I don't know about you all, but what good would this do with Unix users? I use Nedit, so I'm more often cutting and pasting with the mouse than typing out full lines of code. Lots of people use vi, who the hell could tell what they actually typed with all of those silly keyboard commands? (not that there's any thing wrong with them, please don't flame me =-)
What if you knew this and avoided _typing_ anything sensitive? Once my keyboard went out and I shut down the computer by X copy/pasting 'shutdown -h now' after su'ing... The keyboard wasn't involved. What are they going to do, log the screens and mouse clicks? What do they do when you place the insertion point somewhere else? What kind of gibberish are these people looking through?
You could enter 'sensitive' text without using the keyboard, then the benign stuff by typing. In short, who cares?
And they're not even doing anything useful
on
The Eroded Self
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· Score: 2
Imagine the following:
I personally am waiting for the day when everyone is wearing/is implanted with a medical status recording device. Until then, we can only guess what the affect of drugs and hormones is on the body. Of course, then everyone will know what you are doing at all times, just by reading the tape.
It could even be combined with a GPS tracking system so it can call an ambulance if you have a heart attack or stroke. But it would also let someone somewhere know all of your movements. Imagine getting a speeding ticket through the mail because your personal GPS tracker said you were speeding...
The invasion of privacy is bad now, but it will only get worse. Right now it is expensive to store all of that data, but that's getting cheaper all of the time. It's expensive to build such devices, but will Nanotech change that?
Just what is it that we're all doing anyway? Are we, the geeks, responsible for our own torment because we made it possible? Where do we draw the line?
Perhaps someone will mark the end of the Dark Ages as when, in the presence of overwhelming technology, we have a society that doesn't spy on itself all of the time.
I figure that the kids will be about 7 or 8 when they get to the 'able to form their own opinions' stage. After that, I'll severely cut back on what I disapprove of.
The 'attend political rallies' was a joke, too lame...
I'm sorry if I came across that way, but you have gotten the wrong opinion. I didn't say that mine would be the only opinion they will know, but that I will be there with them when they are forming opinions. I just don't intend to lie to them and I certainly don't intend to let anyone else do so.
Children are very trusting, they will believe anything you tell them until they have enough data to decide for themselves. I'm just going to speed up the process by giving them more than one opinion. I'll answer any question that they ask, no matter what the subject, based on the best available evidence. That's what makes the information age so cool, you can find out almost anything.
That is why I don't want any net filtering software running anywhere near me. Certainly not at my ISP where I can't change anything.
I don't expect to have much of a problem controlling their web surfing at home. If they get in the habit of surfing with Dad, it will seem pretty natural. I probably won't try to stop them from going anywhere they want. I think that their concience will keep them out of trouble. How many porn sites would you visit with your Dad in the room? They won't have computers in their room, or even net appliances.
If you don't take your kids to Church on a weekly basis as being a responsible parent DEMANDS, then you don't deserve the right to have them. Unless you take them to Church you are raising the next Columbine Shooters. That is a FACT. Kids don't get Morals from thin air. Without a Christian upbringing there is little hope for them.
Nice to hear from the thinking impaired side of the house.
Back to the subject: Having AOL decide what sites are good to let a child see is silly and naive. It promotes parental laziness, which is the actual cause of the school shootings.
Most people have better behaved dogs than kids, precisely because people know that they have to train their dogs. Then they entrust the welfare and education of their kids to other people who are actually justified in thinking that it isn't their responsibility. Everyone thinks about their rights and no one thinks about their duties. I personally don't like Kennedy, but 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country' is probably his finest quote.
I just wish that people still felt that way. Someone sometime is going to compile a list of what caused this society to collapse and this shirking of parental responsibility is going to be right near the top of the list. Trusting some anal retentive moron at AOL or CyberPatrol to choose what information your own children can see just goes to show that the collapse is near.
I don't want my kids (when I have them) exposed to anything persuasive either. I don't care if it's a religion, a political party, a sexual orientation or anything where other people tell them what to believe.
That will be my job. I don't plan on letting my kids go to church, surf the 'net, attend political rallies or whatever until they are old enough to be able to formulate their own opinions. In short: until they are cynical, like me.
I certainly don't intend to ever get any internet service where blocking software is part of the package. When my kids want to access the 'net, I'll be right there, sitting next to them. I'm not one of the millions of lazy people that think that schools or software should raise their kids for them.
Your kids are the only thing you leave behind in the world, it is your responsibility to raise them. If you don't want the responsibility, then don't have kids.
If you're a minor who thinks it's disgusting to have to surf the net sitting next to your father, well, all I can say is once my kids prove to me that they are responsible, I won't have to sit there anymore. My goal is to raise responsible, mature citizens. Other people may have different goals, but I can't imagine what they might be.
You can't put 'just' 4 processors in an S80, it comes in multiples of 6 up to 24.
The biggest advantage to an S80 is the price/performance ratio. The big disadvantage is that it has to be shut down when a CPU or a memory card fails. E10K's can hot swap CPUs and memory, but E450's can't...
Don't forget that every PCI card effectively cuts the bus bandwidth to all of the cards by a larger amount. 2 cards gives up to 66MB/s each, but 4 cards get only 33MB/s. That's why AGP is such a good idea, at least you have dedicated bandwidth to the video card.
Yes, I know... I still think that panels have a future in commercial power. It doesn't really matter how inefficient it is if the panel gets cheap enough. The real cost has come down by a factor of 20 in about as many years, there's no reason to think that it won't come down another several factors. Efficiency is going up, albeit only on the bleeding-edge expensive panels.
Everything gets cheaper if it's manufactured enough (Econometricians: please don't from my stating it backwards).
Peak load power is still pretty expensive. Last year KCPL lost two power plants to explosions and had to pay $2200/MWH. Ouch.
I was thinking that it could be practical to install solar farms as sunshades for cooling ponds for steam power plants. The grid is local, the land is in use already and the shading should help the efficiency of the ponds. They could even have heat sinks into the pond for cooling.
But we've divered far afield. I agree with you wholeheartedly, esp. about fuel cell "batteries" for laptops, I really want one badly...
Suppose you worked outside all of the time for the expected life of the system, 20 years. Suppose that once you figure in the number of hours of daylight times the 'directness' of the sunlight cutting into the efficiency, you'd get about 7 hours of 13.8 watts. Then you'd get about 700kWH out of the pack over its lifetime. At $395, that works out to only $0.56/kWH. Not bad, only about 10 times the cost of plugging into a wall.
I figure these things are 2 panels of about 9" by 12" or about.15 m^2. The incident solar power constant is about 700 watts/m^2 at noon. At 13.8 watts, these things come out to about 12% efficient. Also not bad.
So, obviously, these things aren't for everybody. But it is a good thing that prices have come down and they're manufacturing the cells more durably than before.
Maybe in a few years (with the power grid peak prices hitting $6000/MWH recently), someone will decide to build a solar panel power plant. It has the advantage of having its peak output at the same time as the air conditioners are using the most energy. It's just on the edge of being a practical energy source at $0.56/kWH. We'd just need to make lots and lots (and lots) of cells...
Obviously you wouldn't try and run 40000 copies of seti@home or some such, you wouldn't get enough CPU time each.
You could however use the machine as a file server or a web server without paying any hardware or software costs. This could make a big difference to a company who has a mainframe sitting in the basement. The next time someone wants to get a windoze server for their workgroup, you install samba or apache on the mainframe and skip the $10000+ for hardware and licenses.
Or you just install it temporarily while the permanent boxes are being ordered (which can take 6-12 months for a large enterprise, not kidding).
You don't even need to install Linux, samba and apache already run on OS/390.
This is the real value proposition for large businesses, avoid M$ tax, server room wasted space and yet another box to maintain.
It depends on the subject
on
Laptop Exams?
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· Score: 2
How would taking a laptop in help on a high-level math test? Then there's the composition/essay tests like in philosophy... 'Please search the net for your opinion and turn it in...'
This may serve to further weed out the dumb ones. When taking a test, the idiots would rely on the answers to the questions being on the net somewhere. Where the smart ones would actually study and spend the test time actually thinking about the answer.
I gotta wonder how they're going to keep people from cheating... What are they going to do, watch everyone like a hawk to make sure they're not emailing their friends?
I just think this is a bad idea. Maybe with a firewalled net appliance with no email program enabled you could keep people from cheating. Who knows? Maybe this is a useful life skill, learning how to rely on someone else's work to get ahead. But I'm a cynic.
It'd be fun to put up some good spider food for this purpose, fake answers and stupid ideas. You could have a lot of fun with this, messing around with freshmen... Did I mention that I'm both a cynic and a jerk? Thought so.
Then again, here I am about to put up an example program website, I guess I'll have to make it clear to everyone that they shouldn't use it for tests in comsci...
Core memory was slow for simple reasons. In order to make the magents move quickly, there has to be a lot of power used. Using lots of power makes the system heat up and requires more cooling and better wiring. The mass of the magnets themselves, which had to be physically moved (spun, flipped, whatever) is the major energy requirement. So, given a set amount of power that you can use, a set switching speed is defined.
This proposed system does not have massive magnets to move around, just their fields. Beyond that, power would be consumed for the get/set currents and the switched voltages. With electronic transistors, there has to be enough electrons (or holes) to affect the electric field enough to change whether current can flow through the device. With a magnetic transistor, you can eliminate the current required to affect the switched current flow, but you can't eliminate the switched current itself. Since the switched current is not going to be used later on to switch other currents, it can be much lower than in an entirely electronic system. A lot of the micro-fields could be fixed at the factory for core logic and programming, with changable magnetic transistors just for RAM.
Right now, current has to go through a whole bunch of cascading transistors to do computation, which is why the switching rate on current chips is in the several gigahertz's while the actual clock speed is in the sub-gigahertz range. This may not be necessary with magnetic transistors, since the voltages and currents can basically just flow from one end of the chip to the other, accomplishing computation in the process. Kinda like a quantum computer (pretty similar once you consider magnetic field effect transistors to be quantum in nature).
Sounds like a good system. I liked the 'beowulf cluster of iron filings' post, wish I had some moderator points left, that was funny...
This doesn't have anything at all to do with the Earth's magnetic field. All of the magnetic fields discussed here are microscopic and local. Global magnetic fields would have to increase by many orders of magnitude before they could have an effect on this technology. It is quite obvious that these chips would have to be shielded from external magnetic fileds, but just a little bit of non-ferromagnetic metal foil would be more than sufficient. A reversal in the Earth's field would have no effect at all, it can just barely be detected macroscopically. I doubt that any micron or smaller scale integrated circuit could even detect the field.
I think you're just trying to be a troll. I don't know why, but you can just be a troll elsewhere.
1 & 2: Water comes out of the tailpipe with gasoline, diesel and whatever else gets burnt that has hydrogen in it and uses oxygen as the oxidizer. Just with H2 as the fuel, the _only_ significant reaction product is water. Water will not likely drip out of the tailpipe after the exhaust system is warm. So LA does not have _this_ to worry about for flooding. =-]
3. Yes, fueling stations need to be careful, but they already have to be careful. The likelyhood of storing H2 in liquid form is so remote as to be incomputable. It just wouldn't be done.
In response to the other posts, I abbreviated. I left out the metal hydride storage, water injection and fuel cells on purpose. Really =-]
I'd like them to use turbines instead of fuel cells because turbines have better instantaneous power. Unless the fuel cell is hooked up to the flywheel power storage system I saw in Discover a few years back (4.2KWh/wheel with 50HP apiece instantaneous power output), then we'd have good acceleration. I drive a big, powerful car because I think it's safer to get out of the way of an accident than to be stuck in some little piece of crap econo-box deathtrap =-]
For one, if you burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, you get nitrogen oxides as well as water coming out of the tailpipe. Nitrogen oxides are noxious, cause acid rain and contribute to smog. This is not the perfect solution, although as a fuel for power plants or other large-scale installations, it's about as good as methane.
Humongous ponds of this would also tie up a large quantity of greenhouse-effect causing CO2 and of course using hydrogen for fuel will reduce the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere for a two-fold effect. That would be a Good Thing.
Now if the car companies would just invent a catalytic converter that got rid of the nitrogen oxides and invent a safe way to store hydrogen in a car, this would be very cool. Although, hydrogen isn't all that dangerous to carry around; e.g. a lot of the people on the Hindenberg lived through the explosion (more died from falling and getting burned to death than being blown to bits).
I'd love to have my own little hydrogen refinery pond in my back yard. I'd like to see this get developed further, but someone may come along and kill the project. Let's hope not.
Just like in the clear case we're talking about, the plastic is coated with a conductive paint which shields the RF interference. Having the case off OTOH lets the RF noise leak out. Good thing the wattage is pretty low for the high frequency stuff. The FCC could take a dim view of a little FM station in every household...
Do you think that something similar could be done to simulate the sense of touch? It is possible to hook up a VR world along with a finger movement detecting glove, but all the designs I've seen for simulating the sense of touch have been with hydraulics. Do you think it could be simulated touch to run a little current through the fingertips? I think it would be a lot easier to do than hydraulics, not to mention faster.
I think it could work. You'd need a good multichannel DAC to run all of the emitters, but I think it could be tested for very little money.
This is a public domain idea, anyone wanting to implement it can feel free to do so, provided it's not already been done or patented by someone else.
if [ $1 = "-rf" ]; then     /bin/rm $@ else      if [ $HOME/.trashcan = $PWD ]; then         /bin/rm $@      else          stamp=`date '+%j.%H%M%S'`          echo "moving files to ~/.trashcan/"          for arg in $@; do          &nb sp   filenm=`echo $arg | sed 's/\//V/g'`          &nb sp   mv $arg $HOME/.trashcan/$stamp.$filenm          done      fi fi
Then just name this something like 'remove', put it on your $PATH and make an alias/script called 'dump' that 'rm -i $HOME/.trashcan/*' then alias rm remove (assuming tcsh alias syntax).
This has the advantage of being able to see where the file came from if you interpret the 'V' for '/'. It's a little slow, but if you're concerned about accidentally deleting a file, it helps a lot.
I really think it's more pleasant to sit next to a huge box that gives out about 70dB of high noise than sit next to an open rack system. It also keeps the dust off of the computers.
Instead of fixed shelves, I had to use sliding shelves since the back of the case is inaccessible. A queen size eggcrate foam mattress pad gave up its life to provide soundproofing material. The exterior of the case is mostly oak, brass and glass. It looks very nice.
Inside is all steel, everything is bolted to 1" square profile punched beams. These don't work with rackmount stuff at 1.75", so I have a couple of little steel plates to adapt my rackmount stuff. The beams are 20.5" apart for this purpose.
On the whole it cost about $750 including the fans and lights. It is very nice to work next to.
I think that Tyan is the only manufacturer so far that is coming out with a dual processor board. It will apparently be called the dolphin, this according to www.slota.com/motherboards.
Tyan itself is, as usual, saying nothing about it at all. Release date is listed as '00, so it may be december for all slota.com knows...
My chief reasons for building my own systems are as follows:
1. Selection of individual components.
2. Price.
3. Avoiding clueless salesmen.
#1 is most important. I want exact control over my parts, not some substandard, off-the-shelf piece of crap system. Everyone should buy nothing but error-correcting RAM. No off-the-shelf system has ECC, ever. You can only even get the option of ECC when ordering a 'server' for 2 times the component price.
I just don't see how hardware companies justify their prices. If I went out and ordered all of the individual components for my LeSabre, it'd cost $90,000. Then I'd have to put it together, which would take months. If I order all the parts for a computer, it takes about an hour to put together and costs 50 to 70 percent of the 'boxed' system, even when taking shipping costs into consideration. What gives?
Once I ordered a system from Gateway for the lab I worked in. They shipped it with these substiute shitty components that almost immediately failed. Within 6 months, the keyboard shorted out, the NIC failed, the video card went on the fritz and the memory needed replaced. (Gateway, by the way when they decided that they were 'gateway.com' not 'gw2k.com', sued the owner of gateway for trademark infringement although he was in business first. Not the honorable purchasing of the domain name, just bullying tactics. What a bunch of assholes)
There are lots of idiots out there who want to sell you substandard components and switch your ordered part for something 'just as good'. Always send it back. I almost exclusively order parts from websites (the only exception is when the price listed at pricewatch.com doesn't match the website price). I usually order something simple first, just to test the site out, then order components. Sure, it takes longer to do things this way, but you save hundreds of dollars.
The chief reason that we are all voting for 'build your own' is that we, the UNIX users (mostly), don't need a pre-installed OS or applications. We can get most of what makes a system usable to us for free. Why should we pay for 'bundled' software that we wouldn't use in the first place. The cost is in the price of the system somewhere.
Remember that windoze systems are fragile, the software is more reliable when the drivers are installed in a certain order and it may take quite a while to figure out that order. Perchance that's why Dell charges an arm and a leg for a system. They had to figure out how to get it to work... That and they make you pay M$ tax.
In summary, it'll be a cold day in hell if I ever order another pre-built x86 system. My Macintoshes are another case entirely, when you can't buy parts, you can't build a system. My Alpha systems will probably be partially pre-built since it's cheaper that way. I guess there are no general rules except buy what you need for as cheap as you can. I don't see any reason to support companies that have never done anything good for me.
1. Assholes. No one wants to work around assholes or on a project with assholes. If someone is habitually surly and rude, fire them. Make sure the other people know you fired the asshole just because he was an asshole.
2. Pay cuts. So you can't pay anyone anything much right now, no problem. When you do start making money, make sure you can always pay people in a monotonically increasing manner. People can survive on no pay for a while and not hate it, but if you start paying them something then stop, you might as well close up shop right then. No one will want to work anymore.
3. PHBs. Don't be like Dilbert's boss. Listen to your people's concerns, interact with them socially (especially in bars, more great ideas get generated in bars than anywhere else).
4. Make sure your people know what the goals of the project are in explicit detail. If you're not sure yet, make sure you keep interacting with everyone until you decide just what it is that you want to accomplish. Everyone is happier if their work is useful, wasting effort pisses people off.
These were the mistakes that completely destroyed the research group I was in. None of our work was ever used for anything usefull and we don't even speak to each other anymore.
Pity since the work was cool and could have been profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
And turn that into the international space station. 135 miles long... Lots of space =-]
I don't know about you all, but what good would this do with Unix users? I use Nedit, so I'm more often cutting and pasting with the mouse than typing out full lines of code. Lots of people use vi, who the hell could tell what they actually typed with all of those silly keyboard commands? (not that there's any thing wrong with them, please don't flame me =-)
What if you knew this and avoided _typing_ anything sensitive? Once my keyboard went out and I shut down the computer by X copy/pasting 'shutdown -h now' after su'ing... The keyboard wasn't involved. What are they going to do, log the screens and mouse clicks? What do they do when you place the insertion point somewhere else? What kind of gibberish are these people looking through?
You could enter 'sensitive' text without using the keyboard, then the benign stuff by typing. In short, who cares?
Imagine the following:
I personally am waiting for the day when everyone is wearing/is implanted with a medical status recording device. Until then, we can only guess what the affect of drugs and hormones is on the body. Of course, then everyone will know what you are doing at all times, just by reading the tape.
It could even be combined with a GPS tracking system so it can call an ambulance if you have a heart attack or stroke. But it would also let someone somewhere know all of your movements. Imagine getting a speeding ticket through the mail because your personal GPS tracker said you were speeding...
The invasion of privacy is bad now, but it will only get worse. Right now it is expensive to store all of that data, but that's getting cheaper all of the time. It's expensive to build such devices, but will Nanotech change that?
Just what is it that we're all doing anyway? Are we, the geeks, responsible for our own torment because we made it possible? Where do we draw the line?
Perhaps someone will mark the end of the Dark Ages as when, in the presence of overwhelming technology, we have a society that doesn't spy on itself all of the time.
I left out the words 'without me' in the quote.
I figure that the kids will be about 7 or 8 when they get to the 'able to form their own opinions' stage. After that, I'll severely cut back on what I disapprove of.
The 'attend political rallies' was a joke, too lame...
I'm sorry if I came across that way, but you have gotten the wrong opinion. I didn't say that mine would be the only opinion they will know, but that I will be there with them when they are forming opinions. I just don't intend to lie to them and I certainly don't intend to let anyone else do so.
Children are very trusting, they will believe anything you tell them until they have enough data to decide for themselves. I'm just going to speed up the process by giving them more than one opinion. I'll answer any question that they ask, no matter what the subject, based on the best available evidence. That's what makes the information age so cool, you can find out almost anything.
That is why I don't want any net filtering software running anywhere near me. Certainly not at my ISP where I can't change anything.
I don't expect to have much of a problem controlling their web surfing at home. If they get in the habit of surfing with Dad, it will seem pretty natural. I probably won't try to stop them from going anywhere they want. I think that their concience will keep them out of trouble. How many porn sites would you visit with your Dad in the room? They won't have computers in their room, or even net appliances.
Nice to hear from the thinking impaired side of the house.
Back to the subject: Having AOL decide what sites are good to let a child see is silly and naive. It promotes parental laziness, which is the actual cause of the school shootings.
Most people have better behaved dogs than kids, precisely because people know that they have to train their dogs. Then they entrust the welfare and education of their kids to other people who are actually justified in thinking that it isn't their responsibility. Everyone thinks about their rights and no one thinks about their duties. I personally don't like Kennedy, but 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country' is probably his finest quote.
I just wish that people still felt that way. Someone sometime is going to compile a list of what caused this society to collapse and this shirking of parental responsibility is going to be right near the top of the list. Trusting some anal retentive moron at AOL or CyberPatrol to choose what information your own children can see just goes to show that the collapse is near.
MMmmm.. Troll food...
I don't want my kids (when I have them) exposed to anything persuasive either. I don't care if it's a religion, a political party, a sexual orientation or anything where other people tell them what to believe.
That will be my job. I don't plan on letting my kids go to church, surf the 'net, attend political rallies or whatever until they are old enough to be able to formulate their own opinions. In short: until they are cynical, like me.
I certainly don't intend to ever get any internet service where blocking software is part of the package. When my kids want to access the 'net, I'll be right there, sitting next to them. I'm not one of the millions of lazy people that think that schools or software should raise their kids for them.
Your kids are the only thing you leave behind in the world, it is your responsibility to raise them. If you don't want the responsibility, then don't have kids.
If you're a minor who thinks it's disgusting to have to surf the net sitting next to your father, well, all I can say is once my kids prove to me that they are responsible, I won't have to sit there anymore. My goal is to raise responsible, mature citizens. Other people may have different goals, but I can't imagine what they might be.
This looks like AIX system configuration output.
How did you get this?
BTW, the proc[0-3] represents the processor card, each of which holds 6 processors and is hooked to the backplane (thus the 00-)
You can't put 'just' 4 processors in an S80, it comes in multiples of 6 up to 24.
The biggest advantage to an S80 is the price/performance ratio. The big disadvantage is that it has to be shut down when a CPU or a memory card fails. E10K's can hot swap CPUs and memory, but E450's can't...
Just clarifying.
Don't forget that every PCI card effectively cuts the bus bandwidth to all of the cards by a larger amount. 2 cards gives up to 66MB/s each, but 4 cards get only 33MB/s. That's why AGP is such a good idea, at least you have dedicated bandwidth to the video card.
Yes, I know... I still think that panels have a future in commercial power. It doesn't really matter how inefficient it is if the panel gets cheap enough. The real cost has come down by a factor of 20 in about as many years, there's no reason to think that it won't come down another several factors. Efficiency is going up, albeit only on the bleeding-edge expensive panels.
Everything gets cheaper if it's manufactured enough (Econometricians: please don't from my stating it backwards).
Peak load power is still pretty expensive. Last year KCPL lost two power plants to explosions and had to pay $2200/MWH. Ouch.
I was thinking that it could be practical to install solar farms as sunshades for cooling ponds for steam power plants. The grid is local, the land is in use already and the shading should help the efficiency of the ponds. They could even have heat sinks into the pond for cooling.
But we've divered far afield. I agree with you wholeheartedly, esp. about fuel cell "batteries" for laptops, I really want one badly...
But first, I should get a laptop. =-]
Suppose you worked outside all of the time for the expected life of the system, 20 years. Suppose that once you figure in the number of hours of daylight times the 'directness' of the sunlight cutting into the efficiency, you'd get about 7 hours of 13.8 watts. Then you'd get about 700kWH out of the pack over its lifetime. At $395, that works out to only $0.56/kWH. Not bad, only about 10 times the cost of plugging into a wall.
.15 m^2. The incident solar power constant is about 700 watts/m^2 at noon. At 13.8 watts, these things come out to about 12% efficient. Also not bad.
I figure these things are 2 panels of about 9" by 12" or about
So, obviously, these things aren't for everybody. But it is a good thing that prices have come down and they're manufacturing the cells more durably than before.
Maybe in a few years (with the power grid peak prices hitting $6000/MWH recently), someone will decide to build a solar panel power plant. It has the advantage of having its peak output at the same time as the air conditioners are using the most energy. It's just on the edge of being a practical energy source at $0.56/kWH. We'd just need to make lots and lots (and lots) of cells...
Obviously you wouldn't try and run 40000 copies of seti@home or some such, you wouldn't get enough CPU time each.
You could however use the machine as a file server or a web server without paying any hardware or software costs. This could make a big difference to a company who has a mainframe sitting in the basement. The next time someone wants to get a windoze server for their workgroup, you install samba or apache on the mainframe and skip the $10000+ for hardware and licenses.
Or you just install it temporarily while the permanent boxes are being ordered (which can take 6-12 months for a large enterprise, not kidding).
You don't even need to install Linux, samba and apache already run on OS/390.
This is the real value proposition for large businesses, avoid M$ tax, server room wasted space and yet another box to maintain.
How would taking a laptop in help on a high-level math test? Then there's the composition/essay tests like in philosophy... 'Please search the net for your opinion and turn it in...'
This may serve to further weed out the dumb ones. When taking a test, the idiots would rely on the answers to the questions being on the net somewhere. Where the smart ones would actually study and spend the test time actually thinking about the answer.
I gotta wonder how they're going to keep people from cheating... What are they going to do, watch everyone like a hawk to make sure they're not emailing their friends?
I just think this is a bad idea. Maybe with a firewalled net appliance with no email program enabled you could keep people from cheating. Who knows? Maybe this is a useful life skill, learning how to rely on someone else's work to get ahead. But I'm a cynic.
It'd be fun to put up some good spider food for this purpose, fake answers and stupid ideas. You could have a lot of fun with this, messing around with freshmen... Did I mention that I'm both a cynic and a jerk? Thought so.
Then again, here I am about to put up an example program website, I guess I'll have to make it clear to everyone that they shouldn't use it for tests in comsci...
Core memory was slow for simple reasons. In order to make the magents move quickly, there has to be a lot of power used. Using lots of power makes the system heat up and requires more cooling and better wiring. The mass of the magnets themselves, which had to be physically moved (spun, flipped, whatever) is the major energy requirement. So, given a set amount of power that you can use, a set switching speed is defined.
This proposed system does not have massive magnets to move around, just their fields. Beyond that, power would be consumed for the get/set currents and the switched voltages. With electronic transistors, there has to be enough electrons (or holes) to affect the electric field enough to change whether current can flow through the device. With a magnetic transistor, you can eliminate the current required to affect the switched current flow, but you can't eliminate the switched current itself. Since the switched current is not going to be used later on to switch other currents, it can be much lower than in an entirely electronic system. A lot of the micro-fields could be fixed at the factory for core logic and programming, with changable magnetic transistors just for RAM.
Right now, current has to go through a whole bunch of cascading transistors to do computation, which is why the switching rate on current chips is in the several gigahertz's while the actual clock speed is in the sub-gigahertz range. This may not be necessary with magnetic transistors, since the voltages and currents can basically just flow from one end of the chip to the other, accomplishing computation in the process. Kinda like a quantum computer (pretty similar once you consider magnetic field effect transistors to be quantum in nature).
Sounds like a good system. I liked the 'beowulf cluster of iron filings' post, wish I had some moderator points left, that was funny...
This doesn't have anything at all to do with the Earth's magnetic field. All of the magnetic fields discussed here are microscopic and local. Global magnetic fields would have to increase by many orders of magnitude before they could have an effect on this technology. It is quite obvious that these chips would have to be shielded from external magnetic fileds, but just a little bit of non-ferromagnetic metal foil would be more than sufficient. A reversal in the Earth's field would have no effect at all, it can just barely be detected macroscopically. I doubt that any micron or smaller scale integrated circuit could even detect the field.
I think you're just trying to be a troll. I don't know why, but you can just be a troll elsewhere.
Responses:
1 & 2: Water comes out of the tailpipe with gasoline, diesel and whatever else gets burnt that has hydrogen in it and uses oxygen as the oxidizer. Just with H2 as the fuel, the _only_ significant reaction product is water. Water will not likely drip out of the tailpipe after the exhaust system is warm. So LA does not have _this_ to worry about for flooding. =-]
3. Yes, fueling stations need to be careful, but they already have to be careful. The likelyhood of storing H2 in liquid form is so remote as to be incomputable. It just wouldn't be done.
In response to the other posts, I abbreviated. I left out the metal hydride storage, water injection and fuel cells on purpose. Really =-]
I'd like them to use turbines instead of fuel cells because turbines have better instantaneous power. Unless the fuel cell is hooked up to the flywheel power storage system I saw in Discover a few years back (4.2KWh/wheel with 50HP apiece instantaneous power output), then we'd have good acceleration. I drive a big, powerful car because I think it's safer to get out of the way of an accident than to be stuck in some little piece of crap econo-box deathtrap =-]
For one, if you burn hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, you get nitrogen oxides as well as water coming out of the tailpipe. Nitrogen oxides are noxious, cause acid rain and contribute to smog. This is not the perfect solution, although as a fuel for power plants or other large-scale installations, it's about as good as methane.
Humongous ponds of this would also tie up a large quantity of greenhouse-effect causing CO2 and of course using hydrogen for fuel will reduce the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere for a two-fold effect. That would be a Good Thing.
Now if the car companies would just invent a catalytic converter that got rid of the nitrogen oxides and invent a safe way to store hydrogen in a car, this would be very cool. Although, hydrogen isn't all that dangerous to carry around; e.g. a lot of the people on the Hindenberg lived through the explosion (more died from falling and getting burned to death than being blown to bits).
I'd love to have my own little hydrogen refinery pond in my back yard. I'd like to see this get developed further, but someone may come along and kill the project. Let's hope not.
Just like in the clear case we're talking about, the plastic is coated with a conductive paint which shields the RF interference. Having the case off OTOH lets the RF noise leak out. Good thing the wattage is pretty low for the high frequency stuff. The FCC could take a dim view of a little FM station in every household...
Do you think that something similar could be done to simulate the sense of touch? It is possible to hook up a VR world along with a finger movement detecting glove, but all the designs I've seen for simulating the sense of touch have been with hydraulics. Do you think it could be simulated touch to run a little current through the fingertips? I think it would be a lot easier to do than hydraulics, not to mention faster.
I think it could work. You'd need a good multichannel DAC to run all of the emitters, but I think it could be tested for very little money.
This is a public domain idea, anyone wanting to implement it can feel free to do so, provided it's not already been done or patented by someone else.
#!/bin/sh
/bin/rm $@ /bin/rm $@ b sp   filenm=`echo $arg | sed 's/\//V/g'` b sp   mv $arg $HOME/.trashcan/$stamp.$filenm
if [ $1 = "-rf" ]; then
    
else
     if [ $HOME/.trashcan = $PWD ]; then
        
     else
         stamp=`date '+%j.%H%M%S'`
         echo "moving files to ~/.trashcan/"
         for arg in $@; do
         &n
         &n
         done
     fi
fi
Then just name this something like 'remove', put it on your $PATH and make an alias/script called 'dump' that 'rm -i $HOME/.trashcan/*' then alias rm remove (assuming tcsh alias syntax).
This has the advantage of being able to see where the file came from if you interpret the 'V' for '/'. It's a little slow, but if you're concerned about accidentally deleting a file, it helps a lot.
I really think it's more pleasant to sit next to a huge box that gives out about 70dB of high noise than sit next to an open rack system. It also keeps the dust off of the computers.
Instead of fixed shelves, I had to use sliding shelves since the back of the case is inaccessible. A queen size eggcrate foam mattress pad gave up its life to provide soundproofing material. The exterior of the case is mostly oak, brass and glass. It looks very nice.
Inside is all steel, everything is bolted to 1" square profile punched beams. These don't work with rackmount stuff at 1.75", so I have a couple of little steel plates to adapt my rackmount stuff. The beams are 20.5" apart for this purpose.
On the whole it cost about $750 including the fans and lights. It is very nice to work next to.
I think that Tyan is the only manufacturer so far that is coming out with a dual processor board. It will apparently be called the dolphin, this according to www.slota.com/motherboards.
Tyan itself is, as usual, saying nothing about it at all. Release date is listed as '00, so it may be december for all slota.com knows...
My chief reasons for building my own systems are as follows:
1. Selection of individual components.
2. Price.
3. Avoiding clueless salesmen.
#1 is most important. I want exact control over my parts, not some substandard, off-the-shelf piece of crap system. Everyone should buy nothing but error-correcting RAM. No off-the-shelf system has ECC, ever. You can only even get the option of ECC when ordering a 'server' for 2 times the component price.
I just don't see how hardware companies justify their prices. If I went out and ordered all of the individual components for my LeSabre, it'd cost $90,000. Then I'd have to put it together, which would take months. If I order all the parts for a computer, it takes about an hour to put together and costs 50 to 70 percent of the 'boxed' system, even when taking shipping costs into consideration. What gives?
Once I ordered a system from Gateway for the lab I worked in. They shipped it with these substiute shitty components that almost immediately failed. Within 6 months, the keyboard shorted out, the NIC failed, the video card went on the fritz and the memory needed replaced. (Gateway, by the way when they decided that they were 'gateway.com' not 'gw2k.com', sued the owner of gateway for trademark infringement although he was in business first. Not the honorable purchasing of the domain name, just bullying tactics. What a bunch of assholes)
There are lots of idiots out there who want to sell you substandard components and switch your ordered part for something 'just as good'. Always send it back. I almost exclusively order parts from websites (the only exception is when the price listed at pricewatch.com doesn't match the website price). I usually order something simple first, just to test the site out, then order components. Sure, it takes longer to do things this way, but you save hundreds of dollars.
The chief reason that we are all voting for 'build your own' is that we, the UNIX users (mostly), don't need a pre-installed OS or applications. We can get most of what makes a system usable to us for free. Why should we pay for 'bundled' software that we wouldn't use in the first place. The cost is in the price of the system somewhere.
Remember that windoze systems are fragile, the software is more reliable when the drivers are installed in a certain order and it may take quite a while to figure out that order. Perchance that's why Dell charges an arm and a leg for a system. They had to figure out how to get it to work... That and they make you pay M$ tax.
In summary, it'll be a cold day in hell if I ever order another pre-built x86 system. My Macintoshes are another case entirely, when you can't buy parts, you can't build a system. My Alpha systems will probably be partially pre-built since it's cheaper that way. I guess there are no general rules except buy what you need for as cheap as you can. I don't see any reason to support companies that have never done anything good for me.
Here's the things that kill motivation:
1. Assholes. No one wants to work around assholes or on a project with assholes. If someone is habitually surly and rude, fire them. Make sure the other people know you fired the asshole just because he was an asshole.
2. Pay cuts. So you can't pay anyone anything much right now, no problem. When you do start making money, make sure you can always pay people in a monotonically increasing manner. People can survive on no pay for a while and not hate it, but if you start paying them something then stop, you might as well close up shop right then. No one will want to work anymore.
3. PHBs. Don't be like Dilbert's boss. Listen to your people's concerns, interact with them socially (especially in bars, more great ideas get generated in bars than anywhere else).
4. Make sure your people know what the goals of the project are in explicit detail. If you're not sure yet, make sure you keep interacting with everyone until you decide just what it is that you want to accomplish. Everyone is happier if their work is useful, wasting effort pisses people off.
These were the mistakes that completely destroyed the research group I was in. None of our work was ever used for anything usefull and we don't even speak to each other anymore.
Pity since the work was cool and could have been profitable.
Hope this helped,
Tony