My faithful 12in. PowerBook would disagree with you there - I've had it for over 3 years. I don't baby it - I don't even have a laptop bag for it, I just throw it in the back pocket of my backpack when I take it somewhere. The battery has lost a bit of capacity, it only gives 3 hours now.
I have a cast-off Compaq laptop from work... it's now 7 years old. Although the battery is toast, the rest of it still works perfectly, and the CPU performance of a c.2000 laptop is perfectly adequate for everyday use. It could do with another memory module though. That laptop wasn't babied either. After being someone's main laptop, it was used as a training device, moved from office to office with no particular love.
The reactor containment on a fission reactor hasn't changed and would allow chernobyl-type contamination to spread if it fails due to operator or equipment failure
Sorry, you're so wrong you aren't even wrong.
Chernobyl was an insanely unsafe reactor design, of the typical "keep up with the Joneses and build it as fast as possible, no matter what" Soviet philosophy to show greater engineering prowess than the west. (Soviet engineering is littered with examples of this - from airliners with dreadful 'user interfaces', which require crazy things like having to retard the thrust levers then push them forwards again for reverse thrust, to deep stall modes with absolutely no safeguards to stop a pilot entering a deep stall) - and to Chernobyl.
The RBMK reactor design has intrinsic, fail dangerous faults, that no civilian power reactor anywhere else in the world ever had. It had operating modes that were unstable (particularly low power) and it had a positive void coefficient. It used graphite as a moderator, with water as a coolant. Water also controls the amount of neutrons happily pinging about. What happens if voids develop in the coolant (say, becuase the reactor is overheating) is that a positive feedback loop is created, which makes the reaction speed up, which makes more water boil - increasing the voids and increasing the amount of availble neutrons, heating it more, boiling more water, which increases the voids... you get the idea, it starts to run away.
Added to that, the control rods had hollow tips that ALSO displaced water. So not only did the reactor design have a highly dangerous positive feedback mode (which no other civilian reactor in the world has), the hollow tips of the control rods cause yet more voids. So when you drop the control rods in quickly to stop the reactor, you initially increase its power even further as you displace more water!
So when they realised they were in trouble, they scrammed the reactor and dropped the control rods in. The operators (many not even RBMK trained!) simply didn't understand that this would cause the reactor to explode - as the hollow tips of the control rods went in, instead of the reaction slowing, it dramatically increased and blew the lid off the roof. Unlike any other civilian reactor in the world, the RBMK reactor didn't even have an outer containment building, either.
Chernobyl is not comparable to any other civilian reactor - it is a fail dangerous design, with no outer containment building. No one except the Soviets built such an insanely dangerous reactor. Unfortunately, what they did is made people who don't have the slightest understanding of nuclear reactor design irrationally fear properly designed, fail safe reactor designs (like every other reactor in use in the rest of the world).
There are still RBMK reactors running in the former Soviet union. They have been modified somewhat to mitigate their fail-dangerous design, but the fundamental flaws of the design have still not been fixed because the only way to fix them is to shut the RBMK reactor down for good.
As for nuclear waste: it seems a lot easier than coal waste. Coal waste is simply discharged into the atmosphere and can't be got back. Nuclear waste at least can easily be contained in a very, very small area instead of affecting the entire planet's atmosphere.
You may be forgetting that Japan had become a total war economy; the civilian population was as much involved in driving the war effort as the soldiers. Britain was also a total war economy, as was Germany. The Germans bombed British cities, and the British bombed German cities. They were valid military targets by the time Germany and Britain both had total war economies.
No, it's not nice - it's deeply unpleasant, in fact. But anything's fair game in a total war economy.
I've always thought this - of course, I didn't have any scientific evidence, but my personal experience is I find learning easier now as an adult than I did as a child - the easier learning now because I have a more disciplined approach to learning and I'm much better able to stay the course. But the actual mechanism of learning something new, at least for me, doesn't appear to have faded at all. (In fact I enjoy it - my best days at work are when I'm doing something completely new and having to discover new things, and my hobbies all include learning new things).
That and the anecdotes of retired people learning new things with all the time they now have - such as a friend's father, who's a retired air force officer - doing a computer science degree in his 60s, and doing it as well as any college kid.
It saves power because you don't have to keep the power supply running (transformer or SMPS). A typical monitor's power supply - totally unloaded, will consume 6 or 7 watts if just plugged in - it will have nearly 0% efficiency when powering a micropower device. The standby circuit only requires microwatts.
Once the PSU is under load (when the monitor is being used), the incremental energy cost to charge a capacitor that will run a micropower device is just...well, a few extra microwatts. So the power used to charge the capacitor to run the standby mode is much, much smaller than running the standby mode off the monitor's power transformer. It means the standby circuit really can be a micropower device instead of drawing 6-7 watts.
So what you're doing is not making standby truly zero power, but you are making it use just a few microwatts rather than 6 or 7 watts.
If you power your standby circuit off the line power, you need a transformer or switch mode supply to isolate it from line power and provide the low voltage (probably not 5v, probably 3.3v for most modern devices). The power supply itself unloaded will consume several watts - at very low loads, the power supply is probably less than 1% efficient, so it's just wasting 99% of the energy.
If you charge a capacitor instead, when the supply is under load and operating efficiently, then while you've just shunted energy around - the incremental energy cost of charging that capacitor while the device is on is tiny, and you don't have to keep that big lump of iron running when the device is in standby. Hence instead of consuming 6 or 7 watts (mostly due to the unloaded power supply), you can truly use microwatts to run the standby circuitry because you're using the power transformer or SMPS much more intelligently.
Turn the brightness control down, then. If a CRT is doing this, it's either a poor quality monitor without great contrast, or the brightness control is wound up far too high.
Electric engines have been hauling much, much more than articulated lorries for decades. All it requires is the right transport policy. Here's a photograph of one of these new fangled electric engine thingies hauling a load of frieght:
I've not used it on phones, but we do have it on some hand held data terminals at work. I agree, it's molasses slow. It's like it's been designed for 2GHz Intel space heaters. The 400 MHz ARM has plenty of power. RiscOS flew on a 6MHz ARM in 1989... there's just too many layers of abstraction and bloat for the job - and Moore's law won't be helping here: low power devices will necessarily keep relatively low clock speeds - and won't be a multi-core space heater than Windows CE really needs to not have a dreadfully unresponsive UI. The applications writers don't exactly help, either.
With modern high resolution (and inexpensive) laser printers, you can make remarkably fine pitch PCBs at home for a couple of quid. I just made a breakout board for a W5100 ethernet controller, which comes in an LQFP80-10 package (this package is 1cm by 1cm with 80 pins. The pins are 20 a side, and 20 pins fit into 8mm - so your tracks are 0.2mm wide with 0.2mm spacing - this is finer pitch than the design rules for some commercial PCB houses).
This was made with these tools:
double sided copper clad board two sheets of the cheapest Tesco's Value brand matte inkjet paper an HP LaserJet printer (1200dpi) a normal domestic household iron some fine grit wet-and-dry sandpaper etchant and tinning chemicals. an inexpensive pillar drill and 0.8mm / 1.0mm bits to make vias and holes for through-hole components
The consumables for this (photo paper, cost of printing, the blank PCB) was less than a couple of quid. It is quite time consuming though, but I enjoy making the boards anyway. It's nice to achieve something that everyone else tells you can't be done.
I *hand soldered* the fine pitch surface mount parts. All you do is carefully line up the part, tack corner pins into position with solder, then get a blob of solder on the tip of the iron and drag it down the pins - then mop up the excess with solder wick.
The nice thing about making PCBs rather than wire wrapping is you can use surface mount components (quite a few interesting chips are only available in insanely fine pitch SMD packages), and make a reasonable ground plane.
Back in the late 80s, such a device existed - the Cambridge Z88. About the size of a sheet of A4 paper (roughly letter size if you're in the US), the Z88 would run about 15 hours on a set of AA batteries.
Unfortunately, everyone seems to need masses of power for a laptop, and the OS makers don't help.
I was specifically mentioning USB drivers, and specifically pointed out the complaint about kernel ABIs were not valid here, because USB "drivers" can be all userland these days. So yes, manufacturers can release binary USB drivers and expect them to work for a good while.
It would, however, be better if they would release specs. Just imagine if Zilog and MOS et al. had kept the Z80 and 6502 datasheet secret in the 70s and 80s - the home computer boom would never have happened. It's awful that you can BUY an electronic component like a USB device, and all the interfaces are secret. It's even worse that this is so for things like video cards which have a processor on them.
The sun's nuclear reactions are in actual fact incredibly feeble. 1 kilogram of matter in the Sun's core generates only 6 *microwatts* of energy. By contrast, 1 kilogram of human body generates over one watt of heat, orders of magnitude more.
But the sun is very very large, and has lots and lots of matter at its core fusing away - so even with the feeble reaction rate an a per kilogram basis, because there's so much matter there, it adds up to quite a large total.
The idea of the Tsar bomba was not to level the town, but level pretty much the entire country. If a 100MT bomb was dropped over central England, people in London who were exposed to the flash would receive 3rd degree burns. A single bomb of that size can more or less incapacitate most of a European country.
However, it was entirely impractical - the aircraft probably wouldn't get much beyond the border of the Iron Curtain before getting shot down, and the radioactive "blowback", given the prevailing westerly flows, would be back over the Warsaw pact countries and Soviet Union.
I can use my 12in PowerBook on an airline tray (in steerage). But it did cost 4 times as much:-)
My trouble with airline trays is that I usually have some kid sitting in the seat in front, who insists on not slowly reclining their seat, but slamming it back to the stop at close to relativistic speeds. I've nearly had my display broken by that (trapped between the seat and tray), and nearly had my airline dinner on my lap because of that too. They should put a damper in the seats to limit the speed at which a passenger can recline them.
Incidentally, this hardware doesn't "just work" in Windows, either. The advantage Windows has is that the manufacturer writes the driver for Microsoft. Why can't the manufacturer write the driver for Linux, too - especially for USB, where there's a stable library and the usual complaints of no-stable-kernel-ABI don't apply?
Some companies are coming around, HP, Intel, AMD. But many are not and that's not the fault of Linux developers - especially if the companies keep their interfaces "super seekrit" requiring a massive reverse engineering effort just to get minimal functionality.
Not Linux, but the rest of the computing world. Every other OS, including router operating systems like Cisco IOS, comes with ssh these days. Solaris has it. OS X has it. Cisco IOS has it (even their wireless access points have ssh). BSD of course has it. So does Linux. Microsoft is the only OS vendor that doesn't have an ssh server by default.
Incidentally, Ireland - only fifteen years ago, the poor man of western Europe - has overtaken the United States. Ireland's GDP per capita is now about $3000 higher than the US GDP per capita.
Slashdot Mirror
My faithful 12in. PowerBook would disagree with you there - I've had it for over 3 years. I don't baby it - I don't even have a laptop bag for it, I just throw it in the back pocket of my backpack when I take it somewhere. The battery has lost a bit of capacity, it only gives 3 hours now.
I have a cast-off Compaq laptop from work... it's now 7 years old. Although the battery is toast, the rest of it still works perfectly, and the CPU performance of a c.2000 laptop is perfectly adequate for everyday use. It could do with another memory module though. That laptop wasn't babied either. After being someone's main laptop, it was used as a training device, moved from office to office with no particular love.
No! Don't! Making IT's job harder provides IT with better job security, gets a bigger budget, more staff etc.
Ever been on an airliner? It has depleted uranium counterweights in the control surfaces.
Do you have a smoke detector? In which case, you have a radioactive product.
Sorry, you're so wrong you aren't even wrong.
Chernobyl was an insanely unsafe reactor design, of the typical "keep up with the Joneses and build it as fast as possible, no matter what" Soviet philosophy to show greater engineering prowess than the west. (Soviet engineering is littered with examples of this - from airliners with dreadful 'user interfaces', which require crazy things like having to retard the thrust levers then push them forwards again for reverse thrust, to deep stall modes with absolutely no safeguards to stop a pilot entering a deep stall) - and to Chernobyl.
The RBMK reactor design has intrinsic, fail dangerous faults, that no civilian power reactor anywhere else in the world ever had. It had operating modes that were unstable (particularly low power) and it had a positive void coefficient. It used graphite as a moderator, with water as a coolant. Water also controls the amount of neutrons happily pinging about. What happens if voids develop in the coolant (say, becuase the reactor is overheating) is that a positive feedback loop is created, which makes the reaction speed up, which makes more water boil - increasing the voids and increasing the amount of availble neutrons, heating it more, boiling more water, which increases the voids... you get the idea, it starts to run away.
Added to that, the control rods had hollow tips that ALSO displaced water. So not only did the reactor design have a highly dangerous positive feedback mode (which no other civilian reactor in the world has), the hollow tips of the control rods cause yet more voids. So when you drop the control rods in quickly to stop the reactor, you initially increase its power even further as you displace more water!
So when they realised they were in trouble, they scrammed the reactor and dropped the control rods in. The operators (many not even RBMK trained!) simply didn't understand that this would cause the reactor to explode - as the hollow tips of the control rods went in, instead of the reaction slowing, it dramatically increased and blew the lid off the roof. Unlike any other civilian reactor in the world, the RBMK reactor didn't even have an outer containment building, either.
Chernobyl is not comparable to any other civilian reactor - it is a fail dangerous design, with no outer containment building. No one except the Soviets built such an insanely dangerous reactor. Unfortunately, what they did is made people who don't have the slightest understanding of nuclear reactor design irrationally fear properly designed, fail safe reactor designs (like every other reactor in use in the rest of the world).
There are still RBMK reactors running in the former Soviet union. They have been modified somewhat to mitigate their fail-dangerous design, but the fundamental flaws of the design have still not been fixed because the only way to fix them is to shut the RBMK reactor down for good.
As for nuclear waste: it seems a lot easier than coal waste. Coal waste is simply discharged into the atmosphere and can't be got back. Nuclear waste at least can easily be contained in a very, very small area instead of affecting the entire planet's atmosphere.
You may be forgetting that Japan had become a total war economy; the civilian population was as much involved in driving the war effort as the soldiers. Britain was also a total war economy, as was Germany. The Germans bombed British cities, and the British bombed German cities. They were valid military targets by the time Germany and Britain both had total war economies.
No, it's not nice - it's deeply unpleasant, in fact. But anything's fair game in a total war economy.
Ah, that's helpful. I've also found "I bet I get modded down for this, but..." a great way to get modded up!
I've always thought this - of course, I didn't have any scientific evidence, but my personal experience is I find learning easier now as an adult than I did as a child - the easier learning now because I have a more disciplined approach to learning and I'm much better able to stay the course. But the actual mechanism of learning something new, at least for me, doesn't appear to have faded at all. (In fact I enjoy it - my best days at work are when I'm doing something completely new and having to discover new things, and my hobbies all include learning new things).
That and the anecdotes of retired people learning new things with all the time they now have - such as a friend's father, who's a retired air force officer - doing a computer science degree in his 60s, and doing it as well as any college kid.
It saves power because you don't have to keep the power supply running (transformer or SMPS). A typical monitor's power supply - totally unloaded, will consume 6 or 7 watts if just plugged in - it will have nearly 0% efficiency when powering a micropower device. The standby circuit only requires microwatts.
Once the PSU is under load (when the monitor is being used), the incremental energy cost to charge a capacitor that will run a micropower device is just...well, a few extra microwatts. So the power used to charge the capacitor to run the standby mode is much, much smaller than running the standby mode off the monitor's power transformer. It means the standby circuit really can be a micropower device instead of drawing 6-7 watts.
So what you're doing is not making standby truly zero power, but you are making it use just a few microwatts rather than 6 or 7 watts.
No, it can be saving power and this is why.
If you power your standby circuit off the line power, you need a transformer or switch mode supply to isolate it from line power and provide the low voltage (probably not 5v, probably 3.3v for most modern devices). The power supply itself unloaded will consume several watts - at very low loads, the power supply is probably less than 1% efficient, so it's just wasting 99% of the energy.
If you charge a capacitor instead, when the supply is under load and operating efficiently, then while you've just shunted energy around - the incremental energy cost of charging that capacitor while the device is on is tiny, and you don't have to keep that big lump of iron running when the device is in standby. Hence instead of consuming 6 or 7 watts (mostly due to the unloaded power supply), you can truly use microwatts to run the standby circuitry because you're using the power transformer or SMPS much more intelligently.
Because monitors have no power switch (only a software power switch), and the non-techy user might not know this.
Also, office workers don't really like to have to dive deep under the desks to unplug it from the mains.
Provide a proper hardware switch on the front of the monitor, and people will indeed turn them off.
Turn the brightness control down, then. If a CRT is doing this, it's either a poor quality monitor without great contrast, or the brightness control is wound up far too high.
Electric engines have been hauling much, much more than articulated lorries for decades. All it requires is the right transport policy. Here's a photograph of one of these new fangled electric engine thingies hauling a load of frieght:
http://jasonrodhouse.fotopic.net/p43746708.html
One of these:
http://www.fotosearch.com/UNT246/u14463932/
I've not used it on phones, but we do have it on some hand held data terminals at work. I agree, it's molasses slow. It's like it's been designed for 2GHz Intel space heaters. The 400 MHz ARM has plenty of power. RiscOS flew on a 6MHz ARM in 1989... there's just too many layers of abstraction and bloat for the job - and Moore's law won't be helping here: low power devices will necessarily keep relatively low clock speeds - and won't be a multi-core space heater than Windows CE really needs to not have a dreadfully unresponsive UI. The applications writers don't exactly help, either.
With modern high resolution (and inexpensive) laser printers, you can make remarkably fine pitch PCBs at home for a couple of quid. I just made a breakout board for a W5100 ethernet controller, which comes in an LQFP80-10 package (this package is 1cm by 1cm with 80 pins. The pins are 20 a side, and 20 pins fit into 8mm - so your tracks are 0.2mm wide with 0.2mm spacing - this is finer pitch than the design rules for some commercial PCB houses).
This was made with these tools:
double sided copper clad board
two sheets of the cheapest Tesco's Value brand matte inkjet paper
an HP LaserJet printer (1200dpi)
a normal domestic household iron
some fine grit wet-and-dry sandpaper
etchant and tinning chemicals.
an inexpensive pillar drill and 0.8mm / 1.0mm bits to make vias and holes for through-hole components
The consumables for this (photo paper, cost of printing, the blank PCB) was less than a couple of quid. It is quite time consuming though, but I enjoy making the boards anyway. It's nice to achieve something that everyone else tells you can't be done.
I *hand soldered* the fine pitch surface mount parts. All you do is carefully line up the part, tack corner pins into position with solder, then get a blob of solder on the tip of the iron and drag it down the pins - then mop up the excess with solder wick.
The nice thing about making PCBs rather than wire wrapping is you can use surface mount components (quite a few interesting chips are only available in insanely fine pitch SMD packages), and make a reasonable ground plane.
You just need a more efficient laptop.
Back in the late 80s, such a device existed - the Cambridge Z88. About the size of a sheet of A4 paper (roughly letter size if you're in the US), the Z88 would run about 15 hours on a set of AA batteries.
Unfortunately, everyone seems to need masses of power for a laptop, and the OS makers don't help.
I was specifically mentioning USB drivers, and specifically pointed out the complaint about kernel ABIs were not valid here, because USB "drivers" can be all userland these days. So yes, manufacturers can release binary USB drivers and expect them to work for a good while.
It would, however, be better if they would release specs. Just imagine if Zilog and MOS et al. had kept the Z80 and 6502 datasheet secret in the 70s and 80s - the home computer boom would never have happened. It's awful that you can BUY an electronic component like a USB device, and all the interfaces are secret. It's even worse that this is so for things like video cards which have a processor on them.
The sun's nuclear reactions are in actual fact incredibly feeble. 1 kilogram of matter in the Sun's core generates only 6 *microwatts* of energy. By contrast, 1 kilogram of human body generates over one watt of heat, orders of magnitude more.
But the sun is very very large, and has lots and lots of matter at its core fusing away - so even with the feeble reaction rate an a per kilogram basis, because there's so much matter there, it adds up to quite a large total.
The idea of the Tsar bomba was not to level the town, but level pretty much the entire country. If a 100MT bomb was dropped over central England, people in London who were exposed to the flash would receive 3rd degree burns. A single bomb of that size can more or less incapacitate most of a European country.
However, it was entirely impractical - the aircraft probably wouldn't get much beyond the border of the Iron Curtain before getting shot down, and the radioactive "blowback", given the prevailing westerly flows, would be back over the Warsaw pact countries and Soviet Union.
It only moves at 4 degrees per minute - if it suddenly stops, it's not going to result in "wild tumbling".
I can use my 12in PowerBook on an airline tray (in steerage). But it did cost 4 times as much :-)
My trouble with airline trays is that I usually have some kid sitting in the seat in front, who insists on not slowly reclining their seat, but slamming it back to the stop at close to relativistic speeds. I've nearly had my display broken by that (trapped between the seat and tray), and nearly had my airline dinner on my lap because of that too. They should put a damper in the seats to limit the speed at which a passenger can recline them.
Incidentally, this hardware doesn't "just work" in Windows, either. The advantage Windows has is that the manufacturer writes the driver for Microsoft. Why can't the manufacturer write the driver for Linux, too - especially for USB, where there's a stable library and the usual complaints of no-stable-kernel-ABI don't apply?
Some companies are coming around, HP, Intel, AMD. But many are not and that's not the fault of Linux developers - especially if the companies keep their interfaces "super seekrit" requiring a massive reverse engineering effort just to get minimal functionality.
Linux people are capable of learning - so I would suggest that PowerShell would be usable by Linux people. All they need to do is learn how it works.
Not Linux, but the rest of the computing world. Every other OS, including router operating systems like Cisco IOS, comes with ssh these days. Solaris has it. OS X has it. Cisco IOS has it (even their wireless access points have ssh). BSD of course has it. So does Linux. Microsoft is the only OS vendor that doesn't have an ssh server by default.
Incidentally, Ireland - only fifteen years ago, the poor man of western Europe - has overtaken the United States. Ireland's GDP per capita is now about $3000 higher than the US GDP per capita.