And don't go spouting nonsense about how they work just as good. B.S. Got in an older Toyota the other day that still had the old refrigerant in it, and the air it throws out of this little 4 banger is WAY colder than any new car I've been in, and that is several makes and models.
That's completely idiotic.
The fact that a certain car has a more powerful A/C is because it was designed to be more powerful, NOT because of the refrigerant. No doubt your old Toyota's A/C demands far more power to operate than any of the newer ones you've compared it with.
There is a difference between refrigerants, but it's a very small one, and couldn't REMOTELY account for your magical little story there. In fact, air conditioners have been getting more and more energy efficient over the years, at the same time that refrigerants have been getting less toxic.
Oh no, no... You've got it all wrong. I've seen countless PR people on TV and they all say the same thing... It's only cheap, off-brand batteries that explode, NEVER the manufacturer's own batteries.
The news media, of course, never argues the point.
MP3 and iPod is actively damaging the quality of the music we get because recording engineers are forced to compress the dynamic range and make other sound quality compromises to enhance listenability on this crappy delivery chain.
MP3 supports far wider dynamic range than just about anything that has come before it, and the clean and powerful amplifier in iPods also makes it equally practical.
I have no idea why you're complaining that the two technologies that make dynamic range more practical, are destroying dynamic range.
To make the best sounding MP3s, download iTunesLame and start making the best-sounding 320 kb/sec MP3 that the algorhythm can make.
At bitrates of 192 and up, you'll get better sound quality with MP2. Toolame and Twolame both do a good job of encoding MP2, and more importantly, MP3 is backwards compatible, so any MP3 decoder will play the MP2 files just fine.
if you want audiophile-quality playback and without 'missing' anything in the music assuming you've purchased the CD, then you need to be listening to that music on a stereo system of no less than $10,000 (U.S.) purchased from a professional sound shop.
That's just a bunch of pseudo audiophile dogma, and it's pure crap. Something along the lines of superstition.
For $100 you can get an amplifier with 0.02% THD, which is about as good as you can get, and for another $100 a pair of very good full range speakers.
You can even go cheaper... Skip the amp, and plug a $50 pair of full-sized headphones (eg. Senheiser/Aiwa) directly into the preamp/line-out of a decent quality CD player, or very good sound card (eg. $25 SB Live).
Go for the British model. Announce elections, campaign 5 weeks, over and done with.
That might work if the US wasn't 40X larger than Britain.
Let's see. 5 weeks times 40 is 200 weeks, or nearly 4 years... So basically CONSTANT campaigning for presidential elections. Hmm... Sounds like the US has the better system.
If the whole planet switched to hydrogen, what would be the overall effect of running a billion humidifiers on our roads?
Wet roads.
Would Arizona suddenly become as humid as Florida?
Not the remotest chance.
Urban areas have long faced higher levels of humidity than is natural, thanks to human use of water. However, even with all the people with all the sprinklers spraying all the water, on all the lawns... it only raises the humidity a very small amount. A few million fuel cell vehicles couldn't hope to compete.
Fuel cells drip a little water, but they aren't constantly blowing out large volumes of gas, similar to current car exhaust, somewhat like a humidifier. Even millions of cars, spitting out a few drips of water constantly, can't compete with a few people watering their lawns. It really wouldn't make a noticeable difference. Maybe you'll see a few more plants growing on the roadside.
The Geode development boards have been around for many years, are a bit smaller than this thing, are lower power, and can include CPUs that will absolutely run rings around the 1GHz Via C7, while running fanless.
To this day, I don't see why VIA's CPUs have gotten so popular in the small space. There have always been many other CPUs from both Intel and AMD that can outperform them, with much lower power requirements.
not. Those economies that respect and enforce rights, thrive. Those that do not, stagnate. It happens over and over, with country after country.
The USSR had quite a thriving economy in the beginning.
I suggest you look at Africa for examples of both sides. No doubt there are plenty of countries that enforce rights, but remain dirt poor; as well as nations who have socialist leadership, and yet are relatively prosperous.
So, by the same token, murder is no worse than someone falling off a ladder.
What the hell!? That isn't "by the same token" at all, that's completely out of left field.
Murder is purely a value judgment, and to the natural world, the effect is the same, on more dead body to dispose of. Dying of murder is no better or worse than dying in an accident. It certainly has nothing at all to do with what he's talking about... which is whether some changes (natural or not) will be beneficial or not.
So, we could potentially have a solar system filled with seeder asteroids (meteoroids?) from massive impacts with Earth
I can't imagine any possible way that could happen. The Earth has a lot of gravity, and a lot of atmosphere. It would be pretty amazing if even rocks were able to escape earth, let alone ice (extremely likely to melt several times over in the process).
It is believed a scenario like that caused the moon to form, but by all accounts that predates life on this planet, we have no evidence of any similarly large impact any time since then (and that kind of catastrophe should be easy to find), and more to the point, the existence of the moon suggests even with a world-killing asteroid impact, the material still didn't escape orbit, and will eventually come crashing back down.
As for other planets... Maybe the odds are slightly better, but a planet has to be reasonably large to support an atmosphere, and both make it very hard to send anything out of orbit.
Unfortunately, real estate space is getting higher day by day.
Fortunately, the speed of light is very fast. Even in areas with the highest priced real estate around, it's just a few dozen miles (or a couple milliseconds delay) to get to the middle of nowhere, where the same land is dirt cheap.
and any physical space extension requires quite some investment (such as for cooling, you'd need more coolers to cover more space).
If you have an empty building, you don't need a cooler (more accurately, a very very tiny one would do). The size of the cooler you need is tied directly to the power consumption of equipment inside the building.
Companies do often buy a single large cooler, generator, UPS, etc. for their needs, but IMHO that's a bad idea as well. Buying smaller, independent systems is much better for reliability (fail-over) only slightly more expensive (though you get more than that back in savings when you find you need to expand), and would correspond exactly with my pricing model.
Somebody can simply do that using an Excel sheet and the customer will know that his server costs $1000/year.
You have an interesting point at least. It is simpler billing, but charging by size is the worst possible thing you can do. It has lead to many problems over time, a few of which I've already mentioned.
A thought experiment: What if you were to price based purely on number of servers, using average server size? What if you were to price based on the WEIGHT of the server instead of U size? What if you base the cost on power consumption, and average the U size instead? etc.
People good with numbers will usually take the usable floor space of a data center and put a watts per square foot estimate with it based on average or projected power consumption.
Of course the (average) price of electricity is figured into it. That is the PROBLEM.
It is a (self-perpetuating) prisoner's dilemma. The more power consumption you can squeeze into the smallest space, the better of a deal you get. Since it's all averaged out, those using more power than average are getting subsidized by those who do not. It's basically stupid to invest in power-saving tech, since your hosting bill won't be any cheaper. However, this has gradually, yet significantly, raises hosting costs for all.
It's a terrible system, that has single-handedly led to the wholly unnatural market for cramped and massively hot 1U servers.
I've long been dumbfounded by the way datacenters charge. They seemingly all charge a hell of a lot for physical space, and then almost completely ignore power requirements. This seems incredibly strange, since datacenter operating costs are pretty much tied directly to power consumption (monthly electricity fees, UPSes, electrical generators, cooling, etc.), and only incidentally to physical space.
Further, the cost to handle each extra watt is multiplied thanks to cooling, power back-up, wiring, etc., while increasing the physical size of the building, constructing more datacenters, etc. is just a flat (linear) cost, and mostly just a one-time expenditure at that.
This strange arrangement is what has led us here. It's not the natural evolution of technology to cram as much power consumption into as tiny a box as possible. It's an artificial need, created by the idiotic distribution of fees common to datacenters.
If a few large datacenters declared their fees as a small $$$ value for each unit of space, and additionally a few dollars, per watt of power consumption, you'd see the problem naturally fix itself, through normal economic forces. As soon as watts are the defining factor, companies won't pay more for a cramped 1U server rather than an (inexpensive) 2U or 3U server. You will also see companies happy to pay more for lower-powered server hardware, as having them directly bear the energy cost will make buying efficient servers a significant savings to them.
IMHO 90% of the config tasks are easier with IIS for a non-expert, but 5% are MUCH harder, and the remaining 5% you just can't do at all. Period.
I think it's very important to add that those 90% of tasks you can perform with IIS, though possible, are not at all fast or easy to do, for amateur or expert. It takes a lot of fumbling around with menus that are in no particular order, with sub-sub-sub options, and nonsensical arbitrary style (interface) changes for some options.
"A stitch in time" has never been more appropriate than when applied to Microsoft software.
You're obviously joking, but that's not necessarily wrong.
There's two things about life we absolutely don't have the slightest clue about...
One is how easy it is to create life from abiotic sources. Two is how easy it is for life to evolve sentience.
If each of those is one in a trillion, even on perfectly habitable planets, then it's possible it only ever happened once in the history of the universe... Or at least, we may have been the only ones, YET. We simply GUESS the odds are better, even though we only have ourselves as examples, and so really can't even make an educated guess.
In the old days, scientists like Darwin believed life was just something that regularly bubbled up from the bottom of the ocean, spontaneously created from rotting meat, and such. Now we know it isn't anywhere that easy, but don't honestly know HOW hard (or easy) it really is.
Sentience is even more tricky. We barely know how to quantify it. We can't even imagine what each mechanism causes it in us. The assumption is that it just takes a big brain, and a few centuries, but of course we don't know enough to say with any certainty. If not for a big meteor with the perfect timing, we could all be big stupid cold-blooded lizards.
Now though, it looks like there may soon be a large world market for hydrogen, if fuel cells and other hydrogen consuming automotive engines take off. Iceland has all the ingredients to produce it - seawater, and abundant electricity.
Iceland has the ingredients. However, the people who live there aren't too happy about factories being built over every geothermal vent in sight. They recently put a stop to Alcoa's expansion plans for that very reason.
Here in the US, we have quite a bit of geothermal vents as well. Only problem is that people aren't going to be too happy when you propose your plan to plow Yellowstone under, and build a hydrogen plant on top of Old Faithful.
First, the report by Dan Rather didn't demonstrate bias at all. Whether Bush got out of his duty or not, doesn't really reflect on one's political views, or affect others'.
Second, the fact that Dan Rather was publicly humiliated and quickly and summarily kicked out of CBS demonstrates very clearly that his theoretical bias wasn't at all shared by CBS News.
Did you by any chance see the "in-depth" report on black rifles a couple weeks ago?
Nope. Can you provide a link to the story online, or perhaps just name the network and perhaps something more substantial about it (than 'color' 'weapon')?
I'd be willing to bet if he had the same sort of documentation about something Kerry did he would have had his staff dig into it to prove it was false or ignored it.
The fact that you'd bet that shows you have a very serious bias. I don't have any reason at all to believe, and in fact believe the exact opposite. He rushed to get the story on Bush out, and would similarly rushed to get a story on Kerry out. Again, the fact he got fired for it doesn't support your theory that CBS News is biased.
No matter how hard someone tries when covering news there will be a personal bias, then you tend to get like minded people working at an organization.
Not true at all. It's actually quite easy to put together an unbiased newsroom. Your theory of how it works, again, is not based in fact at all. And personal bias only rarely enters into mainstream news reporting, as they don't do opinion pieces, debates, etc., etc. There is still room for some bias, but very little, and the facts do not support the claim that there is actually any there, with the major news outlets.
All of these are easily left-leaning news outlets,
It's sad, very sad, that the right-wing talking points and propaganda has been so successful that people are tricked into believing absolutely unbiased (and fact-based) news organizations are somehow left-leaning.
By all means, take the big 3 networks CBS, NBC, ABC, and try to list ANYTHING they've done that is liberally biased (as opposed to factually based).
The fact that you think that facts, unbiased new, and simple reality are liberal, says a lot about conservatives.
I'm not talking about a low-quality, 2 minute clip shot by a 13 year old, replicating the mentos+coke video. Youtube is an interesting experiment, but at least it's current incarnation is little more than a fad.
Hmmm... How many decades has "America's Funniest Home Videos" been on the air now?
I'm actually talking about a high quality video feed produced by professionals that would play on my IP-TV capable television.
(we all know there's people that download video, but it's about at the level that trading pictures/text was before HTTP was invented, mostly for techno-nerds).
Slashdot Mirror
That's completely idiotic.
The fact that a certain car has a more powerful A/C is because it was designed to be more powerful, NOT because of the refrigerant. No doubt your old Toyota's A/C demands far more power to operate than any of the newer ones you've compared it with.
There is a difference between refrigerants, but it's a very small one, and couldn't REMOTELY account for your magical little story there. In fact, air conditioners have been getting more and more energy efficient over the years, at the same time that refrigerants have been getting less toxic.
Oh no, no... You've got it all wrong. I've seen countless PR people on TV and they all say the same thing... It's only cheap, off-brand batteries that explode, NEVER the manufacturer's own batteries.
The news media, of course, never argues the point.
Where the hell do you shop, that buying a gallon of milk is $3501+?
MP3 supports far wider dynamic range than just about anything that has come before it, and the clean and powerful amplifier in iPods also makes it equally practical.
I have no idea why you're complaining that the two technologies that make dynamic range more practical, are destroying dynamic range.
At bitrates of 192 and up, you'll get better sound quality with MP2. Toolame and Twolame both do a good job of encoding MP2, and more importantly, MP3 is backwards compatible, so any MP3 decoder will play the MP2 files just fine.
That's just a bunch of pseudo audiophile dogma, and it's pure crap. Something along the lines of superstition.
For $100 you can get an amplifier with 0.02% THD, which is about as good as you can get, and for another $100 a pair of very good full range speakers.
You can even go cheaper... Skip the amp, and plug a $50 pair of full-sized headphones (eg. Senheiser/Aiwa) directly into the preamp/line-out of a decent quality CD player, or very good sound card (eg. $25 SB Live).
Your $10,000 option won't do any better...
That might work if the US wasn't 40X larger than Britain.
Let's see. 5 weeks times 40 is 200 weeks, or nearly 4 years... So basically CONSTANT campaigning for presidential elections. Hmm... Sounds like the US has the better system.
Wet roads.
Not the remotest chance.
Urban areas have long faced higher levels of humidity than is natural, thanks to human use of water. However, even with all the people with all the sprinklers spraying all the water, on all the lawns... it only raises the humidity a very small amount. A few million fuel cell vehicles couldn't hope to compete.
Fuel cells drip a little water, but they aren't constantly blowing out large volumes of gas, similar to current car exhaust, somewhat like a humidifier. Even millions of cars, spitting out a few drips of water constantly, can't compete with a few people watering their lawns. It really wouldn't make a noticeable difference. Maybe you'll see a few more plants growing on the roadside.
The Geode development boards have been around for many years, are a bit smaller than this thing, are lower power, and can include CPUs that will absolutely run rings around the 1GHz Via C7, while running fanless.
To this day, I don't see why VIA's CPUs have gotten so popular in the small space. There have always been many other CPUs from both Intel and AMD that can outperform them, with much lower power requirements.
The USSR had quite a thriving economy in the beginning.
I suggest you look at Africa for examples of both sides. No doubt there are plenty of countries that enforce rights, but remain dirt poor; as well as nations who have socialist leadership, and yet are relatively prosperous.
What the hell!? That isn't "by the same token" at all, that's completely out of left field.
Murder is purely a value judgment, and to the natural world, the effect is the same, on more dead body to dispose of. Dying of murder is no better or worse than dying in an accident. It certainly has nothing at all to do with what he's talking about... which is whether some changes (natural or not) will be beneficial or not.
I can't imagine any possible way that could happen. The Earth has a lot of gravity, and a lot of atmosphere. It would be pretty amazing if even rocks were able to escape earth, let alone ice (extremely likely to melt several times over in the process).
It is believed a scenario like that caused the moon to form, but by all accounts that predates life on this planet, we have no evidence of any similarly large impact any time since then (and that kind of catastrophe should be easy to find), and more to the point, the existence of the moon suggests even with a world-killing asteroid impact, the material still didn't escape orbit, and will eventually come crashing back down.
As for other planets... Maybe the odds are slightly better, but a planet has to be reasonably large to support an atmosphere, and both make it very hard to send anything out of orbit.
Fortunately, the speed of light is very fast. Even in areas with the highest priced real estate around, it's just a few dozen miles (or a couple milliseconds delay) to get to the middle of nowhere, where the same land is dirt cheap.
If you have an empty building, you don't need a cooler (more accurately, a very very tiny one would do). The size of the cooler you need is tied directly to the power consumption of equipment inside the building.
Companies do often buy a single large cooler, generator, UPS, etc. for their needs, but IMHO that's a bad idea as well. Buying smaller, independent systems is much better for reliability (fail-over) only slightly more expensive (though you get more than that back in savings when you find you need to expand), and would correspond exactly with my pricing model.
You have an interesting point at least. It is simpler billing, but charging by size is the worst possible thing you can do. It has lead to many problems over time, a few of which I've already mentioned.
A thought experiment:
What if you were to price based purely on number of servers, using average server size?
What if you were to price based on the WEIGHT of the server instead of U size?
What if you base the cost on power consumption, and average the U size instead?
etc.
I can't see any reason why not. An induction coil costs a few cents, and you could easily feed a rack worth into a single cheap meter.
But more to the point, I really wasn't suggesting live monitoring. Just have them select from a range of power levels and charge them as appropriate.
Of course the (average) price of electricity is figured into it. That is the PROBLEM.
It is a (self-perpetuating) prisoner's dilemma. The more power consumption you can squeeze into the smallest space, the better of a deal you get. Since it's all averaged out, those using more power than average are getting subsidized by those who do not. It's basically stupid to invest in power-saving tech, since your hosting bill won't be any cheaper. However, this has gradually, yet significantly, raises hosting costs for all.
It's a terrible system, that has single-handedly led to the wholly unnatural market for cramped and massively hot 1U servers.
I've long been dumbfounded by the way datacenters charge. They seemingly all charge a hell of a lot for physical space, and then almost completely ignore power requirements. This seems incredibly strange, since datacenter operating costs are pretty much tied directly to power consumption (monthly electricity fees, UPSes, electrical generators, cooling, etc.), and only incidentally to physical space.
Further, the cost to handle each extra watt is multiplied thanks to cooling, power back-up, wiring, etc., while increasing the physical size of the building, constructing more datacenters, etc. is just a flat (linear) cost, and mostly just a one-time expenditure at that.
This strange arrangement is what has led us here. It's not the natural evolution of technology to cram as much power consumption into as tiny a box as possible. It's an artificial need, created by the idiotic distribution of fees common to datacenters.
If a few large datacenters declared their fees as a small $$$ value for each unit of space, and additionally a few dollars, per watt of power consumption, you'd see the problem naturally fix itself, through normal economic forces. As soon as watts are the defining factor, companies won't pay more for a cramped 1U server rather than an (inexpensive) 2U or 3U server. You will also see companies happy to pay more for lower-powered server hardware, as having them directly bear the energy cost will make buying efficient servers a significant savings to them.
I think it's very important to add that those 90% of tasks you can perform with IIS, though possible, are not at all fast or easy to do, for amateur or expert. It takes a lot of fumbling around with menus that are in no particular order, with sub-sub-sub options, and nonsensical arbitrary style (interface) changes for some options.
"A stitch in time" has never been more appropriate than when applied to Microsoft software.
You're obviously joking, but that's not necessarily wrong.
There's two things about life we absolutely don't have the slightest clue about...
One is how easy it is to create life from abiotic sources.
Two is how easy it is for life to evolve sentience.
If each of those is one in a trillion, even on perfectly habitable planets, then it's possible it only ever happened once in the history of the universe... Or at least, we may have been the only ones, YET. We simply GUESS the odds are better, even though we only have ourselves as examples, and so really can't even make an educated guess.
In the old days, scientists like Darwin believed life was just something that regularly bubbled up from the bottom of the ocean, spontaneously created from rotting meat, and such. Now we know it isn't anywhere that easy, but don't honestly know HOW hard (or easy) it really is.
Sentience is even more tricky. We barely know how to quantify it. We can't even imagine what each mechanism causes it in us. The assumption is that it just takes a big brain, and a few centuries, but of course we don't know enough to say with any certainty. If not for a big meteor with the perfect timing, we could all be big stupid cold-blooded lizards.
Iceland has the ingredients. However, the people who live there aren't too happy about factories being built over every geothermal vent in sight. They recently put a stop to Alcoa's expansion plans for that very reason.
Here in the US, we have quite a bit of geothermal vents as well. Only problem is that people aren't going to be too happy when you propose your plan to plow Yellowstone under, and build a hydrogen plant on top of Old Faithful.
Spelling is hard.
Quite the opposite.
First, the report by Dan Rather didn't demonstrate bias at all. Whether Bush got out of his duty or not, doesn't really reflect on one's political views, or affect others'.
Second, the fact that Dan Rather was publicly humiliated and quickly and summarily kicked out of CBS demonstrates very clearly that his theoretical bias wasn't at all shared by CBS News.
Nope. Can you provide a link to the story online, or perhaps just name the network and perhaps something more substantial about it (than 'color' 'weapon')?
The fact that you'd bet that shows you have a very serious bias. I don't have any reason at all to believe, and in fact believe the exact opposite. He rushed to get the story on Bush out, and would similarly rushed to get a story on Kerry out. Again, the fact he got fired for it doesn't support your theory that CBS News is biased.
Not true at all. It's actually quite easy to put together an unbiased newsroom. Your theory of how it works, again, is not based in fact at all. And personal bias only rarely enters into mainstream news reporting, as they don't do opinion pieces, debates, etc., etc. There is still room for some bias, but very little, and the facts do not support the claim that there is actually any there, with the major news outlets.
It's sad, very sad, that the right-wing talking points and propaganda has been so successful that people are tricked into believing absolutely unbiased (and fact-based) news organizations are somehow left-leaning.
By all means, take the big 3 networks CBS, NBC, ABC, and try to list ANYTHING they've done that is liberally biased (as opposed to factually based).
The fact that you think that facts, unbiased new, and simple reality are liberal, says a lot about conservatives.
Hmmm... How many decades has "America's Funniest Home Videos" been on the air now?
Oh, so you mean like...
Akimbo: http://www.akimbo.com/
Democracy Player (Miro): http://www.getmiro.com/
JOOST: http://www.joost.com/
Zatoo: http://zattoo.com/
BBC iPlayer
Nullsoft/NSV TV
Yes, everyone on YouTube is a techno-nerd.