If you mean in single-player, it shows up later in the game. You can't miss it-- it's a plot element. People will talk to you about it and teach you to use it. Just keep playing.
I stand corrected! I'll have to go back and enjoy the shoddy plumbing in Nova Prospekt. You'd think the combine could bolt 'em down better than those ramshackle apartments earlier in the game where you couldn't rip 'em up.
I haven't found a toilet in single-player I could pick up and toss, yet. I'm in the citadel now, and I'm guessing everybody in there either craps in their little man-pod or has had their colon removed and replaced with the air filter from an '82 chevette, so I'm not holding out hope of finding one I can try the super-grav-gun on.
I'm 6'1" and 145 lbs, which is close. I'm a runner and a triathlete, and can at least vouch for the fact that you *can* be quite healthy at that height and weight. It's just how I'm built.
Not that this has anything to do with the story, really, but you asked.
I have a couple of 12" fresnel lenses-- they were all of $10 each from edmund scientific when I was in college. Looks like they have 11" square fresnels for $5 now.
Their industrial optics catalog can probably get you larger ones.
The 11" square is enough to melt pennies, and you don't have to be nearly as patient as you would have to with a piddly 4" round glass lens. I recommend adding a pair of welding goggles to the box when you give it to your kids as a present, though-- the "bright spot" it makes is more than a little bit dangerous to look at, even indirectly.
I used to think so, too. I've recently played through SQ1-4 and MI1-3, and have to say that space quest didn't hold up over time nearly as well as monkey island. Both definitely have their moments, though!
My favorite thing about the GBA SP is that it lasts longer than any flight I've had to take for work. I'm sure if I took a nonstop to australia, I could run it down-- but I'd probably need to sleep before I cashed the battery. It lasts long enough that even if you're not at a save point, you can just turn off the backlight and leave it running for most of a day until you finally arrive somewhere with an outlet you can use.
Somehow, I don't think your suggestion of a home console is likely to do me much good on an 8-hour flight.
According to the article, they're generating a white signal from the RGB input and have four color elements for each pixel-- RGBW. I suspect they're arranged in a square, like:
RG BW
or some such. This would let them apply a system like ClearType or OSX or the old Apple II subpixel rendering in two dimensions, rather than just one as with the typical horizontal RGB subpixel arrangement.
All of the energy going into the processor is going to come out as heat. It's similar to what would happen if you put a lightbulb in a box, and then measured how much heat was being produced outside.
Some of the power going to the lightbulb makes waste heat directly, and some of it makes light. But since it's all closed up in a box, all of the light ends up making heat, too.
So yes, some of the power going into the processor does useful work. But from the point of view outside the processor at the heatsink, even the useful work creates heat.
While I can't comment on the rest of your rant, having no direct experience with the NYC protests, or protests in general-- you make an excellent point.
Fair is fair. Both groups need their names and addresses published, or none at all. I'm of the opinion that they're all asshats.
"Seal item in uranium block, bury somewhere in Iraq. Ain't nobody gonna steal that fucker."
It's not like nobody has been stealing anything in Iraq, for starters. It's really peaceful and secure over there, with no looting, riots, or insurgency.
On top of that, I think the Uranium might make it both easier to find and a more tempting target for somebody to dig up than just a buried painting. "The Scream" doesn't exactly have military value, but a block of uranium big enough to encase it might.
The general thrust of your plan is good, though-- if you're willing to forgo ever having anyone SEE the painting, you can make it very secure. I would suggest something more along the lines of just tossing it in the fire. That method has the same effect on people's ability to see it, but guarantees nobody can steal it ever again.
I was fortunate enough to snag mine at auction after the company evaporated, and it now sits at home. Why are good chairs so frequently overlooked in an industry made up entirely of people who sit on their asses all day?
If that's your favorite part, you can enjoy your favorite part of backpacking by simply hiding all your clocks, gadgets, and computers and hanging out in your house. You'll save money on gear and travel time, and you won't have to hang your food in midair to prevent the animals from eating it.
It's cheaper, and those of us who backpack for reasons besides an inability to think of another way to get away from clocks will have less crowded trails to deal with.
People who backpack to "get away" baffle me-- I backpack to get somewhere I want to be, not to hide from my wristwatch. If it's dark and raining, and I'm stuck in my tent-- I'll be loving the 10-hour battery on my GBA.
Riiiiight. I think you're failing to note the rapid depreciation of this hardware.
How is paying $100 for a $300 video card "subsidizing his next purchase?" He's taken a 67% loss in a year. All I'm doing is lessening the pain slightly-- he's *still* paying double what I am even after he gets my money, for the sole advantage of being about a year ahead tech-wise. I use last years' hardware to play last years' games, and the whole lot of it is cheaper. Significantly cheaper.
His yearly outlay would be $200 or so-- buy new $300 card, sell for $100.
My yearly outlay would be $100, or half what he pays.
Unless of course, you've got a chump of another sort-- the type who will pay well more than the card is worth for your used hardware.
For some people, having the latest and greatest is worth the extra outlay-- for me, it's not. But I'm grateful those folks exist, because I get their hardware later for cheap.
The last card I bought was a Radeon 9800 Pro for $100 in august. Here's the trick: find a friend or acquaintance who is one of those nutcases who buys every latest high-end whatever, and buy their stuff a year later used for cheap.
It's all memory, just of varying speeds and capacities. Some of the memory systems for older computers were much more like today's disk drives than they are like our SDRAM chips. Things like drum memory, which is essentially a cylindrical hard drive, were used as main system RAM in the 1950s and 1960s.
DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs are forms of memory, as are hard drives, but it still bugs me for some reason when people say things like "my computer has 200GB of memory," even though I know they're technically right.
I believe the Sandia Z-Machine is filled with some sort of cooling or dialectric (i can't remember exactly) fluid that is low-density enough for swimming to be impossible. If you fall in, you're supposed to hold your breath, walk to the side, and climb up the ladder.
I'm having trouble finding the article that talked about the fluid, but you can at least have a look at a picture of it running (you don't want to swim in it while it's on, I imagine...)
I know it's driving you crazy, but calling it memory is fine. What did you think the "M" in DVD-ROM or CD-ROM stood for? And in case you're still not sure, ROM stands for "Read-Only Memory."
Flow rate is definitely a consideration. A solar preheat system would raise your max flow rate, as would a second unit.
You have to do the research yourself for your own particular situation and usage-- if it's prohibitively expensive for you to switch, don't do it. The units I've looked at all specify how much hot water per second they can produce-- that's the number you're concerned with. You'll need to find one (or a couple) that meet your maximum load. You can get a system that will fill a bath at a reasonable speed-- you just have to determine what you need up front, and whether that fits your budget.
Broken (as in, just shutting off) isn't the same as "running out." If it's not working, it's hardly a fair comparison! If it gets colder (but not as cold as when it's off) when the washer comes on, your tankless unit probably isn't big enough for the combined load.
You could increase its capacity (after you get it fixed) by looking into solar preheat. Essentially, you have a tank *before* the water heater that contains water warmed by the sun-- giving the heater a "head start," so not as much energy is needed to warm the water. This means:
1. less energy to achieve the same amount of water 2. maximum flow of heated water is higher, since we don't have to do as much work to heat it.
I'm waiting to replace my old tank with a tankless unit when it expires-- so I don't have firsthand experience. Friends and family are recommending them, but a couple of posters have indicated problems like yours as well as one guy who thinks he is less efficient than he was with a tank-- so careful research into the details of which unit you want and how it will work in your situation are a must.
I should have mentioned this. The most efficient setup would be to run solar and/or geothermal preheat into a tank of warm water that then goes through the tankless/instant water heater, just like you say. You can use geothermal preheat even in colder areas-- sink some pipes underground to act as an exchanger, since the ground stays 50-60F all year round. This means your tankless unit will be starting with 50-60F water, rather than the near-ice-cold stuff coming out of the pipes.
Solar preheat (or fully solar) is workable with panels full of black pipes (or a simple black tank), too. In the summer, you may get enough heat that the tankless unit never runs. In winter, it means that the tankless unit doesn't have to use as much fuel to bring the water up to temperature.
I was trying to keep it easy, mostly-- things get more complex with multi-stage systems, and it's hard to convince most people to do that. But getting them to go tankless is relatively painless, and even offers some benefits besides the efficiency to help sell it.
I strongly encourage everybody to go whole-hog-- power companies are greedy monopolies, and projects like super-efficient multistage water heating systems are the pinnacle of geeky home improvement.
A tankless water heater can't "run out" of water, period. If theirs is shutting off during use, it's broken, or has some sort of over/underflow shutoff that isn't properly set up for their usage situation. I would have it looked at ASAP.
It just sits on the pipe, and cold water goes in one side, and comes out the other side hot. You should be more than able to run it all day long. When they DO shut off or fail, the transition to cold will be abrupt-- there is no "gradually running out" like there is with a tank heater.
I'm not suggesting that the plot of either of these games is plausible by any stretch of the imagination-- but do you *really* think that a megacorp opening a portal to hell on mars is the more realistic of the two? And that hell is full of heads wearing jetpacks?
Oh well-- I don't have much time for games right now anyway. I have to finish up this head-sized jetpack I've been working on for the last two years, and get it down to the boys in the Portal Research Group who asked for it.
I don't think what he's suggesting will dim the bulbs. His suggestion is basically a hack that screws with the oddities of AC power. Without checking things exactly, I believe what he's done is screw up his Power Factor. In the US (I believe), residential owners are billed without consideration for the Power Factor, so he's probably right that this will save you money. The light won't be any dimmer.
He's also right that it doesn't save any power. And he omits the fact that screwing up your Power Factor is not good for the efficiency of the grid, and probably ends up costing the grid more power than just running normally in the end.
I have heard that other countries measure the PF for residential users-- which is why you see computer power supplies marketed with "active PF correction" to keep your 600W gaming machine's PSU from fucking up the power grid.
Here's an article(and another) that explains the basics of AC Power Factor-- an excess of capacitive or inductive loads will result in a leading or lagging power factor, which results in you getting more current delivered for the same amount of power used, and they eat it as line loss in their grid. Industrial facilities in the US *are* charged for having a leading or lagging (ie, not 1) Power Factor, so for factories with lots of electric motors (big inductors), they'll often have a big capacitor bank to pull the PF back in the other direction.
His trick is to use the fact that light bulbs could care less about PF, AC, or DC to run them roughly DC. The diode clips off the bottom half of the 120V sine wave. The capacitor (charged during the "up" cycle) will supply power during the "down" half of the cycle (which is now off, thanks to the diode), with side effect of giving him a leading power factor.
My EE classes are getting rusty, so if anybody wants to post a more thorough analysis or point out any mistakes, feel free.
Slashdot Mirror
If you mean in single-player, it shows up later in the game. You can't miss it-- it's a plot element. People will talk to you about it and teach you to use it. Just keep playing.
I stand corrected! I'll have to go back and enjoy the shoddy plumbing in Nova Prospekt. You'd think the combine could bolt 'em down better than those ramshackle apartments earlier in the game where you couldn't rip 'em up.
I haven't found a toilet in single-player I could pick up and toss, yet. I'm in the citadel now, and I'm guessing everybody in there either craps in their little man-pod or has had their colon removed and replaced with the air filter from an '82 chevette, so I'm not holding out hope of finding one I can try the super-grav-gun on.
I'm 6'1" and 145 lbs, which is close. I'm a runner and a triathlete, and can at least vouch for the fact that you *can* be quite healthy at that height and weight. It's just how I'm built.
Not that this has anything to do with the story, really, but you asked.
I have a couple of 12" fresnel lenses-- they were all of $10 each from edmund scientific when I was in college. Looks like they have 11" square fresnels for $5 now.
Their industrial optics catalog can probably get you larger ones.
The 11" square is enough to melt pennies, and you don't have to be nearly as patient as you would have to with a piddly 4" round glass lens. I recommend adding a pair of welding goggles to the box when you give it to your kids as a present, though-- the "bright spot" it makes is more than a little bit dangerous to look at, even indirectly.
I used to think so, too. I've recently played through SQ1-4 and MI1-3, and have to say that space quest didn't hold up over time nearly as well as monkey island. Both definitely have their moments, though!
My favorite thing about the GBA SP is that it lasts longer than any flight I've had to take for work. I'm sure if I took a nonstop to australia, I could run it down-- but I'd probably need to sleep before I cashed the battery. It lasts long enough that even if you're not at a save point, you can just turn off the backlight and leave it running for most of a day until you finally arrive somewhere with an outlet you can use.
Somehow, I don't think your suggestion of a home console is likely to do me much good on an 8-hour flight.
According to the article, they're generating a white signal from the RGB input and have four color elements for each pixel-- RGBW. I suspect they're arranged in a square, like:
RG
BW
or some such. This would let them apply a system like ClearType or OSX or the old Apple II subpixel rendering in two dimensions, rather than just one as with the typical horizontal RGB subpixel arrangement.
All of the energy going into the processor is going to come out as heat. It's similar to what would happen if you put a lightbulb in a box, and then measured how much heat was being produced outside.
Some of the power going to the lightbulb makes waste heat directly, and some of it makes light. But since it's all closed up in a box, all of the light ends up making heat, too.
So yes, some of the power going into the processor does useful work. But from the point of view outside the processor at the heatsink, even the useful work creates heat.
While I can't comment on the rest of your rant, having no direct experience with the NYC protests, or protests in general-- you make an excellent point.
Fair is fair. Both groups need their names and addresses published, or none at all. I'm of the opinion that they're all asshats.
Me too.
--A different Dan
"Seal item in uranium block, bury somewhere in Iraq. Ain't nobody gonna steal that fucker."
It's not like nobody has been stealing anything in Iraq, for starters. It's really peaceful and secure over there, with no looting, riots, or insurgency.
On top of that, I think the Uranium might make it both easier to find and a more tempting target for somebody to dig up than just a buried painting. "The Scream" doesn't exactly have military value, but a block of uranium big enough to encase it might.
The general thrust of your plan is good, though-- if you're willing to forgo ever having anyone SEE the painting, you can make it very secure. I would suggest something more along the lines of just tossing it in the fire. That method has the same effect on people's ability to see it, but guarantees nobody can steal it ever again.
I was fortunate enough to snag mine at auction after the company evaporated, and it now sits at home. Why are good chairs so frequently overlooked in an industry made up entirely of people who sit on their asses all day?
If that's your favorite part, you can enjoy your favorite part of backpacking by simply hiding all your clocks, gadgets, and computers and hanging out in your house. You'll save money on gear and travel time, and you won't have to hang your food in midair to prevent the animals from eating it.
It's cheaper, and those of us who backpack for reasons besides an inability to think of another way to get away from clocks will have less crowded trails to deal with.
People who backpack to "get away" baffle me-- I backpack to get somewhere I want to be, not to hide from my wristwatch. If it's dark and raining, and I'm stuck in my tent-- I'll be loving the 10-hour battery on my GBA.
Riiiiight. I think you're failing to note the rapid depreciation of this hardware.
How is paying $100 for a $300 video card "subsidizing his next purchase?" He's taken a 67% loss in a year. All I'm doing is lessening the pain slightly-- he's *still* paying double what I am even after he gets my money, for the sole advantage of being about a year ahead tech-wise. I use last years' hardware to play last years' games, and the whole lot of it is cheaper. Significantly cheaper.
His yearly outlay would be $200 or so-- buy new $300 card, sell for $100.
My yearly outlay would be $100, or half what he pays.
Unless of course, you've got a chump of another sort-- the type who will pay well more than the card is worth for your used hardware.
For some people, having the latest and greatest is worth the extra outlay-- for me, it's not. But I'm grateful those folks exist, because I get their hardware later for cheap.
The last card I bought was a Radeon 9800 Pro for $100 in august. Here's the trick: find a friend or acquaintance who is one of those nutcases who buys every latest high-end whatever, and buy their stuff a year later used for cheap.
It's all memory, just of varying speeds and capacities. Some of the memory systems for older computers were much more like today's disk drives than they are like our SDRAM chips. Things like drum memory, which is essentially a cylindrical hard drive, were used as main system RAM in the 1950s and 1960s.
DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs are forms of memory, as are hard drives, but it still bugs me for some reason when people say things like "my computer has 200GB of memory," even though I know they're technically right.
I believe the Sandia Z-Machine is filled with some sort of cooling or dialectric (i can't remember exactly) fluid that is low-density enough for swimming to be impossible. If you fall in, you're supposed to hold your breath, walk to the side, and climb up the ladder.
I'm having trouble finding the article that talked about the fluid, but you can at least have a look at a picture of it running (you don't want to swim in it while it's on, I imagine...)
Picture
I know it's driving you crazy, but calling it memory is fine. What did you think the "M" in DVD-ROM or CD-ROM stood for? And in case you're still not sure, ROM stands for "Read-Only Memory."
Flow rate is definitely a consideration. A solar preheat system would raise your max flow rate, as would a second unit.
You have to do the research yourself for your own particular situation and usage-- if it's prohibitively expensive for you to switch, don't do it. The units I've looked at all specify how much hot water per second they can produce-- that's the number you're concerned with. You'll need to find one (or a couple) that meet your maximum load. You can get a system that will fill a bath at a reasonable speed-- you just have to determine what you need up front, and whether that fits your budget.
Broken (as in, just shutting off) isn't the same as "running out." If it's not working, it's hardly a fair comparison! If it gets colder (but not as cold as when it's off) when the washer comes on, your tankless unit probably isn't big enough for the combined load.
You could increase its capacity (after you get it fixed) by looking into solar preheat. Essentially, you have a tank *before* the water heater that contains water warmed by the sun-- giving the heater a "head start," so not as much energy is needed to warm the water. This means:
1. less energy to achieve the same amount of water
2. maximum flow of heated water is higher, since we don't have to do as much work to heat it.
I'm waiting to replace my old tank with a tankless unit when it expires-- so I don't have firsthand experience. Friends and family are recommending them, but a couple of posters have indicated problems like yours as well as one guy who thinks he is less efficient than he was with a tank-- so careful research into the details of which unit you want and how it will work in your situation are a must.
I should have mentioned this. The most efficient setup would be to run solar and/or geothermal preheat into a tank of warm water that then goes through the tankless/instant water heater, just like you say. You can use geothermal preheat even in colder areas-- sink some pipes underground to act as an exchanger, since the ground stays 50-60F all year round. This means your tankless unit will be starting with 50-60F water, rather than the near-ice-cold stuff coming out of the pipes.
Solar preheat (or fully solar) is workable with panels full of black pipes (or a simple black tank), too. In the summer, you may get enough heat that the tankless unit never runs. In winter, it means that the tankless unit doesn't have to use as much fuel to bring the water up to temperature.
I was trying to keep it easy, mostly-- things get more complex with multi-stage systems, and it's hard to convince most people to do that. But getting them to go tankless is relatively painless, and even offers some benefits besides the efficiency to help sell it.
I strongly encourage everybody to go whole-hog-- power companies are greedy monopolies, and projects like super-efficient multistage water heating systems are the pinnacle of geeky home improvement.
A tankless water heater can't "run out" of water, period. If theirs is shutting off during use, it's broken, or has some sort of over/underflow shutoff that isn't properly set up for their usage situation. I would have it looked at ASAP.
It just sits on the pipe, and cold water goes in one side, and comes out the other side hot. You should be more than able to run it all day long. When they DO shut off or fail, the transition to cold will be abrupt-- there is no "gradually running out" like there is with a tank heater.
I'm not suggesting that the plot of either of these games is plausible by any stretch of the imagination-- but do you *really* think that a megacorp opening a portal to hell on mars is the more realistic of the two? And that hell is full of heads wearing jetpacks?
Oh well-- I don't have much time for games right now anyway. I have to finish up this head-sized jetpack I've been working on for the last two years, and get it down to the boys in the Portal Research Group who asked for it.
I don't think what he's suggesting will dim the bulbs. His suggestion is basically a hack that screws with the oddities of AC power. Without checking things exactly, I believe what he's done is screw up his Power Factor. In the US (I believe), residential owners are billed without consideration for the Power Factor, so he's probably right that this will save you money. The light won't be any dimmer.
He's also right that it doesn't save any power. And he omits the fact that screwing up your Power Factor is not good for the efficiency of the grid, and probably ends up costing the grid more power than just running normally in the end.
I have heard that other countries measure the PF for residential users-- which is why you see computer power supplies marketed with "active PF correction" to keep your 600W gaming machine's PSU from fucking up the power grid.
Here's an article (and another) that explains the basics of AC Power Factor-- an excess of capacitive or inductive loads will result in a leading or lagging power factor, which results in you getting more current delivered for the same amount of power used, and they eat it as line loss in their grid. Industrial facilities in the US *are* charged for having a leading or lagging (ie, not 1) Power Factor, so for factories with lots of electric motors (big inductors), they'll often have a big capacitor bank to pull the PF back in the other direction.
His trick is to use the fact that light bulbs could care less about PF, AC, or DC to run them roughly DC. The diode clips off the bottom half of the 120V sine wave. The capacitor (charged during the "up" cycle) will supply power during the "down" half of the cycle (which is now off, thanks to the diode), with side effect of giving him a leading power factor.
My EE classes are getting rusty, so if anybody wants to post a more thorough analysis or point out any mistakes, feel free.