Come on, a 1990'sh Civic the size of a Prius (nope, the cars were much smaller then, an Accord of that era is almost the size of a 2004 Civic) that gets 50MPG? I want one of these too!
Your claim that the automatic transmission has an impact to the tune of 25% on the mileage is ridiculous. The difference is less than 5% and mostly due to the hydraulic clutch losses.
What the automatic car does is create bad driving habits (speedup-brake-speedup-break-repeat) that kill the mileage. A responsible driver will get a reasonably good mileage on an automatic car too.
I drive stick Civics and strive to get as good as mileage as possible. My 2000 LX one has a mileage in the range of 34 to 36 MPG for 50/50 city/highway driving and newer Civics are even better, despite the increase in engine power.
Of course, the actual system will need to further downconvert the DC level to their needs. Especially the Vcore and DDR rails carry huge currents (more than 125A on Vcore needed for high-performance CPUs). This is at a low voltage and there are special transient requirements.
Therefore, if by "unclean power" you mean less than stellar regulation, you're right. However, this is not an issue because the final DC/DC converters take care of this line (for them) fluctuation.
The biggest downside of a DC rail to power a rack is that, for safety reasons, it must operate at reasonably small voltages (maybe 48V), which means that huge currents must be carried through the wiring. And anything above 24V as system voltage is already hurting this last stage conversion efficiency. Damn if you increase the system voltage, damn if you don't...
We seem to have moronic moderators today, as it's uncomprehensive why the above comment got modded as "Insightful".
For Christ's sake, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about! "DC power is naturally unstable", "unclean power" WTH?
Back to the original topic, the article is, as other mentioned already, 100% pure dribble. The major advantage of AC input power is that the power conversion (AC to DC system and from there down to 5V/3.3V/VCore/DDR/IO/etc), happens close to the loads.
AC voltage is 110V or more, therefore a power of 400W per system will give about 6.3A RMS (considering a conversion efficiency of 80%). So, one must design the wiring to the system to withstand let's say 7.5A. And then the last down conversion stages start from 12V only.
If you want to carry a DC voltage (e.g. -48V), then you must use an isolated DC/DC down to the system voltage because it's impractical to downconvert from -48V to every rail voltage needed in the system. The same 400W will be 9.3A out of the -48V input (for a 90% conversion efficiency).
Transmission power losses increase with the square of the passed current. The 9.3A versus 6.3A means one must use thicker wire, i.e. the wiring is costlier to carry the DC voltage and there is no obvious benefit.
In the end, if anyone wants to lower the electricity cost, he/she must invest in better off-line power supplies. For high power ones with PFC, cheapies have 65-70% efficiency, while a good design has more like 85-90%. This difference is significant.
I feel the same. The last two Nokia phones I owned (on Sprint) were nothing but shitty. Lots of "features" but abysmal reception.
Now they're dead hardware in a drawer, happily replaced by Sanyo gear, which does exactely what it's supposed to do (making/receiving calls) and does it very well.
Hey Nokia, if you're ever listening, fix first your frigging chipsets and then talk about adding features!
B.t.w., it is very difficult these days to find comparative data for reception and sound quality of cellphones (I'm talking about the US market). All reviews use buckets of ink to rave about the features, without any mention of the features that make a cellphone a cellphone.
Serban
If you want, I can send you snapshots of logos I put now in all my chips.
For geekiness karma points, I'm using the GIMP with the P2M module, which some kind folk told me about here on/. (when the other story about the very same subject has been posted about one year ago).
Serban
For 2D drawing, tgif is truly the king of the hill.
Although its interface is manly coded straight in X, its features make it a very, very productive tool that I highly recommend for any task needing accurate and high-quality drawing.
However, with a watch you're unlikely to be able to actually read anything smaller than a second (or perhaps 1/2 a second) on the smooth moving second hand... but with music our ears (or at least some peoples ears) can hear a lot more from an analog source than is present in a digital copy...
Then your analogy is flawed.
Don't flame though, I happen to agree to a certain extent with what you say (same equipment from the line-in to the speakers, and good quality turntable/needle and nice, old-fashioned 20b dual-A/D converter CD player; PF's "the final cut" on vinyl sounds warmer and more brilliant that the CD version).
Again, don't bother to give an analogy if you know it's flawed, you just sound totally unconvincing.
Cellphones tend today to become a neccessity, so to do without them may not be an option (I myself do not own a cellphone and I'm very happy about it).
For the people who need the phone part of cell-phone, today's offering is really crummy: lots and lot of cellphones that do many things, beside voice, and do all of them badly.
This is not even the cellphone makers' fault, as they need to differentiate themselves somehow from the competition in a market where there's almost no profit and where the ultimate selector is cost.
Many people I spoke with would simply prefer a more expensive cellphone that does not have all the crappy gadgets but will provide good voice quality, a sensitive RX (so that the signal is not so easily lost) and good battery life. They must be the minority though, cos' no one steps up to offer such a device.
They spent a lot of time doing the tests and still missed spelling out one essential parameter: ambient temperature...
They complained that by dropping the CPU clock rate from 2.4GHz down to 800MHz they lowered the CPU temperature by a flimsy 6.5 *C. Of course, if the ambient temperature is 24 *C, then they reduced the temp increase (which is what matters) from 9 *C down to 2.5 *C, a 3.6X improvement!
Of course there is merit in underclocking; they just picked a relatively cool CPU to start with.
to my knowledge they make the custom enclosure for the battery to fit inside of the computer and add the LED power level indicator, and whatnot
B.S. Apple doesn't build anything, although they are among the few remaining brand-name companies having real engineers in place who have a say in how the various Taiwan OEMs design and build notebooks.
Anyway, back to the subject. Because of the huge risk a LiIon battery presents, the pack consists in much more than the cells and a LED power level indicator. Protection circuitry (overvoltage/undervoltage/overcurrent/overtemperat ure), typically both solid-state and fusible, gas gauge (that among other things, computes how many LEDs to turn on), communication circuitry (to chat with the PC about its health status, presence etc, you name it.
To make them, it's simply beyond the engineering capabilities of shops like Apple; even the OEMs lean on the ODMs for such parts (along with RAM sticks and AC adapters, other famously recalled items).
The Win2k in front of me is configured to use Outlook2k. The guys from across my cubicle have WinXP and Outlook 2003 and they still have an Outlook Express folder full of... despite the fact that they too unchecked the Outlook Express in Add/Remove Programs.
Sorry for using stupid words (hmmm dense), I got carried away by your sig, that to me seems slant-ish.
Are you as dense as you sound? For a large class of machines (most?), you can't get rid of that crapware.
Sitting right now in front of my Win2000 Professional workstation, I just verified that the Outlook Express is unchecked in the Add/Remove Programs. Still, the Program Files holds an Outlook Express folder with all the content present; if I remove the folder, it shows up again.
It's probably possible to hack the registry to disable the rebuild behavior, but anyone with common sense would expect that when you uncheck (a.k.a. uninstall) the damn program, it's gone for good from his/her harddrive.
What matters is the trend and it definitely looks better and better for AMD. My focus is on notebooks and since K8 rev E CPU was announced in the mobile arena there's a flurry of new designs with AMD in shops (all of Taiwan and mainland China) that made previously only Intel systems.
This highly unstable market is really similar to a tug-of-war game. You don't have to pull steadily the opponent beyond the mid-point, it suffices to get enough momentum so that the opponent collapses. IOW the ranking will change quicky once AMD gains a critical mass presence (25-30% ?).
This is certainly not true. Last month, our program coordinator got for herself a 17" Viewsonic LCD monitor (VA720). Guess what? Whoever installed it for her changed the refresh rate from the default 60Hz to 75Hz. The image was unbelievably blurry.
60Hz for a direct-addressable matrix is more than enough, so as soon as she changed back to 60Hz the image quality improved dramatically (to the extent expected from a LCD).
The reason the image can be blurry is because, with the exception of digitally-linked systems, the video signal sent from the videocard is still analog and must be sampled and converted to digital levels. If the bandwidth of the A->D block in the LCD monitor is lower than of the video signal, the converted samples do bleed to neighbor pixels.
Related to the original discussion, IMO most headaches related to CRTs are associated with curved displays, on which cold-cathode lights flicker. A truly flat screen with high video bandwidth, driven by a good quality video card (low clock jitter) is, in my experience, much nicer to the eyes than anything else.
The possible exception are xrays; the jury is still out debating if they are harmful at that level.
As for the cold-cathode lights, I found that having on the side of the monitor a source of non-flickering, very white light (krypton bulb) helps tremendously.
Yes, I know. You can't miss the signs when driving up the Waimea Canyon. They also have some NASA facilities there, it seems.
I somehow doubt that the many happy minesweeper players and text writers and movie watchers were all working there. It also was a Saturday.
My point is that there's a significant percentage of travellers who carry and use a notebook during the flight and that probably every one of them thinks it would be nice to charge the batteries in flight instead of draining them.
What you do not understand is that the aviation regulators become paranoid when thinking about batteries exploding/smoking because of a defective charger.
This is the main reason why the notebook power outlets built in the seats cannot be used for charging. FAA prohibits this use.
In the past, there have been cases of smoking batteries because a charger would not stop (one example I know of involved the IC from our competitor, sweet!). LiIon/LiPoly are especially nasty when overheated/ignited.
Of course, customer pressure may lead eventually to the FAA relaxing the rules. After all, on every recent flight I've been, at least one person in every seat row was having a notebook turned on on his lap (even on flights supposedly for pleasure, e.g. flying to Lihue, Kauai).
You're on drugs or maybe the OSX version is special. When talking about bloat in the Acrobat Reader context, one typically complains about the painfully long time it takes to start up or to manipulate pdfs with large bitmaps.
After seeing the yesterday Reader discussion on/. I downloaded the version 5 and uninstalled the 6.? I had. Version 5 starts almost an order of magnitude faster and seems snappier on my Windows PC at work than the bloody version 6.
Before, I actually avoided opening up pdf files because it took so long to start up. To cope with this issue, I had to keep the Reader always running.
Now it's much much better. I strongly advise everyone to downgrade to Revision 5, unless there is something special, can't-live-without feature in the latest adove crap.
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The laser diode you're talking about is not made of silicon...
Come on, a 1990'sh Civic the size of a Prius (nope, the cars were much smaller then, an Accord of that era is almost the size of a 2004 Civic) that gets 50MPG? I want one of these too!
Your claim that the automatic transmission has an impact to the tune of 25% on the mileage is ridiculous. The difference is less than 5% and mostly due to the hydraulic clutch losses.
What the automatic car does is create bad driving habits (speedup-brake-speedup-break-repeat) that kill the mileage. A responsible driver will get a reasonably good mileage on an automatic car too.
I drive stick Civics and strive to get as good as mileage as possible. My 2000 LX one has a mileage in the range of 34 to 36 MPG for 50/50 city/highway driving and newer Civics are even better, despite the increase in engine power.
Of course, the actual system will need to further downconvert the DC level to their needs. Especially the Vcore and DDR rails carry huge currents (more than 125A on Vcore needed for high-performance CPUs). This is at a low voltage and there are special transient requirements.
Therefore, if by "unclean power" you mean less than stellar regulation, you're right. However, this is not an issue because the final DC/DC converters take care of this line (for them) fluctuation.
The biggest downside of a DC rail to power a rack is that, for safety reasons, it must operate at reasonably small voltages (maybe 48V), which means that huge currents must be carried through the wiring. And anything above 24V as system voltage is already hurting this last stage conversion efficiency. Damn if you increase the system voltage, damn if you don't...
And, of course, corrosion may be an issue too.
Serban
We seem to have moronic moderators today, as it's uncomprehensive why the above comment got modded as "Insightful".
For Christ's sake, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about! "DC power is naturally unstable", "unclean power" WTH?
Back to the original topic, the article is, as other mentioned already, 100% pure dribble. The major advantage of AC input power is that the power conversion (AC to DC system and from there down to 5V/3.3V/VCore/DDR/IO/etc), happens close to the loads.
AC voltage is 110V or more, therefore a power of 400W per system will give about 6.3A RMS (considering a conversion efficiency of 80%). So, one must design the wiring to the system to withstand let's say 7.5A. And then the last down conversion stages start from 12V only.
If you want to carry a DC voltage (e.g. -48V), then you must use an isolated DC/DC down to the system voltage because it's impractical to downconvert from -48V to every rail voltage needed in the system. The same 400W will be 9.3A out of the -48V input (for a 90% conversion efficiency).
Transmission power losses increase with the square of the passed current. The 9.3A versus 6.3A means one must use thicker wire, i.e. the wiring is costlier to carry the DC voltage and there is no obvious benefit.
In the end, if anyone wants to lower the electricity cost, he/she must invest in better off-line power supplies. For high power ones with PFC, cheapies have 65-70% efficiency, while a good design has more like 85-90%. This difference is significant.
Serban
Nice touch with the username/password!
Now they're dead hardware in a drawer, happily replaced by Sanyo gear, which does exactely what it's supposed to do (making/receiving calls) and does it very well.
Hey Nokia, if you're ever listening, fix first your frigging chipsets and then talk about adding features!
B.t.w., it is very difficult these days to find comparative data for reception and sound quality of cellphones (I'm talking about the US market). All reviews use buckets of ink to rave about the features, without any mention of the features that make a cellphone a cellphone. Serban
If you want, I can send you snapshots of logos I put now in all my chips. For geekiness karma points, I'm using the GIMP with the P2M module, which some kind folk told me about here on /. (when the other story about the very same subject has been posted about one year ago).
Serban
What are you smoking?
I have a LiDE 30 and it works very well in Linux, in some ways better than with TWAIN in Windows.
After trying to make it work with SANE, I gave up and started using the very nice vuescan, which works out-of-the-box
Although its interface is manly coded straight in X, its features make it a very, very productive tool that I highly recommend for any task needing accurate and high-quality drawing.
Serban
Then your analogy is flawed.
Don't flame though, I happen to agree to a certain extent with what you say (same equipment from the line-in to the speakers, and good quality turntable/needle and nice, old-fashioned 20b dual-A/D converter CD player; PF's "the final cut" on vinyl sounds warmer and more brilliant that the CD version).
Again, don't bother to give an analogy if you know it's flawed, you just sound totally unconvincing.
For the people who need the phone part of cell-phone, today's offering is really crummy: lots and lot of cellphones that do many things, beside voice, and do all of them badly.
This is not even the cellphone makers' fault, as they need to differentiate themselves somehow from the competition in a market where there's almost no profit and where the ultimate selector is cost.
Many people I spoke with would simply prefer a more expensive cellphone that does not have all the crappy gadgets but will provide good voice quality, a sensitive RX (so that the signal is not so easily lost) and good battery life. They must be the minority though, cos' no one steps up to offer such a device.
They spent a lot of time doing the tests and still missed spelling out one essential parameter: ambient temperature...
They complained that by dropping the CPU clock rate from 2.4GHz down to 800MHz they lowered the CPU temperature by a flimsy 6.5 *C. Of course, if the ambient temperature is 24 *C, then they reduced the temp increase (which is what matters) from 9 *C down to 2.5 *C, a 3.6X improvement!
Of course there is merit in underclocking; they just picked a relatively cool CPU to start with.
B.S. Apple doesn't build anything, although they are among the few remaining brand-name companies having real engineers in place who have a say in how the various Taiwan OEMs design and build notebooks.
Anyway, back to the subject. Because of the huge risk a LiIon battery presents, the pack consists in much more than the cells and a LED power level indicator. Protection circuitry (overvoltage/undervoltage/overcurrent/overtemperat ure), typically both solid-state and fusible, gas gauge (that among other things, computes how many LEDs to turn on), communication circuitry (to chat with the PC about its health status, presence etc, you name it.
To make them, it's simply beyond the engineering capabilities of shops like Apple; even the OEMs lean on the ODMs for such parts (along with RAM sticks and AC adapters, other famously recalled items).
The Win2k in front of me is configured to use Outlook2k. The guys from across my cubicle have WinXP and Outlook 2003 and they still have an Outlook Express folder full of ... despite the fact that they too unchecked the Outlook Express in Add/Remove Programs.
Sorry for using stupid words (hmmm dense), I got carried away by your sig, that to me seems slant-ish.
Sitting right now in front of my Win2000 Professional workstation, I just verified that the Outlook Express is unchecked in the Add/Remove Programs. Still, the Program Files holds an Outlook Express folder with all the content present; if I remove the folder, it shows up again.
It's probably possible to hack the registry to disable the rebuild behavior, but anyone with common sense would expect that when you uncheck (a.k.a. uninstall) the damn program, it's gone for good from his/her harddrive.
What matters is the trend and it definitely looks better and better for AMD. My focus is on notebooks and since K8 rev E CPU was announced in the mobile arena there's a flurry of new designs with AMD in shops (all of Taiwan and mainland China) that made previously only Intel systems.
This highly unstable market is really similar to a tug-of-war game. You don't have to pull steadily the opponent beyond the mid-point, it suffices to get enough momentum so that the opponent collapses. IOW the ranking will change quicky once AMD gains a critical mass presence (25-30% ?).
This is certainly not true. Last month, our program coordinator got for herself a 17" Viewsonic LCD monitor (VA720). Guess what? Whoever installed it for her changed the refresh rate from the default 60Hz to 75Hz. The image was unbelievably blurry.
60Hz for a direct-addressable matrix is more than enough, so as soon as she changed back to 60Hz the image quality improved dramatically (to the extent expected from a LCD).
The reason the image can be blurry is because, with the exception of digitally-linked systems, the video signal sent from the videocard is still analog and must be sampled and converted to digital levels. If the bandwidth of the A->D block in the LCD monitor is lower than of the video signal, the converted samples do bleed to neighbor pixels.
Related to the original discussion, IMO most headaches related to CRTs are associated with curved displays, on which cold-cathode lights flicker. A truly flat screen with high video bandwidth, driven by a good quality video card (low clock jitter) is, in my experience, much nicer to the eyes than anything else.
The possible exception are xrays; the jury is still out debating if they are harmful at that level.
As for the cold-cathode lights, I found that having on the side of the monitor a source of non-flickering, very white light (krypton bulb) helps tremendously.
Yes, I know. You can't miss the signs when driving up the Waimea Canyon. They also have some NASA facilities there, it seems.
I somehow doubt that the many happy minesweeper players and text writers and movie watchers were all working there. It also was a Saturday.
My point is that there's a significant percentage of travellers who carry and use a notebook during the flight and that probably every one of them thinks it would be nice to charge the batteries in flight instead of draining them.
What you do not understand is that the aviation regulators become paranoid when thinking about batteries exploding/smoking because of a defective charger.
This is the main reason why the notebook power outlets built in the seats cannot be used for charging. FAA prohibits this use.
In the past, there have been cases of smoking batteries because a charger would not stop (one example I know of involved the IC from our competitor, sweet!). LiIon/LiPoly are especially nasty when overheated/ignited.
Of course, customer pressure may lead eventually to the FAA relaxing the rules. After all, on every recent flight I've been, at least one person in every seat row was having a notebook turned on on his lap (even on flights supposedly for pleasure, e.g. flying to Lihue, Kauai).
Hey, who modded this as "funny"? This guy's post is remarkably "insightful", you dolt!
What do you actually do? I also have an office PC with 1GB of RAM and, right after booting up, the OS requests the creation of a pagefile.
My gut feeling is that 1GB is plenty of memory for what I typically use this system for, yet I can't get past the Windows' whims.
Thank you for any hints you may provide.
Serban
You're on drugs or maybe the OSX version is special. When talking about bloat in the Acrobat Reader context, one typically complains about the painfully long time it takes to start up or to manipulate pdfs with large bitmaps.
/. I downloaded the version 5 and uninstalled the 6.? I had. Version 5 starts almost an order of magnitude faster and seems snappier on my Windows PC at work than the bloody version 6.
After seeing the yesterday Reader discussion on
Before, I actually avoided opening up pdf files because it took so long to start up. To cope with this issue, I had to keep the Reader always running.
Now it's much much better. I strongly advise everyone to downgrade to Revision 5, unless there is something special, can't-live-without feature in the latest adove crap.
Serban
I too do love bread and, fortunately, in the Bay Area there are several decent bakeries, making simple and flavorful breads.
:-)
Who knows, bad chocolate may be a blessing in US, everything you eat is so much "enriched" that you have to fight to avoid getting overweight
Serban
You obviously did not RTFA. They mention that a bag for a 16 square meters building weights about 500lb.
Pretty light, maybe even lighter than a canvas tent of the same size, due to the lack of skeleton, which the tent needs.
And you call that cow manure chocolate?
What's weird is that in US all brand-name chocolatiers make crap. All of them. After years of living here, I still fail to understand why.
Serban