The interesting question is how people come to calling a computer a hard drive or a modem and why this usage has become common enough that we are all familiar with it. When someone says "Save it to your hard drive." the listener knows what to do and that their document is stored on the box below their desk. The issue is that the term hard drive is in common usage, but many people have never seen one. Now confusion sets in, since they don't have any model for what is being referred to so many people assume that hard drive must be a synonym for computer. It also seems to them that knowledgeable people refer to it this way, because they hear "hard drive" so often. So, being reasonable folks, they adopt what they perceive as the common usage.
The same thing likely happened with "modem" back in the day. Someone would say something like "The modem won't connect to the Internet". Since the listener has not yet learned what a modem is, he just assumes that the part the people are always talking about is another name for the whole.
Having done some tech support I reject the disdainful attitude some take towards the users' explanations. I found that it was sometimes important to understand how they were using terms to get to the core of their complaint. This would often save a lot of troubleshooting time. Also once I understood their misunderstandings, I could help clarify just a bit, so next time communication would be smoother. It doesn't take long or have to be technical. ("The hard drive is the part inside your computer where you save your documents.")
If people are bothering to pirate this book that means that it is still relevant. Just because he hasn't updated it lately does not give people the right to rip it off. He invested his time and energy into writing it and most works do not pay for themselves instantly, but over time. Writing a book is a risk as is publishing it. Some don't ever pay off. Some are worthwhile enough that ten years later people are still reading them. A publisher invests substantial money in giving an advance to an author and promoting a book and loses money on the majority of them, though a few sell enough over time to make up for the losses on the others.
If the work has become dated, or the cost appears to exceed the work's current value then someone else can write their own book or wiki article on the topic. If you don't like the cost of a good in our capitalist marketplace the solution is to compete, not to steal.
I also have no idea how updating his book will solve his problem of people pirating his book. People who are too cheap to spend a few dollars to compensate the author of a book that they spend many hours reading are unlikely to change their habit because of the date of the last update.
(Btw, the quote "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." implies that the "lady" is a bit too strident in making affirmative statements for someone who is truthful, "protest" having not yet acquired its negative connotation. In the debate on this man's book there is no question of truthfulness, only on how you view his concern.)
Its disposable because the device is so cheap that when one breaks then you just use your buddy's device. If its mil-spec you might end up with no backup device or no device at all. When my nephew was in Iraq they had problems getting enough mil-spec radios for their Guard trucks - they had been ripped out and given to other units that had shipped out earlier.
This is a myth. TFA points out that PC's are designed for 40,000 power cycles, or about 100 years of daily power cycles. Leaving your computer on an extra 128 hours a week draws 4x as much dust into your machine, than just having it hibernate while you are away. Turning off/hibernating your machine should extend its life by reducing that thick carpet of dust insulating your components, making them hotter than needed.
You seem to want to see if the programmer can avoid the issues inherent in writing threaded code - a worthy goal since writing threaded code can be challenging to write correctly (or maybe just easy to get wrong). I don't think passing code to an API that would understand your code would be the way to go, though. Compilers are much better suited to this - they have access to the source code after all and are designed to optimize it to run on particular hardware. The article suggests that part of the solution may lie in better tools such as compilers that recognize code that can be safely parallelized and compile it to run in multiple threads and handle all of the nasty "race conditions," that are easy to create and very hard to debug. The article also warns that automated tools may not be the panacea for the multi-core programming problem that some hope. You have to be careful about your threads competing for limited resources, such as memory bandwidth or needing to talk to each other so much that single-threaded code would have been faster.
The article mentions OS's not being ready, but the main issue is one of applications tending to be written for single cores. Linux happily supports thousands of cores and Windows can now handle 256 cores. The OS can be optimized for multi-core machines by parallelizing certain system calls or kernel operations, or keeping related threads on cores that are near each other, but the applications that are CPU bound seem to be running application code most of the time, not kernel code, so there is a limit to how much the OS can do to help.
No. An application has to execute commands in order. The OS cannot guess the order that you intend the instructions to be executed in or the dependencies between instructions. If the OS executed your instructions in a round-robin fashion, such that instruction 1 was executed on processor 1, instruction 2 on processor 2,... then the OS would have to keep careful track of whether the result of instruction 1 would affect the execution of instruction 2. Similar problems would exist sending chunks of instructions to various processors. The OS would have to keep track of all of these dependencies, and slow things to a crawl.
This kind of thing is done in hardware, however - its called hyperthreading or "simultaneous multithreading" and is done on many modern CPUs within individual cores at the cost of many transistors devoted to doing things like tracking dependencies.
A single-threaded application could benefit from multi-core architecture, if some of its system calls were asynchronous, so that calling print("Hello") would spawn a thread that caused "Hello" to be (eventually) displayed, and then (immediately) execute your next instruction, without waiting for the printing to complete. Not all system calls are asynchronous, and those that are need to be used thoughtfully. Consider what might happen if you executed: print("Hello, "); print("world!"); and each instruction were sent to be executed on a separate core. You could get a "race condition" where your code sometimes printed "world!Hello, ". It is the programmer's job to consider these conditions and ensure threads are properly synchronized - in this case by verifying that print("Hello, ") completes before executing the next instruction.
Yes, but it depends on your workload. If your workload can be split among multiple copies of your application, such as apache launching several processes to serve web page requests, then your application does not need to be multi-threaded to benefit from multi-core hardware. The key here is that each http request is independent and can be handled by a different process. If your workload depends on a single application, which is not it not multi-threaded, then the only benefit you get from multi-core hardware is that other applications may get shifted to other available cores.
Yep, I almost submitted the same post. But then I checked my facts.
It turns out that the graphics in this new Asus Eee 1000HE netbook is based on Intel's GMA 950 core, which is integrated into the new Atom N280 core. The recent news (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/31/1859200 ) was about the GMA 500, which has been in some recent Dell Netbooks. The 950 seems to be in the GMA 900 family, with good old Intel technology and hopefully reasonable Linux drivers.
Sorry, but that egg was *so* close to being on my face!
You have just proposed a "regressive tax," which costs you more as a percentage of income the less you make. Worse, many people would not be in a place to respond to the price signal, such as renters who do not own their appliances, such as fridge, washing machine and air conditioners. Worse yet, those who have high incomes do not notice the price signal from your tax and continue consuming as usual. You could raise this tax until you get the usage reduction you desire, but I think you might become a bit unpopular at some point.
What you call micromanagement, I call smart regulation, because it saves me money on power, barely affects the cost of goods, avoids me having to pay a tax on electricity, and is good for the environment.
Yes, if your financial situation is precarious, then reasonable long term decisions do become foolish in the short term.
But lets look at this in an investment way, using your numbers: $120/year for a $400 dollar investment is about a 30% rate of return. If you do have any savings, this is the about best return on your money you will ever find. If you don't have savings or need them as a cushion in uncertain times, then buying on credit could be reasonable for you. So, instead of paying $10/month to the electric company for power, you pay $10/month (2.5% * $400) to the credit card company and you get a shiny new fridge and you get to stop paying in a few years! Many appliance stores have "no interest until X" deals, that could make sense for you. Your utility might even give you credits for efficient appliances.
In the end we could boost efficiency efforts if low-cost financing were easily available, since so many people live with minimal cash reserves. Also, landlords have little incentive to upgrade tenants appliances, since they can't recover their costs.
Bad air: Yes, my TV runs primarily on fossil fuels (with a few miles of wire between me and the plant). Burning these fuels pollutes the air. Again, the problem is not my laziness of leaving a power sucking TV in a power-sucking standby mode, but that when enough people in my region act the same way, electric demand increases and pollution is generated, which lowers local air quality, harming others, especially kids and the elderly.
Politicians: I choose to elect politicians who understand science and work to protect the environment, for the sake of human health and for the health of the natural world.
Global warming: Your choice not to believe in global warming does not make it go away. The time scale of ten years you cite, is quite short. When climate scientists look at trends they average out fluctuations less than twenty years and often average over continental or hemispheric scales as well. This averaging has the effect of filtering out the noise of daily weather or a few unusual years. The warming trend is global and consistent since industrialization. The data for temperature over the last 1300 years in the northern hemisphere show that the last century is outside the natural variation with confidence intervals exceeding 95%. The warming we see is consistent with what computer models of climate show for our current levels of CO2. Come back when you have better data.
If you talk about conservation in terms of individual virtue and people remembering to turn off the light, then yes, there will be little impact. Tossing out the clunker fridges throughout the land and replacing with modern models will save vast amounts of energy. Same story for old air conditioners. Ditto for washing machines. Front-loading models with high speed spin are easier on your cloths, use less water (and less energy to heat that water) and come out drier so that your cloths dry faster and the drier uses less energy. Add to this the replacement of phantom draws like power bricks. (My newest Nokia phone charger produces no perceptible heat, unlike the previous models which were always warm.)
The point is that we have a choice between switching to modern technology or keeping old tech and building more power plants. The transition to modern technology can be accomplished with your favorite economic or regulatory incentives - choose cap and trade, carbon tax, efficiency regulations, clunker buy-back programs, gold stars or whatever you like. In the end we all save money and the environment.
I'm not sure why you believe that we are unlikely to build new generation plants. Currently we are building many new coal-fired plants to satisfy electric demand. I would be happy to see modern technology make these unnecessary.
Personally, its not my power bill I care about - its the environment. I think waiting a few seconds for the TV to come on and maybe a few minutes for an update the channel guide is worth it to fight global warming and bad air. Unplugging *my* TV doesn't solve the of phantom power draw, though, since the problem isn't *my* TV, its 1 billion TVs x 20 Watts.
Economists call this phenomenon "the tragedy of the commons," taken from the idea if that everyone acts in perfect individual self interest and grazes their sheep as they want on limited common land, then the land is rendered useless. Division of the land or agreements solve this particular issue.
Unfortunately, I can't fence my atmosphere off from your polluting ways, so I support reasonable regulation to protect our common resources.
BTW, the marginal cost to device makers for energy savings can be quite small, but it comes right out of their profit unless all device makers operate under the same rules. In the 1980s appliance manufacturers supported increased efficiency standards, as long as they didn't have to deal with a patchwork of state standards. In the end a tighter standard ends up being win-win. You pay $1 more for your TV and save that much in a month on electricity and the TV makers standardize on hardware that remembers the channel lineup. Oh, and we get less climate change.
Greatly agreed. Our unmanned program has been such an astounding success.
What I don't get is the benefit of adding a human to these missions. They are ill suited to the environment and require all sorts of extra equipment to keep alive during the voyage and on the planet. Worse, they have to be shipped back to earth intact. Their value is so high that heavy expensive multiply redundant systems have to be built to ensure their safety.
I do get the benefit of having a device that can make decisions without up to two hours lag time, but the investment might be better spent on a bit of navigation software rather than transporting wetware.
I would invoke the "Humpty Dumpty Principle" (from Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass"). Quoting: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
"Their" is in common usage to indicate his/her. It has the advantage of being less awkward to say and looks less strange on the page. It also has the benefit of annoying grammarians, who seem to believe that they subscribe to the One True Way.
Their has been in common usage for a possessive of indeterminate gender since before grammarians decided to declare rules for the English language based on their (sexist) biases and preferences. Wikipedia provides a mind-numbingly detailed description of this history and grammatical rules surrounding it, but this usage dates to the 1300's.
Here are some fun quotes that Wikipedia gathered showing usage of they and their as singular by famous authors:
-- Arise; one knocks. /... / Hark, how they knock! - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
-- 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech. - Shakespeare, Hamlet
-- I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. - Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
-- That's always your way, Maimâ"always sailing in to help somebody before they're hurt. - Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
So this is not some modern invention of feminists or the ignorant, but simply usage that is not favored by self-appointed grammar police. (At least in France the grammar police are official and given the duty of writing the rules on behalf of that nation. It seems that there, too, people go on speaking without regard to the official rules.)
They appear to be using TCP/IP. I was reading this
paper (PDF) about GFS which says, in part,
A large chunk size offers several advantages. First, it reduces clients' needs to interact with the master because reads and writes on the same chunk require only one initial request to the master for chunk location informa- tion. The reduction is especially significant for our work- loads because applications mostly read and write large files sequentially. Even for small random reads, the client can comfortably cache all the chunk location information for a multi-TB working set. Second, since on a large chunk, a client is more likely to perform many operations on a given chunk, it can reduce network overhead by keeping a persis- tent TCP connection to the chunkserver over an extended period of time. Third, it reduces the size of the metadata stored on the master. This allows us to keep the metadata in memory, which in turn brings other advantages that we will discuss in Section 2.6.1.
MSNBC actually had a much better story on the subject that took the time to discuss the issues with mercury in CF bulbs, located at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17831334/
"People concerned about the environment and their health can buy these CFLs with a clear conscience," Noah Horowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement released by Wal-Mart.
"In fact," he added, "the energy savings delivered through the use of CFLs will actually reduce more mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants than is added through manufacture of the bulbs."
The issue of how to dispose of CF bulbs is important, but the article linked to in the/. summary is of poor quality and is of the "we'll tell you what to worry about" type rather than anything designed to enlighten.
The lack of good disposal options is points to a clear lack of state and national leadership on the issue. I would support any system over the current "see no evil" approach, from requiring manufacturers or stores to take back the burnt out bulbs to curbside pickup, though it would make sense for the purchase price to include the recycling cost however it is done.
Another issue is the lack of labeling on the packages. Shouldn't the package itself tell you what to do when you break a bulb? Shouldn't the package give guidance on disposal or recycling?
We can do better than what we are currently doing here while we wait for LEDs to save us.
They never mention making hydrogen cheaper than gasoline, as the EETimes article does. Instead they talk about their efficient electrolysis method and how it can be used plug-in hybrid cars. The car has the electrolysis machine on board and makes H2 from electricity. The car then runs on a fuel cell. They also talk about what the power source is - a rarity for any article on "hydrogen power" - which could be "off-peak electricity at night and solar power during the day."
There is also good discussion about the problems with the current methods of hydrogen production.
If their technology is as good as they claim, then we may have a good alternative for storing or transporting energy generated by renewable means such as solar and wind. Since solar and wind are best sited where the best conditions are (such Texas for wind or the US Southwest for solar) and their power output tends to be variable with time of day and weather, co-locating an hydrogen-production facility could smooth out the supply bumps, and allow the energy to be transported by tank or pipeline without the energy losses inherent in long-distance electric transmission.
Well, not necessarily, I know some folks with a solar car. Well, its a truck, actually - an electric Ford Ranger. The solar part is on the rooftop of their house. (You didn't think they were dragging around a solar array, did you?) They generate more than enough power to run their house, charge their truck and sell extra back to the utility. Who are these fabulously wealthy people who can afford this technological extravagance? A school teacher and a tutor. The economics of their situation is helped by California sunshine and California tax rebates and a lack of kids.
This is all with yesterday's technology. Tomorrow's technology will make this solution available to more people, as cost of solar seems to be dropping rapidly (Nanosolar.com, etc).
There are still issues with peak demand and charging, but if you can plug in at work or at the parking meter, then you nicely match solar power's power peak.
Ah, a fellow caps-lock hater. I customarily pop off a bunch of keys on my keyboards. It gets me a few odd looks at work, but it saves me lots of hassle. If I truly need one of those keys I can use a pencil to activate it. Here's the rest of my hate list:
Insert - I've never had a use for "write over mode." Has anyone? Windows - Almost useless, squeezed between useful keys. Fortunately my Linux systems ignore this key. Menu - I'll just right-click, thanks. Num lock - Why won't this go away? Why do I need a way for my numeric keypad stop to working? Are the arrow keys hard to find?
Efficient lighting is low-hanging fruit. It is existing technology that gives cost savings to its users and can be implemented quickly. I'm curious where you see other low-hanging fruit in energy efficiency.
I can't really say too much about RFI interference. I haven't noticed any effect on my audio and video devices from all the bulbs around my home. Perhaps you have a sensitive stereo. You can still replace lighting elsewhere in your home.
I'm curious about your headache comment. I am familiar with many people getting headaches from 60Hz light sources. These sources include monitors running at their default refresh rate and older florescent lights. Newer compact florescent lights have electronic ballasts which produce light somewhere over 1,00 Hz, which is not detectable by the human eye. Monitors can be fixed by setting the refresh rates of your machine and those you tend to to somewhere over 72 Hz - you'll might cure somebody's chronic headache. I know I have.
If your headaches are not coming from a 60Hz flicker, I would conclude that you might be sensitive to the color spectrum. Try looking at a few compact florescent bulbs. Some cast a harsh white light, while others cast a warmer light similar to incandescent bulbs. From your comment, it seems you are very aware of the light quality of bulbs. Hopefully a bit of experimentation will help you find a bulb that gives off light which pleases you.
I think the driver issue is not too much of a problem since the live CD distributions of Linux have drivers included which support most Ethernet cards. (With the exception, of course, of many wireless cards.) If the driver is not present there is no (simple) way to load it after you have booted off the live CD.
Maybe you are suggesting that someone might poison the Linux kernel with a Trojan. That would be dastardly indeed. Hopefully the kernel team would catch such an attempt. It has been tried before. I guess its a matter of a chain of trust of who is reviewing kernel submissions. One might more easily poison a userland application that receives less rigorous review. Either type of poisoning with a Trojan is vulnerable to discovery by people with running Ethereal to catch rogue packets leaking out of their systems.
Perhaps the most effective point to insert a Trojan would be at the point that the bank is creating the customizations for the boot device (USB flash or CD). This would require an insider, though, and would be vulnerable to packet analysis.
I'm sure I'm missing some other good attack vectors. Maybe there are some nice gaping holes in my thoughts above. Any thoughts anyone?
My bank had a poster in the lobby stating that they used "state of the art" security measures to protect their online banking customers. I reflected on the state of the art and wondered why anyone would trust their money with online banking. For me the risk / convenience just doesn't work out. My electronic banking is limited to checking balances and cleared checks by phone. I know my account number and password are transmitted in cleartext (clearbeeps), but access to the phone network is reasonably limited and the phone access system doesn't allow transfers to anywhere but my other accounts. I'm curious what benefit other people feel they get from online banking.
I'm a little troubled by the security researcher's online banking ritual. Its not that it doesn't make sense technically and help protect against a class of attacks. It just feels wrong. It feels like he is performing a ritual to reassure himself before doing his online banking, which he clearly has reservations about. He does not discuss any other measures he takes to secure his system.
Those who talk about booting off a live CD such as Knoppix sound a little more sensible to me, as the integrity of the system is pretty well ensured. This isn't an approach that scales well to the general public, though, for reasons of convenience and knowledge. It involves education about the risks, downloading and burning and ISO and sometimes fiddling with BIOS settings - not something that the bank is likely to ask users to do. A bootable read-only flash drive might simplify things, though. Maybe a security minded bank would distribute bootable read-only flash drives with built-in password-generating fob. Plug in, boot, see browser window already pointing to your bank's site with secure connection. Type in account number from a card, password from memory and number from fob. Now I want to know how you would break this system. Let the replies begin...
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The interesting question is how people come to calling a computer a hard drive or a modem and why this usage has become common enough that we are all familiar with it. When someone says "Save it to your hard drive." the listener knows what to do and that their document is stored on the box below their desk. The issue is that the term hard drive is in common usage, but many people have never seen one. Now confusion sets in, since they don't have any model for what is being referred to so many people assume that hard drive must be a synonym for computer. It also seems to them that knowledgeable people refer to it this way, because they hear "hard drive" so often. So, being reasonable folks, they adopt what they perceive as the common usage.
The same thing likely happened with "modem" back in the day. Someone would say something like "The modem won't connect to the Internet". Since the listener has not yet learned what a modem is, he just assumes that the part the people are always talking about is another name for the whole.
Having done some tech support I reject the disdainful attitude some take towards the users' explanations. I found that it was sometimes important to understand how they were using terms to get to the core of their complaint. This would often save a lot of troubleshooting time. Also once I understood their misunderstandings, I could help clarify just a bit, so next time communication would be smoother. It doesn't take long or have to be technical. ("The hard drive is the part inside your computer where you save your documents.")
If people are bothering to pirate this book that means that it is still relevant. Just because he hasn't updated it lately does not give people the right to rip it off. He invested his time and energy into writing it and most works do not pay for themselves instantly, but over time. Writing a book is a risk as is publishing it. Some don't ever pay off. Some are worthwhile enough that ten years later people are still reading them. A publisher invests substantial money in giving an advance to an author and promoting a book and loses money on the majority of them, though a few sell enough over time to make up for the losses on the others.
If the work has become dated, or the cost appears to exceed the work's current value then someone else can write their own book or wiki article on the topic. If you don't like the cost of a good in our capitalist marketplace the solution is to compete, not to steal.
I also have no idea how updating his book will solve his problem of people pirating his book. People who are too cheap to spend a few dollars to compensate the author of a book that they spend many hours reading are unlikely to change their habit because of the date of the last update.
(Btw, the quote "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." implies that the "lady" is a bit too strident in making affirmative statements for someone who is truthful, "protest" having not yet acquired its negative connotation. In the debate on this man's book there is no question of truthfulness, only on how you view his concern.)
Its disposable because the device is so cheap that when one breaks then you just use your buddy's device. If its mil-spec you might end up with no backup device or no device at all. When my nephew was in Iraq they had problems getting enough mil-spec radios for their Guard trucks - they had been ripped out and given to other units that had shipped out earlier.
This is a myth. TFA points out that PC's are designed for 40,000 power cycles, or about 100 years of daily power cycles. Leaving your computer on an extra 128 hours a week draws 4x as much dust into your machine, than just having it hibernate while you are away. Turning off/hibernating your machine should extend its life by reducing that thick carpet of dust insulating your components, making them hotter than needed.
You seem to want to see if the programmer can avoid the issues inherent in writing threaded code - a worthy goal since writing threaded code can be challenging to write correctly (or maybe just easy to get wrong). I don't think passing code to an API that would understand your code would be the way to go, though. Compilers are much better suited to this - they have access to the source code after all and are designed to optimize it to run on particular hardware. The article suggests that part of the solution may lie in better tools such as compilers that recognize code that can be safely parallelized and compile it to run in multiple threads and handle all of the nasty "race conditions," that are easy to create and very hard to debug. The article also warns that automated tools may not be the panacea for the multi-core programming problem that some hope. You have to be careful about your threads competing for limited resources, such as memory bandwidth or needing to talk to each other so much that single-threaded code would have been faster.
The article mentions OS's not being ready, but the main issue is one of applications tending to be written for single cores. Linux happily supports thousands of cores and Windows can now handle 256 cores. The OS can be optimized for multi-core machines by parallelizing certain system calls or kernel operations, or keeping related threads on cores that are near each other, but the applications that are CPU bound seem to be running application code most of the time, not kernel code, so there is a limit to how much the OS can do to help.
No. An application has to execute commands in order. The OS cannot guess the order that you intend the instructions to be executed in or the dependencies between instructions. If the OS executed your instructions in a round-robin fashion, such that instruction 1 was executed on processor 1, instruction 2 on processor 2, ... then the OS would have to keep careful track of whether the result of instruction 1 would affect the execution of instruction 2. Similar problems would exist sending chunks of instructions to various processors. The OS would have to keep track of all of these dependencies, and slow things to a crawl.
This kind of thing is done in hardware, however - its called hyperthreading or "simultaneous multithreading" and is done on many modern CPUs within individual cores at the cost of many transistors devoted to doing things like tracking dependencies.
A single-threaded application could benefit from multi-core architecture, if some of its system calls were asynchronous, so that calling print("Hello") would spawn a thread that caused "Hello" to be (eventually) displayed, and then (immediately) execute your next instruction, without waiting for the printing to complete. Not all system calls are asynchronous, and those that are need to be used thoughtfully. Consider what might happen if you executed: print("Hello, "); print("world!"); and each instruction were sent to be executed on a separate core. You could get a "race condition" where your code sometimes printed "world!Hello, ". It is the programmer's job to consider these conditions and ensure threads are properly synchronized - in this case by verifying that print("Hello, ") completes before executing the next instruction.
Yes, but it depends on your workload. If your workload can be split among multiple copies of your application, such as apache launching several processes to serve web page requests, then your application does not need to be multi-threaded to benefit from multi-core hardware. The key here is that each http request is independent and can be handled by a different process. If your workload depends on a single application, which is not it not multi-threaded, then the only benefit you get from multi-core hardware is that other applications may get shifted to other available cores.
Yep, I almost submitted the same post. But then I checked my facts.
It turns out that the graphics in this new Asus Eee 1000HE netbook is based on Intel's GMA 950 core, which is integrated into the new Atom N280 core. The recent news (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/31/1859200 ) was about the GMA 500, which has been in some recent Dell Netbooks. The 950 seems to be in the GMA 900 family, with good old Intel technology and hopefully reasonable Linux drivers.
Sorry, but that egg was *so* close to being on my face!
You have just proposed a "regressive tax," which costs you more as a percentage of income the less you make. Worse, many people would not be in a place to respond to the price signal, such as renters who do not own their appliances, such as fridge, washing machine and air conditioners. Worse yet, those who have high incomes do not notice the price signal from your tax and continue consuming as usual. You could raise this tax until you get the usage reduction you desire, but I think you might become a bit unpopular at some point.
What you call micromanagement, I call smart regulation, because it saves me money on power, barely affects the cost of goods, avoids me having to pay a tax on electricity, and is good for the environment.
Yes, if your financial situation is precarious, then reasonable long term decisions do become foolish in the short term.
But lets look at this in an investment way, using your numbers: $120/year for a $400 dollar investment is about a 30% rate of return. If you do have any savings, this is the about best return on your money you will ever find. If you don't have savings or need them as a cushion in uncertain times, then buying on credit could be reasonable for you. So, instead of paying $10/month to the electric company for power, you pay $10/month (2.5% * $400) to the credit card company and you get a shiny new fridge and you get to stop paying in a few years! Many appliance stores have "no interest until X" deals, that could make sense for you. Your utility might even give you credits for efficient appliances.
In the end we could boost efficiency efforts if low-cost financing were easily available, since so many people live with minimal cash reserves. Also, landlords have little incentive to upgrade tenants appliances, since they can't recover their costs.
Bad air: Yes, my TV runs primarily on fossil fuels (with a few miles of wire between me and the plant). Burning these fuels pollutes the air. Again, the problem is not my laziness of leaving a power sucking TV in a power-sucking standby mode, but that when enough people in my region act the same way, electric demand increases and pollution is generated, which lowers local air quality, harming others, especially kids and the elderly.
Politicians: I choose to elect politicians who understand science and work to protect the environment, for the sake of human health and for the health of the natural world.
Global warming: Your choice not to believe in global warming does not make it go away. The time scale of ten years you cite, is quite short. When climate scientists look at trends they average out fluctuations less than twenty years and often average over continental or hemispheric scales as well. This averaging has the effect of filtering out the noise of daily weather or a few unusual years. The warming trend is global and consistent since industrialization. The data for temperature over the last 1300 years in the northern hemisphere show that the last century is outside the natural variation with confidence intervals exceeding 95%. The warming we see is consistent with what computer models of climate show for our current levels of CO2. Come back when you have better data.
If you talk about conservation in terms of individual virtue and people remembering to turn off the light, then yes, there will be little impact. Tossing out the clunker fridges throughout the land and replacing with modern models will save vast amounts of energy. Same story for old air conditioners. Ditto for washing machines. Front-loading models with high speed spin are easier on your cloths, use less water (and less energy to heat that water) and come out drier so that your cloths dry faster and the drier uses less energy. Add to this the replacement of phantom draws like power bricks. (My newest Nokia phone charger produces no perceptible heat, unlike the previous models which were always warm.)
The point is that we have a choice between switching to modern technology or keeping old tech and building more power plants. The transition to modern technology can be accomplished with your favorite economic or regulatory incentives - choose cap and trade, carbon tax, efficiency regulations, clunker buy-back programs, gold stars or whatever you like. In the end we all save money and the environment.
I'm not sure why you believe that we are unlikely to build new generation plants. Currently we are building many new coal-fired plants to satisfy electric demand. I would be happy to see modern technology make these unnecessary.
Personally, its not my power bill I care about - its the environment. I think waiting a few seconds for the TV to come on and maybe a few minutes for an update the channel guide is worth it to fight global warming and bad air. Unplugging *my* TV doesn't solve the of phantom power draw, though, since the problem isn't *my* TV, its 1 billion TVs x 20 Watts.
Economists call this phenomenon "the tragedy of the commons," taken from the idea if that everyone acts in perfect individual self interest and grazes their sheep as they want on limited common land, then the land is rendered useless. Division of the land or agreements solve this particular issue.
Unfortunately, I can't fence my atmosphere off from your polluting ways, so I support reasonable regulation to protect our common resources.
BTW, the marginal cost to device makers for energy savings can be quite small, but it comes right out of their profit unless all device makers operate under the same rules. In the 1980s appliance manufacturers supported increased efficiency standards, as long as they didn't have to deal with a patchwork of state standards. In the end a tighter standard ends up being win-win. You pay $1 more for your TV and save that much in a month on electricity and the TV makers standardize on hardware that remembers the channel lineup. Oh, and we get less climate change.
Greatly agreed. Our unmanned program has been such an astounding success.
What I don't get is the benefit of adding a human to these missions. They are ill suited to the environment and require all sorts of extra equipment to keep alive during the voyage and on the planet. Worse, they have to be shipped back to earth intact. Their value is so high that heavy expensive multiply redundant systems have to be built to ensure their safety.
I do get the benefit of having a device that can make decisions without up to two hours lag time, but the investment might be better spent on a bit of navigation software rather than transporting wetware.
-Jon
I would invoke the "Humpty Dumpty Principle" (from Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass"). Quoting: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
"Their" is in common usage to indicate his/her. It has the advantage of being less awkward to say and looks less strange on the page. It also has the benefit of annoying grammarians, who seem to believe that they subscribe to the One True Way.
Their has been in common usage for a possessive of indeterminate gender since before grammarians decided to declare rules for the English language based on their (sexist) biases and preferences. Wikipedia provides a mind-numbingly detailed description of this history and grammatical rules surrounding it, but this usage dates to the 1300's.
Here are some fun quotes that Wikipedia gathered showing usage of they and their as singular by famous authors:
-- Arise; one knocks. / ... / Hark, how they knock! - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
-- 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech. - Shakespeare, Hamlet
-- I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. - Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
-- That's always your way, Maimâ"always sailing in to help somebody before they're hurt. - Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
So this is not some modern invention of feminists or the ignorant, but simply usage that is not favored by self-appointed grammar police. (At least in France the grammar police are official and given the duty of writing the rules on behalf of that nation. It seems that there, too, people go on speaking without regard to the official rules.)
-Jon
paper (PDF) about GFS which says, in part,
(from page 3, section 2.5)
-Jon
The issue of how to dispose of CF bulbs is important, but the article linked to in the
The lack of good disposal options is points to a clear lack of state and national leadership on the issue. I would support any system over the current "see no evil" approach, from requiring manufacturers or stores to take back the burnt out bulbs to curbside pickup, though it would make sense for the purchase price to include the recycling cost however it is done.
Another issue is the lack of labeling on the packages. Shouldn't the package itself tell you what to do when you break a bulb? Shouldn't the package give guidance on disposal or recycling?
We can do better than what we are currently doing here while we wait for LEDs to save us.
-Jon
Yes, everyone please read the link http://www.qsinano.com/news/newsletters/2008_02/f1.php. It is a press release which is informative, technical and skips PR-speak.
They never mention making hydrogen cheaper than gasoline, as the EETimes article does. Instead they talk about their efficient electrolysis method and how it can be used plug-in hybrid cars. The car has the electrolysis machine on board and makes H2 from electricity. The car then runs on a fuel cell. They also talk about what the power source is - a rarity for any article on "hydrogen power" - which could be "off-peak electricity at night and solar power during the day."
There is also good discussion about the problems with the current methods of hydrogen production.
If their technology is as good as they claim, then we may have a good alternative for storing or transporting energy generated by renewable means such as solar and wind. Since solar and wind are best sited where the best conditions are (such Texas for wind or the US Southwest for solar) and their power output tends to be variable with time of day and weather, co-locating an hydrogen-production facility could smooth out the supply bumps, and allow the energy to be transported by tank or pipeline without the energy losses inherent in long-distance electric transmission.
Good news indeed.
Well, not necessarily, I know some folks with a solar car. Well, its a truck, actually - an electric Ford Ranger. The solar part is on the rooftop of their house. (You didn't think they were dragging around a solar array, did you?) They generate more than enough power to run their house, charge their truck and sell extra back to the utility. Who are these fabulously wealthy people who can afford this technological extravagance? A school teacher and a tutor. The economics of their situation is helped by California sunshine and California tax rebates and a lack of kids.
This is all with yesterday's technology. Tomorrow's technology will make this solution available to more people, as cost of solar seems to be dropping rapidly (Nanosolar.com, etc).
There are still issues with peak demand and charging, but if you can plug in at work or at the parking meter, then you nicely match solar power's power peak.
-Jon
There is a video involving an electric drill which demonstrates the stability of A123 Systems' batteries. It used to be on their web site. Now you can find it at: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/08/13/video-nail-drilled-through-a123-battery/
Fortunately, for folks who enjoy a bit of flame and spark, they also drill a conventional battery. Check it out.
A123 Systems also has a good bit of detail on the safety of their batteries at: http://www.a123systems.com/#/technology/safety/
-Jon
Ah, a fellow caps-lock hater. I customarily pop off a bunch of keys on my keyboards. It gets me a few odd looks at work, but it saves me lots of hassle. If I truly need one of those keys I can use a pencil to activate it. Here's the rest of my hate list:
Insert - I've never had a use for "write over mode." Has anyone?
Windows - Almost useless, squeezed between useful keys. Fortunately my Linux systems ignore this key.
Menu - I'll just right-click, thanks.
Num lock - Why won't this go away? Why do I need a way for my numeric keypad stop to working? Are the arrow keys hard to find?
-Jon
Efficient lighting is low-hanging fruit. It is existing technology that gives cost savings to its users and can be implemented quickly. I'm curious where you see other low-hanging fruit in energy efficiency.
I can't really say too much about RFI interference. I haven't noticed any effect on my audio and video devices from all the bulbs around my home. Perhaps you have a sensitive stereo. You can still replace lighting elsewhere in your home.
I'm curious about your headache comment. I am familiar with many people getting headaches from 60Hz light sources. These sources include monitors running at their default refresh rate and older florescent lights. Newer compact florescent lights have electronic ballasts which produce light somewhere over 1,00 Hz, which is not detectable by the human eye. Monitors can be fixed by setting the refresh rates of your machine and those you tend to to somewhere over 72 Hz - you'll might cure somebody's chronic headache. I know I have.
If your headaches are not coming from a 60Hz flicker, I would conclude that you might be sensitive to the color spectrum. Try looking at a few compact florescent bulbs. Some cast a harsh white light, while others cast a warmer light similar to incandescent bulbs. From your comment, it seems you are very aware of the light quality of bulbs. Hopefully a bit of experimentation will help you find a bulb that gives off light which pleases you.
I think the driver issue is not too much of a problem since the live CD distributions of Linux have drivers included which support most Ethernet cards. (With the exception, of course, of many wireless cards.) If the driver is not present there is no (simple) way to load it after you have booted off the live CD.
Maybe you are suggesting that someone might poison the Linux kernel with a Trojan. That would be dastardly indeed. Hopefully the kernel team would catch such an attempt. It has been tried before. I guess its a matter of a chain of trust of who is reviewing kernel submissions. One might more easily poison a userland application that receives less rigorous review. Either type of poisoning with a Trojan is vulnerable to discovery by people with running Ethereal to catch rogue packets leaking out of their systems.
Perhaps the most effective point to insert a Trojan would be at the point that the bank is creating the customizations for the boot device (USB flash or CD). This would require an insider, though, and would be vulnerable to packet analysis.
I'm sure I'm missing some other good attack vectors. Maybe there are some nice gaping holes in my thoughts above. Any thoughts anyone?
-Jon
The question for me is:
Why do online banking?
My bank had a poster in the lobby stating that they used "state of the art" security measures to protect their online banking customers. I reflected on the state of the art and wondered why anyone would trust their money with online banking. For me the risk / convenience just doesn't work out. My electronic banking is limited to checking balances and cleared checks by phone. I know my account number and password are transmitted in cleartext (clearbeeps), but access to the phone network is reasonably limited and the phone access system doesn't allow transfers to anywhere but my other accounts. I'm curious what benefit other people feel they get from online banking.
I'm a little troubled by the security researcher's online banking ritual. Its not that it doesn't make sense technically and help protect against a class of attacks. It just feels wrong. It feels like he is performing a ritual to reassure himself before doing his online banking, which he clearly has reservations about. He does not discuss any other measures he takes to secure his system.
Those who talk about booting off a live CD such as Knoppix sound a little more sensible to me, as the integrity of the system is pretty well ensured. This isn't an approach that scales well to the general public, though, for reasons of convenience and knowledge. It involves education about the risks, downloading and burning and ISO and sometimes fiddling with BIOS settings - not something that the bank is likely to ask users to do. A bootable read-only flash drive might simplify things, though. Maybe a security minded bank would distribute bootable read-only flash drives with built-in password-generating fob. Plug in, boot, see browser window already pointing to your bank's site with secure connection. Type in account number from a card, password from memory and number from fob. Now I want to know how you would break this system. Let the replies begin...
-Jon