There they have double water dams/basins one high one low. During peak hour the water is rushed down for electricity. During night they buy cheap French nuclear energy to pump water back.
I don't doubt that they do this, but I doubt that much electricity from France is involved. The Scandinavian grid and the Middle European grid are not synchronized, so only DC links between them exist (or perhaps AC links with phase regeneration, but does anyone do that anymore?) The amount of electricity that could be moved is rather small -- there has been much talk about increasing capacity, but has anything really happened? In fact, if I read the map on GENI right, the Norwegian power grid is somewhat wimpy and reliant on the Swedish grid. That's the kind of thing you can get away with when you have lots of hydro spread across the country, but not the kind of thing for major energy import/export.
The point was the irony of having voice recognition text entry on a phone for the purpose of communicating in written form when you could go directly with voice.
I understood the irony. It is still a feature I would like and use. Because SMS's are polite, whereas phone calls interrupt.
There is a reason that autonegotiation is often disabled & it's called experience...
Usually it's called resistance to change. I haven't seen any trouble since around 2000. Except when the idiot at the other end of the cable locked it at 100-full, forcing my end to go 100-half. Luckily that problem is gone with gigabit, since that is autonegotiation or nothing.
AC induction motors are more efficient than DC motors - that's why all modern electric and hybrid cars use them and an inverter rather than a DC motor with PWM.
None of the efficient AC motors run on fixed 50Hz AC. If you want efficiency, you need variable frequency. If your fridge isn't ancient, it rectifies the AC to DC and then back to AC. Getting rid of the AC-to-DC bit would be nice.
Kernel developers regularly hunt elusive speed boosts which can only be detected by specialized benchmark. 2% on something as generic as kernel compilation is fantastic.
Of course the tests probably weren't conducted in a sufficiently scientific way, so the measurement error probably swamps the 2% improvement. If it can be independently repeated, congratulations are definitely in order!
What is to prevent people from storing electricity (in batteries) during off peak hours and then selling it back during peak hours and generating a profit?
The electricity companies would love it if you do that. Off-peak prices (wholesale, untaxed) sometimes go as low as 0.01USD/kWh around here. If they can sell it to you for even 0.05USD/kWh, that's a nice profit. On the other hand, at peak times inefficient generation methods are used, and production price is really high. They would be very happy to buy the electricity back from you, even at peak price.
The command registers are stored in the drive not the controller. Updating the system to deal with large disks is a device driver issue, not a hardware issue.
That is how it should be. However, ATA controllers have in some cases grown a bit too smart -- some of them interpret commands before they pass them on to the drives. 48-bit-support is done by sending the address in two cycles instead of one. Those "smart" controllers get confused by the second address cycle. Yet another case of PC hardware designers being crazy.
It's reasonably easy to find a cable. At those depths the cables lie directly on the sea floor, and if you run a hook across the sea floor from one side of the cable to the other, you'll cross it by definition. Sure you might then end up some distance from the break, but they are apparently reasonably good at handling that. Such techniques don't work with shipwrecks -- and even if they did, there may not be anything the right shape for a hook to catch.
Today's lesson: It takes a compelling application, not one that already exists in the Windows world to make people switch. The variety of apps is the fertilizer out of which a killer app will come that will make people switch.
Why won't this app be ported to Windows a month later? Killer apps don't exist anymore.
There are four computers in your home. Three are running Windows XP, one is running Windows Vista. The computers running WinXP are fine, but your computer running WinVista is having problems, and you conclude that your router is broken and pester Linksys with your operating system issues?
Computers running anything with TCP Window Scaling have problems. We have been pestering Linksys and other router manufacturers since before XP was released. The router is broken.
Why would Metacity want to prevent the configurability?
You'll have to see if you can find their reasons on the web somewhere. Searching for gnome configurability on Google and Groups got me some results, but not something definite to link to. Perhaps you'll have more luck...
Anyway, to solve your specific problem, you can actually assign a keyboard shortcut to "maximize vertically" to Metacity with gconf-editor. Not as good as what you really want perhaps, but it might tide you over. In the process I discovered that click-to-front is known as raise-on-click in Metacity, and that it can be turned off! Yay!
I want my Xterm window to maximize to the vertical height of the screen without changing width when I double-click the title bar. How would you tell a non-programmer to accomplish that in Gnome or KDE? Will it be easier in GNUStep?
This is actually a window manager thing, not something to do with Gnome or KDE. It's not particularly hard to accomplish with old-school window managers, but modern ones like Metacity deliberately prevent such configurability. Personally I'm just waiting for a modern window manager which lets me turn off click-to-front off.
What if this warming trend is part of a natural cycle? Do the environmentalist just want to sit back and let the environment do its thing then?
I consider myself an environmentalist, and if global warming turns out to be natural variations, that probably also leaves some hope that it will naturally vary back down. At least the likelyhood that we'll experience runaway warming seems low, if it's all from natural causes. Therefore we can be a bit more lax about trying to stop it -- it isn't likely to kill us. Except if the natural cause is the sun getting hotter or something else which isn't likely to reverse, in which case we should still combat global warming just as hard. As long as we keep everything mostly the same, the Earth has a long history of being a relatively benign place for animals and plants, and therefore we can have some confidence that it will continue to be so. The problem is that with the atmospheric contents changing dramatically, we cannot rely on past experience.
If natural variations turn out to be a threat to humans, I am all for fighting them.
It's always interesting how we're trying to predict when scientific breakthroughs will occur. Isn't it the nature of science such that breakthroughs happen when you don't expect them?
This isn't really science, it's more like engineering. Engineering at the edge of what is currently possibly, admittedly, but still engineering. It's unlikely that significant new scientific breakthroughs will come of this.
Believe me, brazilian portuguese Windows has no support for asian languages (at least not by default, and actually I don't know if it's even possible with a regular brazilian Windows XP). What now?
You're screwed already, if you don't happen to have a link somewhere. Try Korsør (Ha! Slashdot is messed up and can't handle æøå in domains. The link is supposed to be www.korsør.com).
But what is it with Slashdotters these days? Luddites and conservatives, all of you! There is such a thing as POSITIVE change, you know.
Its just a fact of life that the encoding scheme implemented has a limited set of characters that is readable by the technically adept people who built the thing.
It's not particularly a fact of life. It's just a policy that ICANN has decided on. Domains in.dk are available with the Danish letters æ, ø, and å, admittedly by using a harebrained encoding scheme. ICANN could easily allow more letters in domain names, either using the same harebrained scheme or by simply using UTF-8.
So you're telling me I can't just do a "dd if=/dev/rcd0c of=dvd.rip bs=1024000" and then burn that to another disc?
Correct. Well you can do that, but the disc you get out of it won't play in a standard DVD player.
Are the keys stored somewhere else on the disc, like the innermost plastic area before the data area begins?
They are stored in an area on the normal writing surface, but standard writers won't let you write that area, and standard burnable disks have that area pre-recorded.
Theoretically, you could do a bit-for-bit clone of the DVD disk, and, in this manner, you wouldn't have to decrypt it in order to copy it.
This is actually easy. The trick is that you don't get the keys copied when you try that with a regular DVD burner or regular DVD writables. Therefore standard players are unable to decrypt the copied DVD, so you can't actually watch it. Certain players CAN play it though, the ones that break the encryption instead of asking for the keys. In most cases removing the encryption is done when copying, since it's just easier that way -- but it isn't the only way.
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Alrigty, show me where I can sign up to get 48V DC power delivered to a data center.
As you explained, that would be silly. What would NOT be silly is 400V DC or perhaps 15kV DC for a large data center.
This is done a lot in Norway,
There they have double water dams/basins one high one low.
During peak hour the water is rushed down for electricity.
During night they buy cheap French nuclear energy to pump water back.
I don't doubt that they do this, but I doubt that much electricity from France is involved. The Scandinavian grid and the Middle European grid are not synchronized, so only DC links between them exist (or perhaps AC links with phase regeneration, but does anyone do that anymore?) The amount of electricity that could be moved is rather small -- there has been much talk about increasing capacity, but has anything really happened? In fact, if I read the map on GENI right, the Norwegian power grid is somewhat wimpy and reliant on the Swedish grid. That's the kind of thing you can get away with when you have lots of hydro spread across the country, but not the kind of thing for major energy import/export.
The point was the irony of having voice recognition text entry on a phone for the purpose of communicating in written form when you could go directly with voice.
I understood the irony. It is still a feature I would like and use. Because SMS's are polite, whereas phone calls interrupt.
Once, someone suggested building in voice recognition for entering an SMS...My reply was, "why don't you just call them instead."
SMS's are polite.
Some folk think that the best editor ever was the original vi.
ed is the standard text editor.
There is a reason that autonegotiation is often disabled & it's called experience...
Usually it's called resistance to change. I haven't seen any trouble since around 2000. Except when the idiot at the other end of the cable locked it at 100-full, forcing my end to go 100-half. Luckily that problem is gone with gigabit, since that is autonegotiation or nothing.
AC induction motors are more efficient than DC motors - that's why all modern electric and hybrid cars use them and an inverter rather than a DC motor with PWM.
None of the efficient AC motors run on fixed 50Hz AC. If you want efficiency, you need variable frequency. If your fridge isn't ancient, it rectifies the AC to DC and then back to AC. Getting rid of the AC-to-DC bit would be nice.
Kernel developers regularly hunt elusive speed boosts which can only be detected by specialized benchmark. 2% on something as generic as kernel compilation is fantastic.
Of course the tests probably weren't conducted in a sufficiently scientific way, so the measurement error probably swamps the 2% improvement. If it can be independently repeated, congratulations are definitely in order!
What is to prevent people from storing electricity (in batteries) during off peak hours and then selling it back during peak hours and generating a profit?
The electricity companies would love it if you do that. Off-peak prices (wholesale, untaxed) sometimes go as low as 0.01USD/kWh around here. If they can sell it to you for even 0.05USD/kWh, that's a nice profit. On the other hand, at peak times inefficient generation methods are used, and production price is really high. They would be very happy to buy the electricity back from you, even at peak price.
The command registers are stored in the drive not the controller. Updating the system to deal with large disks is a device driver issue, not a hardware issue.
That is how it should be. However, ATA controllers have in some cases grown a bit too smart -- some of them interpret commands before they pass them on to the drives. 48-bit-support is done by sending the address in two cycles instead of one. Those "smart" controllers get confused by the second address cycle. Yet another case of PC hardware designers being crazy.
It's reasonably easy to find a cable. At those depths the cables lie directly on the sea floor, and if you run a hook across the sea floor from one side of the cable to the other, you'll cross it by definition. Sure you might then end up some distance from the break, but they are apparently reasonably good at handling that. Such techniques don't work with shipwrecks -- and even if they did, there may not be anything the right shape for a hook to catch.
Anyway, there's an old but interesting article on undersea cables by Neal Stephenson.
Today's lesson: It takes a compelling application, not one that already exists in the Windows world to make people switch. The variety of apps is the fertilizer out of which a killer app will come that will make people switch.
Why won't this app be ported to Windows a month later? Killer apps don't exist anymore.
Which means that as soon as 2009, China will overtake the US in carbon emissions.
About damn time they did. They are a few more people, after all.
There are four computers in your home. Three are running Windows XP, one is running Windows Vista. The computers running WinXP are fine, but your computer running WinVista is having problems, and you conclude that your router is broken and pester Linksys with your operating system issues?
Computers running anything with TCP Window Scaling have problems. We have been pestering Linksys and other router manufacturers since before XP was released. The router is broken.
you fail to keep in mind that MS did some wierd and wacky stuff with window scaling. violating RFCs in a wierd and wacky way even.
Documentation welcome. I don't believe you.
Why would Metacity want to prevent the configurability?
You'll have to see if you can find their reasons on the web somewhere. Searching for gnome configurability on Google and Groups got me some results, but not something definite to link to. Perhaps you'll have more luck...
Anyway, to solve your specific problem, you can actually assign a keyboard shortcut to "maximize vertically" to Metacity with gconf-editor. Not as good as what you really want perhaps, but it might tide you over. In the process I discovered that click-to-front is known as raise-on-click in Metacity, and that it can be turned off! Yay!
I want my Xterm window to maximize to the vertical height of the screen without changing width when I double-click the title bar. How would you tell a non-programmer to accomplish that in Gnome or KDE? Will it be easier in GNUStep?
This is actually a window manager thing, not something to do with Gnome or KDE. It's not particularly hard to accomplish with old-school window managers, but modern ones like Metacity deliberately prevent such configurability. Personally I'm just waiting for a modern window manager which lets me turn off click-to-front off.
What if this warming trend is part of a natural cycle? Do the environmentalist just want to sit back and let the environment do its thing then?
I consider myself an environmentalist, and if global warming turns out to be natural variations, that probably also leaves some hope that it will naturally vary back down. At least the likelyhood that we'll experience runaway warming seems low, if it's all from natural causes. Therefore we can be a bit more lax about trying to stop it -- it isn't likely to kill us. Except if the natural cause is the sun getting hotter or something else which isn't likely to reverse, in which case we should still combat global warming just as hard. As long as we keep everything mostly the same, the Earth has a long history of being a relatively benign place for animals and plants, and therefore we can have some confidence that it will continue to be so. The problem is that with the atmospheric contents changing dramatically, we cannot rely on past experience.
If natural variations turn out to be a threat to humans, I am all for fighting them.
Yay! Now people will hopefully fix their firewalls so I can turn those on again in my Linux boxes.
It's always interesting how we're trying to predict when scientific breakthroughs will occur. Isn't it the nature of science such that breakthroughs happen when you don't expect them?
This isn't really science, it's more like engineering. Engineering at the edge of what is currently possibly, admittedly, but still engineering. It's unlikely that significant new scientific breakthroughs will come of this.
Believe me, brazilian portuguese Windows has no support for asian languages (at least not by default, and actually I don't know if it's even possible with a regular brazilian Windows XP). What now?
You're screwed already, if you don't happen to have a link somewhere. Try Korsør (Ha! Slashdot is messed up and can't handle æøå in domains. The link is supposed to be www.korsør.com).
But what is it with Slashdotters these days? Luddites and conservatives, all of you! There is such a thing as POSITIVE change, you know.
Its just a fact of life that the encoding scheme implemented has a limited set of characters that is readable by the technically adept people who built the thing.
.dk are available with the Danish letters æ, ø, and å, admittedly by using a harebrained encoding scheme. ICANN could easily allow more letters in domain names, either using the same harebrained scheme or by simply using UTF-8.
It's not particularly a fact of life. It's just a policy that ICANN has decided on. Domains in
In fact, it would be easier and more reliable to simply to use the IP address.
Using the IP address rarely works. All but the largest sites depend on virtual hosts.
So you're telling me I can't just do a "dd if=/dev/rcd0c of=dvd.rip bs=1024000" and then burn that to another disc?
Correct. Well you can do that, but the disc you get out of it won't play in a standard DVD player.
Are the keys stored somewhere else on the disc, like the innermost plastic area before the data area begins?
They are stored in an area on the normal writing surface, but standard writers won't let you write that area, and standard burnable disks have that area pre-recorded.
Theoretically, you could do a bit-for-bit clone of the DVD disk, and, in this manner, you wouldn't have to decrypt it in order to copy it.
This is actually easy. The trick is that you don't get the keys copied when you try that with a regular DVD burner or regular DVD writables. Therefore standard players are unable to decrypt the copied DVD, so you can't actually watch it. Certain players CAN play it though, the ones that break the encryption instead of asking for the keys. In most cases removing the encryption is done when copying, since it's just easier that way -- but it isn't the only way.