It's a shame that the EEtimes reports such unreliable crap sometimes. When they run articles on solar cells, new products, and tech business they're usually pretty good. Whenever I see an EEtimes article about superconducting circuits, MRAM, FE-RAM, or any tech coming out of research labs, their articles SUCK. Classic case of 'the new journalism' - unless there's a press release they can quote from, they're lost.
I've heard of two-pass algorithms, and n-pass algorithms, but I can only guess that a "Knuth-pass" algorithm gives you the benefits of an infinite number of passes in only one pass.
What's so bad about inflation? As long as it's controlled, consistent, and reasonably low (1-4% per year), the net result is simply a tax on hoarded money. That's a GOOD thing.
Wealth isn't money - wealth is money changing hands! Any money that's just sitting around is a net drain on the economy, and makes it harder for the central banks to manage things. Money must be invested to be useful - even a savings account is useful.
Besides, inflation hurts the rich way more than the poor, as long as the minimum wage is adjusted properly. That it hasn't been doesn't mean the whole idea is bad.
In the time between now and when SSD becomes cheaper than magnetic storage, might we see a resurgence of RAID 4? RAID 4 stripes data across several disks, but stores parity information all on one disk, rather than distributing the parity bits like RAID 5.
This has benefits for workloads that issue many small randomly located reads and writes: if the requested data size is smaller than the block size, a single disk can service the request. The other disks can independently service other requests, leading to much higher random access bandwidth (though it doesn't help latency).
One of the side effects of this is that the parity disk must be much faster than the data disks, since it must service all requests, to provide the parity info. Here SSD shines, with its quick random access times, but poor sequential performance. Interesting, no?
Just mod him funny - then we will all know it's a joke, without having to exercise our critical thinking skills. I know I don't come here to do that, I rely on the moderators.
Here, I've even got mod points, I'll do it for you.... Oops!
How does this even work? Everything I download has a MD5 or SHA hash in the filename, so why would a pirate site fall for a pile of garbage. Unless MediaDefender can find MD5 collisions at will (which would be a huge result, even with the known weakness of MD5), or the pirate trackers don't check hashes.
One is ridiculous and the other is stupid. Hmm, I guess I just answered my own question.
Call me when it shows up on CNN or Fox news TV, without a "freedom-fighting MediaDefender sued by communist Nazi pirate filesharing company" spin. THEN we can crow about it. The people who need to hear about this don't read CNET or Valleywag.
Similar bad news for Los Alamos national lab - it's in New Mexico. The senior senator from NM, Pete Domenici, has decided not to run again, and for some reason, all the labs in NM got their budgets cut.
Hmmmm?
I can think of three techniques off the top of my head that one can only do at a lab like Fermilab:
ARPES,
Muon spin spectroscopy and
neutron scattering.
Materials scientists live and die by these techniques - and they investigate things like improved materials for hard drive read heads, new steel alloys, materials for solar cells, everything.
The sad thing is that if this money hadn't come along, it could have completely destroyed Fermilab. People think research produces papers which anyone can read and become an expert. How many people became great Java programmers after reading one book or a few papers? None - it takes practice, and many years at that. If you have to fire any of these guys and gals, they will never come back, and that knowledge is very expensive to lose. You can hire someone and train them, but it takes time, and many of the little secrets never make it into the published literature.
That would be true if small plants had the same efficiency as big ones, but they don't! The very largest power plants normally achieve something like 40% efficiency (that is, power out / thermal power), but this figure really dives (to 10-20%) for a plant smaller than about 1 megawatt. It's simply a matter of scale - you can cascade turbines at a big plant, which is hard to do for smaller ones.
Unless the difference due to distribution is made up by this (and I don't think it is), we're better off with giant plants. Besides, the grid is old and creaky, and I'm sure its distribution efficiency can be improved.
The only advantage of a small local plant is cogeneration - using the waste heat to heat domestic water or provide heat in the winter.
The thing about the avalanche effect is that it converts a single energetic electron into several less energetic ones. Normally a single photon has way more energy than can be easily harvested (energetic electrons tend to convert their excess energy into heat), so spreading that around to more than one electron will definitely help with the efficiency.
Really, don't. If you have an electric hot dog cooker that you want to run off solar power, great. Hack something together, have a blast, cook a hot dog. Heck, grind your own mustard.
DO NOT try to feed power back into the grid on your own. The power company will hate you, the insurance companies will hate you, and even your neighbors might hate you. First, consider the local building codes: are you a licensed electrician, insured and bonded by the state? If not, you're breaking the law, and the insurance company will NOT pay for ANYTHING that happens to your house. Even if it burns in a brush fire.
Second: consider catastrophic failure. It can happen - the odds are low, but the grid is supposed to be resilient against such things (even if it largely isn't now, thanks to deregulation). If you blow up your local pole pig (step down transformer), you'll have to pay for it, and your neighborhood won't be happy. They are also full of quite nasty dielectric oil - you don't want that on your lawn. Even simply screwing with the phase will quite likely have the electric company breathing down your neck.
Put it this way: you are an ISP, and one of your customers builds a ramshackle NAT box for home use, gets the interfaces wrong, and accidentally starts issuing IPs to other customers. What do you do? You cut him off quick, and follow up with a nasty phone call. Why would the electric company treat you any differently?
The Manhatten project was functional? Yes, in the sense that they made two bombs that exploded. What they did not do, was develop a process for manufacturing bombs. After the original team left and went back to academic research (mostly), we had ZERO bombs ready for a couple of years. If the Soviets had found out, Europe would have been a nasty place to live for quite a while.
Yes, when the military wants something they push ahead regardless of incidental failure, but as with all research projects, what you get isn't necessarily what you wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Radial scratches go from center to edge, azimuthal scratches go around the center.
It's a shame that the EEtimes reports such unreliable crap sometimes. When they run articles on solar cells, new products, and tech business they're usually pretty good. Whenever I see an EEtimes article about superconducting circuits, MRAM, FE-RAM, or any tech coming out of research labs, their articles SUCK. Classic case of 'the new journalism' - unless there's a press release they can quote from, they're lost.
They destroyed the gates of Minas Tirith, for one thing. Whenever I need to utterly wreck something, I reach for my grond.
That sounds super hot.
I've heard of two-pass algorithms, and n-pass algorithms, but I can only guess that a "Knuth-pass" algorithm gives you the benefits of an infinite number of passes in only one pass.
Knuth really was a smart guy.
I'm very disappointed that the whole thing wasn't written as a collection of image macros. That ain't lolcat, it's just stupid.
That's actually the point - there are no "real ones," because you can always just make another one.
"Oh, you touched that one? No problem." BZZZRT. "Here's another."
Wait! Don't do it - it might suck!
What's so bad about inflation? As long as it's controlled, consistent, and reasonably low (1-4% per year), the net result is simply a tax on hoarded money. That's a GOOD thing.
Wealth isn't money - wealth is money changing hands! Any money that's just sitting around is a net drain on the economy, and makes it harder for the central banks to manage things. Money must be invested to be useful - even a savings account is useful.
Besides, inflation hurts the rich way more than the poor, as long as the minimum wage is adjusted properly. That it hasn't been doesn't mean the whole idea is bad.
Everyone knows Candlejack always presses the submit button for you, but now he has to press Preview then Submit. Maybe he browses oldsch
In the time between now and when SSD becomes cheaper than magnetic storage, might we see a resurgence of RAID 4? RAID 4 stripes data across several disks, but stores parity information all on one disk, rather than distributing the parity bits like RAID 5.
This has benefits for workloads that issue many small randomly located reads and writes: if the requested data size is smaller than the block size, a single disk can service the request. The other disks can independently service other requests, leading to much higher random access bandwidth (though it doesn't help latency).
One of the side effects of this is that the parity disk must be much faster than the data disks, since it must service all requests, to provide the parity info. Here SSD shines, with its quick random access times, but poor sequential performance. Interesting, no?
Just mod him funny - then we will all know it's a joke, without having to exercise our critical thinking skills. I know I don't come here to do that, I rely on the moderators. Here, I've even got mod points, I'll do it for you.... Oops!
How does this even work? Everything I download has a MD5 or SHA hash in the filename, so why would a pirate site fall for a pile of garbage. Unless MediaDefender can find MD5 collisions at will (which would be a huge result, even with the known weakness of MD5), or the pirate trackers don't check hashes. One is ridiculous and the other is stupid. Hmm, I guess I just answered my own question.
Call me when it shows up on CNN or Fox news TV, without a "freedom-fighting MediaDefender sued by communist Nazi pirate filesharing company" spin. THEN we can crow about it. The people who need to hear about this don't read CNET or Valleywag.
Similar bad news for Los Alamos national lab - it's in New Mexico. The senior senator from NM, Pete Domenici, has decided not to run again, and for some reason, all the labs in NM got their budgets cut. Hmmmm?
I can think of three techniques off the top of my head that one can only do at a lab like Fermilab:
ARPES, Muon spin spectroscopy and neutron scattering. Materials scientists live and die by these techniques - and they investigate things like improved materials for hard drive read heads, new steel alloys, materials for solar cells, everything.
The sad thing is that if this money hadn't come along, it could have completely destroyed Fermilab. People think research produces papers which anyone can read and become an expert. How many people became great Java programmers after reading one book or a few papers? None - it takes practice, and many years at that. If you have to fire any of these guys and gals, they will never come back, and that knowledge is very expensive to lose. You can hire someone and train them, but it takes time, and many of the little secrets never make it into the published literature.
Simply an observation:
When a liberal insults a conservative, it nearly always involves a reference to lack of education.
Conservatives usually just call liberals idiots.
I wonder why?
That would be true if small plants had the same efficiency as big ones, but they don't! The very largest power plants normally achieve something like 40% efficiency (that is, power out / thermal power), but this figure really dives (to 10-20%) for a plant smaller than about 1 megawatt. It's simply a matter of scale - you can cascade turbines at a big plant, which is hard to do for smaller ones.
Unless the difference due to distribution is made up by this (and I don't think it is), we're better off with giant plants. Besides, the grid is old and creaky, and I'm sure its distribution efficiency can be improved.
The only advantage of a small local plant is cogeneration - using the waste heat to heat domestic water or provide heat in the winter.
The thing about the avalanche effect is that it converts a single energetic electron into several less energetic ones. Normally a single photon has way more energy than can be easily harvested (energetic electrons tend to convert their excess energy into heat), so spreading that around to more than one electron will definitely help with the efficiency.
The people who do run Linux pretend to run *BSD, to maintain their elite status.
No one actually runs *BSD except Theo de Raadt (he actually runs NetBSD, OpenBSD is a hoax) ~
Now you better deliver, or everyone on /. will think nasty thoughts about you for five minutes.
Seriously, that's all. We got nuthin.
What has he done? He now can plausibly deny ANY kind of fraud committed in his name.
If I was a total scumbag I'd make a fortune (off the books, in cash) out of this.
Ha ha! Finally an advantage for the electrical engineer! I simply use old Omega, Digikey, McMaster, and Newark catalogs for booster seats.
My mother in law is only 5' tall too, I'm just waiting for her to ask for one for her car...
Really, don't. If you have an electric hot dog cooker that you want to run off solar power, great. Hack something together, have a blast, cook a hot dog. Heck, grind your own mustard.
DO NOT try to feed power back into the grid on your own. The power company will hate you, the insurance companies will hate you, and even your neighbors might hate you. First, consider the local building codes: are you a licensed electrician, insured and bonded by the state? If not, you're breaking the law, and the insurance company will NOT pay for ANYTHING that happens to your house. Even if it burns in a brush fire.
Second: consider catastrophic failure. It can happen - the odds are low, but the grid is supposed to be resilient against such things (even if it largely isn't now, thanks to deregulation). If you blow up your local pole pig (step down transformer), you'll have to pay for it, and your neighborhood won't be happy. They are also full of quite nasty dielectric oil - you don't want that on your lawn. Even simply screwing with the phase will quite likely have the electric company breathing down your neck.
Put it this way: you are an ISP, and one of your customers builds a ramshackle NAT box for home use, gets the interfaces wrong, and accidentally starts issuing IPs to other customers. What do you do? You cut him off quick, and follow up with a nasty phone call. Why would the electric company treat you any differently?
The Manhatten project was functional? Yes, in the sense that they made two bombs that exploded. What they did not do, was develop a process for manufacturing bombs. After the original team left and went back to academic research (mostly), we had ZERO bombs ready for a couple of years. If the Soviets had found out, Europe would have been a nasty place to live for quite a while.
Yes, when the military wants something they push ahead regardless of incidental failure, but as with all research projects, what you get isn't necessarily what you wanted.