Just something to beware of with security freezes. A few months ago I did freeze my accounts at the credit reporting agencies because my tax preparer recommended it as a proactive move to prevent identity theft.
I have a credit card that reports my current FICO score monthly. The month after I froze my accounts my FICO score dropped by 57 points. Looking back over the last year, my rating had moved up 11 points before this unexpected drop, so I think it's likely that the change was caused by initiating the credit freeze.
It doesn't matter as my credit history is frozen, but if I do need to give someone access to my credit ratings for any reason (buying a new car, getting a new job, whatever) then I presume the much lower score will be shown.
Then you didn't do a good site survey before installing your panels. You should have considered that before installing panels.
At my request, 32 of my 48 panels face south west. On a per panel basis they produce about 91% of the 16 panels facing south, but they peek about 4pm during the summer. I know this because I have monitoring on my system that records energy production and panel diagnostic data every 5 minutes, and 10+ years of data sitting in PostgreSQL database.
You happen to be lucky by living in a cheap electricity area. Here in northern California the cheapest rate is 16.3 cents/kWh. That's for baseline usage of 7 kWh/day (depending on where you live) and anything above that costs more in tiers that go up to 33.5 cents/kWh. If you have air conditioning, you are certain to end up paying far more than the baseline cost in non-winter months.
Supposedly, there's a 0.5% drop in solar cell output per year, but I'm not seeing that at all. Last year my installation generated more than the first year - of course, climate change affects that figure.
My roof is metal tile - don't you think I factored that into my purchase decision?
Maintenance costs have been zero so far. There are three components - the panels, the wiring and the inverters. The inverters are likely to fail first, and the cost of replacement is drastically lower than when my system was first installed.
There have been zero maintenance costs. Except that I do hose down the panels once a year, so there's the cost of the water and an hour of my time. It's likely that the inverters that convert the DC from the panels to AC for the house will be the first components to fail. Fortunately the cost of these items has dropped significantly in the 12 years since they current ones were installed, and I would only need one today compared to the three I have installed now. This change alone would drop the installation cost by over $10,000.
I have a metal tile roof that should last the lifetime of the house. If you have a shingle or composite roof that will be a limiting factor. On the other hand, installing on a metal tile roof is more expensive because the metal tiles have to be drilled to fasten the rails that hold the solar panels to the rafters, and flashing has to be installed around each hole to prevent water getting in. That was four days work for a specialist roofing company which bumped the cost by $9,000.
I installed 48 panels on my roof back in 2003 which generate up to 8.8 kW DC (7.5 kW AC). The installation generates 10,500 to 12,000 kWh per year depending on the weather. The total cost was $65,000 which after subsidies and tax breaks dropped to $31,000 - which is roughly the same as my installation would cost today before any subsidies. Since installation I've had to cover the meter rental (currently 16.3 cents per day) but I've had no other utility costs and no maintenance costs.
In the year before I installed solar, electricity cost me a tad under $3,000. Utility costs have increased considerably since then, so I've more than covered the cost of the installation. And I should have another 20 years of life in the panels. Perhaps more.
If you plan to stay in your house for 10 years or more, it may make good financial sense to consider solar. Based on my experience, it's certainly worth considering.
As you point out, Valve views Microsoft as a huge threat to their business. They don't want nVidia as an additional enemy who could retaliate by only enabling some optimizations on versions purchased from Microsoft.
Neil deGrasse Tyson used to be a scientist. Now he's more a science reporter and commentator. And he has to be somewhat tactful in how he expresses his views so that he doesn't upset people who can determine whether he works or not.
I think we both agree that laws should be interpreted by what's considered reasonable. One problem is that the term "reasonable" is highly subjective. You say that that no reasonable person would interpret the law that way, but what Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas thinks is reasonable is often very different from what Justice Ginsburg or Justice Breyer thinks is reasonable. And reasonable or not, justices often fall back to their default position, which is the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
That's the other problem. The judiciary gets to define reasonable, and they tend to be long on law knowledge and short in other areas. Nobody can be an expert on everything, but we expect our justices to have wide ranging knowledge so they can make a judgement between two adversarial views that are often diametrically apart on highly subjective issues. As many have said, going to the courts is often a crap shoot.
You call my views bullshit. You have that right. But I believe you are incorrect on both reasonableness and Obamacare.
I hope you aren't suggesting that Republicans do care about science - there seems to be ample evidence to the contrary.
And why would Democrats want to destroy capitalism? The stock market has done much better under the last two Democratic presidents than under the last two Republicans who held the office. Heck, when Clinton left office we had a net surplus and were actually reducing the national Debt.
Are you completely sure it's bullshit? Are you certain that no group impacted by a ruling will not use every possible way of undermining a negative result, valid or otherwise? Have you so little imagination?
Just look at the news today. Republicans are using four words in Obamacare to remove healthcare subsidies for 15 million people. While the act is completely clear, these four words were poorly chosen, and on that basis they want to throw out a major provision. It's no exaggeration to say that people will die if this challenge is upheld.
The problem is that ALL the data must be public. For example, it means that medical studies that do not publish the raw data (including patient identities) cannot be used by the EPA as the basis for rule making.
It also requires the EPA to use reproducible results, which means that a number of studies are required and each must come to exactly the same result. Imagine the situation where study results have the same conclusion, but slightly different results (say one says 64% of people will die from smoking and another says 66%). Industries could then argue that the results are not reproducible and these studies should not be used as the basis for restricting cigarettes.
My wife used Uber once. The vehicle was not clean, the driver was (in her words) creepy, she didn't like his driving, and he insisted on playing music she thought obnoxious. All in all, she quite unhappy with the whole experience. She insists that we'll be staying with taxis.
Send an email to someone with employee type click-bait (juicy info about your company or a major competitor, whatever) and get drive-by malware that installs some VBA code in Outlook.
When that employee emails others in the company, the VBA is included and installs itself, tells the user his Outlook session has expired and puts up a dialog asking for the account and password. Employee enters the data and it is sent to a command and control server. That user is now pwned.
Send messages (seemingly from a pwned employee) to the CEO, CFO, Finance and Legal departments with VBA attachments that are installed. The VBA sends all their email to the bad guys. Not saying it's the way it was done, but that's one way to do it.
That is true, but nVidia's outreach engineers have a history of checking code that regresses performance on competitor hardware. See what this Value developer has to say about "Vendor A": Vendor A is also jokingly known as the "Graphics Mafia". Be very careful if a dev from Vendor A gets embedded into your team. These guys are serious business.
So, you are suggesting that game studios let vendors check in code totally unreviewed? I worked at a company that had two engineers from Nvidia and 3 from AMD - none of them had the ability to check in code, although they did have access to our sources.
The Nvidia engineers were top notch, knew their products, knew how to get performance from their products, and would be unhappy if we didn't take notice of what they said. The AMD people were OK, but just not in the same league as the Nvidia people. Which was best for us? The Nvidia guys improved our product for both their customers and AMD customers. The AMD people would only look at AMD specific code and provided way less assistance. I'd go with the Nvidia guys any day - they were indeed serious, hard working engineers, one with a ph.d., the other with a masters.
And the best you can suggest for fiddling is a benchmark from 13 years ago? That several lifetimes in graphics technology - go look at any 2001 game. As I recall, both Nvidia and ATI (as it was then) tweaked benchmarks to favor their product around that time and were found out. However, modern graphics benchmarks make it difficult for any manufacturer to corrupt the results.
How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware? They don't write the games. Both AMD and Nvidia have extensive outreach programs to developers and make engineers available to game studios, and obviously those engineers will make suggestions on how to improve game performance on their hardware. But I doubt that game studio staff would be willing to cripple their games on either platform at the behest of Nvidia or AMD engineers.
Would you like to provide citations that they bribe sites? And how would that hurt game performance? How can using certain benchmarks (as you suggest) make games run slower on other hardware? And even if they did, are you saying that sites would accept Nvidia's suggestions and ignore AMD suggestions?
A component manufacturer is unhappy that someone else is using his product id so he puts code in a driver that sets the product id to zero. This prevents the fake component being recognized by his driver or any other driver. The license for the driver explicitly states that using the driver with a fake component may irretrievably damage the component.
If the component manufacturer doesn't want the fake product to work with his driver he can code his driver to ignore the fake. Modifying the product id to brick the component is another matter entirely.
This doesn't hurt the people who created the fake, or even the people who purchased the fake and used them in their manufacturing. It only hurts end users who have done nothing except purchase a product in retail channels. Deliberately destroying equipment because it uses a fake component goes to a whole new level of nastiness.
It really is insulting to give a Nobel prize for an improvement to a revolutionary idea, and ignore the person who did the original work. Without Holonyak's original work there would be no basis for the improvement.
I agree. If you don't mind tinkering, pfSense is the way to go
I agree that pfSense is a great solution but I disagree about the tinkering . pfSense fits well in the mantra of "simple things can be done simply but complex things are possible". It needs little tinkering if you have a reasonably standard setup - say an internet connection plus a local network. It has decent defaults.
If you have a more complex setup (I have a LAN interface, a DMZ, a guest network, and a VPN interface as well as several additional software packages) then some tinkering will be needed.
I have pfSense running on a Soekris net6501 for my home network firewall. I have set up OpenVPN - configuration took only a few minutes and it has worked perfectly.
The Soekris Net6501 is more than sufficient for my needs but pfSense scales well and will run on many types of hardware. When I was testing it I ran pfSense as a VM without any problems - in retrospect I should have left it that way permanently.
This isn't patent trolling. nVidia literally invented the GPU and much shader technology back in the 1990s. A lot of graphic stuff now considered basic was developed and patented by nVidia.
These are probably legitimate patents that other companies are using without a license. One of the reasons that Intel graphics technology is still far behind is that they are coming late to the graphics game and have a patent minefield to avoid. It looks like Qualcomm and Samsung decided to ignore the minefield and hope that they didn't step on a patent mine - or at least not step on one that would be noticed by nVidia.
1. Place immature people (of any physical age) in an anonymous, no consequences environment. 2. Give them the ability to address people whom they would never have the opportunity to approach outside of a virtual environment. 3. Supply a conduit such as Twitter or Facebook or email that requires very little effort compared to writing and mailing a physical letter.
Automobile companies make a large number of vehicles - both GM and Toyota make around 10 million per year. Saving just one dollar on each vehicle adds millions to the company profits.
Something as simple as the extra wiring to create multiple data busses in the vehicle could add a couple of dollars to the vehicle cost. The auto makers will not do it unless it is mandated (either by law or their legal department fearing lawsuits) or they see some sort of a competitive advantage (somewhat unlikely) or there's a PR disaster.
nVidia makes the chips and very recently a couple of reference designs and retail tablets. They don't make the OS and other software.
As you pointed out, Google (not nVidia) removed support for CL rendering to push their own product. I'm sure nVidia was unhappy about that as it removed one of their competitive advantages.
With the Tegra K1, nVidia is pointing out (quite rightly) that their hardware supports a bunch of new things. nVidia's literature describes the Jetson-TK1 as a development kit, not a product. It is made available so that people can write software that supports the features in the hardware
I completely fail to see where nVidia has been dishonest in this.
Slashdot Mirror
Just something to beware of with security freezes. A few months ago I did freeze my accounts at the credit reporting agencies because my tax preparer recommended it as a proactive move to prevent identity theft.
I have a credit card that reports my current FICO score monthly. The month after I froze my accounts my FICO score dropped by 57 points. Looking back over the last year, my rating had moved up 11 points before this unexpected drop, so I think it's likely that the change was caused by initiating the credit freeze.
It doesn't matter as my credit history is frozen, but if I do need to give someone access to my credit ratings for any reason (buying a new car, getting a new job, whatever) then I presume the much lower score will be shown.
Then you didn't do a good site survey before installing your panels. You should have considered that before installing panels.
At my request, 32 of my 48 panels face south west. On a per panel basis they produce about 91% of the 16 panels facing south, but they peek about 4pm during the summer. I know this because I have monitoring on my system that records energy production and panel diagnostic data every 5 minutes, and 10+ years of data sitting in PostgreSQL database.
You happen to be lucky by living in a cheap electricity area. Here in northern California the cheapest rate is 16.3 cents/kWh. That's for baseline usage of 7 kWh/day (depending on where you live) and anything above that costs more in tiers that go up to 33.5 cents/kWh. If you have air conditioning, you are certain to end up paying far more than the baseline cost in non-winter months.
Supposedly, there's a 0.5% drop in solar cell output per year, but I'm not seeing that at all. Last year my installation generated more than the first year - of course, climate change affects that figure.
My roof is metal tile - don't you think I factored that into my purchase decision?
Maintenance costs have been zero so far. There are three components - the panels, the wiring and the inverters. The inverters are likely to fail first, and the cost of replacement is drastically lower than when my system was first installed.
There have been zero maintenance costs. Except that I do hose down the panels once a year, so there's the cost of the water and an hour of my time. It's likely that the inverters that convert the DC from the panels to AC for the house will be the first components to fail. Fortunately the cost of these items has dropped significantly in the 12 years since they current ones were installed, and I would only need one today compared to the three I have installed now. This change alone would drop the installation cost by over $10,000.
I have a metal tile roof that should last the lifetime of the house. If you have a shingle or composite roof that will be a limiting factor. On the other hand, installing on a metal tile roof is more expensive because the metal tiles have to be drilled to fasten the rails that hold the solar panels to the rafters, and flashing has to be installed around each hole to prevent water getting in. That was four days work for a specialist roofing company which bumped the cost by $9,000.
I installed 48 panels on my roof back in 2003 which generate up to 8.8 kW DC (7.5 kW AC). The installation generates 10,500 to 12,000 kWh per year depending on the weather. The total cost was $65,000 which after subsidies and tax breaks dropped to $31,000 - which is roughly the same as my installation would cost today before any subsidies. Since installation I've had to cover the meter rental (currently 16.3 cents per day) but I've had no other utility costs and no maintenance costs.
In the year before I installed solar, electricity cost me a tad under $3,000. Utility costs have increased considerably since then, so I've more than covered the cost of the installation. And I should have another 20 years of life in the panels. Perhaps more.
If you plan to stay in your house for 10 years or more, it may make good financial sense to consider solar. Based on my experience, it's certainly worth considering.
As you point out, Valve views Microsoft as a huge threat to their business. They don't want nVidia as an additional enemy who could retaliate by only enabling some optimizations on versions purchased from Microsoft.
Neil deGrasse Tyson used to be a scientist. Now he's more a science reporter and commentator. And he has to be somewhat tactful in how he expresses his views so that he doesn't upset people who can determine whether he works or not.
I think we both agree that laws should be interpreted by what's considered reasonable. One problem is that the term "reasonable" is highly subjective. You say that that no reasonable person would interpret the law that way, but what Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas thinks is reasonable is often very different from what Justice Ginsburg or Justice Breyer thinks is reasonable. And reasonable or not, justices often fall back to their default position, which is the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
That's the other problem. The judiciary gets to define reasonable, and they tend to be long on law knowledge and short in other areas. Nobody can be an expert on everything, but we expect our justices to have wide ranging knowledge so they can make a judgement between two adversarial views that are often diametrically apart on highly subjective issues. As many have said, going to the courts is often a crap shoot.
You call my views bullshit. You have that right. But I believe you are incorrect on both reasonableness and Obamacare.
I hope you aren't suggesting that Republicans do care about science - there seems to be ample evidence to the contrary.
And why would Democrats want to destroy capitalism? The stock market has done much better under the last two Democratic presidents than under the last two Republicans who held the office. Heck, when Clinton left office we had a net surplus and were actually reducing the national Debt.
Are you completely sure it's bullshit? Are you certain that no group impacted by a ruling will not use every possible way of undermining a negative result, valid or otherwise? Have you so little imagination?
Just look at the news today. Republicans are using four words in Obamacare to remove healthcare subsidies for 15 million people. While the act is completely clear, these four words were poorly chosen, and on that basis they want to throw out a major provision. It's no exaggeration to say that people will die if this challenge is upheld.
The problem is that ALL the data must be public. For example, it means that medical studies that do not publish the raw data (including patient identities) cannot be used by the EPA as the basis for rule making.
It also requires the EPA to use reproducible results, which means that a number of studies are required and each must come to exactly the same result. Imagine the situation where study results have the same conclusion, but slightly different results (say one says 64% of people will die from smoking and another says 66%). Industries could then argue that the results are not reproducible and these studies should not be used as the basis for restricting cigarettes.
My wife used Uber once. The vehicle was not clean, the driver was (in her words) creepy, she didn't like his driving, and he insisted on playing music she thought obnoxious. All in all, she quite unhappy with the whole experience. She insists that we'll be staying with taxis.
Send an email to someone with employee type click-bait (juicy info about your company or a major competitor, whatever) and get drive-by malware that installs some VBA code in Outlook.
When that employee emails others in the company, the VBA is included and installs itself, tells the user his Outlook session has expired and puts up a dialog asking for the account and password. Employee enters the data and it is sent to a command and control server. That user is now pwned.
Send messages (seemingly from a pwned employee) to the CEO, CFO, Finance and Legal departments with VBA attachments that are installed. The VBA sends all their email to the bad guys. Not saying it's the way it was done, but that's one way to do it.
That is true, but nVidia's outreach engineers have a history of checking code that regresses performance on competitor hardware. See what this Value developer has to say about "Vendor A":
Vendor A is also jokingly known as the "Graphics Mafia". Be very careful if a dev from Vendor A gets embedded into your team. These guys are serious business.
So, you are suggesting that game studios let vendors check in code totally unreviewed? I worked at a company that had two engineers from Nvidia and 3 from AMD - none of them had the ability to check in code, although they did have access to our sources.
The Nvidia engineers were top notch, knew their products, knew how to get performance from their products, and would be unhappy if we didn't take notice of what they said. The AMD people were OK, but just not in the same league as the Nvidia people. Which was best for us? The Nvidia guys improved our product for both their customers and AMD customers. The AMD people would only look at AMD specific code and provided way less assistance. I'd go with the Nvidia guys any day - they were indeed serious, hard working engineers, one with a ph.d., the other with a masters.
And the best you can suggest for fiddling is a benchmark from 13 years ago? That several lifetimes in graphics technology - go look at any 2001 game. As I recall, both Nvidia and ATI (as it was then) tweaked benchmarks to favor their product around that time and were found out. However, modern graphics benchmarks make it difficult for any manufacturer to corrupt the results.
How, exactly, can Nvidia make games run poorly on other hardware? They don't write the games. Both AMD and Nvidia have extensive outreach programs to developers and make engineers available to game studios, and obviously those engineers will make suggestions on how to improve game performance on their hardware. But I doubt that game studio staff would be willing to cripple their games on either platform at the behest of Nvidia or AMD engineers.
Would you like to provide citations that they bribe sites? And how would that hurt game performance? How can using certain benchmarks (as you suggest) make games run slower on other hardware? And even if they did, are you saying that sites would accept Nvidia's suggestions and ignore AMD suggestions?
AMD fanboy much?
A component manufacturer is unhappy that someone else is using his product id so he puts code in a driver that sets the product id to zero. This prevents the fake component being recognized by his driver or any other driver. The license for the driver explicitly states that using the driver with a fake component may irretrievably damage the component.
If the component manufacturer doesn't want the fake product to work with his driver he can code his driver to ignore the fake. Modifying the product id to brick the component is another matter entirely.
This doesn't hurt the people who created the fake, or even the people who purchased the fake and used them in their manufacturing. It only hurts end users who have done nothing except purchase a product in retail channels. Deliberately destroying equipment because it uses a fake component goes to a whole new level of nastiness.
It really is insulting to give a Nobel prize for an improvement to a revolutionary idea, and ignore the person who did the original work. Without Holonyak's original work there would be no basis for the improvement.
It took me all of 5 seconds to hide the album in iTunes. All gone, I'll never see it again (unless I choose to unhide it).
Such a hardship.
I agree. If you don't mind tinkering, pfSense is the way to go
I agree that pfSense is a great solution but I disagree about the tinkering . pfSense fits well in the mantra of "simple things can be done simply but complex things are possible". It needs little tinkering if you have a reasonably standard setup - say an internet connection plus a local network. It has decent defaults.
If you have a more complex setup (I have a LAN interface, a DMZ, a guest network, and a VPN interface as well as several additional software packages) then some tinkering will be needed.
I have pfSense running on a Soekris net6501 for my home network firewall. I have set up OpenVPN - configuration took only a few minutes and it has worked perfectly.
The Soekris Net6501 is more than sufficient for my needs but pfSense scales well and will run on many types of hardware. When I was testing it I ran pfSense as a VM without any problems - in retrospect I should have left it that way permanently.
This isn't patent trolling. nVidia literally invented the GPU and much shader technology back in the 1990s. A lot of graphic stuff now considered basic was developed and patented by nVidia.
These are probably legitimate patents that other companies are using without a license. One of the reasons that Intel graphics technology is still far behind is that they are coming late to the graphics game and have a patent minefield to avoid. It looks like Qualcomm and Samsung decided to ignore the minefield and hope that they didn't step on a patent mine - or at least not step on one that would be noticed by nVidia.
1. Place immature people (of any physical age) in an anonymous, no consequences environment.
2. Give them the ability to address people whom they would never have the opportunity to approach outside of a virtual environment.
3. Supply a conduit such as Twitter or Facebook or email that requires very little effort compared to writing and mailing a physical letter.
The result is completely predictable.
Automobile companies make a large number of vehicles - both GM and Toyota make around 10 million per year. Saving just one dollar on each vehicle adds millions to the company profits.
Something as simple as the extra wiring to create multiple data busses in the vehicle could add a couple of dollars to the vehicle cost. The auto makers will not do it unless it is mandated (either by law or their legal department fearing lawsuits) or they see some sort of a competitive advantage (somewhat unlikely) or there's a PR disaster.
nVidia makes the chips and very recently a couple of reference designs and retail tablets. They don't make the OS and other software.
As you pointed out, Google (not nVidia) removed support for CL rendering to push their own product. I'm sure nVidia was unhappy about that as it removed one of their competitive advantages.
With the Tegra K1, nVidia is pointing out (quite rightly) that their hardware supports a bunch of new things. nVidia's literature describes the Jetson-TK1 as a development kit, not a product. It is made available so that people can write software that supports the features in the hardware
I completely fail to see where nVidia has been dishonest in this.
It's pretty clear that this is merely a failed attempt to win a Darwin Award. Perhaps he needs to try the same thing on a windy road.