Most modern water heaters already have the equivalent of the insulation blankets people put on older models. A recent model will not benefit from the blanket nearly as much as an older unit. More insulation always helps, but the gains become very small after a while.
A quick reference on when to use or not use the blanket. Anybody reading this should note that the original poster's "warm to the touch test" is absolutely correct-- if it isn't warmer than the surroundings, it isn't losing much heat.
What you REALLY want to fix this "keeping a tank of water warm all the time" problem is an on-demand water heater. They're a little more expensive than normal water heaters, but they have a few key benefits:
1. No tank to take up space. 2. Never runs out of hot water. 3. Doesn't have to keep a tank of water warm when not in use, making them much more efficient.
I'm surprised that #2 alone hasn't made them the de-facto replacement for tank water heaters in America (I understand they're common in europe and japan). Energy efficiency aside-- you can't run out of hot water with a tankless, on-demand water heater!
If you're even *considering* a new unit in the near future, go tankless! Installing them isn't any different than anything else that needs plumbing for water and gas-- even if they've never heard of one, your local contractor will be able to install it.
I have two tivos, and love them-- and thought the same thing about commercial skip. "How could it be any better than a 60x fast forward?"
It just is, in the same way that a tivo "just is" better than a VCR. It's hard to convince somebody of it, but once I had a chance to watch a few shows on a friend's replay, I can honestly say that automatic commercial skip rules.
It's not worth giving up the Season Pass Manager, but watching a movie all they way through without touching the remote to fast forward is really, really nice.
Does anybody have links to good info on MythTV and Linux support for the various HDTV tuner cards out there? I already have a tivo for the normal stuff.
Last time I looked, Linux support for these cards was spotty to nonexistant-- if it has improved, I would love to dump windows for free software for recording HDTV.
I agree with you. If they managed to find enough evidence to prove there was collusion, then surely they have enough information to point out the names of at least some of the people involved in the price fixing. These people should all be punished under normal theft laws for taking the money.
Your pick:
1. One huge count of stealing millions as if it were from a federal bank.
2. Hundreds of thousands of smaller counts of stealing from the individuals and companies who paid higher prices for their RAM.
The punishment should include immediate repayment of the amount they gained through price-fixing, and whatever additional jailtime and fines are associated with theft of that magnitude (or quantity). Only when the *people* who run corporations are subject to the penalties for their illegal actions will this crap stop.
It strikes me as an odd side effect of "corporate personhood" that the crime belongs to the company, and the individuals are not punished-- yet we have no comparable punishments for a company. We can't put a corp in jail for 20 years, and we can't give it the death penalty for awful crimes. So everything is just a fine... and companies treat it as "cost of doing business," just like you and I paying speeding tickets.
Another poster already pointed out that film is more than good enough to make HD versions, and he's right. Your analogy is a bit flawed: it's not like converting 8-track to CD, it's like converting an analog 2" reel-to-reel master to CD, which is what many studios have been doing for years. It may be analog, but it's of significantly higher quality than the digital media we're converting to.
At how the quiz was scored. The ranges seem to effectively be the "vote of no confidence" you are requesting, so that if you know you don't know something, you specify a very broad range. I scored very, very low, but had only one answer fall outside the range I estimated.
The quiz is more of a straight "how close can you guess" than it is "how aware are you of what you know," which is more what I expected. My results indicate no accuracy whatsoever, but a very thorough understanding of where the limits of my knowledge are and how big my margin of error will be.
So, I suck at estimating, but at least I'm aware of it.
Please note that the original poster said "in your apartment" not "on your apartment." You are both quite right-- the landlord absolutely cannot restrict placement of a dish of 1m diameter or less within property that is rented exclusively to you (inside the apartment, or within but not protruding past the edge of a balcony or exclusive patio). Drilling holes is subject to whatever rules your landlord already has about the structure, which is why most apartment dish mounts end up being the "dish on a pole in a bucket of cement" variety, with the cable run through the balcony/patio door. Several people at the last place I lived actually took them back inside when they were done watching, and just used little marks to line it up next time.
Does anybody make a cheap, simple software (or better, standalone) reverse firewall that would be handy for deploying on the networks of friends and family? It's all well and good for you, the least likely type of person to be zombied in the first place, to be reverse firewalled, but it is much more effective when placed where trouble is more likely to occur.
If only that were true! I suspect that the actual effect will fall somewhere in this range:
Low end: Everyone still posts just as much crap everywhere else, but they also manage to generate reams and reams of new crap yelling at eachother in the new section.
High end: Everyone generates reams and reams of new crap in the new section, and are so worked up and angry over the "discussions" they are having by screaming at eachother that they end up posting *even more* crap on the rest of the site.
I fully expect this section to be a non-stop flamefest that leaves nobody untouched. A knock-down drag-out troll fight, with everyone yelling, minimal dialogue, and 4 billion threads that run something like this:
"Bush Sucks." "Democrats Suck." "Non-libertarians Suck." "America Sucks." "Europe Sucks." "My Country Isn't In Europe, You American Idiot." "I'm Not an American, You Elitist Freak." "I hate the it.slashdot.org color scheme." "I predict all of the threads in this section will sound like this:"
*beep*
Infinite Loop.
Coal and radioactive waste
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
Now if you assert that coal plants produce the same radiation in the same densities and quantities as nuclear fission plants and pose similar clean up costs then I'll just say fuck you, you're full of shit.
I think that's why he was suggesting spreading the nuclear waste out into the same low density as the coal plant ash.
He was probably joking-- although this is one of those ideas that is probably valid "on paper," you can bet nobody's gonna buy into the idea of "spread it out real thin" as a solution to nuclear waste *even if* it is equivalent to or less than what we get from coal plants now. Coal contains Thorium and Uranium at average levels of roughly 3.2ppm and 1.3ppm respectively, and it ends up in the ash. If you burn a lot of coal, you release a lot of radioactive material-- it's just spread pretty thin.
But the way people's minds work, this amount of radiactive material released by burning coal is acceptable, as it's a natural waste product of the burning. Pulverizing, mixing with filler, and pumping out the nuclear waste into the air as a similar fine ash, however, is not.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This seems like a "where do we put the definition" question. All the energy going into a CPU ends up as heat. Because the "work" it does turns into heat, too. But it does do some stuff, too.
Take a lightbulb-- the normal way to think about efficiency is "how much of the energy is made into light vs. heat." The original poster would seem to suggest that it all ends up as heat, because as soon as the light hits something, it's just going to warm it up. Just like the CPU-- it does some number crunching... but moving those electrons around in there just ends up making heat after we're done crunching, too. It's just that with the CPU, this step is done before we leave the CPU. The CPU is like a lightbulb in a box. The lightbulb does make light-- but from the view outside the box, all the energy you put in is becoming heat.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I have several that are instant-on, although in your circumstance, I think I'd want a redundant array of various bulbs and circuits with backup batteries and generators of various types, a drawer full of glowsticks and flashlights, and a gas fireplace with an instant ignition.
I can't remember the brand off the top of my head-- it's been six years since I bought them. I also have several dimmable ones.
What I haven't been able to find is dimmable G30 or G40 decorator globe replacements. I have a 10-bulb light bar in the bathroom I would like to cut the power use on.
GPUs are very purpose-built, and CPUs are pretty general-purpose. Your GPU is like a car factory-- lots of people and lots of specialized machinery that are very good at making cars. You could *ask* them to make a wooden rocking horse, and they might eventually think of a way to use the assembly line, robots, and some tools from the maintenance shack to make it-- but it would take some really creative thinking, and they wouldn't be nearly as good or as fast at it as they are at making cars.
Your CPU is like a room full of contractors with common tools. They can do nearly anything, from carpentry to metalwork, but if you ask them to build cars, they won't be nearly as fast as the car factory folks, just because they don't have the specialized assembly line.
The slowness gave it away? Really? Perhaps the PDP-11 was faster than I remember, or there was some really hairy "back when men were men, and programming was assembly" optimization going on.
I remember waiting whole days for moves from the first computer chess game I had.
If he has a recent Dell, the OP is probably right. The D500s have the HDD under the front left handrest (oddly, the headphone jacks are actually *attached* to the HDD), and it gets annoyingly warm with use. The vent fans (presumably where the CPU and GPU heatpipes are going to dump their heat) are elsewhere.
Both suck. T-mobile's national coverage map looks like an incomplete highway map-- no coverage out of cities or off the largest roads. To top that off, the sidekick had radio problems for a long time, which makes the already-bad T-mobile coverage even worse. I don't know if they've fixed the hardware, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I had a sidekick for a year, and then a treo. I like the treo better, but it's a toss-up. Sidekick's interface is better, but it lacks sync, 4-network IM, good reception, hardware reliability, and 3rd-party applications.
The treo has a slower browser, smaller keyboard, and difficulty multitasking (although I can get IMs while doing other things).
Both are good. If you don't need sync and are fine with T-mobile's coverage in your area, as well as the occasional RMA (I needed 4 sidekicks in six months), the sidekick is far friendlier to use. If you have to sync, and need a better network, get the treo.
I've heard this complaint from a lot of people, so it must happen. Doesn't bother me, but I'm the "skinny geek" variety, so I doubt I push the mesh far enough down to have the issue. As always, ergonomics are different for everybody. The Aeron was the best money I've spent on furniture-- no more back issues.
An excellent point. In areas with properly functioning mass transit, those systems kick ass. The numbers for Indianapolis had busses averaging lower than cars, even per person, but this is only because they don't go enough places to make people want to ride them, so they just drive around empty destroying their economy.
Airlines do better because they're so good at keeping planes crammed full.
Looking at some other people's posts, Moller is making 20mpg claims for their skycar-- but that thing has been a prototype forever.
It's just going to have to be "wait and see," I suspect-- we won't know how they'll do until we can actually test for ourselves.
Re:We really need to find something like...
on
A Flying Leap for Cars?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm an environmental nut, and I'm not sure how the economy for small planes is-- but large airliners get something like 90 mpg per passenger, more efficient per person than my civic with an extra passenger.
Economy of scale plays a big part, by cramming lots of people in. But don't lump all air travel into the "automatically inefficient" category-- it was more efficient than I expected, too.
I have a 4-month-old HDVR2. I've pruned the channels down to just the 100 or so I actually get. I've been using the tivo-style guide since day one, since I got used to it on my old tivo. There are no modifications. "Now playing" is empty enough that it fills itself with recommendations, and there are just under 30 season passes, most for new episodes only.
And yet it's still dog-slow compared to my old Series 1, which had 2x more season passes, a 4x bigger hard drive, and less RAM. All of the things you mention help somewhat, but they don't fix it by a long shot. At least I'm not one of the *really* unlucky folks, who can't change season pass order in less than an hour.
Yeah, mine too. Hughes HDVR2, no mods or upgrades at all. I have a series 1 standalone with a TurboNet card and an 80GB second drive that runs circles around it.
I wish I knew what the magic variable was, so I could make my tivo stop sucking and start making my tv less painful like the old one did.
My S1 was slower than S2 boxes, but both are faster than the DTV units. I had twice as many season passes on the S1, and a hard drive four times as large. My DTV unit is unmodified, and yet the S1 still kicks its ass.
That's a fair assesment of the actual work involved, but the fact remains that my series 1 standalone tivo, with slower processor and less memory, was faster at the same operations. I suspect that having two tuners multiplies the amount of work, but not enough to account for the multiple orders of magnitude we've slowed down. Especially in the case of my poor friend whose tivo takes several hours to reorg the season passes.
But like I said earlier-- even if there *is* a legit reason for the slowness, why not save the new SP order, and do the schedule shuffle in the background while the user goes back to watching TV?
Slashdot Mirror
Most modern water heaters already have the equivalent of the insulation blankets people put on older models. A recent model will not benefit from the blanket nearly as much as an older unit. More insulation always helps, but the gains become very small after a while.
A quick reference on when to use or not use the blanket. Anybody reading this should note that the original poster's "warm to the touch test" is absolutely correct-- if it isn't warmer than the surroundings, it isn't losing much heat.
What you REALLY want to fix this "keeping a tank of water warm all the time" problem is an on-demand water heater. They're a little more expensive than normal water heaters, but they have a few key benefits:
1. No tank to take up space.
2. Never runs out of hot water.
3. Doesn't have to keep a tank of water warm when not in use, making them much more efficient.
I'm surprised that #2 alone hasn't made them the de-facto replacement for tank water heaters in America (I understand they're common in europe and japan). Energy efficiency aside-- you can't run out of hot water with a tankless, on-demand water heater!
If you're even *considering* a new unit in the near future, go tankless! Installing them isn't any different than anything else that needs plumbing for water and gas-- even if they've never heard of one, your local contractor will be able to install it.
I have two tivos, and love them-- and thought the same thing about commercial skip. "How could it be any better than a 60x fast forward?"
It just is, in the same way that a tivo "just is" better than a VCR. It's hard to convince somebody of it, but once I had a chance to watch a few shows on a friend's replay, I can honestly say that automatic commercial skip rules.
It's not worth giving up the Season Pass Manager, but watching a movie all they way through without touching the remote to fast forward is really, really nice.
Does anybody have links to good info on MythTV and Linux support for the various HDTV tuner cards out there? I already have a tivo for the normal stuff.
Last time I looked, Linux support for these cards was spotty to nonexistant-- if it has improved, I would love to dump windows for free software for recording HDTV.
I agree with you. If they managed to find enough evidence to prove there was collusion, then surely they have enough information to point out the names of at least some of the people involved in the price fixing. These people should all be punished under normal theft laws for taking the money.
Your pick:
1. One huge count of stealing millions as if it were from a federal bank.
2. Hundreds of thousands of smaller counts of stealing from the individuals and companies who paid higher prices for their RAM.
The punishment should include immediate repayment of the amount they gained through price-fixing, and whatever additional jailtime and fines are associated with theft of that magnitude (or quantity). Only when the *people* who run corporations are subject to the penalties for their illegal actions will this crap stop.
It strikes me as an odd side effect of "corporate personhood" that the crime belongs to the company, and the individuals are not punished-- yet we have no comparable punishments for a company. We can't put a corp in jail for 20 years, and we can't give it the death penalty for awful crimes. So everything is just a fine... and companies treat it as "cost of doing business," just like you and I paying speeding tickets.
Another poster already pointed out that film is more than good enough to make HD versions, and he's right. Your analogy is a bit flawed: it's not like converting 8-track to CD, it's like converting an analog 2" reel-to-reel master to CD, which is what many studios have been doing for years. It may be analog, but it's of significantly higher quality than the digital media we're converting to.
At how the quiz was scored. The ranges seem to effectively be the "vote of no confidence" you are requesting, so that if you know you don't know something, you specify a very broad range. I scored very, very low, but had only one answer fall outside the range I estimated.
The quiz is more of a straight "how close can you guess" than it is "how aware are you of what you know," which is more what I expected. My results indicate no accuracy whatsoever, but a very thorough understanding of where the limits of my knowledge are and how big my margin of error will be.
So, I suck at estimating, but at least I'm aware of it.
Please note that the original poster said "in your apartment" not "on your apartment." You are both quite right-- the landlord absolutely cannot restrict placement of a dish of 1m diameter or less within property that is rented exclusively to you (inside the apartment, or within but not protruding past the edge of a balcony or exclusive patio). Drilling holes is subject to whatever rules your landlord already has about the structure, which is why most apartment dish mounts end up being the "dish on a pole in a bucket of cement" variety, with the cable run through the balcony/patio door. Several people at the last place I lived actually took them back inside when they were done watching, and just used little marks to line it up next time.
Does anybody make a cheap, simple software (or better, standalone) reverse firewall that would be handy for deploying on the networks of friends and family? It's all well and good for you, the least likely type of person to be zombied in the first place, to be reverse firewalled, but it is much more effective when placed where trouble is more likely to occur.
If only that were true! I suspect that the actual effect will fall somewhere in this range:
Low end: Everyone still posts just as much crap everywhere else, but they also manage to generate reams and reams of new crap yelling at eachother in the new section.
High end: Everyone generates reams and reams of new crap in the new section, and are so worked up and angry over the "discussions" they are having by screaming at eachother that they end up posting *even more* crap on the rest of the site.
I fully expect this section to be a non-stop flamefest that leaves nobody untouched. A knock-down drag-out troll fight, with everyone yelling, minimal dialogue, and 4 billion threads that run something like this:
"Bush Sucks."
"Democrats Suck."
"Non-libertarians Suck."
"America Sucks."
"Europe Sucks."
"My Country Isn't In Europe, You American Idiot."
"I'm Not an American, You Elitist Freak."
"I hate the it.slashdot.org color scheme."
"I predict all of the threads in this section will sound like this:"
*beep*
Infinite Loop.
Now if you assert that coal plants produce the same radiation in the same densities and quantities as nuclear fission plants and pose similar clean up costs then I'll just say fuck you, you're full of shit.
I think that's why he was suggesting spreading the nuclear waste out into the same low density as the coal plant ash.
He was probably joking-- although this is one of those ideas that is probably valid "on paper," you can bet nobody's gonna buy into the idea of "spread it out real thin" as a solution to nuclear waste *even if* it is equivalent to or less than what we get from coal plants now. Coal contains Thorium and Uranium at average levels of roughly 3.2ppm and 1.3ppm respectively, and it ends up in the ash. If you burn a lot of coal, you release a lot of radioactive material-- it's just spread pretty thin.
But the way people's minds work, this amount of radiactive material released by burning coal is acceptable, as it's a natural waste product of the burning. Pulverizing, mixing with filler, and pumping out the nuclear waste into the air as a similar fine ash, however, is not.
This seems like a "where do we put the definition" question. All the energy going into a CPU ends up as heat. Because the "work" it does turns into heat, too. But it does do some stuff, too.
Take a lightbulb-- the normal way to think about efficiency is "how much of the energy is made into light vs. heat." The original poster would seem to suggest that it all ends up as heat, because as soon as the light hits something, it's just going to warm it up. Just like the CPU-- it does some number crunching... but moving those electrons around in there just ends up making heat after we're done crunching, too. It's just that with the CPU, this step is done before we leave the CPU. The CPU is like a lightbulb in a box. The lightbulb does make light-- but from the view outside the box, all the energy you put in is becoming heat.
I have several that are instant-on, although in your circumstance, I think I'd want a redundant array of various bulbs and circuits with backup batteries and generators of various types, a drawer full of glowsticks and flashlights, and a gas fireplace with an instant ignition.
I can't remember the brand off the top of my head-- it's been six years since I bought them. I also have several dimmable ones.
What I haven't been able to find is dimmable G30 or G40 decorator globe replacements. I have a 10-bulb light bar in the bathroom I would like to cut the power use on.
GPUs are very purpose-built, and CPUs are pretty general-purpose. Your GPU is like a car factory-- lots of people and lots of specialized machinery that are very good at making cars. You could *ask* them to make a wooden rocking horse, and they might eventually think of a way to use the assembly line, robots, and some tools from the maintenance shack to make it-- but it would take some really creative thinking, and they wouldn't be nearly as good or as fast at it as they are at making cars.
Your CPU is like a room full of contractors with common tools. They can do nearly anything, from carpentry to metalwork, but if you ask them to build cars, they won't be nearly as fast as the car factory folks, just because they don't have the specialized assembly line.
The slowness gave it away? Really? Perhaps the PDP-11 was faster than I remember, or there was some really hairy "back when men were men, and programming was assembly" optimization going on.
I remember waiting whole days for moves from the first computer chess game I had.
If he has a recent Dell, the OP is probably right. The D500s have the HDD under the front left handrest (oddly, the headphone jacks are actually *attached* to the HDD), and it gets annoyingly warm with use. The vent fans (presumably where the CPU and GPU heatpipes are going to dump their heat) are elsewhere.
Both suck. T-mobile's national coverage map looks like an incomplete highway map-- no coverage out of cities or off the largest roads. To top that off, the sidekick had radio problems for a long time, which makes the already-bad T-mobile coverage even worse. I don't know if they've fixed the hardware, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I had a sidekick for a year, and then a treo. I like the treo better, but it's a toss-up. Sidekick's interface is better, but it lacks sync, 4-network IM, good reception, hardware reliability, and 3rd-party applications.
The treo has a slower browser, smaller keyboard, and difficulty multitasking (although I can get IMs while doing other things).
Both are good. If you don't need sync and are fine with T-mobile's coverage in your area, as well as the occasional RMA (I needed 4 sidekicks in six months), the sidekick is far friendlier to use. If you have to sync, and need a better network, get the treo.
I've heard this complaint from a lot of people, so it must happen. Doesn't bother me, but I'm the "skinny geek" variety, so I doubt I push the mesh far enough down to have the issue. As always, ergonomics are different for everybody. The Aeron was the best money I've spent on furniture-- no more back issues.
An excellent point. In areas with properly functioning mass transit, those systems kick ass. The numbers for Indianapolis had busses averaging lower than cars, even per person, but this is only because they don't go enough places to make people want to ride them, so they just drive around empty destroying their economy.
Airlines do better because they're so good at keeping planes crammed full.
Looking at some other people's posts, Moller is making 20mpg claims for their skycar-- but that thing has been a prototype forever.
It's just going to have to be "wait and see," I suspect-- we won't know how they'll do until we can actually test for ourselves.
I'm an environmental nut, and I'm not sure how the economy for small planes is-- but large airliners get something like 90 mpg per passenger, more efficient per person than my civic with an extra passenger.
Economy of scale plays a big part, by cramming lots of people in. But don't lump all air travel into the "automatically inefficient" category-- it was more efficient than I expected, too.
I have a 4-month-old HDVR2. I've pruned the channels down to just the 100 or so I actually get. I've been using the tivo-style guide since day one, since I got used to it on my old tivo. There are no modifications. "Now playing" is empty enough that it fills itself with recommendations, and there are just under 30 season passes, most for new episodes only.
And yet it's still dog-slow compared to my old Series 1, which had 2x more season passes, a 4x bigger hard drive, and less RAM. All of the things you mention help somewhat, but they don't fix it by a long shot. At least I'm not one of the *really* unlucky folks, who can't change season pass order in less than an hour.
Yeah, mine too. Hughes HDVR2, no mods or upgrades at all. I have a series 1 standalone with a TurboNet card and an 80GB second drive that runs circles around it.
I wish I knew what the magic variable was, so I could make my tivo stop sucking and start making my tv less painful like the old one did.
My S1 was slower than S2 boxes, but both are faster than the DTV units. I had twice as many season passes on the S1, and a hard drive four times as large. My DTV unit is unmodified, and yet the S1 still kicks its ass.
That's a fair assesment of the actual work involved, but the fact remains that my series 1 standalone tivo, with slower processor and less memory, was faster at the same operations. I suspect that having two tuners multiplies the amount of work, but not enough to account for the multiple orders of magnitude we've slowed down. Especially in the case of my poor friend whose tivo takes several hours to reorg the season passes.
But like I said earlier-- even if there *is* a legit reason for the slowness, why not save the new SP order, and do the schedule shuffle in the background while the user goes back to watching TV?