First of all, going from 45nm to 32nm means that every transistor takes up half the space it used to. The choice then is between the same number of transistors per chip resulting in lower per unit cost or twice as many transistors per chip resulting in better performance. As usual, there will be some of both.
Some people need better single-core performance, some people need more cores, and some people just need lower power consumption. Not everyone needs the same thing, which is why there are different product lines (Server, Desktop, Mobile, and Netbook) each with different models.
Anyway, I'll go back to waiting for my program to finish; it's been almost 10 hours so I obviously fall into the needing better performance category.
The problem is that every large company (like banks) don't sign contracts with their customers. They have policies (which are impossible to find online by the way) but they change them and then claim they told you and then you're stuck paying $10 or something that's a pain in the butt but not worth fighting about.
And no, the free market obviously hasn't fixed it.
I've always wondered why bothering writing over a disk 5 times with zeroes. Generally, the read out from a bit is something like 0.980 or 0.020, which is obviously a 1 or a 0 (respectively), but look like they used to be a 0 or a 1 (respectively) before the last time they were overwritten or else they would look like a 0.995 or 0.005 or something. So wouldn't it make more sense to alternating writing over with 0's with 1's so that it would even harder to recover.
On a similar note, as a grad student in physics all the computer code I generate belongs to the university. However, most of the code I've written is either too short for anyone to care, or an expansion of something I GPLed before I became a student. So as an employee I can modify that code a whole bunch, but in the end it's still GPLed.
The features I want to see in Mathematica are the ones that have been present since at least the last version of WordPerfect for DOS that I used: being able to press undo more than once and being able to press redo. Autosaving (or not crashing) would also be nice.
For those of you who have never used Undo in Mathematica it works like this: you're typing along and want to undo the last sentence. You hit Control-Z and one of two things happens:
1) It deletes one word; you get to delete the rest by hand.
2) It deletes a half dozen equations/formulas/programs. Sucks to be you if you didn't save before hitting undo.
IANA rocket scientist, but I am a physicist and the physics here is fairly straightforward. No matter how you throw it, if you can't throw it hard enough to enter the earth's atmosphere before it makes it to the other side of the planet, it will go back to the exact same spot you threw it from due to energy conservation. Exceptions only exist if the initial (ISS) orbit is highly elliptical (it's almost circular) so that it processes a lot or if you put a rocket on it, in which case energy conservation behaves less simply.
The least energy intensive way of getting it to impact the atmosphere is to throw it backwards so that it's not going fast enough to maintain orbit at that radius and so it will fall toward the earth and hopefully impact the atmosphere. IIRC, this is called a Hohmann transfer orbit. Note that it is not possible to get a object from one circular orbit to another without not one but two impulses, which means you would need a rocket on the trash.
Gigawatts of power are not wasted every night. Power plants shut off when the demand for electricity if low (like at night). In general, nuclear power plants run all the time (except for refueling outages of course), but since they generate significantly less than the baseline load (minimum power demanded by the grid) there are always easy to shut off plants online.
Power cannot be generated on the grid without being used somewhere; if power plant operators didn't shut off their plants when demand went down then the line frequency and/or voltage would go up until your 60W light bulb had 180V across it and started using 90W instead...which doesn't work too well for things like electronics.
Therefore, every kWh used at night costs us some CO2 in the air (depending on the type of power plant that would otherwise be off). That being said, there is a small amount of energy that probably is lost when peak power plants are shut off because they are allowed to cool down and then have to warm up again before they can generate more electricity, but we're not talking much energy there.
It is also interesting to note that by using more power plants at capacity at night you are allowing the operators to make money at night too so the rates can be lower and still allow them to recoup their capital investment faster and/or make more of a profit.
You are correct, but looking at the replies, this thread seems to be in serious need of some information about liquid oxygen.
Liquid oxygen is (not surprisingly) a very powerful oxidizer and many things will combust in its presence due to the fact that the increase in density overcomes the cold temperature.
Making liquid oxygen is very easy due to the fact that the boiling point of oxygen is a couple of degrees higher than the boiling point of nitrogen: get pressurized oxygen in a closed system and cool it down with liquid nitrogen until it liquefies. Congratulations, you're done.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
Getting paid doesn't mean crippling the software so customers need to go back and get permission from the publisher when they want to re-install the game in 20 years to play it a bit for old times sake, only to find out the server was shut down.
I can't find information anywhere on how long sunspots last, but if they last less than 12 days (which seems reasonable) then they could have occurred on the other side of the sun during the 12.5-18 day window when we couldn't see that area.
By "Mac" in the requirements they mean *Intel Mac* so if you have a Mac that's ancient (over 2 and a half years old) then it doesn't count as a Mac because Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 beta won't run on it.
I feel like the democratic party is giving the finger to families who can't afford to upgrade their computer every three years. I thought the democrats were supposed to help the little guy.
I even installed Silverlight 1.0 hoping it would work (I also have a Mac running Tiger, Safari 3.1, and Firefox 3) but no. Makes it impossible to get excited it.
You must have the 2.4L version. I have the 3.0L engine and get the same fuel economy as I would if I had a 4.0L engine (less than 19mpg highway) and yet get only 5hp and 5 lb-ft more than the 2.4L; I really don't understand Ford.
For any blackbody emitter (incandescent light bulb or this fancy new plasma), the color temperature IS the temperature. It's only for things that don't emit like blackbody radiators (fluorescent and LED) where you have a different color temperature than temperature.
Yeah, changing the numbers works when you have numbers. But when the assignment is to solve something algebraically, answers are going to tend to look similar.
Because it makes more sense to tax people according to their ability to pay taxes. Explain to me why people below the poverty line should pay more tax than they do now while the wealthiest pay less. Also explain why you should tax food at the same rate as luxury automobiles -- or maybe this "Fair Tax" which is actually a tax of about 30% (if 23/100 of what you pay goes to the government, then it's about 30% more than what it costed before tax) should have different rates for different types of goods. Or if you really want to get into a nice discussion, explain why people below the poverty line should pay tax.
I need a file system that is read/writable from Linux and OS X and supports files larger than 4GB. As far as I can tell, ZFS is the only file system headed in that direction.
While not relevant, I would like to point out that I can in fact prove the uncertainty principle. You too can find this proof at the wikipedia page for the uncertainty principle. That being said, it still is totally irrelevant.
You failed to explain why you think that we cannot pay for things now and why instead our children should have to pay several times as much due to interest. Maintaining a debt is just blowing money on interest until you decide to pay it back. Pay off the debt (or at least work on it) and you free up that money that would be spent on interest to do things.
Borrowing money to pay for World War II makes sense, the entire country was engaged in huge war and sacrifices were made across the nation (rationing for example). However, look at today: we are taxing our children without giving up anything ourselves.
On the fly increasing of the ISO increases the noise of your pictures. As noise is what limits the low end of the range of CCDs, this means we would have to improve the dynamic range of the CCDs.
First of all, companies will maximize profits. When they have to build a new plant, they will build the one that provides what they need for the cheapest amount even if they can supposedly pass on the added expense to the consumer. The problem is that as rates go up, people will use less electricity from the grid (whether by running air conditioners less or buying rooftop solar for homes or businesses), and reduce the profit of the companies.
Second, with sanctioned monopolies, they often cannot raise prices without showing the government that it is necessary, and choosing the build expensive plants when they could be building cheaper ones is not going to convince people that they are trying to keep costs down.
Finally, you're not looking at the electricity industry correctly because demand for electricity peaks based on the time of year and the time of day. Plants with low variable costs always operate whenever they can while plants with high variable costs only operate when there is high demand. By taxing pollution, they are raising the variable costs of plants based on the pollution they generate. This means that plants that pollute more will have to charge more and therefore be on less. Furthermore, this will mean that the return on investment will be lower for high-pollution plants and so in the long run more low-pollution plants will be built.
Oddly enough, the power it takes to lift a car 50 meters is also the power generated by lowering a car 50 meters. If you generate power on the way down, the net effect is pretty small (due to losses like friction).
Slashdot Mirror
Our qualifications for driving are way to slack. We let plenty of unqualified drivers on the road.
Our qualifications for slashdot posting are way too slack. We let plenty of people who don't use proper grammar on the tubes.
First of all, going from 45nm to 32nm means that every transistor takes up half the space it used to. The choice then is between the same number of transistors per chip resulting in lower per unit cost or twice as many transistors per chip resulting in better performance. As usual, there will be some of both.
Some people need better single-core performance, some people need more cores, and some people just need lower power consumption. Not everyone needs the same thing, which is why there are different product lines (Server, Desktop, Mobile, and Netbook) each with different models.
Anyway, I'll go back to waiting for my program to finish; it's been almost 10 hours so I obviously fall into the needing better performance category.
The problem is that every large company (like banks) don't sign contracts with their customers. They have policies (which are impossible to find online by the way) but they change them and then claim they told you and then you're stuck paying $10 or something that's a pain in the butt but not worth fighting about.
And no, the free market obviously hasn't fixed it.
I've always wondered why bothering writing over a disk 5 times with zeroes. Generally, the read out from a bit is something like 0.980 or 0.020, which is obviously a 1 or a 0 (respectively), but look like they used to be a 0 or a 1 (respectively) before the last time they were overwritten or else they would look like a 0.995 or 0.005 or something. So wouldn't it make more sense to alternating writing over with 0's with 1's so that it would even harder to recover.
On a similar note, as a grad student in physics all the computer code I generate belongs to the university. However, most of the code I've written is either too short for anyone to care, or an expansion of something I GPLed before I became a student. So as an employee I can modify that code a whole bunch, but in the end it's still GPLed.
At least, I think so since IANAL.
The features I want to see in Mathematica are the ones that have been present since at least the last version of WordPerfect for DOS that I used: being able to press undo more than once and being able to press redo. Autosaving (or not crashing) would also be nice.
For those of you who have never used Undo in Mathematica it works like this: you're typing along and want to undo the last sentence. You hit Control-Z and one of two things happens:
1) It deletes one word; you get to delete the rest by hand.
2) It deletes a half dozen equations/formulas/programs. Sucks to be you if you didn't save before hitting undo.
IANA rocket scientist, but I am a physicist and the physics here is fairly straightforward. No matter how you throw it, if you can't throw it hard enough to enter the earth's atmosphere before it makes it to the other side of the planet, it will go back to the exact same spot you threw it from due to energy conservation. Exceptions only exist if the initial (ISS) orbit is highly elliptical (it's almost circular) so that it processes a lot or if you put a rocket on it, in which case energy conservation behaves less simply. The least energy intensive way of getting it to impact the atmosphere is to throw it backwards so that it's not going fast enough to maintain orbit at that radius and so it will fall toward the earth and hopefully impact the atmosphere. IIRC, this is called a Hohmann transfer orbit. Note that it is not possible to get a object from one circular orbit to another without not one but two impulses, which means you would need a rocket on the trash.
Gigawatts of power are not wasted every night. Power plants shut off when the demand for electricity if low (like at night). In general, nuclear power plants run all the time (except for refueling outages of course), but since they generate significantly less than the baseline load (minimum power demanded by the grid) there are always easy to shut off plants online.
Power cannot be generated on the grid without being used somewhere; if power plant operators didn't shut off their plants when demand went down then the line frequency and/or voltage would go up until your 60W light bulb had 180V across it and started using 90W instead...which doesn't work too well for things like electronics.
Therefore, every kWh used at night costs us some CO2 in the air (depending on the type of power plant that would otherwise be off). That being said, there is a small amount of energy that probably is lost when peak power plants are shut off because they are allowed to cool down and then have to warm up again before they can generate more electricity, but we're not talking much energy there.
It is also interesting to note that by using more power plants at capacity at night you are allowing the operators to make money at night too so the rates can be lower and still allow them to recoup their capital investment faster and/or make more of a profit.
You are correct, but looking at the replies, this thread seems to be in serious need of some information about liquid oxygen.
Liquid oxygen is (not surprisingly) a very powerful oxidizer and many things will combust in its presence due to the fact that the increase in density overcomes the cold temperature.
Making liquid oxygen is very easy due to the fact that the boiling point of oxygen is a couple of degrees higher than the boiling point of nitrogen: get pressurized oxygen in a closed system and cool it down with liquid nitrogen until it liquefies. Congratulations, you're done.
Getting paid doesn't mean crippling the software so customers need to go back and get permission from the publisher when they want to re-install the game in 20 years to play it a bit for old times sake, only to find out the server was shut down.
I can't find information anywhere on how long sunspots last, but if they last less than 12 days (which seems reasonable) then they could have occurred on the other side of the sun during the 12.5-18 day window when we couldn't see that area.
What is their technical contact address so more of us can complain?
By "Mac" in the requirements they mean *Intel Mac* so if you have a Mac that's ancient (over 2 and a half years old) then it doesn't count as a Mac because Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 beta won't run on it.
I feel like the democratic party is giving the finger to families who can't afford to upgrade their computer every three years. I thought the democrats were supposed to help the little guy.
I even installed Silverlight 1.0 hoping it would work (I also have a Mac running Tiger, Safari 3.1, and Firefox 3) but no. Makes it impossible to get excited it.
360 degrees...something doesn't feel quite right...let's visualize that for a second... don't you mean 180 degrees?
You must have the 2.4L version. I have the 3.0L engine and get the same fuel economy as I would if I had a 4.0L engine (less than 19mpg highway) and yet get only 5hp and 5 lb-ft more than the 2.4L; I really don't understand Ford.
For any blackbody emitter (incandescent light bulb or this fancy new plasma), the color temperature IS the temperature. It's only for things that don't emit like blackbody radiators (fluorescent and LED) where you have a different color temperature than temperature.
Yeah, changing the numbers works when you have numbers. But when the assignment is to solve something algebraically, answers are going to tend to look similar.
Because it makes more sense to tax people according to their ability to pay taxes. Explain to me why people below the poverty line should pay more tax than they do now while the wealthiest pay less. Also explain why you should tax food at the same rate as luxury automobiles -- or maybe this "Fair Tax" which is actually a tax of about 30% (if 23/100 of what you pay goes to the government, then it's about 30% more than what it costed before tax) should have different rates for different types of goods. Or if you really want to get into a nice discussion, explain why people below the poverty line should pay tax.
I need a file system that is read/writable from Linux and OS X and supports files larger than 4GB. As far as I can tell, ZFS is the only file system headed in that direction.
While not relevant, I would like to point out that I can in fact prove the uncertainty principle. You too can find this proof at the wikipedia page for the uncertainty principle. That being said, it still is totally irrelevant.
You failed to explain why you think that we cannot pay for things now and why instead our children should have to pay several times as much due to interest. Maintaining a debt is just blowing money on interest until you decide to pay it back. Pay off the debt (or at least work on it) and you free up that money that would be spent on interest to do things. Borrowing money to pay for World War II makes sense, the entire country was engaged in huge war and sacrifices were made across the nation (rationing for example). However, look at today: we are taxing our children without giving up anything ourselves.
On the fly increasing of the ISO increases the noise of your pictures. As noise is what limits the low end of the range of CCDs, this means we would have to improve the dynamic range of the CCDs.
First of all, companies will maximize profits. When they have to build a new plant, they will build the one that provides what they need for the cheapest amount even if they can supposedly pass on the added expense to the consumer. The problem is that as rates go up, people will use less electricity from the grid (whether by running air conditioners less or buying rooftop solar for homes or businesses), and reduce the profit of the companies.
Second, with sanctioned monopolies, they often cannot raise prices without showing the government that it is necessary, and choosing the build expensive plants when they could be building cheaper ones is not going to convince people that they are trying to keep costs down.
Finally, you're not looking at the electricity industry correctly because demand for electricity peaks based on the time of year and the time of day. Plants with low variable costs always operate whenever they can while plants with high variable costs only operate when there is high demand. By taxing pollution, they are raising the variable costs of plants based on the pollution they generate. This means that plants that pollute more will have to charge more and therefore be on less. Furthermore, this will mean that the return on investment will be lower for high-pollution plants and so in the long run more low-pollution plants will be built.
Oddly enough, the power it takes to lift a car 50 meters is also the power generated by lowering a car 50 meters. If you generate power on the way down, the net effect is pretty small (due to losses like friction).
Also, USB2 wasn't finalized until 2000. Firewire was around when USB was painfully slow.