Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen. The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.
Water depends on house. Electrical hot water, unless it's on-demand, can wait too. Pumped mains pressure cannot, simply because it's also used to drive fire extinguishing systems. If you're in an area that uses a water tower or top-of-building tank for pressure though, then the pump can be shut down during a deman peak.
The simplist way would be to encode it onto the mains signal - either as a slight frequency variation (It already gets slower under load) or as a digital signal. All it needs to do is give a number from, say -8 to +8 telling appliances how precious energy is at that exact moment. Older appliances simply ignore it, new ones can have a dirt-cheap (So cheap manufacturers wouldn't mind adding it) decoder chip and slightly adjust their settings and cycles according to that. Just make sure that the signal averages out at 0 over a long enough period.
It's a very simple system, yes. But it's also the cheapest for the appliance end - no new expensive communications hardware, no wireless or internet connectivity. Just a very cheap decoder part consisting of an isolation/stepdown transformer an a single chip, and some of the time it can share a transformer with the microcontroller power suppply.
And most of those who do have even 2.1 don't have it set up right due to room layout. For it to work you need your TV to be centered on one wall, and a sofa on the opposite wall. In many shapes of living room, including my own, that isn't possible. We just use the speakers in the TV.
You do. But they need to be seperated by eye. That's done either by having two small screens (The 3D visor, much used in VR rigs), or by using polarisation to allow one screen to appear to show two images depending upon eye (The cinema approach) or by using active shutter glasses an very rapidly alternating images (Most home 3DTV systems.)
What could be done by reversing this process from the stream? There's a nifty trick on surround sound - some sounds you'll find the center channel is used for lyrics and the sides for instrumentals in songs, making it trivial to isolate them and get clean audio for redubbing with. If it works as you describe, would that make it easy to pull out individual instruments or effects? That could be useful for hobbyist remixers.
Not entirely evil. Thanks to those ad-funded companies like Tripod, many people were able to create websites that could not otherwise have afforded to do so. Web hosting was expensive back in those days, and even now it'll still cost you at least ten quid a month or so, which is a significant amount for some. Even today we continue to reap the benefits of advertising-based businesses for all manner of useful things - even though the ads themselves are so loathed that many users find ways to block them.
But you don't get to see random public sentiment. You get to see the public sentiment of one site's readership, as filtered through their moderation policy.
Statistics, perhaps? Humans must have an 8-ish hour downtime every day*. Easy enough to detect that cycle over a long enough period. If someone has been posting every hour for a week, they are certainly fishy: It's either a bot or a shared account.
I'm talking about new product major versions, not just patches.
The only reason many organisations are ditching XP right now is that MS stopped supplying updates. That isn't "Getting new software to further advance the organisation." That's more "Reluctantly going through the testing and training nightmare of a major deployment because Microsoft want to obsolete our otherwise-satisfactory existing software."
The only problem there is that it is, for most purposes, pointless. Most people would be hard pressed to tell 720p from 1080p on their large TV under normal viewing conditions. What we see really is a placebo effect, similar to the one that plagues audiophile judgement: When you've paid a heap of cash for something, it's going to sound subjectively better.
Even software is slowing down, though. A lot of the commodity software reached the point of 'good enough' years ago - look how long it's taken to get away from XP, and still many organisations continue to use it. The same is true of office suites: For most people, they don't use any feature not present in Office 95. Updating software has gone from an essential part of the life cycle to something that only needs to be done every five years, sometimes longer.
Around 2025 we will probably see a repeat of the XP situation as Microsoft tries desperately to get rid of the vast installed base of Windows 7, and organisations point out that what they have been using for the last decade works fine so they have no reason to upgrade.
Yes, it would. People using Vorbis aren't using WMA. Microsoft has patents on WMA, and makes money from every device supporting it. So it's in their best interests not to promote Vorbis: It may not cost them directly, but it cuts into their profits from WMA.
Logging this type of thing wouldn't be a matter for the OS, it'd be a matter for the database software. I know MySQL supports it, I imagine all major RDBM software does. Doesn't mean it was enabled.
Or log avoidance. The secure access station probably keeps detailed logs which could be used to reveal fishing expeditions, an out-of-channels approach like this leaves no paper trail which could then come back to bit someone.
I suspect my IQ is untestable. I was a subject in a few research projects as a child and teenager, so I've been through the common tests so many times I'd have an unfair advantage.
No idea what they were researching. Most of it seemed to involve contriving circumstances and recording response - there was one involving a 'target shooting' game rigged so the researcher could decide if the subject would appear to score or miss the target. I remember because I took a great interest in trying to determine how it worked - I guessed the gun part was connected up to a rotary encoder or pot at the base that allowed a circuit to measure the angle it was pointing, before I realised that it was actually just a fake and the researcher had a switch on the back to determine if the solenoid to drop the target should be activated when the trigger was pulled.
The curse of the academically capable: I breezed through school getting very good grades with no effort at all. Never revised - I was just good at the code subjects (Except English Lit). Then went to university and had a breakdown, because it was the first time I'd been seriously challenged.
Slashdot Mirror
Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen. The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.
Water depends on house. Electrical hot water, unless it's on-demand, can wait too. Pumped mains pressure cannot, simply because it's also used to drive fire extinguishing systems. If you're in an area that uses a water tower or top-of-building tank for pressure though, then the pump can be shut down during a deman peak.
The simplist way would be to encode it onto the mains signal - either as a slight frequency variation (It already gets slower under load) or as a digital signal. All it needs to do is give a number from, say -8 to +8 telling appliances how precious energy is at that exact moment. Older appliances simply ignore it, new ones can have a dirt-cheap (So cheap manufacturers wouldn't mind adding it) decoder chip and slightly adjust their settings and cycles according to that. Just make sure that the signal averages out at 0 over a long enough period.
It's a very simple system, yes. But it's also the cheapest for the appliance end - no new expensive communications hardware, no wireless or internet connectivity. Just a very cheap decoder part consisting of an isolation/stepdown transformer an a single chip, and some of the time it can share a transformer with the microcontroller power suppply.
And most of those who do have even 2.1 don't have it set up right due to room layout. For it to work you need your TV to be centered on one wall, and a sofa on the opposite wall. In many shapes of living room, including my own, that isn't possible. We just use the speakers in the TV.
You do. But they need to be seperated by eye. That's done either by having two small screens (The 3D visor, much used in VR rigs), or by using polarisation to allow one screen to appear to show two images depending upon eye (The cinema approach) or by using active shutter glasses an very rapidly alternating images (Most home 3DTV systems.)
What could be done by reversing this process from the stream? There's a nifty trick on surround sound - some sounds you'll find the center channel is used for lyrics and the sides for instrumentals in songs, making it trivial to isolate them and get clean audio for redubbing with. If it works as you describe, would that make it easy to pull out individual instruments or effects? That could be useful for hobbyist remixers.
Not entirely evil. Thanks to those ad-funded companies like Tripod, many people were able to create websites that could not otherwise have afforded to do so. Web hosting was expensive back in those days, and even now it'll still cost you at least ten quid a month or so, which is a significant amount for some. Even today we continue to reap the benefits of advertising-based businesses for all manner of useful things - even though the ads themselves are so loathed that many users find ways to block them.
Because it's gusty, and wind turbines need steady wind.
The 'Walkie Talkie' AKA 'Solar Death Ray' was mentioned in the article as another example of an unanticipated danger in architecture.
Sod's law. The correct answer is the least desirable.
Once phones have more memory, we can start hash-addressing files and greatly improve caching.
You have found a field so obscure that I am unable to tell if that is nonsense technobabble, or just science beyond my level of understanding.
An email? That's far too practical to be cool. This is the buzz age now. It'd have to tweet the message, or at least post it on facebook.
But you don't get to see random public sentiment. You get to see the public sentiment of one site's readership, as filtered through their moderation policy.
Statistics, perhaps? Humans must have an 8-ish hour downtime every day*. Easy enough to detect that cycle over a long enough period. If someone has been posting every hour for a week, they are certainly fishy: It's either a bot or a shared account.
*Humans suck.
I'm talking about new product major versions, not just patches.
The only reason many organisations are ditching XP right now is that MS stopped supplying updates. That isn't "Getting new software to further advance the organisation." That's more "Reluctantly going through the testing and training nightmare of a major deployment because Microsoft want to obsolete our otherwise-satisfactory existing software."
The only problem there is that it is, for most purposes, pointless. Most people would be hard pressed to tell 720p from 1080p on their large TV under normal viewing conditions. What we see really is a placebo effect, similar to the one that plagues audiophile judgement: When you've paid a heap of cash for something, it's going to sound subjectively better.
Even software is slowing down, though. A lot of the commodity software reached the point of 'good enough' years ago - look how long it's taken to get away from XP, and still many organisations continue to use it. The same is true of office suites: For most people, they don't use any feature not present in Office 95. Updating software has gone from an essential part of the life cycle to something that only needs to be done every five years, sometimes longer.
Around 2025 we will probably see a repeat of the XP situation as Microsoft tries desperately to get rid of the vast installed base of Windows 7, and organisations point out that what they have been using for the last decade works fine so they have no reason to upgrade.
I think the problems stem more from everyone involved trying to make sure that their patents would be required in some way.
Yes, it would. People using Vorbis aren't using WMA. Microsoft has patents on WMA, and makes money from every device supporting it. So it's in their best interests not to promote Vorbis: It may not cost them directly, but it cuts into their profits from WMA.
And yet they still make it, even though they know how dangerous it is.
All the OS sees are block read-write requests. There isn't much use logging that. It wouldn't even see the requesting user, only the DBM PID.
Logging this type of thing wouldn't be a matter for the OS, it'd be a matter for the database software. I know MySQL supports it, I imagine all major RDBM software does. Doesn't mean it was enabled.
Or log avoidance. The secure access station probably keeps detailed logs which could be used to reveal fishing expeditions, an out-of-channels approach like this leaves no paper trail which could then come back to bit someone.
I suspect my IQ is untestable. I was a subject in a few research projects as a child and teenager, so I've been through the common tests so many times I'd have an unfair advantage.
No idea what they were researching. Most of it seemed to involve contriving circumstances and recording response - there was one involving a 'target shooting' game rigged so the researcher could decide if the subject would appear to score or miss the target. I remember because I took a great interest in trying to determine how it worked - I guessed the gun part was connected up to a rotary encoder or pot at the base that allowed a circuit to measure the angle it was pointing, before I realised that it was actually just a fake and the researcher had a switch on the back to determine if the solenoid to drop the target should be activated when the trigger was pulled.
The curse of the academically capable: I breezed through school getting very good grades with no effort at all. Never revised - I was just good at the code subjects (Except English Lit). Then went to university and had a breakdown, because it was the first time I'd been seriously challenged.