Note: the delay appears to have been the switches at either end not working nicely with the new link medium
Was there any sort of increased packet loss? Also, was it merely an average increase of 0.3ms? If there were any sort of peaks in the latency, i.e. increased jitter, that could be much more noticeable than an average latency increase might suggest.
If your signals travel the speed of light, the propagation delay from pt. A to pt. B (100m in your case) should be around.33us (microseconds). Propagation delay in, say, a coax cable is about twice that--signals move at about half the speed of light. Even if it was 1/10th the speed of light in your fibre line (unlikely as that may be), that's still only 3.3us.
To see 0.3 milliseconds difference (300 microseconds), I'm guessing that the overall line behavior must not have been very nice and there was a fair bit of misbehavior going on.
I was thinking that a practical collector would need to be in geostationary orbit, which means it would be over the equator. Such a collector would lose light for at least part of the day. That said, the radius of GEO is much larger than the radius of the earth, so the daily eclipses would be short, and the amount of shadowing minimal. (In other words, I'm largely agreeing with you, with a minor caveat.)
Based on the numbers on this page, the entire world's energy consumption rate is just shy of 13 TW. If we beamed in 13 TW of electricity and ceased all emissions due to energy production, I think you'd see a rather dramatic drop in the rate of climate change. Rather than releasing terawatts of energy that already arrived here (which is what burning fossil fuels accomplished) AND increasing how much solar energy the Earth absorbs from the Sun, we'd merely be beaming that energy in while letting the atmosphere take a breather from our pollution.
The satellite will largely be collecting light that would have hit the earth already, so no, it won't be increasing the total energy input to the earth. Also, the total solar energy absorbed by the earth is on the order of 89 petawatts. Even if we harnessed a few hundred gigawatts in space, we wouldn't make an appreciable difference in the amount of energy earth absorbs. This isn't like terrestrial pollution, where we actually affect how much energy from the sun we absorb vs. radiate away.
Actually, if there is a mechanism to turn it into a memory zone, it could be managed more effectively than swap. Swap should be the lowest level of hierarchy, and video RAM should be above it, just like a multi-level cache. Right now, if you put swap on a video card, it's in parallel with any swap you have on a hard drive. Sure, you can put it at a higher priority for allocation, but that doesn't mean the "hot" stuff allocates there, it just means it fills up first.
Oh, I agree--if video RAM is just carved from the main system RAM, reclaim it as system RAM. If it's separate RAM over a slower interface, you really need to treat it as a lower level of the memory hierarchy.
If it's lower bandwidth and higher latency than the rest of system memory, then it makes perfect sense to NOT use it as primary storage but as a secondary storage. Currently, swap is the only straightforward mechanism Linux offers for doing so.
Another fun technique is to just paste something plausible there—like another face, or pieces of other faces—before blurring. I often do the same thing when blurring out numbers. You might be able to get away with a plasma fractal with appropriate skin tones.
I figure it gives the hacks something to get excited about until they realize it really is gibberish.:-)
My left and right eyes see color slightly differently, and I imagine I'm not alone. In my case, one eye sees slightly more saturated colors than the other. So, when you cross your eyes and they end up looking different, you're probably seeing the effects of a slightly different color response in each eye.
These days, Roland's links go to the original story. Originally, his links went to his blog, as others have described. I don't his current posts. His previous ones, though, were just a bit self-serving.
There are embedded processors (DSPs mostly) that have "saturating shift" and "saturating add" instructions. These prevent signed integer overflow and set a "saturation occurred" bit typically. Saturation isn't treated as a fault--you don't take a "trap." But you do go from 0x40000000 to 0x7FFFFFFF on the shift that saturates.
Anyways, I'm not sure what your point on GPL is here. Since when does the license on the code have anything to do with its quality and adherence to standards? (Other than silly cases like the FCC saying software radios can't be free software.)
Hmmm... That is a 42 bit number. Depending on what order you do the math, you could easily have some intermediate loss of precision, even with the generous 52-bit mantissa "double" gives you. Factorials are bad news.:-)
As Harlan Grove pointed out in the thread, some functions may be taking the value from the.Text property rather than the.Value property. Most things see the correct value despite it being misdisplayed.
Why would they do something goofy like that? I have no idea, and I don't have an easy way to check off-hand, at least not in Excel 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm.... I wonder where all those "channels" for Windows Media Player come from? And how about all the content coming down the pipe for Zune?
--JoeWas there any sort of increased packet loss? Also, was it merely an average increase of 0.3ms? If there were any sort of peaks in the latency, i.e. increased jitter, that could be much more noticeable than an average latency increase might suggest.
If your signals travel the speed of light, the propagation delay from pt. A to pt. B (100m in your case) should be around .33us (microseconds). Propagation delay in, say, a coax cable is about twice that--signals move at about half the speed of light. Even if it was 1/10th the speed of light in your fibre line (unlikely as that may be), that's still only 3.3us.
To see 0.3 milliseconds difference (300 microseconds), I'm guessing that the overall line behavior must not have been very nice and there was a fair bit of misbehavior going on.
--JoeWorrisome, isn't it? As Cecil pointed out, global dimming may have artificially slowed the apparent rate of global warming.
And in the last 10 years that's started to reverse.
(This time with a working link.)
And in the last 10 years that's started to reverse.
Isn't velocity just slope? It's just dx/dt, dy/dt, dz/dt....
I was thinking that a practical collector would need to be in geostationary orbit, which means it would be over the equator. Such a collector would lose light for at least part of the day. That said, the radius of GEO is much larger than the radius of the earth, so the daily eclipses would be short, and the amount of shadowing minimal. (In other words, I'm largely agreeing with you, with a minor caveat.)
Based on the numbers on this page, the entire world's energy consumption rate is just shy of 13 TW. If we beamed in 13 TW of electricity and ceased all emissions due to energy production, I think you'd see a rather dramatic drop in the rate of climate change. Rather than releasing terawatts of energy that already arrived here (which is what burning fossil fuels accomplished) AND increasing how much solar energy the Earth absorbs from the Sun, we'd merely be beaming that energy in while letting the atmosphere take a breather from our pollution.
The satellite will largely be collecting light that would have hit the earth already, so no, it won't be increasing the total energy input to the earth. Also, the total solar energy absorbed by the earth is on the order of 89 petawatts. Even if we harnessed a few hundred gigawatts in space, we wouldn't make an appreciable difference in the amount of energy earth absorbs. This isn't like terrestrial pollution, where we actually affect how much energy from the sun we absorb vs. radiate away.
--JoeEve, huh?/A?
I *think* this may be the drive.
Flip to page 13 and read along with me:
The more you know!
--JoeActually, if there is a mechanism to turn it into a memory zone, it could be managed more effectively than swap. Swap should be the lowest level of hierarchy, and video RAM should be above it, just like a multi-level cache. Right now, if you put swap on a video card, it's in parallel with any swap you have on a hard drive. Sure, you can put it at a higher priority for allocation, but that doesn't mean the "hot" stuff allocates there, it just means it fills up first.
Oh, I agree--if video RAM is just carved from the main system RAM, reclaim it as system RAM. If it's separate RAM over a slower interface, you really need to treat it as a lower level of the memory hierarchy.
If it's lower bandwidth and higher latency than the rest of system memory, then it makes perfect sense to NOT use it as primary storage but as a secondary storage. Currently, swap is the only straightforward mechanism Linux offers for doing so.
...errr... Naturally, I don't paste faces for the numbers... ;-) YouknowwhatImeant.
Another fun technique is to just paste something plausible there—like another face, or pieces of other faces—before blurring. I often do the same thing when blurring out numbers. You might be able to get away with a plasma fractal with appropriate skin tones.
I figure it gives the hacks something to get excited about until they realize it really is gibberish. :-)
--JoeMy left and right eyes see color slightly differently, and I imagine I'm not alone. In my case, one eye sees slightly more saturated colors than the other. So, when you cross your eyes and they end up looking different, you're probably seeing the effects of a slightly different color response in each eye.
These days, Roland's links go to the original story. Originally, his links went to his blog, as others have described. I don't his current posts. His previous ones, though, were just a bit self-serving.
There are embedded processors (DSPs mostly) that have "saturating shift" and "saturating add" instructions. These prevent signed integer overflow and set a "saturation occurred" bit typically. Saturation isn't treated as a fault--you don't take a "trap." But you do go from 0x40000000 to 0x7FFFFFFF on the shift that saturates.
Anyways, I'm not sure what your point on GPL is here. Since when does the license on the code have anything to do with its quality and adherence to standards? (Other than silly cases like the FCC saying software radios can't be free software.)
--JoeHey wow, the VHS version was produced with the help of the John Birch Society. Hmmmm..... :-)
It's a spreadsheet. Show me where I can declare a cell "long long"? Cells have floating point numbers by default.
That explains all the votes for the "never have, never will" option on the "How often do you vote in Slashdot polls?" poll....
Right next to that twinkle in my eye as I say, ever so politely, "die in a fire." ;-)
*chuckle* Thanks for the laugh. :-)
Erp. I can't count. That IS a 52 bit number, and so is right on the edge of what a double precision mantissa can store. Move along.
Hmmm... That is a 42 bit number. Depending on what order you do the math, you could easily have some intermediate loss of precision, even with the generous 52-bit mantissa "double" gives you. Factorials are bad news. :-)
As Harlan Grove pointed out in the thread, some functions may be taking the value from the .Text property rather than the .Value property. Most things see the correct value despite it being misdisplayed.
Why would they do something goofy like that? I have no idea, and I don't have an easy way to check off-hand, at least not in Excel 2007.