I still don't see the point. There are already hand-powered dynamos available, and they can put out a lot more than 3 watts. This is a cool piece of engineering but it doesn't solve a problem that couldn't be solved a different way.
Poking fun isn't racism. It might be offensive, but it's not the same thing.
Racism is telling people they can't drink from the same water fountains as other people, or refusing to sell a house to them based on their skin color, or herding them into gas chambers, or dragging them behind pickup trucks, or chanting "Death to all ABC" where ABC is the race of your choice.
Joking about an accent which, let's be honest here, can sometimes border on absolutely incomprehensible is possibly in bad taste but definitely not RACISM.
That won't work with the Cisco VPN client, as one example. It does some weird kernel shit to stop local LAN access from userspace. Even root can't get around it.
Yeah, you could hack their kernel module to disable this "feature" but that's a real bitch.
While you are dragging a window you obviously can't do anything else productive, unless you've found a way to compose an email while simultaneously dragging another window with the mouse, and dragging the window only takes a second at the most, so what difference does it make what the CPU load jumps to during that operation? So a background app gets slowed down for a second.
I use a dual Athlon 2400 SMP box at work AND at home. At least until last week, when I "downgraded" to a Mac Mini, and I can't tell the damn difference.
If you think SMP is somehow helping you as you browse the web and play some MP3s you're deluding yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, though. By all means have fun, like I said, I have a similar system myself.
By the way, if you're playing an MP3 and it starts to skip or lag because of other stuff that's going on, that's a sign your operating system sucks, or is misconfigured. There's this thing called priority. Boost it for the MP3 player, or lower it for the encoder or whatever else is going on.
If you have any multithreaded app that is even remotely competently written, then it will benefit from dual cores or (possibly) hyperthreading. If your multithreaded app is full of "big locks", then dual cores won't help, and the application designer is a failure.
You assume everything can be trivially multithreaded. That's utterly wrong.
First of all, multithreading is not always done for performance. Sometimes it makes the code easier to write. It's nice to be able to compartmentalize tasks into threads and control them with a boss.
Second, in the field of parallel programming there is a term called "embarrassingly parallel." This means that it's obvious how to multithread the task, in such a way that you get maximum benefit from each CPU. However, real-world tasks are rarely "embarassingly parallel." It's absolutely unfair to call the application designer a "failure" because the application can't be effectively multithreaded. Most things can't be.
There are many real-world super parallel applications (the kinds of things that run on 10,000 CPU clusters) that have properties like, to double the execution speed you must have 8 times the number of CPUs. This doesn't mean the application designer is an idiot, it means the problem is hard.
It's easy for people who've never done parallel programming to run their mouth off, however.
Get real. The only time I ever even notice that I have an SMP system is when I'm doing something crazy in a VMWare and a compile at the same time. My load average over the past few days is 0.02.
Yeah, I can build the kernel almost twice as fast as on a single-CPU system. So what.
Your average user simply isn't capable of maxing a single CPU, let alone two of them.
Its that Firefox can be run on one processor, while your MP3 player is running at the same time on the other. This in turn will speed up BOTH applications, since Firefox does not ever have to yield to the player, and visa versa.
Only if those applications were maxing the CPU to begin with. An MP3 player on a modern processor only utilizes around 1% of its capacity. Firefox a similar amount. They can easily share a CPU with 98% of its capacity to spare. They might run imperceptibly faster due to better cache utilization, but the reality is that almost every application spends 99% of its time waiting for something slower, like disk or network.
The only sort of application that a typical user (i.e. a non-developer) uses that's actually capable of maxing the CPU is, say, video editing, or a high-performance game.
Most people aren't going to want to buy a house with something that bizarre going on in the basement. You'll either have to tear it all out, or drop your price accordingly.
It might represent increased value for you but not to most people. It certainly won't increase your home's value.
It's easy to say you'll never want to sell, but things change...
You forget the step where you get arrested yourself for viewing child porn.
Under current laws you'd have to be fucking insane to report it. Show me a law that SPECIFICALLY and CLEARLY exempts the person reporting, and I'd consider reporting it.
Big deal, what sort of asshole wouldn't report child porn to the police if they found it on their servers (or anywhere else for that matter)?
Certainly not me. Under current laws I'd probably be charged with viewing child pornography.
Much better to just delete the stuff and forget about it, than to attempt to get the actual source busted. The law is fucked and it encourages people not to report.
300% more power at the same voltage means 3 times the current. Since power dissipation goes as the current squared, this supposed battery would produce 9 times as much waste heat.
Smells like bullshit to me.
The black hole is essentially converting virtual particles into real ones -- without the presence of the black hole the radiation would not be emitted, so I don't see how it is wrong to say that the black hole is emitting radiation.
That depends on whether you draw a distinction between the effects of a thing and the thing itself. It might be reasonable to say that the physical existence of a thing does not extend beyond its effects on other things. A thing which has no effect on anything cannot reasonably be said to exist.
I see the possibility of what you're suggesting, but what are the chances that a large mass of stars has precisely NO net angular momentum? It seems that all galaxies must spin at least a little bit simply due to chance.
Nothing escapes the event horizon. Not even "invisible" radiation, whatever that is.
I knew somebody would make a fool of themselves... My original comment had a warning against it, but I removed it to see who would bite.
I guess you've never heard of Hawking radiation. Massive black holes don't emit enough of it to be detectable, but the fact remains that black holes always emit radiation across the entire spectrum. No accretion disc required.
It its comprised of large amounts of Dark Matter, how can they tell that its spinning?
All galaxies must spin, otherwise they would collapse.
As for how they tell how much it is spinning -- one side is spinning towards us, the other is spinning away. Thus the spectrum of radiation from the side spinning toward us is blue-shifted relative to the side spinning away from us. By measuring the amount of blue-shift they can figure out the speed at which it rotates.
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I still don't see the point. There are already hand-powered dynamos available, and they can put out a lot more than 3 watts. This is a cool piece of engineering but it doesn't solve a problem that couldn't be solved a different way.
What about the inverse question... Why lose a supported standard?
Racism is telling people they can't drink from the same water fountains as other people, or refusing to sell a house to them based on their skin color, or herding them into gas chambers, or dragging them behind pickup trucks, or chanting "Death to all ABC" where ABC is the race of your choice.
Joking about an accent which, let's be honest here, can sometimes border on absolutely incomprehensible is possibly in bad taste but definitely not RACISM.
Wouldn't the "smart mind" be the one who solves the problem, not the one that poses the question?
Yeah, you could hack their kernel module to disable this "feature" but that's a real bitch.
Imagine that, the owner of a site with the primary purpose of facilitating massive copyright infringement takes off with people's cash? Shocking!
While you are dragging a window you obviously can't do anything else productive, unless you've found a way to compose an email while simultaneously dragging another window with the mouse, and dragging the window only takes a second at the most, so what difference does it make what the CPU load jumps to during that operation? So a background app gets slowed down for a second.
If you think SMP is somehow helping you as you browse the web and play some MP3s you're deluding yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, though. By all means have fun, like I said, I have a similar system myself.
By the way, if you're playing an MP3 and it starts to skip or lag because of other stuff that's going on, that's a sign your operating system sucks, or is misconfigured. There's this thing called priority. Boost it for the MP3 player, or lower it for the encoder or whatever else is going on.
You assume everything can be trivially multithreaded. That's utterly wrong.
First of all, multithreading is not always done for performance. Sometimes it makes the code easier to write. It's nice to be able to compartmentalize tasks into threads and control them with a boss.
Second, in the field of parallel programming there is a term called "embarrassingly parallel." This means that it's obvious how to multithread the task, in such a way that you get maximum benefit from each CPU. However, real-world tasks are rarely "embarassingly parallel." It's absolutely unfair to call the application designer a "failure" because the application can't be effectively multithreaded. Most things can't be.
There are many real-world super parallel applications (the kinds of things that run on 10,000 CPU clusters) that have properties like, to double the execution speed you must have 8 times the number of CPUs. This doesn't mean the application designer is an idiot, it means the problem is hard.
It's easy for people who've never done parallel programming to run their mouth off, however.
Yeah, I can build the kernel almost twice as fast as on a single-CPU system. So what.
Your average user simply isn't capable of maxing a single CPU, let alone two of them.
Only if those applications were maxing the CPU to begin with. An MP3 player on a modern processor only utilizes around 1% of its capacity. Firefox a similar amount. They can easily share a CPU with 98% of its capacity to spare. They might run imperceptibly faster due to better cache utilization, but the reality is that almost every application spends 99% of its time waiting for something slower, like disk or network.
The only sort of application that a typical user (i.e. a non-developer) uses that's actually capable of maxing the CPU is, say, video editing, or a high-performance game.
They have well-known brand name in the PVR sector.
His sarcasm went by at Mach 6, apparently...
It might represent increased value for you but not to most people. It certainly won't increase your home's value.
It's easy to say you'll never want to sell, but things change...
It's not entirely composed of dark matter. They are measuring the doppler shift of atomic hydrogen. It's in the article.
Under current laws you'd have to be fucking insane to report it. Show me a law that SPECIFICALLY and CLEARLY exempts the person reporting, and I'd consider reporting it.
Certainly not me. Under current laws I'd probably be charged with viewing child pornography.
Much better to just delete the stuff and forget about it, than to attempt to get the actual source busted. The law is fucked and it encourages people not to report.
300% more power at the same voltage means 3 times the current. Since power dissipation goes as the current squared, this supposed battery would produce 9 times as much waste heat. Smells like bullshit to me.
The black hole is essentially converting virtual particles into real ones -- without the presence of the black hole the radiation would not be emitted, so I don't see how it is wrong to say that the black hole is emitting radiation.
If it's charged and it accelerates, it emits radiation. If it has a temperature above absolute zero, it emits radiation.
But now we're veering into philosophy.
I see the possibility of what you're suggesting, but what are the chances that a large mass of stars has precisely NO net angular momentum? It seems that all galaxies must spin at least a little bit simply due to chance.
I knew somebody would make a fool of themselves... My original comment had a warning against it, but I removed it to see who would bite.
I guess you've never heard of Hawking radiation. Massive black holes don't emit enough of it to be detectable, but the fact remains that black holes always emit radiation across the entire spectrum. No accretion disc required.
All galaxies must spin, otherwise they would collapse.
As for how they tell how much it is spinning -- one side is spinning towards us, the other is spinning away. Thus the spectrum of radiation from the side spinning toward us is blue-shifted relative to the side spinning away from us. By measuring the amount of blue-shift they can figure out the speed at which it rotates.
Even black holes emit light. What they are saying is that no visible radiation is being emitted.