When my wife and I were considering a property that was Off The Grid, I bought a great little product called a Watt's Up? It gives you both instantaneous and accumulated power use info. I started testing everything in the house. Very educational. Refrigerators and top-loading washing machines are power pigs.
One of the great surprises is how much energy is wasted by wall warts (AKA vampires, AKA external power transformers). They are always "on" and suck up an amazing amount of power.
If you have a source of running water on the property, you may be able to go micro-hydro (or pico-hydro). If you have any kind of flow down any kind of slope it can be a huge win. Flow (in gallons/minute) * Fall (in feet) / 12 = watts per hour. A small stream (20 gpm) coming down a moderate slope (say, 100 feet) = 20*100/12 = 166 watts per hour, 24/7. Thats 4kW a day. Hell, if it starts raining, you get even more power!
Admittedly, I would want to see a Whole Bunch Of Lawyers(tm) try to rip the idea in to little tiny pieces. But, if they can't easily find a way to sink it, then why the hell not?
Yes. Robert X. Cringely was an invented name for a column in InfoWorld (I think). When the guy who was writing the column left the paper after many years, he took the name with him. Lawsuits followed, etc. He ended up reatining use of the name, but so did the paper.
I dropped by Fidelity Investments to see what the short position on SCOX was. Imagine my surprise when the first sentence under Company Info was:
The SCO Group, Inc. develops and markets software based on the Linux operating system and [ etc. ]
To quote The Emperor, "There it is!"
Those who do not execute history
on
PDP-10 Revival
·
· Score: 1
are doomed to live in an infinite loop.
The PDP-10 had one of the most wonderful instruction sets imaginable. Consider:
1. Using a single, 36 bit word, you can have the
lower half-word be the address (2^18 36bit words) and the upper half composed of fields indicating byte size and offset in the current word. Combine this with wonderful instructions like Increment and LoaD Byte and you have arrays
of arbitrary-sized strings.
2. JFFO! Jump on Find First One. Although originally put in to help sell machines to the telco's (it is a really fast way to find the next available line), it is also a memory-allocator's dream.
3. "being able to reference them as absolute memory locations is of dubious value." Use your imagination! I had a roomate that wrote an amazing search program that first built a state table and then loaded the code that executed it in the registers. It only dropped into "normal" memory when it got a hit -- blazing!
And did you ever see a machine with a speed dial on the main console? On the KA-10, you could slow the machine's clock down to about an instruction every few seconds and watch the blink'n lights while you debugged. Especially impressive when mated to a BBN Pager Box.
Speaking of languages created to exploit the 10's instructions, remember SAIL... ahhhh what a language. Especially LEAP -- an associative data store that stored 3 item numbers in a word (max 4090 items). It was weird and it was fast.
Extra point question: What does SAIL stand for? Hint: It does not stand for Stanford AI Lab/Language.
Whew! Taking a high-speed tobagon ride down memory lane, when people wrote self-modifying code for the kernel, languages were designed at 2am on drugs and rock-and-roll (they probably still are), and the only thing you couldn't do with a computer was pick it up.
Portability? We don't need no steekin' portability!
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When my wife and I were considering a property that was Off The Grid, I bought a great little product called a Watt's Up? It gives you both instantaneous and accumulated power use info. I started testing everything in the house. Very educational. Refrigerators and top-loading washing machines are power pigs.
One of the great surprises is how much energy is wasted by wall warts (AKA vampires, AKA external power transformers). They are always "on" and suck up an amazing amount of power.
If you have a source of running water on the property, you may be able to go micro-hydro (or pico-hydro). If you have any kind of flow down any kind of slope it can be a huge win. Flow (in gallons/minute) * Fall (in feet) / 12 = watts per hour. A small stream (20 gpm) coming down a moderate slope (say, 100 feet) = 20*100/12 = 166 watts per hour, 24/7. Thats 4kW a day. Hell, if it starts raining, you get even more power!
Admittedly, I would want to see a Whole Bunch Of Lawyers(tm) try to rip the idea in to little tiny pieces. But, if they can't easily find a way to sink it, then why the hell not?
I am eargerly waiting to send in my $20 check!
Yes. Robert X. Cringely was an invented name for a column in InfoWorld (I think). When the guy who was writing the column left the paper after many years, he took the name with him. Lawsuits followed, etc. He ended up reatining use of the name, but so did the paper.
The "PBS one" is the original RXC.
The PDP-10 had one of the most wonderful instruction sets imaginable. Consider:
1. Using a single, 36 bit word, you can have the lower half-word be the address (2^18 36bit words) and the upper half composed of fields indicating byte size and offset in the current word. Combine this with wonderful instructions like Increment and LoaD Byte and you have arrays of arbitrary-sized strings.
2. JFFO! Jump on Find First One. Although originally put in to help sell machines to the telco's (it is a really fast way to find the next available line), it is also a memory-allocator's dream.
3. "being able to reference them as absolute memory locations is of dubious value." Use your imagination! I had a roomate that wrote an amazing search program that first built a state table and then loaded the code that executed it in the registers. It only dropped into "normal" memory when it got a hit -- blazing!
And did you ever see a machine with a speed dial on the main console? On the KA-10, you could slow the machine's clock down to about an instruction every few seconds and watch the blink'n lights while you debugged. Especially impressive when mated to a BBN Pager Box.
Speaking of languages created to exploit the 10's instructions, remember SAIL ... ahhhh what a language. Especially LEAP -- an associative data store that stored 3 item numbers in a word (max 4090 items). It was weird and it was fast.
Extra point question: What does SAIL stand for? Hint: It does not stand for Stanford AI Lab/Language.
Whew! Taking a high-speed tobagon ride down memory lane, when people wrote self-modifying code for the kernel, languages were designed at 2am on drugs and rock-and-roll (they probably still are), and the only thing you couldn't do with a computer was pick it up.
Portability? We don't need no steekin' portability!