Well, wiseguy, FYI, I did notice you used the word "Kansas", and that you were using the acronym KSC. As space centers go, KSC stands for the one in Florida, and not for anything in Kansas, as shown by the page www.ksc.nasa.gov. I thought that would be clear from my posting, but I must have overestimated something.
"I'm kind of curious how much it costs (approximately) to remove another 250 watts from a room."
Mee too, enough to do a google and this is what I found:
AC efficiency is 'measured' in SEER. AC installations generally are 10 SEER to 12 SEER. One BTU of cooling is cooling of one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit. And: Annual Cooling in BTU's/Total Watt Hours = SEER. The SEER rating takes into account the efficiency of the condenser, the coolant pump (if any), and the air handler including the fan.
Thus a 10 SEER AC installation will cool 10 BTU's per watt hour used, on average year-round.
Now if only they used metric Joules, it would have been easier... But OMG, Google Really rocks. 1 BTU = 1055.05585 Joules. And of course we already knew that 1 Watt = 1 Joules per second, thus 1 Joules = 1 Watt second.
With W(1) being the wattage of cooling and W(2) the wattage of input power, thus 0.293 is the ratio of wattage cooled per watt used.
Thus, a 10-12 SEER AC system cools 2.93 to 3.52 watts per watt used.
That translates into a cooling cost of 1/3.52...1/2.93 = 0.28...0.34 of the generated heat-power.
Thus, with airconditioning you will have to add 28 to 34 percent to the electricity cost of the heat source.
But keep in mind that in the cold months, you will not be spending AC power to cool things, but the heat source will actually alleviate your heating requirements a bit (and the SEER rating does not take that into account).
Hmm, this could be a neat high-school math/physics exam question.
Now I wonder if I made a mistake, so I google again, and find that I made no mistakes and that the watts of cooling per watt used must be called the "SCOP"...
"KSC is a private sector organization in the middle of Kansas (more or less)."
Hold on, are you talking about the same KSC that I'm thinking of? That already has an actual saturn V rocket on display inside of an air-conditioned building together with the actual launch control room equipment? Note that the KSC I'm talking about is in Florida, not in Kansas, not even more or less...
"because science rejects unobservable causation without any basis for doing so"
Without an observation, you get no information, hence you need observations to find the truth.
Finding the 'truth' by just thinking something up, or philisophising is called speculation. Speculation can be used to help find the truth, but the result of speculation is only considered to be truth after observations prove it. Anybody can speculate anything, but only reproducable observations are informative about the truth.
What you are doing is speculating about demons. That is fine, now show the observations to confirm the speculation if you want to get scientists interested.
It's not just civil engineering where tolerances of your building materials are large. The amplification factors of individual transistors often have tolerances of more than 20%, even resistors can sometimes have 20% tolerance.
"So when scientists decide that they are going to give us "guidance" on how to respond to the global warming "crisis", are they acting as priests, or as scientists?"
Those scientist should stop mixing too and restrain to presenting scientific results and predictions based purely in science.
"And when religions make declarations about the nature of man, or about the origins of the cosmos, exactly how are they giving us "guidance""
They are not and they should stop doing that.
"And when scientists ignore an entire class of possible explanations because of nothing more than an ideological predisposition against those explanations"
"Some times true but if other repectable employees make it know that your the only one knows what the hell the code does they are likely to atleast think twice."
Yes, it will then focus on getting you off the project and letting somebody more capable take over before they lose you when you quit or die.
"This is also for short scripts, where maintainability shouldn't really be an issue"
Maintainability is always an issue.
"(if its broke, you should be able to write a new one fast enough)"
For example if something else went wrong (a compounded failure on a higher level in the system) and you're trying to figure out if that 'small script' was (part of) the culprit.
Actually, since the thing crashed, they will realize how bad you were and rejoice the firing, while hiring somebody else to do it right this time, or at the very least... do it again.
"building a medical infrastucture on an unlicensed band (anyone in the building next door can swamp your signal) with no QoS is a bad idea."
The frequencies used by 802.11a/b/g are licence excempt, but that definitely is not the same as unrestricted. Every device operating in that frequency band is restricted in the amount of power it may transmit with. You can calculate the signal streng of any wifi signal that a neighbour may legally point at you and place your APs accordingly. If your neighbours transmit with too much power, you have as much legal recourse to make it stop as you have in any frequency band (plus I'm sure that a hospital will get good cooperation finding and stopping the culprit quickly).
Add to that the level of control that a hospital has of which devices can be installed/used inside of a hospital, and the location and size of the hospital buildings as I know them, it should be no problem at all to build an indoor wifi network in a hospital without interference problems.
Note that things are like that in virtually all fields of engineering. For example to get good and cheap chips, chip designers go through the same process of balancing probabilities for a particular target cost and risk of failure. Its a complex process, because if you make the silicon process or chip design more robust to increase yield (to get fewer chips that fail the tests, thus reducing overall chip production cost), you're often increasing the chip size or power usage, thus increasing the cost or reducing the value...
It looks to me like you first need to do some soul searching into who you really are and what you really want to do in life. Example:
First you say "I'm incredibly intense and concentrated, yet I often become bored of specific projects in a few months." but later you say "My attention span is practically unlimited when I am interested in a topic, and I get intensely interested in it."
And you say you love to learn, and people tell you you should be getting very good grades at school, but you don't. Do you want to learn or not? (and how/where?).
You need to make up your mind. That means doing two things: making a choice and then setting a goal. Stop waiting what the day brings you, but take the day to where you want it to go. Take charge of your own life.
You seem interested in many things, but keep getting worried that you're missing something better if you stick with it, hence the feeling of boredom sets in. Independent of whether you actually do have attention problems and can't stick with something, or possibly you do have a practically unlimited attention span (but you are still not sure what for) what you need to do is look farther into the future and set an ambitious goal. Imagine yourself 10 years from now, and what it would take for you to see yourself being happy and successful. I'm saying you and yourself and I mean it, don't go for the bland 'commonly accepted definitions' of happyness and success, but what really is it that makes you happy and what would you consider a success when you look at yourself 10 years from now. For some people that means having a family of your own (loving wife & kids), for others a particular career (money, respect, power), for others a particular social position in society (love, respect, power), and for some it is linked to a geographical place, or other people, or a particular surrounding, also religion may be a factor, etc.
It can help to add the 10 years to your age and search for people in that age group that can (partly) serve as a role model or guide. Your personal role models don't have to be alive, or currently in the target age group, but it can be very helpful to research 'what did eeeee do when he/she was that age'.
When you know where and what you want to be in the future, that will tell you exactly what steps to take now and will help you make all those smaller choices needed to get there.
Just my 2cts worth...
Myself I feel like I'm just in the process of achieving current long-term goals and I must say that I am happy and feel successful, and now I am searching for a new goal. I am confident I will have a much clearer picture of it by the end of this year, and for you: I hope you do too.
AFAIK, digital cable uses standard MPEG2 transport streams (just like DVB), but uses a proprietary data encryption on top of the transport streams.
There are no digital cable tuners for PCs, but...
It does support digital cable, by connecting the s-video and audio out of your digital cable box to your PVR-250, and connecting an infrared transmitter (lirc.org) to your PC that you place in front of the cable box, and then some software configuration.
No bearings and motor, no head control/pickup arm, and no magnetic media? Hmm. Now I'm getting interested in the expected actual mtbf of such memory! (I say actual, because the numbers harddisk manufacturers publish there days are more dream numbers than actual _means_).
Good suggestions, except for "two identical servers", which is a very bad idea. Identical servers will fail at nearly identical points in time.
You'll know what I'm talking about when you have a backup server die the day after you switched over to it when the primary failed.
Diversify at least the the mainboards, power supplies, and hard disks.
A little addition for the UPS's: plug them into different power outlets on preferably different circuit breakers (if unknown, try opposite ends of the room). No need to let a single breaker bring both your servers down.
And, even with a setup like that, still a backup should be kept, because that file-delete command will replicate to the backup server in the blink of an eye.
"how does Japan manage to stay lightyears ahead of everyone else in wireless?"
Just to stay that much ahead to the US for wireless phone services, all they needed to do is virtually nothing for at least the last three years. At least, that's how long it seems to me that the technology of US wireless companies has been standing still now. Ok, so now you get 600 minutes, evenings and week-ends calling, for the price that three years ago got 300 minutes calling. Whooptydoo. Crap.
"Divided by US population is around 160."... "Myself and my three kids use only around 140 gal/year per each even with three cars"
I don't think even 160 gallons per person is feasible right now.
Even at 50 MPG, 140 gallons is only 7000 miles. Judging by odometer values on used cars that I see for sale, I believe nationwide average driving (in the US) is around 12000 miles per year (and average mpg on all cars on the road is probably less than half of 50mpg).
If you use one 50 MPG car for a 14 miles trip and back on each working day (5*50 days per year), then you're already using 140 gallons per year. I think the average commute is much more than 14 miles total for each four people, plus most people drive more than just to work and back.
You are way below (US) average if 140 gallons a year gets you and three kids around (the planet must love you). My guess is that the current average is somewhere 400-600 gallons per car per year.
Btw, If that really is your usage, then did you ever compare your yearly gasoline cost with your yearly auto insurance cost, even at today's high gasoline prices? Eye-opening isn't it? (or is auto insurance in your area really that cheap?)
Slashdot Mirror
You're not only joking, you're obviously also joking
Well, wiseguy, FYI, I did notice you used the word "Kansas", and that you were using the acronym KSC. As space centers go, KSC stands for the one in Florida, and not for anything in Kansas, as shown by the page www.ksc.nasa.gov. I thought that would be clear from my posting, but I must have overestimated something.
"I'm kind of curious how much it costs (approximately) to remove another 250 watts from a room."
Mee too, enough to do a google and this is what I found:
AC efficiency is 'measured' in SEER. AC installations generally are 10 SEER to 12 SEER. One BTU of cooling is cooling of one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit. And: Annual Cooling in BTU's/Total Watt Hours = SEER. The SEER rating takes into account the efficiency of the condenser, the coolant pump (if any), and the air handler including the fan.
Thus a 10 SEER AC installation will cool 10 BTU's per watt hour used, on average year-round.
Now if only they used metric Joules, it would have been easier... But OMG, Google Really rocks. 1 BTU = 1055.05585 Joules. And of course we already knew that 1 Watt = 1 Joules per second, thus 1 Joules = 1 Watt second.
Thus 1 SEER = 1055.05585 / 3600 [J/W(2)t] = 0.293071069 [W(1)/W(2)]
With W(1) being the wattage of cooling and W(2) the wattage of input power, thus 0.293 is the ratio of wattage cooled per watt used.
Thus, a 10-12 SEER AC system cools 2.93 to 3.52 watts per watt used.
That translates into a cooling cost of 1/3.52...1/2.93 = 0.28...0.34 of the generated heat-power.
Thus, with airconditioning you will have to add 28 to 34 percent to the electricity cost of the heat source.
But keep in mind that in the cold months, you will not be spending AC power to cool things, but the heat source will actually alleviate your heating requirements a bit (and the SEER rating does not take that into account).
Hmm, this could be a neat high-school math/physics exam question.
Now I wonder if I made a mistake, so I google again, and find that I made no mistakes and that the watts of cooling per watt used must be called the "SCOP"...
"KSC is a private sector organization in the middle of Kansas (more or less)."
Hold on, are you talking about the same KSC that I'm thinking of? That already has an actual saturn V rocket on display inside of an air-conditioned building together with the actual launch control room equipment? Note that the KSC I'm talking about is in Florida, not in Kansas, not even more or less...
"because science rejects unobservable causation without any basis for doing so"
Without an observation, you get no information, hence you need observations to find the truth.
Finding the 'truth' by just thinking something up, or philisophising is called speculation. Speculation can be used to help find the truth, but the result of speculation is only considered to be truth after observations prove it. Anybody can speculate anything, but only reproducable observations are informative about the truth.
What you are doing is speculating about demons. That is fine, now show the observations to confirm the speculation if you want to get scientists interested.
I repeat: Science is about observing your surroundings. If you see the daemon, call the scientists.
No, it is not, because science is about observing your surroundings, and what you call 'non-naturalistic' does not include observations.
It's not just civil engineering where tolerances of your building materials are large. The amplification factors of individual transistors often have tolerances of more than 20%, even resistors can sometimes have 20% tolerance.
"So when scientists decide that they are going to give us "guidance" on how to respond to the global warming "crisis", are they acting as priests, or as scientists?"
Those scientist should stop mixing too and restrain to presenting scientific results and predictions based purely in science.
"And when religions make declarations about the nature of man, or about the origins of the cosmos, exactly how are they giving us "guidance""
They are not and they should stop doing that.
"And when scientists ignore an entire class of possible explanations because of nothing more than an ideological predisposition against those explanations"
Such as?
"Some times true but if other repectable employees make it know that your the only one knows what the hell the code does they are likely to atleast think twice."
Yes, it will then focus on getting you off the project and letting somebody more capable take over before they lose you when you quit or die.
"This is also for short scripts, where maintainability shouldn't really be an issue"
Maintainability is always an issue.
"(if its broke, you should be able to write a new one fast enough)"
For example if something else went wrong (a compounded failure on a higher level in the system) and you're trying to figure out if that 'small script' was (part of) the culprit.
Actually, since the thing crashed, they will realize how bad you were and rejoice the firing, while hiring somebody else to do it right this time, or at the very least... do it again.
"and a week power with a simple lighter fluid refill..."
You wish. Those refills will be like the ink and toners of today's printers: incompatible, hard-to-find, and overpriced.
"building a medical infrastucture on an unlicensed band (anyone in the building next door can swamp your signal) with no QoS is a bad idea."
The frequencies used by 802.11a/b/g are licence excempt, but that definitely is not the same as unrestricted. Every device operating in that frequency band is restricted in the amount of power it may transmit with. You can calculate the signal streng of any wifi signal that a neighbour may legally point at you and place your APs accordingly. If your neighbours transmit with too much power, you have as much legal recourse to make it stop as you have in any frequency band (plus I'm sure that a hospital will get good cooperation finding and stopping the culprit quickly).
Add to that the level of control that a hospital has of which devices can be installed/used inside of a hospital, and the location and size of the hospital buildings as I know them, it should be no problem at all to build an indoor wifi network in a hospital without interference problems.
Science is the quest for truth, religion is the quest for guidance.
Stop mixing them.
Note that things are like that in virtually all fields of engineering. For example to get good and cheap chips, chip designers go through the same process of balancing probabilities for a particular target cost and risk of failure. Its a complex process, because if you make the silicon process or chip design more robust to increase yield (to get fewer chips that fail the tests, thus reducing overall chip production cost), you're often increasing the chip size or power usage, thus increasing the cost or reducing the value...
One-letter class names? Is he nuts? That guy never had to maintain code I guess...
It looks to me like you first need to do some soul searching into who you really are and what you really want to do in life. Example:
First you say "I'm incredibly intense and concentrated, yet I often become bored of specific projects in a few months." but later you say "My attention span is practically unlimited when I am interested in a topic, and I get intensely interested in it."
And you say you love to learn, and people tell you you should be getting very good grades at school, but you don't. Do you want to learn or not? (and how/where?).
You need to make up your mind. That means doing two things: making a choice and then setting a goal. Stop waiting what the day brings you, but take the day to where you want it to go. Take charge of your own life.
You seem interested in many things, but keep getting worried that you're missing something better if you stick with it, hence the feeling of boredom sets in. Independent of whether you actually do have attention problems and can't stick with something, or possibly you do have a practically unlimited attention span (but you are still not sure what for) what you need to do is look farther into the future and set an ambitious goal. Imagine yourself 10 years from now, and what it would take for you to see yourself being happy and successful. I'm saying you and yourself and I mean it, don't go for the bland 'commonly accepted definitions' of happyness and success, but what really is it that makes you happy and what would you consider a success when you look at yourself 10 years from now. For some people that means having a family of your own (loving wife & kids), for others a particular career (money, respect, power), for others a particular social position in society (love, respect, power), and for some it is linked to a geographical place, or other people, or a particular surrounding, also religion may be a factor, etc.
It can help to add the 10 years to your age and search for people in that age group that can (partly) serve as a role model or guide. Your personal role models don't have to be alive, or currently in the target age group, but it can be very helpful to research 'what did eeeee do when he/she was that age'.
When you know where and what you want to be in the future, that will tell you exactly what steps to take now and will help you make all those smaller choices needed to get there.
Just my 2cts worth...
Myself I feel like I'm just in the process of achieving current long-term goals and I must say that I am happy and feel successful, and now I am searching for a new goal. I am confident I will have a much clearer picture of it by the end of this year, and for you: I hope you do too.
AFAIK, digital cable uses standard MPEG2 transport streams (just like DVB), but uses a proprietary data encryption on top of the transport streams.
There are no digital cable tuners for PCs, but...
It does support digital cable, by connecting the s-video and audio out of your digital cable box to your PVR-250, and connecting an infrared transmitter (lirc.org) to your PC that you place in front of the cable box, and then some software configuration.
No bearings and motor, no head control/pickup arm, and no magnetic media? Hmm. Now I'm getting interested in the expected actual mtbf of such memory! (I say actual, because the numbers harddisk manufacturers publish there days are more dream numbers than actual _means_).
Good suggestions, except for "two identical servers", which is a very bad idea. Identical servers will fail at nearly identical points in time.
You'll know what I'm talking about when you have a backup server die the day after you switched over to it when the primary failed.
Diversify at least the the mainboards, power supplies, and hard disks.
A little addition for the UPS's: plug them into different power outlets on preferably different circuit breakers (if unknown, try opposite ends of the room). No need to let a single breaker bring both your servers down.
And, even with a setup like that, still a backup should be kept, because that file-delete command will replicate to the backup server in the blink of an eye.
If you haven't patched after two months, you've just been trying to keep the TCO of Windows low.
A while back? Right above _this_ thread the microsoft ad it shows me says that microsoft has a lower TCO and that 7/11 is evaluating it.
I really don't care where that 7/11 CIO 'Keith Morrow' with an "MBA in e-Commerce from Dallas Baptist University" gets his TCO estimates (did he count things like the virus/worm/spyware of the day?), and/or I don't care how much if any MS threw in the bargain bin for the marketing opportunity, but:
Windows still sucks big time, and I don't care about the ads.
"how does Japan manage to stay lightyears ahead of everyone else in wireless?"
Just to stay that much ahead to the US for wireless phone services, all they needed to do is virtually nothing for at least the last three years. At least, that's how long it seems to me that the technology of US wireless companies has been standing still now. Ok, so now you get 600 minutes, evenings and week-ends calling, for the price that three years ago got 300 minutes calling. Whooptydoo. Crap.
"Divided by US population is around 160." ... "Myself and my three kids use only around 140 gal/year per each even with three cars"
I don't think even 160 gallons per person is feasible right now.
Even at 50 MPG, 140 gallons is only 7000 miles. Judging by odometer values on used cars that I see for sale, I believe nationwide average driving (in the US) is around 12000 miles per year (and average mpg on all cars on the road is probably less than half of 50mpg).
If you use one 50 MPG car for a 14 miles trip and back on each working day (5*50 days per year), then you're already using 140 gallons per year. I think the average commute is much more than 14 miles total for each four people, plus most people drive more than just to work and back.
You are way below (US) average if 140 gallons a year gets you and three kids around (the planet must love you). My guess is that the current average is somewhere 400-600 gallons per car per year.
Btw, If that really is your usage, then did you ever compare your yearly gasoline cost with your yearly auto insurance cost, even at today's high gasoline prices? Eye-opening isn't it? (or is auto insurance in your area really that cheap?)