Interesting how the woman in the photo is painted entirely in black, while some of the men have their faces or entire bodies painted in red. Obviously it would be nice to know why they have those customs, but I'm not sure how to find out without disturbing them.
The colors differentiate the class of warrior. When they go out on dangerous missions, the ones painted red get killed, the ones painted blue return unharmed, and the ones painted gold get laid.
I just tried your idea. Forcing the system down to 1GHz from 2.5Gz causes it to use 13 additional watts instead of 63 extra watts while under load. The frames-per-second performance scaled with the clock speed at 40%, while the power increment was only 20% as much as full speed. So on this test low speed was twice as "efficient" at producing results per additional watt. (Of course, that assumes the system was going to be left turned on anyway. If not, it looks like full speed would get through a given number crunching workload with the lowest overall energy usage.)
TFS says that this new CPU is also their first superscalar, speculative out-of-order design. If they've made an effective implementation of that, they should get significantly more performance per clock out of this CPU compared to the C7.
What's the actual difference in energy costs, though?
I just hooked a Killawatt to my Athlon 64 X2 4800+ system. Idle, it uses 67 watts at the wall outlet. Simultaneously transcoding two videos with mencoder reads 130 watts.
If this runs 24x7, the extra 63 watts would use 1.5 KwH per day, which would cost me $71 per year with my incremental electricity cost of about 13 cents per KwH. That costs almost as much as a subscription to Netflix.
Another consideration is that when idle, the system is almost silent. Under load, both the power supply fan and CPU fan crank up and get rather loud.
Gee, if only the 18th century elders had considered the fact that the constitution might need to change..Oh wait, they did.
You're right. Ideally, we'd amend the constitution to specifically state that the government has the authority to do what needs to be done in a modern industrial civilization. But the end result would still be the same as what we have now: federal funding of large basic research laboratories.
you really are missing the point that both parties are corrupt and extending government beyond the constitutionally defined limits.
So since the elders of an 18th century agrarian society somehow failed to specifically envisage the important technological advances that high energy physics could provide for a nation, then the government must abstain from all involvement in that area. Maybe some private business would pick up the slack and build a big particle accelerator for basic research. Maybe they could fund it by painting Taco Bell ads on the ring.
Few other countries would worry about such strict constructionist issues, however. They'd just go ahead and leave us in the dust as a technology backwater.
no American space presence - manned or robotic - will occur again.
I wasn't advocating stopping robotic missions. In fact, I think that it would be better to cancel all manned activity and use those funds (and more) to increase robotic mission activity by a factor of 10X or more. Why not build a permanent Mars base staffed with a variety of robots and rovers for a fraction of the cost of a manned mission? The savings could be used to also explore moons of outer planets that are probably more interesting anyway (and too radioactive for human exploration in the foreseeable future).
After a few decades, if we find anything worthwhile on Mars, then we can send out some astronauts to swoop down, hang out in the established Mars base, and pose for pix next to a flag.
Well stopping it for five years will effectivly kill it.
GOOD. Then maybe when they resurrect it they'll be able to eliminate all vestiges of overpriced government committee designed Space Shuttle hardware and/or derivatives, ditch the ISS boondoggle in the ocean, dump the pointless moonbase ideas in the trash, and lay off any and all people who have vested interests in them.
Sometimes a patch of land has so many weeds that the only thing to do is hose it down with Roundup. That's exactly what the US manned space program needs right now.
15,000 microns? I don't think you know what you're talking about. Microns are a unit of distance. The brochure that you reference mentions 5000 particles, each of 3 microns diameter. That's about 1e-7 cm^3, or about 2 microgram's worth of Pu-238. As I said, quantities of Pu-238 measurable in mircrogram quantities have significant health risks.
At any rate, at least now you admit that the radiation danger of Pu-238 is much higher than the chemical toxicity of heavy metals, and you can no longer claim that "it's probably more toxic as a heavy metal than as a radioactive substance." (OSHA allows for workers to breath air containing 50 micrograms per m^3 of lead all day long every day, for example.), or that the only radiation worth worrying about is gamma emmiters.
Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence?.
You would actually have to have quite a bit of intelligence to represent that "date". It can't be done directly, but my best guess would be to represent it as an integer timestamp, cast as a floating point value. The answer would then be "NaN".
It can't possibly do any damage to anyone, unless someone perhaps feels the urge to eat large quantities of it, in which case it's probably more toxic as a heavy metal than as a radioactive substance.
You've got your isotopes mixed up. RTGs use Pu-238, which is orders of magnitude more radioactive than Pu-239. It's an alpha emitter, which makes it extremely dangerous to ingest. (Yes, the radiation can't go through your skin blah blah. That's not the issue if you breath it or eat it.) Absorbing microgram quantities would probably be a grave danger to your health.
The US government already knows how to make nuclear weapons the easy way, so the US government chemically extracting neptunium 237 from waste and irradiating it in a reactor to make Pu-238 would not be a proliferation threat. Moreover, neither of those isotopes is used in weapons.
It has simply been easier for us to buy the stuff from Russia over the last couple of decades. (This probably has had the beneficial side effect of keeping some of their nuclear technicians gainfully employed.)
If you really needed megawatts of power on a space mission, RTGs would not be the way to do it. The Pu-238 fuel is hideously expensive, and you can't turn the damned things off.
It would be much simpler, safer and cheaper to simply put a small nuclear reactor in the spacecraft. Tiny reactors use ordinary cheap weapons grade uranium fuel. Before the reactor is turned on, the virgin fuel isn't even significantly radioactive, so no launch issues. Unlike RTGs, the power output of reactors can be adjusted as needed.
The Soviet Union launched a few dozen nuclear reactors into orbit in the 1970s that are still whizzing over our heads. IIRC, they had a power output in the range of hundreds of kilowatts. It's straightforward and mature technology, and it would be a good way to get rid of the excess weapons grade uranium that we have stockpiled from the cold war.
We currently have more plutonium right here on earth than we know what to do with. Spent nuclear fuel and disassembled nuclear weapons both contain plutonium and contribute to the current glut. We are burning some of it up in nuclear reactors, and we're trying to figure out how to safely bury the rest. What's actually in short supply is the specific isotope used to power: RTGs Pu-238.
The problem is not a shortage of raw materials (Pu-238 is currently made by irradiating components of otherwise useless nuclear waste.) The problem is that the steps involved in production and extraction of the isotope are dangerous, esoteric and expensive, so we haven't been doing it.
And, as in Enron's case, it can be as devastating or even more so than some pimp or drug dealer.
I agree. Therefore, these pirates should receive punishments that are proportional to those of Enron executives, based on total economic damages.
In the case of Enron, a few $billion in mayhem is worth maybe 30 years of prison time. These pirates probably served up a few $million worth of of CDs. That would make the applicable prison sentence about 1/1000 of an Enron: let's say a week or two.
make it legal and increase it's use 10x then get back to me. bottom line is misuse of any drug will cause social problems
The overall situation would still be an improvement. A lot of alcohol consumption would be *replaced* by pot usage if pot were legal. Alcohol is a powerful drug that tends to cause belligerent, violent and reckless behavior a large percentage of its users. Replacing that with a drug that causes lethargy and subtle mental deterioration over time would be a net gain, partly because the "victims" would be the users themselves instead of innocent people that the users beat the crap out of.
You just need a disclaimer and the declaration of the PD gift.
Then there's no legal requirement (like the BSD license has) for a 3rd party to distribute your disclaimer with your code. It's likely that end users won't even have a chance to see it.
And the idea of trying to distribute anything more than a toy program anonymously is plain silly. How many hoops would you have to jump through to communicate with users or contributors while avoiding being tracked down? Just slap a BSD license on the damned thing and be done with it.
vim is great for managing small collections of random data. Even better is also using something like git to track the changes over time.
After trying all sorts of PIM software and PDAs over the years, that's the one solution that I've found most useful. The only real drawback is the steep learning curve before one gets comfortable with vim's more powerful features.
It is my hope that more PD projects will be made available by other authors as a result of my extolling the superior virtues of PD
As I understand it, placing works in the public domain is not necessarily a good idea for software authors because they have no protection against liability in the event that someone claims that a bug resulted in loss or injury.
Using a BSD-style license achieves essentially the same thing while at least asserting some disclaimer of liability for the author.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. But when was the last time you were unable to pull up Google's search page? At the end of the day, that's all that matters.
BTW, I'd bet good money that a "broadcast engineering truck" costs 25X what google pays per CPU cycle.
It stayed quiet. The fans only seem to have a few discreet settings, and they didn't step up for that amount of power.
The colors differentiate the class of warrior. When they go out on dangerous missions, the ones painted red get killed, the ones painted blue return unharmed, and the ones painted gold get laid.
I just tried your idea. Forcing the system down to 1GHz from 2.5Gz causes it to use 13 additional watts instead of 63 extra watts while under load. The frames-per-second performance scaled with the clock speed at 40%, while the power increment was only 20% as much as full speed. So on this test low speed was twice as "efficient" at producing results per additional watt. (Of course, that assumes the system was going to be left turned on anyway. If not, it looks like full speed would get through a given number crunching workload with the lowest overall energy usage.)
TFS says that this new CPU is also their first superscalar, speculative out-of-order design. If they've made an effective implementation of that, they should get significantly more performance per clock out of this CPU compared to the C7.
I just hooked a Killawatt to my Athlon 64 X2 4800+ system. Idle, it uses 67 watts at the wall outlet. Simultaneously transcoding two videos with mencoder reads 130 watts.
If this runs 24x7, the extra 63 watts would use 1.5 KwH per day, which would cost me $71 per year with my incremental electricity cost of about 13 cents per KwH. That costs almost as much as a subscription to Netflix.
Another consideration is that when idle, the system is almost silent. Under load, both the power supply fan and CPU fan crank up and get rather loud.
You're right. Ideally, we'd amend the constitution to specifically state that the government has the authority to do what needs to be done in a modern industrial civilization. But the end result would still be the same as what we have now: federal funding of large basic research laboratories.
And just where do you think that universities get the money for basic research like this?
So since the elders of an 18th century agrarian society somehow failed to specifically envisage the important technological advances that high energy physics could provide for a nation, then the government must abstain from all involvement in that area. Maybe some private business would pick up the slack and build a big particle accelerator for basic research. Maybe they could fund it by painting Taco Bell ads on the ring.
Few other countries would worry about such strict constructionist issues, however. They'd just go ahead and leave us in the dust as a technology backwater.
I wasn't advocating stopping robotic missions. In fact, I think that it would be better to cancel all manned activity and use those funds (and more) to increase robotic mission activity by a factor of 10X or more. Why not build a permanent Mars base staffed with a variety of robots and rovers for a fraction of the cost of a manned mission? The savings could be used to also explore moons of outer planets that are probably more interesting anyway (and too radioactive for human exploration in the foreseeable future).
After a few decades, if we find anything worthwhile on Mars, then we can send out some astronauts to swoop down, hang out in the established Mars base, and pose for pix next to a flag.
The point is, no H-bomb has ever been dropped on Hiroshima. Thus, the date is NaN in any system.
Somehow, all the current popular OSes except one manage to make do just fine with only the linefeed.
GOOD. Then maybe when they resurrect it they'll be able to eliminate all vestiges of overpriced government committee designed Space Shuttle hardware and/or derivatives, ditch the ISS boondoggle in the ocean, dump the pointless moonbase ideas in the trash, and lay off any and all people who have vested interests in them.
Sometimes a patch of land has so many weeds that the only thing to do is hose it down with Roundup. That's exactly what the US manned space program needs right now.
That's obviously invalid. One important requirement for patentability is that an invention must be useful.
At any rate, at least now you admit that the radiation danger of Pu-238 is much higher than the chemical toxicity of heavy metals, and you can no longer claim that "it's probably more toxic as a heavy metal than as a radioactive substance." (OSHA allows for workers to breath air containing 50 micrograms per m^3 of lead all day long every day, for example.), or that the only radiation worth worrying about is gamma emmiters.
You would actually have to have quite a bit of intelligence to represent that "date". It can't be done directly, but my best guess would be to represent it as an integer timestamp, cast as a floating point value. The answer would then be "NaN".
You've got your isotopes mixed up. RTGs use Pu-238, which is orders of magnitude more radioactive than Pu-239. It's an alpha emitter, which makes it extremely dangerous to ingest. (Yes, the radiation can't go through your skin blah blah. That's not the issue if you breath it or eat it.) Absorbing microgram quantities would probably be a grave danger to your health.
It has simply been easier for us to buy the stuff from Russia over the last couple of decades. (This probably has had the beneficial side effect of keeping some of their nuclear technicians gainfully employed.)
It would be much simpler, safer and cheaper to simply put a small nuclear reactor in the spacecraft. Tiny reactors use ordinary cheap weapons grade uranium fuel. Before the reactor is turned on, the virgin fuel isn't even significantly radioactive, so no launch issues. Unlike RTGs, the power output of reactors can be adjusted as needed.
The Soviet Union launched a few dozen nuclear reactors into orbit in the 1970s that are still whizzing over our heads. IIRC, they had a power output in the range of hundreds of kilowatts. It's straightforward and mature technology, and it would be a good way to get rid of the excess weapons grade uranium that we have stockpiled from the cold war.
The problem is not a shortage of raw materials (Pu-238 is currently made by irradiating components of otherwise useless nuclear waste.) The problem is that the steps involved in production and extraction of the isotope are dangerous, esoteric and expensive, so we haven't been doing it.
I agree. Therefore, these pirates should receive punishments that are proportional to those of Enron executives, based on total economic damages.
In the case of Enron, a few $billion in mayhem is worth maybe 30 years of prison time. These pirates probably served up a few $million worth of of CDs. That would make the applicable prison sentence about 1/1000 of an Enron: let's say a week or two.
The overall situation would still be an improvement. A lot of alcohol consumption would be *replaced* by pot usage if pot were legal. Alcohol is a powerful drug that tends to cause belligerent, violent and reckless behavior a large percentage of its users. Replacing that with a drug that causes lethargy and subtle mental deterioration over time would be a net gain, partly because the "victims" would be the users themselves instead of innocent people that the users beat the crap out of.
Then there's no legal requirement (like the BSD license has) for a 3rd party to distribute your disclaimer with your code. It's likely that end users won't even have a chance to see it.
And the idea of trying to distribute anything more than a toy program anonymously is plain silly. How many hoops would you have to jump through to communicate with users or contributors while avoiding being tracked down? Just slap a BSD license on the damned thing and be done with it.
After trying all sorts of PIM software and PDAs over the years, that's the one solution that I've found most useful. The only real drawback is the steep learning curve before one gets comfortable with vim's more powerful features.
As I understand it, placing works in the public domain is not necessarily a good idea for software authors because they have no protection against liability in the event that someone claims that a bug resulted in loss or injury.
Using a BSD-style license achieves essentially the same thing while at least asserting some disclaimer of liability for the author.