I really hope languages become more abstract
on
As Languages Evolve...
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· Score: 4, Interesting
As I recall from my software engineering class, programmers program at the same rate in lines of code regardless of the language (I believe IBM did the study in the 80's, but dont quote me on that). Therefore, programming languages SHOULD be more abstract to increase productivity. It also comes down to the "reinventing the wheel" factor. The more bug-free features/libraries we can stuff into a language, the more we can produce bug free code quicker. The only problem is of course that abstraction comes at the cost of speed. How much more enjoyable is it to program in java and not have to worry about cleaning up memory than say C or even assembly where everything is a battle. I dont know about you, but I would much rather type create_new_window() than worry about framebuffers and things of that nature. Hopefully this can be accomplished while keeping speed up and code bloat down
Longer, thinner cables are a huge advantage. As processors start catching up to space heaters in the amount of heat they throw off, airflow is ever more critical in a case. Ribbon cables can really screw up the flow in a case. In the case of meter long cables, they could even be ran along the side of the case. And do you honestly like ribbon cables? serial ata will have a keyed connector... no more guessing as to which way it should plug in. Similarly, one device per header should reduce aggravation between master and slave drives. Have you seen the size of the new headers? They are smaller than half the size of the ribbon connectors, and also, since there are fewer data lines, there is alot less space needed on the mobo for connections. And yeah the speed will be faster. Serial ATA was never intended to be a major milestone in computing like the article hypes it up to be. However, it IS an improvement, and a step in the right direction. I personally can not wait until I build a system without those dreaded annoying ribbon cables. Its nice, its better, it IS backward compatible (they will sell adapters to convert the two connections). You are not losing anything here, but you are gaining some nice advantages.
Actually, what often happens in places like China and Southeast Asia is that companies sign agreements to employ X number of workers. The nice thing (to the companies) is that the workers are so cheap that they can often cost less money to employ to do the machinery's job once you consider the cost of upkeeping the machines. Even if you dont come out ahead, the difference is minimal to these companies that still get to hire all those people for labor intensive work for dirt cheap. I think you are a little off base by assuming that machines do most of the work. These companies do move there for a reason, and while lax laws are a big part of that, I think saving on labor costs is still number 1. I mean people still need to unpack trucks and maintain the facilities and things like that. In the US, guys like that make $12-20 an hour. Over there, they make a few dollars a day at the very most? So you are talking about HUGE savings. Even the most sophisticated automated chip plants employ hundreds of people. It adds up very quick.
It is unlikely that you would experience lag due to the root servers going down unless you were using those same routes which were experiencing the DDOS. It is still unlikely though that routes even a few hops away from the server's main links were completely saturated though. All the DNS server does is resolve the domain name to an IP address, once it is done for a site it does not need to be done again. Also, it is often cached either on your local machine, or your local ISP's DNS server, so you rarely need to actually go all the way up to the root server.
well, since the servers cache the lookup info, they dont need to be as impressive as you might think. Each domain has its own domain server with its own cache. So... you lookup slashdot.org, your machine might have the IP cached, and your domain's machine might have the machine cached (which is very likely). Alot of requests do not need to go through the root servers. This is especially true nowadays since people for the most part tend to have 5 or 10 or whatever sites they visit often, and rarely stray from them.
Well I think this comes back to the fact that most people only use their machine to surf the web and read email. I think it is a fair guess that most of these people have onboard video or an otherwise anemic card, along with a 5400rpm HD, etc. Also, unlike business machines which are usually on 24 hours a day for their entire lifespans, I would say most home computers are not on as much and maybe more importantly- recieve less use as they get older and get relegated as a secondary machine in a house. I would say very few home machines get used for much more than word, websurfing and file sharing nowadays, which is a breeze for todays, yesterday's and even two years ago processors. This is a bit of a stretch, but I worked for a company that regularly made use of upgrades to extend the life of a machine... adding second disk drives, upgrading the processor, ram, etc... but of course never even thinking about upgrading the PS. I can not say how prevalent this is in other companies, but if it is, that could be another reason the PS's are overloaded and thus fail.
Well, considering all the work that has been put into all the "minor" version upgrades, especially 2.2->2.4, I think there is an expectation that any major kernel version jump should have a considerable number of new major features included in it. From a geek POV, its not that big of a deal, but to some boss type making decisions on something he has only a vague grasp of (bigger version numbers are better than smaller ones) It is important, and if somewhere he reads that the change from 2.whatever he is using to 3.0 doesnt include anything of signifigance, he/she will then be dissapointed in Linux's development. If you want to encourage widespread adoption, you have to play by the business world's rules. It is unfortunate, yes, but what can you do? And if Linux is reduced to a small niche community supported OS, progress will slow down quite a bit, especially in areas like enterprise computing where companies like IBM have been throwing a great deal of weight behind the OS.
well, this is an academic program supported by the various sources that academic types get funding from (state agencies, the university, private sponsors, etc.) I dont think they ever had any intention of making it able to support itself. SETI has been running a long time, and most likely the core project will still run even if the @home portion has to go. Even though the bandwidth costs are high for the project, if the project ever had to purchase THAT kind of processing power for itself, I am sure the cost would far exceed by many orders of magnitude the price for processing time now. If the funders look at a cost/benefit analysis of the project they will find the money. SETI was meant to be a very long term project. It must be nice to not be expected to produce any results at any given time:). I mean correct me if I am wrong, but 1 million people (which I think is about right) * 2 megabyte (which I think is alot) = 1,000GB right? An OC-3 + whatever connection should just about cover that, so youre looking at bandwidth costs of around $100k/month, or about 1.2 million per year. Now I bet you there is absolutely no way that they could come even remotely close to getting that kind of processing power for that little amount of money. For a popular (with the people) project like this, I would think getting another million to run for a year would be a piece of cake. And is this news? Projects like this are always in need of funding. At my old university every year the chairman came by and said, geez, the funding is really tight this year, I dont know... we might have to cut you 10% or so... at which point the scientists beg and plead and say theyll do this this and that and whatnot and negotiate to get their funding. Its a game. I doubt seti@home is going anywhere.
The good old days were as never as good as wethink
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 1
When you were growing up in the 60's, did you have: A dishwasher? DVD player? VCR? TV in every room? Two cars less than 7 years old? Air conditioning? Cable/Digital Cable? A computer? Internet Access? the latest gaming console, mebbe even two? Microwave? Your own room? Your lawn mowed by a landscaper? A cell phone? A big screen tv? Your own stereo system? A home theater system?
Regardless of your personal opinion of the value of these items, I would say a majority of middle class homes have 80% of the things on this list, and THAT is why there are more two family households. Think about it, if you lived like your parents, you would have no A/C, be washing your dishes every night, driving the equivalent of a hyundai accent, climbing on the roof to fix that damn antenna to get reception constantly, at 100k miles the car would be almost worthless, etc. but... your monthly bills would be.. Phone (dont forget you can only call people who use the same phone company as you), electric, mortgage, mebbe a car payment and insurance. People are working harder to maintain a better lifestyle... The good old days were never as good as they seemed. Do you really think your father was better off driving to work in 90+ temps in the summer with no A/C in his car? Or your mom was better off having to make a production out of dinner and doing laundry every night? Do you think your parents went out to eat as often as you do? Went out to bars, clubs, movies as often as you do? Dont kid yourself, we're doing pretty damn good for ourselves. The real problem is that everyone feels they NEED everything, and thats where the debt problem comes in, and they only see the things they dont have (BMW, central air, Plasma TV). I can live my grandparents lifestyle without a problem. I believe anyone can.
An important clarification is that we have have a smaller percentage of young people, not fewer total young people... One thing that makes me wonder is... where is all the wealth from the older generation going to go when they pass on?
well I am fairly certain the author was referring to having a total worth of $100,000. This includes IRA's, 401k's, equity in your house, savings, stocks, and any other assets you may have. Your salary isnt that great (although I am surprised, I heard chef's salaries have skyrocketed over the past 10 -20 years) but if you had bought your home, be it a condo, trailer, co-op, whatever... you would be alot better off right now. I dont know what area you are from, but where I live, rents are a little less than $1k/ month. Houses are ridiculously expensive, but co-ops and homes in undesirable areas can be found for that monthly mortgage, especially if you buy one with someone else. so, over 10 years you could have taken $120k in money that would have went down a rent hole and put it towards a mortgage, you would have about $25k in equity right now. I am not criticising you, I am just trying to show you where the author is getting his figures from. These figures are a little out of hand, I mean they have to assume an above average earner with ridiculously disciplined spending habits who is willing to forgo going out after work in favor of throwing that $20 into the market, but hey its money magazine. I guess that type of person who reads this stuff. Even then, you come down to a quality of life issue. I am sure there is some guy sitting home on friday night watching basic cable on his 14" TV eating white rice and ramen noodles with a practical used civc in his driveway who is absolutely thrilled that he has money in the bank, but is that really how you want to live? Is that what makes you happy? You have to remember that the author is addressing a readership whose main goal in life tends to be the numbers on their bank statement, not necessarily people who are happy.
Is it a significantly dirtier process? Is it dirtier environmentally than building an oil plant? nuclear? gas, etc? (Obviously I am asking on a per kilowatt basis, not one cell against an entire plant). I am curious... I could not find any information on the environmental cost of producing a solar cell...
Well, like I mentioned tax rebates and power company incentives bring it down to that point. Also, in my area the power company will allow you to reverse the meter (thus helping put more power back in the system when they need it most), elminating or at least reducing the need for a large battery system. I forget if you still require an inverter using that system... I forget the details of how the systems work.
Correct me If I am wrong... but... we are producing 1kW with our pretend $3000 array on our house. Now, lets say you get that peak power for 8 hours a day. 8 hours *7 days * 4 weeks we get 224kilowatt-hours each month. * your rate....1103... we get $24.70 as your monthly return... without factoring any of the other benefits (clean energy, power outages not as large a problem, etc...). It will take about 10 years for the array to pay for itself. However, as I mentioned before, this is about alot more than just saving money. You are pretty lucky, in my area rates average 16 cents per kWh, making monthy savings about $35.
Ok I just realized my math was off there, so $3000 would have each house produce 1kW, which would mean you would need 1000 homes per megawatt, or 3000 homes for 3 megawatts, aka a "few" megawatts.
Well.. I doubt that you would need to cover 1/2 of southern california to provide all the energy needs... but even taking that as a fact... Consider what would happen if everyone, or even a significant number of people (thousands to millions) put a couple of panels on their roof. You are talking about a serious amount of energy production, and just as important, a serious amount of energy production when it is needed most, during the hottest part of the day when everyone has their air conditioners on high. The point of the student's exercise was not to turn people's houses into Multi-Megawatt power plants, but to make homes more self sufficient, energy efficient, and able to produce in aggregate large amounts of energy in a pollutionless manner. After tax incentives and rebates in my area (LI,NY) the cost for solar power is about $3/ watt as I recall (which is considered by the industry to be a magic price point, ala the $1000 PC). So you say everyone spends $3000 on a system, or all new houses incorporate a system, and produces 3kW of power during the day. Times 1000 homes is 3 megawatts, without all the impending doom problems that lurk with nuclear power (dont peg me as some tree hugger though- nuclear is my preferred method of power after hydroelectric and solar). Nice added benefits: reduced reliance on fossil fuels and thus the middle east. Also... power outages are less problematic. I dont think any of the students or even any solar energy zealots really believe that solar is the answer to all of our energy problems, but solar can make a huge dent in our energy needs.
Hmm... so the internet is supposed to be able to withstand a nuclear attack? Yet some misguided admin can bring it to its knees by botching an upgrade? Interesting...
This is where watercooling can reap benefits, and could also save money. With a watercooling system the only moving part would be a waterpump. This pump would be the only mechanical point of failure. This would lead to quieter, cooler systems. Waterpumps do not need to spin at high rpm's in high heat environments which also make them more reliable. Instead of adding more fans, all you need to add are more waterblocks over your system. If Oem's or large manufacturers started to develop products based on watercooling, I bet waterblock and radiator prices would drop to the point where they are only marginally more expensive than fan systems, especially as components such as disk drives, north and south bridge chips, graphics cards, and power supplies are requiring more cooling power. When you also consider that most watercooling solutions on the market today are designed for hardcore overclocking, and you could use much smaller (and cheaper) radiators and pumps, watercooling could become integrated into mainstream PC's. I think most of the resistance stems from a vision of water leaks ruining all of your hardware. But a properly sealed system should have a much smaller rate of failure than a five fan system whirring at 4,000 rpm's each whose noise drives you crazy... I guess that giant circular copper finned heatsink with the fan on top does look like something out of a sci-fi movie, but I would much rather have piece of mind(somewhat) and glow in the dark cooling tubes running through my system...
Re:And Taco said "Let there be comments."
on
Slashdot Turns 5
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· Score: 2, Informative
you can actually find out... using the URL... the sid is the id of the story... but using the search feature, and sorting by date, the earliest story still archived appears to be here... (and it appears someone has found a security hole?)
I dont know if the archive is completely accurate though... they mentioned data was lost...
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?threshold=0&op=sto ri es&sort=1&start=28150
If you noticed, he didnt count the file managers in his count of 37... he said if he did he would have about 51 total. He also did not count his two sick OS'es.
You really cant compare what the RIAA is doing (or should be doing) with what Microsoft is doing. Using windows involves a skill... gaining mind share is huge for a computer company. FUD that arises from uncertainty over using a new system and unfamiliarity with it creates friction in the market that prevents people from jumping ship from product to product. Microsoft is not really selling a CD, or even data on a cd... They are selling the ability to easily use your computer in a productive manner. In a sense they are not even trying to sell software. If they were selling software, features such as X amount of features in X amount of megabytes might be mentioned, or loads in X amount of seconds on a given computer might be mentioned in ads. Instead, the ads say "get things done better" , "99.999% uptime"... etc... Music the RIAA is selling requires no skills to listen to, it doesnt matter if you have listened to Nirvana and only Nirvana for 10 years straight, love Nirvana, spent hours reading about Nirvana... You can go and listen to any other group out there without a problem. The RIAA also does not benefit from companies buying mass quantities of music that their employees like to listen to. Its not like if I go home and listen to Pearl Jam, my company is going to hold a meeting at any point and say, hey the employees really like this pearl jam stuff. Maybe we should play that in the elevator instead of Bach. I dont see how you could make a parallel between the two different types of piracy. I guess to some small extent, if everyone listens to Britney Spears, and loves her, then it will be easier to introduce some facsmile of her (christina aguilera, IE) and make a quick easy buck off of it. That is a real stretch though.
I think this would be alot more interesting if they used today's PC architecture, and stretched it to the limit with 1k. Maybe its just because I am too young to really know what Commodore 64 games looked like, so I dont have much of a basis to compare these games.
Carmack looks to raise the common denominator. How many companies drag their feet implementing the latest direct X features or using programmable pixel shaders, etc. because the lowest common denominator is still a tnt2 ultra or something like that. Carmack, due to his immense respect in the industry, is one of the only people who can actually force the bar up. His games have been legendary for their use of the latest technology and that is what people buy them for (well that and they are damn fun). He writes for the very high end visual gaming experience. True, since Quake the game play improvements have been kind of marginal, but that in no way means he is lazy, or can't program well.
Slashdot Mirror
As I recall from my software engineering class, programmers program at the same rate in lines of code regardless of the language (I believe IBM did the study in the 80's, but dont quote me on that). Therefore, programming languages SHOULD be more abstract to increase productivity. It also comes down to the "reinventing the wheel" factor. The more bug-free features/libraries we can stuff into a language, the more we can produce bug free code quicker. The only problem is of course that abstraction comes at the cost of speed. How much more enjoyable is it to program in java and not have to worry about cleaning up memory than say C or even assembly where everything is a battle. I dont know about you, but I would much rather type create_new_window() than worry about framebuffers and things of that nature. Hopefully this can be accomplished while keeping speed up and code bloat down
Longer, thinner cables are a huge advantage. As processors start catching up to space heaters in the amount of heat they throw off, airflow is ever more critical in a case. Ribbon cables can really screw up the flow in a case. In the case of meter long cables, they could even be ran along the side of the case. And do you honestly like ribbon cables? serial ata will have a keyed connector... no more guessing as to which way it should plug in. Similarly, one device per header should reduce aggravation between master and slave drives. Have you seen the size of the new headers? They are smaller than half the size of the ribbon connectors, and also, since there are fewer data lines, there is alot less space needed on the mobo for connections. And yeah the speed will be faster. Serial ATA was never intended to be a major milestone in computing like the article hypes it up to be. However, it IS an improvement, and a step in the right direction. I personally can not wait until I build a system without those dreaded annoying ribbon cables. Its nice, its better, it IS backward compatible (they will sell adapters to convert the two connections). You are not losing anything here, but you are gaining some nice advantages.
Actually, what often happens in places like China and Southeast Asia is that companies sign agreements to employ X number of workers. The nice thing (to the companies) is that the workers are so cheap that they can often cost less money to employ to do the machinery's job once you consider the cost of upkeeping the machines. Even if you dont come out ahead, the difference is minimal to these companies that still get to hire all those people for labor intensive work for dirt cheap. I think you are a little off base by assuming that machines do most of the work. These companies do move there for a reason, and while lax laws are a big part of that, I think saving on labor costs is still number 1. I mean people still need to unpack trucks and maintain the facilities and things like that. In the US, guys like that make $12-20 an hour. Over there, they make a few dollars a day at the very most? So you are talking about HUGE savings. Even the most sophisticated automated chip plants employ hundreds of people. It adds up very quick.
It is unlikely that you would experience lag due to the root servers going down unless you were using those same routes which were experiencing the DDOS. It is still unlikely though that routes even a few hops away from the server's main links were completely saturated though. All the DNS server does is resolve the domain name to an IP address, once it is done for a site it does not need to be done again. Also, it is often cached either on your local machine, or your local ISP's DNS server, so you rarely need to actually go all the way up to the root server.
well, since the servers cache the lookup info, they dont need to be as impressive as you might think. Each domain has its own domain server with its own cache. So... you lookup slashdot.org, your machine might have the IP cached, and your domain's machine might have the machine cached (which is very likely). Alot of requests do not need to go through the root servers. This is especially true nowadays since people for the most part tend to have 5 or 10 or whatever sites they visit often, and rarely stray from them.
Well I think this comes back to the fact that most people only use their machine to surf the web and read email. I think it is a fair guess that most of these people have onboard video or an otherwise anemic card, along with a 5400rpm HD, etc. Also, unlike business machines which are usually on 24 hours a day for their entire lifespans, I would say most home computers are not on as much and maybe more importantly- recieve less use as they get older and get relegated as a secondary machine in a house. I would say very few home machines get used for much more than word, websurfing and file sharing nowadays, which is a breeze for todays, yesterday's and even two years ago processors. This is a bit of a stretch, but I worked for a company that regularly made use of upgrades to extend the life of a machine... adding second disk drives, upgrading the processor, ram, etc... but of course never even thinking about upgrading the PS. I can not say how prevalent this is in other companies, but if it is, that could be another reason the PS's are overloaded and thus fail.
Well, considering all the work that has been put into all the "minor" version upgrades, especially 2.2->2.4, I think there is an expectation that any major kernel version jump should have a considerable number of new major features included in it. From a geek POV, its not that big of a deal, but to some boss type making decisions on something he has only a vague grasp of (bigger version numbers are better than smaller ones) It is important, and if somewhere he reads that the change from 2.whatever he is using to 3.0 doesnt include anything of signifigance, he/she will then be dissapointed in Linux's development. If you want to encourage widespread adoption, you have to play by the business world's rules. It is unfortunate, yes, but what can you do? And if Linux is reduced to a small niche community supported OS, progress will slow down quite a bit, especially in areas like enterprise computing where companies like IBM have been throwing a great deal of weight behind the OS.
well, this is an academic program supported by the various sources that academic types get funding from (state agencies, the university, private sponsors, etc.) I dont think they ever had any intention of making it able to support itself. SETI has been running a long time, and most likely the core project will still run even if the @home portion has to go. Even though the bandwidth costs are high for the project, if the project ever had to purchase THAT kind of processing power for itself, I am sure the cost would far exceed by many orders of magnitude the price for processing time now. If the funders look at a cost/benefit analysis of the project they will find the money. SETI was meant to be a very long term project. It must be nice to not be expected to produce any results at any given time :). I mean correct me if I am wrong, but 1 million people (which I think is about right) * 2 megabyte (which I think is alot) = 1,000GB right? An OC-3 + whatever connection should just about cover that, so youre looking at bandwidth costs of around $100k/month, or about 1.2 million per year. Now I bet you there is absolutely no way that they could come even remotely close to getting that kind of processing power for that little amount of money. For a popular (with the people) project like this, I would think getting another million to run for a year would be a piece of cake. And is this news? Projects like this are always in need of funding. At my old university every year the chairman came by and said, geez, the funding is really tight this year, I dont know... we might have to cut you 10% or so... at which point the scientists beg and plead and say theyll do this this and that and whatnot and negotiate to get their funding. Its a game. I doubt seti@home is going anywhere.
When you were growing up in the 60's, did you have:
A dishwasher?
DVD player?
VCR?
TV in every room?
Two cars less than 7 years old?
Air conditioning?
Cable/Digital Cable?
A computer?
Internet Access?
the latest gaming console, mebbe even two?
Microwave?
Your own room?
Your lawn mowed by a landscaper?
A cell phone?
A big screen tv?
Your own stereo system?
A home theater system?
Regardless of your personal opinion of the value of these items, I would say a majority of middle class homes have 80% of the things on this list, and THAT is why there are more two family households. Think about it, if you lived like your parents, you would have no A/C, be washing your dishes every night, driving the equivalent of a hyundai accent, climbing on the roof to fix that damn antenna to get reception constantly, at 100k miles the car would be almost worthless, etc. but... your monthly bills would be.. Phone (dont forget you can only call people who use the same phone company as you), electric, mortgage, mebbe a car payment and insurance. People are working harder to maintain a better lifestyle... The good old days were never as good as they seemed. Do you really think your father was better off driving to work in 90+ temps in the summer with no A/C in his car? Or your mom was better off having to make a production out of dinner and doing laundry every night? Do you think your parents went out to eat as often as you do? Went out to bars, clubs, movies as often as you do? Dont kid yourself, we're doing pretty damn good for ourselves. The real problem is that everyone feels they NEED everything, and thats where the debt problem comes in, and they only see the things they dont have (BMW, central air, Plasma TV). I can live my grandparents lifestyle without a problem. I believe anyone can.
An important clarification is that we have have a smaller percentage of young people, not fewer total young people... One thing that makes me wonder is... where is all the wealth from the older generation going to go when they pass on?
well I am fairly certain the author was referring to having a total worth of $100,000. This includes IRA's, 401k's, equity in your house, savings, stocks, and any other assets you may have. Your salary isnt that great (although I am surprised, I heard chef's salaries have skyrocketed over the past 10 -20 years) but if you had bought your home, be it a condo, trailer, co-op, whatever... you would be alot better off right now. I dont know what area you are from, but where I live, rents are a little less than $1k/ month. Houses are ridiculously expensive, but co-ops and homes in undesirable areas can be found for that monthly mortgage, especially if you buy one with someone else. so, over 10 years you could have taken $120k in money that would have went down a rent hole and put it towards a mortgage, you would have about $25k in equity right now. I am not criticising you, I am just trying to show you where the author is getting his figures from. These figures are a little out of hand, I mean they have to assume an above average earner with ridiculously disciplined spending habits who is willing to forgo going out after work in favor of throwing that $20 into the market, but hey its money magazine. I guess that type of person who reads this stuff. Even then, you come down to a quality of life issue. I am sure there is some guy sitting home on friday night watching basic cable on his 14" TV eating white rice and ramen noodles with a practical used civc in his driveway who is absolutely thrilled that he has money in the bank, but is that really how you want to live? Is that what makes you happy? You have to remember that the author is addressing a readership whose main goal in life tends to be the numbers on their bank statement, not necessarily people who are happy.
Is it a significantly dirtier process? Is it dirtier environmentally than building an oil plant? nuclear? gas, etc? (Obviously I am asking on a per kilowatt basis, not one cell against an entire plant). I am curious... I could not find any information on the environmental cost of producing a solar cell...
Well, like I mentioned tax rebates and power company incentives bring it down to that point. Also, in my area the power company will allow you to reverse the meter (thus helping put more power back in the system when they need it most), elminating or at least reducing the need for a large battery system. I forget if you still require an inverter using that system... I forget the details of how the systems work.
Correct me If I am wrong... but... we are producing 1kW with our pretend $3000 array on our house. Now, lets say you get that peak power for 8 hours a day. 8 hours *7 days * 4 weeks we get 224kilowatt-hours each month. * your rate... .1103... we get $24.70 as your monthly return... without factoring any of the other benefits (clean energy, power outages not as large a problem, etc...). It will take about 10 years for the array to pay for itself. However, as I mentioned before, this is about alot more than just saving money. You are pretty lucky, in my area rates average 16 cents per kWh, making monthy savings about $35.
Ok I just realized my math was off there, so $3000 would have each house produce 1kW, which would mean you would need 1000 homes per megawatt, or 3000 homes for 3 megawatts, aka a "few" megawatts.
Well.. I doubt that you would need to cover 1/2 of southern california to provide all the energy needs... but even taking that as a fact... Consider what would happen if everyone, or even a significant number of people (thousands to millions) put a couple of panels on their roof. You are talking about a serious amount of energy production, and just as important, a serious amount of energy production when it is needed most, during the hottest part of the day when everyone has their air conditioners on high. The point of the student's exercise was not to turn people's houses into Multi-Megawatt power plants, but to make homes more self sufficient, energy efficient, and able to produce in aggregate large amounts of energy in a pollutionless manner. After tax incentives and rebates in my area (LI,NY) the cost for solar power is about $3/ watt as I recall (which is considered by the industry to be a magic price point, ala the $1000 PC). So you say everyone spends $3000 on a system, or all new houses incorporate a system, and produces 3kW of power during the day. Times 1000 homes is 3 megawatts, without all the impending doom problems that lurk with nuclear power (dont peg me as some tree hugger though- nuclear is my preferred method of power after hydroelectric and solar). Nice added benefits: reduced reliance on fossil fuels and thus the middle east. Also... power outages are less problematic. I dont think any of the students or even any solar energy zealots really believe that solar is the answer to all of our energy problems, but solar can make a huge dent in our energy needs.
Hmm... so the internet is supposed to be able to withstand a nuclear attack? Yet some misguided admin can bring it to its knees by botching an upgrade? Interesting...
This is where watercooling can reap benefits, and could also save money. With a watercooling system the only moving part would be a waterpump. This pump would be the only mechanical point of failure. This would lead to quieter, cooler systems. Waterpumps do not need to spin at high rpm's in high heat environments which also make them more reliable. Instead of adding more fans, all you need to add are more waterblocks over your system. If Oem's or large manufacturers started to develop products based on watercooling, I bet waterblock and radiator prices would drop to the point where they are only marginally more expensive than fan systems, especially as components such as disk drives, north and south bridge chips, graphics cards, and power supplies are requiring more cooling power. When you also consider that most watercooling solutions on the market today are designed for hardcore overclocking, and you could use much smaller (and cheaper) radiators and pumps, watercooling could become integrated into mainstream PC's. I think most of the resistance stems from a vision of water leaks ruining all of your hardware. But a properly sealed system should have a much smaller rate of failure than a five fan system whirring at 4,000 rpm's each whose noise drives you crazy... I guess that giant circular copper finned heatsink with the fan on top does look like something out of a sci-fi movie, but I would much rather have piece of mind(somewhat) and glow in the dark cooling tubes running through my system...
you can actually find out... using the URL... the sid is the id of the story... but using the search feature, and sorting by date, the earliest story still archived appears to be here... (and it appears someone has found a security hole?)
o ri es&sort=1&start=28150
I dont know if the archive is completely accurate though... they mentioned data was lost...
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?threshold=0&op=st
Just wondering...
Who were the first users to sign up? where did they go?
If you noticed, he didnt count the file managers in his count of 37... he said if he did he would have about 51 total. He also did not count his two sick OS'es.
You really cant compare what the RIAA is doing (or should be doing) with what Microsoft is doing. Using windows involves a skill... gaining mind share is huge for a computer company. FUD that arises from uncertainty over using a new system and unfamiliarity with it creates friction in the market that prevents people from jumping ship from product to product. Microsoft is not really selling a CD, or even data on a cd... They are selling the ability to easily use your computer in a productive manner. In a sense they are not even trying to sell software. If they were selling software, features such as X amount of features in X amount of megabytes might be mentioned, or loads in X amount of seconds on a given computer might be mentioned in ads. Instead, the ads say "get things done better" , "99.999% uptime"... etc... Music the RIAA is selling requires no skills to listen to, it doesnt matter if you have listened to Nirvana and only Nirvana for 10 years straight, love Nirvana, spent hours reading about Nirvana... You can go and listen to any other group out there without a problem. The RIAA also does not benefit from companies buying mass quantities of music that their employees like to listen to. Its not like if I go home and listen to Pearl Jam, my company is going to hold a meeting at any point and say, hey the employees really like this pearl jam stuff. Maybe we should play that in the elevator instead of Bach. I dont see how you could make a parallel between the two different types of piracy. I guess to some small extent, if everyone listens to Britney Spears, and loves her, then it will be easier to introduce some facsmile of her (christina aguilera, IE) and make a quick easy buck off of it. That is a real stretch though.
I think this would be alot more interesting if they used today's PC architecture, and stretched it to the limit with 1k. Maybe its just because I am too young to really know what Commodore 64 games looked like, so I dont have much of a basis to compare these games.
Carmack looks to raise the common denominator. How many companies drag their feet implementing the latest direct X features or using programmable pixel shaders, etc. because the lowest common denominator is still a tnt2 ultra or something like that. Carmack, due to his immense respect in the industry, is one of the only people who can actually force the bar up. His games have been legendary for their use of the latest technology and that is what people buy them for (well that and they are damn fun). He writes for the very high end visual gaming experience. True, since Quake the game play improvements have been kind of marginal, but that in no way means he is lazy, or can't program well.
Wow, you can buy upgrades of windows? I thought you could only get them off of Kazaa. They're going to make millions doing that! :)