Could you use 2 USB 802.11g adapters? Plug one into whatever you are using (presumably a laptop), the other into any other workstation and do point to point?
Seems to me that USB bluetooth adapters could be useful in this regard, though I have no real experience with them, perhaps they would be bandwidth limited?
hmmm - they may well be in violation, depending on locals laws. A quick search failed to reveal the exact situation in Australia, however I did find the following:
the legal distinction seems to be between playing in public and playing in private.
the fact that no one is pursued to pay royalties for playing a radio in public doesn't mean they can't be. I guess, in practice, that it would be very difficult to police.
Not really meaning to be argumentative, just bored at work:)
When your phone rings everyone around you can hear it, therefore you are playing/broadcasting a copyrighted work in public which requires payment of a royalty to the artist.
There is another disadvantage - Helium is a finite resource (excluding fusion). A lot of our current supply of helium is collected almost as a by-product of natural gas mining. When the supply runs out, which is anticipated to happen with a few decades, there won't be any liquid helium for super cooling or *gasp* for your party balloons - let alone to chill your groceries
1. You would need to keep the water free from air to prevent carbon dioxide dissolving resulting in a pH less than 7 - conductive and slightly corrosive
2. The metal on the motherboard would slowly dissolve/corrode into the water - charged ions in solution - conduction
3. Think those electrolyte containing capacitors are sealed nice and tight?
Short exposure to relatively pure water is probably ok, you can even clean electrical equipment with water as long as it is powered down when you do it and allow it to dry completely before you plug it in again.
What the world really needs is a cheap, non-bulky rechargable battery. That would be hydrogen fuel cells.
Compressed air is another possibility. A small battery bank to help regulate the current flow from the solar panels which is then used to run an air-compressor. Yes, there will be energy wasted as heat during compression and then there is the friction within the compressor as well, however, assuming no leaks the energy stored in the tank doesn't degrade over time (such as with conventional batteries).
Some web based financial systems will double charge if the client clicks back at the wrong stage of the transaction. Having the transaction occur in a menu-less, button-less window is often the best solution.
I've read a few comments now that use the argument that storing the electricity generated in batteries is inefficient, high maintenance and environmentally unfriendly. In rebuttal - how does the collection, transport and use of hydrocarbon fuels stack up (most internal combustion engines are reasonably high maintenance)? Would you say nuclear is envirofriendly? Don't just dismiss a solution because it has disadvantages, weigh up the pros and cons and compare to other solutions.
Now for some constructive discussion...how about storing the electricity generated in some other form? Compressed air, heating liquids, spinning up flywheels (BIG flywheels), electrolysis of water (ie splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen), pumping water up a gradient (ie into a storage pond for later use to drive a hydroelectric station) are all possible alternatives. I'd be interested in reading other peoples thoughts on the viability of these alternatives.
For N.M.R. (used in the article) it is not the spin of an electron but the spin of the nucleii, in this case the spin of a carbon 13 nucleus. The spin is induced by irradiating the sample in the magnet with a short narrow radio frequency pulse, for some atoms in some molecules it is possible to selectively change the spin state (up or down) without changing the spin states of the other atoms. The particular atom (or nuclei if you like) irradiated will not permanently hold that spin state, and if I remember correctly, the signal obtained during an N.M.R. experiment requires some form of decay of the spin state (better explanation someone?). I assume this decay could be partly responsible for the introduction of error into this particular form of quantum computing...
Thankyou for the correction GargoyleMT:) I have never played with NT myself, even on a single chip system so I can only relate what I have heard 2nd hand. What I was originally told was that to get the same performance from NT when running a second chip it often required doubling the memory. The explanation I was given as to why this was so is that NT liked to load a "2nd copy" of itself into memory for the 2nd chip. I admit complete ignorance of how NT deals with smp, has anyone run such a system and seen a need for more memory? I have a vague understanding of the threaded vs unthreaded side of things but lack more specific information on the memory side of things (obviously). I'd really like to get this straight so I won't be spreading misinformation...thanks Fian
I am currently running two machines, one is a single PII 233 with 64 Mb RAM the other is a dual P166 with 64 Mb RAM. Under Win95 the PII clearly outperforms the dual 166 as Win95 is only capable of dealing with 1 CPU. I'm told WinNT is capable of dealing with more than one CPU but needs to load another copy of whatever it loads into memory for every extra processor. I don't know about the newer versions of Windows. Running under Linux is a different story. For example simply encoding an mp3 or compiling a program the PII again wins. If, however, I am also web browsing, playing some mp3's, chatting on ICQ the dual chip machine wins. Under such a load the PII will stall during mp3 playback for short periods whilst the dual chip machine performs nicely. As the others have already mentioned it all depends on what you want the machine to do or why you are building it. I built the dual machine (thanks Kim) as an experiment to see what sort of performance it would give compared to single chip systems. It performs so nicely that I much prefer it to the PII. A friend has since built a dual Celeron 400 machine for home which REALLY hums. Again this was done as part of an upgrade and he has been experimenting with running VMWare. He says it is possible to run multiple copies of Win95 under Linux without maxxing out the system. So now it is possible to take advantage of multiple processors under Win95 *grin*
Slashdot Mirror
Could you use 2 USB 802.11g adapters? Plug one into whatever you are using (presumably a laptop), the other into any other workstation and do point to point?
Seems to me that USB bluetooth adapters could be useful in this regard, though I have no real experience with them, perhaps they would be bandwidth limited?
hmmm - they may well be in violation, depending on locals laws. A quick search failed to reveal the exact situation in Australia, however I did find the following:
s /n z/articles/668.html
:)
http://www.findlaw.com/12international/countrie
the legal distinction seems to be between playing in public and playing in private.
the fact that no one is pursued to pay royalties for playing a radio in public doesn't mean they can't be. I guess, in practice, that it would be very difficult to police.
Not really meaning to be argumentative, just bored at work
When your phone rings everyone around you can hear it, therefore you are playing/broadcasting a copyrighted work in public which requires payment of a royalty to the artist.
There is another disadvantage - Helium is a finite resource (excluding fusion). A lot of our current supply of helium is collected almost as a by-product of natural gas mining. When the supply runs out, which is anticipated to happen with a few decades, there won't be any liquid helium for super cooling or *gasp* for your party balloons - let alone to chill your groceries
1. You would need to keep the water free from air to prevent carbon dioxide dissolving resulting in a pH less than 7 - conductive and slightly corrosive
2. The metal on the motherboard would slowly dissolve/corrode into the water - charged ions in solution - conduction
3. Think those electrolyte containing capacitors are sealed nice and tight?
Short exposure to relatively pure water is probably ok, you can even clean electrical equipment with water as long as it is powered down when you do it and allow it to dry completely before you plug it in again.
What the world really needs is a cheap, non-bulky rechargable battery.
That would be hydrogen fuel cells.
Compressed air is another possibility. A small battery bank to help regulate the current flow from the solar panels which is then used to run an air-compressor. Yes, there will be energy wasted as heat during compression and then there is the friction within the compressor as well, however, assuming no leaks the energy stored in the tank doesn't degrade over time (such as with conventional batteries).
Some web based financial systems will double charge if the client clicks back at the wrong stage of the transaction. Having the transaction occur in a menu-less, button-less window is often the best solution.
so do RFID tagged kids how to be tattooed with a warning? :)
I've read a few comments now that use the argument that storing the electricity generated in batteries is inefficient, high maintenance and environmentally unfriendly. In rebuttal - how does the collection, transport and use of hydrocarbon fuels stack up (most internal combustion engines are reasonably high maintenance)? Would you say nuclear is envirofriendly? Don't just dismiss a solution because it has disadvantages, weigh up the pros and cons and compare to other solutions. Now for some constructive discussion...how about storing the electricity generated in some other form? Compressed air, heating liquids, spinning up flywheels (BIG flywheels), electrolysis of water (ie splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen), pumping water up a gradient (ie into a storage pond for later use to drive a hydroelectric station) are all possible alternatives. I'd be interested in reading other peoples thoughts on the viability of these alternatives.
For N.M.R. (used in the article) it is not the spin of an electron but the spin of the nucleii, in this case the spin of a carbon 13 nucleus. The spin is induced by irradiating the sample in the magnet with a short narrow radio frequency pulse, for some atoms in some molecules it is possible to selectively change the spin state (up or down) without changing the spin states of the other atoms. The particular atom (or nuclei if you like) irradiated will not permanently hold that spin state, and if I remember correctly, the signal obtained during an N.M.R. experiment requires some form of decay of the spin state (better explanation someone?). I assume this decay could be partly responsible for the introduction of error into this particular form of quantum computing...
Thankyou for the correction GargoyleMT :) I have never played with NT myself, even on a single chip system so I can only relate what I have heard 2nd hand. What I was originally told was that to get the same performance from NT when running a second chip it often required doubling the memory. The explanation I was given as to why this was so is that NT liked to load a "2nd copy" of itself into memory for the 2nd chip. I admit complete ignorance of how NT deals with smp, has anyone run such a system and seen a need for more memory? I have a vague understanding of the threaded vs unthreaded side of things but lack more specific information on the memory side of things (obviously). I'd really like to get this straight so I won't be spreading misinformation...thanks Fian
I am currently running two machines, one is a single PII 233 with 64 Mb RAM the other is a dual P166 with 64 Mb RAM. Under Win95 the PII clearly outperforms the dual 166 as Win95 is only capable of dealing with 1 CPU. I'm told WinNT is capable of dealing with more than one CPU but needs to load another copy of whatever it loads into memory for every extra processor. I don't know about the newer versions of Windows. Running under Linux is a different story. For example simply encoding an mp3 or compiling a program the PII again wins. If, however, I am also web browsing, playing some mp3's, chatting on ICQ the dual chip machine wins. Under such a load the PII will stall during mp3 playback for short periods whilst the dual chip machine performs nicely. As the others have already mentioned it all depends on what you want the machine to do or why you are building it. I built the dual machine (thanks Kim) as an experiment to see what sort of performance it would give compared to single chip systems. It performs so nicely that I much prefer it to the PII. A friend has since built a dual Celeron 400 machine for home which REALLY hums. Again this was done as part of an upgrade and he has been experimenting with running VMWare. He says it is possible to run multiple copies of Win95 under Linux without maxxing out the system. So now it is possible to take advantage of multiple processors under Win95 *grin*