They wouldn't be collecting SMART data if the drives were inactive. I always get a chuckle when I see hard drive cooler products. It's amazing people think that just because cooling a CPU is a good thing that you have to cool your hard drive. It's why studies like this from Google are important. There is too much lore and unscientific wishy-washy in the computer mod/maintenance world. Google's HUGE data set (vs. your limited life experience with maybe 10 hard drives) really proves the temperature conclusion. Keep that hard drive warm and running (although not 24/365 if you want it to last longer).
Also, the data shows higher temperatures in older drives having high failure rates. Probably due to the hard drive itself contributing to the higher temperature (more friction, more current draw in motor, etc...)
LED light bulbs are overrated. Compact florescent bulbs are much more efficient, but they aren't a sexy as LED's. Here's some ways to conserve, but no one will do this:
1. No more incandescent bulbs. 2. Live 10 minutes away from work in a condo/apartment instead of the suburbs in a giant house 3. Stop leaving your computer on all day
Actually, #2 is about the only one that really saves the most money. Smaller places cost less to heat/cool, and not driving as much saves a huge amount of energy.
But, oh environmentalists are more concerned about prohibiting housing developments or zoning that actually makes sense.
I think it's called a use tax because I believe it's technically illegal for a state to impose an interstate tariff (tax) on goods purchased from another state. Anyone confirm this? Something I was remembering from the federalist papers. I mean, it makes sense. Why wouldn't they just call it a interstate import tax? "Use tax" is a ridiculous name and is obviously weasel wording around something.
Maybe they have been around for LabVIEW, but they are not part of the base library at all. Comparing LabVIEW to say Java or Python's list/queue manipulation abilities is a joke. LabVIEWS concept of "clusters" and "arrays" is also difficult to work with a lot of times. It also lacks even a 64 bit native data types (at least in version 7 that I'm aware of).
I'm not going to waste my time with a "graphical" language when I need to do complex string manipulations. The fact that NI markets LabVIEW as an "end all" solution to everything is counter productive for certain projects.
Do you have any examples of spawning multiple threads? I've asked at least 3 or 4 representatives from NI in person and none of them were able to demonstrate it. Yes, they showed how to dynamically load a different VI, but not how to programatically spawn the function. If it's so simple, why couldn't I find examples of this in the help?
As someone who had to maintain a complex SCADA system written in LabVIEW for over a year I think I have at least some experience with the language. Re-writing it in Python was much easier in the long run though.
As someone who has used LabVIEW extensively I have to say it kind of sucks. They claim "self documenting" and things like that. If you've ever seen a real LabVIEW program, you'll see that it's a mess, and very difficult to understand and debug. It doesn't help that it hasn't been Object Oriented until version 8. You STILL can't spawn 0 to N threads, it's built in library support is very week (simple things like list manipulation, queues, string processing, etc. don't exist!).
It's a niche product meant for data acquisition systems in experimentation.
And you're also likely to have sequential sections of code even with labview. This isn't really a language problem so much as it is an algorithms problem. There are just too many iterative algorithms that require a fast CPU to execute things sequentially.
Only as long as you can get all those phony real-estate agents and politicians to stop littering the sidewalks and public places with their signs. If you look at some of the steel tubing they use to hold those signs up, you could say those are suspicious as well. It's terrorism I tell you!
Yeah, it's funny they are still pushing performance/per/watt. I certainly don't hope they are doing that on the desktop space. Consumers don't give a crap about power efficiency of their products. You can't even get people to replace 2, 60 watt light bulbs in their house, why would they care about performance per watt? It only matters for servers.
Also, there are several classes of applications and problems that cannot be handled well with multiple cores, no matter how much you wish it would. You could have a 3Ghz single core vs. a 2GHz 128 core, and the 3GHz machine may be faster. I think the GHz race will need to continue someday, just not with silicon. Quantum computers here we come!
Not a very good chance. They do that in the embedded space sometimes but usually they don't use brand new process technology for it. I mean, the Pentium 2, and Pentium 3 architectures are not as advanced. Why waste new technology on old architectures? It's more likely they will have embedded versions of Core 2 or more likely they will have an ultra low power 1GHz or 500 MHz processor.
And honestly, for Intel there is no market for third world countries, so unless there is a billionaire philanthropist willing to invest in it (like the $100 computer) it won't happen.
... or they're both going to die. I think there are some industries where mergers really need to happen, and this would be a good one. I don't see how it is efficient to maintain two satellite networks, with frequencies being wasted on providing the same exact service. I mean, it's very expensive to maintain that infrastructure in two places, so why not combine them? Eventually, the savings would be passed onto the consumer, because it's only in XM or Sirius's best interest to be in every car in the U.S. (by reducing costs).
Once the FCC figures out what the hell they are doing with frequency allocations, sattelite radio has a lot of future competition from land based sources. High speed cellular networks stream radio in your car on demand? Digital AM/FM? WiMax? TV broadcast towers transmitting digital audio stations? Any of these may become competitive in metro areas.
If it wasn't for the ridiculous environmental regulations, we could supply a great deal of power from this location, probably only using 20 acres out of the entire site. However, it seems they would rather us continue burning fossil fuels than use renewable natural resources we already have.
Has anyone ever calculated the heat capacity of the earth? I mean, if we start running geo-thermal plants I assume we are allowing the earth's core to cool quicker than it otherwise would have. Maybe the amount of cooling is 0.001% or something more than what the earth loses already. Still would be interesting to know.
"You don't have to run some proprietary software to download ring tones... you just download them from the Web. Lots of the stuff that is on smart phones today is completely negated if you add the real Web."
Ah, i'm sorry. I don't think you understand Cingular. While this would be a good goal for Apple to allow you to download ring tones free of the internet, it's almost guaranteed Cingular will make this impossible. I believe it was some high up at Cingular who said that "bad people" were unlocking cellphones.
After looking at the iPhone I've actually found that it does LESS than my 1 year old HTC Windows Mobile phone. Why do I say this? Because I can load whatever apps on my phone I want. I can even... *GASP* stream shoutcast stations over WiFi or ever the cellphone network if conditions are right!
You sir are a fool for thinking that I want to waste my time typing tabs, aligning columns, when such functionality can be done... by software using a HTML table! Gosh, who would of thought? A mechanism that automatically resizes columns to fit the text typed into them! Maybe someday, we'll even be able to take digital pictures of things and e-mail them to each other, instead of trying to describe the object via text?
Yes, because if I have a table of 30 values, expressing these in a written paragraph is the absolute best way to read them.... I have textbooks like this where they try to explain things by word, when it's more appropriate to do so by tables or figures. Use the right tool for the job.
Some of us aren't so cynical. Do you know how difficult it is to express information without tables using plain text? It's not fun at all. There are legitimate uses for HTML in e-mail. Just none involving javascript, CSS, and anything beyond basic HTML tags.
Not only that, but a lot of mundane harvesting and manufacturing tasks would be automated if it wasn't for ultra cheap labor. Automation is much more efficient, but requires people skilled in engineering, electronics, and technical trades. Engineers to design the machines, craftsmen to build them, programmers to direct them, and technicians to maintain them. We have many people with these skills in the U.S., and these jobs are far more rewarding I'd arguing then doing the action of the resulting machine yourself. However, these types of jobs are being offset by cheap labor from other countries.
You can somehow copy the original RAID drivers onto a install CD you burn for windows. It's a pain, I've done it before, and I wish Microsoft would realize this is not 1995 anymore.
RAID installs should never require a floppy drive. Most computers don't include them anymore. I believe most new versions of Linux and Vista solves this problem.
53.7 amps * 120V = 6.44kW at $0.15/kwh it's about $0.96 an hour. So if he runs this for 30 days it's $696 dollars in electricity. Merry Christmas to the power companies:)
You know, I was thinking about how Nintendo could approach Wii releases... In the days of the gameboy, Nintendo released model out after model with subtle improvements to each one. Could you imagine the business model if Nintendo released Wii HD, which included a more powerful GPU for HD graphics, but was completely backwards compatible with all games? That's what they did with the gameboy color, to some extent. And then, Nintendo just phased in newer gameboy color games. Maybe they could do that with the Wii?
Forget that, you have to find a Zune owner who actually knows what you're talking about and how to actually send a song. You know how many times I have to show people how to transfer phone numbers via bluetooth/infrared? And they are always amazed that they're phone could even do that. Problem is, most average people can't figure this out.
I agree. We could be cheaply moving massive amounts of cargo right now with hydrogen blimps if there wasn't a stupid fear against it. Helium won't be cheap forever since there really isn't much of it in earth (it tends to escape into outerspace).
Who on earth is going to care about this stupid feature? Oh man! Have to upgrade to the NEXT next version of Windows Office Vista JUST SO I can have the emotiflag feature! Yeah, great innovation their microsoft...
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They wouldn't be collecting SMART data if the drives were inactive. I always get a chuckle when I see hard drive cooler products. It's amazing people think that just because cooling a CPU is a good thing that you have to cool your hard drive. It's why studies like this from Google are important. There is too much lore and unscientific wishy-washy in the computer mod/maintenance world. Google's HUGE data set (vs. your limited life experience with maybe 10 hard drives) really proves the temperature conclusion. Keep that hard drive warm and running (although not 24/365 if you want it to last longer).
Also, the data shows higher temperatures in older drives having high failure rates. Probably due to the hard drive itself contributing to the higher temperature (more friction, more current draw in motor, etc...)
LED light bulbs are overrated. Compact florescent bulbs are much more efficient, but they aren't a sexy as LED's. Here's some ways to conserve, but no one will do this:
1. No more incandescent bulbs.
2. Live 10 minutes away from work in a condo/apartment instead of the suburbs in a giant house
3. Stop leaving your computer on all day
Actually, #2 is about the only one that really saves the most money. Smaller places cost less to heat/cool, and not driving as much saves a huge amount of energy.
But, oh environmentalists are more concerned about prohibiting housing developments or zoning that actually makes sense.
Property tax == rent you pay to the government to exist
Otherwise they kick the door down to your house, arrest you, seize your assets, and throw you on the street.
That is all.
I think it's called a use tax because I believe it's technically illegal for a state to impose an interstate tariff (tax) on goods purchased from another state. Anyone confirm this? Something I was remembering from the federalist papers. I mean, it makes sense. Why wouldn't they just call it a interstate import tax? "Use tax" is a ridiculous name and is obviously weasel wording around something.
Maybe they have been around for LabVIEW, but they are not part of the base library at all. Comparing LabVIEW to say Java or Python's list/queue manipulation abilities is a joke. LabVIEWS concept of "clusters" and "arrays" is also difficult to work with a lot of times. It also lacks even a 64 bit native data types (at least in version 7 that I'm aware of).
I'm not going to waste my time with a "graphical" language when I need to do complex string manipulations. The fact that NI markets LabVIEW as an "end all" solution to everything is counter productive for certain projects.
Do you have any examples of spawning multiple threads? I've asked at least 3 or 4 representatives from NI in person and none of them were able to demonstrate it. Yes, they showed how to dynamically load a different VI, but not how to programatically spawn the function. If it's so simple, why couldn't I find examples of this in the help?
As someone who had to maintain a complex SCADA system written in LabVIEW for over a year I think I have at least some experience with the language. Re-writing it in Python was much easier in the long run though.
As someone who has used LabVIEW extensively I have to say it kind of sucks. They claim "self documenting" and things like that. If you've ever seen a real LabVIEW program, you'll see that it's a mess, and very difficult to understand and debug. It doesn't help that it hasn't been Object Oriented until version 8. You STILL can't spawn 0 to N threads, it's built in library support is very week (simple things like list manipulation, queues, string processing, etc. don't exist!).
It's a niche product meant for data acquisition systems in experimentation.
And you're also likely to have sequential sections of code even with labview. This isn't really a language problem so much as it is an algorithms problem. There are just too many iterative algorithms that require a fast CPU to execute things sequentially.
Only as long as you can get all those phony real-estate agents and politicians to stop littering the sidewalks and public places with their signs. If you look at some of the steel tubing they use to hold those signs up, you could say those are suspicious as well. It's terrorism I tell you!
Yeah, it's funny they are still pushing performance/per/watt. I certainly don't hope they are doing that on the desktop space. Consumers don't give a crap about power efficiency of their products. You can't even get people to replace 2, 60 watt light bulbs in their house, why would they care about performance per watt? It only matters for servers.
Also, there are several classes of applications and problems that cannot be handled well with multiple cores, no matter how much you wish it would. You could have a 3Ghz single core vs. a 2GHz 128 core, and the 3GHz machine may be faster. I think the GHz race will need to continue someday, just not with silicon. Quantum computers here we come!
Not a very good chance. They do that in the embedded space sometimes but usually they don't use brand new process technology for it. I mean, the Pentium 2, and Pentium 3 architectures are not as advanced. Why waste new technology on old architectures? It's more likely they will have embedded versions of Core 2 or more likely they will have an ultra low power 1GHz or 500 MHz processor. And honestly, for Intel there is no market for third world countries, so unless there is a billionaire philanthropist willing to invest in it (like the $100 computer) it won't happen.
... or they're both going to die. I think there are some industries where mergers really need to happen, and this would be a good one. I don't see how it is efficient to maintain two satellite networks, with frequencies being wasted on providing the same exact service. I mean, it's very expensive to maintain that infrastructure in two places, so why not combine them? Eventually, the savings would be passed onto the consumer, because it's only in XM or Sirius's best interest to be in every car in the U.S. (by reducing costs).
Once the FCC figures out what the hell they are doing with frequency allocations, sattelite radio has a lot of future competition from land based sources. High speed cellular networks stream radio in your car on demand? Digital AM/FM? WiMax? TV broadcast towers transmitting digital audio stations? Any of these may become competitive in metro areas.
If it wasn't for the ridiculous environmental regulations, we could supply a great deal of power from this location, probably only using 20 acres out of the entire site. However, it seems they would rather us continue burning fossil fuels than use renewable natural resources we already have.
Has anyone ever calculated the heat capacity of the earth? I mean, if we start running geo-thermal plants I assume we are allowing the earth's core to cool quicker than it otherwise would have. Maybe the amount of cooling is 0.001% or something more than what the earth loses already. Still would be interesting to know.
"You don't have to run some proprietary software to download ring tones ... you just download them from the Web. Lots of the stuff that is on smart phones today is completely negated if you add the real Web."
Ah, i'm sorry. I don't think you understand Cingular. While this would be a good goal for Apple to allow you to download ring tones free of the internet, it's almost guaranteed Cingular will make this impossible. I believe it was some high up at Cingular who said that "bad people" were unlocking cellphones.
After looking at the iPhone I've actually found that it does LESS than my 1 year old HTC Windows Mobile phone. Why do I say this? Because I can load whatever apps on my phone I want. I can even... *GASP* stream shoutcast stations over WiFi or ever the cellphone network if conditions are right!
You sir are a fool for thinking that I want to waste my time typing tabs, aligning columns, when such functionality can be done... by software using a HTML table! Gosh, who would of thought? A mechanism that automatically resizes columns to fit the text typed into them! Maybe someday, we'll even be able to take digital pictures of things and e-mail them to each other, instead of trying to describe the object via text?
Yes, because if I have a table of 30 values, expressing these in a written paragraph is the absolute best way to read them.... I have textbooks like this where they try to explain things by word, when it's more appropriate to do so by tables or figures. Use the right tool for the job.
Some of us aren't so cynical. Do you know how difficult it is to express information without tables using plain text? It's not fun at all. There are legitimate uses for HTML in e-mail. Just none involving javascript, CSS, and anything beyond basic HTML tags.
Not only that, but a lot of mundane harvesting and manufacturing tasks would be automated if it wasn't for ultra cheap labor. Automation is much more efficient, but requires people skilled in engineering, electronics, and technical trades. Engineers to design the machines, craftsmen to build them, programmers to direct them, and technicians to maintain them. We have many people with these skills in the U.S., and these jobs are far more rewarding I'd arguing then doing the action of the resulting machine yourself. However, these types of jobs are being offset by cheap labor from other countries.
You can somehow copy the original RAID drivers onto a install CD you burn for windows. It's a pain, I've done it before, and I wish Microsoft would realize this is not 1995 anymore.
RAID installs should never require a floppy drive. Most computers don't include them anymore. I believe most new versions of Linux and Vista solves this problem.
53.7 amps * 120V = 6.44kW at $0.15/kwh it's about $0.96 an hour. So if he runs this for 30 days it's $696 dollars in electricity. Merry Christmas to the power companies :)
LED's anyone?
In the future, all clocks will synchronize wirelessly, getting rid of the excuse that "oh my clock was 5 minutes off so I'm really early not late".
You know, I was thinking about how Nintendo could approach Wii releases... In the days of the gameboy, Nintendo released model out after model with subtle improvements to each one. Could you imagine the business model if Nintendo released Wii HD, which included a more powerful GPU for HD graphics, but was completely backwards compatible with all games? That's what they did with the gameboy color, to some extent. And then, Nintendo just phased in newer gameboy color games. Maybe they could do that with the Wii?
Forget that, you have to find a Zune owner who actually knows what you're talking about and how to actually send a song. You know how many times I have to show people how to transfer phone numbers via bluetooth/infrared? And they are always amazed that they're phone could even do that. Problem is, most average people can't figure this out.
I agree. We could be cheaply moving massive amounts of cargo right now with hydrogen blimps if there wasn't a stupid fear against it. Helium won't be cheap forever since there really isn't much of it in earth (it tends to escape into outerspace).
Who on earth is going to care about this stupid feature? Oh man! Have to upgrade to the NEXT next version of Windows Office Vista JUST SO I can have the emotiflag feature! Yeah, great innovation their microsoft...
A true programmer knows that there are certain cases where a goto must be used (breaking out of a deeply nested loop).