Perhaps your slightly misguided antagonistic take on the Christian religion might benefit from some time spent reading.
Be careful, or Jesus might run you over with his Prius. Assuming he's not just a fictional thing some really old authors made up. In which case, this is all there is and screwing it up by polluting will end your afterlifeless life that much quicker. Either way, you're screwed. So be nice.
The only time I mentioned the Accord was in a parenthetical reference to the approximate SIZE of the car. Everything else (all that stuff not in the parentheses with the word "accord") was intended to be in comparison to last years' Prius. I'm sorry if my wording was unclear, and left your V6 feeling threatened. The Accord is a very nice car.
As a personal curiosity, do you offer to race anybody who thinks their car is faster than yours? You must put a lot of miles on that Accord, sprinting away from modified Dodge Neons. Honda makes reliable cars, though-- so you can expect years and years of racing random people on the internet from it, wherever they are "at."
If it will make you feel better, the next time you're out my way, you can totally waste my completely boring stock CVT Civic HX in a race. Hell, you can put your Accord against me on a bicycle. I guarantee I have less torque and horsepower than a V6, despite my shiny helmet. Victory will be yours, and the world will cheer the speed and might of your chariot.
Seriously, I meant no threat to your car. It is mighty super powerful wicked fast. And this is all intended in good fun. Sorry about the unclear wording.
And go ahead and buy one of those shiny new priuses. The 2004 model is bigger (about as big as a 2004 Accord), faster, more efficient, and has the added trunk space of a hatchback.
Plus, the navigation system responds to voice commands like "I'm Hungry" and plots a course to the nearest restaurant.
It's dorky (see the engine preheat coolant thermos that reduces startup emissions, for example), it gets 60mpg, and makes squeaky-clean emissions. It should hold you over until toyota can come up with a car that runs the exhaust from other people's cars.
I would assume they do so, unless they're making more then they need at that particular moment. At which point, they save the excess power. Sure, it's lossy, but so are all power storage systems. At least this one doesn't involve hundreds of pounds of lead and gallons of acid...
To create a stretched but more accurate analogy, imagine we already have a tested, secure internet-like network, but we're going to fire all the administrators and switch over to a brand new network we've never tested that can be jammed at will by a single guy in a van. And then we're going to rely on it to match thousands of people to their baggage.
The transition is probably a good idea in the long run, but firing the baggage handlers now seems a tad premature.
HBO, Cinemax, etc... are *closer* but are still not all the way to what I want. Take HBO-- I had it for a while, but I was only watching The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Why then, was I paying for 24 hours a day, seven days a week of programming? I want to only buy the shows I want to watch. I want them available for worldwide purchase (movies, too) the second they're done in the editing room. Single-use is okay, but it better be damn cheap. I'd prefer to have the option to buy a show permanently or watch it once, but in either case i want the ability to choose when i start, and be able to pause and come back indefinitely until i'm done with it.
Screw commercials, screw bundled channels, screw buying whole channels with shows I don't watch, screw paying the cable company for anything but bandwidth and the TV stations for anything but content production. Nobody needs their hands on my money except the people who make the shows, and the people who deliver them to me. No more unnecessary middlemen.
You're right, magnetic fields in a PC are fairly small. My point was to indicate that a couple of small fixed magnets around the rim of a fan are not going to be a big deal for your hard drive, as there is already plenty of magnetic noise in a PC. The point wasn't that your power supply will be dragging the chevy you have in the driveway towards your computer-- but rather that there are plenty of fields in there not hurting anything now. Maybe I shouldn't have worded the way I did-- I was just annoyed with all the panic posts about putting magnets in a PC, when it's already chock-full of all sorts of magnets, both permanent and oscillating electromagnets.
As you point out, the fields from the fixed magnets on these motors are going to be much smaller than the rare earth magnet in the HDD itself. And much farther away.
Man, I'm feeling old. No such thing when i was at school there-- I remember feeling special my freshman year because we had actual web access. Back when things were shiny and new, and spam was still an evil twinkle in some deviant salesdroid's eye.
Hell, I remember using FidoNet. And I'm really not that old. I wonder what this is all gonna look like in 20 years? If 10 years brings us as far as the last 10 has, i'm gonna be watching streaming HDTV on my cell phone.
Yeah, I know it does. Screw the middlemen-- that's what we have the internet for. What do the channels do for us now that we have alternate means of distribution (internet, DVD) that we can pay for directly without ads? Nothing. All they do is drown us in ads and produce content of questionable quality that is supported by their handful of successful shows. While simultaneously forcing us to buy hours and hours of programming we don't watch on dozens of bundled channels we have no interest in, to get the few hours a week of TV we do watch.
I say cut 'em out. I'll pay Groening's team directly for more Futurama.
I want to pay only for SHOWS I want to watch. I don't want any more channels-- why should I pay for 24 hours a day of the Discovery channel? 8 of their daily hours are infomercials. And I only watch an hour or two of the remainder, anyway.
I want TV and movies released on DVD the SAME DAY they come out on TV or in the theatre. I'll just pick up what i want to watch at the store, or download it from iShows, or whatever Apple or somebody else comes up with to sell us video.
"and that caroline let frank feel her up in assembly"
Man, you had to do that in assembly? I would think a compiled language would be easier, but still not as easy as just using your hands and the more traditional analog interface.
You're mistaken. Most of the Space Pixie Smoke is actually inside capacitors. You typically only get to see it released when the electrolyte is crap, or when you wire things up wrong.
Computer chips contain very little space pixie smoke, and must be heated to staggering temperatures to get it released. I did, however manage to make a UV-erasable PROM glow (UV erasable chips have a little window in the top so you can see the actual chip through the case, and thus expose it to UV) once by accidentally connecting the power supply to one of the data pins. Just like a little lightbulb, all those tiny circuits worked nicely as a filament.
I'm guessing this was a troll, but i'm going to pretend it isn't and answer it anyway.
The PSU, my misguided friend, is the Power Supply Unit. The "Power Supply" you referred to. I can assure you that you're using one, unless you have replaced it with a series of very large 12v and 5v batteries carefully wired into the rails.
Now, for the 8th-grade lesson you seem to have missed-- your power supply works using a large transformer to convert the voltage coming out of the wall into the 12v and 5v voltages required by your PC. How does a transformer work? at its simplest, it's a pair of coils of wire placed next to eachother. The coils are magnetically coupled-- the first coil gets the power from the wall and generates a HUGE magnetic field. The second coil does what coils do when placed in big magnetic fields-- it makes electrical current. The number of turns of wire on each coil determine the ratio of the input to output voltages.
That's how things worked in the 1980s. Now, today's power supplies aren't that simple. Computer power supplies today are switching power supplies, and use a frequency step-up before feeding into the transformers to reduce the size of the transformer needed. But you will note, as this nice article says and clearly shows in pictures, there are still multiple transformers in a switching power supply. And yes, the way they work is by shunting all the power you're using through a big ol' magnetic field between two coils with different numbers of turns of wire.
So, yes, your power supply is producing a gigantic magnetic field. One large enough to transfer all the hundreds of watts your PC needs through the air as a magnetic field.
If big fields were gonna kill your hard drive, the massive one from the transformer coil in your PSU would probably be the first to do it. Yet somehow, we continue to be able to use PCs stuffed to the brim with magnetic motors, speakers, and transformer coils, all without erasing our hard drives.
Is everybody here retarded? What did you think made your existing fan motors spin, Space Pixies? No, it's a freaking electromagnetic motor. Every single one of them. And there's that PC speaker up front with a big magnetic coil on the back that beeps everytime you turn your PC on, too.
I don't know what generation procedures they used, but "the textures are procedural" means that there are no graphics files in there, and that an algorithm creates the textures at runtime. As a simple example, you could write an algorithm that made a checkerboard image in only a few lines of code. That code takes up only a handful of bytes, whereas the texture graphic itself would take up hundreds of kilobytes, even compressed. You could also look at it as the difference between an equation, and a graph of the equation.
I'm curious to know if the maps are procedural, too.
Don't use batteries. It's not cost-effective. They're huge, high-maintenance, and have to be replaced regularly. It's better to run a grid-tied system and hope somebody else figures out how to handle storage more effectively.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't suggest to most people that they try this to save money. It's at the point where you can break even in 8-10 years, but that's still the sort of time frame where it appeals mostly to folks who are doing it because they want to, not because it's a financial gain. It is a financial gain when done right, but not for a long time.
With a scantily-clad eight-armed gold chrome robot female with a minotaur head in a fur miniskirt riding a rocket surfboard made of ice crystals on a rainbow out of the mouth of a volcano, followed by a swarm of mutant dragonflies with lasers instead of eyes, and ornate knives for wings.
There will be at least 50 stickers on the box, all proclaiming unintelligible things that make you slightly uneasy, like "GOLDEN SAMPLE," "Rotated-grid baby-inhaling anti-establishment engine," "RADIKAL(tm) Three-phase 220v 3D kiloamp power siphon," and "High-velocity pixel exploitation."
The panels you can buy and use for your house today have a 3-4 year energy payoff. (ie, they make an amount of energy equal to what was put in to them in production) They last in the neighborhood of 20-30 years.
There are some nasty chemicals required for production. The total environmental impact, however, is significantly smaller than obtaining the same lifetime amount of power from any other source available. The waste produced by a similar amount of power from coal, nuclear, gas, etc... over a similar lifetime is significantly larger.
The pollution only happens once, for 20-30 years worth of power. The pollution from any other option doesn't stop unless you stop using it.
Honda? My Honda was made entirely in Ohio, with the exception of the transmission, which was made in Japan. Have they outsourced phone support like everybody else, or something?
I'd like to see numbers. I am an "environmentalist", but I'm too much of an engineer/skeptic to take stuff at face value. (Please do not associate an engineer's environmentalism with the nutcases who give simple ideas like efficiency a bad name by strapping themselves to baby seals) Sending trucks to pick up bottles, labor/machinery to sort and remove things like labels and rings of different materials, and the energy to melt down, purify, and re-form materials seems like it would be on par with the digging, shipping, and forming of material in the first place.
This will depend greatly on the material, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if some materials are gains and others are losses.
Without more data, though, my gut tells me that recycling is good, but not so much because of energy savings, as you say.
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Perhaps your slightly misguided antagonistic take on the Christian religion might benefit from some time spent reading.
Be careful, or Jesus might run you over with his Prius. Assuming he's not just a fictional thing some really old authors made up. In which case, this is all there is and screwing it up by polluting will end your afterlifeless life that much quicker. Either way, you're screwed. So be nice.
The only time I mentioned the Accord was in a parenthetical reference to the approximate SIZE of the car. Everything else (all that stuff not in the parentheses with the word "accord") was intended to be in comparison to last years' Prius. I'm sorry if my wording was unclear, and left your V6 feeling threatened. The Accord is a very nice car.
As a personal curiosity, do you offer to race anybody who thinks their car is faster than yours? You must put a lot of miles on that Accord, sprinting away from modified Dodge Neons. Honda makes reliable cars, though-- so you can expect years and years of racing random people on the internet from it, wherever they are "at."
If it will make you feel better, the next time you're out my way, you can totally waste my completely boring stock CVT Civic HX in a race. Hell, you can put your Accord against me on a bicycle. I guarantee I have less torque and horsepower than a V6, despite my shiny helmet. Victory will be yours, and the world will cheer the speed and might of your chariot.
Seriously, I meant no threat to your car. It is mighty super powerful wicked fast. And this is all intended in good fun. Sorry about the unclear wording.
And go ahead and buy one of those shiny new priuses. The 2004 model is bigger (about as big as a 2004 Accord), faster, more efficient, and has the added trunk space of a hatchback.
Plus, the navigation system responds to voice commands like "I'm Hungry" and plots a course to the nearest restaurant.
It's dorky (see the engine preheat coolant thermos that reduces startup emissions, for example), it gets 60mpg, and makes squeaky-clean emissions. It should hold you over until toyota can come up with a car that runs the exhaust from other people's cars.
I would assume they do so, unless they're making more then they need at that particular moment. At which point, they save the excess power. Sure, it's lossy, but so are all power storage systems. At least this one doesn't involve hundreds of pounds of lead and gallons of acid...
Not exactly-- your analogy doesn't quite hold up.
To create a stretched but more accurate analogy, imagine we already have a tested, secure internet-like network, but we're going to fire all the administrators and switch over to a brand new network we've never tested that can be jammed at will by a single guy in a van. And then we're going to rely on it to match thousands of people to their baggage.
The transition is probably a good idea in the long run, but firing the baggage handlers now seems a tad premature.
HBO, Cinemax, etc... are *closer* but are still not all the way to what I want. Take HBO-- I had it for a while, but I was only watching The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Why then, was I paying for 24 hours a day, seven days a week of programming? I want to only buy the shows I want to watch. I want them available for worldwide purchase (movies, too) the second they're done in the editing room. Single-use is okay, but it better be damn cheap. I'd prefer to have the option to buy a show permanently or watch it once, but in either case i want the ability to choose when i start, and be able to pause and come back indefinitely until i'm done with it.
Screw commercials, screw bundled channels, screw buying whole channels with shows I don't watch, screw paying the cable company for anything but bandwidth and the TV stations for anything but content production. Nobody needs their hands on my money except the people who make the shows, and the people who deliver them to me. No more unnecessary middlemen.
You're right, magnetic fields in a PC are fairly small. My point was to indicate that a couple of small fixed magnets around the rim of a fan are not going to be a big deal for your hard drive, as there is already plenty of magnetic noise in a PC. The point wasn't that your power supply will be dragging the chevy you have in the driveway towards your computer-- but rather that there are plenty of fields in there not hurting anything now. Maybe I shouldn't have worded the way I did-- I was just annoyed with all the panic posts about putting magnets in a PC, when it's already chock-full of all sorts of magnets, both permanent and oscillating electromagnets.
As you point out, the fields from the fixed magnets on these motors are going to be much smaller than the rare earth magnet in the HDD itself. And much farther away.
Man, I'm feeling old. No such thing when i was at school there-- I remember feeling special my freshman year because we had actual web access. Back when things were shiny and new, and spam was still an evil twinkle in some deviant salesdroid's eye.
Hell, I remember using FidoNet. And I'm really not that old. I wonder what this is all gonna look like in 20 years? If 10 years brings us as far as the last 10 has, i'm gonna be watching streaming HDTV on my cell phone.
Yeah, I know it does. Screw the middlemen-- that's what we have the internet for. What do the channels do for us now that we have alternate means of distribution (internet, DVD) that we can pay for directly without ads? Nothing. All they do is drown us in ads and produce content of questionable quality that is supported by their handful of successful shows. While simultaneously forcing us to buy hours and hours of programming we don't watch on dozens of bundled channels we have no interest in, to get the few hours a week of TV we do watch.
I say cut 'em out. I'll pay Groening's team directly for more Futurama.
I want to pay only for SHOWS I want to watch. I don't want any more channels-- why should I pay for 24 hours a day of the Discovery channel? 8 of their daily hours are infomercials. And I only watch an hour or two of the remainder, anyway.
I want TV and movies released on DVD the SAME DAY they come out on TV or in the theatre. I'll just pick up what i want to watch at the store, or download it from iShows, or whatever Apple or somebody else comes up with to sell us video.
That's "Oscillation Overthruster," I believe.
"and that caroline let frank feel her up in assembly"
Man, you had to do that in assembly? I would think a compiled language would be easier, but still not as easy as just using your hands and the more traditional analog interface.
You're mistaken. Most of the Space Pixie Smoke is actually inside capacitors. You typically only get to see it released when the electrolyte is crap, or when you wire things up wrong.
Computer chips contain very little space pixie smoke, and must be heated to staggering temperatures to get it released. I did, however manage to make a UV-erasable PROM glow (UV erasable chips have a little window in the top so you can see the actual chip through the case, and thus expose it to UV) once by accidentally connecting the power supply to one of the data pins. Just like a little lightbulb, all those tiny circuits worked nicely as a filament.
I'm guessing this was a troll, but i'm going to pretend it isn't and answer it anyway.
The PSU, my misguided friend, is the Power Supply Unit. The "Power Supply" you referred to. I can assure you that you're using one, unless you have replaced it with a series of very large 12v and 5v batteries carefully wired into the rails.
Now, for the 8th-grade lesson you seem to have missed-- your power supply works using a large transformer to convert the voltage coming out of the wall into the 12v and 5v voltages required by your PC. How does a transformer work? at its simplest, it's a pair of coils of wire placed next to eachother. The coils are magnetically coupled-- the first coil gets the power from the wall and generates a HUGE magnetic field. The second coil does what coils do when placed in big magnetic fields-- it makes electrical current. The number of turns of wire on each coil determine the ratio of the input to output voltages.
That's how things worked in the 1980s. Now, today's power supplies aren't that simple. Computer power supplies today are switching power supplies, and use a frequency step-up before feeding into the transformers to reduce the size of the transformer needed. But you will note, as this nice article says and clearly shows in pictures, there are still multiple transformers in a switching power supply. And yes, the way they work is by shunting all the power you're using through a big ol' magnetic field between two coils with different numbers of turns of wire.
So, yes, your power supply is producing a gigantic magnetic field. One large enough to transfer all the hundreds of watts your PC needs through the air as a magnetic field.
Sadly, no. Look at my userid. I'm just old, cranky, and bitter about the general quality of the nerds here.
I did look. No, they wouldn't.
If big fields were gonna kill your hard drive, the massive one from the transformer coil in your PSU would probably be the first to do it. Yet somehow, we continue to be able to use PCs stuffed to the brim with magnetic motors, speakers, and transformer coils, all without erasing our hard drives.
Is everybody here retarded? What did you think made your existing fan motors spin, Space Pixies? No, it's a freaking electromagnetic motor. Every single one of them. And there's that PC speaker up front with a big magnetic coil on the back that beeps everytime you turn your PC on, too.
I though you were supposed to be nerds.
As opposed to what? Oh, wait, the ones that are in there are ALREADY magnetic. How do you think normal electric motors work?
Yeah, yeah, I know. Go ahead and ruin a simple, explanatory example by pointing out that yes, a checkerboard could actually be stored as data smaller.
I should have picked a two-axis gradient.
I don't know what generation procedures they used, but "the textures are procedural" means that there are no graphics files in there, and that an algorithm creates the textures at runtime. As a simple example, you could write an algorithm that made a checkerboard image in only a few lines of code. That code takes up only a handful of bytes, whereas the texture graphic itself would take up hundreds of kilobytes, even compressed. You could also look at it as the difference between an equation, and a graph of the equation.
I'm curious to know if the maps are procedural, too.
Don't use batteries. It's not cost-effective. They're huge, high-maintenance, and have to be replaced regularly. It's better to run a grid-tied system and hope somebody else figures out how to handle storage more effectively.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't suggest to most people that they try this to save money. It's at the point where you can break even in 8-10 years, but that's still the sort of time frame where it appeals mostly to folks who are doing it because they want to, not because it's a financial gain. It is a financial gain when done right, but not for a long time.
With a scantily-clad eight-armed gold chrome robot female with a minotaur head in a fur miniskirt riding a rocket surfboard made of ice crystals on a rainbow out of the mouth of a volcano, followed by a swarm of mutant dragonflies with lasers instead of eyes, and ornate knives for wings.
There will be at least 50 stickers on the box, all proclaiming unintelligible things that make you slightly uneasy, like "GOLDEN SAMPLE," "Rotated-grid baby-inhaling anti-establishment engine," "RADIKAL(tm) Three-phase 220v 3D kiloamp power siphon," and "High-velocity pixel exploitation."
The panels you can buy and use for your house today have a 3-4 year energy payoff. (ie, they make an amount of energy equal to what was put in to them in production) They last in the neighborhood of 20-30 years.
There are some nasty chemicals required for production. The total environmental impact, however, is significantly smaller than obtaining the same lifetime amount of power from any other source available. The waste produced by a similar amount of power from coal, nuclear, gas, etc... over a similar lifetime is significantly larger.
The pollution only happens once, for 20-30 years worth of power. The pollution from any other option doesn't stop unless you stop using it.
Honda? My Honda was made entirely in Ohio, with the exception of the transmission, which was made in Japan. Have they outsourced phone support like everybody else, or something?
I'd like to see numbers. I am an "environmentalist", but I'm too much of an engineer/skeptic to take stuff at face value. (Please do not associate an engineer's environmentalism with the nutcases who give simple ideas like efficiency a bad name by strapping themselves to baby seals) Sending trucks to pick up bottles, labor/machinery to sort and remove things like labels and rings of different materials, and the energy to melt down, purify, and re-form materials seems like it would be on par with the digging, shipping, and forming of material in the first place.
This will depend greatly on the material, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if some materials are gains and others are losses.
Without more data, though, my gut tells me that recycling is good, but not so much because of energy savings, as you say.