Yes, it does use less power when running the HLT instruction, but not *that* much less. Half the power wouldn't surprise me. Modern cpus use over 50 watts of power -- I remember when the Pentium first came out, and people were amazed at it's 13 watts of power use. If only they knew!
Now, going into suspend or sleep mode, that saves a lot more power, but it can't do that thousands of times a second.
And in case people don't realize it, running things like Seti @Home or RC5 *do* cost them money. Their computer will probably use somewhat less energy if idle than it does when busy.
Also, it gets worse. Not only do you have to pay for the extra power used by your computer, but if you live somewhere hot, you'll have to pay for the extra air conditioning needed (after all, 200 watts of power used by your computer = 200 watts of heat generated.) Somebody told me that as a rule of thumb that 5x the amount of power used to generate the heat is needed to remove it via air conditioning -- so 200 watts of computer = 1000 watts of A/C needed to keep it cool. Can anybody confirm or deny this rule of thumb? -- it sounds like too much to me.)
Kirk could be re-visiting his hometown, or, perhaps he's telling the story about his early life as an old man much as Indiana Jones.
Sounds fine, except that Kirk was killed in Star Trek Generations, made in 1994. Could they make Shatner look 10+ years youger with makeup? (It might be hard, but it's more in the realm of possiblity.)
So they were thrilled when William Shatner came there to film a Star Trek prequel about the early life of Kirk. Except there was no movie.
So, what role would Shatner play here? Kirk's dad? Shatner is almost 40 years older than he was when he first played Kirk. I hope you weren't thinking that they could pull off 40+ years off of Shatner to make him seem even younger than he was when Star Trek started (he's 73 now. He was around 35 when Star Trek started.)
I guess it would make sense for Shatner to have a cameo in whatever Trek show they might make about Kirk, but he won't be playing Kirk in any prequels:)
But reality TV? Blech. I'd rather have a 73 old old Shatner trying to play a 30 year old Kirk:)
I've got the baby (two), the kitten (now a cat) and a decent video card...
Guess which one is being bounced upon my knee as we speak because he won't sleep (probably has something with that projectile vomit bug he has!) Hint: the kitten^H^H^H^H^H^Hcat would just meow and vomit (a previous kitty did that in the back of a monitor. I needed a new monitor anyways (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)), and the video card would probably rather render cacodemons rather than be physically bounced.
(Side note: while bouncing said baby, one hand is usually used holding him, which makes typing difficult and preclues most games, as they generally require two hands to play well.
Chromium BSU is sort of useful in these circumstances -- can be played with one hand, is quick, and your system may already have it installed. Your video card wants OpenGL to render, and Chromium BSU does a fair job of delivering, at least until it crashes (alas, it's not that stable)).
It is irrelevant to the patent infringement issue whether your code is open or closed.
Yes and no. Open source code makes it much easier for a company to verify that their patent is being infringed upon, because they can look and see how things are done.
Now, with closed source, you can often tell that a patent is being violated just by how it works, but often you can't, or not easily anyways.
Suppose you had a patent on the quicksort algorithm (sorry, not algorithm -- you cannot patent algorithms. method -- the quicksort method.) With closed source, they don't know what sort method is used. They might be able to time it, see how long it takes to sort N items, and manybe narrow down the algorithm used, but they can't prove anything without some difficulty. With open source, they just go look.
As for the bit about `go closed source and give the patent-claimers part of the revenue', I don't know what that was about. Maybe they think it's easier to make money off of closed source -- which may be true.
Hmm, Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1996 (and supposed to be out later that year.) Since then, I've gotten married, had two kids, bought a house...
Hopefully It'll come out some time before I start drawing social security (if it's even still around...)
They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.
To be fair, it's not completely FUD. There are still documents that neither OpenOffice nor AbiWord can read at all, let alone properly. Between the two, I can do most documents, but not all.
I know this because I'm a Linux user in a company full of Windows machines and users..doc files are sent all over the place, I pop my mail off the Exchange server, I mount the corporate shares with smbfs, I use pptp to use the Microsoft VPN server...
... but unfortunately, I still have to use rdesktop to connect to a Windows box to occasionally read some of the documents sent around.
a few years back, the indisputed fact that the US has _by far_ the highest incarceration rate in the world
Actually, the US is only slightly higher than Russia with 690 prisoners per 100k people vs. 675 per 100k. (My source
, though it is 3 years old. I don't know of any more recent figures.)
You're right, we do have the highest incarceration rate in the world, but it's not by far the highest rate.
Re:Wouldn't the Galaxies just pass through each ot
on
When Galaxies Collide
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's not really any reason to expect any intense gravity fields, not more intense than you can find in a normal galaxy anyways.
Well, a giant star has a large gravity field, and if two giant stars were to collide, it would be even larger, but that's really about it.
If a large star got close enough to us to affect the local gravity field enough to affect time, we'd all be dead long before, so there's little reason to worry about that. It takes seriously strong gravity (by terrestial standards) to signifigantly affect time, and anything that came even remotely close to doin that would destroy the Earth first (not to mention distrubring our orbit, which alone could cause massive global catastrophes.)
It is outside of the copyright period in effect at the time of the film's initial release.
Um, I don't think so. I am not a lawyer, but if I read correctly, the original film (1977) might be in the public domain if published without notice (reference here and here) -- which seems extremely unlikely. And all the later movies would still be convered by copyright either way.
A film seen by so many people becomes public domain as a result of having entered the cultural consciousness.
That sounds great in theory, but has a court ever actually said this?
I say, ignore the Lucas 'warning', and hold your event.
This sounds like legal advice. Are you ready to accept financial responsiblity for their costs if your advice turns out to be unsound?
Personally, I think they need to contact a lawyer rather than `Ask Slashdot'.
Citywide, wireless Internet access is nothing new. I recall going to a NNO (Nerds Night Out) 12 or so years ago here in Austin where Albert Nurick (since moved to Houston) set up a web cam with a laptop at the bar that we all congregated at.
(Names, dates and locations may have been changed at the whim of random neurons in my head that may not be connected the same way there were in the past.)
He had a PCMCIA card that gave him 19.2kbps access to the Internet. I believe the service was through AT&T and the price wasn't that bad -- something like $80/month for unlimited service. Roadrunner and DSL wasn't available yet, and while this was slower than a modem, it wasn't that much slower. I almost got it myself...
As for free, I don't hold out much hope for anything offered for free by the local government city wide. Even if it were done (which seems unlikely by itself) I wouldn't expect it to be done very well.
Living in Austin, I was quite astounded to find that the city had gone wireless.
Clicking on your link, I learned what I already knew -- many businesses offer wireless access. Oh. Hardly news.
So, to answer your question, you do not convince a city to go wireless. You convince indivual businesses to do so, or if you run a business, you do so yourself.
Hmm, is that the game where you put Tiger Woods into a 4x4 truck and go racing (mudding) around golf courses? Or in a souped-up Pontiac GTO racing from mall to mall looking for the perfect clubs?
Sounds like a Harry Potter movie title too -- I guess it could be turned into a movie.
Re:Wouldn't the Galaxies just pass through each ot
on
When Galaxies Collide
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
and so the comparison is really not a well advised one
It gets worse. The stars are generally further apart (when expressed as the ratio of their diameters) than the molecules in a gas are at STP. And the stars in a general area are usually moving in the same general direction, unlike molecules which are all moving about randomly.
Also, gravity will generally only make two stars collide under very specific conditions -- what will usually happen instead when two stars wander into the same area is that their paths will be deflected by the other, or maybe they'll go into orbit about each other. But without a way to shed the angular momentum, they're unlikely to ever collide unless their initial paths are *just* right.
But if it ever happens (two stars actually colliding, especially big ones)... I'll bet it's one hell of a show! (as long as you're far enough away to be safe from the resulting nova/super nova/black hole -- not that a black hole would be any more dangerous than the two stars that combine to create it, of course.)
Re:Wouldn't the Galaxies just pass through each ot
on
When Galaxies Collide
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
wouldn't the galaxies just pass through each other without colliding at all?
Generally, yes. But gravity would still be in effect, and so the galaxies would certainly be twisted and torn up and the like.
How would it affect the Earth? Well, as long as no stars come too close to us, we'd probably not really be affected at all. We might get thrown out of our galaxy or something, but as long as nothing smacks right into our planet or our sun, and nothing distorts our orbit signifigantly, I wouldn't expect any real problems other than the nighttime sky changing...
... of course, this would all happen or not happen over 100 million years, so any changes would be very gradual, at least as long as no stars get within a light year or so from us.
I could be wrong, but it does not seem that they broke up a molecule
I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
it said that two molecules were released with two protons and two electrons
No, it didn't.
with two protons and two electrons
Are you reading the same article I am? They don't say that at all in the one I'm reading. The one I read only mentions protons as it explains what's in a deuterium and hydrogen atom.
And to expand on my other post in this thread, they're not breaking the nucleus up at all -- just knocking the two deuterium atoms apart.
75 eV isn't nearly enough to split the nucleus apart anyways.
I wonder why they used deuterium molecules rather than just hydrogen, though. I understand why they used hydrogen -- a hydrogen-hydrogen molecule is the simplest possible molecule -- but why deuterium?
Let me see if I can answer my own question...
Deuterium has somewhat different chemical properties than hydrogen due to the different nuclear mass (classically, it's a two body problem, look up `reduced mass' if you want more details.) With a larger nucleus mass, the electrons would have a lower average kinetic energy, and by the virial theorem the average potential energy would therefore be higher
(KE = - 1/2 PE) (a smaller absolute value, but it's negative, so it's higher) and therefore less tightly bound.
So, I'm guessing they used deuterium molecules instead of hydrogen molecules because it would require less energy to split them apart. They're making things as easy as possible...
However, hydrogen (and deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron) atoms are almost never found alone. They're found in molecules of two hydrogen atoms. I think that's what they're talking about breaking up.
99.9% of all spam comes from compromised Windows boxen
I imagine you've got a few too many 9's there. Of course, most spammers probably spam from Windows boxes, but they're doing what they told them to do. Do you consider that to be a compromised box, if it's doing what the owner wants it to do but not what you want it to do?
and nobody with a clue would run a mail server on windows.
That sounds good in theory, but in practice, lots of people with a clue run mail servers on Windows.
There is no reason to use it, apart from not knowing better. There are less power hungry replacement parts which fulfill the same function.
If I'm reading the spec sheet right, the LM555's typical current usage is 3 mA of current at 5 volts. I'd say this usually falls into the `who cares?' category, at least for this purpose. (Certainly, for many applications, 3 mA is a big deal, but I don't see this as one of those.)
If you feel that using a 555 is wrong for this application, then the proper response is to put up a similar page with what you feel are the proper components.
Actually, some microcontrollers just about as cheap as the 555 -- $1 to $2 or so. But often you need to upload firmware into them, and that complicates matters greatly, especially if you need to write that firmware yourself.
For example, I've been looking into building myself one of these for R/C aerial photography. The microcontroller used can be ordered for $1.50 -- but then I need to find somebody who can program it for me (or buy the equipment, which isn't very expensive.) I may just go ahead and ditch the entire idea of controlling the camera entirely and use a 555 timer instead -- it's just a matter of conveneience.
But like you said, just because something is old, that doesn't mean it's obsolete or that you shouldn't use it.
Somewhere, Duke Nukem is cheering, now that he's no longer the standard of perpetually pushed back release dates.
You think that HL2's delays have come anywhere close to Duke Nukem Forever's delays? Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to be shipped in 1997! (I'm not even talking when it was announced -- I'm talking release date!)
Even Half Life (the original) came out *after that* in 1998!
Bit of trivia for you -- when Doom 3 came out, the local Frys (I'm in Austin, TX) completely ran out of video cards of all sorts over $50 within like two days. The shelves were bare, with only a few really old (not even coming close to meeting Doom 3's minimum requirements) video cards left.
Sort of amusing. I wonder if Id's getting a kickback from ATI, Nvidia, etc.:)
Were they smart, they'd buy her her own computer (this part is not optional, but it's not really expensive anymore), and a copy of the Sims 2 and get her interested in it. Why? Because if she's busy playing Sims 2, that means you can play UT2004, D3, HL2, etc. uninterrupted.
Alas, it tends to mean that nobody is downstairs doing the dishes, but that's the price of progress... at least she's not dragging you to a play or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, going into suspend or sleep mode, that saves a lot more power, but it can't do that thousands of times a second.
And in case people don't realize it, running things like Seti @Home or RC5 *do* cost them money. Their computer will probably use somewhat less energy if idle than it does when busy.
Also, it gets worse. Not only do you have to pay for the extra power used by your computer, but if you live somewhere hot, you'll have to pay for the extra air conditioning needed (after all, 200 watts of power used by your computer = 200 watts of heat generated.) Somebody told me that as a rule of thumb that 5x the amount of power used to generate the heat is needed to remove it via air conditioning -- so 200 watts of computer = 1000 watts of A/C needed to keep it cool. Can anybody confirm or deny this rule of thumb? -- it sounds like too much to me.)
I guess it would make sense for Shatner to have a cameo in whatever Trek show they might make about Kirk, but he won't be playing Kirk in any prequels :)
But reality TV? Blech. I'd rather have a 73 old old Shatner trying to play a 30 year old Kirk :)
Guess which one is being bounced upon my knee as we speak because he won't sleep (probably has something with that projectile vomit bug he has!) Hint: the kitten^H^H^H^H^H^Hcat would just meow and vomit (a previous kitty did that in the back of a monitor. I needed a new monitor anyways (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)), and the video card would probably rather render cacodemons rather than be physically bounced.
(Side note: while bouncing said baby, one hand is usually used holding him, which makes typing difficult and preclues most games, as they generally require two hands to play well. Chromium BSU is sort of useful in these circumstances -- can be played with one hand, is quick, and your system may already have it installed. Your video card wants OpenGL to render, and Chromium BSU does a fair job of delivering, at least until it crashes (alas, it's not that stable)).
Now, with closed source, you can often tell that a patent is being violated just by how it works, but often you can't, or not easily anyways.
Suppose you had a patent on the quicksort algorithm (sorry, not algorithm -- you cannot patent algorithms. method -- the quicksort method.) With closed source, they don't know what sort method is used. They might be able to time it, see how long it takes to sort N items, and manybe narrow down the algorithm used, but they can't prove anything without some difficulty. With open source, they just go look.
As for the bit about `go closed source and give the patent-claimers part of the revenue', I don't know what that was about. Maybe they think it's easier to make money off of closed source -- which may be true.
Hopefully It'll come out some time before I start drawing social security (if it's even still around ...)
I know this because I'm a Linux user in a company full of Windows machines and users. .doc files are sent all over the place, I pop my mail off the Exchange server, I mount the corporate shares with smbfs, I use pptp to use the Microsoft VPN server ...
You're right, we do have the highest incarceration rate in the world, but it's not by far the highest rate.
Well, a giant star has a large gravity field, and if two giant stars were to collide, it would be even larger, but that's really about it.
If a large star got close enough to us to affect the local gravity field enough to affect time, we'd all be dead long before, so there's little reason to worry about that. It takes seriously strong gravity (by terrestial standards) to signifigantly affect time, and anything that came even remotely close to doin that would destroy the Earth first (not to mention distrubring our orbit, which alone could cause massive global catastrophes.)
Personally, I think they need to contact a lawyer rather than `Ask Slashdot'.
(Names, dates and locations may have been changed at the whim of random neurons in my head that may not be connected the same way there were in the past.)
He had a PCMCIA card that gave him 19.2kbps access to the Internet. I believe the service was through AT&T and the price wasn't that bad -- something like $80/month for unlimited service. Roadrunner and DSL wasn't available yet, and while this was slower than a modem, it wasn't that much slower. I almost got it myself ...
As for free, I don't hold out much hope for anything offered for free by the local government city wide. Even if it were done (which seems unlikely by itself) I wouldn't expect it to be done very well.
Clicking on your link, I learned what I already knew -- many businesses offer wireless access. Oh. Hardly news.
So, to answer your question, you do not convince a city to go wireless. You convince indivual businesses to do so, or if you run a business, you do so yourself.
Sounds like a Harry Potter movie title too -- I guess it could be turned into a movie.
Also, gravity will generally only make two stars collide under very specific conditions -- what will usually happen instead when two stars wander into the same area is that their paths will be deflected by the other, or maybe they'll go into orbit about each other. But without a way to shed the angular momentum, they're unlikely to ever collide unless their initial paths are *just* right.
But if it ever happens (two stars actually colliding, especially big ones) ... I'll bet it's one hell of a show! (as long as you're far enough away to be safe from the resulting nova/super nova/black hole -- not that a black hole would be any more dangerous than the two stars that combine to create it, of course.)
How would it affect the Earth? Well, as long as no stars come too close to us, we'd probably not really be affected at all. We might get thrown out of our galaxy or something, but as long as nothing smacks right into our planet or our sun, and nothing distorts our orbit signifigantly, I wouldn't expect any real problems other than the nighttime sky changing ...
As they say -- a couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. :)
I'm not sure their explanation really makes sense, however. It may just be overly simplified for the press ...
75 eV isn't nearly enough to split the nucleus apart anyways.
I wonder why they used deuterium molecules rather than just hydrogen, though. I understand why they used hydrogen -- a hydrogen-hydrogen molecule is the simplest possible molecule -- but why deuterium?
Let me see if I can answer my own question ...
Deuterium has somewhat different chemical properties than hydrogen due to the different nuclear mass (classically, it's a two body problem, look up `reduced mass' if you want more details.) With a larger nucleus mass, the electrons would have a lower average kinetic energy, and by the virial theorem the average potential energy would therefore be higher (KE = - 1/2 PE) (a smaller absolute value, but it's negative, so it's higher) and therefore less tightly bound.
So, I'm guessing they used deuterium molecules instead of hydrogen molecules because it would require less energy to split them apart. They're making things as easy as possible ...
However, hydrogen (and deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron) atoms are almost never found alone. They're found in molecules of two hydrogen atoms. I think that's what they're talking about breaking up.
If you feel that using a 555 is wrong for this application, then the proper response is to put up a similar page with what you feel are the proper components.
For example, I've been looking into building myself one of these for R/C aerial photography. The microcontroller used can be ordered for $1.50 -- but then I need to find somebody who can program it for me (or buy the equipment, which isn't very expensive.) I may just go ahead and ditch the entire idea of controlling the camera entirely and use a 555 timer instead -- it's just a matter of conveneience.
But like you said, just because something is old, that doesn't mean it's obsolete or that you shouldn't use it.
Even Half Life (the original) came out *after that* in 1998!
Sorry, but DNF is still king. Shake it, baby!
Sort of amusing. I wonder if Id's getting a kickback from ATI, Nvidia, etc. :)
Were they smart, they'd buy her her own computer (this part is not optional, but it's not really expensive anymore), and a copy of the Sims 2 and get her interested in it. Why? Because if she's busy playing Sims 2, that means you can play UT2004, D3, HL2, etc. uninterrupted.
Alas, it tends to mean that nobody is downstairs doing the dishes, but that's the price of progress ... at least she's not dragging you to a play or something.