Imagine if every PC currently in use had such a CPU, that could reduce clock speed (and thus power consumption) when load was low. The power savings globally would have to be massive (assuming everyone wasn't running SETI@home).
Forcing the students to wear the badges isn't an issue. The real problem would be a student hiding a badge somewhere deep in their book bag and registering an absent student as present.
I'm sure the faculty was smart enough to recognize this problem, thus they would have been performing manual attendance to audit the system. Plus every time a student forgot their ID, or a part of the system failed, or there's a power outage, they would have to resort back to the manual system.
IMO the heart of the problem is misapplying technology. Is taking attendance really such a time-consuming, difficult task to perform to require tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and the dispersal of hardware to every single student? A teacher should recognize their students, and should be cognizant of empty seats that are normally occupied.
Okay, so take a small, light-weight car and put 4 large adults in there (you know - car pooling is a Good Thing). The gross weight of the car just increased by 1000 pounds, which could nearly double the weight of a small car.
So are you saying that vehicles used for car pooling should pay higher taxes because they damage the road more? Again, the same type of counter-intuitive scenario is created as with this GPS idea (penalizing high-efficiency vehicles because they consume less fuel).
is that for those of us that know what's going on, we can get "dead" machines for basically free and fix them for next to nothing.
Our beater home PC is a PIII 500 MHz with a 15" LCD Panel.
The PC came from a guy who had an electrical short in his breaker box that sent 220 V to all the 110 V recepticles (this is in the US). His homeowner insurance basically replaced all electronics in his home wholesale. He gave me his dead PC in exchange for the work I did setting up his new PC (temporarily installing the drive from his old machine into the new to recover files). I opened it up and found a capacitor had been fried in the power supply. I already had the cap, which saved me from buying a $1 component at Radio Shack, so I had a PC for free (this was a few years ago when 500 MHz wasn't too shabby).
Now for the 15" monitor. Another guy had it laying around his house for a year, because his sister's kids had plugged the wrong power adapter into it and it no longer worked. After doing some computer work a couple times for him (for free), he gave me the monitor and said if I could fix it I could have it, otherwise toss it. So after opening it up I found it had a tiny surface mount ceramic fuse. I bridged that bad boy and had a perfectly functioning like-new 15" LCD monitor.
So I've got an entire computer system for free as the result of power supply failures.
The article only contains a few sentences, so it's hard to tell either way, but I get the impression these are prototypes left over from AT&T Research. In that case this is hardly a product you can buy off the shelf, which is the impression the Slashdot story gives.
Don't forget all the prolific Google AdSense content embedded directly into so many web pages. Google is in a better position to track a web surfer than any other entity, with the exception of spyware running on the actual client machine.
Obviously you've not been using the devices for long enough, nor have you seen a wide enough sampling of device types.
I've been writing software for Windows CE devices full-time since 1996 (Windows CE 1.0). I can tell you beyond any doubt that beyond a few specific devices (DELL Axim X5 Basic comes to mind) performance has improved steadily across the board. CE 3.0 brought a new kernel that was vastly superior to the versions before it. The RAM is constantly increasing, the displays are now VGA resolution, the processor speed is increasing, hardware capability is growing (my a716 has Bluetooth, WiFi, CF and SD slots, and many devices now have cameras and cell), and Pocket PCs are already on the market with 3D hardware (DELL X50v)
What you are complaining about is the Pocket PC shell. When Microsoft introduced Pocket PC (in place of "Palm Sized PC - PSPC" CE 2.11) they did take a few steps backwards. They grossly oversimplified the shell in order to mimic Palm. This brought inconsistencies (shell related widgets are now at the bottom and top of the display instead of consolidated in one place, no Cancel button to escape out of a dialog when you don't want to save changes, etc). However all in all it was an improvement, as evidenced by MS finally surpassing Palm-OS devices in sales. All in all the shell is not fundamentally broken.
Since 3.0 Windows CE has been more stable than any incarnation of Windows I've ever used.
You make a list of hardware changes (smaller, battery life, connectivity) that need to occur. How is a total rewrite of the OS supposed to bring that along?
I've been using Staples Picture Paper to transfer the ink to PCBs (you have to print your mask with a laser printer - inkjet won't work). That particular brand of paper works extremely well, as determined by a fellow who tested dozens of types of glossy photo-quality printer paper to see what transferred toner the best.
I don't see why this wouldn't work on cases. You use an iron to transfer the toner from the paper to the surface to be etched. Extremely narrow traces can be obtained ("MUCH less than 0.01 inches") with this method, so I'm sure it would give good results for case mods.
Instead of sitting by idly for 213 minutes while the data transferred, he could have taken some of that time to implement compression, thus increasing throughput and decreasing the overall transfer time.:)
On a serious note, that was an admirable (and true) hack. Although there were several potential routes to extract the bootloader (FireWire, iPod's normal file transfer mechanism, analog data out the headphone jack), he took the path of least resistance (and simplest implementation).
If the computer ran for 6 months straight using 1.8GHz processors, couldn't they have waited several months and utilized newer CPUs running at double the speed, halving the computation time?
Regarding their design, I'm somewhat surprised they used an individual power supply for each board. It seems there would be more efficient and smaller power systems available that could power multiple boards at once. It looks like a quarter of the volume of the computer is comprised of power supplies. Plus all that extra heat is thrown into the mix too.
I think its ironic that MGM got in trouble not because the quality of the Widescreen movies was poor (it is the same thing theater goers would have seen), but that their Fullscreen quality was good. If the Fullscreen versions would have been typical pan and scan crap then their claim that the Widescreen version contained more information would have been correct.
My hunch is that they had a generic marketing plan to slap that text on every Widescreen movie, because in some (most?) cases the Fullscreen version was pan and scan.
Personally I never knew that some movies were shot in Fullscreen ratio and cropped to make it Widescreen until now.
Something about looking at pictures taken at ground-level on other planets and planetoids is so fascinating. I guess because it is the same perspective we would have in person. Recently I was looking at the Soviet pictures from the surface of Venus and felt the same emotion - it's enough to make a person's heart skip a beat or two.
Hopefully within our lifetimes we will be able to casually pull up a website on the internet and view pictures from the surface of every solid body in our solar system. Now that would be an amazing thing.
I envision future spacecraft, similar to Cassini, that would contain dozens of micro-probes that could be used to study several moons in a single mission.
So that explains why Scifi was playing Galactica 1980 all day long. After a marathon of that frack anything else is fantastic in comparison! Sort of like carpet bombing before sending in the troops - that'll soften them up a bit.
According to the article, $170 million has been paid for software development. $100 million of that will be lost of the software is scrapped. The rest went to purchase thousands of computers and set up new networks.
So, surprise, the slashdot story title is misleading.
The planet candidate has 3.375 times the volume of Jupiter (calculated the volume wrong). It is 5 times as massive, so its density is 1.48 times greater. Thus Earth is 2.8 times denser than this planet.
The planet candidate has 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter, which means its volume is 2.25 greater. However it is 5 times as massive as Jupiter, so its density would have to be 2.222 times greater.
Earth is 4.16 times denser than Jupiter, so Earth is only 1.873 times denser than this new planet.
So, how long before this new tech disappears forever after being bought out by the power companies? Remember that carburetor that lets gasoline engines burn water? I hear some Detroit auto-maker bought the design and buried it away for good.;)
Speaking of technical glitches when it matters most, here's a quick story of a wedding I was running sound for (not something I normally do, but I was drafted).
I had the various wedding songs in mp3 format on my Dell notebook. I'd been given the cue that the bride was ready to make her entrance, so as soon as I started the Bridal March she would enter. I was just about to click Play on my notebook when it gives a siren-like sound (not out of the soundcard / line out, but out of some internal speaker) and turns itself off.
Now fortunately (extremely) for me I had copied the songs onto a CF card, so I popped it into my Pocket PC, plugged it into the soundboard, and the wedding began. There was maybe a 20-30 second delay which no-one even noticed.
After the wedding I found the problem. The HDD was somehow not well seated, and the alarm was the BIOS saying the HDD had failed. I popped it out and re-seated it and everything was fine.
I had used that notebook at least 8 hours a day, every day, for 3 years and it had never done that before.
You know, it's interesting that I don't see such a flood of "that is illegal" comments for stories regarding filesharing, wardriving, etc. It's actually a decent idea - an FM system capable of covering a single home. Much like the range of WiFi without directional antennas.
I think the two things that caused a backlash with this story were covered my whole block and ham station. Hams can be pretty rough on one other regarding regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if every PC currently in use had such a CPU, that could reduce clock speed (and thus power consumption) when load was low. The power savings globally would have to be massive (assuming everyone wasn't running SETI@home).
Dan East
Forcing the students to wear the badges isn't an issue. The real problem would be a student hiding a badge somewhere deep in their book bag and registering an absent student as present.
I'm sure the faculty was smart enough to recognize this problem, thus they would have been performing manual attendance to audit the system. Plus every time a student forgot their ID, or a part of the system failed, or there's a power outage, they would have to resort back to the manual system.
IMO the heart of the problem is misapplying technology. Is taking attendance really such a time-consuming, difficult task to perform to require tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and the dispersal of hardware to every single student? A teacher should recognize their students, and should be cognizant of empty seats that are normally occupied.
Dan East
Okay, so take a small, light-weight car and put 4 large adults in there (you know - car pooling is a Good Thing). The gross weight of the car just increased by 1000 pounds, which could nearly double the weight of a small car.
So are you saying that vehicles used for car pooling should pay higher taxes because they damage the road more? Again, the same type of counter-intuitive scenario is created as with this GPS idea (penalizing high-efficiency vehicles because they consume less fuel).
Dan East
in DIRECT RELATION to a perceived threat to their sovereignty coming from the US
So you actually think that they only began developing these weapons after the US invaded Iraq?
That type of naiveté is highly desirable trait for citizens of communist governments like N Korea's.
Dan East
Hmm. Strong magnetic fields? Maybe you're at a convergence in the earth's magnetic field. ;)
Dan East
is that for those of us that know what's going on, we can get "dead" machines for basically free and fix them for next to nothing.
Our beater home PC is a PIII 500 MHz with a 15" LCD Panel.
The PC came from a guy who had an electrical short in his breaker box that sent 220 V to all the 110 V recepticles (this is in the US). His homeowner insurance basically replaced all electronics in his home wholesale. He gave me his dead PC in exchange for the work I did setting up his new PC (temporarily installing the drive from his old machine into the new to recover files). I opened it up and found a capacitor had been fried in the power supply. I already had the cap, which saved me from buying a $1 component at Radio Shack, so I had a PC for free (this was a few years ago when 500 MHz wasn't too shabby).
Now for the 15" monitor. Another guy had it laying around his house for a year, because his sister's kids had plugged the wrong power adapter into it and it no longer worked. After doing some computer work a couple times for him (for free), he gave me the monitor and said if I could fix it I could have it, otherwise toss it. So after opening it up I found it had a tiny surface mount ceramic fuse. I bridged that bad boy and had a perfectly functioning like-new 15" LCD monitor.
So I've got an entire computer system for free as the result of power supply failures.
Dan East
Don't forget AMD's Athlon mobile chips, which can switch between several different clock speeds instead of just 2 like the Pentium M.
Dan East
Just out of curiosity, why do you list infinite writes as a requirement for the ideal medium for archival?
Dan East
The article only contains a few sentences, so it's hard to tell either way, but I get the impression these are prototypes left over from AT&T Research. In that case this is hardly a product you can buy off the shelf, which is the impression the Slashdot story gives.
Dan East
Don't forget all the prolific Google AdSense content embedded directly into so many web pages. Google is in a better position to track a web surfer than any other entity, with the exception of spyware running on the actual client machine.
Dan East
Obviously you've not been using the devices for long enough, nor have you seen a wide enough sampling of device types.
I've been writing software for Windows CE devices full-time since 1996 (Windows CE 1.0). I can tell you beyond any doubt that beyond a few specific devices (DELL Axim X5 Basic comes to mind) performance has improved steadily across the board. CE 3.0 brought a new kernel that was vastly superior to the versions before it. The RAM is constantly increasing, the displays are now VGA resolution, the processor speed is increasing, hardware capability is growing (my a716 has Bluetooth, WiFi, CF and SD slots, and many devices now have cameras and cell), and Pocket PCs are already on the market with 3D hardware (DELL X50v)
What you are complaining about is the Pocket PC shell. When Microsoft introduced Pocket PC (in place of "Palm Sized PC - PSPC" CE 2.11) they did take a few steps backwards. They grossly oversimplified the shell in order to mimic Palm. This brought inconsistencies (shell related widgets are now at the bottom and top of the display instead of consolidated in one place, no Cancel button to escape out of a dialog when you don't want to save changes, etc). However all in all it was an improvement, as evidenced by MS finally surpassing Palm-OS devices in sales. All in all the shell is not fundamentally broken.
Since 3.0 Windows CE has been more stable than any incarnation of Windows I've ever used.
You make a list of hardware changes (smaller, battery life, connectivity) that need to occur. How is a total rewrite of the OS supposed to bring that along?
Dan East
I've been using Staples Picture Paper to transfer the ink to PCBs (you have to print your mask with a laser printer - inkjet won't work). That particular brand of paper works extremely well, as determined by a fellow who tested dozens of types of glossy photo-quality printer paper to see what transferred toner the best.
I don't see why this wouldn't work on cases. You use an iron to transfer the toner from the paper to the surface to be etched. Extremely narrow traces can be obtained ("MUCH less than 0.01 inches") with this method, so I'm sure it would give good results for case mods.
This website has the detailed instructions:
http://www.fullnet.com/u/tomg/gooteepc.htm
Dan East
Instead of sitting by idly for 213 minutes while the data transferred, he could have taken some of that time to implement compression, thus increasing throughput and decreasing the overall transfer time. :)
5 15142
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137702&cid=11
On a serious note, that was an admirable (and true) hack. Although there were several potential routes to extract the bootloader (FireWire, iPod's normal file transfer mechanism, analog data out the headphone jack), he took the path of least resistance (and simplest implementation).
Dan East
If the computer ran for 6 months straight using 1.8GHz processors, couldn't they have waited several months and utilized newer CPUs running at double the speed, halving the computation time?
Regarding their design, I'm somewhat surprised they used an individual power supply for each board. It seems there would be more efficient and smaller power systems available that could power multiple boards at once. It looks like a quarter of the volume of the computer is comprised of power supplies. Plus all that extra heat is thrown into the mix too.
Dan East
I think its ironic that MGM got in trouble not because the quality of the Widescreen movies was poor (it is the same thing theater goers would have seen), but that their Fullscreen quality was good. If the Fullscreen versions would have been typical pan and scan crap then their claim that the Widescreen version contained more information would have been correct.
My hunch is that they had a generic marketing plan to slap that text on every Widescreen movie, because in some (most?) cases the Fullscreen version was pan and scan.
Personally I never knew that some movies were shot in Fullscreen ratio and cropped to make it Widescreen until now.
Dan East
Something about looking at pictures taken at ground-level on other planets and planetoids is so fascinating. I guess because it is the same perspective we would have in person. Recently I was looking at the Soviet pictures from the surface of Venus and felt the same emotion - it's enough to make a person's heart skip a beat or two.
Hopefully within our lifetimes we will be able to casually pull up a website on the internet and view pictures from the surface of every solid body in our solar system. Now that would be an amazing thing.
I envision future spacecraft, similar to Cassini, that would contain dozens of micro-probes that could be used to study several moons in a single mission.
Dan East
So that explains why Scifi was playing Galactica 1980 all day long. After a marathon of that frack anything else is fantastic in comparison! Sort of like carpet bombing before sending in the troops - that'll soften them up a bit.
Dan East
According to the article, $170 million has been paid for software development. $100 million of that will be lost of the software is scrapped. The rest went to purchase thousands of computers and set up new networks.
So, surprise, the slashdot story title is misleading.
Dan East
--. .- - - .- -.-. .- (Lameness filter is lame)
Dan East
Okay, that's wrong.
The planet candidate has 3.375 times the volume of Jupiter (calculated the volume wrong). It is 5 times as massive, so its density is 1.48 times greater. Thus Earth is 2.8 times denser than this planet.
Dan East
Here are some calculations.
:)
The planet candidate has 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter, which means its volume is 2.25 greater. However it is 5 times as massive as Jupiter, so its density would have to be 2.222 times greater.
Earth is 4.16 times denser than Jupiter, so Earth is only 1.873 times denser than this new planet.
I think that's right.
Dan East
The planet candidate is about 1.5 times the diameter of Jupiter and about five times as massive.
Who said it was a ball of gas? The earth is four times denser than Jupiter, so this planet would be similar to the earth in density.
Dan East
So, how long before this new tech disappears forever after being bought out by the power companies? Remember that carburetor that lets gasoline engines burn water? I hear some Detroit auto-maker bought the design and buried it away for good. ;)
Dan East
Speaking of technical glitches when it matters most, here's a quick story of a wedding I was running sound for (not something I normally do, but I was drafted).
I had the various wedding songs in mp3 format on my Dell notebook. I'd been given the cue that the bride was ready to make her entrance, so as soon as I started the Bridal March she would enter. I was just about to click Play on my notebook when it gives a siren-like sound (not out of the soundcard / line out, but out of some internal speaker) and turns itself off.
Now fortunately (extremely) for me I had copied the songs onto a CF card, so I popped it into my Pocket PC, plugged it into the soundboard, and the wedding began. There was maybe a 20-30 second delay which no-one even noticed.
After the wedding I found the problem. The HDD was somehow not well seated, and the alarm was the BIOS saying the HDD had failed. I popped it out and re-seated it and everything was fine.
I had used that notebook at least 8 hours a day, every day, for 3 years and it had never done that before.
Dan East
You know, it's interesting that I don't see such a flood of "that is illegal" comments for stories regarding filesharing, wardriving, etc. It's actually a decent idea - an FM system capable of covering a single home. Much like the range of WiFi without directional antennas.
I think the two things that caused a backlash with this story were covered my whole block and ham station. Hams can be pretty rough on one other regarding regulations.
Dan East