I can say without reservation that SRT has been the best telephone company I've ever dealt with. Of course, them being a coop could have something to do with it.
It might seem strange, but we have better internet access in rural areas than many cities.
They take a lot of juice, potentially? Your standard wire going to the molex plugs in use are around 16 gauge, not exactly small. Mostly overkill, but traces are normally designed for fractions of an amp - think about video cards and their auxillery power ports today.
That's ok; USB isn't designed to power heavy loads. 2.5W (5V x 500mA) is enough to spin a hard drive
It's enough to spin up a laptop HD, but not enough for the cheaper and higher storage but larger3.5" desktop type drives.
Thus those drives need supplimental power, which is still annoying.
I'd have been happier with a limit around 12 watts, which is enough to power a 7200RPM HD, though you might need a capaciter to limit current draw during peaks.
12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two), and you wouldn't be limited to trickle charging quite as many devices, or needing auxillery power sources for as many items.
You might even be able to operate an energy-efficient(if slow) laptop inkjet printer off of that.
I enjoyed portal. The plot fit well and it was fun.
Still, what I mean by simple is that the amount of writing, acting, is minimal compared to many games. More than some like bedazzled, but like I said, less than bioshock.
We never got a huge amount of back story, nor met anybody but the computer other than some writings in hidden spots.
Having a simple story doesn't mean you don't have good writing.
Yes, but it might cost you some consideration in an award like this.
requiring 7.5 kW-hours of electricity per pound to reduce from alumina in high volume smelters.
So we'd be able to get a pound of aluminum per square meter of solar system, per earth day, on average?
Sounds very doable for me, especially if we're not in a hurry.
Still, I'd have to agree that setting up any sort of manufacturing plant on the moon is going to be incredably difficult. Just look at how many different industries it takes to make something so common as an iPod here on Earth, then figure in the complexity of figuring out how to do stuff again in a dust infested low gravity vacuum. When every pound you ship is premium.
I'd think that you'd want to keep it simple, at least at first. A simple digging/extracting/fusing system for creating sealed underground tunnels/chambers for use as a base for the new human crew, for example.
Think about the next, most cost effective item. What can we send to most efficiently reduce the need for further lift? Something like an ability to make solar panels using energy from solar panels would probably be another early example - even if it operates only half the time due to the moon's rotation in relation to the sun, as long as the equipment for making the panels is durable, you can make many more panels from moon materials, increasing the power available, eventually allowing you to start producing something else.
Find a copper deposit, start mining copper for the construction of motors on base, allowing the production of moving mirrors and a solar furnace plant for smelting operations.
These are just ideas, of course. But I think that the trick is to acknowledge that the problem is difficult, yet still look for solutions.
But then it isn't a true MMRPG. It's a single player game with an online community.
Personally, I like the idea of having the world change based on player's actions. Nothing huge or too lasting on the part of level 1 newbies, but a level 100* arch-mage should be able to found or level a city.
Eventually have a mission macro system where the higher level types stop operating at a tactical level normally and switch towards hiring people to do tasks to further their personal or organizational standings.
Basically, they can use a simplified mission editor to create a mission and farm it out to the lower level types. IE the level 100 archmage wants to take over a country - he creates a dozen state takeover quests that are snapped up by level 90 types - the level 90 types create county level takeover quests that are taken by 80'ers, the 80'ers create a bunch of quests to take over cities(70s), towns(60s), villages(50s), etc... They hire lower level types for individual buildings, etc. The higher level types are kept busy putting making sure the task gets done, and helping in dangerous spots/breakthroughs.
*Assuming that 100 is around the 'max', or takes a year's work, etc...
Imagine for a moment that the quad-core market is a seller's dream -- they can't get them out the door fast enough to meet demand.
Then they need to titch the price up a bit on the quads. It's not like people aren't willing to pay outrageous price premiums for the 'best' of many items.
I'm not a NYU student, and I'd have to admit that I'd give my right to vote up for a year for $1Million.
I'd tend to think that the actual rate is quite a bit less, considering that most people don't vote anyways.
Of course, as a fiscally responsible person, I'd be 90% of the way towards early retirement if you handed me $1M. Might be sad, but I wouldn't consider $1M sufficient without having time to figure out my taxes, figure out a budget and investments, get legal advice, etc...
Meanwhile I'm keeping my job for the extra income. Just think - Work an extra year or two and it's like a 10% raise in my life as a retired person.
And I figure I CAN'T get by on my current salary in investment dividends if I retire - gotta remember that I'll have to get health care on my own, spend more on diversions, etc...
It probably has timestamps, but it might be like a system which I worked on which has various manual time entry fields(like callback) in order to give it flexability.
For example, one of the things I'd have to ask is 'When did you notice that it had failed' in case they waited a non-trivial amount of time before calling.
If you want a car with less power, you opt for a smaller engine.
I'd substitute 'more fuel efficiency' instead of less power.
It's cheaper for Initech than to manufacture a second low-performance design and even the crippled processors are a better buy than the competition. It's economically wise and perfectly moral.
This is why I support AMD - keeps Intel (mostly) honest, because if Intel engages in these practices too much sales will go towards AMD instead of Intel.
It might have been dumb of the customer to buy the crippled processors in the first place, but if a competitor can offer uncrippled processors for the same price then the customer won't make that mistake. And sometimes making half of a capital investment now and half later is a good business plan.
True, but in many ways computers depreciate fast enough that I almost don't consider them capital costs anyways.
My problem with the idea is that you need to somehow ensure that the consumers don't turn on the processors despite whatever you do - see AMD and pencils, for an example. This takes resources and development. Then you need a system to activate the shut down systems, preferably remotely, which costs more resources and development.
By the time you're done it's not worth it for home clients and non-enterprise level businesses with normal IT needs. In most cases if a business has a spike in processing needs it'd be better to contract with a business that speciallizes in selling computing time, like virtual servers. That way the processors are used when needed then freed to work for another company having a surge, increasing usage.
Even unused for processors depreciate very quickly.
True, but it's mentioned that most of the problem was that the control system simply wasn't fast enough.
Given our progress in control systems in the last 20 years, I figure that that issue is pretty much solved.;)
What's old is new. The current fuel crunch is causing manufacturers to go back and dust off old ideas to be updated and tried out again.
Modern computer controls can actually allow more control of stuff like valve and ignition timing while an engine is running than could be done in a mechanic's shop with the engine off 20 years ago. Well, at least without rebuilding the engine.
People go on about how hard it is to maintain cars today - yet cars today have many more features and actually break down so much less that the trade off of more difficult maintenance is actually worth it. Please note that I'm talking about on average - there were great running cars back then, and there are lemons today. And vice versa - it's just that nobody remembers the bad old cars because they've been gone for so long.
In this case, rather than having the processing power sitting around unused(and unpaid for) most of the time, I'd think that a virtual server contract with a data farm would make more sense. That way they get processor time when they need it, yet the hardware can be used to support other purposes the rest of the time, like handling christmas rush, the random slashdotting of a site, etc...
Meanwhile they could sell low-availability, but cheap, processing power to non-time critical tasks like protein folding, SETI, etc...
I figure it's not just calculators, but alarm clocks, watches, telephones, car radios and numerous other applications that are efficient to program onto a single chip, yet are massive overkill even for the cheapest silicon in production today.
Honestly enough, I figure that at least 50% of the digital radio alarm clocks out there are all set up on the same chip, and have been for years. Increase that to 3 and I figure you'd have 95-99% of the market.
Actually it's not necessarily so dumb. Modern engines are often massively overpowered than what they actually need to be to simply move the vehicle(even loaded) down the road at 75 mph. Worse yet, a steady cruise at 40 or even through a neighborhood at 25 mph.
There are certain fuel ranges where a cylinder is more efficient - on some larger engines you end up injecting a non-optimal amount of air-gas because there just isn't enough demand, especially at lower speeds.
Of course, the same arguement can be said for CPUs. Why would a user buy a chip 'license' for 2 of the 4 cores on the CPU, knowing that he'll have to spend MORE money to get the other 2 activated(discounting hacking to activate them without paying). From the business side, you now have activation sales, tracking, and support to worry about. Not to mention extra engineering to enable that model, worries about people hacking it, etc...
Yeah, but he was talking about you having to pay to get the extra cylinders activated, vs having the car's computer turn cylinders off and on as necessary to both provide good power and at least maintain some fuel efficiency.
It's like the difference between a laptop turning cores off during low CPU demand to conserve battery life/reduce heat versus having to send an extra check to intel to get the core turned on.
A car with a V8 isn't going to match a 4 cylinder's fuel economy, but you can make up at least some of the difference by shutting off half the cylinders when appropriate.
On top of that, there may be some crippling of intact quad-cores if there is more demand for the cheap "tri-cores".
It'd probably be more profitable to up the price of the tri-core a nitch*. A couple bucks would reduce the demand for the tri-core, as some people decide to settle for a dual core instead and some decide that the now smaller difference between a tri-core and a quad core makes it worth it to buy a quad core.
IE: Quad: $100, Tri $75, Dual $50 - not enough triples to meet demand Quad $100, Tri $77, Dual $50 - Fewer people buy the tri because the quad and duals are 'good deals' in comparison.
Whether more fall back to the dual or move up to the quad, I can't really say. Of course, that can be adjusted a bit by minor variations in price there. Just beware of competition there as well.
Didn't someone predict that we'd only ever need 128 MB of ram and that more ram would be superfluous for most consumers?
I believe that you're thinking about the quote commonly attributed to Bill Gates '640k will be enough for anyone'.
Right now there are a lot of flashy games out there. Users may want to run many more applications at once (or more likely turn on M$ poorly executed eyecandy and not notice their computers slowing down).
Until 3D acceleration is so good that you can't tell it from real life, all other tasks are 'instant' from the viewpoint of the use, greater speed will be in demand.
Monitor resolutions are still creeping up, placing more demand on video card processing power, games are being produced that utilize sophisticated physics engines*.
Still, consider that non-resource intensive games like Bejeweled will often outsell a resource intensive games like Supreme commander, Crysis, or Bioshock.
It will probably happen gradually, as most customers are already low-end.
Agreed, even today I'll recommend economy machines to people who don't play 3D games or do something like video ending.
*To the point that I now have 3 games that you can add a daughtercard to the computer for offloading the processing.
As the other poster noted, no current vendor charges by the core.
Still, I'd go with the same arguement in the software world - Buy the 100 core processor and instead of buying software from the company that charges by the core, buy from the company that doesn't.
The only reason that you'd be screwed over is if there's only one choice of software company, but then, generally speaking you're screwed anyways if that's the case.
In which condition you might find yourself changing a setting in the bios or OS to 'turn off' half the cores, or even paying $200 for a 'special purpose' crippled processor.
For instance you can moisten a hair or thread then stick it on a door placing it so that it sticks to both the door and the molding. If while you're away the door is opened the "seal" will fail and you can spot it.
Personally, I prefer my homemade claymores for that purpose.
Bloodstains are much easier to spot when I get home.;)
You don't have to 'let' them into your home - they need a search warrant for that. Enough evidence and they can even drill the lock and such - you don't have to tell them where your key is.
Still, as long as the constitution holds out, they can ask you your password and you can plead the fifth.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you happen to have a link to that? Using google, I found a couple links about google being sued for not indexing sites.
Several, actually. I have DSL through SRT.
I can say without reservation that SRT has been the best telephone company I've ever dealt with. Of course, them being a coop could have something to do with it.
It might seem strange, but we have better internet access in rural areas than many cities.
It'd be more like having a business and leaving the doors and windows open - with a 'open' sign up and the lights on.
IE it's there for public use, not just because you don't have AC and it's summer time.
They take a lot of juice, potentially? Your standard wire going to the molex plugs in use are around 16 gauge, not exactly small. Mostly overkill, but traces are normally designed for fractions of an amp - think about video cards and their auxillery power ports today.
That's ok; USB isn't designed to power heavy loads. 2.5W (5V x 500mA) is enough to spin a hard drive
It's enough to spin up a laptop HD, but not enough for the cheaper and higher storage but larger3.5" desktop type drives.
Thus those drives need supplimental power, which is still annoying.
I'd have been happier with a limit around 12 watts, which is enough to power a 7200RPM HD, though you might need a capaciter to limit current draw during peaks.
12W@12V would be 1 Amp, so you'd only need a marginally thicker cable(or two), and you wouldn't be limited to trickle charging quite as many devices, or needing auxillery power sources for as many items.
You might even be able to operate an energy-efficient(if slow) laptop inkjet printer off of that.
I enjoyed portal. The plot fit well and it was fun.
Still, what I mean by simple is that the amount of writing, acting, is minimal compared to many games. More than some like bedazzled, but like I said, less than bioshock.
We never got a huge amount of back story, nor met anybody but the computer other than some writings in hidden spots.
Having a simple story doesn't mean you don't have good writing.
Yes, but it might cost you some consideration in an award like this.
requiring 7.5 kW-hours of electricity per pound to reduce from alumina in high volume smelters.
So we'd be able to get a pound of aluminum per square meter of solar system, per earth day, on average?
Sounds very doable for me, especially if we're not in a hurry.
Still, I'd have to agree that setting up any sort of manufacturing plant on the moon is going to be incredably difficult. Just look at how many different industries it takes to make something so common as an iPod here on Earth, then figure in the complexity of figuring out how to do stuff again in a dust infested low gravity vacuum. When every pound you ship is premium.
I'd think that you'd want to keep it simple, at least at first. A simple digging/extracting/fusing system for creating sealed underground tunnels/chambers for use as a base for the new human crew, for example.
Think about the next, most cost effective item. What can we send to most efficiently reduce the need for further lift? Something like an ability to make solar panels using energy from solar panels would probably be another early example - even if it operates only half the time due to the moon's rotation in relation to the sun, as long as the equipment for making the panels is durable, you can make many more panels from moon materials, increasing the power available, eventually allowing you to start producing something else.
Find a copper deposit, start mining copper for the construction of motors on base, allowing the production of moving mirrors and a solar furnace plant for smelting operations.
These are just ideas, of course. But I think that the trick is to acknowledge that the problem is difficult, yet still look for solutions.
But then it isn't a true MMRPG. It's a single player game with an online community.
Personally, I like the idea of having the world change based on player's actions. Nothing huge or too lasting on the part of level 1 newbies, but a level 100* arch-mage should be able to found or level a city.
Eventually have a mission macro system where the higher level types stop operating at a tactical level normally and switch towards hiring people to do tasks to further their personal or organizational standings.
Basically, they can use a simplified mission editor to create a mission and farm it out to the lower level types. IE the level 100 archmage wants to take over a country - he creates a dozen state takeover quests that are snapped up by level 90 types - the level 90 types create county level takeover quests that are taken by 80'ers, the 80'ers create a bunch of quests to take over cities(70s), towns(60s), villages(50s), etc... They hire lower level types for individual buildings, etc. The higher level types are kept busy putting making sure the task gets done, and helping in dangerous spots/breakthroughs.
*Assuming that 100 is around the 'max', or takes a year's work, etc...
Imagine for a moment that the quad-core market is a seller's dream -- they can't get them out the door fast enough to meet demand.
Then they need to titch the price up a bit on the quads. It's not like people aren't willing to pay outrageous price premiums for the 'best' of many items.
I'm not a NYU student, and I'd have to admit that I'd give my right to vote up for a year for $1Million.
I'd tend to think that the actual rate is quite a bit less, considering that most people don't vote anyways.
Of course, as a fiscally responsible person, I'd be 90% of the way towards early retirement if you handed me $1M. Might be sad, but I wouldn't consider $1M sufficient without having time to figure out my taxes, figure out a budget and investments, get legal advice, etc...
Meanwhile I'm keeping my job for the extra income. Just think - Work an extra year or two and it's like a 10% raise in my life as a retired person.
And I figure I CAN'T get by on my current salary in investment dividends if I retire - gotta remember that I'll have to get health care on my own, spend more on diversions, etc...
While Bioshock's got a indepth storyline, I'd tend to say that Portal would generally be considered fairly simple.
Considering the titles - I'd tend to agree that the only ones eligible for this award were union written ones.
It probably has timestamps, but it might be like a system which I worked on which has various manual time entry fields(like callback) in order to give it flexability.
For example, one of the things I'd have to ask is 'When did you notice that it had failed' in case they waited a non-trivial amount of time before calling.
If you want a car with less power, you opt for a smaller engine.
I'd substitute 'more fuel efficiency' instead of less power.
It's cheaper for Initech than to manufacture a second low-performance design and even the crippled processors are a better buy than the competition. It's economically wise and perfectly moral.
This is why I support AMD - keeps Intel (mostly) honest, because if Intel engages in these practices too much sales will go towards AMD instead of Intel.
It might have been dumb of the customer to buy the crippled processors in the first place, but if a competitor can offer uncrippled processors for the same price then the customer won't make that mistake. And sometimes making half of a capital investment now and half later is a good business plan.
True, but in many ways computers depreciate fast enough that I almost don't consider them capital costs anyways.
My problem with the idea is that you need to somehow ensure that the consumers don't turn on the processors despite whatever you do - see AMD and pencils, for an example. This takes resources and development. Then you need a system to activate the shut down systems, preferably remotely, which costs more resources and development.
By the time you're done it's not worth it for home clients and non-enterprise level businesses with normal IT needs. In most cases if a business has a spike in processing needs it'd be better to contract with a business that speciallizes in selling computing time, like virtual servers. That way the processors are used when needed then freed to work for another company having a surge, increasing usage.
Even unused for processors depreciate very quickly.
True, but it's mentioned that most of the problem was that the control system simply wasn't fast enough.
;)
Given our progress in control systems in the last 20 years, I figure that that issue is pretty much solved.
What's old is new. The current fuel crunch is causing manufacturers to go back and dust off old ideas to be updated and tried out again.
Modern computer controls can actually allow more control of stuff like valve and ignition timing while an engine is running than could be done in a mechanic's shop with the engine off 20 years ago. Well, at least without rebuilding the engine.
People go on about how hard it is to maintain cars today - yet cars today have many more features and actually break down so much less that the trade off of more difficult maintenance is actually worth it. Please note that I'm talking about on average - there were great running cars back then, and there are lemons today. And vice versa - it's just that nobody remembers the bad old cars because they've been gone for so long.
In this case, rather than having the processing power sitting around unused(and unpaid for) most of the time, I'd think that a virtual server contract with a data farm would make more sense. That way they get processor time when they need it, yet the hardware can be used to support other purposes the rest of the time, like handling christmas rush, the random slashdotting of a site, etc...
Meanwhile they could sell low-availability, but cheap, processing power to non-time critical tasks like protein folding, SETI, etc...
Something similar is often done with calculators
I figure it's not just calculators, but alarm clocks, watches, telephones, car radios and numerous other applications that are efficient to program onto a single chip, yet are massive overkill even for the cheapest silicon in production today.
Honestly enough, I figure that at least 50% of the digital radio alarm clocks out there are all set up on the same chip, and have been for years. Increase that to 3 and I figure you'd have 95-99% of the market.
Actually it's not necessarily so dumb. Modern engines are often massively overpowered than what they actually need to be to simply move the vehicle(even loaded) down the road at 75 mph. Worse yet, a steady cruise at 40 or even through a neighborhood at 25 mph.
There are certain fuel ranges where a cylinder is more efficient - on some larger engines you end up injecting a non-optimal amount of air-gas because there just isn't enough demand, especially at lower speeds.
Of course, the same arguement can be said for CPUs. Why would a user buy a chip 'license' for 2 of the 4 cores on the CPU, knowing that he'll have to spend MORE money to get the other 2 activated(discounting hacking to activate them without paying). From the business side, you now have activation sales, tracking, and support to worry about. Not to mention extra engineering to enable that model, worries about people hacking it, etc...
Yeah, but he was talking about you having to pay to get the extra cylinders activated, vs having the car's computer turn cylinders off and on as necessary to both provide good power and at least maintain some fuel efficiency.
It's like the difference between a laptop turning cores off during low CPU demand to conserve battery life/reduce heat versus having to send an extra check to intel to get the core turned on.
A car with a V8 isn't going to match a 4 cylinder's fuel economy, but you can make up at least some of the difference by shutting off half the cylinders when appropriate.
On top of that, there may be some crippling of intact quad-cores if there is more demand for the cheap "tri-cores".
;)
It'd probably be more profitable to up the price of the tri-core a nitch*. A couple bucks would reduce the demand for the tri-core, as some people decide to settle for a dual core instead and some decide that the now smaller difference between a tri-core and a quad core makes it worth it to buy a quad core.
IE:
Quad: $100, Tri $75, Dual $50 - not enough triples to meet demand
Quad $100, Tri $77, Dual $50 - Fewer people buy the tri because the quad and duals are 'good deals' in comparison.
Whether more fall back to the dual or move up to the quad, I can't really say. Of course, that can be adjusted a bit by minor variations in price there. Just beware of competition there as well.
*smaller than a notch.
Didn't someone predict that we'd only ever need 128 MB of ram and that more ram would be superfluous for most consumers?
I believe that you're thinking about the quote commonly attributed to Bill Gates '640k will be enough for anyone'.
Right now there are a lot of flashy games out there. Users may want to run many more applications at once (or more likely turn on M$ poorly executed eyecandy and not notice their computers slowing down).
Until 3D acceleration is so good that you can't tell it from real life, all other tasks are 'instant' from the viewpoint of the use, greater speed will be in demand.
Monitor resolutions are still creeping up, placing more demand on video card processing power, games are being produced that utilize sophisticated physics engines*.
Still, consider that non-resource intensive games like Bejeweled will often outsell a resource intensive games like Supreme commander, Crysis, or Bioshock.
It will probably happen gradually, as most customers are already low-end.
Agreed, even today I'll recommend economy machines to people who don't play 3D games or do something like video ending.
*To the point that I now have 3 games that you can add a daughtercard to the computer for offloading the processing.
As the other poster noted, no current vendor charges by the core.
Still, I'd go with the same arguement in the software world - Buy the 100 core processor and instead of buying software from the company that charges by the core, buy from the company that doesn't.
The only reason that you'd be screwed over is if there's only one choice of software company, but then, generally speaking you're screwed anyways if that's the case.
In which condition you might find yourself changing a setting in the bios or OS to 'turn off' half the cores, or even paying $200 for a 'special purpose' crippled processor.
For instance you can moisten a hair or thread then stick it on a door placing it so that it sticks to both the door and the molding. If while you're away the door is opened the "seal" will fail and you can spot it.
;)
Personally, I prefer my homemade claymores for that purpose.
Bloodstains are much easier to spot when I get home.
Start skating.
I can sign _and_ encrypt emails from outlook at work.
You don't have to 'let' them into your home - they need a search warrant for that. Enough evidence and they can even drill the lock and such - you don't have to tell them where your key is.
Still, as long as the constitution holds out, they can ask you your password and you can plead the fifth.
My personal thought upon reading the GP's post was 'Norplant or equivalent for all!'.
No reversals unless you get the permit.
Though honestly enough, we don't need it. Even the USA is barely above replacement.
Hmmm... Large tax breaks for 'worthy' parents...
Heck, I'm an Evil Overlord. I'll go for it.
That and change the name of the DoD back to Department of War, rename homeland security to Department of Defense. Oh yeah, and kick the UN out.