My main desire is more robust ACPI/APM support. My servers motherboard just got CPU frequency scaling support in the latest FC6 kernel update and it's buggy at best (it's over a year old). Furthermore it still isn't recognized by ACPI without forcing. Power savings are a big selling point to data centers (The current main Linux market) and to laptop users (the target consumer if it wants to move into common use). How amazing would it be to say my laptop can run open office for 6 hours on under linux but the same machine can only run MS office for 4?
I remember a serious flaw in the space elevator my theoretical mechanics professor talked about. This concern is never addressed in most accounts of space elevator proposals, why is that? Over time the space elevator ribbon will cross all orbits below the geosynchronous "counter weight" effectively closing any stable lower orbit. Now if we are willing to make that trade-off then my issue is moot and that seems possible as the only examples of value for low earth orbit I can think of are high resolution satellite imagery.
For the Pico PSU you do need an additional power brick like you plug into a laptop (which basically holds a transformer, a rectifier and a big capacitor)
This article makes an inefficient computer when there are plenty of available components that use considerably less power. My favorites include the Via http://www.via.com.tw/ line of processors and motherboards and the PICO PSU from http://www.mini-box.com/ claims >90% efficiency for all of its models. Using these components you can make a system that uses about 30Watts instead of the 168Watts in the article. Thats a five fold difference!
Electric heating is in fact a waste, build a heat pump and you can get a multiplier on you work in to heat out given by
Heat out = (T_hot)/(T_hot-T_cold)work in
An inefficient appliance is just inefficient.
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My main desire is more robust ACPI/APM support. My servers motherboard just got CPU frequency scaling support in the latest FC6 kernel update and it's buggy at best (it's over a year old). Furthermore it still isn't recognized by ACPI without forcing. Power savings are a big selling point to data centers (The current main Linux market) and to laptop users (the target consumer if it wants to move into common use). How amazing would it be to say my laptop can run open office for 6 hours on under linux but the same machine can only run MS office for 4?
I remember a serious flaw in the space elevator my theoretical mechanics professor talked about. This concern is never addressed in most accounts of space elevator proposals, why is that? Over time the space elevator ribbon will cross all orbits below the geosynchronous "counter weight" effectively closing any stable lower orbit. Now if we are willing to make that trade-off then my issue is moot and that seems possible as the only examples of value for low earth orbit I can think of are high resolution satellite imagery.
For the Pico PSU you do need an additional power brick like you plug into a laptop (which basically holds a transformer, a rectifier and a big capacitor)
This article makes an inefficient computer when there are plenty of available components that use considerably less power. My favorites include the Via http://www.via.com.tw/ line of processors and motherboards and the PICO PSU from http://www.mini-box.com/ claims >90% efficiency for all of its models. Using these components you can make a system that uses about 30Watts instead of the 168Watts in the article. Thats a five fold difference!
Electric heating is in fact a waste, build a heat pump and you can get a multiplier on you work in to heat out given by Heat out = (T_hot)/(T_hot-T_cold)work in An inefficient appliance is just inefficient.