No, that's just on "standby mode", that's not "off". Off is no power running through the circuits, and not doing anything useful. Standby is power running through the circuits and not doing anything useful
On is power running through circuits and doing something useful
Gamers. If you want a laptop like a MSI GT72, you get Windows 10 pre-installed. You can run Windows 7 on such laptops, but the drivers for the SteelSeries keyboard backlight and the USB ports are only available for Windows 10. The driver CD and the downloads just will not work for Windows 7.
Microsoft has put some code in the DirectX driver such that certain 3D rendering features are just not available unless Windows 10 is in use.
That was like computer algorithms class. The official recommended textbooks were the classics on algorithms; Sorting, Queuing, Multithreading with problems like the dining philosophers, going all the way up to how to do a discrete FFT transform. These were all recommended as *the* algorithms to use that "just worked", and it wasn't worth trying to design something faster.
Like discussions on how to transfer files from one computer system to another. "Oh, just create a sshd server, set up the root directory to/, set ownership to root, have a guest login that doesn't need a password, and test your set up correctly by visiting this web page. Then you can access all your files from anywhere in the world without the need of having to remember a password.
One side of the argument is that developers should be constantly refreshing their knowledge by reading every source of information available in their spare time, and making their own notes. Then they don't need to read Stack Overflow during the daytime, as the knowledge is in their heads.
But on the other side, if you are developing some advanced piece of technology like a deep-space interplanetary probe, then Googling for "advanced off-the-shelf faster-than-light propulsion system technology kit" isn't going to get very far. And there may be problems if it is a commercially sensitive or secret project.
With file brower windows, the copy and move buttons always seem to next to each other, so one slip and duplicate copies of files rather than moving them.
Fix the increasing code size in Android. It's becoming impossible to install new applications on a Samsung Galaxy SII because of all the "updates" from Google. I have to remove them in order to update Skype. And it's annoying to find out that Skype needs to be updated simply because it has become impossible to log in.
Allow the panoramic photograph option in Android to enable the camera lens to zoom in. This used to be the case, but somebody decided that thy "camera lens shalt always be zoomed out."
When I'm installing Linux on a external HDD drive, it copies the GRUB bootloading data from/dev/sda rather than creating an new fresh install.
Get ALSA sound to work on GT72 laptops (with the ALC898 sound chip). I'm sure it's something in/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf, but just can't find anything that works.
"We have infected your implanted pacemaker with a virus. Your pacemaker will stop within 24 hours. Please send $100,000 by Western Union to the following bank account and we will remove the virus".
It was known in farming lore back in the 1990's. The Times country section had a comment by a farmer about how bees would become slow, dozy and crash into things just when bright yellow fields of crops were being sprayed with pesticide that gave a thick oily smell to the air.
There are plenty of people who care about legacy PC's. There are dozens of light-weight distro's of Linux that run on old PC's. But these guys just take a standard Linux distribution, scoop out the packages they don't want and bundle it on a live CD, DVD or memory stick. They don't try and do anything with a modern clean GUI, or perhaps they can't because at the bottom of all the GUI systems is the "nouveau" graphics driver that comes built into many kernels as an alternative to Nvidia's blobware.
I have an old laptop (NVidia Ti5600, 32-bit PAE, dual-core hyperthreaded 2.8 GHz CPU). The only OS that runs on that laptop is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Anything else usually chokes on nouveau (I know nouveau can be blacklisted).
With latest systems (so new they don't even have ALSA sound drivers or keyboard backlight support), Ubuntu 12+ and Linux Mint 17 are the cleanest UI's that I have seen - mainly because all the menu bars are slim. It makes X-window/Motif look clunky, while Windows XP looks like a childrens toy. Having clean polished set of icons takes a lot of work. I really can't see anything that can be improved.
Old PC's still have GPU acceleration, but even there, the various standards such as GLX, OpenGL are completed different from what is available now (vertex buffer objects vs display lists, framebuffer objects vs. standard framebuffer), so that it would be very difficult to have one modern GUI system that would run at a decent speed on old platforms while still having all the flash of a new platform.
Who would have thought that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets would be going 64-bit? That's only needed for high-end workstations and servers. Who would have thought mobile devices would have four CPU cores and tens of GPU cores?
Intel have the AVX2 instruction set, which is equivalent to the vector instructions of a GPU shader core. They also have Knights Corner/ Knights Landing / Xeon Phi multi-core CPU designs which are getting close to low-end GPU with a few hundred shader cores. Biggest difference between CPU's and GPU's would be the support for the hundreds of different texture formats that are available, everything from single channel color, to floating point RGBA and all those different compressed formats; RGB10_A2) and the parallel processing synchronisation functions. Some shaders are so complex now, that they are really more general purpose algorithms than simple lighting calculations.
Our university had a tier-1 terabit connection, but there were so many people downloading data, that they ended up with about 25K each.... It was frustrating that you could remotely log into your home PC, download the file in seconds, while have to wait hours at your own work desk.
With 8-bit and 16-bit systems, this was the width of the data bus, while memory was mostly limited to 64Kbytes, but there were all sorts of funky paging that could swap in and out 16K blocks. With 32-bit and 64-bit systems, it's the theoretical maximum amount of uniquely addressable memory; 32-bit = 4 Gbytes, 64-bit = 1 Exabyte of storage. But CPU performance is being improved by using 128-bit and 256-bit wide data bus architectures to support SIMD instruction sets like AVX and 3Dnow!
I've had the same laptop for about 6 years. Back in 2009, with a fibre-optic cable TV network in the UK and a 70 Mbit data service (in a student area), I was lucky to get a 300K download speed. I've currently got a 20 Mbit phone line DSL service in a small town and get 1 Mbyte download speed. The price difference was around 5:1
It will also stimulate construction jobs around the junctions or spurs that connect to that infrastructure. If you have two points A and B that are 100 miles away and connected by a new freeway, then every point between these two is now also connected. Just like between SF and SJ.
The last time California tried to propose such a train system, every small town and city in between LA and SF would only grant permission for the tracks to be laid on their land if they got their own train station with guaranteed stops.
Here's a picture of some vantablack applied on top of aluminum foil. It really looks like something out of those Wiley Coyote cartoons with "portable holes".
Maybe it would be a smart-seeder that could take and analyze photographs of planets, perform multi-spectral imaging to determine the possible living conditions and presence of water, maybe even the lifetime of the star. If the conditions were right, seed pods would be released, otherwise the system would just carry on to the next solar system.
Would you fire a load of dumb delivery systems that would be oblivious to obstacles like asteroids, meteorites, solar flares and comets. That didn't work out well for some Earth made space probes.
So what if the databases were encrypted, the hackers would look for a system that had the encryption keys. Talk-Talk insist on every customer using Direct-Debit, rather than online payments or online billing, so they demand everyone's bank details. They could have simply given customers the choice of how to pay.
In Norway, companies just send you an email with the Faktura and KID number. You use online banking to make the payment with confirmation going through your mobile phone with BankID
Any slow down with device drivers usually depends on mutexes and waiting for hardware to finish. Sometimes it needs some encouragement with flush commands (that's true for anything from serial communications to network packet drivers). With network drivers you have memory buffers to store received and sent packets. With graphics drivers you have memory buffers for reading textures, blocks of vertex data, shader variables, and writing out the resulting pixels into a framebuffer or texture.
The problem is that the startup neutron sources receive the neutron flux themselves, changing their composition as an isotope, thus making them unusable. On the other hand, you get inert elements that become more radioactive as they receive neutron flux. So it's a juggling act to maintain optimum radioactivity.
With Chernobyl, the operational staff deliberately disabled the safety systems to see if they could manually shutdown a reactor in time before it went supernova.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's just on "standby mode", that's not "off".
Off is no power running through the circuits, and not doing anything useful.
Standby is power running through the circuits and not doing anything useful
On is power running through circuits and doing something useful
I've seen companies who have written this into their requirements. Interestingly enough, they aren't around any more.
Usually they will only consider someone who has worked on a similar project and can provide references.
Gamers. If you want a laptop like a MSI GT72, you get Windows 10 pre-installed. You can run Windows 7 on such laptops, but the drivers for the SteelSeries keyboard backlight and the USB ports are only available for Windows 10. The driver CD and the downloads just will not work for Windows 7.
Microsoft has put some code in the DirectX driver such that certain 3D rendering features are just not available unless Windows 10 is in use.
That was like computer algorithms class. The official recommended textbooks were the classics on algorithms; Sorting, Queuing, Multithreading with problems like the dining philosophers, going all the way up to how to do a discrete FFT transform. These were all recommended as *the* algorithms to use that "just worked", and it wasn't worth trying to design something faster.
Like discussions on how to transfer files from one computer system to another. "Oh, just create a sshd server, set up the root directory to /, set ownership to root, have a guest login that doesn't need a password, and test your set up correctly by visiting this web page. Then you can access all your files from anywhere in the world without the need of having to remember a password.
One side of the argument is that developers should be constantly refreshing their knowledge by reading every source of information available in their spare time, and making their own notes. Then they don't need to read Stack Overflow during the daytime, as the knowledge is in their heads.
But on the other side, if you are developing some advanced piece of technology like a deep-space interplanetary probe, then Googling for "advanced off-the-shelf faster-than-light propulsion system technology kit" isn't going to get very far. And there may be problems if it is a commercially sensitive or secret project.
With file brower windows, the copy and move buttons always seem to next to each other, so one slip and duplicate copies of files rather than moving them.
Fix the increasing code size in Android. It's becoming impossible to install new applications on a Samsung Galaxy SII because of all the "updates" from Google. I have to remove them in order to update Skype. And it's annoying to find out that Skype needs to be updated simply because it has become impossible to log in.
Allow the panoramic photograph option in Android to enable the camera lens to zoom in. This used to be the case, but somebody decided that thy "camera lens shalt always be zoomed out."
When I'm installing Linux on a external HDD drive, it copies the GRUB bootloading data from /dev/sda rather than creating an new fresh install.
Get ALSA sound to work on GT72 laptops (with the ALC898 sound chip). I'm sure it's something in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf, but just can't find anything that works.
"We have infected your implanted pacemaker with a virus. Your pacemaker will stop within 24 hours. Please send $100,000 by Western Union to the following bank account and we will remove the virus".
It was known in farming lore back in the 1990's. The Times country section had a comment by a farmer about how bees would become slow, dozy and crash into things just when bright yellow fields of crops were being sprayed with pesticide that gave a thick oily smell to the air.
There are plenty of people who care about legacy PC's. There are dozens of light-weight distro's of Linux that run on old PC's. But these guys just take a standard Linux distribution, scoop out the packages they don't want and bundle it on a live CD, DVD or memory stick. They don't try and do anything with a modern clean GUI, or perhaps they can't because at the bottom of all the GUI systems is the "nouveau" graphics driver that comes built into many kernels as an alternative to Nvidia's blobware.
I have an old laptop (NVidia Ti5600, 32-bit PAE, dual-core hyperthreaded 2.8 GHz CPU). The only OS that runs on that laptop is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Anything else usually chokes on nouveau (I know nouveau can be blacklisted).
With latest systems (so new they don't even have ALSA sound drivers or keyboard backlight support), Ubuntu 12+ and Linux Mint 17 are the cleanest UI's that I have seen - mainly because all the menu bars are slim. It makes X-window/Motif look clunky, while Windows XP looks like a childrens toy. Having clean polished set of icons takes a lot of work. I really can't see anything that can be improved.
Old PC's still have GPU acceleration, but even there, the various standards such as GLX, OpenGL are completed different from what is available now (vertex buffer objects vs display lists, framebuffer objects vs. standard framebuffer), so that it would be very difficult to have one modern GUI system that would run
at a decent speed on old platforms while still having all the flash of a new platform.
Who would have thought that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets would be going 64-bit? That's only needed for high-end workstations and servers. Who would have thought mobile devices would have four CPU cores and tens of GPU cores?
Intel have the AVX2 instruction set, which is equivalent to the vector instructions of a GPU shader core. They also have Knights Corner/ Knights Landing / Xeon Phi multi-core CPU designs which are getting close to low-end GPU with a few hundred shader cores. Biggest difference between CPU's and GPU's would be the support for the hundreds of different texture formats that are available, everything from single channel color, to floating point RGBA and all those different compressed formats; RGB10_A2) and the parallel processing synchronisation functions. Some shaders are so complex now, that they are really more general purpose algorithms than simple lighting calculations.
Our university had a tier-1 terabit connection, but there were so many people downloading data, that they ended up with about 25K each.... It was frustrating that you could remotely log into your home PC, download the file in seconds, while have to wait hours at your own work desk.
With 8-bit and 16-bit systems, this was the width of the data bus, while memory was mostly limited to 64Kbytes, but there were all sorts of funky paging that could swap in and out 16K blocks. With 32-bit and 64-bit systems, it's the theoretical maximum amount of uniquely addressable memory; 32-bit = 4 Gbytes, 64-bit = 1 Exabyte of storage. But CPU performance is being improved by using 128-bit and 256-bit wide data bus architectures to support SIMD instruction sets like AVX and 3Dnow!
I've had the same laptop for about 6 years. Back in 2009, with a fibre-optic cable TV network in the UK and a 70 Mbit data service (in a student area), I was lucky to get a 300K download speed. I've currently got a 20 Mbit phone line DSL service in a small town and get 1 Mbyte download speed. The price difference was around 5:1
It will also stimulate construction jobs around the junctions or spurs that connect to that infrastructure. If you have two points A and B that are 100 miles away and connected by a new freeway, then every point between these two is now also connected. Just like between SF and SJ.
The last time California tried to propose such a train system, every small town and city in between LA and SF would only grant permission for the tracks to be laid on their land if they got their own train station with guaranteed stops.
The ultimate Goth bedroom?
Here's a picture of some vantablack applied on top of aluminum foil. It really looks like something out of those Wiley Coyote cartoons with "portable holes".
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmw...
Maybe it would be a smart-seeder that could take and analyze photographs of planets, perform multi-spectral imaging to determine the possible living conditions and presence of water, maybe even the lifetime of the star. If the conditions were right, seed pods would be released, otherwise the system would just carry on to the next solar system.
Would you fire a load of dumb delivery systems that would be oblivious to obstacles like asteroids, meteorites, solar flares and comets. That didn't work out well for some Earth made space probes.
So what if the databases were encrypted, the hackers would look for a system that had the encryption keys. Talk-Talk insist on every customer using Direct-Debit, rather than online payments or online billing, so they demand everyone's bank details. They could have simply given customers the choice of how to pay.
In Norway, companies just send you an email with the Faktura and KID number. You use online banking to make the payment with confirmation going through your mobile phone with BankID
Any slow down with device drivers usually depends on mutexes and waiting for hardware to finish. Sometimes it needs some encouragement with flush commands (that's true for anything from serial communications to network packet drivers). With network drivers you have memory buffers to store received and sent packets. With graphics drivers you have memory buffers for reading textures, blocks of vertex data, shader variables, and writing out the resulting pixels into a framebuffer or texture.
They do, it's called a startup neutron source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem is that the startup neutron sources receive the neutron flux themselves, changing their composition as an isotope, thus making them unusable. On the other hand, you get inert elements that become more radioactive as they receive neutron flux. So it's a juggling act to maintain optimum radioactivity.
With Chernobyl, the operational staff deliberately disabled the safety systems to see if they could manually shutdown a reactor in time before it went supernova.