In order to be efficient you're going to need a variety of voltages from which others can be derived.
That's currently the case, but there's really no reason it needs to be that way. Manufacturers just use the intermediate voltages, because they are there.
You could just as easily have computers on a single-voltage standard (either 12 or 5 V) and be no less efficient than current designs. Current motherboards already step-down PSU voltages to exactly what the CPUs need (Vcore), and there's really no way around that one.
Speaking of, whatever happened to the push for DC datacenters?
Switching (A/C) power supplies went from 60 to 80+ percent efficiency, eliminating the small power savings benefits of DC datacenters... All without requiring massive rewiring.
Am I the only Linux user left that remembers when we had no graphic card (Zero, Zilch, Nada) support or recognition?
Actually, you probably just have a bad memory...
Seems that, in the past couple years, everyone on earth has forgotten that there used-to be videocard manufacturers other than just ATI and NVidia...
Can you say "3dfx" ? And "Matrox" ?
Not that it's unique to the graphics business... I talk about my Quantum hard drives, and people stare at me with utter confusion, the same way my dog does (yeah, she could never understand how to terminate a SCSI chain)...
I loved Futurama, but I loved Simpsons and Family Guy as well...
Season 13, Simpsons jumped the shark, and turned into pointless, mindless, painfully un-funny crap, and Groening has done interview after interview saying how he thinks the show is better than even now, even though the ratings have dropped.
Family Guy was hilarious originally, but after Fox brought it back, there hasn't been one good episode. It's really a rip-off, by someone who didn't understand why the original was funny to begin with.
Now we're combining the destructive powers of Fox, and Groening, into a show that had already really dropped off at the end of its run, and ceased to be funny for most of the final season.
I can't see how this could possibly turn out good in any way.
However, ethanol burns more completely than does bio/diesel or gasoline, more energy efficiently in the total process (including manufacturing the fuel).
I don't believe that for a second. Diesel engines get about twice the power out of equivalent amounts of fuel as gasoline engines, and biodiesel (or rather, straight vegetable oil) is extremely easy to produce, with very little power required for extraction.
Many fewer cars use diesel to replace with biodiesel than gasoline to replace with ethanol.
I'd say that has a hell of a lot to do with the fact that ethanol is currently mandated as an additive in gasoline, while biodiesel is not (yet).
The delivery infrastructure for diesel is also much less deployed.
That's a very US-centric view of things... Diesel vehicles are much more popular in most of Europe. And frankly, I don't believe that's a fair assessment even in the USA. Thanks to commercial trucks, home heating oil, generators, and the like, diesel is everywhere. I imagine it comes close to gasoline in the volume used.
Fuelcells are already operating at 60% energy efficiency,
So are turbines. But that doesn't make it practical to install in vehicles. You can get all kinds of efficiencies in the lab, which you can't possibly hope for in real use.
It will probably take a century before the price of fuel cells comes down to the price of car engines, and the government is funding everything BUT the R&D needed. You can build multi-million-dollar prototypes all you want, but it's not going to help improve the underlying tech.
we need net carbon decrease from our current overall pollution production.
It's a nice theory, but won't possibly work out. Sequestering carbon in ethanol and biodiesel would likely keep it out of the atmosphere for longer periods of time, than leaving it in unused plant biomass, which will likely be allowed to decay and release it's carbon rather quickly, anyhow. Nobody is going to maintain a pile of sequestered carbon. It's going to go somewhere, and quickly.
You're cherry-picking facts, and taking things out of context.
Why should we make something that looks a lot like diesel when we can make ethanol?
Because diesel engines don't run too well on ethanol.
Ethanol is close to the energy content of gasoline.
No. Ethanol is significantly lower than gasoline. Plus, gasoline has significantly lower energy content than diesel to begin with, and that extends to biodiesel as well.
Diesel doesn't burn in fuelcells - it needs more complex, pressurized, much less efficient mechanical parts.
Fuel cells are a scam for government subsidy money anyhow.
And those "less efficient mechanical parts" are mature technologies that we have working right now. Not something that might work several decades down the line.
Ethanol is much less toxic and more easily handled than gasoline or diesel.
But this isn't going to be gasoline or diesel. Biodiesel is even less toxic and far more easily handled than ethanol.
Sure, gasoline goes right into existing cars. But so does high-concentration ethanol/gasoline mixtures.
And so does biodiesel.
And the greenhouse gas pollution we'll pump into the atmosphere will be much less:
The greenhouse gas pollution will be much lower with biodiesel from cellulose than it would be growing crops just for ethanol.
If anything, we should be looking at lower-energy/impact production techniques for methanol, which has 1/2 the carbon of every ethanol molecule to pump into the atmosphere as pollution.
First off, methanol is extremely toxic, which was one of your flag-waving points just a few lines up. What happened? Suddenly you don't care, since it doesn't suit your argument?
Second, the carbon content is utterly irrelevant. Anything produced from plants will be 100% carbon neutral, no matter how much carbon it has in it.
Well, what about an engine that can run on many flammable liquid fuels? (Certainly not all, but a lot.) [...] Diesel FTW.
Diesel, like most heat engines, CAN run on various different flammable liquids, but with any fuel slightly different from the one it was designed for, effeciency is completely shot, and you need to retool it for the new fuel.
I know everyone is drawn to filling the shortfall caused by dwindling petroleum supplies is causing something of a gold rush in ethanol and bio-diesel, but why go through the effort to convert it at all?
Sugar is fuel. In fact, any food with any number of calories is fuel. If it's so cheap and easy to make large volumes of sugar to convert to other fuels, and run vehicles on, then it would be easier, more efficient, and more profitable to just start designing cars/engines that run on pure sugar, instead of gas/diesel to begin with.
Perhaps we need to switch back to boilers, so that our cars can run on anything flamable that we can shovel into the hopper. We'd have some real competition, and I bet straight (dried) cellulose (and things like home tree trimmings) would win out.
I hear all these Windows people complaining about how a PC only lasts a couple of years before you have to buy a new one;
Did you maybe hear that more than 5 years ago, when it really was more or less true?
Or are you perhaps surrounded by idiots who don't know how to reinstall Windows, and just buy a new one when they finally get overwhelmed by the unchecked viruses and spyware?
For the record, my PPro from 1996 is going strong as a firewall/router. My DVR box is a 4+ year-old AthlonXP 2000+. And my desktop machine is a 1.2GHz Athlon, with PC-133 RAM, and a 40GB HDD...
Older systems are great. My machines, that were light on memory even for their time, now all have over 1GB each. When old systems start dying, or just no longer being useful, parts are damn-near free. That applies to most everything.
Today, you can put together a low-end tower for $100 with all-new parts.
Had the same problem, fixing a friend's HP... Failed just over a year (southbridge chip got up to several hundred degrees, just a few seconds after power-on). Only $60 for a mobo, so I swapped it.
XP wouldn't boot on the new board, because of the different IDE controller... For some reason, Microsoft has remained intentionally idiotic on the issue for decades now. If you have a BartPE disc, and the skill to do some tricky registry editing, it is fixable: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216382&cid=175 65792
After that, everything was fine, EXCEPT for WGA. Went through the telephone spiel, only to find it calling me a pirate. Since the software is 100% legal I felt no compunction at all in using some grey-market tools to patch winlogon.exe (see http://astalavista.box.sk/ -- NSFW) , and everything has worked 100% perfectly from there on.
DRM is tolerable only when it doesn't get it your way, and doesn't compromise your privacy. WGA fails completely on both counts.
That little event led me to start learning about customizing Windows 2000 install CDs, because I realize I'm going to be using that version of Windows for a very LONG time into the future, so better make the best of it.
All you Democrats who complain about the administration's wiretapping, warrantless searches, and other invasions of our privacy, what do you think of this?
He's a blowhard going for publicity early, before his idiotic idea gets shot down, with prejudice, in the state assembly.
Just because they're democrats, doesn't stop them from being politicians.
this is something you simply have to expect when you go on these solo sailing expeditions. Sure, there's the allure of "one man against the sea," but the sea often wins
Being solo only nominally increases the risk.
If your boat sinks, having someone else there isn't going to increase your chances. Plenty of boats disappear without a trace, with whole families on-board.
It's only in the event of conditions that instantly and completely debilitate just one person (heart attack, falling overboard, etc.) where being solo could possibly hurt... And even then, not that much.
Of course, this could apply equally well to driving alone vs. carpooling... There just isn't as much mystery, or press when someone driving alone, dies.
Installation isn't necessary to begin with. Any fool can make one monolitic binary that can be run from anywhere.
Apps need to access centralised data that cannot be stored locally
Even if it can't be stored locally, that's no reason to give it a web interface. The standard network tools come to mind (dig, traceroute, etc).
Going to the web removes all of that.
Not really. WindizUpdate crashes on me all the time. Plus, something like realplayer is precisely the kind of thing which can't be replicated.
Not to mention that while AJAX apps can't crash, your web browser certainly can, with even worse consequences (all eggs in one basket).
Do you really want to install amazon to buy books? What if you find a better deal at barnesandnoble?
I would be ecstatic if there was a desktop program replacement for online shopping. Some program which could query Amazon.com, Bn.com, and any other that uses the standard format, and present the content output in a standard way, as selected by the user, not spread all over the page, different for every site, as is the current status with web pages.
WOuldn't it be nice if there was a standard way to create interfaces to interact with these remote services? Well, now your just recreating HTML/ Javascript.
You might as well say C++ or Xlib... A language is not an interface. It gives you freedom to create any random collection of elements you want, with no constraints on consistency, layout, configurability, etc.
BEST VIEWED IN NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR AT 800x600
No, but they can be.
Please, show me ONE. ALL of them I've seen have been utterly pointless and unnecessary. Something like Gmail was a step-up from other web mail interfaces (not even a big step IMHO), but it's still not even near par with standard desktop e-mail programs.
Someone else posted that if "The Hobbit" is a missing link, then we just have to find the next missing link. Good call. That's exactly what many mainstream evangelicals will claim. They will say "that's nice. You did all your laboratory hoopajoob and said that he's similar, but how do you know he evolved into us? Well, prove it by finding the missing link between him and us."
The only thing worse than irrational bible-thumping christians, is ignorant, know-it-all atheists.
All evidence indicates "he" didn't evolve "into us". If anything, it was the opposite. Touting this as proof, and complaining about "bible thumpers" makes you look incredibly stupid.
In other words, get your facts strait before you get up on your soapbox and start criticizing others.
Windows: The most and best selection OS/X: Far less than Windows, but still serviceable Linux: The least selection and most crude.
Linux has the most and best software selection, BY FAR. Some of it can be flaky and crude, but even the worst is better than the loads of freeware/shareware crap available for Windows.
The majority of software you can get on Windows, is TO FIX WINDOWS. Linux users don't go around looking for antivirus programs, tools to fix this and that registry problem, tools to remove some bit of spyware. etc.
What's more, it's infinitely easier to find appropriate software. A great deal of it comes with the base systems of most distros, and a great deal more is very easily accessible through whatever package management interface they use.
Windows may have more brand name commercial programs, but that doesn't mean they are any better than the free programs out there.
Tell me, if Windows has so much great software, why are so many Windows users using Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and the like?
First, its the dumb hicks out in the boonies [...], then its the rich and selfish
It's not mutually exclusive at all.
You have the rich, soul-less business-men running the thing, who get their votes by pandering to the not-too-bright southerners, who are won over by (hypocritical) posturing on right-wing religious issues.
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Where do YOU think the electricity is going, if not being converted into heat? It can't just disappear.
Are the wires getting HEAVIER from holding all that wasted electricity?
You could just as easily have computers on a single-voltage standard (either 12 or 5 V) and be no less efficient than current designs. Current motherboards already step-down PSU voltages to exactly what the CPUs need (Vcore), and there's really no way around that one.
Seems that, in the past couple years, everyone on earth has forgotten that there used-to be videocard manufacturers other than just ATI and NVidia...
Can you say "3dfx" ? And "Matrox" ?
Not that it's unique to the graphics business... I talk about my Quantum hard drives, and people stare at me with utter confusion, the same way my dog does (yeah, she could never understand how to terminate a SCSI chain)...
I loved Futurama, but I loved Simpsons and Family Guy as well...
Season 13, Simpsons jumped the shark, and turned into pointless, mindless, painfully un-funny crap, and Groening has done interview after interview saying how he thinks the show is better than even now, even though the ratings have dropped.
Family Guy was hilarious originally, but after Fox brought it back, there hasn't been one good episode. It's really a rip-off, by someone who didn't understand why the original was funny to begin with.
Now we're combining the destructive powers of Fox, and Groening, into a show that had already really dropped off at the end of its run, and ceased to be funny for most of the final season.
I can't see how this could possibly turn out good in any way.
Specs are nice, but like anything else, it's often cheaper for suppliers to over-promise, and take the gamble on having to pay up later... Where's DEC when you need them?
It will probably take a century before the price of fuel cells comes down to the price of car engines, and the government is funding everything BUT the R&D needed. You can build multi-million-dollar prototypes all you want, but it's not going to help improve the underlying tech. It's a nice theory, but won't possibly work out. Sequestering carbon in ethanol and biodiesel would likely keep it out of the atmosphere for longer periods of time, than leaving it in unused plant biomass, which will likely be allowed to decay and release it's carbon rather quickly, anyhow. Nobody is going to maintain a pile of sequestered carbon. It's going to go somewhere, and quickly.
And those "less efficient mechanical parts" are mature technologies that we have working right now. Not something that might work several decades down the line. But this isn't going to be gasoline or diesel. Biodiesel is even less toxic and far more easily handled than ethanol. And so does biodiesel. The greenhouse gas pollution will be much lower with biodiesel from cellulose than it would be growing crops just for ethanol. First off, methanol is extremely toxic, which was one of your flag-waving points just a few lines up. What happened? Suddenly you don't care, since it doesn't suit your argument?
Second, the carbon content is utterly irrelevant. Anything produced from plants will be 100% carbon neutral, no matter how much carbon it has in it.
I know everyone is drawn to filling the shortfall caused by dwindling petroleum supplies is causing something of a gold rush in ethanol and bio-diesel, but why go through the effort to convert it at all?
Sugar is fuel. In fact, any food with any number of calories is fuel. If it's so cheap and easy to make large volumes of sugar to convert to other fuels, and run vehicles on, then it would be easier, more efficient, and more profitable to just start designing cars/engines that run on pure sugar, instead of gas/diesel to begin with.
Perhaps we need to switch back to boilers, so that our cars can run on anything flamable that we can shovel into the hopper. We'd have some real competition, and I bet straight (dried) cellulose (and things like home tree trimmings) would win out.
Or are you perhaps surrounded by idiots who don't know how to reinstall Windows, and just buy a new one when they finally get overwhelmed by the unchecked viruses and spyware?
For the record, my PPro from 1996 is going strong as a firewall/router. My DVR box is a 4+ year-old AthlonXP 2000+. And my desktop machine is a 1.2GHz Athlon, with PC-133 RAM, and a 40GB HDD...
Older systems are great. My machines, that were light on memory even for their time, now all have over 1GB each. When old systems start dying, or just no longer being useful, parts are damn-near free. That applies to most everything.
Today, you can put together a low-end tower for $100 with all-new parts.
Had the same problem, fixing a friend's HP... Failed just over a year (southbridge chip got up to several hundred degrees, just a few seconds after power-on). Only $60 for a mobo, so I swapped it.
5 65792
XP wouldn't boot on the new board, because of the different IDE controller... For some reason, Microsoft has remained intentionally idiotic on the issue for decades now. If you have a BartPE disc, and the skill to do some tricky registry editing, it is fixable: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216382&cid=17
After that, everything was fine, EXCEPT for WGA. Went through the telephone spiel, only to find it calling me a pirate. Since the software is 100% legal I felt no compunction at all in using some grey-market tools to patch winlogon.exe (see http://astalavista.box.sk/ -- NSFW) , and everything has worked 100% perfectly from there on.
DRM is tolerable only when it doesn't get it your way, and doesn't compromise your privacy. WGA fails completely on both counts.
That little event led me to start learning about customizing Windows 2000 install CDs, because I realize I'm going to be using that version of Windows for a very LONG time into the future, so better make the best of it.
Just because they're democrats, doesn't stop them from being politicians.
If your boat sinks, having someone else there isn't going to increase your chances. Plenty of boats disappear without a trace, with whole families on-board.
It's only in the event of conditions that instantly and completely debilitate just one person (heart attack, falling overboard, etc.) where being solo could possibly hurt... And even then, not that much.
Of course, this could apply equally well to driving alone vs. carpooling... There just isn't as much mystery, or press when someone driving alone, dies.
You can have some action, where each person did something minor, but the end result is something very bad...
When a mob kills someone, who do you want to take the blame?
Not to mention that while AJAX apps can't crash, your web browser certainly can, with even worse consequences (all eggs in one basket). I would be ecstatic if there was a desktop program replacement for online shopping. Some program which could query Amazon.com, Bn.com, and any other that uses the standard format, and present the content output in a standard way, as selected by the user, not spread all over the page, different for every site, as is the current status with web pages. You might as well say C++ or Xlib... A language is not an interface. It gives you freedom to create any random collection of elements you want, with no constraints on consistency, layout, configurability, etc.
BEST VIEWED IN NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR AT 800x600 Please, show me ONE. ALL of them I've seen have been utterly pointless and unnecessary. Something like Gmail was a step-up from other web mail interfaces (not even a big step IMHO), but it's still not even near par with standard desktop e-mail programs.
All evidence indicates "he" didn't evolve "into us". If anything, it was the opposite. Touting this as proof, and complaining about "bible thumpers" makes you look incredibly stupid.
In other words, get your facts strait before you get up on your soapbox and start criticizing others.
The majority of software you can get on Windows, is TO FIX WINDOWS. Linux users don't go around looking for antivirus programs, tools to fix this and that registry problem, tools to remove some bit of spyware. etc.
What's more, it's infinitely easier to find appropriate software. A great deal of it comes with the base systems of most distros, and a great deal more is very easily accessible through whatever package management interface they use.
Windows may have more brand name commercial programs, but that doesn't mean they are any better than the free programs out there.
Tell me, if Windows has so much great software, why are so many Windows users using Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and the like?
You have the rich, soul-less business-men running the thing, who get their votes by pandering to the not-too-bright southerners, who are won over by (hypocritical) posturing on right-wing religious issues.
If Verizon was pricing their service low enough that $1 more doesn't make a difference, they aren't a very good company, and were wasting money.
So no, taxes and fines have to come out of their profits. Particularly when you're wrong.