"Cost" is not a dirty word. It is a measure of the resources that it took to implement a particular effort.
I don't believe he was using the word in that sense.
I am not advocating that we implement any and every "plan" for energy conservation that comes along regardless of cost, financial or otherwise. I was commenting on how many individuals refuse to take even simple steps which clearly reduce their energy consumption just because it doesn't save them any money.
You're exploding the argument into something more general than what I was addressing.
The waste from nuclear energy is so dirty that various state governors have attempted to block it from being shipped through their states.
No, those governers have done what they've done because the residents of those states have irrational fears of nuclear waste. It is certainly a "dirty" material but it can be transported safely. Truck it down my street, if you like.
I wonder if you have ever stopped to consider the extraordinary amount of energy it takes to mine and refine uranium. I doubt it.
The amount of energy extracted from that refined uranium during the nuclear reactions absolutely dwarfs the energy required to refine it. In fact, it is quite possible to power a uranium refining facility with a nuclear generator.
I know, I know... You're not the only person hounding me to do a writeup on this entire process:-) Once the installation is complete, tested, and burned in I'll start thinking about it.
It does sound like he got a hell of a deal, though. The systems I've been looking at cost about as much as a small car.
The panels I purchased are BP-850's which as far as I know were recently discontinued. The newer model is even more efficient. That is part of the reason the price was good.
The other reason was that we got 20 people together and literally ordered a semi-truck full of panels. That really cuts down the shipping costs for four tons of solar panels!
Guess why PV panels cost hundreds of dollars: they take LOTS of energy to make!
And the payback time for that energy is on the order of two years. The panels will be operational far longer than that.
As far as solar panels paying for themselves: a $600 solar panel that puts out a hundred watts (that's how much they cost) is not going to pay for itself in its lifetime.
This is simply WRONG. The 500 watts of panels I just purchased cost me $1500. That's $3 per watt, as opposed to your made-up figure of $6 per watt.
If your purpose is to push nuclear as a viable power source, by all means do so, I am in complete agreement that nuclear is the best way to go. But do NOT push your agenda by impugning a perfectly viable option which can serve us well in the meantime.
I challenge you to produce five independent reports that show that modern PV manufacturing processes result in a net energy deficit over a period of 20 years. In fact, I'll make it easier for you. Give me three reports.
Even if we were entirely solar/thermal/wind, we'd STILL want to conserve, because the more energy you use the more energy you waste which leads to environmental problems at some point.
While I absolutely agree that conservation should be a core human value regardless of how much energy we have laying around, I don't see that this statement makes physical sense.
The earth is at an energy equilibrium, with the amount of energy entering the system from the sun being equal to the amount going out. If this were not true, the earth would be progressively heating up, and it would continue to heat up until equilibrium was reestablished. Simply by capturing a portion of that solar energy and putting it to use before it turns to heat cannot alter this energy balance because the total energy input to the system remains the same. In order for the equilibrium to change, the energy would have to be stored permanently somewhere.
Consider the heat capacity of the atmosphere. In order to raise the equilibrium temperature of the atmosphere by even one degree, an equivalent amount of energy would have to be stored somewhere. I don't think humans have the ability to build a battery so huge.
For example, you just trashed the environment to get your photovoltaics so that you could feel good about self-powering your computer. Your pollution-per-watt is much, much higher than the equivalent coming out of your wall.
Utterly wrong. Check your facts, which are about 15 years out of date. Energy payback time for photovoltaics is under two years these days. And I buy PV cells which are manufactured out of reprocessed semiconductor waste from the chip-making industry. The majority of the environmental impact from producing those semiconductors already happened, when they were refined in order to make Pentiums (or whatever else they turned into).
You're straining to find excuses for being an energy slob, and going about it in a very dishonest way. Get your facts straight. I spent over three months researching all the environmental aspects of this decision. You clearly have invested about 5 minutes of Googling, if even that.
I want to live on a nice planet, too, but realistically speaking that means centralizing production to a few good, clean resources (read: nuke) than building hundreds of millions of dirty plants across the country.
We are in agreement about nuclear, but what does that have to do with photovoltaics?
All conservation does it make the energy source last longer it does not solve the under lying problem. I tend to the idea that prolonging our dependence is a very bad idea.
This argument is bullshit. Observe:
All law enforcement does is remove criminals from the streets, it does not solve the underlying problem of violence in our society. I tend to the idea that attempting to incarcerate criminals is a very bad idea.
Basically you're saying that we should make the problem as bad as possible so that people will notice that it's a problem.
Unless you're significantly shortening that drive, the upfront costs of relocation will burn through years' worth of fuel savings.
Is it so inconceivable that some people want to save energy regardless of how much it costs to do so? I actually pay a higher rate on my electric bill for "green" energy -- yes, I'm aware that I'm not actually purchasing "green electrons" but that money is directed to sustaining and developing renewable energy resources in the state.
I just bought 500 watts of photovoltaics, which, given a sufficiently large battery bank, will enable me to run my Mac Mini and the LCD it is connected to entirely off-grid. Did I do that to save money? Obviously not.
But I guess putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to the environment gets you labeled either insane or stupid, at least in the USA.
I am talking about Latino having a different meaning in the US and in Europe. But of course, you are probably unaware of those things if you are an Usaian.
Aware of the difference? Certainly. However, the topic at hand is immigration into the United States, so using the European interpretation would be moronic, no?
P.S. Where have I ever called the US the greatest nation on earth? I've never ran for office so such touchy-feelie statements have never been important to me.
I didn't mean to imply that you had. I was warping back to the beginning of this thread, where the fellow posted an enormous list of reasons why we aren't.
Saying that our nation is statistically indistinguishable from the other countries on the planet is hardly a stunning endorsement, and certainly doesn't imply that we're the "Greatest nation on Earth."
The INS (now BCS) is the most backward, retarded, morass of a bureaucracy you can imagine. My wife's been in the country for five years and still doesn't have her green card...it was "lost in the mail" once and the replacement will take 24-30 months. They're the worst government agency I've ever dealt with.
I have an extremely important piece of advice with regards to this:
When you deal with the INS, you always deal with the office/branch at the location you first immigrated to. In my fiancee's case, this means the California INS. Even though she lives in Portland and hasn't lived in California for 5 years.
This absolutely sucks. The California INS is swamped with millions of Hispanic/Latino immigrants. I am not trying to make a negative comment about those folks, but the system is overloaded by the sheer mass of people and it will take YEARS longer to get through it than it would if you were going to a different office.
By no means should you enter the United States at California, or any other location with a heavy immigrant load!
Also, don't assume that just because you're a citizen and are coming back, your wife can come back. If you married her overseas, she has no more legal right to enter the US than any other alien (IANAL, but that is my understanding).
Would it be possible to get a divorce in Japan and re-marry in the US?
My advice is to talk to an immigration attorney ASAP.
First, let me say what sort of code I write. I work almost exclusively with high-performance, 2D graphics code. Most of what I do involve manipulating bits, worrying about cache utilization, and squeezing the last bits of performance out of a three line inner loop. I'm just going to rattle off what I know from my experience with gcc and VC++:
The compiler will perform strength reduction in all reasonable instances.
The compiler will raise invariant computations from inner loops in almost all cases that do not involve pointers.
The compiler knows how to optimize integer division in ways I wouldn't have even thought of.
The compiler sometimes "forgets" about a register and produces sub-optimal code for inner loops.
The compiler can't always tell what variable is most important to keep in a register in an inner loop.
Other stuff:
x^=y; y^=x; x^=y; optimizes to an XCHG instruction with gcc on x86. I was amazed that it could do that. (Yes, that piece of code exchanges x and y). On the other hand, tmp=x; x=y; y=tmp; doesn't get optimized to an XCHG. Obviously, the compiler is using a Boolean simplifier or identity-prover.
The compiler always assumes a branch will be taken (unless you use certain compiler switches to change this behavior). Thus you should always arrange your conditional tests so that the less-often executed code is within the braces.
Don't be afraid to write complex expressions. Subexpression elimination is almost foolproof in all instances where pointers are NOT involved. It's better to leave your code clear, and let the compiler optimize it.
And ABOVE ALL:
No matter how much the compiler optimizes your code, you can throw it all down the toilet with bad design by screwing the cache utilization. This is EXTREMELY important especially in graphical applications which process huge raster buffers. Row-wise processing is always more efficient than column-wise. Random access will kill your performance. Do not trust the memory allocator to keep your allocations together. Write your own allocator if you are dealing with thousands or millions of small, related chunks of information.
I could go on... But I must also second what others have said, which is to perform algorithmic optimizations FIRST and do not bother with constant-factor optimizations until you are CERTAIN that you are using the best algorithm. If you ignore this advice you might waste a week optimizing a three-line inner loop and then come up with a better algorithm the next week which makes all your hard work redundant.
You're refining the definition to fit your purposes.
In fact, an emulator is anything that, well, emulates the behavior of something else. Wine may not be a hardware emulator, in that the instructions execute natively on the processor, but the mass of DLLs and system software certainly exists for the purpose of emulating a Windows environment.
And oh God, let's please not get into the semantics between "emulation" and "simulation" shall we?
It's not a HARDWARE emulator, but is certainly "emulates" a Windows environment. I don't care what the letters WINE stand for, the thing is an emulator.
Then, a couple years from now when (please please please) SVG actually starts to be a standard in browsers, we'll see SVG advertisements that not only move around but ANIMATE.
Then we'll be forced to implement crap like "Only allow SVG from the sites I authorize" etc etc...
It's an arms race. I prefer to deal with the issue by not browsing to sites which choose to run ads that pollute my browsing experience.
But you made the point about OS, were you running the same OS on both machines?
I was running it on the same MACHINE, booting between an SMP linux kernel and a single-processor kernel.
Also PPC processors are very different beasts from x86 chips. PPC is a much more modern design and is designed for multitasking OS's, unlike x86 chips.
Are you SERIOUS? Since the 80386 the x86 line has had significant multitasking features. Task state segments, interrupt context chaining, full memory protection, all these features are explicitly designed to support multitasking. It is true that the x86 instruction set is fairly ancient but the internal design of the processor (at least modern ones) is just as advanced as a PPC.
Before you try to start an Apple/Intel war, let me state that I switched over to a Mac Mini last week for home use and I freaking love it. PPC does rock, but don't try to tell us that Intel chips aren't modern.
I'm not denying that there are application where it makes a difference. I was very careful in my statements to say that TYPICAL use doesn't benefit from SMP. I admit that "typical" is a very vague term.
You're saying all this to a person who has used exclusively SMP systems since 2000. I have five years of experience telling me it doesn't make any fucking difference for everyday use. It's not "theoretical" in the slightest bit.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe he was using the word in that sense.
I am not advocating that we implement any and every "plan" for energy conservation that comes along regardless of cost, financial or otherwise. I was commenting on how many individuals refuse to take even simple steps which clearly reduce their energy consumption just because it doesn't save them any money.
You're exploding the argument into something more general than what I was addressing.
No, those governers have done what they've done because the residents of those states have irrational fears of nuclear waste. It is certainly a "dirty" material but it can be transported safely. Truck it down my street, if you like.
I wonder if you have ever stopped to consider the extraordinary amount of energy it takes to mine and refine uranium. I doubt it.
The amount of energy extracted from that refined uranium during the nuclear reactions absolutely dwarfs the energy required to refine it. In fact, it is quite possible to power a uranium refining facility with a nuclear generator.
I know, I know... You're not the only person hounding me to do a writeup on this entire process :-) Once the installation is complete, tested, and burned in I'll start thinking about it.
The panels I purchased are BP-850's which as far as I know were recently discontinued. The newer model is even more efficient. That is part of the reason the price was good.
The other reason was that we got 20 people together and literally ordered a semi-truck full of panels. That really cuts down the shipping costs for four tons of solar panels!
And the payback time for that energy is on the order of two years. The panels will be operational far longer than that.
As far as solar panels paying for themselves: a $600 solar panel that puts out a hundred watts (that's how much they cost) is not going to pay for itself in its lifetime.
This is simply WRONG. The 500 watts of panels I just purchased cost me $1500. That's $3 per watt, as opposed to your made-up figure of $6 per watt.
If your purpose is to push nuclear as a viable power source, by all means do so, I am in complete agreement that nuclear is the best way to go. But do NOT push your agenda by impugning a perfectly viable option which can serve us well in the meantime.
I challenge you to produce five independent reports that show that modern PV manufacturing processes result in a net energy deficit over a period of 20 years. In fact, I'll make it easier for you. Give me three reports.
While I absolutely agree that conservation should be a core human value regardless of how much energy we have laying around, I don't see that this statement makes physical sense.
The earth is at an energy equilibrium, with the amount of energy entering the system from the sun being equal to the amount going out. If this were not true, the earth would be progressively heating up, and it would continue to heat up until equilibrium was reestablished. Simply by capturing a portion of that solar energy and putting it to use before it turns to heat cannot alter this energy balance because the total energy input to the system remains the same. In order for the equilibrium to change, the energy would have to be stored permanently somewhere.
Consider the heat capacity of the atmosphere. In order to raise the equilibrium temperature of the atmosphere by even one degree, an equivalent amount of energy would have to be stored somewhere. I don't think humans have the ability to build a battery so huge.
Wow, I think that's the first time I've ever seen somebody apologize for being correct! :-)
A gallon is a unit of volume. It's an entirely appropriate unit of measure, especially in this instance!
Utterly wrong. Check your facts, which are about 15 years out of date. Energy payback time for photovoltaics is under two years these days. And I buy PV cells which are manufactured out of reprocessed semiconductor waste from the chip-making industry. The majority of the environmental impact from producing those semiconductors already happened, when they were refined in order to make Pentiums (or whatever else they turned into).
You're straining to find excuses for being an energy slob, and going about it in a very dishonest way. Get your facts straight. I spent over three months researching all the environmental aspects of this decision. You clearly have invested about 5 minutes of Googling, if even that.
I want to live on a nice planet, too, but realistically speaking that means centralizing production to a few good, clean resources (read: nuke) than building hundreds of millions of dirty plants across the country.
We are in agreement about nuclear, but what does that have to do with photovoltaics?
This argument is bullshit. Observe:
All law enforcement does is remove criminals from the streets, it does not solve the underlying problem of violence in our society. I tend to the idea that attempting to incarcerate criminals is a very bad idea.
Basically you're saying that we should make the problem as bad as possible so that people will notice that it's a problem.
Is it so inconceivable that some people want to save energy regardless of how much it costs to do so? I actually pay a higher rate on my electric bill for "green" energy -- yes, I'm aware that I'm not actually purchasing "green electrons" but that money is directed to sustaining and developing renewable energy resources in the state.
I just bought 500 watts of photovoltaics, which, given a sufficiently large battery bank, will enable me to run my Mac Mini and the LCD it is connected to entirely off-grid. Did I do that to save money? Obviously not.
But I guess putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to the environment gets you labeled either insane or stupid, at least in the USA.
Aware of the difference? Certainly. However, the topic at hand is immigration into the United States, so using the European interpretation would be moronic, no?
What are you talking about?
I didn't mean to imply that you had. I was warping back to the beginning of this thread, where the fellow posted an enormous list of reasons why we aren't.
Saying that our nation is statistically indistinguishable from the other countries on the planet is hardly a stunning endorsement, and certainly doesn't imply that we're the "Greatest nation on Earth."
I have an extremely important piece of advice with regards to this:
When you deal with the INS, you always deal with the office/branch at the location you first immigrated to. In my fiancee's case, this means the California INS. Even though she lives in Portland and hasn't lived in California for 5 years.
This absolutely sucks. The California INS is swamped with millions of Hispanic/Latino immigrants. I am not trying to make a negative comment about those folks, but the system is overloaded by the sheer mass of people and it will take YEARS longer to get through it than it would if you were going to a different office.
By no means should you enter the United States at California, or any other location with a heavy immigrant load!
Also, don't assume that just because you're a citizen and are coming back, your wife can come back. If you married her overseas, she has no more legal right to enter the US than any other alien (IANAL, but that is my understanding).
Would it be possible to get a divorce in Japan and re-marry in the US?
My advice is to talk to an immigration attorney ASAP.
I second, third, and fourth this advice!
The compiler will perform strength reduction in all reasonable instances.
The compiler will raise invariant computations from inner loops in almost all cases that do not involve pointers.
The compiler knows how to optimize integer division in ways I wouldn't have even thought of.
The compiler sometimes "forgets" about a register and produces sub-optimal code for inner loops.
The compiler can't always tell what variable is most important to keep in a register in an inner loop.
Other stuff:
x^=y; y^=x; x^=y; optimizes to an XCHG instruction with gcc on x86. I was amazed that it could do that. (Yes, that piece of code exchanges x and y). On the other hand, tmp=x; x=y; y=tmp; doesn't get optimized to an XCHG. Obviously, the compiler is using a Boolean simplifier or identity-prover.
The compiler always assumes a branch will be taken (unless you use certain compiler switches to change this behavior). Thus you should always arrange your conditional tests so that the less-often executed code is within the braces.
Don't be afraid to write complex expressions. Subexpression elimination is almost foolproof in all instances where pointers are NOT involved. It's better to leave your code clear, and let the compiler optimize it.
And ABOVE ALL:
No matter how much the compiler optimizes your code, you can throw it all down the toilet with bad design by screwing the cache utilization. This is EXTREMELY important especially in graphical applications which process huge raster buffers. Row-wise processing is always more efficient than column-wise. Random access will kill your performance. Do not trust the memory allocator to keep your allocations together. Write your own allocator if you are dealing with thousands or millions of small, related chunks of information.
I could go on... But I must also second what others have said, which is to perform algorithmic optimizations FIRST and do not bother with constant-factor optimizations until you are CERTAIN that you are using the best algorithm. If you ignore this advice you might waste a week optimizing a three-line inner loop and then come up with a better algorithm the next week which makes all your hard work redundant.
Why are you blowing your fucking top? Just curious. Try enjoying your Friday instead.
In fact, an emulator is anything that, well, emulates the behavior of something else. Wine may not be a hardware emulator, in that the instructions execute natively on the processor, but the mass of DLLs and system software certainly exists for the purpose of emulating a Windows environment.
And oh God, let's please not get into the semantics between "emulation" and "simulation" shall we?
It's not a HARDWARE emulator, but is certainly "emulates" a Windows environment. I don't care what the letters WINE stand for, the thing is an emulator.
Then, a couple years from now when (please please please) SVG actually starts to be a standard in browsers, we'll see SVG advertisements that not only move around but ANIMATE.
Then we'll be forced to implement crap like "Only allow SVG from the sites I authorize" etc etc... It's an arms race. I prefer to deal with the issue by not browsing to sites which choose to run ads that pollute my browsing experience.
I was running it on the same MACHINE, booting between an SMP linux kernel and a single-processor kernel.
Also PPC processors are very different beasts from x86 chips. PPC is a much more modern design and is designed for multitasking OS's, unlike x86 chips.
Are you SERIOUS? Since the 80386 the x86 line has had significant multitasking features. Task state segments, interrupt context chaining, full memory protection, all these features are explicitly designed to support multitasking. It is true that the x86 instruction set is fairly ancient but the internal design of the processor (at least modern ones) is just as advanced as a PPC.
Before you try to start an Apple/Intel war, let me state that I switched over to a Mac Mini last week for home use and I freaking love it. PPC does rock, but don't try to tell us that Intel chips aren't modern.
I'm not denying that there are application where it makes a difference. I was very careful in my statements to say that TYPICAL use doesn't benefit from SMP. I admit that "typical" is a very vague term.
Maybe it's your operating system that sucks.
Well that's exactly my point. Feel free to joke about our accent as well. In either case I think it's just joking, not racism.