Racer X, knowing he can never tell Speed that he is really his brother, nods knowingly, putting his FreeBSD disk in the trunk, and drives off into the sunset.........
However, Racer X didn't notice that Chim Chim and Spridle had sneaked into the trunk as well.
Machines must become more organic (fixing themselves, etc).
Imagine the possibilities... Say that two deep space probes were to be disabled by serious failures. With self-repair technology, if they chanced to cross paths, they could join together, merge their resources and continue on a hybrid of their original missions!
Since they said "engine idling", I assume it means that they're sitting parked with the engine on just so they can run the A/C. I'm guessing that this would consume a gallon every couple of hours.
As I understand it, when driving at highway speeds, using the A/C actually saves fuel vs. keeping the windows rolled down (because of lower air drag).
Fine. If you want to switch to alternative energy without any new taxes, simply outlaw pumping, selling or using fossil fuels. That's how the government deals with problems like drugs, murder and illicit file sharing. The law-and-order types should love this approach.
As a bonus, this action would stimulate all sorts of private investment into alternative energy sources as the free market attempts to find some way to provide people with power. Entrepreneurial types should love this approach as well.
The real thing on the line for the managers is the bonus they receive come review time. You don't get a great bonus if you ship really late. And you also don't get a great bonus if the product you ship sucks. "Reward" isn't just based on one factor.
Maybe these managers' bonuses should go into escrow for a few years. At the end of that time period, if no security holes were discovered in the product, then the managers would get to collect their bonuses.
The picture on the website says 100 miles at 60mph and 0-60 in 4.1 seconds (still not slow).
100 miles at 60mph is nothing special nor is it anything good.
That's not an issue with this car. Anybody who can afford to spend $200K on an electric car can easily afford to buy a luxury SUV and trailer stocked with 4 sets of fresh batteries, and hire a pit crew to follow them around and swap batteries as needed.
I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that some patches aren't immediate; they register with the OS to shuffle stuff around on the next boot. That would cause those strange little dialogs and messages that sometimes pop up briefly during the next Windows startup.
If I'm right, it probably means that some patches aren't actually activated until after a boot, even if the system still seems to work fine.
And how exactly is 1950s technology non-technological?
OK, replace the paper slips with light and dark pebbles dropped into baskets made of leaves. Replace the adding machines with various sized pebbles set on the ground in patterns like an abacus. Replace the phone lines with human runners. Leave a non-paper trail by rolling the used pebbles up in balls of mud and having the local election official put his handprint on it. You could still easily have a 100M-vote election with no technology at all, and the speed of the runners would be the only significant delay in getting the results.
They didn't say they wanted a system of counting 100 million votes using horribly outdated technology. We already have that.
The original post at the top of the thread made the point that horribly outdated technology sometimes works just fine and is the best solution for a given problem.
I'd like to see a non-technological solution to recording approximately 100 million votes.
You'd need:
100 million slips of paper
10 million golf pencils - (not hard to make)
20,000 polling stations manned with 5 volunteers each
1 call center in each state + 1 national headquarters, each equipped with a 1950s technology phone switchboard, couple dozen volunteers and some old fashioned adding machines
Theoretically, you could have the nationwide election results within 2 hours. 1 Hour for each local volunteer to count the 1,000 votes allocated to them, 45 minutes for the state centers to add up the phone calls, 15 minutes for the national headquarters to do the grand totals.
The way I did it involved my HP multimeter, a spare junction box and a few odds and ends from my box of electrical power connectors and terminals. As far as safety, I'd say don't try something like that unless you really know what you're doing.
Actually, I think that you can now buy or rent pre-fab ammeters built into an outlet adapter that are made just for measuring appliance power draws. That's probably the simplest route.
Now that it's technically feasible for people to easily rip them off: Surprise! People are ripping them off. They have no choice but to come up with a new plan.
You have to deal with the real world and the people who live in it. Wal-mart can leave bags of mulch unattended on palettes in front of the store because it's usually not really worth ripping them off. Liquor stores never leave their whiskey sitting out in front of the store, even though people *shouldn't* steal it if it were left unattended. The Internet has just changed music from a mulch-like product to a whiskey-like product.
Did you see the pictures of him waving after he got out of the capsule? Did you notice anything funny about them? There were no stars visible in the sky! That's a dead giveaway right there.
See the computer you're staring at? Guess what, most of it came from China. Their communist ways, despite your beliefs, will make them a superpower within the next century.
The Chinese government seems to be a strange mix comprised mostly of a mix of communism and fascism. The computer production is mostly a result of the newer fascist side. The communist side deals mainly with subsistence farming.
Over time, the trend looks like they will entirely drop the communism and the fascism may mellow out. In the meantime, the US is becoming more authoritarian. I think it's possible that one day both countries (and others too) will converge towards a system that looks something like the current Singapore government.
This is absolutely false. There is a credit reporting agency which tracks your medical history, and it is used for determining if you qualify or not for health insurance as well as life insurance.
Yes, I know that they already know all about your medical history. That's why I said that group health plans are not really insurance: They ignore information that they already have about your risk profile.
They do keep the info around, however, just in case you ever do need to buy real insurance from them in the form of an individual policy.
"Insurance", by definition, covers unpredictable risks. As medical science provides more and more means to predict an individual's medical future, the possible space for issuing insurance for that person's health shrinks. Maybe one day the "health insurance" industry is going to shrink itself out of business.
The problem is that for a significant portion of the population, individual insurance is useless because it is easy to determine that they are or are likely unhealthy enough so that unaffordable premiums are necessary. In fact, almost everybody will be eventually be in this boat as they get older. (Oh wait... they might not. We've already completely socialized healthcare for old people. It's just that the young people who pay for their care don't get to join in on the benefits paid for by our payroll taxes.)
Individual insurance can't cover the needs of many people, so most rely on "group insurance". This isn't really insurance, though, because the providers aren't doing the homework to see who's a risk an who's not. They just close their eyes and accept the whole group. Kind of like a mini corporate-sponsored commune.
For some unknown reason, everybody seems to think that all of the people who happen to work for one employer makes a natural "group" to do this blind communal risk sharing. That doesn't change the fact that some people are sicker and are "freeloading", as you put it, off of the others in that group. Why is that any more fair than any other manipulation of "insurance" rates?
IMO, most everybody who wants health coverage would agree to sign into one universal risk pool over the span of their lifetime in return for an end to the stress over being kicked out of the system if they change employers after they or one of their dependents get sick. Sure, a young healthy person might pay a little more up front, but the unpredictability of the current system would be erased. And someday the currently healthy person is most likely going to get back what they put in to the pool.
That's 1.9 cents per kWH. With a modern 90% efficient furnace, I get 2.1 cents per kWH of thermal energy.
Electric bill from same month:
9.2 cents per kWH. Electric furnace would be 100% efficient, so I would get 9.2 cents per kWH for electric heat. That costs 4.38 times as much as gas heat.
I assume you must live somewhere in Canada where it's very cold and they provide cheap hydroelectric power. That's not the most common situation for most people.
Only people in the coldest climates run nothing but heat. Most people run heat sometimes and A/C at other times; this will tend to cancel out any savings. In warm climates, the additional A/C load will make things even worse than the original $65.
Moreover, electrical resistance is a horribly expensive way to heat a building. IIRC, it costs 3 or 4 times as much per BTU delivered than natural gas or an electric heat pump. So the $65 per year of electricity might only offsetting $18 per year of gas even if you live at an arctic outpost and need heat all year round.
A while back I plugged a variety of appliances into an ammeter to see what they consumed. Here is what I got for a couple of computer systems:
Dell PIII-550MHz:
Idle - 39W
Unreal Tournament - 57W
Compiler Build - 56W
Powered Down - 2W
Athlon 1800+
Idle - 99W
Unreal Tournament - 118W
Powered Down - 5W
So my computers seem to use about 20 extra watts under load compared to idle. That would amount to an extra $18/year if the app ran all the time compared to letting the machine idle all the time (@ $.10/kwh).
However, I usually power my systems off when I'm not using them. If my athlon system is off an average of 16 hours per day vs. running under load, that saves $65 per year.
My 17-inch CRT monitor used 74 watts. Turning off or suspending that would save a similar amount of money. Altogether, that would be about $10 per month, as you guessed.
It is well-known that *BSD squeezes a more performance out of the same piece of hardware than Linux can
IIRC, OSX uses a mach kernel, not the BSD kernel. OSX uses BSD userland apps (that way nobody will try to make them rename it GNU/OSX), but these aren't going to have a big effect on supercomputer app performance.
plus the Apple uses a RISC processor which is a lot more efficient than the Intel CISC processors
No modern processor is simple enough to be called RISC in the classic sense, and all modern CISC processors use a RISC-like core. Moreover, the Power instruction set architecture is one of the more convoluted of those CPUs that claim to be "RISC"; maybe it's not RISC at all.
These days, instruction sets and clock speed are irrelevant red herrings. Cache size, I/O bandwidth and branch prediction are the main determiners of CPU performance. From what I've seen, the integer performance of the fastest X86 chips and the fastest G5 chips (and the Itanium for that matter) benchmark to rather similar numbers. Floating-point benchmarks vary more, but that's mainly a function of how much real estate the designers put in the FPU to address the chip's target market.
Slashdot Mirror
However, Racer X didn't notice that Chim Chim and Spridle had sneaked into the trunk as well.
Imagine the possibilities... Say that two deep space probes were to be disabled by serious failures. With self-repair technology, if they chanced to cross paths, they could join together, merge their resources and continue on a hybrid of their original missions!
As I understand it, when driving at highway speeds, using the A/C actually saves fuel vs. keeping the windows rolled down (because of lower air drag).
As a bonus, this action would stimulate all sorts of private investment into alternative energy sources as the free market attempts to find some way to provide people with power. Entrepreneurial types should love this approach as well.
Maybe these managers' bonuses should go into escrow for a few years. At the end of that time period, if no security holes were discovered in the product, then the managers would get to collect their bonuses.
100 miles at 60mph is nothing special nor is it anything good.
That's not an issue with this car. Anybody who can afford to spend $200K on an electric car can easily afford to buy a luxury SUV and trailer stocked with 4 sets of fresh batteries, and hire a pit crew to follow them around and swap batteries as needed.
If I'm right, it probably means that some patches aren't actually activated until after a boot, even if the system still seems to work fine.
777
I've got to agree with you there. It looks like the top ~10 "occupied" floors of this building are no bigger than broom closets.
I know one at least one person who would find that situation to be a major crisis.
Of course, since that person can't hold down a job and is perpetually broke, she actually gets to live through that crisis nearly every week.
OK, replace the paper slips with light and dark pebbles dropped into baskets made of leaves. Replace the adding machines with various sized pebbles set on the ground in patterns like an abacus. Replace the phone lines with human runners. Leave a non-paper trail by rolling the used pebbles up in balls of mud and having the local election official put his handprint on it. You could still easily have a 100M-vote election with no technology at all, and the speed of the runners would be the only significant delay in getting the results.
They didn't say they wanted a system of counting 100 million votes using horribly outdated technology. We already have that.
The original post at the top of the thread made the point that horribly outdated technology sometimes works just fine and is the best solution for a given problem.
You'd need:
- 100 million slips of paper
- 10 million golf pencils - (not hard to make)
- 20,000 polling stations manned with 5 volunteers each
- 1 call center in each state + 1 national headquarters, each equipped with a 1950s technology phone switchboard, couple dozen volunteers and some old fashioned adding machines
Theoretically, you could have the nationwide election results within 2 hours. 1 Hour for each local volunteer to count the 1,000 votes allocated to them, 45 minutes for the state centers to add up the phone calls, 15 minutes for the national headquarters to do the grand totals.Maybe with dynamic typing, that would only be a 30,000 line project.
Maybe if you're not careful and save your data on an old NTFS partition, you'll end up with something like this:
Actually, I think that you can now buy or rent pre-fab ammeters built into an outlet adapter that are made just for measuring appliance power draws. That's probably the simplest route.
You have to deal with the real world and the people who live in it. Wal-mart can leave bags of mulch unattended on palettes in front of the store because it's usually not really worth ripping them off. Liquor stores never leave their whiskey sitting out in front of the store, even though people *shouldn't* steal it if it were left unattended. The Internet has just changed music from a mulch-like product to a whiskey-like product.
Did you see the pictures of him waving after he got out of the capsule? Did you notice anything funny about them? There were no stars visible in the sky! That's a dead giveaway right there.
The Chinese government seems to be a strange mix comprised mostly of a mix of communism and fascism. The computer production is mostly a result of the newer fascist side. The communist side deals mainly with subsistence farming.
Over time, the trend looks like they will entirely drop the communism and the fascism may mellow out. In the meantime, the US is becoming more authoritarian. I think it's possible that one day both countries (and others too) will converge towards a system that looks something like the current Singapore government.
Yes, I know that they already know all about your medical history. That's why I said that group health plans are not really insurance: They ignore information that they already have about your risk profile.
They do keep the info around, however, just in case you ever do need to buy real insurance from them in the form of an individual policy.
The problem is that for a significant portion of the population, individual insurance is useless because it is easy to determine that they are or are likely unhealthy enough so that unaffordable premiums are necessary. In fact, almost everybody will be eventually be in this boat as they get older. (Oh wait... they might not. We've already completely socialized healthcare for old people. It's just that the young people who pay for their care don't get to join in on the benefits paid for by our payroll taxes.)
Individual insurance can't cover the needs of many people, so most rely on "group insurance". This isn't really insurance, though, because the providers aren't doing the homework to see who's a risk an who's not. They just close their eyes and accept the whole group. Kind of like a mini corporate-sponsored commune.
For some unknown reason, everybody seems to think that all of the people who happen to work for one employer makes a natural "group" to do this blind communal risk sharing. That doesn't change the fact that some people are sicker and are "freeloading", as you put it, off of the others in that group. Why is that any more fair than any other manipulation of "insurance" rates?
IMO, most everybody who wants health coverage would agree to sign into one universal risk pool over the span of their lifetime in return for an end to the stress over being kicked out of the system if they change employers after they or one of their dependents get sick. Sure, a young healthy person might pay a little more up front, but the unpredictability of the current system would be erased. And someday the currently healthy person is most likely going to get back what they put in to the pool.
Average town, U.S.A
but here electricity is a much cheaper way to heat than either of the other two.
Old gas bill from last winter:
11300 cubic feet ~= 12.43e6 btu == 13.1e9 j == 3643 kWh for $71.66
That's 1.9 cents per kWH. With a modern 90% efficient furnace, I get 2.1 cents per kWH of thermal energy.
Electric bill from same month:
9.2 cents per kWH. Electric furnace would be 100% efficient, so I would get 9.2 cents per kWH for electric heat. That costs 4.38 times as much as gas heat.
I assume you must live somewhere in Canada where it's very cold and they provide cheap hydroelectric power. That's not the most common situation for most people.
Moreover, electrical resistance is a horribly expensive way to heat a building. IIRC, it costs 3 or 4 times as much per BTU delivered than natural gas or an electric heat pump. So the $65 per year of electricity might only offsetting $18 per year of gas even if you live at an arctic outpost and need heat all year round.
Dell PIII-550MHz:
Athlon 1800+
So my computers seem to use about 20 extra watts under load compared to idle. That would amount to an extra $18/year if the app ran all the time compared to letting the machine idle all the time (@ $.10/kwh).
However, I usually power my systems off when I'm not using them. If my athlon system is off an average of 16 hours per day vs. running under load, that saves $65 per year.
My 17-inch CRT monitor used 74 watts. Turning off or suspending that would save a similar amount of money. Altogether, that would be about $10 per month, as you guessed.
Indeed, I don't see any oversized black anodized allen screws anywhere on these iPods. They're obviously not audiophile quality.
IIRC, OSX uses a mach kernel, not the BSD kernel. OSX uses BSD userland apps (that way nobody will try to make them rename it GNU/OSX), but these aren't going to have a big effect on supercomputer app performance.
plus the Apple uses a RISC processor which is a lot more efficient than the Intel CISC processors
No modern processor is simple enough to be called RISC in the classic sense, and all modern CISC processors use a RISC-like core. Moreover, the Power instruction set architecture is one of the more convoluted of those CPUs that claim to be "RISC"; maybe it's not RISC at all.
These days, instruction sets and clock speed are irrelevant red herrings. Cache size, I/O bandwidth and branch prediction are the main determiners of CPU performance. From what I've seen, the integer performance of the fastest X86 chips and the fastest G5 chips (and the Itanium for that matter) benchmark to rather similar numbers. Floating-point benchmarks vary more, but that's mainly a function of how much real estate the designers put in the FPU to address the chip's target market.