I see nothing in Kerry's voting record that would indicate he would be more responsible then Bush...which is not saying much. Kerry will pour money into a broken welfare system and a broken educational system. Neither will take on issue of rising health care prices. Neither will take a strategic view of fiscal responsibility.
I am beyond your line of thinking here. I will only vote in *support* of a candidate. I don't want Kerry including me in his "manadate," and watch him table the school vouchers issue and try to socialize medicine.
We do agree...and I find it painfully ironic...that I long for the days of grid lock. If I take off my idealogue cap and cast a pragmatic glance at the situation, we should keep the republican majority and welcome a very weak Kerry to the Oval Office. But, I think you are wrong about the budget stalemate. The money is *always* spent...always. Blueberry farms subsidies or underwater UAV spy equipment or something. Congress will *never* let money on the table when there's pork at market.
I fault both sides equally for their lack of fiscal responsibility. Clinton had the Internet Boom to hide the pork and the handouts and result in a surplus. Even then, Congree was talking about how to *spend* the surplus. Tax-n-Spend! I used to look to the Republicans for some measure of fiscal restraint, but that isn't true anymore. Deficit-Spend Warmongering!
Lawrence Lessig's article on Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.html ?pg=5 really grabbed my attention...so much so that I can't bring myself to vote for either Bush or Kerry. The future financial well being of this country is clearly in doubt. Whether it lasts 10 or 20 or 50 years, social security outlays and debt interest will eventually bankrupt us. Neither candidate wants to face this. Everyone is focused on "tactical" thinking. "How do I position myself for this election...or this fiscal quarter?" No one wants to think strategically..."How will this effect the next 10 years of productivity and job growth?"
So, I am going to vote Libertarian simply because both major parties are racing headlong down similar paths to financial ruin. I hope that I can become independently wealthy and appropriately tax sheltered before taxes are "adjusted" to account the retiring baby boomers. I might make it...how many of you will?
Honestly, it is a common practice to buy 3ware "raid" controllers and only use them as non-raid IDE controllers. Then use Linux Software RAID to build the array.
Sorry to reply to my own post. More information...avoid putting master and slave on the same port. Sometimes, if one of the drives goes, it will whack the entire port and drop out the other drive. In raid5, this is bad though unrecoverable. It might require you to manually rebuild (mkraid --secret-option) to get the data back after replacing the drive. That is a scarely situation that can be easily avoided by only using one drive per ide port.
That information may be (and probably is) outdated with regard to SATA. I don't have experience with them yet, though I will be building four 1.75 TB RAID5 (or 1.5 TB RAID6...Linux 2.6 willing) arrays next month that use 250 GB SATA drives.
I have build at least two dozen software RAID5 boxes over the past few years. Usually Promise controllers, Maxtor drives. Performance is generally pretty good. Here are bonnie numbers for my 1.2 TB media server (five Maxtor 300 GB drives in Software RAID5). These numbers are a little slower then other systems because it uses an Athlon motherboard. I have found that Intel chipset boards generally give read performance ~100-140 MB/sec. [root@media root]# more bonnie20.log Bonnie 1.2: File '/raid/Bonnie.27772', size: 2097152000, volumes: 10 Writing with putc()... done: 14517 kB/s 83.2 %CPU Rewriting... done: 25060 kB/s 17.1 %CPU Writing intelligently... done: 41987 kB/s 29.5 %CPU Reading with getc()... done: 18830 kB/s 96.1 %CPU Reading intelligently... done: 82754 kB/s 62.2 %CPU
Using an older processor/motherboard is probably not a huge concern. I've used 300 MHz Celerons before. Of course, your performance might not be as high as this, but if you are using this as network attached storage (NFS or SMB), you will likely be limited to 12 MB/sec due to fast ethernet. If you have (and need) gigabit transfer speeds, you should probably use a better motherboard/CPU.
Lastly, remember that you shouldn't skimp on power supplies and an UPS that automatically shuts the system down. The *only* data loss I have ever had on raid5 arrays came because of power-related issues. Heed my warning! 8)
Not to crush you illusions or anything, but deep space probes have been launched with radioactive thermal generation units for decades. These run on plutonium! A big lump of it, too. We have been doing it; we are doing it; we will do it again.
The problem with hydrogen is *not* producing it. Electrolysis is easily accomplish. People have been genetically engineering algae to produce hydrogen gas directly from sunlight. We can gasify coal or other hydrocarbons, bleed off and sequester the CO2 to get H2 pretty efficiently.
The problem with hydrogen is storing it and transporting it safely. There is no good solution for this. The concept of using hydrogen as a bulk fuel is a complete non-starter until this problem is solved. With current approaches, either the pressure is too high, the temperature is too cold, or the energy density is too low. It leaks very easily, so it is difficult to store for extended periods of time. And recent studies seem to indicate that the environmental impact from significant H2 leakage could be worse than CO2 emissions.
Methanol is necessary because it can work with existing polymer electrolyte fuel cells. Methanol is CH4O...that can be ionized and transported through the electrolyte OK. Ethanol is C2H6O. It can't be ionized into a form that can diffuse through the electrolyte. Direct methanol fuel cells are special in that they don't require a reformer for their liquid fuel. That makes them really attractive for compact power systems...like laptops and cell phones.
I am not a physical chemist, so I don't know if it is possible to design an electrolyte to work with ethanol or other larger hydrocarbons. Usually when fuel cells "burn" larger hydrocarbons, they use some reforming process to turn them into H2 and/or CO first. This makes the systems bigger and much hotter (>800 C)...so there are heat exchangers, pumps, insulation, etc.
Electric resistance heating has a coefficient of performance of 1. 1 watt of electricity turns into 1 watt of heat. There are much better ways to use that 1 watt of electricity...even it Canada...that will make 4 watts of heat. Electric resistance heating is the worse possible use of electric power ever conceived.
No, I clearly stated that both methane and methanol are likely chemical forms that can be used in fuel cells and stored in a safe cost efficient way:
All fuel cell manufactures are also looking at reforming mechanisms to make methane useful in fuel cells.
in portable electronics that will use liquid methanol as a fuel.
In fact, one could claim that crude oil "stores" hydrogen. Other approaches of storing hydrogen involve absorbtion (chemical or physical) into porous materials like activated carbon or dissolution into liquid solutions. Neither of these really seem to be panning out. Just adding one carbon to four hydrogens gives us a nice stable, easy to handle molecule that we already have experience using both in stationary power and transportation applications.
Clearly, I have been trumped by your mastery of hand-says-it-ain't-hot form of heat transfer analysis.
Turn on the power to your water heater. How long will it stay hot? I suspect that you will loose about 1 or 2 degrees F per hour. For 40 gallons or ~320 lbs of water, that is quiet a bit of energy. That is heat that you are paying for every day. Chances are 25% of your electric bill goes to feed your water heater. Adding that "useless" blanket might drop that to 20%. It isn't sexy, but that is maybe $5 a month times 12 months times 50 million households.
But the first movers on the "big ticket" efficiency ideas are the ones that get all of the press. I am not against PVs. I think it is great that the technology is progressing as it has, but there are millions of households that could save ~$100-$300 worth of electricity per year with very simple, inexpensive, boring improvements. These aren't whizbang enough to attract media attention, so people just don't know about them.
Fuel cells, PVs, super-insulated passive solar houses...these get the press...or at least did at different times since the 70s. Turning down 10% of the water heaters in America by 5 degrees and installing a water heater blanket will save more energy than produced by all of the PVs ever produced. See, my argument is that it must be economically viable in order for Joe Average to bother with it. There are economically feasible efficiency ideas that are commonly overlooked because they are so boring.
Good example. I have a ground-source (aka geothermal) heat pump in my house. I had a hard time finding a dealer to install it. They just aren't that popular. During heating season, it operates at a coefficient of performance of about 4. Every watt of electricity I put in, I get 4 watts of heat out. My electric bills are only about $100/month, even in the winter (Southwestern PA)...compared to people who got $400 gas bills last year. That is an energy efficiency and an economic win. But, there was no promotion of geothermal heat pumps. There was no discussions of them in the press. Energy efficient ideas have been divorced from economic viability for far too long...lining them up right next to people wearing hemp clothing. This needs to change. It should not be "fringe" to be energy efficient.
The key issue with hydrogen is that there is no good way to store it. It diffuses through everything, so leaks will always be an issue. Liquifying takes super cold temperatures and is very expensive. Compressed hydrogen needs to be a ~1000 psi to get a sufficiently high energy density...and that will make for one interesting car crash.
The best solution for transportable, stable, environmentally friendly fuel is probably methane. Compressed natural gas vehicles are very common. We can make methane about as easily as we can make hydrogen or oil or even from coal, via gasification. All fuel cell manufactures are also looking at reforming mechanisms to make methane useful in fuel cells. As engineer who has worked on fuel cell technology for the last five years, I think it is pretty clear that for future of transportation applications of fuel cells...particularly hydrogen-only systems...is very bleak.
Fuel cells will be used (eventually) in stationary power systems and very soon in portable electronics that will use liquid methanol as a fuel. Everything else is just a pipe dream, IMO.
There is a definite need for energy conservation ideas that can be directly supported with economic validation. So many "green" initiatives are driven solely by politics and have economics, and often even environmental impacts, that are questionable. We need more people installing compact flourescent lamps and water heater blankets...not $20,000 solar panel arrays. A healthy dose of common sense here could really make energy efficiency ideas more popular. Here's hoping it works.
In far too many ways, he is right! From a commercial software perspective, supporting "Linux" is almost impossible...because "Linux" means so many different things...Redhat, Fedora, SUSE, Debian...which release of Fedora...which version of Redhat? It makes a big difference when your commercially distributed builds need to touch different versions of glibs or different kernel versions. It runs on Redhat 7.3 but not on Redhat 8.
Honestly, as a big Linux advocate, this is the biggest problem I see for the future of Linux. Casual changes to glibs break so many things...requiring new builds, new distributions to customers, etc. In my view, it is the demagogery of the Open Source advocates that are making this happen. The "well, if you code was open source, you could just relink" argument will get you laughed at...and your platform dropped from the supportted list.
This is a big problem and it needs to be fixed. But that can only happen if the Linux community starts all going the same direction...or for one vendor to emerge as the clear Linux distro "winner" that commercial customers can all standardize on.
As someone also "in the know," I completely agree with you. One point raised in the Navy study was that all measurements and expectations for fusion behavior were dictated by high-energy experiments in plasmas, not in solid solutions. They postulate that quantum mechanical effects caused by the presense of the metal matrix are providing an enviroment more amenable to fusion, not unlike using muons to catalyze fusion in a high temperature enviroment. Though I am not familiar with all of the details, I cannot dismiss such a possibility out of hand.
I have a card at home as well, but never bothered with Steam. Can anyone with a code verify that it works? If so, I will need to get off the dime and get it downloaded.
Re:Somebody explain this to me?
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 5, Informative
In any crystal, there are potential imperfection. The MatSci term for them is dislocations. These are holes in the crystal lattice. These holes can move around (think of piles of marbles). In single crystals, these dislocations lead to stress risers at the hole (try tearing a sheet of paper by just pulling at opposite ends...then tear a small notch in the middle of one edge and try again). So these dislocations can move around and basically "unzip" the whole crystal. The failure mode leads to "cleaving" planes along different directions in the crystal and makes the bulk strength much lower.
High strength alloys generally try to put extra chemicals in the metal mixture to block the movements of the dislocations. Also, you tend to "quench" the formed metal so that the crystals that it forms (called "grains") are small. Smaller grains usually means stronger metals because they can only "unzip" a short distance before they hit a different grain with a different orientation.
These guys at ORNL have basically taken the tiny grain idea to the ultimate limit. Each grain basically only has one or a few atoms in it. FYI, IAA Mech. Engineeer.
It's not like the PII/III days when you could get as much as a 50% boost over the rated speed (rare, but it did happen.)
It wasn't at all rare. The Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 MHz without so much as a whimper. I built several systems (single and dual) using them. I had dual 366 celerons that ran at 550 in SMP. That was the heyday of overclocking and it was created by Intel's marketing practices. With competition from AMD, Intel hasn't been able to "downbin" and terrace the market to its whim anymore, so overclocking isn't that big of a deal.
Re:We, the US, brought this on ourselves...
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
True enough. My point was that the corruption of the governmnet is one factor, the widespread support of Wahabi radical teachings is another. They are in direct conflict and are pulling the country in two different directions...neither of which are very good.
Re:We, the US, brought this on ourselves...
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Invaded by whom? Iran has to go through Iraq to get to the Saudis or Kuwait. Egypt? Turkey? There is no standing Iraqi army under uniform control. Incursions from militants or Baath loyalists could happen, but nothing that Saudi forces couldn't easily handle without the US.
The instability in the Saudi government is caused by tension between the extremely radical Islamic groups and the fundamentally corrupt government. I'm sure it will all become a big issue sooner or later, but internal unrest is something the Crown Prince of Morale Management can deal with. The Saudis wouldn't want the US or anyone else involved in that anyway.
We, the US, brought this on ourselves...
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...and I don't mean just by buying huge SUVs and being generally glutonous. I mean by defeating Saddam!
See, when that crazy SOB was running loose in Iraq, Saudia Arabia and the other OPEC nations were scared. They needed their big buddy, the US, to keep him in line. Now that he is gone and Iraq has declined into a state of continuous *local* guerrilla war, the possibility of Kuwait or Saudia Arabia being invaded is zero. So now, things are a little different between the US and OPEC. Sure, we did them a huge favor by removing Saddam, but now, the US has nothing over them. So, if oil prices should drift up and up and up. So sorry. Pay me, sucker.
I suspect that a network bootloader (syslinux) could be hacked into it as well. The floppy image that I use to network boot one of my clusters is only 50 or 60 KBs. That would fit about anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I see nothing in Kerry's voting record that would indicate he would be more responsible then Bush...which is not saying much. Kerry will pour money into a broken welfare system and a broken educational system. Neither will take on issue of rising health care prices. Neither will take a strategic view of fiscal responsibility.
I am beyond your line of thinking here. I will only vote in *support* of a candidate. I don't want Kerry including me in his "manadate," and watch him table the school vouchers issue and try to socialize medicine.
We do agree...and I find it painfully ironic...that I long for the days of grid lock. If I take off my idealogue cap and cast a pragmatic glance at the situation, we should keep the republican majority and welcome a very weak Kerry to the Oval Office. But, I think you are wrong about the budget stalemate. The money is *always* spent...always. Blueberry farms subsidies or underwater UAV spy equipment or something. Congress will *never* let money on the table when there's pork at market.
I fault both sides equally for their lack of fiscal responsibility. Clinton had the Internet Boom to hide the pork and the handouts and result in a surplus. Even then, Congree was talking about how to *spend* the surplus. Tax-n-Spend! I used to look to the Republicans for some measure of fiscal restraint, but that isn't true anymore. Deficit-Spend Warmongering!
l ?pg=5 really grabbed my attention...so much so that I can't bring myself to vote for either Bush or Kerry. The future financial well being of this country is clearly in doubt. Whether it lasts 10 or 20 or 50 years, social security outlays and debt interest will eventually bankrupt us. Neither candidate wants to face this. Everyone is focused on "tactical" thinking. "How do I position myself for this election...or this fiscal quarter?" No one wants to think strategically..."How will this effect the next 10 years of productivity and job growth?"
Lawrence Lessig's article on Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.htm
So, I am going to vote Libertarian simply because both major parties are racing headlong down similar paths to financial ruin. I hope that I can become independently wealthy and appropriately tax sheltered before taxes are "adjusted" to account the retiring baby boomers. I might make it...how many of you will?
Honestly, it is a common practice to buy 3ware "raid" controllers and only use them as non-raid IDE controllers. Then use Linux Software RAID to build the array.
Sorry to reply to my own post. More information...avoid putting master and slave on the same port. Sometimes, if one of the drives goes, it will whack the entire port and drop out the other drive. In raid5, this is bad though unrecoverable. It might require you to manually rebuild (mkraid --secret-option) to get the data back after replacing the drive. That is a scarely situation that can be easily avoided by only using one drive per ide port.
That information may be (and probably is) outdated with regard to SATA. I don't have experience with them yet, though I will be building four 1.75 TB RAID5 (or 1.5 TB RAID6...Linux 2.6 willing) arrays next month that use 250 GB SATA drives.
I have build at least two dozen software RAID5 boxes over the past few years. Usually Promise controllers, Maxtor drives. Performance is generally pretty good. Here are bonnie numbers for my 1.2 TB media server (five Maxtor 300 GB drives in Software RAID5). These numbers are a little slower then other systems because it uses an Athlon motherboard. I have found that Intel chipset boards generally give read performance ~100-140 MB/sec.
[root@media root]# more bonnie20.log
Bonnie 1.2: File '/raid/Bonnie.27772', size: 2097152000, volumes: 10
Writing with putc()... done: 14517 kB/s 83.2 %CPU
Rewriting... done: 25060 kB/s 17.1 %CPU
Writing intelligently... done: 41987 kB/s 29.5 %CPU
Reading with getc()... done: 18830 kB/s 96.1 %CPU
Reading intelligently... done: 82754 kB/s 62.2 %CPU
Using an older processor/motherboard is probably not a huge concern. I've used 300 MHz Celerons before. Of course, your performance might not be as high as this, but if you are using this as network attached storage (NFS or SMB), you will likely be limited to 12 MB/sec due to fast ethernet. If you have (and need) gigabit transfer speeds, you should probably use a better motherboard/CPU.
Lastly, remember that you shouldn't skimp on power supplies and an UPS that automatically shuts the system down. The *only* data loss I have ever had on raid5 arrays came because of power-related issues. Heed my warning! 8)
Not to crush you illusions or anything, but deep space probes have been launched with radioactive thermal generation units for decades. These run on plutonium! A big lump of it, too. We have been doing it; we are doing it; we will do it again.
...may qualify as "Chicken Little"-ish.
Sorry. The sky has already fallen.
The problem with hydrogen is *not* producing it. Electrolysis is easily accomplish. People have been genetically engineering algae to produce hydrogen gas directly from sunlight. We can gasify coal or other hydrocarbons, bleed off and sequester the CO2 to get H2 pretty efficiently.
The problem with hydrogen is storing it and transporting it safely. There is no good solution for this. The concept of using hydrogen as a bulk fuel is a complete non-starter until this problem is solved. With current approaches, either the pressure is too high, the temperature is too cold, or the energy density is too low. It leaks very easily, so it is difficult to store for extended periods of time. And recent studies seem to indicate that the environmental impact from significant H2 leakage could be worse than CO2 emissions.
Methanol is necessary because it can work with existing polymer electrolyte fuel cells. Methanol is CH4O...that can be ionized and transported through the electrolyte OK. Ethanol is C2H6O. It can't be ionized into a form that can diffuse through the electrolyte. Direct methanol fuel cells are special in that they don't require a reformer for their liquid fuel. That makes them really attractive for compact power systems...like laptops and cell phones.
I am not a physical chemist, so I don't know if it is possible to design an electrolyte to work with ethanol or other larger hydrocarbons. Usually when fuel cells "burn" larger hydrocarbons, they use some reforming process to turn them into H2 and/or CO first. This makes the systems bigger and much hotter (>800 C)...so there are heat exchangers, pumps, insulation, etc.
The 6600GT seems to run Doom3 almost as well as a 6800. ~60 FPS at 1600x1200 in high quality. So, I think "crush" is the right term.
Electric resistance heating has a coefficient of performance of 1. 1 watt of electricity turns into 1 watt of heat. There are much better ways to use that 1 watt of electricity...even it Canada...that will make 4 watts of heat. Electric resistance heating is the worse possible use of electric power ever conceived.
No, I clearly stated that both methane and methanol are likely chemical forms that can be used in fuel cells and stored in a safe cost efficient way:
All fuel cell manufactures are also looking at reforming mechanisms to make methane useful in fuel cells.
in portable electronics that will use liquid methanol as a fuel.
In fact, one could claim that crude oil "stores" hydrogen. Other approaches of storing hydrogen involve absorbtion (chemical or physical) into porous materials like activated carbon or dissolution into liquid solutions. Neither of these really seem to be panning out. Just adding one carbon to four hydrogens gives us a nice stable, easy to handle molecule that we already have experience using both in stationary power and transportation applications.
Clearly, I have been trumped by your mastery of hand-says-it-ain't-hot form of heat transfer analysis.
Turn on the power to your water heater. How long will it stay hot? I suspect that you will loose about 1 or 2 degrees F per hour. For 40 gallons or ~320 lbs of water, that is quiet a bit of energy. That is heat that you are paying for every day. Chances are 25% of your electric bill goes to feed your water heater. Adding that "useless" blanket might drop that to 20%. It isn't sexy, but that is maybe $5 a month times 12 months times 50 million households.
But the first movers on the "big ticket" efficiency ideas are the ones that get all of the press. I am not against PVs. I think it is great that the technology is progressing as it has, but there are millions of households that could save ~$100-$300 worth of electricity per year with very simple, inexpensive, boring improvements. These aren't whizbang enough to attract media attention, so people just don't know about them.
Fuel cells, PVs, super-insulated passive solar houses...these get the press...or at least did at different times since the 70s. Turning down 10% of the water heaters in America by 5 degrees and installing a water heater blanket will save more energy than produced by all of the PVs ever produced. See, my argument is that it must be economically viable in order for Joe Average to bother with it. There are economically feasible efficiency ideas that are commonly overlooked because they are so boring.
Good example. I have a ground-source (aka geothermal) heat pump in my house. I had a hard time finding a dealer to install it. They just aren't that popular. During heating season, it operates at a coefficient of performance of about 4. Every watt of electricity I put in, I get 4 watts of heat out. My electric bills are only about $100/month, even in the winter (Southwestern PA)...compared to people who got $400 gas bills last year. That is an energy efficiency and an economic win. But, there was no promotion of geothermal heat pumps. There was no discussions of them in the press. Energy efficient ideas have been divorced from economic viability for far too long...lining them up right next to people wearing hemp clothing. This needs to change. It should not be "fringe" to be energy efficient.
The key issue with hydrogen is that there is no good way to store it. It diffuses through everything, so leaks will always be an issue. Liquifying takes super cold temperatures and is very expensive. Compressed hydrogen needs to be a ~1000 psi to get a sufficiently high energy density...and that will make for one interesting car crash.
The best solution for transportable, stable, environmentally friendly fuel is probably methane. Compressed natural gas vehicles are very common. We can make methane about as easily as we can make hydrogen or oil or even from coal, via gasification. All fuel cell manufactures are also looking at reforming mechanisms to make methane useful in fuel cells. As engineer who has worked on fuel cell technology for the last five years, I think it is pretty clear that for future of transportation applications of fuel cells...particularly hydrogen-only systems...is very bleak.
Fuel cells will be used (eventually) in stationary power systems and very soon in portable electronics that will use liquid methanol as a fuel. Everything else is just a pipe dream, IMO.
There is a definite need for energy conservation ideas that can be directly supported with economic validation. So many "green" initiatives are driven solely by politics and have economics, and often even environmental impacts, that are questionable. We need more people installing compact flourescent lamps and water heater blankets...not $20,000 solar panel arrays. A healthy dose of common sense here could really make energy efficiency ideas more popular. Here's hoping it works.
In far too many ways, he is right! From a commercial software perspective, supporting "Linux" is almost impossible...because "Linux" means so many different things...Redhat, Fedora, SUSE, Debian...which release of Fedora...which version of Redhat? It makes a big difference when your commercially distributed builds need to touch different versions of glibs or different kernel versions. It runs on Redhat 7.3 but not on Redhat 8.
Honestly, as a big Linux advocate, this is the biggest problem I see for the future of Linux. Casual changes to glibs break so many things...requiring new builds, new distributions to customers, etc. In my view, it is the demagogery of the Open Source advocates that are making this happen. The "well, if you code was open source, you could just relink" argument will get you laughed at...and your platform dropped from the supportted list.
This is a big problem and it needs to be fixed. But that can only happen if the Linux community starts all going the same direction...or for one vendor to emerge as the clear Linux distro "winner" that commercial customers can all standardize on.
As someone also "in the know," I completely agree with you. One point raised in the Navy study was that all measurements and expectations for fusion behavior were dictated by high-energy experiments in plasmas, not in solid solutions. They postulate that quantum mechanical effects caused by the presense of the metal matrix are providing an enviroment more amenable to fusion, not unlike using muons to catalyze fusion in a high temperature enviroment. Though I am not familiar with all of the details, I cannot dismiss such a possibility out of hand.
I have a card at home as well, but never bothered with Steam. Can anyone with a code verify that it works? If so, I will need to get off the dime and get it downloaded.
In any crystal, there are potential imperfection. The MatSci term for them is dislocations. These are holes in the crystal lattice. These holes can move around (think of piles of marbles). In single crystals, these dislocations lead to stress risers at the hole (try tearing a sheet of paper by just pulling at opposite ends...then tear a small notch in the middle of one edge and try again). So these dislocations can move around and basically "unzip" the whole crystal. The failure mode leads to "cleaving" planes along different directions in the crystal and makes the bulk strength much lower.
High strength alloys generally try to put extra chemicals in the metal mixture to block the movements of the dislocations. Also, you tend to "quench" the formed metal so that the crystals that it forms (called "grains") are small. Smaller grains usually means stronger metals because they can only "unzip" a short distance before they hit a different grain with a different orientation.
These guys at ORNL have basically taken the tiny grain idea to the ultimate limit. Each grain basically only has one or a few atoms in it. FYI, IAA Mech. Engineeer.
It's not like the PII/III days when you could get as much as a 50% boost over the rated speed (rare, but it did happen.)
It wasn't at all rare. The Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 MHz without so much as a whimper. I built several systems (single and dual) using them. I had dual 366 celerons that ran at 550 in SMP. That was the heyday of overclocking and it was created by Intel's marketing practices. With competition from AMD, Intel hasn't been able to "downbin" and terrace the market to its whim anymore, so overclocking isn't that big of a deal.
True enough. My point was that the corruption of the governmnet is one factor, the widespread support of Wahabi radical teachings is another. They are in direct conflict and are pulling the country in two different directions...neither of which are very good.
Invaded by whom? Iran has to go through Iraq to get to the Saudis or Kuwait. Egypt? Turkey? There is no standing Iraqi army under uniform control. Incursions from militants or Baath loyalists could happen, but nothing that Saudi forces couldn't easily handle without the US.
The instability in the Saudi government is caused by tension between the extremely radical Islamic groups and the fundamentally corrupt government. I'm sure it will all become a big issue sooner or later, but internal unrest is something the Crown Prince of Morale Management can deal with. The Saudis wouldn't want the US or anyone else involved in that anyway.
...and I don't mean just by buying huge SUVs and being generally glutonous. I mean by defeating Saddam!
See, when that crazy SOB was running loose in Iraq, Saudia Arabia and the other OPEC nations were scared. They needed their big buddy, the US, to keep him in line. Now that he is gone and Iraq has declined into a state of continuous *local* guerrilla war, the possibility of Kuwait or Saudia Arabia being invaded is zero. So now, things are a little different between the US and OPEC. Sure, we did them a huge favor by removing Saddam, but now, the US has nothing over them. So, if oil prices should drift up and up and up. So sorry. Pay me, sucker.
I suspect that a network bootloader (syslinux) could be hacked into it as well. The floppy image that I use to network boot one of my clusters is only 50 or 60 KBs. That would fit about anywhere.
I lost months of my young life to Colonial Conquest. I shudder to think where I might be were it not for that game.