But you can't store the power delivered by those turbines, towers and panels. Can't run a truck on it. Nor can you even use the power you get when suddenly wind power dumps a lot of electricity, close to their max power (which is rare btw) whereas the hour before you were getting squat shit from it.
Barring some ill-defined or expensive solution, all these "renewable" energies require near-line power plants that burn, you name it, frackin' natural gas.
But maybe you get to salvage an original Intel 8086! And who knows what crap is flying over our heads. Bubble memory, perhaps. Soviet Z80 clones. Solar panels that were incredibly expensive and rare 15 years ago. Worn out capacitors. I guess it's worth it to some people. The other trouble is, what if you have some mission failure and end up adding to the junk pool.
You're damn accurate and funny, except that Iran has always declared it did not want a BOMB, and puts all its fissile material under international safeguard.
FTL travel will probably never be possible at all. Even though the Alcubierre drive is "not so impossible", there are still problems that make it improbable or useless. The front of the bubble has Planck lenght thickness : good luck assembling that!, from exotic negative mass matter with may or may not exist. But my favorite is being unable to steer the bubble or make it stop, so you're trapped in warp speed or hyperspace essentially.
Without FTL there's probably no point to interstellar travel at all. But maybe you can count on relativistic time dilatation so that you can reach a star in a short enough time for you?, if you go way over 0.1c. The only price to pay is all your friends and family, society and culture you lived in are all dead. But you can only reach a nearby system where you'll get to skirt around useless rocks, comets and gas giants.
Only 256MB are mapped to the vid card even if you have more vid memory (possibly 256MB are reserved no matter what even with a 128MB or 64MB one?). Only having multiple video cards will make you waste more memory.
Windows 7 32bit can run XP and even 2000 drivers happily, I've done that on an old computer for a network card and graphics card. Dunno if it would have helped in the article's story but just running the XP driver on 7 can be a way out.
It's obvious they refer to using the heat itself, whether that is "usable energy" depend on your needs but heat can be pretty useful, if only for cooking, making tea and taking a shower. I think the 80% figure is the sum of electricity and useful heat, leaving 20% as heat wasted away.
There's motherboard cost too, you can run an i7 on the cheapest motherboard But with an FX 8350 or lower, using the cheap 760G boards leads you to trouble because the VRM circuitry can't handle above 95 watts. Many buyers unknowingly make that mistake and so end up with a great FX CPU underclocked at 800MHz, or it works fast but throttles down and stutters when you do something demanding enough with it.
An awful lot of people run 10 year old computers, and also an awful lot of people run XP on computers that could handle 7 64bit or linux 64bits. So you'd better have a 32bit version of your program (Google Chrome, Google Earth, Firefox, whatever). Though, it ought to be easier to have a fully 64bit system (a linux distro without Wine might do it, if you're careful to not install 32bit software and if Chromium and/or Firefox are 64bit there. But the benefits is only not storing and running duplicate 32bit libraries)
One pet idea of mine is we should generate ammonia (NH3) from water, air, electricity and heat. You would need nuclear power or efficient renewables for that ; it's wasteful as you need electrolysis of water, then use the Haber process to combine hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia but the end result is a non carbonated liquid fuel you can easily enough handle, with about a third the energy density of diesel fuel by volume - that's way better energy storage than H2 and batteries! Ammonia can be burnt in converted internal combustion engines or more specific engines, and used in fuel cells. HCPVT would be very useful, as it provides both electricity and heat, needed by the Haber process.
Another great fuel to make would be CH4, which is already widespread, burns clearly and used in transportation (mainly city buses) as well as flexible power generation. The process here is methanation, but requires CO2 which you can't easily get from the air, barring "artificial trees" that are questionable for now. You would use this on industrial sites (e.g. cement factory), taking waste CO2 as input.
Any idea if we should do this, and especially on a major scale? We badly need to get rid of all fossil fuels and even "bio"fuels (palm oil, ethanol) IMO and that's why I favor nuclear fission too (though we can't have terawatts of it it seems), anyway I don't want to leech off the current biosphere and past ones.
Let me say I'm excited that IBM is building a Dyson sphere powered by human blood, first, to get 80% of the Sun's output is tremendously effective and secundly who knew the blueprints were somehow sitting in our DNA? It comes at a surprise that IBM is so technologically advanced, now it ain't gonna easy to launch all that stuff and assemble it in heliocentric orbit.
I made an installation a week ago (a basic one from network boot) and apt-get install avidemux got me.. nothing. So, they're now boasting about multimedia but it's missing quite an obvious piece of software that is simple enough to use even if just for grabbing an extract of a video. I also suffered a few silly things : - The netinstall iso doesn't work if put on a USB drive with unetbootin. Had to install a tftp and dhcp server on another box. I didn't try the big CD and DVD images. This is a bit of a problem as I've always used and instructed to use unetbootin (I don't want to dd a USB drive, destroying its filesystem and content) - There was no lxdm. I put lightdm instead, but there was no wallpaper, very ugly boxy look and every time after the first one, it has displayed graphical corruption as a wallpaper. I'll have to see if it was because of --no--install-recommends - Something I forgot. - Ah yes, ALSA did not work on this laptop so I had to install OSSv4 instead. Mint 12's ALSA worked.
So, I was ready to hype up every body but sadly I will still recommend Linux Mint 13 Xfce for a ready-made desktop (though it pisses off the user with the duck duck go search, and occasionnally the outdated flash plugin), and for a base system with no graphical environment on the first time you boot Ubuntu 12.04 is a bit easier and with a bit more software. On the plus side there's a debian squeeze desktop I installed and gave to someone that I will upgrade (though it can't access wireless networks because of it's kernel with free firmware only). The installer also asked me about non-free firmware, it first confused me (sort of implying I was going to get fucked) but the next step worked fine. I could choose a kernel with non-free firmware. So, a badly message peeved me but in the end I can appreciate that I had the option to get a working system.
I've read some magazine and monthly newspaper stuff today, for a grand total of zero euro. Among it, Guardian Weekly, looking at pictures in a Chinese magazine I can't even read the title of, and French stuff : Science&Vie, Science&Avenir, La Décroissance. Poster above me mentions Scientific American, there's a French version of it (Pour la science) that I remember reading at the university's library.
If I had a bit more money I'd certainly buy some printed press. I buy about an item once a month. Apart from convenience (no need to sit in front of my desk at home and bleed my eyes, nor to get a tablet computer I don't need or want) and the high res, high area of the medium I can get to read stuff I didn't know I wanted to read. That can happen on the web too, but not so much, you get tied to two or three websites and some "global news" crap that goes on on radio and TV but you don't get to flip through dozens of focused articles published the same month and so on.
So, I should trust you saying that +2C in such a short time frame is frivolous? (a figure that is expected if we actually do something about it, +3C or +4C fits more with the current exponential CO2 emissions trend) You don't have anything to say. Looks small to you, so you handwave the consequences as small. You've decreed it's fine for ecological, agricultural, social and political systems because it seems fine to you.
BTW the huge conspiracy of scientists you point at doesn't exist. It would crumble down in an instant because the way science works. Plus, a scientist who gets caught loses his whole career and credibility, not so much for a blogger or talking head.
I've installed wheezy + lxde on a laptop that was little more than dying noisy slow crap, not long before. Laptop saved. But I had to install OSSv4 instead of ALSA, and lightdm is ugly (was ugly at first and now shows a backgrounds that looks like graphical corruption. It sucks. I miss lxdm, which is available in Ubuntu 12.04 and comes with some blue background picture!)
For the parent I'd say Linux Mint 13 Mate is where it's at. Just Mate configured in a working state, with even the gnome2 applets (sadly missing the ubuntu 10.04 theme). You can even quickly change the window manager, using the "registry editor" called mateconf-editor. Same 5 year support as vanilla Ubuntu.
Global warming is very much an underestimated problem, it doesn't help that there exists a denial industry funded by hundreds million dollars in occult, anonymous money. As for the timeframe, it's in my lifetime and it's probably the worst thing ever since WW2 or the black plague.
The only reason to be optimistic would be to count on an amazing breakthrough in energy storage, and solar power and/or nuclear fission, or the reason would be to believe you and I will still be part of what currently is humanity 10% richest people, with ample access to energy, varied and proteinated food, water and sanitation, and all other stuff we take for granted. What will be the way of life, even 50 years from now is unpredictable but it could look a tad more like Soylent Green or North Korea that it currently does.
I could overclock (and get fan speed control) just by setting Option Coolbits "5" in xorg.conf, then a new section appears in nvidia-settings. (the coolbits number is a binary mask about enabling three features so it can go from 0 to 7). I learnt of this by finally reading the nvidia driver documentation, which was quite detailed and allowed me to learn the xorg option to bypass monitor EDID. Then I quickly disabled overclocking before of concern for stability - my card is an old 7600GT and I think it crashed on a 20MHz oveclock.
dwm is just one tiny piece of software only provided as source - the source code serves as a configuration file for this one. But excepting this little, extremely specific aspect, he only had to type apt-get install xorg-xserver build-essential sometexteditor somebrowser someshit somecrap. This is very quickly done. Everything installs itself and sets up itself automatically, so you suck.
sorry I must have missed you. Well, 10GbE is even more expensive than TB and uses more power, which makes it not that desirable on a consumer laptop. Plus you can use TB for something other than storage and networking.
You gotta plug that 10GbE controller somewhere, right? Currently the bus of choice is PCIe, with differing physical forms : chip soldered onboard, regular card, expresscard (similar to PCMCIA) and then TB. If your PC doesn't have 10GbE onboard and no available PCIe 4x, 8x or 16x slot, but has a TB port then you gotta use it if you want to "just use 10GbE".
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But you can't store the power delivered by those turbines, towers and panels. Can't run a truck on it. Nor can you even use the power you get when suddenly wind power dumps a lot of electricity, close to their max power (which is rare btw) whereas the hour before you were getting squat shit from it.
Barring some ill-defined or expensive solution, all these "renewable" energies require near-line power plants that burn, you name it, frackin' natural gas.
But maybe you get to salvage an original Intel 8086!
And who knows what crap is flying over our heads. Bubble memory, perhaps. Soviet Z80 clones. Solar panels that were incredibly expensive and rare 15 years ago. Worn out capacitors. I guess it's worth it to some people. The other trouble is, what if you have some mission failure and end up adding to the junk pool.
You're damn accurate and funny, except that Iran has always declared it did not want a BOMB, and puts all its fissile material under international safeguard.
FTL travel will probably never be possible at all. Even though the Alcubierre drive is "not so impossible", there are still problems that make it improbable or useless. The front of the bubble has Planck lenght thickness : good luck assembling that!, from exotic negative mass matter with may or may not exist. But my favorite is being unable to steer the bubble or make it stop, so you're trapped in warp speed or hyperspace essentially.
Without FTL there's probably no point to interstellar travel at all. But maybe you can count on relativistic time dilatation so that you can reach a star in a short enough time for you?, if you go way over 0.1c. The only price to pay is all your friends and family, society and culture you lived in are all dead. But you can only reach a nearby system where you'll get to skirt around useless rocks, comets and gas giants.
With BOINC and "@Home" projects, who knows : home users will eventually get there.
Only 256MB are mapped to the vid card even if you have more vid memory (possibly 256MB are reserved no matter what even with a 128MB or 64MB one?). Only having multiple video cards will make you waste more memory.
does using Win 7 32bit and running the XP driver for the dongle work?
Windows 7 32bit can run XP and even 2000 drivers happily, I've done that on an old computer for a network card and graphics card. Dunno if it would have helped in the article's story but just running the XP driver on 7 can be a way out.
It's obvious they refer to using the heat itself, whether that is "usable energy" depend on your needs but heat can be pretty useful, if only for cooking, making tea and taking a shower.
I think the 80% figure is the sum of electricity and useful heat, leaving 20% as heat wasted away.
There's motherboard cost too, you can run an i7 on the cheapest motherboard
But with an FX 8350 or lower, using the cheap 760G boards leads you to trouble because the VRM circuitry can't handle above 95 watts. Many buyers unknowingly make that mistake and so end up with a great FX CPU underclocked at 800MHz, or it works fast but throttles down and stutters when you do something demanding enough with it.
An awful lot of people run 10 year old computers, and also an awful lot of people run XP on computers that could handle 7 64bit or linux 64bits. So you'd better have a 32bit version of your program (Google Chrome, Google Earth, Firefox, whatever).
Though, it ought to be easier to have a fully 64bit system (a linux distro without Wine might do it, if you're careful to not install 32bit software and if Chromium and/or Firefox are 64bit there. But the benefits is only not storing and running duplicate 32bit libraries)
One pet idea of mine is we should generate ammonia (NH3) from water, air, electricity and heat. You would need nuclear power or efficient renewables for that ; it's wasteful as you need electrolysis of water, then use the Haber process to combine hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia but the end result is a non carbonated liquid fuel you can easily enough handle, with about a third the energy density of diesel fuel by volume - that's way better energy storage than H2 and batteries!
Ammonia can be burnt in converted internal combustion engines or more specific engines, and used in fuel cells.
HCPVT would be very useful, as it provides both electricity and heat, needed by the Haber process.
Another great fuel to make would be CH4, which is already widespread, burns clearly and used in transportation (mainly city buses) as well as flexible power generation. The process here is methanation, but requires CO2 which you can't easily get from the air, barring "artificial trees" that are questionable for now. You would use this on industrial sites (e.g. cement factory), taking waste CO2 as input.
Any idea if we should do this, and especially on a major scale? We badly need to get rid of all fossil fuels and even "bio"fuels (palm oil, ethanol) IMO and that's why I favor nuclear fission too (though we can't have terawatts of it it seems), anyway I don't want to leech off the current biosphere and past ones.
Let me say I'm excited that IBM is building a Dyson sphere powered by human blood, first, to get 80% of the Sun's output is tremendously effective and secundly who knew the blueprints were somehow sitting in our DNA?
It comes at a surprise that IBM is so technologically advanced, now it ain't gonna easy to launch all that stuff and assemble it in heliocentric orbit.
I made an installation a week ago (a basic one from network boot) and apt-get install avidemux got me.. nothing. So, they're now boasting about multimedia but it's missing quite an obvious piece of software that is simple enough to use even if just for grabbing an extract of a video.
I also suffered a few silly things :
- The netinstall iso doesn't work if put on a USB drive with unetbootin. Had to install a tftp and dhcp server on another box. I didn't try the big CD and DVD images. This is a bit of a problem as I've always used and instructed to use unetbootin (I don't want to dd a USB drive, destroying its filesystem and content)
- There was no lxdm. I put lightdm instead, but there was no wallpaper, very ugly boxy look and every time after the first one, it has displayed graphical corruption as a wallpaper. I'll have to see if it was because of --no--install-recommends
- Something I forgot.
- Ah yes, ALSA did not work on this laptop so I had to install OSSv4 instead. Mint 12's ALSA worked.
So, I was ready to hype up every body but sadly I will still recommend Linux Mint 13 Xfce for a ready-made desktop (though it pisses off the user with the duck duck go search, and occasionnally the outdated flash plugin), and for a base system with no graphical environment on the first time you boot Ubuntu 12.04 is a bit easier and with a bit more software.
On the plus side there's a debian squeeze desktop I installed and gave to someone that I will upgrade (though it can't access wireless networks because of it's kernel with free firmware only). The installer also asked me about non-free firmware, it first confused me (sort of implying I was going to get fucked) but the next step worked fine. I could choose a kernel with non-free firmware. So, a badly message peeved me but in the end I can appreciate that I had the option to get a working system.
I've read some magazine and monthly newspaper stuff today, for a grand total of zero euro.
Among it, Guardian Weekly, looking at pictures in a Chinese magazine I can't even read the title of, and French stuff : Science&Vie, Science&Avenir, La Décroissance. Poster above me mentions Scientific American, there's a French version of it (Pour la science) that I remember reading at the university's library.
If I had a bit more money I'd certainly buy some printed press. I buy about an item once a month.
Apart from convenience (no need to sit in front of my desk at home and bleed my eyes, nor to get a tablet computer I don't need or want) and the high res, high area of the medium I can get to read stuff I didn't know I wanted to read. That can happen on the web too, but not so much, you get tied to two or three websites and some "global news" crap that goes on on radio and TV but you don't get to flip through dozens of focused articles published the same month and so on.
So, I should trust you saying that +2C in such a short time frame is frivolous? (a figure that is expected if we actually do something about it, +3C or +4C fits more with the current exponential CO2 emissions trend)
You don't have anything to say. Looks small to you, so you handwave the consequences as small. You've decreed it's fine for ecological, agricultural, social and political systems because it seems fine to you.
BTW the huge conspiracy of scientists you point at doesn't exist. It would crumble down in an instant because the way science works. Plus, a scientist who gets caught loses his whole career and credibility, not so much for a blogger or talking head.
I've installed wheezy + lxde on a laptop that was little more than dying noisy slow crap, not long before. Laptop saved. But I had to install OSSv4 instead of ALSA, and lightdm is ugly (was ugly at first and now shows a backgrounds that looks like graphical corruption. It sucks. I miss lxdm, which is available in Ubuntu 12.04 and comes with some blue background picture!)
For the parent I'd say Linux Mint 13 Mate is where it's at. Just Mate configured in a working state, with even the gnome2 applets (sadly missing the ubuntu 10.04 theme). You can even quickly change the window manager, using the "registry editor" called mateconf-editor. Same 5 year support as vanilla Ubuntu.
Global warming is very much an underestimated problem, it doesn't help that there exists a denial industry funded by hundreds million dollars in occult, anonymous money.
As for the timeframe, it's in my lifetime and it's probably the worst thing ever since WW2 or the black plague.
The only reason to be optimistic would be to count on an amazing breakthrough in energy storage, and solar power and/or nuclear fission, or the reason would be to believe you and I will still be part of what currently is humanity 10% richest people, with ample access to energy, varied and proteinated food, water and sanitation, and all other stuff we take for granted.
What will be the way of life, even 50 years from now is unpredictable but it could look a tad more like Soylent Green or North Korea that it currently does.
I thought almost all the CAD software is on Windows.
I could overclock (and get fan speed control) just by setting Option Coolbits "5" in xorg.conf, then a new section appears in nvidia-settings. (the coolbits number is a binary mask about enabling three features so it can go from 0 to 7).
I learnt of this by finally reading the nvidia driver documentation, which was quite detailed and allowed me to learn the xorg option to bypass monitor EDID. Then I quickly disabled overclocking before of concern for stability - my card is an old 7600GT and I think it crashed on a 20MHz oveclock.
dwm is just one tiny piece of software only provided as source - the source code serves as a configuration file for this one. But excepting this little, extremely specific aspect, he only had to type apt-get install xorg-xserver build-essential sometexteditor somebrowser someshit somecrap. This is very quickly done. Everything installs itself and sets up itself automatically, so you suck.
3D is made of two frames, one for each eye, so to display 48 fps 3D stereo you usually need as much bandwith as for displaying 96 fps.
misread
sorry I must have missed you.
Well, 10GbE is even more expensive than TB and uses more power, which makes it not that desirable on a consumer laptop. Plus you can use TB for something other than storage and networking.
You gotta plug that 10GbE controller somewhere, right?
Currently the bus of choice is PCIe, with differing physical forms : chip soldered onboard, regular card, expresscard (similar to PCMCIA) and then TB.
If your PC doesn't have 10GbE onboard and no available PCIe 4x, 8x or 16x slot, but has a TB port then you gotta use it if you want to "just use 10GbE".