Considering that all of the features that make a woman "womanly" are the ones that indicate, even indirectly, fertility and the ability to bear children, that's not surprising at all. Women have also been shown to choose men with more masculine (testosterone-induced) features when they're more fertile. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that "evolutionary fitness" simply means being able to pass along your genes, and so evolution has shaped most of our behaviors around conceiving, bearing, and raising children.
Try running Pro-Engineer on a Sparc-10 with just 64 megs of RAM... when there are no fewer than four other students running Pro-E on that same machine, displaying the results on their terminals. That's what it was like for me...
search for "solar electric information". You'll find all kinds of stuff.
Your solar panels won't put out full power when it's cloudy or hot, so oversize them by a good margin. Get an inverter, and you're set. A 175-watt panel and an inverter could start out at $1,000.
Since your power usage is fairly low, you could add a charge-controller, and as many batteries as you desire, which would accomplish two things: First, it would get your 50-watt load through the night as well. Second, it would give you power to run higher-draw devices than your solar panel could drive for a short to moderate amount of time. The total bill would still be under $2500.
Higher currents aren't just about overclocking. "Back in the day", chips drew 20 watt, and that was at 5, or 3.3 volts, so you had 4 or 6 amps. Today, chips drawing over 100 watts are running at around 1.3 volts, for over 75 amps of current. That's a lot.
That wasn't meant to say that it didn't work with sound and video, just that the assortment of sound and video I have used has been far less diverse than the rest of the hardware. My bad.
I'd believe your comment if I hadn't thrown Fedora on every type of hardware from single-CPU/IDE machines to 4x/8x machines with high-end SCSI arrays and fiber networking, Intel and AMD architectures. Apart from sound and video, there's not a lot of hardware I haven't run it on. Other than one particular issue with a RAID card, it's done a good job of setting up hardware. It's not like it's hard for a distro to add a line to modprobe.conf telling it which driver to load....
If anything, the problems you encounter are, in my experience, more likely to be problems with the Linux drivers themselves than with Fedora, although there may be a handful of cases to the contrary.
If your machine locks up regularly, then perhaps you should look to something other than blaming Fedora. I have machines from single- to quad-CPU machines that have run for so long on Fedora Core 2 that theit next upgrade was to CentOS 4.4. These are machines that get used 24x7, under heavy loads. Some of the DBMS machines have gone for months without ever seeing a system load below 1.
It may be your configuration, your hardware, or various other causes, but if you're going to complain about Fedora, at least complain about the *valid* deficiencies...
Many places around the US get pretty cold in the winter, which means your battery capacity is halved - or worse. And some places (including some of the cold places) get hot enough in the winter that driving without AC simply isn't an option, which again, reduces your battery capacity.
Remembering that you really don't want to drain your batteries all the way (50% is a more reasonable day-to-day figure), that means that your 40-mile radius is chopped to 20 miles, then down to 10 miles or less in the winter.
It really is a sad thing. I thought long and hard about a battery-electric vehicle, but with temps down to -25 F in the winter and over 100 F in the summer, it would spend 7 or 8 months out of the year in my garage, plugged in to a trickle-charger to keep the batteries alive.
There's an info-mercial for a chicken roaster where the guy repeatedly says "just set it... and FORGET IT!!!" He has the audience repeat it for the mic over and over, too.
I have a picture of one of those units in the store, with a big label on the front that says "Don't take 'set it and forget it' literally."
The performance-per-dollar has always been pretty outstanding. On top of that, there's the positive-feedback effect of nearly all software being available for it.
There are a lot of nifty features in "bigger" or "better" architectures, but if you don't need those features, it's hard to resist spending just $500 and having a spankingly fast machine.
64-bit ARM? I'm not big on the ARM architecture, but it's always seemed like a low-power (electrically), low-cost solution, it hasn't seemed powerful enough for most people's general needs.
If anything, it's always amazed me how often x86 chips get used in embedded systems, both for the low cost, good performance, and the fact that x86 coders are probably more plentiful and cheaper than ARM coders. Many years ago, it surprised me to open up $30,000 portmaster 3's, and see that they were based on an AMD 486-knockoff. (If I recall correctly).
A friend of mine has worked at Novell for quite a while. Quite some time ago (10 years, maybe a little more), he took a support call from a company complaining about how slow their network had become as they added more stations, and that it had eventually become completely, totally, unusable for any task.
It turned out that they had at least 1,000 stations (I want to say 3,000, but I'm not positive) - all using ethernet *hubs*, not switches.
I have a hard time coming up with cases where virtualization is that useful. If you run an ISP and want to give root-level access to your hosted accounts, sure. If you want to run a few different OSs on your desktop, sure.
But, virtualization is so often touted as a way to consolidate servers. I keep asking myself "Who are these people that have that many servers with so little load, that many servers that they could consolidate (making a single COMPLETE point of failure), and haven't already done so?" Sure, they have a web server, mail server, and DNS server. If they don't mind the single point of failure, why haven't they already put them on the same machine?
In all of the places where I've worked, it's been a race to keep hardware fast enough that a single machine could handle even a single task - putting multiple tasks on the machines would just be lunacy. From small ISPs with overloaded web and news servers to health care companies throwing millions of dollars at single machines to online retail where we're throwing in a half-dozen more dual-CPU machines into the load-balanced pool every year, replacing quad-Opteron database machines with eight-ways, and about to have to go bigger than the eight-way, I've never personally seen a need for something like virtualization.
So... help me wrap my feeble brain around this. Give me some really cool examples.
There's at least some level of that communication, if you buy all of your equipment from the same vendor. One of my setups, if you hit "play" on the CD player, will turn on the amplifier and set the input appropriately.
Or you can buy one of the expensive programmable remote. I just bought a hundred-and-some-odd dollar Logitech programmable remote for my mother which allows her to hit things like "play movie", and everything will be set correctly.
Just transmit the power DC, and use the heavy-gauge cable. There are already plenty of cable tv amplifiers which use that concept, the "power injector" can be farther down the line than the amplifier. Take the same concept and just scale it up.
Instead of internal transformers, use switching power supplies. My laptop uses one, and it is amazingly efficient. When my laptop is turned off, the power draw from the wall is low enough to simply read zero on my power meter. I leave an extra charger plugged in near my night stand, and don't even worry about it.
It's not just size. 60 years ago, your entire electrical appliance list probably consisted of a toaster, a television, a radio, and a clothes iron. You didn't have three televisions, thee DVD players, two TIVOs, two (or more) computers, two external hard drives, a home theater receiver, four cell phone chargers, a laptop charger, three CD players, a breadmaker, baby monitors, three hair curlers, two hair dryers, an air conditioner, and about a hundred other things.
The NEC has constantly revised the electrical loads to provide more and more outlets precisely because people use more and more electrical devices over time. It's just how things go.
On an unrelated note, I've tried using CFLs in my house for about four years. I still can't find a model where the color doesn't make me want to vomit.
I don't know about your TV, but I've measured some LCD monitors in standby, and came out with draws of 3 or 4 watts. While that's not zero, and claims like "We could get rid of fifteen power plants..." are thrown around, it's hard for me to worry about that when my gaming computer draws a hundred times that much, and my air conditioner draws five hundred times that much. When an hour of using the AC is worth almost a month of standby time on my LCD, I have bigger fish to fry than unplugging the monitor.
It might, it might not. I have an old dual pentium-133 server (two CPUs), and it only draws 45-50 watts from the wall. I also have a 650 Mhz Pentium 3 that only draws 60 or so watts from the wall, and it has a couple more disks.
About a half of a year ago, I measured some Athlon64 3200+ desktops in order to size out UPS systems. These measurements included the 19" LCD panel, which alone uses about 40 watts during use. The systems used Abit motherboards, stock AMD coolers, and GeForce 6200TC video cards. Through booting, using, and shutting down the systems, I found that an average draw during usage was about 100 watts - which included 40 watts for the monitor, putting draw from the wall at around 60 watts. Peak draw never got above 143 watts during those trials.
I didn't even bother measuring the Pentium-D systems that we had - the amount of heat alone that those things pumped out told me all that I needed to know.
Of course, the laptop that I'm typing on right now has a 1.8 GHz dual-core chip (Core Duo), and has a "measly" 65-watt power adapter. The 65 watts (which is what it draws from the wall, I measured) is enough to run both cores at a pretty good load, the 12" display, and burn a DVD at the same time - and still have a little power left over to charge the battery. That's a bit unfair, as it's an extremely power-optimized system, but it shows what can be achieved.
As an interesting side-note, I have a couple of Via's C3 systems, which are supposed to be low-power setups. Measuring power draw from the wall, I get 55-70 watts being pulled, depending on the machine. While the CPU is very low-power, system fans and hard drives still take power, and the cheap power supplies in them are extremely inefficient.
Getting people to see the use in something doesn't mean that they'll do it. Plenty of people see the use in having a reasonable amount of personal savings (or backing up their data), but look at how few actually do.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that all of the features that make a woman "womanly" are the ones that indicate, even indirectly, fertility and the ability to bear children, that's not surprising at all. Women have also been shown to choose men with more masculine (testosterone-induced) features when they're more fertile. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that "evolutionary fitness" simply means being able to pass along your genes, and so evolution has shaped most of our behaviors around conceiving, bearing, and raising children.
steve
Wah, wah, wah.
Try running Pro-Engineer on a Sparc-10 with just 64 megs of RAM... when there are no fewer than four other students running Pro-E on that same machine, displaying the results on their terminals. That's what it was like for me...
steve
search for "solar electric information". You'll find all kinds of stuff.
Your solar panels won't put out full power when it's cloudy or hot, so oversize them by a good margin. Get an inverter, and you're set. A 175-watt panel and an inverter could start out at $1,000.
Since your power usage is fairly low, you could add a charge-controller, and as many batteries as you desire, which would accomplish two things: First, it would get your 50-watt load through the night as well. Second, it would give you power to run higher-draw devices than your solar panel could drive for a short to moderate amount of time. The total bill would still be under $2500.
steve
(+1 Sarcastic)
Higher currents aren't just about overclocking. "Back in the day", chips drew 20 watt, and that was at 5, or 3.3 volts, so you had 4 or 6 amps. Today, chips drawing over 100 watts are running at around 1.3 volts, for over 75 amps of current. That's a lot.
That wasn't meant to say that it didn't work with sound and video, just that the assortment of sound and video I have used has been far less diverse than the rest of the hardware. My bad.
steve
I'd believe your comment if I hadn't thrown Fedora on every type of hardware from single-CPU/IDE machines to 4x/8x machines with high-end SCSI arrays and fiber networking, Intel and AMD architectures. Apart from sound and video, there's not a lot of hardware I haven't run it on. Other than one particular issue with a RAID card, it's done a good job of setting up hardware. It's not like it's hard for a distro to add a line to modprobe.conf telling it which driver to load....
If anything, the problems you encounter are, in my experience, more likely to be problems with the Linux drivers themselves than with Fedora, although there may be a handful of cases to the contrary.
steve
"if the usually jackasses didn't post the usual anti Fedora FUD."
You mean like this?
If your machine locks up regularly, then perhaps you should look to something other than blaming Fedora. I have machines from single- to quad-CPU machines that have run for so long on Fedora Core 2 that theit next upgrade was to CentOS 4.4. These are machines that get used 24x7, under heavy loads. Some of the DBMS machines have gone for months without ever seeing a system load below 1.
It may be your configuration, your hardware, or various other causes, but if you're going to complain about Fedora, at least complain about the *valid* deficiencies...
Cold, and heat.
Many places around the US get pretty cold in the winter, which means your battery capacity is halved - or worse. And some places (including some of the cold places) get hot enough in the winter that driving without AC simply isn't an option, which again, reduces your battery capacity.
Remembering that you really don't want to drain your batteries all the way (50% is a more reasonable day-to-day figure), that means that your 40-mile radius is chopped to 20 miles, then down to 10 miles or less in the winter.
It really is a sad thing. I thought long and hard about a battery-electric vehicle, but with temps down to -25 F in the winter and over 100 F in the summer, it would spend 7 or 8 months out of the year in my garage, plugged in to a trickle-charger to keep the batteries alive.
There's an info-mercial for a chicken roaster where the guy repeatedly says "just set it... and FORGET IT!!!" He has the audience repeat it for the mic over and over, too.
I have a picture of one of those units in the store, with a big label on the front that says "Don't take 'set it and forget it' literally."
They're giving a demo of DVD shrink, BitTorrent, and Nero?
Oh, wait. WITH css. Oh, well.
steve
The performance-per-dollar has always been pretty outstanding. On top of that, there's the positive-feedback effect of nearly all software being available for it.
There are a lot of nifty features in "bigger" or "better" architectures, but if you don't need those features, it's hard to resist spending just $500 and having a spankingly fast machine.
64-bit ARM? I'm not big on the ARM architecture, but it's always seemed like a low-power (electrically), low-cost solution, it hasn't seemed powerful enough for most people's general needs.
If anything, it's always amazed me how often x86 chips get used in embedded systems, both for the low cost, good performance, and the fact that x86 coders are probably more plentiful and cheaper than ARM coders. Many years ago, it surprised me to open up $30,000 portmaster 3's, and see that they were based on an AMD 486-knockoff. (If I recall correctly).
A friend of mine has worked at Novell for quite a while. Quite some time ago (10 years, maybe a little more), he took a support call from a company complaining about how slow their network had become as they added more stations, and that it had eventually become completely, totally, unusable for any task.
It turned out that they had at least 1,000 stations (I want to say 3,000, but I'm not positive) - all using ethernet *hubs*, not switches.
"using a dripping tap to keep the sewerage U-bend full of water in a computer room, (huh?)."
If you have a u-bend, you do need to keep water in it. Just wait until you see what happens when the u-bend dries out... it's a very smelly affair.
I have a hard time coming up with cases where virtualization is that useful. If you run an ISP and want to give root-level access to your hosted accounts, sure. If you want to run a few different OSs on your desktop, sure.
But, virtualization is so often touted as a way to consolidate servers. I keep asking myself "Who are these people that have that many servers with so little load, that many servers that they could consolidate (making a single COMPLETE point of failure), and haven't already done so?" Sure, they have a web server, mail server, and DNS server. If they don't mind the single point of failure, why haven't they already put them on the same machine?
In all of the places where I've worked, it's been a race to keep hardware fast enough that a single machine could handle even a single task - putting multiple tasks on the machines would just be lunacy. From small ISPs with overloaded web and news servers to health care companies throwing millions of dollars at single machines to online retail where we're throwing in a half-dozen more dual-CPU machines into the load-balanced pool every year, replacing quad-Opteron database machines with eight-ways, and about to have to go bigger than the eight-way, I've never personally seen a need for something like virtualization.
So... help me wrap my feeble brain around this. Give me some really cool examples.
steve
Or use CentOS, which keeps your redhat-ish knowledge useful, and have a good lifespan of updates available.
steve
There's at least some level of that communication, if you buy all of your equipment from the same vendor. One of my setups, if you hit "play" on the CD player, will turn on the amplifier and set the input appropriately.
Or you can buy one of the expensive programmable remote. I just bought a hundred-and-some-odd dollar Logitech programmable remote for my mother which allows her to hit things like "play movie", and everything will be set correctly.
steve
Just transmit the power DC, and use the heavy-gauge cable. There are already plenty of cable tv amplifiers which use that concept, the "power injector" can be farther down the line than the amplifier. Take the same concept and just scale it up.
steve
Instead of internal transformers, use switching power supplies. My laptop uses one, and it is amazingly efficient. When my laptop is turned off, the power draw from the wall is low enough to simply read zero on my power meter. I leave an extra charger plugged in near my night stand, and don't even worry about it.
steve
It's not just size. 60 years ago, your entire electrical appliance list probably consisted of a toaster, a television, a radio, and a clothes iron. You didn't have three televisions, thee DVD players, two TIVOs, two (or more) computers, two external hard drives, a home theater receiver, four cell phone chargers, a laptop charger, three CD players, a breadmaker, baby monitors, three hair curlers, two hair dryers, an air conditioner, and about a hundred other things.
The NEC has constantly revised the electrical loads to provide more and more outlets precisely because people use more and more electrical devices over time. It's just how things go.
On an unrelated note, I've tried using CFLs in my house for about four years. I still can't find a model where the color doesn't make me want to vomit.
I don't know about your TV, but I've measured some LCD monitors in standby, and came out with draws of 3 or 4 watts. While that's not zero, and claims like "We could get rid of fifteen power plants..." are thrown around, it's hard for me to worry about that when my gaming computer draws a hundred times that much, and my air conditioner draws five hundred times that much. When an hour of using the AC is worth almost a month of standby time on my LCD, I have bigger fish to fry than unplugging the monitor.
steve
It might, it might not. I have an old dual pentium-133 server (two CPUs), and it only draws 45-50 watts from the wall. I also have a 650 Mhz Pentium 3 that only draws 60 or so watts from the wall, and it has a couple more disks.
About a half of a year ago, I measured some Athlon64 3200+ desktops in order to size out UPS systems. These measurements included the 19" LCD panel, which alone uses about 40 watts during use. The systems used Abit motherboards, stock AMD coolers, and GeForce 6200TC video cards. Through booting, using, and shutting down the systems, I found that an average draw during usage was about 100 watts - which included 40 watts for the monitor, putting draw from the wall at around 60 watts. Peak draw never got above 143 watts during those trials.
I didn't even bother measuring the Pentium-D systems that we had - the amount of heat alone that those things pumped out told me all that I needed to know.
Of course, the laptop that I'm typing on right now has a 1.8 GHz dual-core chip (Core Duo), and has a "measly" 65-watt power adapter. The 65 watts (which is what it draws from the wall, I measured) is enough to run both cores at a pretty good load, the 12" display, and burn a DVD at the same time - and still have a little power left over to charge the battery. That's a bit unfair, as it's an extremely power-optimized system, but it shows what can be achieved.
As an interesting side-note, I have a couple of Via's C3 systems, which are supposed to be low-power setups. Measuring power draw from the wall, I get 55-70 watts being pulled, depending on the machine. While the CPU is very low-power, system fans and hard drives still take power, and the cheap power supplies in them are extremely inefficient.
steve
"You're always going to get the "I can either fix it or log it. Choose." kind of attitude. The answer is "You're going to do both.""
I thought the answer was "You can take notes, or you can find somewhere else to get a paycheck."
Behavior only changes when there is accountability.
Getting people to see the use in something doesn't mean that they'll do it. Plenty of people see the use in having a reasonable amount of personal savings (or backing up their data), but look at how few actually do.