There are only two sane answers. A different college is one of them, accompanied with a thoughtfully-worded, civil, professional explanation to Central Michigan just exactly why you have declined to attend or are transferring out. Keep it calm and professional, and avoid ranting about it. Advise them that your computer is your personal property, and that you reject the notion that using their network entitles them to install anything in particular on it. Remind them that you would be paying them for their services.
The other sane option, again leveraging the idea that you would be paying them for their services, is to get enough students riled up to make a noise that the college authorities will have a difficult time ignoring. This is a lot of work, especially at state colleges (because state colleges get a lower percentage of their revenue from tuition/fees than do private colleges) and the success/failure of it is largely dependent on (a) how excitable the student body is and (b) how sensitive the administration is to embarrassment.
Really, though, the first idea, finding someplace else to be, is the one that makes the most sense and is far less of a gamble. Doing anything besides these two options is trying to find a technical solution to a political problem.
Related to this in the US, various state laws prohibit you from having a radio in the vehicle that can pick up police frequencies. Federal law overrides this for hams.
Here in New York State, the authority to enforce is given both to all law enforcement agencies, so you could get nabbed by the State Police, a county Sheriff, or the police force of a town, city or village. Just like Federal Law providing an override for hams, the New York State law also has an exception for hams and for radio engineers acting in a professional capacity.
The hams living in my area know: don't drive into the Village of Altamont unless you strip off and hide all of your radio gear and antennas.
I have an acquaintance who is both a ham and a professional radio engineer. His employer had the contract to maintain the radios used by the Village of Altamont Police Department. One day, about a mile after leaving the Alatmont police station, in his work vehicle, which clearly stated his employer's name, he was pulled over on a suspicion of having a scanner in the vehicle (the large number of antennas on his work truck set off the officer's suspicion). No amount of talking could get this officer to accept (a) that he was a professional radio engineer (b) that he was their professional radio engineer, (c) that he was exempt from NY's law as a ham, (d) that he was exempt from all states' laws because he is a ham.
Let me emphasize this: The truck he was driving very clearly stated "HUDSON VALLEY COMMUNICATIONS" on the side of the truck and was very clearly a commercial vehicle.
At any rate, his company did mount his legal defense, charges were dropped, and his company advised the Village of Altamont that they considered this a breach of contract and no longer wished to provide them service. Apparently, they were the third or fourth radio shop to do this, and from what I understand, the other radio shops in the area won't touch the Village of Altamont with a ten-foot pole.
I believe you have a typo . . . Shouldn't your first example say "print item" rather than "print list"?
Now, how about this:
print join ("\n", @list);
Perl, of course. It's very clear and meaningful, and very concise, all at once. It also eschews all of the visual cruft of having to build a loop when one is really not needed.
Perl gets a bad rap for some of the serious junk that is written in it, but I think that an example such as the one I just gave demonstrates that there is great power there, and that it can work well if coupled with an appropriate level of responsibility.
Actually, it's more like saying "video and DVD" or "Cars and Fords" or some such case where the "first" or "most popular" player gets called by the name of the superset. It's pedantics, really
That said, the Windows/Linux running, generic-hardware, Intel/AMD/Via-powered computer is a descendant of a clone of a descendent of a computer made once upon a time by IBM called the IBM PC. Hence, the PC is capitalized, not because it is an abbreviation, but because it is a proper noun. It is akin to "Libertarian" meaning the party, versus "libertarian" meaning the idealogy. Yes, a Macintosh is a "personal computer", but no, it is not a "Personal Computer".
I have a sliderule. I don't know how old it is, but I can guess. My dad used it when he was in high school, and he would have been in the class of 1963, so it could be as old as 1958 or so, depending on what math classes he was taking. He is a math whiz, so it is conceivable that he was taking more advanced courses earlier than later.
Related, I have a Monroe desk calculator that I do use every time I pay my bills. I don't know its age, but I would guess at around 1980 or so. It has a vacuum fluorescent display, and can run either on 4 C cells or a wall wart. It doesn't have a printer like many in that era, but it does use the accumulator approach to addition and subtraction.
Horsepower is a measure of mechanical energy. Kilowatts are a measure of both mechanical and electrical energy. Kilowatts of mechanical and electrical energy are freely interchangeable, i.e. it is a given that a motor that develops 100kW uses 100kW plus some (hopefully) small overhead, but under no circumstances does it use less than 100kW.
You cannot develop 400 HP with two 100kW motors. 100kW is 134 HP, hence two 100kW motors can produce, at most, 268 HP.
I think this is akin to the claims of 5 HP on some power tools -- yes, if you had the motor developing its maximum torque while running its maximum speed, it would, indeed, develop that. Unfortunately for the liars who concoct these figures, maximum torque is at near-minimum speed, and maximum speed is at near-minimum torque. Maximum output can never exceed maximum input, no matter what.
Now, it seems like they've got a cool idea here, so why cloud it up with bullshit?
More to the point, though, I am not sure what is wrong with using the actual system load to determine clock speed. Rather than picking up on the user's state of being, let the computer pick up on its own.
If a computer has work to do, why not let it run at 100% until that work is done, then idle? This is the way it is done now, it is far less complex, it gets the most work done in the least time, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the energy savings be close to, if not equal to, this project.
Of course, I do applaud them for thinking outside the box. I will also gladly concede if my hypothesis is wrong.
Incidentally, the small differential on a Via system is waaaaaaay outside the norm. One of my machines is an AMD Athlon X2, and can scale between 1.0GHz and 2.6GHz. The whole system (minus monitor) uses about 53W at idle and 93W with both cores fully loaded. The Via it replaced (not fanless, with full-sized HDD and DVD) ran between 50W and 60W dependent on load. While it does use somewhat more energy per time than the Via it replaced, it uses substantially less energy per work produced -- the Athlon can do in 45 minutes what took the Via 6-8 hours.
Here are my specifics (note that I am not in the Boston area or other similarly-congested area):
My commute is 20 miles each way. My car gets 30 MPG, and gasoline is currently around $2.20 in my area. Counting fuel only, my commute would cost me about $3 daily. There are, on average, 22 workdays in a month, making the total cost $66 to drive, again, counting fuel only. I have no parking fees at home or work.
Taking the bus (my beloved dysfunctional region has no train service yet), a monthly pass for weekdays costs me $55. This only saves me $11/month over fuel costs, or $132/year. Bus stops are within walking distance of both ends of my commute.
It was a better deal two months ago. The fares just went up for the first time in 14 years, and the monthly passes were $36 until last month.
Now, if I were to give up the car, I would say we can use the IRS rate for business mileage as a proxy for the total costs of owning the car. That rate is $0.55/mile, making my daily commute equal to $11, or $242/month. At that rate, $55 is a savings of $187/month or $2244/year.
The truth is probably somewhere in between these two figures.
Of course, public transit has other advantages. If you are an greenie, then the 3.6 MPG of a bus (or 5 MPG of a hybrid bus) can translate to as much as 144 (or 200) passenger MPG if the bus is full (trust me, the 57X is always full!). It also means you can do something meaningful with your time, instead of stewing over how bad the traffic is (I take the opportunity to read).
Proximity to a bus stop was a selling point when we bought our house.
How about we get real? What fraction of the bigger bandwidth picture is this 75 Mb/sec? Is this equivalent to jettisoning a big bag of feathers in order to keep a balloon aloft?
Anyway, if shortening the URLs is really going to save that much, then the headers need to be reined in, too -- they use far more bandwidth than the URL.
Compression is probably not the best solution, rather, a lookup table would do a nice job. If the URLs were mapped to a base-64 number, (note, mapped to it, not converted to it) then the bandwidth required on the URL could be cut down pretty well. You would also remove all meaning from the URL.
If nVidia makes chipsets for new Intel parts, doesn't that bolster Intel's brand?
nVidia also make chipsets for AMD processors (I have one such motherboard). Intel also makes their own chipsets (I have one of those, too). There are also other players in the chipset field and (to a lesser degree) the processor field, so, really, neither of these two companies actually needs the other to survive.
Know also, that diesel fuel has a higher energy density than gasoline. A (US) gallon of gasoline has 125,000 BTU of energy, while a (US) gallon of diesel has just under 150,000 BTU. Keep this in mind when comparing the fuel economy of a diesel to that of a gasoline engine.
The LA Times lost all credibility with me when they said this:
LCD -- liquid crystal display -- sets use 43% more electricity, on average, than conventional tube TVs
I'm not aware of any means through which they could possibly be more wrong. They mention size as an additional factor in the next sentence, so that's not it. To be clear: an LCD uses less power than an equivalent CRT, period.
What has been driving the power demand for TVs has been (a) plasma, (b) bigger screens and (c) any kind of projection screen.
Then there was a truly surreal follow up instance. Here's the summary: A professional TV news crew were in the middle of interviewing an Amtrak spokesperson about the photography policy, in which the spokesperson was saying that photography is absolutely okay but the interview was interrupted by a security guard coming to tell them to stop filming immediately as it is prohibited.
My question remains this: How do you pass through an airport without stress? If stress is the indicator of hostile intent, then it seems all parties present are hostile. Either that, or this system will suffer from an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio.
This could be done far lower-tech. When the car goes in for its annual safety inspection, read the odo and register it with the DMV. Sure, some of those miles will have been driven out of the state, possibly even out of the country, but there will be out-of-state and foreign drivers on the roads in Oregon making up the difference. All that with no invasion of privacy and no need to add much, if anything, to the existing infrastructure.
The only other thing I would propose is having a table multipliers in place that adjust for the vehicle's weight and wheel count, because heavier vehicles cause greater wear and tear on the roads, as do extra wheels. Top it off, drivers of super-small cars (Corbin Sparrow, for instance) get a break for having only three wheels, and drivers of motorcycles get a bigger break for having only two.
If your local Cable provider is Time-Warner, you can order Road Runner by itself. I can state this authoritatively, because Road Runner is my current ISP. I pay $45/month (though this is going up to $50 next month) and no additional taxes or fees. I am not paying for cable TV because I am not buying cable TV. This has been my arrangement since 2001.
The passenger railroads thought they were in the train business. They weren't. They were in the transit business. Failing to recognize this led to their demise and the ultimate formation of Amtrak to try (poorly) to fill the void.
The telcos thought, for a long time, that they were in the telephone business. Again, they weren't. They were in the telecommunications business. After fouling up the deployment of ISDN and later DSL here on the East Coast, it seems like Verizon is getting closer to the right idea with FiOS -- if they can just stop botching installations and billing. Meanwhile, the cable companies are eating their lunch.
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There are only two sane answers. A different college is one of them, accompanied with a thoughtfully-worded, civil, professional explanation to Central Michigan just exactly why you have declined to attend or are transferring out. Keep it calm and professional, and avoid ranting about it. Advise them that your computer is your personal property, and that you reject the notion that using their network entitles them to install anything in particular on it. Remind them that you would be paying them for their services.
The other sane option, again leveraging the idea that you would be paying them for their services, is to get enough students riled up to make a noise that the college authorities will have a difficult time ignoring. This is a lot of work, especially at state colleges (because state colleges get a lower percentage of their revenue from tuition/fees than do private colleges) and the success/failure of it is largely dependent on (a) how excitable the student body is and (b) how sensitive the administration is to embarrassment.
Really, though, the first idea, finding someplace else to be, is the one that makes the most sense and is far less of a gamble. Doing anything besides these two options is trying to find a technical solution to a political problem.
Related to this in the US, various state laws prohibit you from having a radio in the vehicle that can pick up police frequencies. Federal law overrides this for hams.
Here in New York State, the authority to enforce is given both to all law enforcement agencies, so you could get nabbed by the State Police, a county Sheriff, or the police force of a town, city or village. Just like Federal Law providing an override for hams, the New York State law also has an exception for hams and for radio engineers acting in a professional capacity.
The hams living in my area know: don't drive into the Village of Altamont unless you strip off and hide all of your radio gear and antennas.
I have an acquaintance who is both a ham and a professional radio engineer. His employer had the contract to maintain the radios used by the Village of Altamont Police Department. One day, about a mile after leaving the Alatmont police station, in his work vehicle, which clearly stated his employer's name, he was pulled over on a suspicion of having a scanner in the vehicle (the large number of antennas on his work truck set off the officer's suspicion). No amount of talking could get this officer to accept (a) that he was a professional radio engineer (b) that he was their professional radio engineer, (c) that he was exempt from NY's law as a ham, (d) that he was exempt from all states' laws because he is a ham.
Let me emphasize this: The truck he was driving very clearly stated "HUDSON VALLEY COMMUNICATIONS" on the side of the truck and was very clearly a commercial vehicle.
At any rate, his company did mount his legal defense, charges were dropped, and his company advised the Village of Altamont that they considered this a breach of contract and no longer wished to provide them service. Apparently, they were the third or fourth radio shop to do this, and from what I understand, the other radio shops in the area won't touch the Village of Altamont with a ten-foot pole.
He said that the sort of debate that often takes place in public forums is useless, because it grossly oversimplifies things.
I believe you have a typo . . . Shouldn't your first example say "print item" rather than "print list"?
Now, how about this:
print join ("\n", @list);
Perl, of course. It's very clear and meaningful, and very concise, all at once. It also eschews all of the visual cruft of having to build a loop when one is really not needed.
Perl gets a bad rap for some of the serious junk that is written in it, but I think that an example such as the one I just gave demonstrates that there is great power there, and that it can work well if coupled with an appropriate level of responsibility.
Actually, it's more like saying "video and DVD" or "Cars and Fords" or some such case where the "first" or "most popular" player gets called by the name of the superset. It's pedantics, really
That said, the Windows/Linux running, generic-hardware, Intel/AMD/Via-powered computer is a descendant of a clone of a descendent of a computer made once upon a time by IBM called the IBM PC. Hence, the PC is capitalized, not because it is an abbreviation, but because it is a proper noun. It is akin to "Libertarian" meaning the party, versus "libertarian" meaning the idealogy. Yes, a Macintosh is a "personal computer", but no, it is not a "Personal Computer".
I have a sliderule. I don't know how old it is, but I can guess. My dad used it when he was in high school, and he would have been in the class of 1963, so it could be as old as 1958 or so, depending on what math classes he was taking. He is a math whiz, so it is conceivable that he was taking more advanced courses earlier than later.
Related, I have a Monroe desk calculator that I do use every time I pay my bills. I don't know its age, but I would guess at around 1980 or so. It has a vacuum fluorescent display, and can run either on 4 C cells or a wall wart. It doesn't have a printer like many in that era, but it does use the accumulator approach to addition and subtraction.
Horsepower is a measure of mechanical energy. Kilowatts are a measure of both mechanical and electrical energy. Kilowatts of mechanical and electrical energy are freely interchangeable, i.e. it is a given that a motor that develops 100kW uses 100kW plus some (hopefully) small overhead, but under no circumstances does it use less than 100kW.
You cannot develop 400 HP with two 100kW motors. 100kW is 134 HP, hence two 100kW motors can produce, at most, 268 HP.
I think this is akin to the claims of 5 HP on some power tools -- yes, if you had the motor developing its maximum torque while running its maximum speed, it would, indeed, develop that. Unfortunately for the liars who concoct these figures, maximum torque is at near-minimum speed, and maximum speed is at near-minimum torque. Maximum output can never exceed maximum input, no matter what.
Now, it seems like they've got a cool idea here, so why cloud it up with bullshit?
". . . and I am that fool!"
- Gomez Addams
Oops.
Well, "swine flu" is the past tense of "pigs fly" . . .
Um, guys? A black flag symbolizes Anarchism. The suggestion of waving a black flag, I think, was intended as a sign of support.
Then again, I reserve the right to be wrong.
More to the point, though, I am not sure what is wrong with using the actual system load to determine clock speed. Rather than picking up on the user's state of being, let the computer pick up on its own.
If a computer has work to do, why not let it run at 100% until that work is done, then idle? This is the way it is done now, it is far less complex, it gets the most work done in the least time, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the energy savings be close to, if not equal to, this project.
Of course, I do applaud them for thinking outside the box. I will also gladly concede if my hypothesis is wrong.
Incidentally, the small differential on a Via system is waaaaaaay outside the norm. One of my machines is an AMD Athlon X2, and can scale between 1.0GHz and 2.6GHz. The whole system (minus monitor) uses about 53W at idle and 93W with both cores fully loaded. The Via it replaced (not fanless, with full-sized HDD and DVD) ran between 50W and 60W dependent on load. While it does use somewhat more energy per time than the Via it replaced, it uses substantially less energy per work produced -- the Athlon can do in 45 minutes what took the Via 6-8 hours.
Here are my specifics (note that I am not in the Boston area or other similarly-congested area):
My commute is 20 miles each way. My car gets 30 MPG, and gasoline is currently around $2.20 in my area. Counting fuel only, my commute would cost me about $3 daily. There are, on average, 22 workdays in a month, making the total cost $66 to drive, again, counting fuel only. I have no parking fees at home or work.
Taking the bus (my beloved dysfunctional region has no train service yet), a monthly pass for weekdays costs me $55. This only saves me $11/month over fuel costs, or $132/year. Bus stops are within walking distance of both ends of my commute.
It was a better deal two months ago. The fares just went up for the first time in 14 years, and the monthly passes were $36 until last month.
Now, if I were to give up the car, I would say we can use the IRS rate for business mileage as a proxy for the total costs of owning the car. That rate is $0.55/mile, making my daily commute equal to $11, or $242/month. At that rate, $55 is a savings of $187/month or $2244/year.
The truth is probably somewhere in between these two figures.
Of course, public transit has other advantages. If you are an greenie, then the 3.6 MPG of a bus (or 5 MPG of a hybrid bus) can translate to as much as 144 (or 200) passenger MPG if the bus is full (trust me, the 57X is always full!). It also means you can do something meaningful with your time, instead of stewing over how bad the traffic is (I take the opportunity to read).
Proximity to a bus stop was a selling point when we bought our house.
Nothing. He's already been told twice.
How about we get real? What fraction of the bigger bandwidth picture is this 75 Mb/sec? Is this equivalent to jettisoning a big bag of feathers in order to keep a balloon aloft?
Anyway, if shortening the URLs is really going to save that much, then the headers need to be reined in, too -- they use far more bandwidth than the URL.
Compression is probably not the best solution, rather, a lookup table would do a nice job. If the URLs were mapped to a base-64 number, (note, mapped to it, not converted to it) then the bandwidth required on the URL could be cut down pretty well. You would also remove all meaning from the URL.
nVidia also make chipsets for AMD processors (I have one such motherboard). Intel also makes their own chipsets (I have one of those, too). There are also other players in the chipset field and (to a lesser degree) the processor field, so, really, neither of these two companies actually needs the other to survive.
Know also, that diesel fuel has a higher energy density than gasoline. A (US) gallon of gasoline has 125,000 BTU of energy, while a (US) gallon of diesel has just under 150,000 BTU. Keep this in mind when comparing the fuel economy of a diesel to that of a gasoline engine.
First off, I'm not saying this to be an asshat; I am completely serious in suggesting this:
Why not pick up a converter box yourself, and present it to your friend as a gift? It would be a fantastic practical gesture.
The LA Times lost all credibility with me when they said this:
I'm not aware of any means through which they could possibly be more wrong. They mention size as an additional factor in the next sentence, so that's not it. To be clear: an LCD uses less power than an equivalent CRT, period.
What has been driving the power demand for TVs has been (a) plasma, (b) bigger screens and (c) any kind of projection screen.
This has happened before.
Then there was a truly surreal follow up instance. Here's the summary: A professional TV news crew were in the middle of interviewing an Amtrak spokesperson about the photography policy, in which the spokesperson was saying that photography is absolutely okay but the interview was interrupted by a security guard coming to tell them to stop filming immediately as it is prohibited.
My question remains this: How do you pass through an airport without stress? If stress is the indicator of hostile intent, then it seems all parties present are hostile. Either that, or this system will suffer from an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio.
This could be done far lower-tech. When the car goes in for its annual safety inspection, read the odo and register it with the DMV. Sure, some of those miles will have been driven out of the state, possibly even out of the country, but there will be out-of-state and foreign drivers on the roads in Oregon making up the difference. All that with no invasion of privacy and no need to add much, if anything, to the existing infrastructure.
The only other thing I would propose is having a table multipliers in place that adjust for the vehicle's weight and wheel count, because heavier vehicles cause greater wear and tear on the roads, as do extra wheels. Top it off, drivers of super-small cars (Corbin Sparrow, for instance) get a break for having only three wheels, and drivers of motorcycles get a bigger break for having only two.
If your local Cable provider is Time-Warner, you can order Road Runner by itself. I can state this authoritatively, because Road Runner is my current ISP. I pay $45/month (though this is going up to $50 next month) and no additional taxes or fees. I am not paying for cable TV because I am not buying cable TV. This has been my arrangement since 2001.
Does FDIV count?
People often forget what business they are in.
The passenger railroads thought they were in the train business. They weren't. They were in the transit business. Failing to recognize this led to their demise and the ultimate formation of Amtrak to try (poorly) to fill the void.
The telcos thought, for a long time, that they were in the telephone business. Again, they weren't. They were in the telecommunications business. After fouling up the deployment of ISDN and later DSL here on the East Coast, it seems like Verizon is getting closer to the right idea with FiOS -- if they can just stop botching installations and billing. Meanwhile, the cable companies are eating their lunch.
I am sure there are more examples.