available steered headlights... the lights turn with the wheel
Yeah, this again. IIRC, Lincoln and Cadillacs used to have this feature in the 80s. There's a reason it never caught on then, and that's because it's not very useful.
All HID systems are self levelling. It's just that self levelling only works in 90% of the cases. Pothole? Doesn't work. Going over a gradually changing slope? Doesn't work. And perhaps the worst part: car becomes ~10 years old and self-levelling system has experienced sensor failure? You're officially a safety hazard.
And it only takes that one second to spoil your night vision for the next two-three minutes. In a city, it may not be a problem, but when you're driving through the forests of northern Sweden and you really want your night vision at its best to spot any moose crossing the road, it's bloody dangerous to have someone's low-beam HID blind you.
IMO, HID should be disallowed for all low beams, and should be freely available for all high beams. This would solve all the problems, except new cars would not look as "cool" as they do today.
Is there any evidence that their manufacturing is any more polluting that that of other cars?
If you say "other electric cars", perhaps no. But it is well known that production of electric cars is much more polluting than production of ICE cars. See e.g. this recent peer-reviewed article.
However, your concerns about manufacturing process and moving energy use around are ignorant trolling.
Here, let me point you towards a recent article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology which shows that the production of batteries for the longest-range Tesla S emits roughly as much CO2 as driving 50 000 miles (depending on the car you compare with).
And it would slow global warming and the associated (arguably worse) acidification of the oceans.
[citation needed]. Better make that "Life cycle analysis needed". I agree with your points regarding reducing local emissions, which is very important in many cities, but I haven't seen a single complete life cycle analysis of any current production electric vehicle that gets significantly better than an equivalent gasoline powered car.
This patch allocates the boot services regions during EFI init and makes
sure that they're executable. Then, after SetVirtualAddressMap(), it
discards them and everyone lives happily ever after. Except for the ones
who have to work on EFI, who live sad lives haunted by the knowledge that
someone's eventually going to write yet another firmware specification.
Indeed. USB stick with "insert favorite linux version" installed, and just enough things to allow you to SSH home and access whatever you need (VNC for the GUI stuff). Make sure the USB stick is read-only, no personal stuff whatsoever stored on it, and password-protect the SSH key.
1080p for a game is just so-so even if your playing on a HDTV from just a couple of feet away.
Can't tell if trolling or really serious.
Come on, now. 1080p is the max resolution of an HDTV (higher res is normally called 4K). Are you saying that you play games on your HDTV at higher resolutions than the max resolution? If your intention is to have a 4K monitor and sit reaally close to it to cover most of your field-of-view, then you're doing it wrong. It's cheaper and much better to have multiple monitors, since then you can curve them around you.
Grrr... Third such unsubstantiated statement from you on this story. Seriously, do you have any shred of evidence suggesting Steam is planning to centralize the gaming hardware and stream the games from the cloud? Cause you're the only person that seems to believe so.
I even doubt that people are expected to even install games onto the OS itself.
No, no-one will install games on this thing. It's not like Steam has the most successful gaming app store ever.
(I'm guessing you mean "install from a third party", and that will probably be difficult, yes.)
I expect the ultimate intention is Valve will launch a cloud service so that SteamOS is just a minimal frontend for games running somewhere else.
This doesn't make sense from a lot of perspectives. One is latency. Another is the fact that they've spent a lot of time, money and PR on making a box+OS to actually run games on, including large improvements to the Linux GPU drivers. A third is the fact that all previous attempts have failed, see OnLive.
Since you're an experienced ZFS user, do you have any recommendations for how to sync the systems described below?
I have a setup simliar to the one you describe. One box at work with 2x3TB with ZFS and mirroring (raid1), similar box at home. The box at home is fairly recent, so I haven't gotten a good system for synchronizing them yet. My internet at home is 50/10 Mbps, work is much faster. The idea is that I backup both my personal photos (originates on home box, usually ~10 GB a month) and my work data (created on the work box, usually a steady stream of 1 GB per week and bursts of 10-50 GB occasionally). If possible I would like to have some directories on the work box that are not synchronized to the home box.
If the fact that both computers are sources of new data is a problem, I guess it's possible to modify that workflow.
And any other recommendations for ZFS? I scrub the pools weekly, but otherwise treat it as zero-maintenance.
you get the option of having a Retina display, which may or may not be extra-helpful
[citation needed]
Seriously, show me a double-blind test with a decent sample size where it's found to be statistically significant that people can distinguish a non-retina ipad from a retina one. Not just calculations on the theoretical resolution of the human eye.
I will note as evidence supporting my theory that "retina==overkill" that monitors recommended for professional photo/video editing, including Apple's own "Thunderbolt MC914LL/B", have less than half the DPI of a retina screen. If it's not popular among people who have virtually unlimited budgets for buying displays, then that's because it's not necessary.
C is probably the closst you should get today to the "metal" anymore. Unless of course you have a VERY good reason to go lower, but I can not really think of anything that doesn't deal with the OS itself.
I would add Fortran (90/95/2003/2008) to that one-item list. Not to spark a flame war here, but Fortran can often be 10x faster for number crunching, given the same amount of programmer-hours to code it. Not saying you can't make a C program equally fast, but the default way people structure Fortran code for number crunching results in faster code than the default way people stucture C code for number crunching.
Take IPA for instance: you have to put in some work in order to write C code that will actually benefit from a compiler that has IPA support. Limit your use of pointers, only strict aliasing, etc. For Fortran, you have to put in some work in order to write code that won't benefit from a compiler with IPA.
Lets face it, Moore's Law made systems several orders more powerful than the work the masses can come up for them to do. Who cares if Moore's Law finally winds down when the systems are so powerful they spend more time idling than anything else?
I care about Moore's law winding down. For my applications (CFD) it means that not only do I have to start paying attention to the fact that I'm running close-to-metal, e.g. I have to minimize the amount of cache misses, but also that if I want to have a scalable application, I can't do it without MPI. And MPI is tricky.
Well, the US military has one called Active Denial System, but that's not the one I was thinking about. I can't seem to find any good links at the moment, sorry:( But it looks like the ADS is not very popular anymore with the military (never been used in the field), so I'm guessing they scrapped the civilan versions. Too much negative PR potential for a riot control device.
You could have a look at the ATLAS-I machine built at Sandia in the 70's, they used it for simulated EMP testing. 200 gigawatts @ 10 megavolts, focused at ~50 m distance.
For reference, the vehicles that have been built for riot control using RF radiation (which obviously put out much less power than an EMP, otherwise they wouldn't be usable in cities) have charge-up times of more than a day, and they're probably supplied by 480V three-phase at several hundred amps.
The "Project Thumper", as someone below mentioned, charges the capacitor bank at 110V 20 A for a few minutes, so that's roughly 4*10*60*24= 60 000 times less energy than something which has much less energy than an EMP. Myth busted.
The other reply pretty much nailed it. BTW, you can get converters that run HDMI over cat6 in order to have non-pathetic range, but the good ones are expensive.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how much microwave radiation you have to submit a modern car to before the ECU craps out? I know S-band radar, which is basically what microwave ovens use, can disable an ECU. There are law enforcement agencies using such devices. But I haven't seen any numbers on the mW/cm^2 needed. I do know that brief pulses of 10 mW/cm^2 is the human safety limit for ovens, so it's probably in that ballpark.
So I'm thinking, with a $50 oven magnetron at 1100 W and a parabolic reflector, it shouldn't be hard nor expensive to drive around in an old pre-ECU car randomly disabling other vehicles. You might even be able to do it at a decent range!
I should also say: I've gotten some very cool photos in bars by using the camera built-in flash and a full glass of beer as a diffuser. At 1/8@f/2.8, ISO 400 (with a good IS system/small sensor) you get quite a bit of ambient light to balance the shot nicely.
This is by the way something professional photographers tend to overlook: that larger sensor produces less noise at a given ISO/shutter/aperture, sure, but with a smaller sensor and an equivalent IS system you can often go as much as a stop or two lower in shutter speed before it gets tricky to hold the camera steady.
The kind of photography discussed in the article uses active illumination. That changes things quite a bit; I have no problems taking pictures in a wedding with what i call the "IKEA Fong sphere" on top of my camera, I can even do it at f/2.8 @ ISO 200.
See this for an example photo and how to build one yourself.
Analysts have pointed out that the way Amazon is investing, it is clear that it intends to use it's current advantage in online retail to build a distribution network that is sufficiently advanced that any competitors will have to spend huge amounts of time/money to catch up. It's a long tail gambit.
Imagine in twenty years being able to look at your infrastructure and be confident that no-one on the planet has anything on the same scale (except perhaps the US military). Then you can start churning a profit like nobody's business (pun intended).
Slashdot Mirror
available steered headlights... the lights turn with the wheel
Yeah, this again. IIRC, Lincoln and Cadillacs used to have this feature in the 80s. There's a reason it never caught on then, and that's because it's not very useful.
All HID systems are self levelling. It's just that self levelling only works in 90% of the cases. Pothole? Doesn't work. Going over a gradually changing slope? Doesn't work. And perhaps the worst part: car becomes ~10 years old and self-levelling system has experienced sensor failure? You're officially a safety hazard.
And it only takes that one second to spoil your night vision for the next two-three minutes. In a city, it may not be a problem, but when you're driving through the forests of northern Sweden and you really want your night vision at its best to spot any moose crossing the road, it's bloody dangerous to have someone's low-beam HID blind you.
IMO, HID should be disallowed for all low beams, and should be freely available for all high beams. This would solve all the problems, except new cars would not look as "cool" as they do today.
Is there any evidence that their manufacturing is any more polluting that that of other cars?
If you say "other electric cars", perhaps no. But it is well known that production of electric cars is much more polluting than production of ICE cars. See e.g. this recent peer-reviewed article.
However, your concerns about manufacturing process and moving energy use around are ignorant trolling.
Here, let me point you towards a recent article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology which shows that the production of batteries for the longest-range Tesla S emits roughly as much CO2 as driving 50 000 miles (depending on the car you compare with).
And it would slow global warming and the associated (arguably worse) acidification of the oceans.
[citation needed]. Better make that "Life cycle analysis needed". I agree with your points regarding reducing local emissions, which is very important in many cities, but I haven't seen a single complete life cycle analysis of any current production electric vehicle that gets significantly better than an equivalent gasoline powered car.
Nope - that'd be Secure Boot. There's nothing inherently wrong with UEFI.
Au contraire. See e.g. the rants of people who have to implement UEFI support in Linux: http://lwn.net/Articles/444666/
This patch allocates the boot services regions during EFI init and makes sure that they're executable. Then, after SetVirtualAddressMap(), it discards them and everyone lives happily ever after. Except for the ones who have to work on EFI, who live sad lives haunted by the knowledge that someone's eventually going to write yet another firmware specification.
Remember: remote wipe without a foolproof and frequently used backup strategy is a very very bad idea.
Indeed. USB stick with "insert favorite linux version" installed, and just enough things to allow you to SSH home and access whatever you need (VNC for the GUI stuff). Make sure the USB stick is read-only, no personal stuff whatsoever stored on it, and password-protect the SSH key.
1080p for a game is just so-so even if your playing on a HDTV from just a couple of feet away.
Can't tell if trolling or really serious.
Come on, now. 1080p is the max resolution of an HDTV (higher res is normally called 4K). Are you saying that you play games on your HDTV at higher resolutions than the max resolution? If your intention is to have a 4K monitor and sit reaally close to it to cover most of your field-of-view, then you're doing it wrong. It's cheaper and much better to have multiple monitors, since then you can curve them around you.
Grrr... Third such unsubstantiated statement from you on this story. Seriously, do you have any shred of evidence suggesting Steam is planning to centralize the gaming hardware and stream the games from the cloud? Cause you're the only person that seems to believe so.
[citation needed]
I even doubt that people are expected to even install games onto the OS itself.
No, no-one will install games on this thing. It's not like Steam has the most successful gaming app store ever.
(I'm guessing you mean "install from a third party", and that will probably be difficult, yes.)
I expect the ultimate intention is Valve will launch a cloud service so that SteamOS is just a minimal frontend for games running somewhere else.
This doesn't make sense from a lot of perspectives. One is latency. Another is the fact that they've spent a lot of time, money and PR on making a box+OS to actually run games on, including large improvements to the Linux GPU drivers. A third is the fact that all previous attempts have failed, see OnLive.
I would mod you up if I wasn't out of points.
And I too think lavarnd.org being down at this moment in time is semi-spooky.
Since you're an experienced ZFS user, do you have any recommendations for how to sync the systems described below?
I have a setup simliar to the one you describe. One box at work with 2x3TB with ZFS and mirroring (raid1), similar box at home. The box at home is fairly recent, so I haven't gotten a good system for synchronizing them yet. My internet at home is 50/10 Mbps, work is much faster. The idea is that I backup both my personal photos (originates on home box, usually ~10 GB a month) and my work data (created on the work box, usually a steady stream of 1 GB per week and bursts of 10-50 GB occasionally). If possible I would like to have some directories on the work box that are not synchronized to the home box.
If the fact that both computers are sources of new data is a problem, I guess it's possible to modify that workflow.
And any other recommendations for ZFS? I scrub the pools weekly, but otherwise treat it as zero-maintenance.
you get the option of having a Retina display, which may or may not be extra-helpful
[citation needed]
Seriously, show me a double-blind test with a decent sample size where it's found to be statistically significant that people can distinguish a non-retina ipad from a retina one. Not just calculations on the theoretical resolution of the human eye.
I will note as evidence supporting my theory that "retina==overkill" that monitors recommended for professional photo/video editing, including Apple's own "Thunderbolt MC914LL/B", have less than half the DPI of a retina screen. If it's not popular among people who have virtually unlimited budgets for buying displays, then that's because it's not necessary.
C is probably the closst you should get today to the "metal" anymore. Unless of course you have a VERY good reason to go lower, but I can not really think of anything that doesn't deal with the OS itself.
I would add Fortran (90/95/2003/2008) to that one-item list. Not to spark a flame war here, but Fortran can often be 10x faster for number crunching, given the same amount of programmer-hours to code it. Not saying you can't make a C program equally fast, but the default way people structure Fortran code for number crunching results in faster code than the default way people stucture C code for number crunching.
Take IPA for instance: you have to put in some work in order to write C code that will actually benefit from a compiler that has IPA support. Limit your use of pointers, only strict aliasing, etc. For Fortran, you have to put in some work in order to write code that won't benefit from a compiler with IPA.
Lets face it, Moore's Law made systems several orders more powerful than the work the masses can come up for them to do. Who cares if Moore's Law finally winds down when the systems are so powerful they spend more time idling than anything else?
I care about Moore's law winding down. For my applications (CFD) it means that not only do I have to start paying attention to the fact that I'm running close-to-metal, e.g. I have to minimize the amount of cache misses, but also that if I want to have a scalable application, I can't do it without MPI. And MPI is tricky.
Well, the US military has one called Active Denial System, but that's not the one I was thinking about. I can't seem to find any good links at the moment, sorry :( But it looks like the ADS is not very popular anymore with the military (never been used in the field), so I'm guessing they scrapped the civilan versions. Too much negative PR potential for a riot control device.
You could have a look at the ATLAS-I machine built at Sandia in the 70's, they used it for simulated EMP testing. 200 gigawatts @ 10 megavolts, focused at ~50 m distance.
For reference, the vehicles that have been built for riot control using RF radiation (which obviously put out much less power than an EMP, otherwise they wouldn't be usable in cities) have charge-up times of more than a day, and they're probably supplied by 480V three-phase at several hundred amps.
The "Project Thumper", as someone below mentioned, charges the capacitor bank at 110V 20 A for a few minutes, so that's roughly 4*10*60*24= 60 000 times less energy than something which has much less energy than an EMP. Myth busted.
http://xkcd.com/908/
The other reply pretty much nailed it. BTW, you can get converters that run HDMI over cat6 in order to have non-pathetic range, but the good ones are expensive.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how much microwave radiation you have to submit a modern car to before the ECU craps out? I know S-band radar, which is basically what microwave ovens use, can disable an ECU. There are law enforcement agencies using such devices. But I haven't seen any numbers on the mW/cm^2 needed. I do know that brief pulses of 10 mW/cm^2 is the human safety limit for ovens, so it's probably in that ballpark.
So I'm thinking, with a $50 oven magnetron at 1100 W and a parabolic reflector, it shouldn't be hard nor expensive to drive around in an old pre-ECU car randomly disabling other vehicles. You might even be able to do it at a decent range!
I should also say: I've gotten some very cool photos in bars by using the camera built-in flash and a full glass of beer as a diffuser. At 1/8@f/2.8, ISO 400 (with a good IS system/small sensor) you get quite a bit of ambient light to balance the shot nicely.
This is by the way something professional photographers tend to overlook: that larger sensor produces less noise at a given ISO/shutter/aperture, sure, but with a smaller sensor and an equivalent IS system you can often go as much as a stop or two lower in shutter speed before it gets tricky to hold the camera steady.
The kind of photography discussed in the article uses active illumination. That changes things quite a bit; I have no problems taking pictures in a wedding with what i call the "IKEA Fong sphere" on top of my camera, I can even do it at f/2.8 @ ISO 200.
See this for an example photo and how to build one yourself.
Analysts have pointed out that the way Amazon is investing, it is clear that it intends to use it's current advantage in online retail to build a distribution network that is sufficiently advanced that any competitors will have to spend huge amounts of time/money to catch up. It's a long tail gambit.
Imagine in twenty years being able to look at your infrastructure and be confident that no-one on the planet has anything on the same scale (except perhaps the US military). Then you can start churning a profit like nobody's business (pun intended).