I am not an economist, but doesn't a secondary market for a product (i.e. being able to sell your car used) have a positive impact on first-time sales?
The article notes in passing that a watt-year costs about a dollar right now.
But the big glaring omission in the article is cooling costs. Every dollar spent on electricity is probably tripled when you add in cooling costs. You have to buy the air conditioners, maintain them, and supply them with electricity. Then you have to buy a bigger UPS and backup generator to run them. Plus the bigger air conditioners and UPS take up space that you can't use for servers.
I've had excellent luck with DSPAM. It's fast (written in C), easy to install/administer (server-side only tho, AFAIK) and shockingly effective once it's trained (takes about 100 spams to train it from scratch).
There's the occasional false positive to sort out (1 in every 1000 messages or so), but it pretty much catches every spam.
I haven't had especially good luck with spamassassin, but then I never updated the ruleset or enabled the Bayesian feature.
The nice thing about DSPAM is that the only updates involved are for security fixes and new features (unless you count each user sending in the occasional uncaught spam or false positive).
Besides the driving cycle being out-of-date, the simulated load of the car (aerodynamic drag and mass) is figured out by some very out-of-date and rough formulas.
The drag coefficient is guestimated by looking at a bunch of variables (ca. 1977) like whether the car has gutters, what angle the windshield is at, etc. The frontal area is measured by taping a square-foot sheet of cardboard to the front of the car and photographing it from 50 feet away. Thus cars with a short hood (like my old Element) get penalized.
Also, it is OK to not "keep up with traffic" in the test if your car is underpowered. To inflate their fuel economy ratings, Honda shifted up a gear at very low RPM, giving them insanely high numbers. Then they put a rule in place saying that you had to shift at x percent of redline, giving e.g. Ferraris incredibly low numbers (they did practically the whole test in first gear). So then automakers started putting in the "yellow line" (WTF?) that said you should really sorta kinda stay out of this RPM zone, but the engine won't break, and the rev limiter won't kick in for another few grand.
Bottom line, the EPA numbers have very little to do with reality. Take a look at C&D or Consumer Reports (or CAR if you're in the UK) to get more real-world numbers.
Patrick Smith, an out-of-work pilot that writes for Salon, encouraged people to vote down the Dreamliner name that the French apparently overwhelmingly approved of.
mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
It would be like a moist towelette, but large enough to bathe with. Just step into a closet, tear open the package (roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper), and use*.
Also in the vein of ridiculously oversized consumer products, how about a "house freshener." It would be like those vile little tree-shaped car fresheners, except roughly one meter tall. You'd hang it from your ceiling and fill your house with noxious faux-pine fumes.
*I'm paraphrasing the instructions of an actual moist towelette ("tear open package, remove towelette, and use").
It seems to escape a lot of people that electrical outlets are far more plentiful than gas stations. Save for those people that work (or live) at a gas station, an electric vehicle doesn't involve any extra stops. Finally, in the amounts that an electric-assist bicycle uses, electricity is basically free (as in beer), which is less and less the case with gasoline.
For a while, IIRC, the user 'elvis' owned all of the files on a BeOS system. At some point it was changed to (or from, I'm a little foggy here) 'baron'.
Anyone remember? One of these days I'm going to install one of the really ghetto early versions of BeOS on my BeBox. One of the versions where the Pulse app could turn off both processors:).
Swimming pool control with Linux
Something happened Saturday, February 9, 2002, resulting in this
Web site getting hammered with hits and overloading the server.
Why is my site getting 10,000s of hits this morning?
Was there a provocative link posted somewhere?
Please someone email me about this at: address deleted
Richard J. Kinch
You could take this to it's logical but absurd conclusion and say that students should have to enter their program with little switches and a button, eight bits at a time. But seriously, you can learn a lot about how computers work if you have to write your own stack, your own heap, and your own start-up code.
What you won't learn is how to use a modern computer to create useful applications (unless you want to go into embedded programming). IOW half of CS is knowing how a computer works, but the other half is getting the computer to do most of the work.
Java may get a lot of bashing, but I see it as C++ with most of the bullshit removed (oh, yeah, and it's slow). I think it makes a perfectly good into-to-OO language.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not an economist, but doesn't a secondary market for a product (i.e. being able to sell your car used) have a positive impact on first-time sales?
How should this affect my New Year's countdown?
One of the biggest themes in software industry failures is a platform vendor that didn't understand that they were a platform vendor, so they alienated their key constituency: the developers.
I'll have to finish my Newton Ant Farm.
Any idea where I can get an EL backlight?
The article notes in passing that a watt-year costs about a dollar right now.
But the big glaring omission in the article is cooling costs. Every dollar spent on electricity is probably tripled when you add in cooling costs. You have to buy the air conditioners, maintain them, and supply them with electricity. Then you have to buy a bigger UPS and backup generator to run them. Plus the bigger air conditioners and UPS take up space that you can't use for servers.
...and block the offending IP.
I'm still not sure how plugging in your car at night is more of a hassle than biweekly trips to the gas station and bimontly oil changes...
I guess there's that whole "what if I want to drive to Vegas?" thing, but how often do you do that?
I've had excellent luck with DSPAM. It's fast (written in C), easy to install/administer (server-side only tho, AFAIK) and shockingly effective once it's trained (takes about 100 spams to train it from scratch).
There's the occasional false positive to sort out (1 in every 1000 messages or so), but it pretty much catches every spam.
I haven't had especially good luck with spamassassin, but then I never updated the ruleset or enabled the Bayesian feature.
The nice thing about DSPAM is that the only updates involved are for security fixes and new features (unless you count each user sending in the occasional uncaught spam or false positive).
...always gas up in 10-gallon increments.
Besides the driving cycle being out-of-date, the simulated load of the car (aerodynamic drag and mass) is figured out by some very out-of-date and rough formulas.
The drag coefficient is guestimated by looking at a bunch of variables (ca. 1977) like whether the car has gutters, what angle the windshield is at, etc. The frontal area is measured by taping a square-foot sheet of cardboard to the front of the car and photographing it from 50 feet away. Thus cars with a short hood (like my old Element) get penalized.
Also, it is OK to not "keep up with traffic" in the test if your car is underpowered. To inflate their fuel economy ratings, Honda shifted up a gear at very low RPM, giving them insanely high numbers. Then they put a rule in place saying that you had to shift at x percent of redline, giving e.g. Ferraris incredibly low numbers (they did practically the whole test in first gear). So then automakers started putting in the "yellow line" (WTF?) that said you should really sorta kinda stay out of this RPM zone, but the engine won't break, and the rev limiter won't kick in for another few grand.
Bottom line, the EPA numbers have very little to do with reality. Take a look at C&D or Consumer Reports (or CAR if you're in the UK) to get more real-world numbers.
Patrick Smith, an out-of-work pilot that writes for Salon, encouraged people to vote down the Dreamliner name that the French apparently overwhelmingly approved of.
mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
Also in the vein of ridiculously oversized consumer products, how about a "house freshener." It would be like those vile little tree-shaped car fresheners, except roughly one meter tall. You'd hang it from your ceiling and fill your house with noxious faux-pine fumes.
*I'm paraphrasing the instructions of an actual moist towelette ("tear open package, remove towelette, and use").
It seems to escape a lot of people that electrical outlets are far more plentiful than gas stations. Save for those people that work (or live) at a gas station, an electric vehicle doesn't involve any extra stops. Finally, in the amounts that an electric-assist bicycle uses, electricity is basically free (as in beer), which is less and less the case with gasoline.
...or does that read like the table of contents of a fuel cell textbook?
-Frank
Anyone remember? One of these days I'm going to install one of the really ghetto early versions of BeOS on my BeBox. One of the versions where the Pulse app could turn off both processors :).
Swimming pool control with Linux
Something happened Saturday, February 9, 2002, resulting in this Web site getting hammered with hits and overloading the server. Why is my site getting 10,000s of hits this morning?
Was there a provocative link posted somewhere?
Please someone email me about this at:
address deleted
Richard J. Kinch
-Frank
-frank
Cool! It looks like the phone book application can now dial the stored numbers for you.
How long till somebody makes it do redbox tones? Do those still work?
Fortunately those of us with GSM phones haven't had to deal with this, since user data is stored on the SIM card.
I want a radio tuner wheel that "clicks" into stations relative to how strong they are.
-Frank
I always thought the Great Programmer used something more O.G., like lisp.
-Frank
...How about teaching them embedded programming?
You could take this to it's logical but absurd conclusion and say that students should have to enter their program with little switches and a button, eight bits at a time. But seriously, you can learn a lot about how computers work if you have to write your own stack, your own heap, and your own start-up code.
What you won't learn is how to use a modern computer to create useful applications (unless you want to go into embedded programming). IOW half of CS is knowing how a computer works, but the other half is getting the computer to do most of the work.
Java may get a lot of bashing, but I see it as C++ with most of the bullshit removed (oh, yeah, and it's slow). I think it makes a perfectly good into-to-OO language.
To answer my own question, not very hard at all. You'd need a well-filtered wall wart and a 300-ohm resistor.
So it's just a matter of software.