if you're running one the million- or billion-dollar companies [...] actually do anything, you're talking mainframes one way or another (call them a "cloud" if you must).
A cloud is usually a cluster a commodity computers, not a mainframe. A cluster can easily outperform a mainframe at lower cost, while having much higher reliability.
Certainly, the Fortune 1000 companies used-to run lots of mainframes, and they've got plenty running legacy apps, but today, they're just as interested in clusters of cheap PCs as the little guys. Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al, aren't interested in mainframes at all.
Lovely... So you're saying we get a whole 2-year window to jump on the latest bandwagon, before we get branded as bigots, fired from our jobs, and ostracized by the public at-large?
What is happening now with gay rights is what happened with racism in the 60's.
That's utter bullshit. I'm sure blacks in the south would have loved if the only problem they had in the world was not being able to get the tax breaks and entitlements that come from a state recognized marriage.
Is that was passes for oppression, these days? I'm inclined to go lynch 10,000 homosexuals, just so people would get to see what real discrimination looks like...
Such a first-world problem, that a group not getting the tax-breaks and incentives (that were always meant as incentives for child-bearing families) passes for discrimination these days.
"I'm not accepting any patches until you fix your bugs" is hardly suspending someone,
Only because that's an inaccurate misquote. Let's try the real thing:
"I will *not* be merging any code from Kay into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed. This has been going on for *years*, and doesn't seem to be getting any better."
That's not a "fix this bug first" message... That's a much more general and sweeping "you suck, so you're fired," message.
Of course both Kay and Linus reserve the right to change their minds and play nice together in the near future, but that doesn't sound likely.
I'd have to punch holes in the wall and I really don't want to do that.
Not sure what you mean... You just run wires from the reed switch up to the fixture, or down to the switch/electrical box. No holes in the walls needed. If you're talking about screw holes, you could opt for double-sided tape.
I put a timer switch on a closet light my wife and I tend to forget to turn off. Automatically shuts off after 5 minutes as it is just a pantry/storage closet. I've got another spot with motion sensors. I have to turn the lights on but then a motion sensor turns them off if there is no motion in the room for X number of minutes. Good for locations like kitchens.
I hope those devices were cheap. With the efficiency (and low cost) of LEDs, it might take YEARS of energy usage to pay off those (also reasonably inexpensive) timers and motion sensors:
They said CFL would last 7 years. Good luck having one last more than 2 years if it's used regularly. I replace my outside CFLs yearly.
CFLs are terrible for outdoor (cold location) use, and they're lousy anywhere they'll be turned on/off frequently. CFLs also have issues with failure if not mounted in the proper orientation they were designed for, or used in small fixtures that get hot.
LEDs have no such problems, and furthermore, the $10 Cree 60W equivalents come with a 10-year warranty from the manufacturer.
5v is so your keyboard doesn't need a voltage regulator [...] 100mA at 20v to 3.3v inside a keyboard? A nice 1.7 watts of heat converting your keyboard to a gentle hand warmer.
You might have noticed that USB has more than two wires... It would be absolutely trivial to add one more pin that outputs 12V.
Higher voltages, like 20V, would be trickier, because computer PSUs are standardized on providing lots of amps on the 5V and 12V rails, and only very, very little at other voltages. PSUs do 24VDC, but you can't draw more than a quarter amp before something pops.
Ok then. Lets not start looking for long term solutions.
Buying expensive bulbs isn't a long-term solution... It's just an irrational delusion. Furthermore, you've failed to explain why your ridiculously expensive choice of high-tech bulbs is any better than the cheaper and low-tech options of timers and motion-sensors...
Your thinking will change when you start paying 50 cents per KW.
No, my thinking won't change one bit... In the future, like now, I'll be comparing the up-front cost of the device, against the ongoing cost of electricity, and I won't waste my money on options which cost more than they save.
But more importantly, I'll have far more money to spend on whatever option is practical, because I'll be earning interest on the thousands of dollars I didn't spend on WiFi bulbs, which didn't offer any savings over $4 LEDs, anyhow.
You also didn't consider the high cost of these LED bulbs.
Of course I did... What the hell were you reading? I linked to a generic $3.40 LED bulb on Amazon, and the calculations I made for energy usage were for a $10 Cree 60W LED equivalent.
The cost of replacement should also be added to the equation as these bulbs do not last as long as their claims.
1) You're thinking of CFLs, not LEDs. LEDs will last an extremely long time. 2) LEDs can handle being cycled on/off many, many times more than any other type of light. 3) The $10 Cree 60watt equivalents, which I ran the numbers for, come with a 10-year warranty from the manufacturer.
I consider myself lucky when a CFL lasts more than 2 years (And yes, I take proper precautions when installing them).
You're buying cheap crap CFLs, most likely from Walmart. I've got a set of 9W Ecosmart (Home Depot) CFLs I've been taking with me from apartment to apartment, for just shy of a decade now. Not ONE of them has burnt out yet.
I finally gave them away to family members when I found dirt-cheap LEDs, which use 50% less power than CFLs, and so will pay for themselves within a couple years. Not to mention that they work great in refrigerators, and unconditioned spaces like outdoor lights, where CFLs just don't work right.
This kind of thinking is the same thinking car companies and consumers had in the 70s. Ahh, gas is cheap, who cares about using less.
There's no comparison. If car buyers in the 70s were comparing the up-front cost of a more efficient car, against the gasoline savings, then you'd have a point. In reality, the more efficient cars were CHEAPER, but simply not fashionable. That's a lot like your position... You want fancy, high-tech blinking lights, and really aren't concerned with how much they cost, or how you can best save energy.
Instead, my position is vastly more like someone, today, deciding whether or not a hybrid car is actually a good purchase, based on fuel savings, versus extra up-front cost.
Fact is that there is no harm in developing home automation systems like this as they serve multiple purposes outside just saving energy.
The harm is wasting money that could be put to better use.
And I fail to see why home "automation" is even desirable for saving energy. Motion sensors are far and away the better method, which will automatically save MORE energy, while being cheaper up-front. Notice that offices (which may otherwise have LOTS of building automation, already) use them, and not WiFi-controlled bulbs.
Instead, you WANT high-tech lights, because you think they are fashionable, and are only using energy efficiency as a smokescreen to justify wasting all that money.
In the morning everyone gets up early. If you stayed up late reading or something you still get up early in the morning
Teenagers are biologically wired to stay up late and sleep-in late. Forcing them to wake-up very early is tantamount to forcing everyone else to switch to 3rd shift, waking everyone up at 10pm, no matter how much sleep they did or didn't get.
The major advantage I see of having lighting controlled is to allow automatic management of such. Does a bare bone interface to turn on individual lights make sense? IMHO, NO. But with the right software and hardware managing lighting and other devices in a home is an essential step to reduce the bill.
That's nonsense... Motion-sensors and power-on timers have been around for a long time, they cost far, FAR less than these expensive bulbs, they don't need a computer program written and running around the clock, and they don't need to be replaced when the bulb eventually burns out.
What's more... LED bulbs are so power-frugal, that you'd literally have to accidentally leave a light turned-on for YEARS to pay off the up-front purchase cost of smarter equipment.
Back of the envelope figures for a 60-watt equivalent LED:
9.5watts * 24hrs * 365days / 1,000 * $0.11 = $9.15 per YEAR of power-on time.
That's right, with an LED in your porch light, it'll take YEARS to pay off the cost of a dusk-to-dawn sensor, versus just leaving it turned-on around-the-clock.
A motion-sensor is still a good investment in big rooms, where you're going to wire multiple bulbs to one sensor...
But for closets, bed rooms, bathrooms, dens, attics, etc.? You're better off just spending $3.40 up-front for a 30watt equivalent LED, and not bothering with anything more advanced than a light switch for it:
People seem to completely miss the key part of this experiment... The energy has to go somewhere:
As you can see, in the region where bores were drilled, wave strength dropped immensely. Near the source, the strength increased, as waves were reflected backwards.
Just think of it... Those with the most money to spend, get to be earthquake-free, but everyone else gets their earthquake intensity INCREASED, perhaps DOUBLED.
I fail to see how your word-games here are anything but arbitrary...
For example between 100 and 110 MHz there is 10MHz of bandwidth. Between 1000 and 1100 MHz there is 100MHz of bandwidth.
Yes, but you just picked a couple numbers arbitrarily, with no particular significance. Between 100 and 200MHz, there's 100MHz of bandwidth, just like 1000 to 1100MHz.
Between 5 and 5.5 GHz there is 500MHz of bandwidth.
And? The US TV broadcast band starts at 50MHz, and has several hundred MHz of bandwidth as well.
If we make a simplified assumtion as assume that we're going to regulate that a fixed percentage (say 10%) of bandwidth throughout the spectrum will be available for general public use then the vast majority of the bandwidth is going to be in the higher frequencies.
You're picking "higher" arbitrarily wherever you feel like...
Since the spectrum starts at zero and continues on into infinity, 10% would be infinite, and the overwhelming majority of it would be in the 999trillion terahertz+ range. But I'm guessing that's not quite what you meant by "higher frequencies".
Your first line is nonsense... A given bandwidth (eg. 6MHz channel) will give you the same throughput, whether it's at 700Mhz or 50GHz. People see higher frequencies as faster, only because there's usually a lot more bandwidth available at higher frequencies, in part because pentration is lower and reuse is higher.
One reason why you've never seen an area saturated with 5 GHz signals is that they don't penetrate walls and other obstacles as easily as 2.4 GHz signals.
The difference certainly exists, but it is actually very small, and this element gets horribly overblown.
Most people don't really use WiFi signals going through their walls and floors, anyhow (thin, interior doors notwithstanding). Instead, they use the diffraction down corridors, through windows, etc., and both frequencies can easily manage that...
I've done side-by-side comparisons of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and the latter only has a very tiny reduction in range, in all but extreme scenarios.
The FCC should just allow a 20% increase in transmit power on the 5GHz band, and suddenly 5GHz (with more available channels) would be much more desirable than 2.4GHz. Then manufacturers will start defaulting to do, and the band would open up for those stuck on it for legacy reasons.
Reply to them and say your minimum is $210k per year (or whatever).
Yeah, I'll get right on that... I'm still a little busy replying to every spam e-mail I get, telling them I'm not interested and asking them to remove me from their mailing list. Once I get that finished up, and don't get any more spam, I'll switch over to recruiters.
Have you seriously not talked to a recruiter in the past 5 years? There's a horde of (I'm guessing: Pakistani?) 3rd world "recruiters" that call up the phone numbers of EVERY SINGLE RESUME they find with a single matching keyword on it. Hiring companies are smart enough that they don't even tell these morons what salary they are even willing to pay. Hell, these guys don't even check where you are located, with a few maybe making sure you're somewhere in the state, but nothing more.
They're not even hired by any firms, they're just hoping you'll hear about the job from them, before you've submitted your own resume, so they'll get the $1,000 finders fee that meant to reward GOOD leads. When you've got 3rd world recruiters that don't earn that much in a month, it's worth a bunch of non-stop fishing expeditions, submitting completely random resumes to every company, for every job, in the hopes of just one of millions matching-up... Tell them you want $X, and they'll tell you they have no clue, and they'll keep trying to sign you up, anyhow. Ask them a question, and they'll tell you they have no clue, and keep trying to sign you up, anyhow. It's so bad I've entirely removed my phone number from my resume, it's been such a massive nuisance.
The only counter-measure I've seen is companies requiring recruiters to state that they've met the candidate in person, before they can submit the resume. That's quite a mess when the recruiter may be 200 miles away from you, and again, they don't know anything about the job, the company, or the salary, so I'm not willing to go through the hassle. I've even removed my resume from certain job sites, because the irrelevant noise e-mails from recruiters became incessant.
If things keep going this way, I suppose I'll be permanently unemployed in just a few years, and unable to find jobs, even if there's an opening across the street from me.
My salary's been steadily rising, except when I deliberately took a hit to change specialties.
That's possible on a personal scale quite easily... You may not have been in the job market very long, started low, switched fields, moved to a higher cost-of-living area, etc., etc.
But on an industry scale, has the average income for your job position been rising faster than the rate of inflation? The general answer, across the board, is no.
Slashdot Mirror
A cloud is usually a cluster a commodity computers, not a mainframe. A cluster can easily outperform a mainframe at lower cost, while having much higher reliability.
Certainly, the Fortune 1000 companies used-to run lots of mainframes, and they've got plenty running legacy apps, but today, they're just as interested in clusters of cheap PCs as the little guys. Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al, aren't interested in mainframes at all.
Religion survived, and even thrived, after the invention of the printing press... So access to information does not turn everyone into atheists.
And yet you are alone... So very alone...
Lovely... So you're saying we get a whole 2-year window to jump on the latest bandwagon, before we get branded as bigots, fired from our jobs, and ostracized by the public at-large?
Oh good... You wouldn't mind if he was being fired for his race then?
That's utter bullshit. I'm sure blacks in the south would have loved if the only problem they had in the world was not being able to get the tax breaks and entitlements that come from a state recognized marriage.
Is that was passes for oppression, these days? I'm inclined to go lynch 10,000 homosexuals, just so people would get to see what real discrimination looks like...
Such a first-world problem, that a group not getting the tax-breaks and incentives (that were always meant as incentives for child-bearing families) passes for discrimination these days.
Only because that's an inaccurate misquote. Let's try the real thing:
"I will *not* be merging any code from Kay into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed. This has been going on for *years*, and doesn't seem to be getting any better."
That's not a "fix this bug first" message... That's a much more general and sweeping "you suck, so you're fired," message.
Of course both Kay and Linus reserve the right to change their minds and play nice together in the near future, but that doesn't sound likely.
That certainly sheds some more light on your reservations.
Not sure what you mean... You just run wires from the reed switch up to the fixture, or down to the switch/electrical box. No holes in the walls needed. If you're talking about screw holes, you could opt for double-sided tape.
No reason for it, but there's the question of the cost of devices to automatically shut them off...
For your pantry/storage closet, I'd probably use an old $1 refrigerator door switch, or maybe a magnetic alarm switch like so:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GU...
I hope those devices were cheap. With the efficiency (and low cost) of LEDs, it might take YEARS of energy usage to pay off those (also reasonably inexpensive) timers and motion sensors:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
CFLs are terrible for outdoor (cold location) use, and they're lousy anywhere they'll be turned on/off frequently. CFLs also have issues with failure if not mounted in the proper orientation they were designed for, or used in small fixtures that get hot.
LEDs have no such problems, and furthermore, the $10 Cree 60W equivalents come with a 10-year warranty from the manufacturer.
You might have noticed that USB has more than two wires... It would be absolutely trivial to add one more pin that outputs 12V.
Higher voltages, like 20V, would be trickier, because computer PSUs are standardized on providing lots of amps on the 5V and 12V rails, and only very, very little at other voltages. PSUs do 24VDC, but you can't draw more than a quarter amp before something pops.
http://cdn.pcper.com/files/ima...
Buying expensive bulbs isn't a long-term solution... It's just an irrational delusion. Furthermore, you've failed to explain why your ridiculously expensive choice of high-tech bulbs is any better than the cheaper and low-tech options of timers and motion-sensors...
No, my thinking won't change one bit... In the future, like now, I'll be comparing the up-front cost of the device, against the ongoing cost of electricity, and I won't waste my money on options which cost more than they save.
But more importantly, I'll have far more money to spend on whatever option is practical, because I'll be earning interest on the thousands of dollars I didn't spend on WiFi bulbs, which didn't offer any savings over $4 LEDs, anyhow.
Of course I did... What the hell were you reading? I linked to a generic $3.40 LED bulb on Amazon, and the calculations I made for energy usage were for a $10 Cree 60W LED equivalent.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Cre...
1) You're thinking of CFLs, not LEDs. LEDs will last an extremely long time.
2) LEDs can handle being cycled on/off many, many times more than any other type of light.
3) The $10 Cree 60watt equivalents, which I ran the numbers for, come with a 10-year warranty from the manufacturer.
You're buying cheap crap CFLs, most likely from Walmart. I've got a set of 9W Ecosmart (Home Depot) CFLs I've been taking with me from apartment to apartment, for just shy of a decade now. Not ONE of them has burnt out yet.
I finally gave them away to family members when I found dirt-cheap LEDs, which use 50% less power than CFLs, and so will pay for themselves within a couple years. Not to mention that they work great in refrigerators, and unconditioned spaces like outdoor lights, where CFLs just don't work right.
There's no comparison. If car buyers in the 70s were comparing the up-front cost of a more efficient car, against the gasoline savings, then you'd have a point. In reality, the more efficient cars were CHEAPER, but simply not fashionable. That's a lot like your position... You want fancy, high-tech blinking lights, and really aren't concerned with how much they cost, or how you can best save energy.
Instead, my position is vastly more like someone, today, deciding whether or not a hybrid car is actually a good purchase, based on fuel savings, versus extra up-front cost.
The harm is wasting money that could be put to better use.
And I fail to see why home "automation" is even desirable for saving energy. Motion sensors are far and away the better method, which will automatically save MORE energy, while being cheaper up-front. Notice that offices (which may otherwise have LOTS of building automation, already) use them, and not WiFi-controlled bulbs.
Instead, you WANT high-tech lights, because you think they are fashionable, and are only using energy efficiency as a smokescreen to justify wasting all that money.
Teenagers are biologically wired to stay up late and sleep-in late. Forcing them to wake-up very early is tantamount to forcing everyone else to switch to 3rd shift, waking everyone up at 10pm, no matter how much sleep they did or didn't get.
That's nonsense... Motion-sensors and power-on timers have been around for a long time, they cost far, FAR less than these expensive bulbs, they don't need a computer program written and running around the clock, and they don't need to be replaced when the bulb eventually burns out.
What's more... LED bulbs are so power-frugal, that you'd literally have to accidentally leave a light turned-on for YEARS to pay off the up-front purchase cost of smarter equipment.
Back of the envelope figures for a 60-watt equivalent LED:
9.5watts * 24hrs * 365days / 1,000 * $0.11 = $9.15 per YEAR of power-on time.
That's right, with an LED in your porch light, it'll take YEARS to pay off the cost of a dusk-to-dawn sensor, versus just leaving it turned-on around-the-clock.
A motion-sensor is still a good investment in big rooms, where you're going to wire multiple bulbs to one sensor...
But for closets, bed rooms, bathrooms, dens, attics, etc.? You're better off just spending $3.40 up-front for a 30watt equivalent LED, and not bothering with anything more advanced than a light switch for it:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AN...
People seem to completely miss the key part of this experiment... The energy has to go somewhere:
Just think of it... Those with the most money to spend, get to be earthquake-free, but everyone else gets their earthquake intensity INCREASED, perhaps DOUBLED.
I fail to see how your word-games here are anything but arbitrary...
Yes, but you just picked a couple numbers arbitrarily, with no particular significance. Between 100 and 200MHz, there's 100MHz of bandwidth, just like 1000 to 1100MHz.
And? The US TV broadcast band starts at 50MHz, and has several hundred MHz of bandwidth as well.
You're picking "higher" arbitrarily wherever you feel like...
Since the spectrum starts at zero and continues on into infinity, 10% would be infinite, and the overwhelming majority of it would be in the 999trillion terahertz+ range. But I'm guessing that's not quite what you meant by "higher frequencies".
Arguing out of ignorance and anecdotes is never a good idea...
Go look up a chart or other hard numbers on the penetration of various frequencies in whatever wall material, and get back to us...
Your first line is nonsense... A given bandwidth (eg. 6MHz channel) will give you the same throughput, whether it's at 700Mhz or 50GHz. People see higher frequencies as faster, only because there's usually a lot more bandwidth available at higher frequencies, in part because pentration is lower and reuse is higher.
The date/time you see on the story depends on your timezone. Yet it doesn't put everyone else into a time-warp where it's not April 1st for them...
This story absolutely was posted on April 1st, /. local time, as evidenced by the date embedded in the link to it:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
The difference certainly exists, but it is actually very small, and this element gets horribly overblown.
Most people don't really use WiFi signals going through their walls and floors, anyhow (thin, interior doors notwithstanding). Instead, they use the diffraction down corridors, through windows, etc., and both frequencies can easily manage that...
I've done side-by-side comparisons of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and the latter only has a very tiny reduction in range, in all but extreme scenarios.
The FCC should just allow a 20% increase in transmit power on the 5GHz band, and suddenly 5GHz (with more available channels) would be much more desirable than 2.4GHz. Then manufacturers will start defaulting to do, and the band would open up for those stuck on it for legacy reasons.
I don't know why everyone seems to think hydrogen and helium are the only gases lighter than air.
Natural gas is dirt cheap in the US, and is extremely buoyant.
Yeah, I'll get right on that... I'm still a little busy replying to every spam e-mail I get, telling them I'm not interested and asking them to remove me from their mailing list. Once I get that finished up, and don't get any more spam, I'll switch over to recruiters.
Have you seriously not talked to a recruiter in the past 5 years? There's a horde of (I'm guessing: Pakistani?) 3rd world "recruiters" that call up the phone numbers of EVERY SINGLE RESUME they find with a single matching keyword on it. Hiring companies are smart enough that they don't even tell these morons what salary they are even willing to pay. Hell, these guys don't even check where you are located, with a few maybe making sure you're somewhere in the state, but nothing more.
They're not even hired by any firms, they're just hoping you'll hear about the job from them, before you've submitted your own resume, so they'll get the $1,000 finders fee that meant to reward GOOD leads. When you've got 3rd world recruiters that don't earn that much in a month, it's worth a bunch of non-stop fishing expeditions, submitting completely random resumes to every company, for every job, in the hopes of just one of millions matching-up... Tell them you want $X, and they'll tell you they have no clue, and they'll keep trying to sign you up, anyhow. Ask them a question, and they'll tell you they have no clue, and keep trying to sign you up, anyhow. It's so bad I've entirely removed my phone number from my resume, it's been such a massive nuisance.
The only counter-measure I've seen is companies requiring recruiters to state that they've met the candidate in person, before they can submit the resume. That's quite a mess when the recruiter may be 200 miles away from you, and again, they don't know anything about the job, the company, or the salary, so I'm not willing to go through the hassle. I've even removed my resume from certain job sites, because the irrelevant noise e-mails from recruiters became incessant.
If things keep going this way, I suppose I'll be permanently unemployed in just a few years, and unable to find jobs, even if there's an opening across the street from me.
That's possible on a personal scale quite easily... You may not have been in the job market very long, started low, switched fields, moved to a higher cost-of-living area, etc., etc.
But on an industry scale, has the average income for your job position been rising faster than the rate of inflation? The general answer, across the board, is no.