I was just thinking the same thing outloud when that Wired article on synthetic diamonds was up.
I would so much love to see a package design with a CPU that had DRAM clicked right onto the sides and just ditching the motherboard altogether.
Of course this would be a bit more than a package design to be useful without a board, it would require an SOC as well. Sounds out there, but TSMC was hyping their SOC plans as the next big thing awhile back.
But then all it would need would be outputs for VGA, USB2.0 and perhaps two Gig ethernet ports. That would be so sweet.
Imagine filling an industrial freezer case with a thousand of these little babies Use an oversized scroll compressor on the refrigerant and there ya go supercompiting for the masses. You could even put a glass lid on it with blue LEDs.
But even better, you could use them individually as well wherever you needed computing power and with the slick form factor they'd be so fashionable they'd probably even woo the Mac crowd. And talking about saving desk real estate. It's a win-win unless you're a mobo or case maker. So where is it?
are featured large in the biochemistry GRE subject test. It's that fission reproduction trick and the related regenerative abilities that gets them all the attention.
Apparently this position is quite popular among Russian scientists.
I read that some recent deep oil wells in rock strata that never reached the surface during times when life was plentiful have also raised some eyebrows.
I thought it was crazy, but then the part about how common it was to find petrochemicals on comets or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn did make me wonder if there might not be something to it.
But it is off-topic, isn't it.
Indeed, if you check the text of the US Copyright law you will find that in the subsection on fair use for libraries and archives --note, that's a separate subsection than the one for indivudual fair use-- it specifically states that in order to avoid damage to originals, it is not a violation of copyright to make a copy of an edition or phonorecording for lending to another instituion.
Since each member of this organization is like an independent lending archive, then this seems to suggest that lending copies of your materials should be fine so you can keep the originals.
If you disagree, I'd like to know which part of the copyright law supports your position. You'll find the part about fair use all nice and easy to read in HTML here at the LOC.
I burn thousands of silver CDRs every year, always the cheapest possible ones in bulk, for a publisher that publishes books with accompanying CDRs.
In the last five years of doing this, we've only had problems with mold that could be wiped off restoring their usefulness without returning them to us.
Perhaps the Danish market got ripped off. It's quite possible that somebody made some money moving defective discs.
We've seen a few stacks where individual discs intermittently would fail to write a few years back. That was a hassle, but after a few months of going back and forth with the supplier the quality seemed to improve and never went bad again. This definitely sounds like there was a bad shipment.
But that ol' get what you pay for wheeze is obviously somebody's idea of a joke. Probably someone with a lousy sense of humor drinking cheap booze. You know, listening to Rush Limbaugh on AM and slurring out Ditto Rush! Every now and then.
I just found a stack of old el cheapo music CDRs in a translucent case sitting next to a window that had been overlooked for several years. I thought for sure it was all but destroyed and, indeed, the label sides were faded. Surprisingly, none of the data seemed to have any errors.
Excellent explanation about the various circuits.
I think you're right that the Supreme Court hasn't looked at a number of these issues. And even since the DMCA was first proposed, I seem to recall hearing that the underlying idea was the everyone on board, Congress and the Clinton administration, knew it was unconstitutional so it was politically pain free. Just pass it and wait for the Supreme Court to nullify it. The question is why the RIAA is so inept as to force it to the Supreme Court.
The next one is the NET Act. That is the most absurd piece of legislation I can imagine. It essentially tries to re-write the English language to make all exchanges commercial. That's illogical on so many levels. To take it to an extreme it makes all sex prostitution, but you don't have to take it to an extreme. How about gifts? How can the IRS have a gift exemption if a gift is a commercial transaction? If a gift isn't commercial, then how is P2P commercial? You can't have it both ways.
So true, and this same phenomena has much to do with the problems in the markets where making the numbers became more important than being honest about accounting. It's a confidence trick of enormous proportions and we're watching it crumble at the price the US economy.
Our markets have been totally manipulated by these made-up notions like Moore's Law and now that the game is up, people are acting shocked when the problem is obvious.
I was very impressed with this article for putting the time period within a ten year framework rather than extending it to thirty or fifty years like most business publications tend to do in order to keep shareholders from getting frightened.
But before ten years is up, a note I saw at EETimes may be of note. An engineer in the EDA field was saying that at 60nm the wall between design and manufacture must fall. Well, with all the new fab investment in China and the speculation about immersion lithography it looks like Intel may already be in deep shit. I know they were squealing when IBM's immersion tests came out looking good.
Well, bud, I think the issue of prohibition is all of those rolled into one. Apparently you don't see it that way. That's okay with me if you disagree. But I feel strongly about it and have for many years and I know I'm not the only one.
As you put it, that's your opinion. And that's fine. Many people base their votes on drug policy and prison reform issues only. I'm one of them. There are many others.
The drug war has always been and will always be, until it is over, the most important political issue in America. That's my opinion.
How can you say there was no revolt when they call it a war?
That was why I didn't get the Zalman Flower, too pricey. I love the design though. I'm planning to do something similar on my own when I add another case-less board to my collection.
If you haven't seen the Zalman Flower, google for it, it's pretty cool. Basically, it's just a monstrous and fine veined heat sink.
They do a lot of acrobatics to make it fit in a case though and that's where we part ways. Personally I stopped using cases altogether a while back. I just use racks with the components laying flat on the rack and it seems to keep all the components much cooler.
So, without the constraints of the case, I'm thinking along the lines of the Zalman Flower, but just using a bundle of several foot lengths of copper wires soldered onto a piece of copper plate.
Now before you jump to the conclusion that the weight will rip the heat sink clamps off the board, I got it all figured out. Since there's no case and the board is laying flat, the wires can bend outwards so that the heat sink's shape forms its own support.
It should look cool too. It's time to get past case modding and into integrated cooling forms similar to what this thing offers, but homebrew.
This is already done. Grid-tie inverters are the main reason solar panel sales are as strong as they are. And it doesn't necessarily make work more hazardous for linemen because it's not like they were previously able to work casually and assume the lines were safe. They've always had to be careful and methodical and always will.
The same is true in the West. Many of the authors that we now consider the core of the western literary canon did not publish under their own names when they were alive out of fear or persecution. And naturally this was particularly true when it came to erotic or satirical works. Two edgy genres with long a history of overlap.
However, I believe there is abundant evidence that historically Chinese writers and artists of all types have often considered pseudonymous works a matter of honor and a mark of distinction rather than mere insurance against persecution.
I can understand that as a self-described political refugee you have a strong agenda to insist that fear and oppession are the overiding factors, but I don't believe the historical record would support the assertion that this is the primary reason for the popularity of pseudonymous works that span centuries when the Middle Kingdom was undoubtedly the most prosperous, urban, liberal and civilized society in existance.
And if you think "jail time for words" is a sad thing, you must be quite upset about American law these days. If you look at the DMCA and the NetAct you will see that jail time for words is all too common in the here and now of the USA. Maybe someday you will "escape" from there too. Good luck in all your future escapes.
Well, I didn't have to. I chose to because I dig porn.
But the simple answer to your question is that in the history of Chinese literature there are five works called the five classics. All of these were written by pseudonymous authors. Basically, you can't claim authorship and hope to become a classic in Chinese literature. It's an unwritten law --Confucius say. Nah, just kidding.
But among the five classics is the Jin Ping Mei and I've read bits and pieces of it in Chinese, and several English translations and I can tell you that for the vast portion, it is pure porn. It's porn in the sense that there's no plot. It's just descriptions of positions, partners and sex scenes back to back over and over. In fact, it's got some similarities to Sade in the way it's so repetitive.
But despite being porn, it's still considered a classic. And other books among the classics also contain explicit sex scenes like the Dream of the Red Chamber although that's clearly not a pornographic work like the Jin Ping Mei.
I would suggest that the interweaving of sexuality into a culture represents a level of cultural maturity that is still mostly undeveloped in the West. And --watch him stretch it really thin-- you would expect the GPL to work best in mature and open cultures.
Having said all this, I realize you can easily demonstate that the current Chinese goverment is almost the opposite of these things. Indeed, the Jin Ping Mei is not legally distributed in Mainland China under the current government.
But my underlying position is that when you're talking about China you should speak of the greater culture that is China and is the real shared identity of the people of Mainland China, rather than the tenuous and questionable leadership in posion today.
About.com? Oh man, that's some killer research.
Look, what I said was that the writings attributed to the pseudonym Confucius were not all written by the person named Confucius. That's not the same as saying there was no person ever named Confucius, is it?
At the end there, Ian was talking about the future of Debian. I think the creeping, but dramatic, changes in commodity RAM technology are making it possible to run much more powerful systems with less resources. And I believe this will be a huge benefit priomarily to Linux because corporate OS's don't want to work better and faster with fewer hardware resources. That screws up the whole business plan. This is especially true for Apple, but it's also true for Microsoft.
I may be wrong, but my reading of the Midori Linux being packaged with the Chinese made Dragon processor was that it would run the whole OS in RAMDisk. And this same thing is being done among enthusiasts using stripped down LiveCD distros according the Knoppix discussing boards. So, already this is one direction Debian based distros are heading.
With 1GB PC2700 333Mhz RAM already coming close to a hundred dollars and 2BG already below $500 we're looking at a market where RAM is . . . well, it's the new frontier much more so than the next 66Mhz bump up in CPU speed.
But this new frontier is largely being ignored by closed source OS's because it doesn't offer any marketing advantage. In fact, quite the contrary, it poses the possiblity of cheaper or older systems running much more efficiently and potentially eating into future sales.
I think this is a big opportunity for Debian distros because nobody else wants to touch it. And it's not going away any time soon, so there's no rush. It seems to be a real ace up the sleeve.
In fact, you could say the entire three thousand year history of Chinese culture --never mind recent governments-- has treated what American lawyers call intellectual property much the way the FSF suggests.
In traditional Chinese literature, which includes abundant pornography, it has always been considered a matter of good taste that an author who is proud of his works will sign it pseudonymously. Indeed, writers such as Confucious are not, in fact, individual persons, but popular pseudonyms. This is a well known fact.
In fact, 400kv is an old standard. The US started using 800kv AC for long hauls in the 70s and then switched to DC in the 80s and 90s along with the rest of the world precisely because improvements in technology made it very efficient, reliable and cost effective.
If you google for HVDC, you'll find that Quebec is a leader in HVDC and even has a GUI CAD package for designing HVDC networks. Looks like a fun toy. But there's also lots of information on the history of the transition to HVDC from AC and the hows and whys and technical background.
It's not just that it's efficient either, adding DC makes your overall grid more reliable. It's simply better technology.
10,000 watt stereo amps!
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is the REAL deal with these diamonds in semiconductors. I just stumbled on it at another site. Wow. Of course, I should have come up with it from the beginning. This is huge.
Power amps. These babies are where this tech is needed most.
Who cares about CPUs anymore. I mean it's no mystery that x86 means 66Mhz clock and if all you're doing is multiplying the clock and then splitting it into different tasks with the OS, then why not just have a separate CPUs? You know what I'm saying? How exciting is that really? You need twice the computing power, get a KVM. I have four boards connected to this monitor and I have another similar setup in another room and it's incredibly cheap. Why would I spend twice the bucks for a single monster machine when I already have all the excess computing power I need at the flick of a dial and they're all hooked together on ethernet? It goes back to my original point --the packaging is the problem.
But when it comes to driving those 21" inch woofers, there's no such thing as too much power concentrated in one space and who cares about the heat when you're cranking the jams. And just think, with all that power we could see 30" woofers make it in the consumer market. You could use a few thousand watts just for that one speaker.
Diamond transistors will bring block rocking beats to the deaf!
Well, maybe I didn't express myself clearly. I was refering to the topic at hand and meant that long distance HVDC, like intercontinental power sharing, wasn't adopted a long time ago for political reasons. Of course you're right that for short haul use AC makes more sense.
Well you've just conceded the previous post's point. That's administration in title only. Sending out notes to tell people to do a job is not the same as doing the job, now is it?
Besides, my original point wasn't that there was a vast army of overpaid individuals. I'm sure the administration is thinly staffed. It usually is in public school networks. Not only is it thinly staffed, but as I mentioned, it's more or less off limits to everyone outside the extremely limited network staff. But I wasn't addessing the issue of staff numbers, I was addressing the waste of cash money. Did your poor overworked adminstrator buddy give you some cash figures on server licenses? Yeah, right. That's not available to the public. It's a security issue. Ha hah hah.
Simply asserting that there is a 1 to 3000 ratio of administrators to PCs doesn't answer my accusation, does it? In fact, it seems to be side-stepping which is probably the single greatest skill of school district administrators. You may want to consider getting into this line of work.
And as for your issue about all these apps that won't work under Wine. I can tell you as a developer with tens of thousands of dollars worth of Macromedia licenses that 99.99% of your Authorware and Director titles will work under Wine just as they do under Windows. Or, are you telling me that the classrooms don't use Macromedia based instructional materials? Interesting, well if that's the case you're in a very unusual district. But I suspect you've never tried running any of these titles under Wine and don't plan to although you seem happy to talk about how much trouble it would be if you did.
If you check the reference in the story it was to my main man Bucky Fuller. Of course he didn't invent long distance high voltage as he didn't invent the dome or the octet truss, but he popularized the use of all these things and I try to do the same. Boy oh boy does it bore the hell out of my wife.
But anyway, that's the answer to your question --HVDC. It's a well known and old idea that was never implemented for political rather than engineering reasons.
But another idea right along these lines of scaling up electricity is to simply build larger conventional turbogenerators. The big multi-gigawatt plants we have todays don't even come close to maximum efficiency. You know why they don't build them any bigger? The parts would be too expensive to transport. Really. It's fact. Terrawatt turbogenerators are possible and they'd be even more efficient at using conventional fuels, but they'd be so big they wouldn't be cost effective to build. Cost and efficiency is all so relative.
Statistics obviously don't mean jack and statitsitcal prognostications are perhaps the only thing less reliable. I personally think that the GNU/Linux desktop numbers are way higher than what gets reported. I mean it's free and you download it from the net. If sixty million people are using P2P to download DivX, Mp3, games and apps with who knows what kind of archiving I have to assume that downloading distros is not as challenging to the masses as folks imagine.
In fact, I think it's the non-geek types who are quickest to switch. They just want something that works and the fact is that whether or not they're really the ones to blame, MS products piss ordinary users off all the time. Sure, Linux will do the same, but you know how people are, they'll turn away just out of spite. Loyalty, hah. This is the twenty-first century.
it's not in the classrooms. That's the tricky part. You don't see the waste that goes on in public school districts because it's off limits even for the teachers. You walk into the classroom and you see this pathetic scene and you think, god these people need money bad. And they do, but that doesn't mean there isn't extravagant waste. It's just that you're not permitted to see it.
The waste is at the district level, not the classrooms. And the worst offenders are usually the district network admins why are owned by MS at the vast majority of American K-12 schools.
In large part, this district level administrative waste is the major motive for the charter school initiative.
It's all rather insidious though because if you ask for more information, you won't get anywhere for so-called security reasons. That's security like as in job security. Call it the corporate/educational complex if you will.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just thinking the same thing outloud when that Wired article on synthetic diamonds was up.
I would so much love to see a package design with a CPU that had DRAM clicked right onto the sides and just ditching the motherboard altogether.
Of course this would be a bit more than a package design to be useful without a board, it would require an SOC as well. Sounds out there, but TSMC was hyping their SOC plans as the next big thing awhile back.
But then all it would need would be outputs for VGA, USB2.0 and perhaps two Gig ethernet ports. That would be so sweet.
Imagine filling an industrial freezer case with a thousand of these little babies Use an oversized scroll compressor on the refrigerant and there ya go supercompiting for the masses. You could even put a glass lid on it with blue LEDs.
But even better, you could use them individually as well wherever you needed computing power and with the slick form factor they'd be so fashionable they'd probably even woo the Mac crowd. And talking about saving desk real estate. It's a win-win unless you're a mobo or case maker. So where is it?
are featured large in the biochemistry GRE subject test. It's that fission reproduction trick and the related regenerative abilities that gets them all the attention.
Apparently this position is quite popular among Russian scientists.
I read that some recent deep oil wells in rock strata that never reached the surface during times when life was plentiful have also raised some eyebrows.
I thought it was crazy, but then the part about how common it was to find petrochemicals on comets or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn did make me wonder if there might not be something to it.
But it is off-topic, isn't it.
Since each member of this organization is like an independent lending archive, then this seems to suggest that lending copies of your materials should be fine so you can keep the originals.
If you disagree, I'd like to know which part of the copyright law supports your position. You'll find the part about fair use all nice and easy to read in HTML here at the LOC.
I burn thousands of silver CDRs every year, always the cheapest possible ones in bulk, for a publisher that publishes books with accompanying CDRs.
In the last five years of doing this, we've only had problems with mold that could be wiped off restoring their usefulness without returning them to us.
Perhaps the Danish market got ripped off. It's quite possible that somebody made some money moving defective discs.
We've seen a few stacks where individual discs intermittently would fail to write a few years back. That was a hassle, but after a few months of going back and forth with the supplier the quality seemed to improve and never went bad again. This definitely sounds like there was a bad shipment.
But that ol' get what you pay for wheeze is obviously somebody's idea of a joke. Probably someone with a lousy sense of humor drinking cheap booze. You know, listening to Rush Limbaugh on AM and slurring out Ditto Rush! Every now and then.
I just found a stack of old el cheapo music CDRs in a translucent case sitting next to a window that had been overlooked for several years. I thought for sure it was all but destroyed and, indeed, the label sides were faded. Surprisingly, none of the data seemed to have any errors.
Excellent explanation about the various circuits.
I think you're right that the Supreme Court hasn't looked at a number of these issues. And even since the DMCA was first proposed, I seem to recall hearing that the underlying idea was the everyone on board, Congress and the Clinton administration, knew it was unconstitutional so it was politically pain free. Just pass it and wait for the Supreme Court to nullify it. The question is why the RIAA is so inept as to force it to the Supreme Court.
The next one is the NET Act. That is the most absurd piece of legislation I can imagine. It essentially tries to re-write the English language to make all exchanges commercial. That's illogical on so many levels. To take it to an extreme it makes all sex prostitution, but you don't have to take it to an extreme. How about gifts? How can the IRS have a gift exemption if a gift is a commercial transaction? If a gift isn't commercial, then how is P2P commercial? You can't have it both ways.
So true, and this same phenomena has much to do with the problems in the markets where making the numbers became more important than being honest about accounting. It's a confidence trick of enormous proportions and we're watching it crumble at the price the US economy.
Our markets have been totally manipulated by these made-up notions like Moore's Law and now that the game is up, people are acting shocked when the problem is obvious.
I was very impressed with this article for putting the time period within a ten year framework rather than extending it to thirty or fifty years like most business publications tend to do in order to keep shareholders from getting frightened.
But before ten years is up, a note I saw at EETimes may be of note. An engineer in the EDA field was saying that at 60nm the wall between design and manufacture must fall. Well, with all the new fab investment in China and the speculation about immersion lithography it looks like Intel may already be in deep shit. I know they were squealing when IBM's immersion tests came out looking good.
Well, bud, I think the issue of prohibition is all of those rolled into one. Apparently you don't see it that way. That's okay with me if you disagree. But I feel strongly about it and have for many years and I know I'm not the only one.
As you put it, that's your opinion. And that's fine. Many people base their votes on drug policy and prison reform issues only. I'm one of them. There are many others.
The drug war has always been and will always be, until it is over, the most important political issue in America. That's my opinion.
How can you say there was no revolt when they call it a war?
That was why I didn't get the Zalman Flower, too pricey. I love the design though. I'm planning to do something similar on my own when I add another case-less board to my collection.
If you haven't seen the Zalman Flower, google for it, it's pretty cool. Basically, it's just a monstrous and fine veined heat sink.
They do a lot of acrobatics to make it fit in a case though and that's where we part ways. Personally I stopped using cases altogether a while back. I just use racks with the components laying flat on the rack and it seems to keep all the components much cooler.
So, without the constraints of the case, I'm thinking along the lines of the Zalman Flower, but just using a bundle of several foot lengths of copper wires soldered onto a piece of copper plate.
Now before you jump to the conclusion that the weight will rip the heat sink clamps off the board, I got it all figured out. Since there's no case and the board is laying flat, the wires can bend outwards so that the heat sink's shape forms its own support.
It should look cool too. It's time to get past case modding and into integrated cooling forms similar to what this thing offers, but homebrew.
This is already done. Grid-tie inverters are the main reason solar panel sales are as strong as they are. And it doesn't necessarily make work more hazardous for linemen because it's not like they were previously able to work casually and assume the lines were safe. They've always had to be careful and methodical and always will.
The same is true in the West. Many of the authors that we now consider the core of the western literary canon did not publish under their own names when they were alive out of fear or persecution. And naturally this was particularly true when it came to erotic or satirical works. Two edgy genres with long a history of overlap.
However, I believe there is abundant evidence that historically Chinese writers and artists of all types have often considered pseudonymous works a matter of honor and a mark of distinction rather than mere insurance against persecution.
I can understand that as a self-described political refugee you have a strong agenda to insist that fear and oppession are the overiding factors, but I don't believe the historical record would support the assertion that this is the primary reason for the popularity of pseudonymous works that span centuries when the Middle Kingdom was undoubtedly the most prosperous, urban, liberal and civilized society in existance.
And if you think "jail time for words" is a sad thing, you must be quite upset about American law these days. If you look at the DMCA and the NetAct you will see that jail time for words is all too common in the here and now of the USA. Maybe someday you will "escape" from there too. Good luck in all your future escapes.
Wow, no kidding. Even a jury that has no idea about programming can see the similarity here. This seems to put the whole issue to bed.
Well, I didn't have to. I chose to because I dig porn.
But the simple answer to your question is that in the history of Chinese literature there are five works called the five classics. All of these were written by pseudonymous authors. Basically, you can't claim authorship and hope to become a classic in Chinese literature. It's an unwritten law --Confucius say. Nah, just kidding.
But among the five classics is the Jin Ping Mei and I've read bits and pieces of it in Chinese, and several English translations and I can tell you that for the vast portion, it is pure porn. It's porn in the sense that there's no plot. It's just descriptions of positions, partners and sex scenes back to back over and over. In fact, it's got some similarities to Sade in the way it's so repetitive.
But despite being porn, it's still considered a classic. And other books among the classics also contain explicit sex scenes like the Dream of the Red Chamber although that's clearly not a pornographic work like the Jin Ping Mei.
I would suggest that the interweaving of sexuality into a culture represents a level of cultural maturity that is still mostly undeveloped in the West. And --watch him stretch it really thin-- you would expect the GPL to work best in mature and open cultures.
Having said all this, I realize you can easily demonstate that the current Chinese goverment is almost the opposite of these things. Indeed, the Jin Ping Mei is not legally distributed in Mainland China under the current government.
But my underlying position is that when you're talking about China you should speak of the greater culture that is China and is the real shared identity of the people of Mainland China, rather than the tenuous and questionable leadership in posion today.
About.com? Oh man, that's some killer research.
Look, what I said was that the writings attributed to the pseudonym Confucius were not all written by the person named Confucius. That's not the same as saying there was no person ever named Confucius, is it?
At the end there, Ian was talking about the future of Debian. I think the creeping, but dramatic, changes in commodity RAM technology are making it possible to run much more powerful systems with less resources. And I believe this will be a huge benefit priomarily to Linux because corporate OS's don't want to work better and faster with fewer hardware resources. That screws up the whole business plan. This is especially true for Apple, but it's also true for Microsoft.
I may be wrong, but my reading of the Midori Linux being packaged with the Chinese made Dragon processor was that it would run the whole OS in RAMDisk. And this same thing is being done among enthusiasts using stripped down LiveCD distros according the Knoppix discussing boards. So, already this is one direction Debian based distros are heading.
With 1GB PC2700 333Mhz RAM already coming close to a hundred dollars and 2BG already below $500 we're looking at a market where RAM is . . . well, it's the new frontier much more so than the next 66Mhz bump up in CPU speed.
But this new frontier is largely being ignored by closed source OS's because it doesn't offer any marketing advantage. In fact, quite the contrary, it poses the possiblity of cheaper or older systems running much more efficiently and potentially eating into future sales.
I think this is a big opportunity for Debian distros because nobody else wants to touch it. And it's not going away any time soon, so there's no rush. It seems to be a real ace up the sleeve.
In fact, you could say the entire three thousand year history of Chinese culture --never mind recent governments-- has treated what American lawyers call intellectual property much the way the FSF suggests.
In traditional Chinese literature, which includes abundant pornography, it has always been considered a matter of good taste that an author who is proud of his works will sign it pseudonymously. Indeed, writers such as Confucious are not, in fact, individual persons, but popular pseudonyms. This is a well known fact.
In fact, 400kv is an old standard. The US started using 800kv AC for long hauls in the 70s and then switched to DC in the 80s and 90s along with the rest of the world precisely because improvements in technology made it very efficient, reliable and cost effective.
If you google for HVDC, you'll find that Quebec is a leader in HVDC and even has a GUI CAD package for designing HVDC networks. Looks like a fun toy. But there's also lots of information on the history of the transition to HVDC from AC and the hows and whys and technical background.
It's not just that it's efficient either, adding DC makes your overall grid more reliable. It's simply better technology.
This is the REAL deal with these diamonds in semiconductors. I just stumbled on it at another site. Wow. Of course, I should have come up with it from the beginning. This is huge.
Power amps. These babies are where this tech is needed most.
Who cares about CPUs anymore. I mean it's no mystery that x86 means 66Mhz clock and if all you're doing is multiplying the clock and then splitting it into different tasks with the OS, then why not just have a separate CPUs? You know what I'm saying? How exciting is that really? You need twice the computing power, get a KVM. I have four boards connected to this monitor and I have another similar setup in another room and it's incredibly cheap. Why would I spend twice the bucks for a single monster machine when I already have all the excess computing power I need at the flick of a dial and they're all hooked together on ethernet? It goes back to my original point --the packaging is the problem.
But when it comes to driving those 21" inch woofers, there's no such thing as too much power concentrated in one space and who cares about the heat when you're cranking the jams. And just think, with all that power we could see 30" woofers make it in the consumer market. You could use a few thousand watts just for that one speaker.
Diamond transistors will bring block rocking beats to the deaf!
Well, maybe I didn't express myself clearly. I was refering to the topic at hand and meant that long distance HVDC, like intercontinental power sharing, wasn't adopted a long time ago for political reasons. Of course you're right that for short haul use AC makes more sense.
Well you've just conceded the previous post's point. That's administration in title only. Sending out notes to tell people to do a job is not the same as doing the job, now is it?
Besides, my original point wasn't that there was a vast army of overpaid individuals. I'm sure the administration is thinly staffed. It usually is in public school networks. Not only is it thinly staffed, but as I mentioned, it's more or less off limits to everyone outside the extremely limited network staff. But I wasn't addessing the issue of staff numbers, I was addressing the waste of cash money. Did your poor overworked adminstrator buddy give you some cash figures on server licenses? Yeah, right. That's not available to the public. It's a security issue. Ha hah hah.
Simply asserting that there is a 1 to 3000 ratio of administrators to PCs doesn't answer my accusation, does it? In fact, it seems to be side-stepping which is probably the single greatest skill of school district administrators. You may want to consider getting into this line of work.
And as for your issue about all these apps that won't work under Wine. I can tell you as a developer with tens of thousands of dollars worth of Macromedia licenses that 99.99% of your Authorware and Director titles will work under Wine just as they do under Windows. Or, are you telling me that the classrooms don't use Macromedia based instructional materials? Interesting, well if that's the case you're in a very unusual district. But I suspect you've never tried running any of these titles under Wine and don't plan to although you seem happy to talk about how much trouble it would be if you did.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
RMS is cool, but my pony tail is way longer. He's got me in the beard department though.
If you check the reference in the story it was to my main man Bucky Fuller. Of course he didn't invent long distance high voltage as he didn't invent the dome or the octet truss, but he popularized the use of all these things and I try to do the same. Boy oh boy does it bore the hell out of my wife.
But anyway, that's the answer to your question --HVDC. It's a well known and old idea that was never implemented for political rather than engineering reasons.
But another idea right along these lines of scaling up electricity is to simply build larger conventional turbogenerators. The big multi-gigawatt plants we have todays don't even come close to maximum efficiency. You know why they don't build them any bigger? The parts would be too expensive to transport. Really. It's fact. Terrawatt turbogenerators are possible and they'd be even more efficient at using conventional fuels, but they'd be so big they wouldn't be cost effective to build. Cost and efficiency is all so relative.
Statistics obviously don't mean jack and statitsitcal prognostications are perhaps the only thing less reliable. I personally think that the GNU/Linux desktop numbers are way higher than what gets reported. I mean it's free and you download it from the net. If sixty million people are using P2P to download DivX, Mp3, games and apps with who knows what kind of archiving I have to assume that downloading distros is not as challenging to the masses as folks imagine.
In fact, I think it's the non-geek types who are quickest to switch. They just want something that works and the fact is that whether or not they're really the ones to blame, MS products piss ordinary users off all the time. Sure, Linux will do the same, but you know how people are, they'll turn away just out of spite. Loyalty, hah. This is the twenty-first century.
it's not in the classrooms. That's the tricky part. You don't see the waste that goes on in public school districts because it's off limits even for the teachers. You walk into the classroom and you see this pathetic scene and you think, god these people need money bad. And they do, but that doesn't mean there isn't extravagant waste. It's just that you're not permitted to see it.
The waste is at the district level, not the classrooms. And the worst offenders are usually the district network admins why are owned by MS at the vast majority of American K-12 schools.
In large part, this district level administrative waste is the major motive for the charter school initiative.
It's all rather insidious though because if you ask for more information, you won't get anywhere for so-called security reasons. That's security like as in job security. Call it the corporate/educational complex if you will.