When I can be find time to finish the job, I'll do the maths and buy the parts to add 19V and 6.8V for two other devices.
Wiring 12V+ to 5V+ will give you 7V, which should be more than close enough to 6.8V, as long as this isn't a massively power hungry device, you should be fine.
Why would you trust them not to make your crypto crackable?
Because they have a several-decades long track record of doing exactly the opposite.
This situation shows one of the strongest arguments for open source. Trust no one.
Now that's just a completely idiotic statement.
When it comes to cryptography, the algorithm is damn near always open, and the it doesn't matter how many eyes you have on it. It takes the world's top experts, studying each method for years, and making groundbreaking mathematical breakthroughs to find weaknesses in cryptography. Crypto operates at the very limits of current knowledge, and open or closed really doesn't make any difference as to whether the effects of the NSA's changes will be spotted, in the end.
Open or closed matters in specific implementations, but for very different reasons.
You no doubt know that the fallout from Chernobyl circled the globe? That it contaminated neighboring countries fairly heavily?
...and the only people that died were those in the immediate vicinity.
Just like anything else, distance decreases risk.
A population center with a lot to lose and no way to evacuate in short order in the event of an accident will work very hard to make the plants as safe as they can be.
Work as hard as you want... Nothing in the world is 100% safe, and going out of your way to put extra people in danger is just idiotic.
Maybe it'll be a couple centuries, but sooner or later, there will be an accident.
Putting them away from population centers wastes a lot of energy in the transmission lines
It's not "a lot" of energy, it's a very small amount. And there plenty of progress being made on high temperature superconductors, which might be practical in such circumstances.
and also gives people a false sense of security
No, it's a very real sense of security. It would be even better if it was not just a distance away, but could be put behind a mountain range, or in a deep valley, that will naturally contain any potential fallout.
The Enrico Fermi reactor that melted would have contaminated the whole northeast corridor.
"Contaminated" != killing everyone.
and think setting them 50 or 100 miles away makes them safe. It doesn't.
It certainly makes you safer than being located closer to it. Like any other contaminate, the contamination disperses more the further you are away from where it's released... With a nuclear fallout, 100 miles away could be the difference between "radioactive poisoning" and "3% increased risk of developing cancer".
We've all heard of RAMDisks before, and I currently use RAM for/tmp on several systems. But I certainly don't have a system that can even potentially handle 40GBs+ of RAM, and even if it could, the process of copying from disk to RAM on ever boot-up would be... slow, difficult, and unnecessary.
you need electricity to keep DRAM refreshed.. so it's certainly not that low power.
Sure it is. Keeping DRAM refreshed requires, what, about 1watt? What's more, though, I believe it costs you less energy on writes than NAND, so depending on the workload, it could be a better option.
and I had use Gigabyte's i-RAM before, hot as hell.
Not sure what to say about that. 4 PC-266 DIMMs shouldn't get seriously hot. Perhaps the PCI form factor just means that you had it stuffed in a very tight spot, with little or no airflow... It's not at all difficult to do the same, and get HDDs or even Flash up to ridiculous temperatures.
Maybe we can have this discussion again when there's a more useful search engine out there, when it's actually a concern.
Clusty is better. Results are just about the same quality as Google, and it does a great job of automatically categorizing them, so you can easily narrow down expansive subjects... eg. searching for "putty" could be a nightmare on google, depending on whether the "putty" you're looking for is the more popular one searched for.
What bothers me, though, isn't that it's not the default, but that it's a PITA to find it.
Click the "G" Google search icon. Go to "Manage Search Engines." Click "Get More Search Engines." Look around that page and realize Clusty isn't there (or Yahoo, or many others)... Click on the "mycroft" link for "More". Clusty again not listed. Type "Clusty" in the Search box. Don't click on the #1 result or you'll get an "image" search. Go down and click on #2. In just 500 short steps, you, too, can have Clusty search installed, replacing Google. Yay!
All I have to say is screw NAND. Give me some DDR RAM-based hard drive... Ridiculously fast, very low power, no possible questions about lifetime. Perhaps even the possibility of just swapping out one failed SODIMM instead of scrapping the whole drive, is quite enticing.
I've been using Flash longer than most... From wiring minuscule capacity EEPROMs into embedded circuits, to squeezing OSes down to 8MBs for firewalls. Floppies are a no-go for important systems.
They're low power, quiet, and have high speed seeking, but I don't really care. What I want most in a drive is seriously high throughput... That probably means RAM, with a battery back-up. In the mean time, HDDs keep getting faster and quieter.
Sometimes, throwing in a completely different suggestion might garner you a rental and possibly more rentals because you might like other movies of that type.
It's very, very important. If it isn't highly accurate, you're just going to completely ignore what it suggests, and get no benefits from it.
And your analogy is extremely flawed. If it's a movie you would like, then it SHOULD be recommended. That's what the system is there for. The odds that recommending a random movie to someone will inadvertently expose them to something wonderful that they wouldn't have seen otherwise, is about as likely as someone winning the lottery... There's millions of movies and TV shows out there, and most of them are crap.
Yeah this just happens to be a prison but how are you going to feel when someone releases the schematics to the air conditioning system at jrandom fort in your town and proceeds to gas and entire base of people?
The US Military tends to be pretty good at physical security...
You would be mistaken. The air conditioner and the dehumidifier have to handle an equal volume of air, whether it's in a loop, or a straight-through system.
If you were cooling outside air by "20-30 degrees" and passing it through, it would cost just as much as cooling recirculated air the same amount.
Economies of scale have diminishing returns, and Walmart has practically no advantage over other major big box retailers. eg. Target. What makes Wal-mart able to sustain nominally cheaper prices is the significantly lower wages they pay their employees.
Also, economies of scale is balanced by diseconomies of scale.
So you end up needing humidification, usually by heating water to produce steam.
I can't agree with you there. Heating water to produce steam is absolutely the least efficient method of humidifying air, and pretty uncommon, outside of perhaps hospitals and similar reasons of medical-necessity. Other types of humidifiers work quite nicely, while requiring practically no power.
alot of the heat in a PS is generated from the transformer in converting the AC power coming to DC used by the computer.
That's flatly incorrect. AC to DC conversion is a very simple and very efficient process.
I will also note that the original post says "device" not "server".
I have no idea what you are talking about. It says what it says, exactly as I quoted it: "device/server"
What's more, no matter how you look at, it's simply NOT true.
A PSU would have to be 49% efficient or less, to output more heat itself than whatever device it is powering (Power==Heat). Meanwhile, even the very cheapest of junk PSUs are 60% efficient. I can't remember when I last saw a PSU that was any less efficient. Meanwhile, it's quite easy and inexpensive to purchase one of many PSUs that are 80% efficient or better, with a few exceeding 90%.
How many servers now have multiple power supplies for redundancy?
I'd say most do, but that's besides the point. No matter how many PSUs you have, they can't possibly be 60% efficient, and yet wasting more power than they are supplying. THAT'S WHAT THE PSU EFFICIENCY NUMBER MEANS.
Even if it is only 15% as you claim, that 15% could stretch 2 hours of run time until critical into 2 hours and 18 minutes.
No it couldn't. That 15% is not something you can get rid of in any way that I know of. It isn't caused by being AC, it's there because it costs some energy to convert from one voltage to another.
If you have some single power supply converting grid power into 48V DC, the 48V DC PSUs that convert into all the standard PC voltages will probably waste 15%+, and that's not including the losses from converting INTO 48V in the first place.
If you go to extremes, and standardize all PC hardware on a single voltage, then the losses will be in every device, and they will easily exceed 15%. Your motherboard will have to convert from a higher voltage down to whatever the CPU, chipset, and RAM needs. And you're still converting AC from the grid into low-voltage DC, which is certainly losing more than 15%, and then some more due to the high current in the electrical lines that now need to be massive. Not to mention that it still won't work, because every time a server turns on or off, the voltage will fluctuate slightly, which will potentially erase you RAM, cause your CPU to output garbage, cause your hard drive to spin down, etc., etc.
You are purposely misreading my statements and attributing meanings that do not fit reality,
Not true in the slightest. If I've misread anything you've written, I suggest you take some time to work on your written skills.
I also responded to your comment "dehumidification only shouldn't necessarily require running a coil with the 20-30 degree temperature gap that the AC coil requires, thus saving some energy."
I have NEVER said anything of the sort.
I was talking about free cooling, which is bringing air directly in to a space because it is already cooled. [...] You turned it into heat exchangers,
Heat exchangers were an example that refute your claims that such methods are "not used in residential," and are "an order of magnitude more complicated."
You can't seem to get your head around the fact that, though not the primary purpose, they do indeed operate along-side the AC, and for "free" happen to bring in a small percentage of cooler outside air.
My further comments had NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH HEAT EXCHANGERS. Simply, the operating principles of dehumidifiers.
your rebuttal to my comments on dehumidification violate physical laws
Not remotely true at all. I can back up everything I've said.
Somehow, when I was talking about outside air heat exchangers, you thought I was talking about dehumidifiers.
You quote my statement about dehumidifiers, where I explain why dehumidifiers use far less energy than AC. Then, directly below, you start talking about passive (residential) heat exchangers instead... You think it's my fault you either can't read or quote?
In either case, you still haven't tried to back up your (factually inaccurate) assertion that dehumidifiers consume more power than AC.
If you are bringing air in from the outside, unless the room is near an outside wall there is ductwork required to carry the air, sometimes long runs.
If you aren't "near" either an outside wall or the roof, you're pumping some type of coolant a rather impractically long distance to get to the compressor and back.
With a heat exchanger, you are bringing cool air in, and then HEATING IT UP with the waste heat from the exhaust air.
Yes you are, but heat exchangers aren't remotely perfect, so in cool weather you get a small portion of "free" cooling.
You don't heat it up through a HX, because you need the 65F air to maintain temp setpoint. But now you are dumping a lot of water into the space, and it doesn't *feel* cool.
This is a brutally stupid statement. Dehumidifiers run the outside air over the cool coils to dehumidify it, then over the hot coils to re-heat it. THAT is the heat exchange. You'd be an idiot to run it over the hot coils first, that's the exact opposite of what you need. Why you're confusing the simple operation of a dehumidifier with residential heat exchangers, I haven't a clue.
The coil temperature MUST be less than the dew point of the air, by the very definition of "dew point".
Indeed, but any amount of cooling will put the temperature below ambient and you'll get some condensation, and the very nature of imperfect conductors (radiators) means that one portion of the coil will be significantly colder, while the rest will be a much smaller temperature difference.
Often, that temp is less than desired for discharge air temp.
Yes, but we're talking about a DEHUMIDIFIER, not an air conditioner. All that heat will be added back.
Call me when you've bought a psychrometric chart and a ductulator.
You're quick to name calling, but it's pretty damn clear you've never even SEEN a dehumidifier. If you're claiming to be an HVAC designer, you'd have to be by far the single most incompetent I've ever seen.
With Windows there's usually some neighbor's kid who "knows computers".
In 98% of my experience, that "neighbor's kid" knows just enough to get into big trouble, and causes more problems that he solves.
That goes, not just double, but 10X, where hardware is involved. I can't count the number of times I hear about some kid replacing an optical drive in someone's computer, and fries the video, motherboard, etc., because he doesn't know shit about ICs and static electricity.
Unless it's absolute trash already, don't let "some neighbor's kid" near your computer. Would you trust him to replace/repair the brakes in your car?
Of course that doesn't go for trivial things like asking how to burn a CD, but the average person has no way of knowing what action is trivial, and what is seriously risky.
Now, there are a few exceptions to the rule, and many people on/. probably qualified when they were younger (or perhaps still do). However, in that case, a good number probably also know Linux as well (I certainly did). Second, a Linux system is much less likely to have spontaneous problems like a driver that just stops working one day, or viruses, spyware, deleted system files, etc., and that is the vast majority of the every-day problems people experience with Windows, and get some kid to help them with.
First, a Linux is much less likely to have spontaneous problems.
Many TVs today can easily show a 800x600 desktop which is affordable for work.
Standard definition NTSC TVs have a maximum resolution of 704x480, and most of that is cropped off. PAL TVs are 704x576 but at a 20% lower frequency (refresh rate). But even more than that, the picture is interlaced, and the dot pitch is large. That means you need a huge font to be able to read still text on a TV screen (while tiny text is readable on a monitor) and it's still not a present experience.
It worked with old computers because 80x24 text was a enough resolution. Text was vastly over scanned, overcoming the limitations of TVs.
With new HDTVs, CRTs are still almost always interlaced, Plasma is subject to burn-in. And even if you have an LCD HDTV, do you really want to hog your $1,000 HDTV with computer use, in order to save $100 on a monitor?
I guarantee you almost everyone on Slashdot shops at Wal-Mart,
I guarantee you a majority of the people on Slashdot do not.
There have been plenty of studies on the typical Wal-Mart shoppers. It's well-known what the average political views and socio-economic status of the large majority of Wal-mart customers are, and/.ers do not qualify.
It's not elitism at all, it's just the facts. Even politicians are using those simple facts to target specific voter demographics.
If the PC is sold out, 85% of it is because of dorks like you and me. The other 15% is people that didn't know what they were buying.
Now there's some pro-Microsoft elitism if I've ever heard-it.
I resent that incredibly racist and elitist statement.
Racist? I didn't realize there was a certain race that shopped at Wal-mart more than others.
I would be a fool to spend fifty dollars for a pair of jeans elsewhere when I can get a pair of Wranglers at Wal Mart for $12.
No, you would be a fool to buy a $12 pair of jeans anywhere. You can get some good deals at Wal-mart, but you're far more likely to be ripped-off, fooled by low prices, not realizing, until too late, that the quality is 10X worse than the product you didn't want to pay 2X as much for...
Really now, it's not as if Walmart has some magic wand, that allows them to sell the same products for a lower price than every other retailer. What you're giving up, for the insignificantly lower price, is significant. There are some cases where they'll have the same items as other stores, at loss-leader pricing, but that is a rare exception.
NO we would not. We would all have 100MB+ NETWORK access, all the way to the head office.
THEN, when it has to leave the cable co.'s lines, we'll have 128kbps INTERNET access.
The only way it could possibly work is if cable companies are required to allow anyone that wants to, to host their server at the cable co.'s HQ, thereby getting full-speed access to the lines.
Then, of course, you're back to the TV model, it just happens to be multicast over IP and harder to steal (by splicing).
Not true. "Heat exchangers" as they are called, are quite commonly used in home HVAC to bring in a certain portion of outside air.
Controls become an order of magnitude more complicated.
Such residential heat exchangers don't require any complex additional controls to get a good portion of the benefits of "outside air boost" or whatever the marketing name is for commercial HVAC systems today.
dehumidification typically required a COLDER coil than necessary for cooling alone, and then you reheat the air. It is horribly inefficient
That's also untrue. The direct, free-flowing heat exchange between hot and cold coils allows dehumidifiers to be much more energy efficient, using typically around 1/3rd as much power for the same volume of air.
As to coil temperature, obviously any temperature will work, to varying degrees of effectiveness. You'll need to provide some numbers to back up your claim. General-purpose dehumidifiers are usually just slightly modified AC units.
So to get twice the airflow you use 8x the power.
No, what you do is install a second fan.
It's a patently ridiculous claim, anyhow. If you couldn't blow-in enough cool air from outside, then you couldn't move enough air to/from the AC units.
The powersupply probably generates 25-50% of the heat from a device/server.
50% is outlandish. The number is probably 15-40%. But most importantly, you can't eliminate that loss by switching to DC. DC power supplies aren't any more efficient than AC PSUs. In fact, the two are largely identical.
And you simply can't run computers on a single voltage, or even a small number of voltages. Your CPU and other chipsets need anywhere from 0-3 volts these days. Motors, in hard drives, case fans, etc. are more efficient with the use of higher voltages. Different buses and ports require a range of different voltages. etc.
And even if you could standardize on a single voltage, you'd still need a power supply, because computers won't handle the voltage spikes and surges of a shared line, they need ultra-clean DC, so expect to pay ungodly amounts of money for ultra-massive banks of capacitors and voltage regulators, all with really no gain in efficiency.
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Wiring 12V+ to 5V+ will give you 7V, which should be more than close enough to 6.8V, as long as this isn't a massively power hungry device, you should be fine.
19V isn't so easy.
Because they have a several-decades long track record of doing exactly the opposite.
Now that's just a completely idiotic statement.
When it comes to cryptography, the algorithm is damn near always open, and the it doesn't matter how many eyes you have on it. It takes the world's top experts, studying each method for years, and making groundbreaking mathematical breakthroughs to find weaknesses in cryptography. Crypto operates at the very limits of current knowledge, and open or closed really doesn't make any difference as to whether the effects of the NSA's changes will be spotted, in the end.
Open or closed matters in specific implementations, but for very different reasons.
ask.com's categorization is absolutely useless, and borderline insane for every search I've tried. Clusty just about always gets it right.
Just like anything else, distance decreases risk.
Work as hard as you want... Nothing in the world is 100% safe, and going out of your way to put extra people in danger is just idiotic.
Maybe it'll be a couple centuries, but sooner or later, there will be an accident.
It's not "a lot" of energy, it's a very small amount. And there plenty of progress being made on high temperature superconductors, which might be practical in such circumstances.
No, it's a very real sense of security. It would be even better if it was not just a distance away, but could be put behind a mountain range, or in a deep valley, that will naturally contain any potential fallout.
"Contaminated" != killing everyone.
It certainly makes you safer than being located closer to it. Like any other contaminate, the contamination disperses more the further you are away from where it's released... With a nuclear fallout, 100 miles away could be the difference between "radioactive poisoning" and "3% increased risk of developing cancer".
We've all heard of RAMDisks before, and I currently use RAM for /tmp on several systems. But I certainly don't have a system that can even potentially handle 40GBs+ of RAM, and even if it could, the process of copying from disk to RAM on ever boot-up would be... slow, difficult, and unnecessary.
Sure it is. Keeping DRAM refreshed requires, what, about 1watt? What's more, though, I believe it costs you less energy on writes than NAND, so depending on the workload, it could be a better option.
Not sure what to say about that. 4 PC-266 DIMMs shouldn't get seriously hot. Perhaps the PCI form factor just means that you had it stuffed in a very tight spot, with little or no airflow... It's not at all difficult to do the same, and get HDDs or even Flash up to ridiculous temperatures.
Clusty is better. Results are just about the same quality as Google, and it does a great job of automatically categorizing them, so you can easily narrow down expansive subjects... eg. searching for "putty" could be a nightmare on google, depending on whether the "putty" you're looking for is the more popular one searched for.
What bothers me, though, isn't that it's not the default, but that it's a PITA to find it.
Click the "G" Google search icon. Go to "Manage Search Engines." Click "Get More Search Engines." Look around that page and realize Clusty isn't there (or Yahoo, or many others)... Click on the "mycroft" link for "More". Clusty again not listed. Type "Clusty" in the Search box. Don't click on the #1 result or you'll get an "image" search. Go down and click on #2. In just 500 short steps, you, too, can have Clusty search installed, replacing Google. Yay!
All I have to say is screw NAND. Give me some DDR RAM-based hard drive... Ridiculously fast, very low power, no possible questions about lifetime. Perhaps even the possibility of just swapping out one failed SODIMM instead of scrapping the whole drive, is quite enticing.
I've been using Flash longer than most... From wiring minuscule capacity EEPROMs into embedded circuits, to squeezing OSes down to 8MBs for firewalls. Floppies are a no-go for important systems.
They're low power, quiet, and have high speed seeking, but I don't really care. What I want most in a drive is seriously high throughput... That probably means RAM, with a battery back-up. In the mean time, HDDs keep getting faster and quieter.
It's very, very important. If it isn't highly accurate, you're just going to completely ignore what it suggests, and get no benefits from it.
And your analogy is extremely flawed. If it's a movie you would like, then it SHOULD be recommended. That's what the system is there for. The odds that recommending a random movie to someone will inadvertently expose them to something wonderful that they wouldn't have seen otherwise, is about as likely as someone winning the lottery... There's millions of movies and TV shows out there, and most of them are crap.
The US Military tends to be pretty good at physical security...
You would be mistaken. The air conditioner and the dehumidifier have to handle an equal volume of air, whether it's in a loop, or a straight-through system.
If you were cooling outside air by "20-30 degrees" and passing it through, it would cost just as much as cooling recirculated air the same amount.
Economies of scale have diminishing returns, and Walmart has practically no advantage over other major big box retailers. eg. Target. What makes Wal-mart able to sustain nominally cheaper prices is the significantly lower wages they pay their employees.
Also, economies of scale is balanced by diseconomies of scale.
I can't agree with you there. Heating water to produce steam is absolutely the least efficient method of humidifying air, and pretty uncommon, outside of perhaps hospitals and similar reasons of medical-necessity. Other types of humidifiers work quite nicely, while requiring practically no power.
Try copy/paste the string into a hex editor instead.
That's flatly incorrect. AC to DC conversion is a very simple and very efficient process.
I have no idea what you are talking about. It says what it says, exactly as I quoted it: "device/server"
What's more, no matter how you look at, it's simply NOT true.
A PSU would have to be 49% efficient or less, to output more heat itself than whatever device it is powering (Power==Heat). Meanwhile, even the very cheapest of junk PSUs are 60% efficient. I can't remember when I last saw a PSU that was any less efficient. Meanwhile, it's quite easy and inexpensive to purchase one of many PSUs that are 80% efficient or better, with a few exceeding 90%.
I'd say most do, but that's besides the point. No matter how many PSUs you have, they can't possibly be 60% efficient, and yet wasting more power than they are supplying. THAT'S WHAT THE PSU EFFICIENCY NUMBER MEANS.
No it couldn't. That 15% is not something you can get rid of in any way that I know of. It isn't caused by being AC, it's there because it costs some energy to convert from one voltage to another.
If you have some single power supply converting grid power into 48V DC, the 48V DC PSUs that convert into all the standard PC voltages will probably waste 15%+, and that's not including the losses from converting INTO 48V in the first place.
If you go to extremes, and standardize all PC hardware on a single voltage, then the losses will be in every device, and they will easily exceed 15%. Your motherboard will have to convert from a higher voltage down to whatever the CPU, chipset, and RAM needs. And you're still converting AC from the grid into low-voltage DC, which is certainly losing more than 15%, and then some more due to the high current in the electrical lines that now need to be massive. Not to mention that it still won't work, because every time a server turns on or off, the voltage will fluctuate slightly, which will potentially erase you RAM, cause your CPU to output garbage, cause your hard drive to spin down, etc., etc.
Not true in the slightest. If I've misread anything you've written, I suggest you take some time to work on your written skills.
I have NEVER said anything of the sort.
Heat exchangers were an example that refute your claims that such methods are "not used in residential," and are "an order of magnitude more complicated."
You can't seem to get your head around the fact that, though not the primary purpose, they do indeed operate along-side the AC, and for "free" happen to bring in a small percentage of cooler outside air.
My further comments had NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH HEAT EXCHANGERS. Simply, the operating principles of dehumidifiers.
Not remotely true at all. I can back up everything I've said.
You quote my statement about dehumidifiers, where I explain why dehumidifiers use far less energy than AC. Then, directly below, you start talking about passive (residential) heat exchangers instead... You think it's my fault you either can't read or quote?
In either case, you still haven't tried to back up your (factually inaccurate) assertion that dehumidifiers consume more power than AC.
If you aren't "near" either an outside wall or the roof, you're pumping some type of coolant a rather impractically long distance to get to the compressor and back.
Yes you are, but heat exchangers aren't remotely perfect, so in cool weather you get a small portion of "free" cooling.
This is a brutally stupid statement. Dehumidifiers run the outside air over the cool coils to dehumidify it, then over the hot coils to re-heat it. THAT is the heat exchange. You'd be an idiot to run it over the hot coils first, that's the exact opposite of what you need. Why you're confusing the simple operation of a dehumidifier with residential heat exchangers, I haven't a clue.
Indeed, but any amount of cooling will put the temperature below ambient and you'll get some condensation, and the very nature of imperfect conductors (radiators) means that one portion of the coil will be significantly colder, while the rest will be a much smaller temperature difference.
Yes, but we're talking about a DEHUMIDIFIER, not an air conditioner. All that heat will be added back.
You're quick to name calling, but it's pretty damn clear you've never even SEEN a dehumidifier. If you're claiming to be an HVAC designer, you'd have to be by far the single most incompetent I've ever seen.
For info about 3D under Linux, there are only a handful of places to go. NVidia, ATI, and Intel's sites contain drivers and info on their chipsets.
If yours isn't covered by those, however, there is only one other other place to go, that is DRI: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Status
In 98% of my experience, that "neighbor's kid" knows just enough to get into big trouble, and causes more problems that he solves.
That goes, not just double, but 10X, where hardware is involved. I can't count the number of times I hear about some kid replacing an optical drive in someone's computer, and fries the video, motherboard, etc., because he doesn't know shit about ICs and static electricity.
Unless it's absolute trash already, don't let "some neighbor's kid" near your computer. Would you trust him to replace/repair the brakes in your car?
Of course that doesn't go for trivial things like asking how to burn a CD, but the average person has no way of knowing what action is trivial, and what is seriously risky.
Now, there are a few exceptions to the rule, and many people on
First, a Linux is much less likely to have spontaneous problems.
Standard definition NTSC TVs have a maximum resolution of 704x480, and most of that is cropped off. PAL TVs are 704x576 but at a 20% lower frequency (refresh rate). But even more than that, the picture is interlaced, and the dot pitch is large. That means you need a huge font to be able to read still text on a TV screen (while tiny text is readable on a monitor) and it's still not a present experience.
It worked with old computers because 80x24 text was a enough resolution. Text was vastly over scanned, overcoming the limitations of TVs.
With new HDTVs, CRTs are still almost always interlaced, Plasma is subject to burn-in. And even if you have an LCD HDTV, do you really want to hog your $1,000 HDTV with computer use, in order to save $100 on a monitor?
I guarantee you a majority of the people on Slashdot do not.
There have been plenty of studies on the typical Wal-Mart shoppers. It's well-known what the average political views and socio-economic status of the large majority of Wal-mart customers are, and
It's not elitism at all, it's just the facts. Even politicians are using those simple facts to target specific voter demographics.
Now there's some pro-Microsoft elitism if I've ever heard-it.
Racist? I didn't realize there was a certain race that shopped at Wal-mart more than others.
No, you would be a fool to buy a $12 pair of jeans anywhere. You can get some good deals at Wal-mart, but you're far more likely to be ripped-off, fooled by low prices, not realizing, until too late, that the quality is 10X worse than the product you didn't want to pay 2X as much for...
Really now, it's not as if Walmart has some magic wand, that allows them to sell the same products for a lower price than every other retailer. What you're giving up, for the insignificantly lower price, is significant. There are some cases where they'll have the same items as other stores, at loss-leader pricing, but that is a rare exception.
NO we would not. We would all have 100MB+ NETWORK access, all the way to the head office.
THEN, when it has to leave the cable co.'s lines, we'll have 128kbps INTERNET access.
The only way it could possibly work is if cable companies are required to allow anyone that wants to, to host their server at the cable co.'s HQ, thereby getting full-speed access to the lines.
Then, of course, you're back to the TV model, it just happens to be multicast over IP and harder to steal (by splicing).
Not true. "Heat exchangers" as they are called, are quite commonly used in home HVAC to bring in a certain portion of outside air.
Such residential heat exchangers don't require any complex additional controls to get a good portion of the benefits of "outside air boost" or whatever the marketing name is for commercial HVAC systems today.
That's also untrue. The direct, free-flowing heat exchange between hot and cold coils allows dehumidifiers to be much more energy efficient, using typically around 1/3rd as much power for the same volume of air.
As to coil temperature, obviously any temperature will work, to varying degrees of effectiveness. You'll need to provide some numbers to back up your claim. General-purpose dehumidifiers are usually just slightly modified AC units.
No, what you do is install a second fan.
It's a patently ridiculous claim, anyhow. If you couldn't blow-in enough cool air from outside, then you couldn't move enough air to/from the AC units.
50% is outlandish. The number is probably 15-40%. But most importantly, you can't eliminate that loss by switching to DC. DC power supplies aren't any more efficient than AC PSUs. In fact, the two are largely identical.
And you simply can't run computers on a single voltage, or even a small number of voltages. Your CPU and other chipsets need anywhere from 0-3 volts these days. Motors, in hard drives, case fans, etc. are more efficient with the use of higher voltages. Different buses and ports require a range of different voltages. etc.
And even if you could standardize on a single voltage, you'd still need a power supply, because computers won't handle the voltage spikes and surges of a shared line, they need ultra-clean DC, so expect to pay ungodly amounts of money for ultra-massive banks of capacitors and voltage regulators, all with really no gain in efficiency.