Ever since I learned about antimatter I've been dreaming of a battery powered of a small amount of the stuff. Yeah, I know about the problems with avoiding uhm, "spectacular" failure-modes. But the energy-density is gargantuan.
Cars that need to swap a tiny battery once-a-year ? Check ! Passenger-jets that emit zero pollution, and that replace tons and tons of jet-fuel with a small, easily swappable battery ? Check !
Okay, so I know this is totally unrealistic. It would however be very cool.
e = mc^2
0.5 gram of antimatter in a battery, reacts with 0.5g of normal matter, releases 0.001 * 300000000 * 300000000 J = gargantuan number. More energy than you could spend in a lifetime. All in a handy AA-cell.
Building a safe antimatter confinement-cell that size is left an engineering-challenge for the reader.
Actually, scientists aren't (universally) that dumb.
If identical twins are much MORE similar in intelligence compared to non-identical twins, we can conclude that there is a high likelihood that the difference is genetic.
Identical twins should not normally have more similar nutrition (in pregnancy or thereafter) than nonidentical ones.
Agreed. The fact that the disclaimer is universal is a good argument against constantly repeating it. If you ask me what the capitol of Norway is I'm -NOT- going to say:
"Assuming that I am not lying, and not insane this moment, and that my sources are not wrong, and that I understood the sources correctly, and the capitol of norway did not change since I last checked, the answer is: Oslo"
There is no point to this. I can just say: Oslo, and if you're not an idiot, you already know that this answer is subject to all the above, and many more, disclaimers.
I wouldn't include a footnote for the claim that the milky-way is a galaxy, that Norway is a country, that Europe is a continent, that Abraham Lincoln was a human being, that earth is a planet or stuff of that nature.
Often one of the sources you -do- include will also confirm this (a source stating the size of the milky-way will generally also confirm that it is indeed a galaxy), but it gets tiresome real quick to put in footnotes for -every- triviality like that.
Sources should however be given for all claims where there is any doubt whatsoever as to the validity.
No I wouldn't. That is why I wrote: "This would become tiresome really quick".
Indeed, I think that disclaimer is UNIVERSAL. Not just WikiPedia-wide but world-wide. Whenever anyone says anything as a statement of fact, it means that person -thinks- this fact is true, based on his sources. (infact not even that, he may not actually believe it, he could be lying)
"Oslo is the capitol of Norway"
Should be heard as: "Assuming that person is not lying, and whatever undisclosed sources he bases his assumption on aren't wrong, Oslo is the capitol of Norway"
The story doesn't quite make sense. Consider the claims:
4 feet high.
10 high-power LEDs
Will give 600-800 lumens
Will run for ~4 hours on a single lifting of the weight
4 feet is sligthly over a meter, let's assume that this means the difference between high and low position of the mass is 1 meter. Falling one meter generates G*m joules, or 10J/kg aproximately.
4 hours is 14400 seconds. If you want to produce a -SINGLE- watt for 4 hours by a mass falling one meter, then the mass needs to be aproximately 1500kgs, which is over 3300 pounds, which you couldn't lift, and which wouldn't fit in the "lamp" anyway.
Furthermore, a -single- watt of led-lightning can NOT infact, produce the same light as 40-60W of incadescent. LEDs are a lot more efficient, but not -THAT- much more efficient.
This assumes the power can be converted to electrictiy with an efficiency of 100% which is certainly -also- not going to be the case.
Realistic numbers look less useful:
Let's make the lamp 7 feet tall to double energy-storage.
Let's make the mass 30lbs, this is about the heaviest that can be lifted without it being a large effort.
This gives us 15*9.8*2 = 300J to work with.
It's not a lot. If you want the lamp to stay on for an hour, the most you can use is a 0.1W LED, this will provide -some- light, but it won't be anywhere NEAR a 40W incadescent, nor will it stay on for 4 hours (for this you'd need to go down to a 0.025W LED.
Technically, Wikipedia should never claim any spesific thing. They don't really have an opinion as such on the size of the MW or anything else. Yeah, I know, the article says "The Milky-Way is so-and-so big". But that should really be read as:
"Our sources, given under this article, claims that the Milky-Way is so-and-so big" One could write it like that, but it'd become tiresome real quick.
That information is by nessecity only at best as good as the sources.
Besides; that's the way reality works in general. When somebody claims some fact it ALWAYS means that based on the sources that that person choose to believe (be it his own eyes or a scientific paper, or Fox-news) says so.
In the real world, a significant part of the machines you may wish to exchange files with will run some operating-system from Microsoft.
I can agree that -IF- you have no need to ever read/write your device from a MS-machine, then there's no good reason to go with TrueCrypt. The main advantage is precisely the cross-platform thing.
You would bother if, for example, the use-case was transporting files securely between different computers, some of which run windows.
It's quite convenient to partition a usb-device in 2 parts, one tiny holding TrueCrypt in "traveller mode" and one larger partition encrypted with TrueCrypt.
That was you can read and write the data on any system you care to, and still are reasonably secure against data-loss should you, for example, lose the usb-gadget during travel, or similar.
The term "God-like" is a relative term. Either that or it's nonsensical.
If it means "someone who can break physical laws" then it's a non-concept, because the moment you learn of a way (any way!) to break a certain rule, that rule is no longer a "physical law". For example, we used to think that all conductors has resistance, but the first person to manage sending electricity trough a conductor with -zero- loss did not become a "God", instead we adjusted our understanding of physics.
In relative terms, "God-like" means someone who is capable of stuff that you aren't capable of, probably not even close to being capable of.
Compared to a cave-man we are ALREADY god-like. We can fly in the air in large mechanical machines. We can replace the heart of a living human being -- and have him/her live on. We carry devices which enable us to chat with people on the other side of the earth at will. We can travel to the moon. Either one of these would be the domain of Gods to a cave-man.
Compared to us, it's a fair bet that future humans will be god-like. We've changed our explanation-modus though. Earlier, if people saw something incomprehencible, they where likely to go "Magic!" or "God!" or "Prophet!" or such, today many people migth be more likely to go "High-Tech!", people are already accustomed to being surrounded by gadgets that do stuff that they don't really understand.
There is no risk that all HD-content becomes available ONLY on blue-ray. There are -already- other sources of HD-material (such as various forms of broadcast and download-services) and these will only multiply, not go away.
Second, there is no risk that the DRM on Blue-ray will actually suceed in preventing EVERYONE EVERYWHERE from copying the content. Remember that the DRM only need to be broken once, by one person. The freed result can thereafter be distributed effortlessly.
My point is, I see no overwhelming demand for PERFECT picture-quality (or sound-quality) recompressing a CD to a 128kbps mp3 produces quite noticeable artifacts too, but reality is that most people don't care very much. Okay, so there's a trend towards 196kbps since today in many contexts its nearly irrelevant if the filesize is 4MB or 6MB.
A 10GB DVD recompressed to 1.5GB is perfectly acceptable to 95% of the movie-watchers out there. Including those who have 42" HD-capable flatscreens.
It is true that recompressing a 35GB blue-ray movie to say 5GB degrades quality. Most people could not care less. The quality will still be significantly better than todays 9GB DVDs (which use a poor compression-scheme and don't have HD), which is ALREADY more than good enough for most people and most movies.
You also underestimate bandwith and storage. 5-10GB DVDs are indeed commonly downloaded, but most people opt for the 1GB recompressed ones, not because they can't handle 10GB, but because the difference in quality is not such that they CARE to spend 10 times the effort.
Downloading 10GB takes about 50 minutes at 25Mbps, which is the "normal" speed offered by my ISP. Even at the -lowest- available speed, 10Mbps, it takes less than 3 hours, not undoable in the least. It's just that it's not worth it to wait for 50 minutes or 3 hours when the other file which is 1/9th the size is in practice equally enjoyable to watch.
I understand residential broadband is still in the stone-age in USA. Perhaps that fools you into thinking that 2Mbps is "fast" or that there are few consumers with 25Mbps+ around ? It's just a question of time until USA also gets reasonable networking, there's no technical barrier, it's mostly a lack of real effective competition.
Actually, transistors can also become more effective, and have been for decades. If not, you'd be right: Doublt computing-power would mean double power-consumption which would mean double heat-production and spell heaps of trouble.
We're still -far- away from the theoretical limits though.
Flipping a -single- bit MUST consume atleast kT joules, where T is the temperature in Kelvin and k is the Bolzmann-constant of around 10^-23.
So if your cpu runs at 300K (cooling it more won't help because then you'll spend energy for that) you can flip a physical max of sligthly over 10^20 bits. Run at 10Ghz, aproximately 10^10 Hz and you can flip a maximum of 10^10 bits every clock-cycle.
Current CPUs don't come anywhere close to being that efficient. They flip perhaps a million transistors in a clocktick which is a factor of 10000 less than they COULD be doing with a single watt, and they spend not ONE watt but more like 50W to do that.
Still, the limits are visible: We can, theoretically, up cpu-efficiency by a factor of 100.000, but a factor of a million looks, imho, physically impossible.
This sounds like a lot, but consider that if we keep doubling every 2 years, we'll hit the hard wall in 20 - 30 years. And long before we get close to the hard wall we'll be in a pretty steep terrain.
Unless we go with reversible computing in which case all bets are off and entirely new limits apply.
They cannot directly. But did you ever stop to consider what you really paid for when you bougth the vw for $25K ? It's basically all work. The hours of the people putting the car together. The hours of the people making the parts. The hours of the people minin the metals. The hours of the people drilling for the oil used to provide the energy for mining the metals and so on.
Increased mechanisation and computer-power means a single individual can do more and more in the same time, which again leads to the price in relative terms becoming less and less. (relative as in compared to the cost of one work-day)
Influences goods that consist of a lot of work and a little bit of raw-materials more than goods that are the other way around offcourse, but the trend is still there: we're getting more and more productive in other areas than electronics too, the progress is just much slower. Doubling is more like 20 years than 20 months.
Sure. The real competition is DVD and downloading. I think there's a real chance that DVD will be the last physical format to achieve market-dominance. There's no real reason we need to mess with physical formats at all, sure files need to be stored -somewhere- but exactly where can safely be left to the consumers.
Music is already like that. Some store their music as round plastic-discs. Others on a hard-disc. Others on flash-based music-players or any combination of these. It doesn't matter. It's the same file. It sounds the same. Okay okay, so that's not strictly true if you compare an original CD to a mp3, but it's close enough that 95% of the population don't care about the difference.
I consider it beyond question that they provide her with a new laptop (or equivalent amounts of cash).
They should also compensate her for not keeping their promises, being without a laptop for weeks or months has an inconvenience-cost. $500 may be low for this, but reasonably it's a few thousand max.
Third, it *may* be reasonable for them to compensate her for her time dealing with them, -SHE- estimates 200 hours, if she normally nets $40/hour that works out to $8000. (assuming you accept her estimate)
Fourth, if they where grossly neglient it may be apropriate to treble damages punitively.
But add this up and you get ($8000 + a-few-thousand + cost-of-laptop) * 3 = in the ballpark of $45.000
This is a -VERY- high amount to pay for a stolen laptop, but not insane to claim. (if you'd -get- it is a different question)
Multiplying this amount by 1000, for a total of 3000 times actual damages is however straigth-out batshit crazy.
I'm suggesting that $50K in damages for -ONE- stolen laptop badly handled would be enough to get the attention of most stores...
But this player still plays any and all discs labeled "blue-ray" (unless the disc or player is broken)
What happens is that if the disc contains v2.0 features, you won't see -those-, you will still be able to play the disc and see the movie, but you may miss out on some of the advanced features, such as the possibility of PiP (let's say the director commenting upon the film from a separate video-track in a corner of the picture)
I don't see the problem. You bought a blue-ray player, it plays blue-ray discs. This is the primary function.
There are some bells and whistles that it don't have, on account of being a v1 player and thus not implementing the additional stuff that came in v2, all of which is, however, optional.
disk-to-ram is very common. But what you're missing is that this is NOT prevented by the use of encryption.
It means that what was:
Order Disk to DMA certain blocks to a certain RAM-location
Wait for disk to signal "done".
Deliver the data to the app (how depends on if it's read() or mmap() or whatever)
Now becomes:
Order Disk to DMA certain blocks to a certain RAM-location
Wait for disk to signal "done"
Decrypt blocks (in-place)
Deliver the data to the app
The DMA-step isn't influenced at all. All that happens is that you need to decrypt the data prior to returning it to the application.
This -does- take additional time offcourse. But in most settings it isn't very significant. With modern CPUs decrypting a few blocks of data goes MUCH quicker than physically accessing disc. If the disc spends 70ms actually getting 100 blocks of data into RAM it doesn't make -that- much of a difference that you now need to spend 5ms additionally to decrypt the blocks. (if we assume 1KB blocks this means 100KB of data in 70ms for the disc, adds up to 1.5MB/s for the disc, slow but realistic for a small transfer like this, you're punished for the seek and rotational latency.
5ms for the decryption is actually fairly generous, it amounts to an encrpytion-speed of 20MB/s, and for example my fairly standard Core2 Duo running at 1800Mhz can do more than double that using only one of the cores.
For larger transfers the slowdown is more noticeable. If your disc can do 40MB/s sustained, that would be about equal to the decryption, so you could see a slowdown to half speed. Worse yet: when copying a file from one encrypted filesystem to another you need to first decrypt with one key, then re-encrypt with another. Which takes double time, so in principle you could see what used to take 2 minutes now taking 6.
In practice it's not quite that bad, because on larger transfers you can do decryption/encryption in parallell with the disc working. You don't need to idle the CPU until the disc is done and then idling the disc until the CPU is done, you can run both in parallell.
Still, in general I'll say that not-noticeable for small seek-dominated access, to half-speed at large transfers fits pretty well with my practical experiences. More RAM helps, because it means stuff can be buffered and encrypted "later" when the CPU has a spare microsecond or two.
Not "on the whole", but yes, a very large percentage of it is plain bullshit. And it is too often a screaming-contest, trying to invade every single surface in our lives rather than trying to be more -relevant- which would actually be an advantage.
Much of it is visual pollution. I only wish it was recognized and treated as such.
Irks me particularily in public spaces when the government sells the surfaces to the highest bidder, frequently assuming that keeping those surfaces has zero value to the population.
Or more precisely: If you don't like stuff breaking on you -- stop VOLUNTEERING as a beta-tester.
Everyone who hasn't been living under a rock KNOWS that buying the latest-and-greatest new bleeding-edge standard before it is established in the marketplace means:
a) There's a significant chance that it'll be obsolete in 3 years because some other standard ends up owning the game.
b) There's a 100% chance that you're paying a MUCH higher price for a MUCH poorer product, compared to those who wait a bit.
c) There's a significant chance that your product has bugs, shortcomings, problems.
d) There's a significant chance that the standard will fluctuate, so by the time it solidifies, your gadget is no longer fully compatible.
It's not as if any of this is news. Furthermore, much of it is unavoidable: If a producer elected not to bring products to market until these things had settles, they'd be handing their market-share to the competitors.
If you don't like this deal, there's a simple cure: Wait a year or two *THEN* buy any random high-def video-player. It'll cost 1/3rd what it costs now, or less, it'll work better and it'll support the stable version of the standard.
This is extremely silly. There's not much energy there, larger amounts can be gathered trivially.
Falling raindrops reach terminal velocity after aproximately 5-10 meters, assuming they're the large type. Tiny raindrops reach terminal velocity after something like -1- meter.
So, if you could somehow collect the entire energy (not possible most of it goes into heating the drop as it's vigorously stirred on impact) you'd have collected the same energy as for the water falling perhaps on the average 3 meters.
Let's say your house has a 100square-meter roof, and you install this magical capture-all-energy stuff on the entire roof. Let's furthermore say it rains 1000mm/year. You have now collected the energy of 100 cubic metres of water falling 3 metres. That is 100*1000*9.8*3 = 3000KJ. Or sligthly less than -1- Kwh.
Market-value for this power at grid-prices ? $0.10.
Market-value for this power from a solar-cell ? (say if there's no grid available) $2.00
Price for a wind-turbine that will deliver 1Kwh/year ? You'd take the smallest one you can get, probably one from a kids toy. We're talking an average of 0.1W here....
Adding insult to injury, the power comes at semi-random impractical times, not when you need it.
Conclusion: Even *IF* you wanted this tiny amount of power, and it MUST be from rain, you'd be better off installing a tank at your roof, and a small turbine in the downspout. That way you could drain the same power (assuming your roof is 3 meters up) and it'd cost less and work better.
Extra-conclusion: Everything is in reality atleast 10 times worse than I state here, because this all assumes the material can magically convert 100% of impact-energy to electricity, which is obvious nonsense, I'd be impressed if it could do 10%...
Slashdot Mirror
Why comparable ?
Ever since I learned about antimatter I've been dreaming of a battery powered of a small amount of the stuff. Yeah, I know about the problems with avoiding uhm, "spectacular" failure-modes. But the energy-density is gargantuan.
Cars that need to swap a tiny battery once-a-year ? Check ! Passenger-jets that emit zero pollution, and that replace tons and tons of jet-fuel with a small, easily swappable battery ? Check !
Okay, so I know this is totally unrealistic. It would however be very cool.
e = mc^2
0.5 gram of antimatter in a battery, reacts with 0.5g of normal matter, releases 0.001 * 300000000 * 300000000 J = gargantuan number. More energy than you could spend in a lifetime. All in a handy AA-cell.
Building a safe antimatter confinement-cell that size is left an engineering-challenge for the reader.
Actually, scientists aren't (universally) that dumb.
If identical twins are much MORE similar in intelligence compared to non-identical twins, we can conclude that there is a high likelihood that the difference is genetic.
Identical twins should not normally have more similar nutrition (in pregnancy or thereafter) than nonidentical ones.
Agreed. The fact that the disclaimer is universal is a good argument against constantly repeating it. If you ask me what the capitol of Norway is I'm -NOT- going to say:
"Assuming that I am not lying, and not insane this moment, and that my sources are not wrong, and that I understood the sources correctly, and the capitol of norway did not change since I last checked, the answer is: Oslo"
There is no point to this. I can just say: Oslo, and if you're not an idiot, you already know that this answer is subject to all the above, and many more, disclaimers.
I wouldn't include a footnote for the claim that the milky-way is a galaxy, that Norway is a country, that Europe is a continent, that Abraham Lincoln was a human being, that earth is a planet or stuff of that nature.
Often one of the sources you -do- include will also confirm this (a source stating the size of the milky-way will generally also confirm that it is indeed a galaxy), but it gets tiresome real quick to put in footnotes for -every- triviality like that.
Sources should however be given for all claims where there is any doubt whatsoever as to the validity.
No I wouldn't. That is why I wrote: "This would become tiresome really quick".
Indeed, I think that disclaimer is UNIVERSAL. Not just WikiPedia-wide but world-wide. Whenever anyone says anything as a statement of fact, it means that person -thinks- this fact is true, based on his sources. (infact not even that, he may not actually believe it, he could be lying)
"Oslo is the capitol of Norway"
Should be heard as: "Assuming that person is not lying, and whatever undisclosed sources he bases his assumption on aren't wrong, Oslo is the capitol of Norway"
4 feet is sligthly over a meter, let's assume that this means the difference between high and low position of the mass is 1 meter. Falling one meter generates G*m joules, or 10J/kg aproximately.
4 hours is 14400 seconds. If you want to produce a -SINGLE- watt for 4 hours by a mass falling one meter, then the mass needs to be aproximately 1500kgs, which is over 3300 pounds, which you couldn't lift, and which wouldn't fit in the "lamp" anyway.
Furthermore, a -single- watt of led-lightning can NOT infact, produce the same light as 40-60W of incadescent. LEDs are a lot more efficient, but not -THAT- much more efficient.
This assumes the power can be converted to electrictiy with an efficiency of 100% which is certainly -also- not going to be the case.
Realistic numbers look less useful:
It's not a lot. If you want the lamp to stay on for an hour, the most you can use is a 0.1W LED, this will provide -some- light, but it won't be anywhere NEAR a 40W incadescent, nor will it stay on for 4 hours (for this you'd need to go down to a 0.025W LED.
Quiz do-you-remember: POKE 53280, 7 does -what- precisely ? (for non-nerds: what happens if you store "7" in memory-address 53280 on a C64 ?
Bonus: What -other- "magical" memory-adresses do you still remember ?
Technically, Wikipedia should never claim any spesific thing. They don't really have an opinion as such on the size of the MW or anything else. Yeah, I know, the article says "The Milky-Way is so-and-so big". But that should really be read as:
"Our sources, given under this article, claims that the Milky-Way is so-and-so big" One could write it like that, but it'd become tiresome real quick.
That information is by nessecity only at best as good as the sources.
Besides; that's the way reality works in general. When somebody claims some fact it ALWAYS means that based on the sources that that person choose to believe (be it his own eyes or a scientific paper, or Fox-news) says so.
In the real world, a significant part of the machines you may wish to exchange files with will run some operating-system from Microsoft.
I can agree that -IF- you have no need to ever read/write your device from a MS-machine, then there's no good reason to go with TrueCrypt. The main advantage is precisely the cross-platform thing.
You would bother if, for example, the use-case was transporting files securely between different computers, some of which run windows.
It's quite convenient to partition a usb-device in 2 parts, one tiny holding TrueCrypt in "traveller mode" and one larger partition encrypted with TrueCrypt.
That was you can read and write the data on any system you care to, and still are reasonably secure against data-loss should you, for example, lose the usb-gadget during travel, or similar.
The term "God-like" is a relative term. Either that or it's nonsensical.
If it means "someone who can break physical laws" then it's a non-concept, because the moment you learn of a way (any way!) to break a certain rule, that rule is no longer a "physical law". For example, we used to think that all conductors has resistance, but the first person to manage sending electricity trough a conductor with -zero- loss did not become a "God", instead we adjusted our understanding of physics.
In relative terms, "God-like" means someone who is capable of stuff that you aren't capable of, probably not even close to being capable of.
Compared to a cave-man we are ALREADY god-like. We can fly in the air in large mechanical machines. We can replace the heart of a living human being -- and have him/her live on. We carry devices which enable us to chat with people on the other side of the earth at will. We can travel to the moon. Either one of these would be the domain of Gods to a cave-man.
Compared to us, it's a fair bet that future humans will be god-like. We've changed our explanation-modus though. Earlier, if people saw something incomprehencible, they where likely to go "Magic!" or "God!" or "Prophet!" or such, today many people migth be more likely to go "High-Tech!", people are already accustomed to being surrounded by gadgets that do stuff that they don't really understand.
There is no risk of that. (either of them)
There is no risk that all HD-content becomes available ONLY on blue-ray. There are -already- other sources of HD-material (such as various forms of broadcast and download-services) and these will only multiply, not go away.
Second, there is no risk that the DRM on Blue-ray will actually suceed in preventing EVERYONE EVERYWHERE from copying the content. Remember that the DRM only need to be broken once, by one person. The freed result can thereafter be distributed effortlessly.
My point is, I see no overwhelming demand for PERFECT picture-quality (or sound-quality) recompressing a CD to a 128kbps mp3 produces quite noticeable artifacts too, but reality is that most people don't care very much. Okay, so there's a trend towards 196kbps since today in many contexts its nearly irrelevant if the filesize is 4MB or 6MB.
A 10GB DVD recompressed to 1.5GB is perfectly acceptable to 95% of the movie-watchers out there. Including those who have 42" HD-capable flatscreens.
It is true that recompressing a 35GB blue-ray movie to say 5GB degrades quality. Most people could not care less. The quality will still be significantly better than todays 9GB DVDs (which use a poor compression-scheme and don't have HD), which is ALREADY more than good enough for most people and most movies.
You also underestimate bandwith and storage. 5-10GB DVDs are indeed commonly downloaded, but most people opt for the 1GB recompressed ones, not because they can't handle 10GB, but because the difference in quality is not such that they CARE to spend 10 times the effort.
Downloading 10GB takes about 50 minutes at 25Mbps, which is the "normal" speed offered by my ISP. Even at the -lowest- available speed, 10Mbps, it takes less than 3 hours, not undoable in the least. It's just that it's not worth it to wait for 50 minutes or 3 hours when the other file which is 1/9th the size is in practice equally enjoyable to watch.
I understand residential broadband is still in the stone-age in USA. Perhaps that fools you into thinking that 2Mbps is "fast" or that there are few consumers with 25Mbps+ around ? It's just a question of time until USA also gets reasonable networking, there's no technical barrier, it's mostly a lack of real effective competition.
"Video Home System" also suffers from being plain bad english, a consequence of being a backronym.
If that was the intended meaning, you'd be more likely to go with "Home Video System" -- "HVS".
Actually, transistors can also become more effective, and have been for decades. If not, you'd be right: Doublt computing-power would mean double power-consumption which would mean double heat-production and spell heaps of trouble.
We're still -far- away from the theoretical limits though.
Flipping a -single- bit MUST consume atleast kT joules, where T is the temperature in Kelvin and k is the Bolzmann-constant of around 10^-23.
So if your cpu runs at 300K (cooling it more won't help because then you'll spend energy for that) you can flip a physical max of sligthly over 10^20 bits. Run at 10Ghz, aproximately 10^10 Hz and you can flip a maximum of 10^10 bits every clock-cycle.
Current CPUs don't come anywhere close to being that efficient. They flip perhaps a million transistors in a clocktick which is a factor of 10000 less than they COULD be doing with a single watt, and they spend not ONE watt but more like 50W to do that.
Still, the limits are visible: We can, theoretically, up cpu-efficiency by a factor of 100.000, but a factor of a million looks, imho, physically impossible.
This sounds like a lot, but consider that if we keep doubling every 2 years, we'll hit the hard wall in 20 - 30 years. And long before we get close to the hard wall we'll be in a pretty steep terrain.
Unless we go with reversible computing in which case all bets are off and entirely new limits apply.
They cannot directly. But did you ever stop to consider what you really paid for when you bougth the vw for $25K ? It's basically all work. The hours of the people putting the car together. The hours of the people making the parts. The hours of the people minin the metals. The hours of the people drilling for the oil used to provide the energy for mining the metals and so on.
Increased mechanisation and computer-power means a single individual can do more and more in the same time, which again leads to the price in relative terms becoming less and less. (relative as in compared to the cost of one work-day)
Influences goods that consist of a lot of work and a little bit of raw-materials more than goods that are the other way around offcourse, but the trend is still there: we're getting more and more productive in other areas than electronics too, the progress is just much slower. Doubling is more like 20 years than 20 months.
Sure. The real competition is DVD and downloading. I think there's a real chance that DVD will be the last physical format to achieve market-dominance. There's no real reason we need to mess with physical formats at all, sure files need to be stored -somewhere- but exactly where can safely be left to the consumers.
Music is already like that. Some store their music as round plastic-discs. Others on a hard-disc. Others on flash-based music-players or any combination of these. It doesn't matter. It's the same file. It sounds the same. Okay okay, so that's not strictly true if you compare an original CD to a mp3, but it's close enough that 95% of the population don't care about the difference.
Nobody gives a fuck. Ok ?
90%+ of average consumers don't have any clue whatsoever what "VHS" stands for, and couldn't care less.
For that matter, most consumers couldn't tell you what "HD" stands for either.
If so, then that's simply a result of the player being -buggy- not of it being -v1-
My point was that -not- being v2 is not imho legitimate grounds for complaint.
Being buggy is a completely different kettle of fish. I have no opinion on the bugginess or lack thereof of this particular player.
It's loony.
I consider it beyond question that they provide her with a new laptop (or equivalent amounts of cash).
They should also compensate her for not keeping their promises, being without a laptop for weeks or months has an inconvenience-cost. $500 may be low for this, but reasonably it's a few thousand max.
Third, it *may* be reasonable for them to compensate her for her time dealing with them, -SHE- estimates 200 hours, if she normally nets $40/hour that works out to $8000. (assuming you accept her estimate)
Fourth, if they where grossly neglient it may be apropriate to treble damages punitively.
But add this up and you get ($8000 + a-few-thousand + cost-of-laptop) * 3 = in the ballpark of $45.000
This is a -VERY- high amount to pay for a stolen laptop, but not insane to claim. (if you'd -get- it is a different question)
Multiplying this amount by 1000, for a total of 3000 times actual damages is however straigth-out batshit crazy.
I'm suggesting that $50K in damages for -ONE- stolen laptop badly handled would be enough to get the attention of most stores...
But this player still plays any and all discs labeled "blue-ray" (unless the disc or player is broken)
What happens is that if the disc contains v2.0 features, you won't see -those-, you will still be able to play the disc and see the movie, but you may miss out on some of the advanced features, such as the possibility of PiP (let's say the director commenting upon the film from a separate video-track in a corner of the picture)
I don't see the problem. You bought a blue-ray player, it plays blue-ray discs. This is the primary function.
There are some bells and whistles that it don't have, on account of being a v1 player and thus not implementing the additional stuff that came in v2, all of which is, however, optional.
It means that what was:
Now becomes:
The DMA-step isn't influenced at all. All that happens is that you need to decrypt the data prior to returning it to the application.
This -does- take additional time offcourse. But in most settings it isn't very significant. With modern CPUs decrypting a few blocks of data goes MUCH quicker than physically accessing disc. If the disc spends 70ms actually getting 100 blocks of data into RAM it doesn't make -that- much of a difference that you now need to spend 5ms additionally to decrypt the blocks. (if we assume 1KB blocks this means 100KB of data in 70ms for the disc, adds up to 1.5MB/s for the disc, slow but realistic for a small transfer like this, you're punished for the seek and rotational latency.
5ms for the decryption is actually fairly generous, it amounts to an encrpytion-speed of 20MB/s, and for example my fairly standard Core2 Duo running at 1800Mhz can do more than double that using only one of the cores.
For larger transfers the slowdown is more noticeable. If your disc can do 40MB/s sustained, that would be about equal to the decryption, so you could see a slowdown to half speed. Worse yet: when copying a file from one encrypted filesystem to another you need to first decrypt with one key, then re-encrypt with another. Which takes double time, so in principle you could see what used to take 2 minutes now taking 6.
In practice it's not quite that bad, because on larger transfers you can do decryption/encryption in parallell with the disc working. You don't need to idle the CPU until the disc is done and then idling the disc until the CPU is done, you can run both in parallell.
Still, in general I'll say that not-noticeable for small seek-dominated access, to half-speed at large transfers fits pretty well with my practical experiences. More RAM helps, because it means stuff can be buffered and encrypted "later" when the CPU has a spare microsecond or two.
Not "on the whole", but yes, a very large percentage of it is plain bullshit. And it is too often a screaming-contest, trying to invade every single surface in our lives rather than trying to be more -relevant- which would actually be an advantage.
Much of it is visual pollution. I only wish it was recognized and treated as such.
Irks me particularily in public spaces when the government sells the surfaces to the highest bidder, frequently assuming that keeping those surfaces has zero value to the population.
Or more precisely: If you don't like stuff breaking on you -- stop VOLUNTEERING as a beta-tester.
Everyone who hasn't been living under a rock KNOWS that buying the latest-and-greatest new bleeding-edge standard before it is established in the marketplace means:
a) There's a significant chance that it'll be obsolete in 3 years because some other standard ends up owning the game.
b) There's a 100% chance that you're paying a MUCH higher price for a MUCH poorer product, compared to those who wait a bit.
c) There's a significant chance that your product has bugs, shortcomings, problems.
d) There's a significant chance that the standard will fluctuate, so by the time it solidifies, your gadget is no longer fully compatible.
It's not as if any of this is news. Furthermore, much of it is unavoidable: If a producer elected not to bring products to market until these things had settles, they'd be handing their market-share to the competitors.
If you don't like this deal, there's a simple cure: Wait a year or two *THEN* buy any random high-def video-player. It'll cost 1/3rd what it costs now, or less, it'll work better and it'll support the stable version of the standard.
This is extremely silly. There's not much energy there, larger amounts can be gathered trivially.
Falling raindrops reach terminal velocity after aproximately 5-10 meters, assuming they're the large type. Tiny raindrops reach terminal velocity after something like -1- meter.
So, if you could somehow collect the entire energy (not possible most of it goes into heating the drop as it's vigorously stirred on impact) you'd have collected the same energy as for the water falling perhaps on the average 3 meters.
Let's say your house has a 100square-meter roof, and you install this magical capture-all-energy stuff on the entire roof. Let's furthermore say it rains 1000mm/year. You have now collected the energy of 100 cubic metres of water falling 3 metres. That is 100*1000*9.8*3 = 3000KJ. Or sligthly less than -1- Kwh.
Market-value for this power at grid-prices ? $0.10.
Market-value for this power from a solar-cell ? (say if there's no grid available) $2.00
Price for a wind-turbine that will deliver 1Kwh/year ? You'd take the smallest one you can get, probably one from a kids toy. We're talking an average of 0.1W here....
Adding insult to injury, the power comes at semi-random impractical times, not when you need it.
Conclusion: Even *IF* you wanted this tiny amount of power, and it MUST be from rain, you'd be better off installing a tank at your roof, and a small turbine in the downspout. That way you could drain the same power (assuming your roof is 3 meters up) and it'd cost less and work better.
Extra-conclusion: Everything is in reality atleast 10 times worse than I state here, because this all assumes the material can magically convert 100% of impact-energy to electricity, which is obvious nonsense, I'd be impressed if it could do 10%...