All that's left now is to move the lights over to LED's and get a solar powered attic fan to help out on hot days
CFLs are a whole lot cheaper, and use about the same amount of power as LEDs.
LEDs are nice for some applications, but aren't quite ready for indoor consumer use. I'd wait a few years for efficiency to improve and costs to come down.
Nevertheless, it's nice to see some Virginians giving a damn about the environment. In the time that I've lived here, I've been pretty shocked about just how (literally) anti-environment some folks here are. I never thought I'd see somebody picketing in support of strip mining...
Also, Virginian urban planning is pretty terrible for the environment. After spending the past 40 years ravaging the Norfolk area, people are only just now starting to realize that lots of strip malls and 4-lane roads (not highways!) isn't a sustainable planning practice.
Indeed. Getting used to the lack of water seems more to be the problem.
I lived in Fairbanks for a bit, and it always seemed like the "no running water" bit would bother me quite a bit more than the electricity.
However, I had quite a few friends and coworkers that lived in that sort of arrangement, and as is typical for Alaskans, they were resourceful and made the most of it.
LEDs are having a tough time competing with incandescent and HID fixtures for a few key reasons.
They're not nearly as bright as their incandescent counterparts. An incandescent PAR64 can inexpensively produce a ridiculously bright loosely-focused beam at very low cost. HID fixtures are even brighter. LEDs simply cannot compete.
HID and Incandescent fixtures can easily be focused into a tight beam. LEDs cannot. Their uses are currently limited to LED-PAR64s, key lighting, and matrix-type displays for effects and/or video display.
The color temperature of LED fixtures doesn't quite match up with what you'd get from an incandescent bulb. Using them together either requires gelling the LEDs to be the same temperature as the incandescent bulbs, which is usually simply not worth the bother.
HID (High Intensity Discharge) fixtures have gained a high degree of acceptance, despite their high price, especially in intelligent and robotic fixtures. Although they cannot be dimmed, most are fitted with a "mechanical" dimmer and a shutter mechanism for a similar instant on/off effect, or strobing.
LEDs have their uses, but for theatrical/concert/club usage, they're still very much a niche market due to these drawbacks.
How is this spam? I honestly don't understand the hate-fest people around here show toward this guy.
It's a legitimately interesting article; the summary is better-written than what the/. editors tend to come up with themselves; he makes no secret about who he is; and he's stopped hyperlinking to his blog, rather than the story in question.
which is not to say I think we need to do it right away or that this is the sole answer.
You're absolutely right. Lemon goes far better with sole than lime.
Re:Why didn't they just kill the lawyer?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
This is a classical ethical dilemma rehashed.
You find a train hurtling toward 5 people tied to the track. In the split-second you have to react, you have the choice to throw a switch that will divert the train to a second track with 1 person tied to it. Which do you do?
If you do nothing, the outcome is not affected, and 5 people will die. If you throw the switch, you have consciously chosen to kill the one person.
China is the one of the worst, if not THE WORST environmental disasters this world has ever had. They are having one HELL of a time trying to clean up the mess they've created for themselves.
At least they seem to be acknowledging the problem for once.
It's not much, but it's a start.
Re:Biggest geek movie until X-Files?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
Have you actually seen it?
You don't need to call it a "geek" movie. It's easily the best comic-book adaptation thus far, though that might not be saying much. This movie aspires to be something more than that.
Even if it's a rehash of an old story, it's a rehash of an old story that was performed abysmally the first time around. Plenty of artistic license was used by Christopher Nolan, when he "rebooted" the Batman series, and I think that most will agree that it was overwhelmingly for the better that he did so.
Heath Ledger would also very very likely have been given the same praise for his character, were he still alive today. I went into the movie with rather low expectations, given the ridiculous hype that surrounded it. Needless to say, the hype was justified, especially that which surrounded Ledger's part. Simply put, he's the best movie villain I've come across.
The movie's excellent, but not perfect. Ledger's role, however, was flawless.
and was that Bose-Einstein condenstate 27km long? This is news because its a huge massive object cooled down to 1.9K.
Liquid helium temperatures are nothing new.
Off of the top of my head, CEBAF (1.4km), Tevatron (6.3km), RHIC (3.8km), and most NMR equipment use liquid helium to cool their low-temperatre superconducting components.
The canceled Superconducting Supercollider would have been 87km long, and have been cooled by liquid helium, had congress not pulled the plug.
Extending the technology to 27km simply requires a bigger investment. That doesn't make it any less impressive, though many of the other engineering aspects of the LHC are far more impressive.
It sounds a bit high. I don't doubt you, but am simply curious for my own sake. I know that the western states are quite arid, though 42% is a lot larger than I'd have expected.
Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
A good gas turbine can be spun up to almost-full-power in about 2 minutes. If a sudden dip in available power is anticipated, they can also be placed on 'standby' to reduce the startup time to a matter of seconds.
Sounds to me like the turbines are what were having problems here.
Also, like others mentioned, remote-control kill switches could help reduce suerfluous loads.
There is, in the form of the DOI, which is used for Journal articles and such, and is accordingly loved by librarians.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many of these librarian-developed databases, they didn't quite "get it" in terms of how the internet functions, and there is a fee to assign each new DOI. Accordingly, though it remains an indispensable tool for keeping track of journal articles, its use hasn't spread very far beyond that.
I think they should be left alone in all formats. When it's put against a background of generally proper grammar, it looks even worse. If there's a higher chance of someone's quote becoming popular, it may (may) get them to consider using a spell checker. Even if it's incremental, getting people to learn better grammar is good for everyone.
This is a 7-year-old girl we're talking about. I think we can cut her some slack, especially if it also improves the clarity/readability of the story, without distracting from the point.
I'd hesitate to call that luck, let alone "really, really, really lucky". It sounds like terrific teamwork by engineering, production and management.
I'd agree 100%. Intel's R&D group in Israel pulled off a small miracle with their work, and should be highly commended for it. However, from what is publicly known, it seems as if it were almost a sort of "skunk works" project, largely independent of the main R&D efforts of the company. I don't think that there was terribly much being expected from them, and the fact that they were able to deliver an extremely viable product was a fortunate coincidence.
Intel's main R&D efforts were terribly misguided. It was common knowledge that RAMBUS Itanium, and the P4 line all had serious limitations, and yet Intel continued pushing forward with these products.
I think this may refer to Radiohead's extreme aversion to doing anything that could be considered remotely "popular."
For some reason, they were upset by the success of OK Computer, and dove off the edge, into stranger, more experimental territory, where the music has to be more "appreciated" than "enjoyed."
This is a shame, because they're amazing in their moments of brilliance, and incredibly talented musicians. However, their latest stuff just seems a bit too pretentious to be palatable.
The problem was that Intel wasn't spending money on products that could compete with CoreDuo. They got really, really, really lucky.
The Core line of chips were originally developed as low-power laptop chips based around an older technology than Intel's "mainstream" chips of the day. Intel's roadmap up until very recently focused on further development of the Pentium 4 and Itanium lines (both of which ultimately proved to be unsustainable)
One of Intel's development teams in Israel saw the huge potential that the old Pentium III architecture had to be fast and power-efficient, when coupled with a more modern manufacturing process. In the end, the low-end power-efficient chips began to outperform their power-hungry Pentium 4 desktop offerings, and Intel quietly rebranded the line, and began to offer the Core chips as their flagship desktop offering.
Intel also made a great many mistakes with the development of Itanium, and their reliance on RAMBUS (which was proprietary, expensive, and actually slower in many cases than plain old DDR SDRAM). Their failure to embrace x86-64 could have also easily spelled disaster for the company. In terms of 64-bit development, AMD has always been the clear leader.
Intel should be counting its blessings, as they've made far more missteps than AMD have. Fortunately for them, they have a massive marketing team and extensive manufacturing facilities, both of which AMD lack.
Hopefully AMD can make something out of their R&D relating to GPGPUs, and stay viable as a competitor.
Well, if you ditch any hard drives (along with optical drives, or anything else that moves) in the system, and underclock the CPU, many desktops can be made to run on just a trickle of power.
2001 is only tolerable if you're watching it on DVD, and are able to fast forward through the vast majority of it.
Otherwise, it's slow and excruciatingly painful most of the time.
A good movie, perhaps. However, watching the main character float about silently in space for 7 minutes had me bored to tears.
2001 is minimalistic to an extreme. I appreciate it in the same manner that I appreciate Philip Glass's music.
Wall-E is hardly minimalistic, but simply forgoes verbal dialogue as a method of telling the story. There are plenty of non-verbal auditory cues throughout the movie.
You're faulting Apple's UI paradigms by using a Microsoft application as your example?
Apple does indeed violate its own UI Guidelines in many cases, though Microsoft, Adobe, and the other remaining holdouts of the Carbon toolkit tend to shit all over them. Not apple's fault.
Is it all that efficient though, to send up massive man-rated rockets?
If we're going to the moon or Mars, why not put the bulk of the spacecraft up on a cheaper unmanned launch vehicle, and then launch the crew in a capsule on a small, but reliable rocket (a la Soyuz), and rendezvous while up there?
I'm not sure how the costs or efficiencies of this work out, but it just never really made sense for the biggest vehicles we build to be man-rated, and tested to absolutely insane tolerances.
After all, there's also far less that can go wrong on a smaller/simpler design, although even at that, capsule-based designs have proven to be extremely safe. Back in the lates 70s and early 80s, there were two instances of catastrophic Soyuz failures in which the cosmonauts survived mostly unharmed. In the first case, the rocket failed mid-launch, and in the second, the rocket caught fire, and exploded on the pad.
Slashdot Mirror
All that's left now is to move the lights over to LED's and get a solar powered attic fan to help out on hot days
CFLs are a whole lot cheaper, and use about the same amount of power as LEDs.
LEDs are nice for some applications, but aren't quite ready for indoor consumer use. I'd wait a few years for efficiency to improve and costs to come down.
Nevertheless, it's nice to see some Virginians giving a damn about the environment. In the time that I've lived here, I've been pretty shocked about just how (literally) anti-environment some folks here are. I never thought I'd see somebody picketing in support of strip mining...
Also, Virginian urban planning is pretty terrible for the environment. After spending the past 40 years ravaging the Norfolk area, people are only just now starting to realize that lots of strip malls and 4-lane roads (not highways!) isn't a sustainable planning practice.
It's not as far off, provided that we can kick-start the right sort of chemical reaction.
Hell, we nearly terraformed (ravaged) Earth's atmosphere in the 1970s thanks to ozone depletion caused by CFCs.
Indeed. Getting used to the lack of water seems more to be the problem.
I lived in Fairbanks for a bit, and it always seemed like the "no running water" bit would bother me quite a bit more than the electricity.
However, I had quite a few friends and coworkers that lived in that sort of arrangement, and as is typical for Alaskans, they were resourceful and made the most of it.
The Batmobile was also real.
Definitely a cool bit of design that went into it.
Lighting geek here.
LEDs are having a tough time competing with incandescent and HID fixtures for a few key reasons.
They're not nearly as bright as their incandescent counterparts. An incandescent PAR64 can inexpensively produce a ridiculously bright loosely-focused beam at very low cost. HID fixtures are even brighter. LEDs simply cannot compete.
HID and Incandescent fixtures can easily be focused into a tight beam. LEDs cannot. Their uses are currently limited to LED-PAR64s, key lighting, and matrix-type displays for effects and/or video display.
The color temperature of LED fixtures doesn't quite match up with what you'd get from an incandescent bulb. Using them together either requires gelling the LEDs to be the same temperature as the incandescent bulbs, which is usually simply not worth the bother.
HID (High Intensity Discharge) fixtures have gained a high degree of acceptance, despite their high price, especially in intelligent and robotic fixtures. Although they cannot be dimmed, most are fitted with a "mechanical" dimmer and a shutter mechanism for a similar instant on/off effect, or strobing.
LEDs have their uses, but for theatrical/concert/club usage, they're still very much a niche market due to these drawbacks.
How is this spam? I honestly don't understand the hate-fest people around here show toward this guy.
It's a legitimately interesting article; the summary is better-written than what the /. editors tend to come up with themselves; he makes no secret about who he is; and he's stopped hyperlinking to his blog, rather than the story in question.
which is not to say I think we need to do it right away or that this is the sole answer.
You're absolutely right. Lemon goes far better with sole than lime.
This is a classical ethical dilemma rehashed.
You find a train hurtling toward 5 people tied to the track.
In the split-second you have to react, you have the choice to throw a switch that will divert the train to a second track with 1 person tied to it.
Which do you do?
If you do nothing, the outcome is not affected, and 5 people will die.
If you throw the switch, you have consciously chosen to kill the one person.
China is the one of the worst, if not THE WORST environmental disasters this world has ever had. They are having one HELL of a time trying to clean up the mess they've created for themselves.
At least they seem to be acknowledging the problem for once.
It's not much, but it's a start.
Have you actually seen it?
You don't need to call it a "geek" movie. It's easily the best comic-book adaptation thus far, though that might not be saying much. This movie aspires to be something more than that.
Even if it's a rehash of an old story, it's a rehash of an old story that was performed abysmally the first time around. Plenty of artistic license was used by Christopher Nolan, when he "rebooted" the Batman series, and I think that most will agree that it was overwhelmingly for the better that he did so.
Heath Ledger would also very very likely have been given the same praise for his character, were he still alive today. I went into the movie with rather low expectations, given the ridiculous hype that surrounded it. Needless to say, the hype was justified, especially that which surrounded Ledger's part. Simply put, he's the best movie villain I've come across.
The movie's excellent, but not perfect. Ledger's role, however, was flawless.
and was that Bose-Einstein condenstate 27km long? This is news because its a huge massive object cooled down to 1.9K.
Liquid helium temperatures are nothing new.
Off of the top of my head, CEBAF (1.4km), Tevatron (6.3km), RHIC (3.8km), and most NMR equipment use liquid helium to cool their low-temperatre superconducting components.
The canceled Superconducting Supercollider would have been 87km long, and have been cooled by liquid helium, had congress not pulled the plug.
Extending the technology to 27km simply requires a bigger investment. That doesn't make it any less impressive, though many of the other engineering aspects of the LHC are far more impressive.
42% of the USA's territory is desert.
Citation please?
It sounds a bit high. I don't doubt you, but am simply curious for my own sake. I know that the western states are quite arid, though 42% is a lot larger than I'd have expected.
Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
A good gas turbine can be spun up to almost-full-power in about 2 minutes. If a sudden dip in available power is anticipated, they can also be placed on 'standby' to reduce the startup time to a matter of seconds.
Sounds to me like the turbines are what were having problems here.
Also, like others mentioned, remote-control kill switches could help reduce suerfluous loads.
There is, in the form of the DOI, which is used for Journal articles and such, and is accordingly loved by librarians.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many of these librarian-developed databases, they didn't quite "get it" in terms of how the internet functions, and there is a fee to assign each new DOI. Accordingly, though it remains an indispensable tool for keeping track of journal articles, its use hasn't spread very far beyond that.
I think they should be left alone in all formats. When it's put against a background of generally proper grammar, it looks even worse. If there's a higher chance of someone's quote becoming popular, it may (may) get them to consider using a spell checker. Even if it's incremental, getting people to learn better grammar is good for everyone.
This is a 7-year-old girl we're talking about. I think we can cut her some slack, especially if it also improves the clarity/readability of the story, without distracting from the point.
I'd hesitate to call that luck, let alone "really, really, really lucky". It sounds like terrific teamwork by engineering, production and management.
I'd agree 100%. Intel's R&D group in Israel pulled off a small miracle with their work, and should be highly commended for it. However, from what is publicly known, it seems as if it were almost a sort of "skunk works" project, largely independent of the main R&D efforts of the company. I don't think that there was terribly much being expected from them, and the fact that they were able to deliver an extremely viable product was a fortunate coincidence.
Intel's main R&D efforts were terribly misguided. It was common knowledge that RAMBUS Itanium, and the P4 line all had serious limitations, and yet Intel continued pushing forward with these products.
I think this may refer to Radiohead's extreme aversion to doing anything that could be considered remotely "popular."
For some reason, they were upset by the success of OK Computer, and dove off the edge, into stranger, more experimental territory, where the music has to be more "appreciated" than "enjoyed."
This is a shame, because they're amazing in their moments of brilliance, and incredibly talented musicians. However, their latest stuff just seems a bit too pretentious to be palatable.
The problem was that Intel wasn't spending money on products that could compete with CoreDuo. They got really, really, really lucky.
The Core line of chips were originally developed as low-power laptop chips based around an older technology than Intel's "mainstream" chips of the day. Intel's roadmap up until very recently focused on further development of the Pentium 4 and Itanium lines (both of which ultimately proved to be unsustainable)
One of Intel's development teams in Israel saw the huge potential that the old Pentium III architecture had to be fast and power-efficient, when coupled with a more modern manufacturing process. In the end, the low-end power-efficient chips began to outperform their power-hungry Pentium 4 desktop offerings, and Intel quietly rebranded the line, and began to offer the Core chips as their flagship desktop offering.
Intel also made a great many mistakes with the development of Itanium, and their reliance on RAMBUS (which was proprietary, expensive, and actually slower in many cases than plain old DDR SDRAM). Their failure to embrace x86-64 could have also easily spelled disaster for the company. In terms of 64-bit development, AMD has always been the clear leader.
Intel should be counting its blessings, as they've made far more missteps than AMD have. Fortunately for them, they have a massive marketing team and extensive manufacturing facilities, both of which AMD lack.
Hopefully AMD can make something out of their R&D relating to GPGPUs, and stay viable as a competitor.
Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!
Unfortunately, Apple didn't go with Be and we'll never know what could have been.
Multiple threads of slashdotters nostalgically longing for the days of NeXTStep to return?
Well, if you ditch any hard drives (along with optical drives, or anything else that moves) in the system, and underclock the CPU, many desktops can be made to run on just a trickle of power.
2001 is only tolerable if you're watching it on DVD, and are able to fast forward through the vast majority of it.
Otherwise, it's slow and excruciatingly painful most of the time.
A good movie, perhaps. However, watching the main character float about silently in space for 7 minutes had me bored to tears.
2001 is minimalistic to an extreme. I appreciate it in the same manner that I appreciate Philip Glass's music.
Wall-E is hardly minimalistic, but simply forgoes verbal dialogue as a method of telling the story. There are plenty of non-verbal auditory cues throughout the movie.
You're faulting Apple's UI paradigms by using a Microsoft application as your example?
Apple does indeed violate its own UI Guidelines in many cases, though Microsoft, Adobe, and the other remaining holdouts of the Carbon toolkit tend to shit all over them. Not apple's fault.
Is it all that efficient though, to send up massive man-rated rockets?
If we're going to the moon or Mars, why not put the bulk of the spacecraft up on a cheaper unmanned launch vehicle, and then launch the crew in a capsule on a small, but reliable rocket (a la Soyuz), and rendezvous while up there?
I'm not sure how the costs or efficiencies of this work out, but it just never really made sense for the biggest vehicles we build to be man-rated, and tested to absolutely insane tolerances.
After all, there's also far less that can go wrong on a smaller/simpler design, although even at that, capsule-based designs have proven to be extremely safe. Back in the lates 70s and early 80s, there were two instances of catastrophic Soyuz failures in which the cosmonauts survived mostly unharmed. In the first case, the rocket failed mid-launch, and in the second, the rocket caught fire, and exploded on the pad.
Your name is Quantum G?