Of course it's dilute, the large area of the kite is what concentrates it.
But anyway, there's a fixed amount of energy, as you say. This energy is in the volume of water flowing in and out of e.g. some coastal area, going both ways mind you. In your calculations, you mention a kite "sequestering" 1 meter of water, arriving at 12*5*1=60 m^3, right? By sequestering this, I assume you mean the energy equivalent of holding up one cubic meter of water per m^2 of kite in its original position, then letting it drop to the low tide 10 meters lower.
Besides the fishyness of using such a calculation, how the heck do you figure only 1 meter? Apparently without regarding the total volume of water moving? Best case calculation??? Your calculation looks odd at best. In fact, the most obvious skipped step is that the water moves FOUR times a day.
Finally, the point of the kites is not to get energy from tidal waters more efficiently than before, because that's what dams are for. The point is that they are cheaper compared to the alternatives.
For goodness sake, RTFA already. Your assumptions are from an entirely different planet, having nothing to do with what they are doing. You assume "a 12-meter by 5-meter kite and it's moving out with the tide", but the kites are not moving "out" anywhere. They are tethered in place. The movement and speed comes in the same way a regular kite ducks and weaves in a strong wind.
It's scorned because most of the time it's used in places where it doesn't fit in or belong. It has its uses, but it doesn't work like some kind of default font, the way some people seem to think.
I've had a computer that gave a high-pitched chirping noise from some electronic component whenever something on the screen moved; text, window, mouse cursor or otherwise.
Actually, he's kind of right. A single tower could control millions of some sort of devices from thousands of miles away, he perhaps just didn't consider signal quality and bandwidth requirements.
For starters, there is a massive (but quite good) reverb laid on top. Besides the obvious, it has the same effect as soft focus for photos: blends together, smoothes out minor blemishes. Continuous hiss and room noise is not that difficult to remove, although I can still hear some in there. Finally, each individual voice/video doesn't contribute much by itself to the final output, as is expected in a choir. If there's 100 voices, the spurious background noises will be tiny in comparison to the whole.
I did check out the KML, the original image and your analysis. But what are you basing the colored-in area on?
There's a small, clearly defined oil slick that is obvious, roughly 60x80 km in size. I can also see how it gradually thins out, esp. the more faint east edge going toward the south, making the area larger than the clearly defined edges would suggest. What about the rest of the massive area to the south and especially to the east, going outside the edge of the satellite pic? The slightly different color of the sea? That's not oil, that's a reflection in the water.
Here's an example from April 22nd, two days after the explosion and the day the oil was noticed in the sea, at which time there wouldn't have been an oil spill as large as the entire brown area you can see. More clearly here in this pic from the 27th, you can see the reflection to the left of the image, and the oil slick to the right, but not clearly visible since the sun isn't reflecting off the oil.
The government is lowballing numbers to prevent mass panic.
To postpone mass panic, I think you mean. The oil won't just disappear. Nope, I don't really buy conspiracy arguments, especially not with flimsy evidence.
Good point, though the difference between the processors is more like 3-4 years. So here is the same test lopsided in favor of the AMD, using a Zaurus:
The processor is a PXA255 XScale 400MHz (ARMv5) from 2004, package power rating 1.4W. Same code, runs in 7,54 seconds. The performance-per-watt still comes out as 1.08x in favor of the XScale, which is 2 years older.
Now I don't know anything about Xeons, but judging by some specs from Wikipedia, an 3GHz Xeon from 2008 at 45W - AFAIK not the maximum rating - would have to do the same work in 0,21 seconds to beat the Cortex A8, i.e. twice as fast as the AMD X2 or thereabout. Using the Tom's Hardware charts as a very rough guide, I would expect the Xeon to be only about 30%-40% faster than the X2, so I still wouldn't expect it to have a better performance-per-watt compared to the A8.
But isn't that the whole point? Push for server performance by adding more processors, and you keep the performance per watt. If you really need fast individual cores for something that doesn't parallellize, it won't work, but I'd imagine the average web server farm would benefit.
ARM cores have both cache and pipelines, y'know? But lets find those benchmark results by making them ourselves:
Using one core on an AMD X2 2,8GHz and an ARM Cortex A8 core at 600MHz on a beagleboard, I've done some tests. Cache-optimized matrix multiplication of two matrices at 600x600 takes 0.45 seconds on the AMD, and 4.57 seconds on the A8. That's about 10x slower. However, the A8 (in an OMAP3530 package) produces just under 1W of heat. The TDP for the AMD is 65W, but since it's dual-core let's take half of that, plus an additional 20% fuzz factor because the TDP is the maximum rating.
By this slightly fuzzy, synthetic but memory-heavy benchmark, the performance-per-watt difference is about 2,5x in favor of the ARM Cortex A8 core. One core of an AMD X2 would have to put out below 10W to beat the A8. By my fuzzy math that would mean a TDP of 25W or below for the processor.
$9.99? In my travels, I pay a few dollars more than that per night to stay at hostels usually, and that includes free wifi. The price gouging of hotels is jaw dropping.
Not so sure. I checked out one of the swarms indicated, and sure enough, I found the peer listed on the that site.
Incidentally, the CLI interface is fragile, and it can break out into a standard apache directory listing. It also occasionally redirects to an RFC document for some reason. Anyway, there's a log of all tried passwords there. But more interestingly, there's a lot of other stuff elsewhere in the tree, an 18MB text file with a Twitter social connection graph (just a list of name pairs), and a monitor/ directory with what looks like GSM/email/p2p monitoring stuff. Can't access most of it except an auto-refreshing IRC monitoring page though.
The problem with autopilots is keeping the pilots aware, alert and capable for the times when AI's fail and humans need to save the day. If the plane flies itself all the time, the pilots won't be able to handle the difficult situations as well, which is the reason you need human pilots in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's dilute, the large area of the kite is what concentrates it.
But anyway, there's a fixed amount of energy, as you say. This energy is in the volume of water flowing in and out of e.g. some coastal area, going both ways mind you. In your calculations, you mention a kite "sequestering" 1 meter of water, arriving at 12*5*1=60 m^3, right? By sequestering this, I assume you mean the energy equivalent of holding up one cubic meter of water per m^2 of kite in its original position, then letting it drop to the low tide 10 meters lower.
Besides the fishyness of using such a calculation, how the heck do you figure only 1 meter? Apparently without regarding the total volume of water moving? Best case calculation??? Your calculation looks odd at best. In fact, the most obvious skipped step is that the water moves FOUR times a day.
Finally, the point of the kites is not to get energy from tidal waters more efficiently than before, because that's what dams are for. The point is that they are cheaper compared to the alternatives.
It's never the right time to compromise, but you have to do it anyway.
For goodness sake, RTFA already. Your assumptions are from an entirely different planet, having nothing to do with what they are doing. You assume "a 12-meter by 5-meter kite and it's moving out with the tide", but the kites are not moving "out" anywhere. They are tethered in place. The movement and speed comes in the same way a regular kite ducks and weaves in a strong wind.
It's scorned because most of the time it's used in places where it doesn't fit in or belong. It has its uses, but it doesn't work like some kind of default font, the way some people seem to think.
Well actually, the bracketed address doesn't show up for me, not even in the HTML source. Must be a weird slashcode bug.
But the larger quantity of data in itself is more expensive than a smaller quantity of data, no?
I've had a computer that gave a high-pitched chirping noise from some electronic component whenever something on the screen moved; text, window, mouse cursor or otherwise.
What's a tethering charge, and how is it different from any other data transfer?
Actually, he's kind of right. A single tower could control millions of some sort of devices from thousands of miles away, he perhaps just didn't consider signal quality and bandwidth requirements.
For starters, there is a massive (but quite good) reverb laid on top. Besides the obvious, it has the same effect as soft focus for photos: blends together, smoothes out minor blemishes. Continuous hiss and room noise is not that difficult to remove, although I can still hear some in there. Finally, each individual voice/video doesn't contribute much by itself to the final output, as is expected in a choir. If there's 100 voices, the spurious background noises will be tiny in comparison to the whole.
I did check out the KML, the original image and your analysis. But what are you basing the colored-in area on?
There's a small, clearly defined oil slick that is obvious, roughly 60x80 km in size. I can also see how it gradually thins out, esp. the more faint east edge going toward the south, making the area larger than the clearly defined edges would suggest. What about the rest of the massive area to the south and especially to the east, going outside the edge of the satellite pic? The slightly different color of the sea? That's not oil, that's a reflection in the water.
Here's an example from April 22nd, two days after the explosion and the day the oil was noticed in the sea, at which time there wouldn't have been an oil spill as large as the entire brown area you can see. More clearly here in this pic from the 27th, you can see the reflection to the left of the image, and the oil slick to the right, but not clearly visible since the sun isn't reflecting off the oil.
The government is lowballing numbers to prevent mass panic.
To postpone mass panic, I think you mean. The oil won't just disappear. Nope, I don't really buy conspiracy arguments, especially not with flimsy evidence.
Just to clarify, the surface oil area is not anywhere near the size of Florida, according to those NASA images and overflight observations.
Did you miss the part about LTS? The long term support is there precisely for the reason you describe.
That's 19 arbitrary digits. The most significant digit there can only be 0 or 1.
Actually, only 19 arbitrary digits, if you mean a 64-bit integer.
Good point, though the difference between the processors is more like 3-4 years. So here is the same test lopsided in favor of the AMD, using a Zaurus:
The processor is a PXA255 XScale 400MHz (ARMv5) from 2004, package power rating 1.4W. Same code, runs in 7,54 seconds. The performance-per-watt still comes out as 1.08x in favor of the XScale, which is 2 years older.
Now I don't know anything about Xeons, but judging by some specs from Wikipedia, an 3GHz Xeon from 2008 at 45W - AFAIK not the maximum rating - would have to do the same work in 0,21 seconds to beat the Cortex A8, i.e. twice as fast as the AMD X2 or thereabout. Using the Tom's Hardware charts as a very rough guide, I would expect the Xeon to be only about 30%-40% faster than the X2, so I still wouldn't expect it to have a better performance-per-watt compared to the A8.
It looks like Unix!
Nope, just plain integers (not long).
But isn't that the whole point? Push for server performance by adding more processors, and you keep the performance per watt. If you really need fast individual cores for something that doesn't parallellize, it won't work, but I'd imagine the average web server farm would benefit.
ARM cores have both cache and pipelines, y'know? But lets find those benchmark results by making them ourselves:
Using one core on an AMD X2 2,8GHz and an ARM Cortex A8 core at 600MHz on a beagleboard, I've done some tests. Cache-optimized matrix multiplication of two matrices at 600x600 takes 0.45 seconds on the AMD, and 4.57 seconds on the A8. That's about 10x slower. However, the A8 (in an OMAP3530 package) produces just under 1W of heat. The TDP for the AMD is 65W, but since it's dual-core let's take half of that, plus an additional 20% fuzz factor because the TDP is the maximum rating.
By this slightly fuzzy, synthetic but memory-heavy benchmark, the performance-per-watt difference is about 2,5x in favor of the ARM Cortex A8 core. One core of an AMD X2 would have to put out below 10W to beat the A8. By my fuzzy math that would mean a TDP of 25W or below for the processor.
There you go, you're welcome! :)
$9.99? In my travels, I pay a few dollars more than that per night to stay at hostels usually, and that includes free wifi. The price gouging of hotels is jaw dropping.
That is a backronym, so the correct spelling was always "spam".
Incidentally, the CLI interface is fragile, and it can break out into a standard apache directory listing. It also occasionally redirects to an RFC document for some reason. Anyway, there's a log of all tried passwords there. But more interestingly, there's a lot of other stuff elsewhere in the tree, an 18MB text file with a Twitter social connection graph (just a list of name pairs), and a monitor/ directory with what looks like GSM/email/p2p monitoring stuff. Can't access most of it except an auto-refreshing IRC monitoring page though.
Somebody is using it for something it seems.
No no, the problem is finding the right chair and keyboard that hold the culprit.
The problem with autopilots is keeping the pilots aware, alert and capable for the times when AI's fail and humans need to save the day. If the plane flies itself all the time, the pilots won't be able to handle the difficult situations as well, which is the reason you need human pilots in the first place.