often enough, precisely because I'm good at fiddling with underpowered secondhand PCs...
Sure, it takes a bit more time and effort to get a nice, clean, tuned and optimized installation, rather than instal and run at startup every bit of unnecessary crap software on the planet. But compare the cost of a used Pentium-2 PC in quantities, with bulk trucking rates, to that of a nice new system... (Hmm... $50 vs $300) and then multiply that across 1,000 stations. Then consider just how much horsepower you really need to run that terminal emulator and a couple simple business apps written 15 years ago...
Yes, at a quarter-million USD, the price difference is certainly enough to pay even a very highly-paid IT pro for a full YEAR of "tinkering". Never mind a small horde of PC Techs.
Dillo, Links2 (GUI), NetSurf, and finally, Konquer-Embedded.
The later of which is fully-featured, has been around for years, and requires just QT to work, not all of KDE. It's decent, I just find the PDA-interface much too limited to be used on a real PC.
No, you would build the solar collector 1X as large, and your generator 1/2 as large, and generate the electricity more evenly around the clock.
If you want to build the solar collector twice as large, fine... you'll get twice as much out of it, but you certainly don't NEED to do so.