A single large electric pool heater consumes around 30kW for a pool size 16x32, but requires three phase power. For larger pools and reliability, it might be practical to have several of these. That could make the swimming pool rival a chip fabrication plant in energy consumption.
I could imagine the school just used four or five single phase heaters.
Modern complex C++ class objects and structures, always seem to have a 'duplicate', 'transfer' or 'swap' function rather than a simple 'memcpy'.
With a complex data structure with dynamically allocated linked lists, trees or chains of data, the assignment over '=' is rather ambiguous. Does it mean duplicate the contents, transfer the contents and clear the original copy, or just swap the contents of the items, which might be quicker.
Worked for a company that was right next to a private school with their own electrically heated swimming pool. Every morning around 11.00am, the fluorescent strips in our room would start blinking one by one then going out. After 12.30pm when the pool had been heated, all the lights would come back on.
Unless it has happened to you at least once, you don't realize how important it is. Out of five PC's and laptops I have owned in the past 20 years, I've had three disk failures, so a drive failure rate of once in seven years.
The first hard disk drive failure was when a power glitch blew out a capacitor on the drive controller for a MS-DOS PC (1994). Fortunately, I religiously used "fastback", but was able to recover the disk by finding a spare drive controller card.
The second hard disk drive was when a laptop drive overheated (2002). The fix for that was to do the "put the disk in a freezer bag, chill it, and give it a sharp twist to get it moving again.". That was enough to get a list of incremental changes for the day.
Third hard disk drive was when the hard disk drive of a desktop system used as a backup server failed due to a lighning strike (2008). Everything was copied over just in case, and copy of the file system was saved using 'dd'.
Without an external hard disk drive, a failure like that will really mess you and your company up. With a backup drive that can just be switched over, it is a minor inconvenience.
It might cost more in the future given that software patents exist. If you can prove that prior art exists, you can invalidate a patent. Here is a simple one:
Maze War was one of the first multi-player 3D person shoot-out games, written around 1974 on an IMLACS PSD-1 at NASA Ames Research Center.
Our November 2004 30th birthday event for "Maze War," the first-ever first-person shooter, uncovered so much prior art that Sony contacted us about several patent challenges on multi-player gaming. It turns out that by recovering the history of "Maze War," we had knocked the wind out of several patent claims, which are now headed to settlement instead of to court.
Out of curiosity, does anyone remember UNIX games like Grid, Convoy, Dune and Wander, written by Peter. S. Langston?
You have so much data being churned around. The high end GPU's have 240+ stream processors, compared to a handful for a mobile phone. Then there is the constant punting of video data from the VRAM chips to the LCD screens (width x depth x RGB x bits/channel Hertz. VRAM is like standard RAM memory except there is a special read channel to allow whole rows of memory to be read by the video decoder simultaneously as it is being read/written by the GPU. It would be possible to raise the clock frequency, but they would need a larger heatsink. If you visit the overclocking websites, you will see some of the custom water cooling systems that they have. Early supercomputers like Cray used Fluorinert.
A friend once left a open bag of spicy rice at the back of a deep cupboard over three months. After about three months he couldn't understand why that particular area of the kitchen always seem to hit him with a wave of hot air. That was just a small bag of rice. I would hate to imagine what decomposed vegetation would smell combined with that - most vegetables decompose into a vinegary/soapy smell.
As far as the command shells and development environment, IRIX seemed to be no different from any other release of Linux or Unix. Most of the innovation would have been with the device drivers interfacing to the graphics hardware and API's. But those patents were sold off to Microsoft.
The most memorable thing about the SGI's was the 'buttonfly' user interface for selecting between the various demo applications (the radiosity/texture mapped house, the SGI logo coming out of the 2D drawing - that one is in the GLUT demos. the 'stonehenge' demo that found its way into the MSDN CD's, if you really dig deep enough).
You can get a jumbo list of around 6400+ servers that maintain cookies, counter, oix, phorm, webwise and all the other related types of tracking. That stops any other subversive attempts of reaching these sites through other protocols than http.
Lots of big shops are heterogenous to the point of pathology.
Risk analysts advice multinational corporations not to become dependent on any one vendor to avoid lock-in, or country to avoid the locals starting to get uppity and start demanding higher wages or better working conditions.
There were some graphics coprocessor cards back in the early 1990's. Texas Instruments TMS34010/TMS34020 range, that could have up four floating point units per processor. All of that was wiped out after Intel deliberately introduced a faster video bus and it became faster to render using the CPU again.
Very much like the Victorian factories during the Industrial Revolution in the UK. The factory owners built terraced housing, schools, churches and parks to make the locations attractive to their staff. It worked perfectly until the factories closed down and their wasn't anything to replace them.
A simple check of the serial number should be able to determine whether it is stolen or not. Keeping a digital photograph of the serial number of every valuable item seems to be the best way of recording them.
Did the developer know about the bug at the time? Did the developer use a relevant set of test cases to check the operation of the code? But all of this goes out of the window if the user and developer both use different versions of these API's.
A developer could only be able to certify his software to work with certain releases of key API's. This seems to be no different from the installation of RPM's or 'yum updates' under Linux distributions, where a package will only install if all the other packages are installed/updated.
There was a similar story going around the conspiracy theory websites about a paper published by bentham.org relating to active thermitic material (flakes of paint that burn under intense heat).
If you have paid off the mortgage on a house in a suburb with a good school or have retired to somewhere rural with more space and lower property taxes, have enough savings where the interest can be used to pay off the loan on a new or slightly used car, the food and utility bills, and you have still have enough left to do whatever you have always wanted to do (timelapse photography, video editing), then money does buy you independence.
I've seen many people do this, from engineers who had a steady career with large corporations, and took the option of early retirement when the companies downsized, to company directors who sold the company off to a mega-corp, and then formed their own startup.
But if you are wanting to continue running your company your way, the investment from megacorp is going to come with a catch; maybe the product manager responsible for that area will start making demands such as wanting the most qualified staff working on a particular aspect of the project, or using particular development tools or methodologies (to showcase their technology).
They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.
That was supposed to be the job of their ambassadors and maybe the sales/marketing people - to get feedback from potential customers as to what they wanted to see in future products. Problem is, they mostly wanted a solid reliable OS that that they wouldn't have to wait for the first service pack before upgrading an entire department as well as having a competitive price/performance ratio.
For Sparc processors like Niagara II, the server group would want more cache and hardware support for encryption, but the workstation group would want more floating-point processors. In the end they both get what they want with multi-core chips.
Each core has its own cache. Intel CPU's have cache pages based on 128 byte boundaries (cache page lines), and so any application has to ensure that the data shared between threads is protected by some suitable mechanism (mutexes) and is also padded to a suitable length. Fail to do this, and any algorithm that is multi-threaded becomes a multi-threaded random number generator.
The original public transportation rail network (just after World War II) allowed anyone to travel from just about any two villages in the country through two or three changes with the rail network. The demand from central routes subsidized the outlying village routes. Though this still required a subsidy from the government to work which was taken away by Beeching. Those non-profitable routes that were not canceled are now some of the most overcrowded services in the UK. Privatizing the railway network separately from the train companies only led to the costs being reduced through reduced safety inspections.
Before nationalization, each train company owned its own locomotives and carriages as well as the train tracks on either the East or the West of the country, so there was competition and each company was responsible for its own track.
Some "high security" hard drives would have a thermal oxidiser as a layer between the glass platters and the magnetic media. If a plug on the front of the hard drive was removed, oxygen would enter the enclosure, cause the oxidiser to react, heat up and disintegrate the binding of the magnetic particles. Complete and guaranteed permanent wipe.
When you purchase anything that has a TV tuner circuit built in, your purchasing address get sent automatically to the TV licensing authority. If you don't already have a license registered at that address, you will be sent a rather threatening warning letter.
The problem is now that you can buy a USB TV tuner dongle for around 18 pounds. The TV license itself is an annual fee of around 142.50 pounds. Many laptops and PC's now come with the TV tuner built in. Not only is there a database of registered TV's, but it essentially becomes a database of registered computers as well.
Slashdot Mirror
A single large electric pool heater consumes around 30kW for a pool size 16x32, but requires three phase power. For larger pools and reliability, it might be practical to have several of these. That could make the swimming pool rival a chip fabrication plant in energy consumption.
I could imagine the school just used four or five single phase heaters.
Electric pool heaters
Modern complex C++ class objects and structures, always seem to have a 'duplicate', 'transfer' or 'swap' function rather than a simple 'memcpy'.
With a complex data structure with dynamically allocated linked lists, trees or chains of data, the assignment over '=' is rather ambiguous. Does it mean duplicate the contents, transfer the contents and clear the original copy, or just swap the contents of the items, which might be quicker.
Worked for a company that was right next to a private school with their own electrically heated swimming pool. Every morning around 11.00am, the fluorescent strips in our room would start blinking one by one then going out. After 12.30pm when the pool had been heated, all the lights would come back on.
Unless it has happened to you at least once, you don't realize how important it is.
Out of five PC's and laptops I have owned in the past 20 years, I've had three disk failures, so a drive failure rate of once in seven years.
The first hard disk drive failure was when a power glitch blew out a capacitor on the drive controller for a MS-DOS PC (1994). Fortunately, I religiously used "fastback", but was able to recover the disk by finding a spare drive controller card.
The second hard disk drive was when a laptop drive overheated (2002). The fix for that was to do the "put the disk in a freezer bag, chill it, and give it a sharp twist to get it moving again.". That was enough to get a list of incremental changes for the day.
Third hard disk drive was when the hard disk drive of a desktop system used as a backup server failed due to a lighning strike (2008). Everything was copied over just in case, and copy of the file system was saved using 'dd'.
Without an external hard disk drive, a failure like that will really mess you and your company up. With a backup drive that can just be switched over, it is a minor inconvenience.
It might cost more in the future given that software patents exist. If you can prove that prior art exists, you can invalidate a patent. Here is a simple one:
Maze War was one of the first multi-player 3D person shoot-out games, written around 1974 on an IMLACS PSD-1 at NASA Ames Research Center.
Having evidence of this prior art, helped to settle many patent claimes related to multi-player and networked gaming.
Our November 2004 30th birthday event for "Maze War," the first-ever first-person shooter, uncovered so much prior art that Sony contacted us about several patent challenges on multi-player gaming. It turns out that by recovering the history of "Maze War," we had knocked the wind out of several patent claims, which are now headed to settlement instead of to court.
Out of curiosity, does anyone remember UNIX games like Grid, Convoy, Dune and Wander, written by Peter. S. Langston?
You have so much data being churned around. The high end GPU's have 240+ stream processors, compared to a handful for a mobile phone. Then there is the constant punting of video data from the VRAM chips to the LCD screens (width x depth x RGB x bits/channel Hertz. VRAM is like standard RAM memory except there is a special read channel to allow whole rows of memory to be read by the video decoder simultaneously as it is being read/written by the GPU. It would be possible to
raise the clock frequency, but they would need a larger heatsink. If you visit the overclocking websites, you will see some of the custom water cooling systems that they have. Early supercomputers like Cray used Fluorinert.
That is what the SGI desktop environment looked like - and that is the demo "Ideas in Motion". Does that mean Motif can be used on Linux?
A friend once left a open bag of spicy rice at the back of a deep cupboard over three months. After about three months he couldn't understand why that particular area of the kitchen always seem to hit him with a wave of hot air. That was just a small bag of rice. I would hate to imagine what decomposed vegetation would smell combined with that - most vegetables decompose into a vinegary/soapy smell.
DeCSS
As far as the command shells and development environment, IRIX seemed to be no different from any other release of Linux or Unix. Most of the innovation would have been with the device drivers interfacing to the graphics hardware and API's. But those patents were sold off to Microsoft.
The most memorable thing about the SGI's was the 'buttonfly' user interface for selecting between the various demo applications (the radiosity/texture mapped house, the SGI logo coming out of the 2D drawing - that one is in the GLUT demos. the 'stonehenge' demo that found its way into the MSDN CD's, if you really dig deep enough).
You can get a jumbo list of around 6400+ servers that maintain cookies, counter, oix, phorm, webwise and all the other related types of tracking. That stops any other subversive attempts of reaching these sites through other protocols than http.
Lots of big shops are heterogenous to the point of pathology.
Risk analysts advice multinational corporations not to become dependent on any one vendor to avoid lock-in, or country to avoid the locals starting to get uppity and start demanding higher wages or better working conditions.
There were some graphics coprocessor cards back in the early 1990's. Texas Instruments TMS34010/TMS34020 range, that could have up four floating point units per processor. All of that was wiped out after Intel deliberately introduced a faster video bus and it became faster to render using the CPU again.
Very true. Another place to check would be the serial number stored in the BIOS, or on the various components (hard disk drive, CPU, LCD screen).
Very much like the Victorian factories during the Industrial Revolution in the UK. The factory owners built terraced housing, schools, churches and parks to make the locations attractive to their staff. It worked perfectly until the factories closed down and their wasn't anything to replace them.
A simple check of the serial number should be able to determine whether it is stolen or not. Keeping a digital photograph of the serial number of every valuable item seems to be the best way of recording them.
Did the developer know about the bug at the time? Did the developer use a relevant set of test cases to check the operation of the code? But all of this goes out of the window if the user and developer both use different versions of these API's.
A developer could only be able to certify his software to work with certain releases of key API's. This seems to be no different from the installation of RPM's or 'yum updates' under Linux distributions, where a package will only install if all the other packages are installed/updated.
There was a similar story going around the conspiracy theory websites about a paper published by bentham.org relating to active thermitic material (flakes of paint that burn under intense heat).
The Open Chemical Physics Journal
If you have paid off the mortgage on a house in a suburb with a good school or have retired to somewhere rural with more space and lower property taxes, have enough savings where the interest can be used to pay off the loan on a new or slightly used car, the food and utility bills, and you have still have enough left to do whatever you have always wanted to do (timelapse photography, video editing), then money does buy you independence.
I've seen many people do this, from engineers who had a steady career with large corporations, and took the option of early retirement when the companies downsized, to company directors who sold the company off to a mega-corp, and then formed their own startup.
But if you are wanting to continue running your company your way, the investment from megacorp is going to come with a catch; maybe the product manager responsible for that area will start making demands such as wanting the most qualified staff working on a particular aspect of the project, or using particular development tools or methodologies (to showcase their technology).
... a new sourceforge project called Open-Debug is being created to replace it.
They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.
That was supposed to be the job of their ambassadors and maybe the sales/marketing people - to get feedback from potential customers as to what they wanted to see in future products. Problem is, they mostly wanted a solid reliable OS that that they wouldn't have to wait for the first service pack before upgrading an entire department as well as having a competitive price/performance ratio.
For Sparc processors like Niagara II, the server group would want more cache and hardware support for encryption, but the workstation group would want more floating-point processors. In the end they both get what they want with multi-core chips.
Each core has its own cache. Intel CPU's have cache pages based on 128 byte boundaries (cache page lines), and so any application has to ensure that the data shared between threads is protected by some suitable mechanism (mutexes) and is also padded to a suitable length. Fail to do this, and any algorithm that is multi-threaded becomes a multi-threaded random number generator.
The original public transportation rail network (just after World War II) allowed anyone to travel from just about any two villages in the country through two or three changes with the rail network. The demand from central routes subsidized the outlying village routes. Though this still required a subsidy from the government to work which was taken away by Beeching. Those non-profitable routes that were not canceled are now some of the most overcrowded services in the UK. Privatizing the railway network separately from the train companies only led to the costs being reduced through reduced safety inspections.
Before nationalization, each train company owned its own locomotives and carriages as well as the train tracks on either the East or the West of the country, so there was competition and each company was responsible for its own track.
Some "high security" hard drives would have a thermal oxidiser as a layer between the glass platters and the magnetic media. If a plug on the front of the hard drive was removed, oxygen would enter the enclosure, cause the oxidiser to react, heat up and disintegrate the binding of the magnetic particles. Complete and guaranteed permanent wipe.
When you purchase anything that has a TV tuner circuit built in, your purchasing address get sent automatically to the TV licensing authority. If you don't already have a license registered at that address, you will be sent a rather threatening warning letter.
The problem is now that you can buy a USB TV tuner dongle for around 18 pounds. The TV license itself is an annual fee of around 142.50 pounds. Many laptops and PC's now come with the TV tuner built in. Not only is there a database of registered TV's, but it essentially becomes a database of registered computers as well.