Here's a lesson, dude: the ONLY reason for a company to do something is either: - bottom line or - regulatory compliance Organic food companies make organic food not because they believe in environmental responsibility, but because it's a great way to carve a niche in an otherwise saturated market. Similarly, companies phase out toxic chemicals not because they are trying to protect the environment, but because it either saves money, reduces potential liability, or ensures compliance with the law. Apple recycles electronics not because they want to save the planet, but because this is a way to avoid costly mandatory recycling requirements and a cheap way to get some good publicity. Instead of having to recycle every machine for free (which is probably what the government would require), they can make it sufficiently cumbersome and costly that very few people would take advantage of that program. A company that makes unsound financial decisions would be instantly sued by its shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.
If you want to have an effective recycling program, simply pass laws to make any place that sells PCs and electronics accept said items from consumers for recycling. Kind of like Wal-mart has to accept my used motor oil even if I didn't buy it there. Trying to voluntarily get manufacturers to do things that don't make financial sense is stupid and counterproductive.
It's just a good drive. I've had plenty of 40 meg drives fail and I had plenty of bigger disks that didn't develop issues. It really mainly depends on how many hours you put on the drive -- if you don't use the computer very often, the hard drive will last a long time.
What do you think, the hard drive's logic runs on 5V? Not if it was made after 1992 or so. The DSP in a typical hard drive probably requires 1.5V, the logic circuits 3.3V, and the 5V is only used for the interface chips. The motor is run from it's own 3-phase power converter. When the manufacturer decides to move their chips to a smaller process, the voltages will need to go down. Not to mention, you often can't use the main supply rails directly, since they are incredibly noisy, filthy, and poorly-regulated.
Not to mention, the power supply in your computer is probably 50-60% efficient. It's expensive to get better efficiency from a multi-output line power supply. A small, high-frequency step-down converter going from 12V to 3.3V is typically about 95% efficient -- it's much easier to make small things efficient than it is to make large things efficient. The cost doesn't increase, since it has to be built into the disk anyway.
Anyway, I work for a telecom company, and there's a reason the company designs all power supplies in-house and doesn't just buy modules or ready-made boards (both of which are available). A standard module is obsolete the minute it is put into production. Nobody can foresee the unique power requirements of a given product. An FPGA chip might require 6 or 7 different power rails, with different voltages and tolerances, levels of noise, current draw, and a certain power-up and power-down sequence. A standard module cannot possibly provide that. Do you really think a standard off-the-shelf power supply could power the tens of thousands of different PC components that are available, each of which might have its own unique requirements? Or that it wouldn't become obsolete the moment a single new chip is released?
currently a 450 Watt ps is pumping most of the wattage into the 5VDC to supply 90 amps of electricity and the computer is capable of using 297 watts (90 * 3.3
Dude, you don't have the slightest clue about power supplies or electronics in general. A 450W PC supply doesn't put out 90 amps at 5 volts. More like 30. The motherboard doesn't even use 5V for much of anything -- when was the last time you saw a 5V chip? And there's no way you are going to be stepping down 5V to 3.3V with a linear regulator at the current levels you describe. Not to mention, there is nothing in a PC that uses 3.3V at such ridiculous currents. What actually happens is that the motherboard CPU supply and the videocard power supply (the main 2 power consumers) step down 12V at ~20 amps to 1.1V at hundreds of amps using a multiphase buck converter. What Google is saying is that PCs don't need the 5V, 3.3V, and all the wacky outputs (-5V, -12V, etc) to run, since we are well past the age when every chip runs on +5V or +12V, and even 3.3V is becoming much less common -- 2.5V, 1.8V, 1.5V, and 1.2V are becoming increasingly common. It is therefore more efficient to make the power supply produce one DC voltage (like 12V) and let the other components use that to generate their own wacky power rails. +5V and +3.3V were useful in the 80s and 90s, not today.
As far as 3-phase power: what the hell would that be useful for? It would just make the power supplies more complex and expensive, and require more wires to be run. 3-phase is mainly useful for large AC motors.
That's not what they are talking about. Currently, a PC power supply puts out about 6 different rails, none of which are directly usable by the motherboard. This means you lose efficiency, because you have switchers stepping down 12V to 1V at high current, circuitry sucking down 3.3V directly, maybe a few circuits that use 5V, some linear regulators stepping down 5V to 2.5V, things like that. It's a mess and designing a high-efficiency power supply is hard and expensive because you need a ton of outputs with wildly varying power draws. Google is just saying that if you make a single output power supply, you could make it much smaller and more efficient since you wouldn't have extra unused capacity on some of the outputs. The motherboards already do their own power conversion, and voltages like +5V are hardly used for anything anymore. Most chips are 3.3V or less.
If you can cut power consumption by 10 watts a machine (quite realistic) and you have 100,000 machines (Google has more) you just saved 1 megawatt of power, or about a million dollars per year in electricity (without even taking into account the electricity required for cooling). That's quite a chunk of cash.
Don't know who the hell you work for, but an employer who doesn't run a $75 background check cannot possibly be "high-paying". Hell, a lot of employers won't hesitate to pay $500 for a plane ticket to interview you. This makes sense because the costs of hiring an employee are in the thousands to tens of thousands. A $75 background check is nothing, and you can count on one of those being performed at some point in the future.
It's actually impossible. $9 is about 90 kWh, or about 1080 kW for 5 minutes. This would require a continuous current of 10,000 amps at 110V. Most houses are wired for about 300A; this is enough capacity to power about 30 houses. The only place where you could get that much capacity would be a power substation.
There are plenty of services that do background checks that root out exactly that type of thing. Most employers use them. And lying on your resume is fairly likely to get you fired.
Because Linux is definitely not ready for primetime, and will just give people a really bad impression that will make sure they will be the last ones to ever try it again. Here's an example. They have an older nvidia card that's not supported by the latest drivers (like a Geforce2/TNT2/whatever). You install the legacy driver from the nvidia website. They perform all the updates that Ubuntu suggests. Next time they reboot, nothing will work (Ubuntu patches the kernel like once a week or so, and it totally breaks everything). Not to mention, they are in for a surprise if they ever want to watch DVDs, visit a website with Shockwave, play streaming video, or use their ipod/other music player. Linux is just not a mainstream desktop system like Windows or MacOS.
If someone is mostly happy with Windows, just give them a live CD to try out. If they are really unhappy with Windows, definitely offer to install Linux on a dual-boot partition. Acting like a drug dealer ("here, why don't you try this? it's really good shit") isn't a good way to make a positive impression.
And your school is 100% correct. It's much better to build nice athletic facilities (that can last 20+ years) than to waste money on computers that will need to be replaced in a year or two. Not to mention, you don't need to be learning to program in high school. Focus on math and science instead, it's far more useful than learning a skill that will be obsolete in a few years. Complaining that the school doesn't offer programming classes is like complaining that they don't teach you how to repair cars. Programming is a specialized skill that cannot be properly taught in a school setting.
According to MathWorld, he said that in 1895, which by my calculations is about 8 years before the Wright brothers. In fact, that guy said a lot of really stupid shit like "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." I don't think that was a widespread belief at the time, I think he was just overly arrogant and sure of himself.
I've never heard of well-established, fundamental theory being "remade". Sometimes it's refined or elaborated, but never totally changed. Especially something like the law of conservation of momentum. Not to mention, the guy "proved" that his device works by deriving equations USING THE SAME THEORY THAT MAKES HIS DEVICE IMPOSSIBLE. This occurred mainly because he made a simple error in his calculations. Of course, now he believes that his thing works, and is getting results mainly due to the experimenter expectation effect. Anyway, try reading this first, and explain how the man is not a crank.
You are confusing "the scientific community" with "uneducated masses". No scientist would ever say planes were impossible. In fact, no person with at least 3 brain cells would say that is impossible, given that birds and insects have no problem flying. In fact, everyone believed it was possible, and many people were trying to do it and were somewhat successful, way before the Wright brothers. I think you are talking out of your ass here, sir.
First, can you provide an example of this? In all of the cases I looked at, the theory came decades before any practical implementation. Things before the 19th century don't really count, since science wasn't mainstream then. Second, his apparatus doesn't actually work -- as he admits, the measured force is less than the margin of error of his equipment.
Re:These are $24 apice, not $16?
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You are wrong. The usb port provides 500mA AT 5 VOLTS. If you convert that down to 1.5V with a buck converter, you could charge a 2500mAh battery in under 1.5 hours.
The whole X prize thing was not much more than a publicity stunt. The actual value of SpaceShipOne for commercializing space travel (or anything really) is pretty much zero. Yeah, it can go up a hundred miles or whatever. That's a pretty far cry of what is required to get into orbit. That's like bringing a pointed wooden stick to a gunfight or trying to compete in Formula 1 with a 10-speed bike. The X prize has not brought us any closer to orbit, and the rest doesn't matter a whole lot.
Well, the visual alert part is pretty easy. Buy an ATA and a visual alert thingee for a regular analog line (I believe Radioshack and many online places sell them). The PA thing is harder, and I don't know of any devices that could easily do that.
Well, I've completed about 3.5 years of an engineering degree with a perfect grade point average, so I'd say I'm pretty well qualified to comment. And marks are only random if you "learn" everything the night before, which is why people in engineering tend to have low grade point averages. The big problem in higher education is not cheating, especially in general education classes. It's the continual lowering of standards in the core courses and grade inflation.
What the hell is the big deal about cribbing homework? At my school, it's not that big a deal in most cases. You know why? Because if you copy homework (which is usually worth about 10% of your grade) you will most certainly fail the tests (worth about 80% of your grade). This problem tends to resolve itself. This is really only an issue with humanities classes which produce no useful, testable skills and base the grade on large amounts of busy-work. Cheating merely exposes the uselessness of many of these disciplines, as well as capricious and arbitrary grading. You can bullshit your way through an art history or a literature class or even have someone do all the work for you. You can't do that in a math, science, or engineering class, so cheating is naturally not a problem there.
No. It's not. If Microsoft tells you the license is not legitimate, then it is not legitimate. Unless you want to try to argue your point in court, it only matters what they think, not what you think. There's even been a precedent not too long ago where someone got burned by buying OEM copies. They had to pay up.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a lesson, dude: the ONLY reason for a company to do something is either:
- bottom line
or
- regulatory compliance
Organic food companies make organic food not because they believe in environmental responsibility, but because it's a great way to carve a niche in an otherwise saturated market. Similarly, companies phase out toxic chemicals not because they are trying to protect the environment, but because it either saves money, reduces potential liability, or ensures compliance with the law. Apple recycles electronics not because they want to save the planet, but because this is a way to avoid costly mandatory recycling requirements and a cheap way to get some good publicity. Instead of having to recycle every machine for free (which is probably what the government would require), they can make it sufficiently cumbersome and costly that very few people would take advantage of that program. A company that makes unsound financial decisions would be instantly sued by its shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.
If you want to have an effective recycling program, simply pass laws to make any place that sells PCs and electronics accept said items from consumers for recycling. Kind of like Wal-mart has to accept my used motor oil even if I didn't buy it there. Trying to voluntarily get manufacturers to do things that don't make financial sense is stupid and counterproductive.
Let me guess: you're a child pornographer.
It's just a good drive. I've had plenty of 40 meg drives fail and I had plenty of bigger disks that didn't develop issues. It really mainly depends on how many hours you put on the drive -- if you don't use the computer very often, the hard drive will last a long time.
What do you think, the hard drive's logic runs on 5V? Not if it was made after 1992 or so. The DSP in a typical hard drive probably requires 1.5V, the logic circuits 3.3V, and the 5V is only used for the interface chips. The motor is run from it's own 3-phase power converter. When the manufacturer decides to move their chips to a smaller process, the voltages will need to go down. Not to mention, you often can't use the main supply rails directly, since they are incredibly noisy, filthy, and poorly-regulated.
Not to mention, the power supply in your computer is probably 50-60% efficient. It's expensive to get better efficiency from a multi-output line power supply. A small, high-frequency step-down converter going from 12V to 3.3V is typically about 95% efficient -- it's much easier to make small things efficient than it is to make large things efficient. The cost doesn't increase, since it has to be built into the disk anyway.
Anyway, I work for a telecom company, and there's a reason the company designs all power supplies in-house and doesn't just buy modules or ready-made boards (both of which are available). A standard module is obsolete the minute it is put into production. Nobody can foresee the unique power requirements of a given product. An FPGA chip might require 6 or 7 different power rails, with different voltages and tolerances, levels of noise, current draw, and a certain power-up and power-down sequence. A standard module cannot possibly provide that. Do you really think a standard off-the-shelf power supply could power the tens of thousands of different PC components that are available, each of which might have its own unique requirements? Or that it wouldn't become obsolete the moment a single new chip is released?
Dude, you don't have the slightest clue about power supplies or electronics in general. A 450W PC supply doesn't put out 90 amps at 5 volts. More like 30. The motherboard doesn't even use 5V for much of anything -- when was the last time you saw a 5V chip? And there's no way you are going to be stepping down 5V to 3.3V with a linear regulator at the current levels you describe. Not to mention, there is nothing in a PC that uses 3.3V at such ridiculous currents. What actually happens is that the motherboard CPU supply and the videocard power supply (the main 2 power consumers) step down 12V at ~20 amps to 1.1V at hundreds of amps using a multiphase buck converter. What Google is saying is that PCs don't need the 5V, 3.3V, and all the wacky outputs (-5V, -12V, etc) to run, since we are well past the age when every chip runs on +5V or +12V, and even 3.3V is becoming much less common -- 2.5V, 1.8V, 1.5V, and 1.2V are becoming increasingly common. It is therefore more efficient to make the power supply produce one DC voltage (like 12V) and let the other components use that to generate their own wacky power rails. +5V and +3.3V were useful in the 80s and 90s, not today.
As far as 3-phase power: what the hell would that be useful for? It would just make the power supplies more complex and expensive, and require more wires to be run. 3-phase is mainly useful for large AC motors.
That's not what they are talking about. Currently, a PC power supply puts out about 6 different rails, none of which are directly usable by the motherboard. This means you lose efficiency, because you have switchers stepping down 12V to 1V at high current, circuitry sucking down 3.3V directly, maybe a few circuits that use 5V, some linear regulators stepping down 5V to 2.5V, things like that. It's a mess and designing a high-efficiency power supply is hard and expensive because you need a ton of outputs with wildly varying power draws. Google is just saying that if you make a single output power supply, you could make it much smaller and more efficient since you wouldn't have extra unused capacity on some of the outputs. The motherboards already do their own power conversion, and voltages like +5V are hardly used for anything anymore. Most chips are 3.3V or less.
If you can cut power consumption by 10 watts a machine (quite realistic) and you have 100,000 machines (Google has more) you just saved 1 megawatt of power, or about a million dollars per year in electricity (without even taking into account the electricity required for cooling). That's quite a chunk of cash.
Don't know who the hell you work for, but an employer who doesn't run a $75 background check cannot possibly be "high-paying". Hell, a lot of employers won't hesitate to pay $500 for a plane ticket to interview you. This makes sense because the costs of hiring an employee are in the thousands to tens of thousands. A $75 background check is nothing, and you can count on one of those being performed at some point in the future.
It's actually impossible. $9 is about 90 kWh, or about 1080 kW for 5 minutes. This would require a continuous current of 10,000 amps at 110V. Most houses are wired for about 300A; this is enough capacity to power about 30 houses. The only place where you could get that much capacity would be a power substation.
We have cars that reach 60-70mpg. They are called diesels. And they are not on the market only because consumers are too stupid to buy them.
There are plenty of services that do background checks that root out exactly that type of thing. Most employers use them. And lying on your resume is fairly likely to get you fired.
Because Linux is definitely not ready for primetime, and will just give people a really bad impression that will make sure they will be the last ones to ever try it again. Here's an example. They have an older nvidia card that's not supported by the latest drivers (like a Geforce2/TNT2/whatever). You install the legacy driver from the nvidia website. They perform all the updates that Ubuntu suggests. Next time they reboot, nothing will work (Ubuntu patches the kernel like once a week or so, and it totally breaks everything). Not to mention, they are in for a surprise if they ever want to watch DVDs, visit a website with Shockwave, play streaming video, or use their ipod/other music player. Linux is just not a mainstream desktop system like Windows or MacOS.
If someone is mostly happy with Windows, just give them a live CD to try out. If they are really unhappy with Windows, definitely offer to install Linux on a dual-boot partition. Acting like a drug dealer ("here, why don't you try this? it's really good shit") isn't a good way to make a positive impression.
And your school is 100% correct. It's much better to build nice athletic facilities (that can last 20+ years) than to waste money on computers that will need to be replaced in a year or two. Not to mention, you don't need to be learning to program in high school. Focus on math and science instead, it's far more useful than learning a skill that will be obsolete in a few years. Complaining that the school doesn't offer programming classes is like complaining that they don't teach you how to repair cars. Programming is a specialized skill that cannot be properly taught in a school setting.
According to MathWorld, he said that in 1895, which by my calculations is about 8 years before the Wright brothers. In fact, that guy said a lot of really stupid shit like "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." I don't think that was a widespread belief at the time, I think he was just overly arrogant and sure of himself.
I've never heard of well-established, fundamental theory being "remade". Sometimes it's refined or elaborated, but never totally changed. Especially something like the law of conservation of momentum. Not to mention, the guy "proved" that his device works by deriving equations USING THE SAME THEORY THAT MAKES HIS DEVICE IMPOSSIBLE. This occurred mainly because he made a simple error in his calculations. Of course, now he believes that his thing works, and is getting results mainly due to the experimenter expectation effect. Anyway, try reading this first, and explain how the man is not a crank.
You are confusing "the scientific community" with "uneducated masses". No scientist would ever say planes were impossible. In fact, no person with at least 3 brain cells would say that is impossible, given that birds and insects have no problem flying. In fact, everyone believed it was possible, and many people were trying to do it and were somewhat successful, way before the Wright brothers. I think you are talking out of your ass here, sir.
First, can you provide an example of this? In all of the cases I looked at, the theory came decades before any practical implementation. Things before the 19th century don't really count, since science wasn't mainstream then. Second, his apparatus doesn't actually work -- as he admits, the measured force is less than the margin of error of his equipment.
You are wrong. The usb port provides 500mA AT 5 VOLTS. If you convert that down to 1.5V with a buck converter, you could charge a 2500mAh battery in under 1.5 hours.
The whole X prize thing was not much more than a publicity stunt. The actual value of SpaceShipOne for commercializing space travel (or anything really) is pretty much zero. Yeah, it can go up a hundred miles or whatever. That's a pretty far cry of what is required to get into orbit. That's like bringing a pointed wooden stick to a gunfight or trying to compete in Formula 1 with a 10-speed bike. The X prize has not brought us any closer to orbit, and the rest doesn't matter a whole lot.
Uh, how about you read a history book, moron? Ever hear the term "secret ballot"? Party-printed tickets? Know why we now longer have those?
Why does the voter need to keep a copy then? What's the point?
Well, the visual alert part is pretty easy. Buy an ATA and a visual alert thingee for a regular analog line (I believe Radioshack and many online places sell them). The PA thing is harder, and I don't know of any devices that could easily do that.
Well, I've completed about 3.5 years of an engineering degree with a perfect grade point average, so I'd say I'm pretty well qualified to comment. And marks are only random if you "learn" everything the night before, which is why people in engineering tend to have low grade point averages. The big problem in higher education is not cheating, especially in general education classes. It's the continual lowering of standards in the core courses and grade inflation.
What the hell is the big deal about cribbing homework? At my school, it's not that big a deal in most cases. You know why? Because if you copy homework (which is usually worth about 10% of your grade) you will most certainly fail the tests (worth about 80% of your grade). This problem tends to resolve itself. This is really only an issue with humanities classes which produce no useful, testable skills and base the grade on large amounts of busy-work. Cheating merely exposes the uselessness of many of these disciplines, as well as capricious and arbitrary grading. You can bullshit your way through an art history or a literature class or even have someone do all the work for you. You can't do that in a math, science, or engineering class, so cheating is naturally not a problem there.
No. It's not. If Microsoft tells you the license is not legitimate, then it is not legitimate. Unless you want to try to argue your point in court, it only matters what they think, not what you think. There's even been a precedent not too long ago where someone got burned by buying OEM copies. They had to pay up.