An idle P4 wastes 10-15W of static power (maintaining its current state, like when the computer is in standby/sleep mode... this is why we have suspend-to-RAM and hibernate), 15-30W in clock distribution and uses 30-60W more for switching transistors while doing useful work.
Since a CPU is not operating at full-speed and full-load 100% of the time, reducing the average quiescent+clock power by 10X could already extend battery life by a substantial amount - how many people run SETI (or comparable non-essential extensive computational load) on their laptops while operating on battery power?
So, if static power and idle clock power are reduced to practically nothing, even if that power accounts for only half of the chip's budget it can decrease the CPU's average power by 10X, assuming the CPU spends ~90% of its time idling on average.
BTW, if you look at typical battery discharge curves, you will see that the effective AH rating depends on load current... so a 50% reduction in system power would come with a ~10% bonus in usable battery capacity. (Batteries are usually rated for 20H discharge and 12AH batteries typically have an effective rating of 7-9AH when drained at ~50A.)
I still have a radio alarm clock I use every morning... but I only pay attention to news, traffic reports and weather since most of the music that airs is not worth listening to.
And with the likes of WiMax and municipal WiFi under way, radio's days as an information service are also nearing the end.
Anyway, I see nothing wrong with the RIAA&all wasting money on technical dead-ends and non-issues... that's better than spending an equivalent amount on going after disabled people on wellfare and unemployed students.
At what speed can you stop a 1500kg car in less than 10m when the highway is covered with ice and snow?
Driving below 70km/h on a 100km/h highway for any reason is basically suicidal if what I see is any indication. Even in snowstorms, quite a few people still go at 100+km/h and zoom right past me.
With the orbital elevator, the ground base was already expected to be problematic even with most of the weight balanced around synchronous orbit.
At the poles, the whole weight would be on the ground.
For the orbital elevators, centrifugal force will counter gravity. Around a specific altitude, there will be zero/micro-gravity and a nearly indefinitely large station can be built there. For the polar elevators, the pillar would have to support their own weight and whatever goes on top. Also, failure to keep a polar elevator perfectly straight (during construction and operation, which may be tough since earth's rotation axis shifts a little every now and then) would eventually cause it to snap. Assuming it did not snap, the wobble would eventually cause the poles to shift towards the equator.
So, if the orbital elevator seemed like a bad idea, the polar elevator must be a double-plus ungood idea.
I wonder how many people would bother with watching wobbly 15fps low-res feature-length movies stitched together from multiple camera phones.
BTW, most digital photo cameras cannot record more than 30 seconds at a time and 30 seconds of a movie is generally accepted as fair use.
The entertainment industry is turning completely paranoid. It is losing control and instead of reinventing itself, it opted for making a jack-ass of itself by doing everything possible and not to keep itself afloat.
I wonder how long it will be until breaking point.
Give me a relatively inexpensive, rollable, 11x17 display with 200dpi or better resolution, fast updates (at least as fast as flipping pages) and then I might start being interested.
One reason people like paper is for sharp text and graphics. Low-end laser printer do 600dpi while urrent eReader devices use the lowest resolution they can get away with and that puts most of them under 100dpi.
Add the facts that eReader documents can be DRM'd or otherwise uncopiable/undistributable.
Paper simply always works. Until eReaders allow people to do everything they can do with paper just as freely and intuitively, paper will remain a preferred reading medium.
BTW, I hate scrolling and tabbing through indexes... given the choice between a free online document and a $40 printed version of the same, I often go for the printed version after verifying that the book covers enough interesting/relevant topics.
Try putting your hands near a 5kV AC electric field... you should feel a slight tingle/tickle from the electric field (mostly from hairs being pulled/pushed) some time before getting zapped.
A relatively small-scale and short-term deployment is not indicative of how a full-scale deployment would fare in the long-term.
Projects are initiated to reduce costs or generate profits. Right now, this looks like a partitioned central database but 20 years down the road (after the initial complaints are forgotten), they may decide to give more agencies full access.
Power and intentions shift when money is involved. Abuse is only a matter of time.
I would be far more concerned about the combination of vibrations and more-or-less good soldering... I have also seen electronics fail due to bad component plating.
I would be also more concerned about cracked housings than radiation, cosmic rays and electrical noise. Each electronic box in a car has its own voltage regulator so little to no electrical noise will ever reach the electronics. Since microcontrollers are typically built on older processes and use SRAM and ROM for memory instead of DRAM and the smallest process available, they are much less susceptible to noise/radiation/rays-induced bit-flipping. Since most automotive controllers handle simple cyclic stuff like injection and ignition, any soft glitch's effect would be bounded by the next sensor check.
What really annoys me with wired engines is that any minor failure can potentially strand you. With fully mechanical engines, you can drive until it burns out... or at least to the nearest garage so you do not have to pay for towing.
This is exactly what I think the rep. implied by writing:
"Even if this capability was available, OnStar would not disclose such information."
But if GM actually had cameras in their vehicles and did not disclose them in their documentation, they would eventually end up facing class action suits from privacy-concerned people.
There is an XP Starter Edition... and if Vista Starter is like it, it should be renamed "Vista Unusable Edition": XP Starter has artificial limits on maximum usable RAM, HDD size, display resolution, number of processes and many other things.
When I see M$ artificially fragment and cripple Windows like this, it makes me feel like I should start considering a Linux migration.
So, the software industry sells/buys souls to get software patents and now, the software industry is starting to simply sign off their patents to the commons.
If this trend picks up, software patents will become one of the silliest things around... like the silly idea software patents rightfully was.
BSD is almost a free-for-all. You can take the code base and build some proprietary closed-source software around it. This is exactly what the GPL is opposing... the GPL even goes so far as to forbid static linking and a bunch of other things. It is highly unlikely that any GPL revision will ever stray this far from GPL1's spirit.
New GPL versions usually add more restrictions and define special cases.
How do you BSD something that was already GPL 3.0'd? That would at least require written authorization from all contributors, which may not be possible for many of the larger and more active projects.
I too was in the "yuck" camp when I first saw and eventually played WindWaker... but once I got in the game and quit paying attention to the unusual styles, it turned out to be a fairly decent Zelda. My main real issue with it is the excruciatingly slow pacing until you get the cyclones and the way you are initially forced to go after the first two pearls... I wanted to at least visit the northern wallet fairy early in my gold game.
What costs the most power in an LCD display is the backlight. The next most costly item is ultra-fast high-current drivers with pre- and post-emphasis necessary to achieve sub-20ms response times... but not all LCDs need to be that fast and sophisticated. Slow low-resolution LCD drivers use far less power than super-fast high-resolution ones.
BTW, ePaper still needs a lighting source for dark environments. Since the backlight is by far the biggest power hog on slow LCD displays, this already kills most of ePaper's relevance for many devices. Since ePaper is incredibly slow to update, scrolling on an MP3 player's display would prossibly be unbearable compared to low-speed LCDs.
The only place where ePaper truly makes sense is for device that only wake up to update an otherwise practically static display... like eBook readers where full-page updates are only necessary when flipping pages.
The GP did not say 1.22, it said "1. 22" as in "1) 22MJ"... 10kg of water.
So, I always keep a 11F capacitor charged to 2kV for those occasions where I want my 1L of water boiled *NOW*.
2.2MJ may not seem like much but it does take 20 minutes to build up 2.2MJ off a single 120V/15A circuit. As far as domestic stuff goes, this is a fair amount of energy.
Not really, it is possible to patent improvements to previously patented stuff... so unless you decide to always work with 20+ years old technology, chances are that newer technology is covered by "upgraded" patents.
What Creative basically did was patent a graphical representation of a file system (or any other obviously hierarchical data structure) and a method of navigating it... sounds like a pretty damn weak patent.
Ripping makes "three for the price of two" rentals much more convenient... being otherwise "forced" to watch three movies in a 24h period sucks and ripping removes this restriction.
Now, why do rentals typically last only 24h? Because the video club cannot own an infinite number of copies of everything. Shorter rentals cut down on the number of required copies, physical storage space and operating costs. Some clubs are even refunding $1 (or crediting on the next rental) when rentals are returned within 12h or before noon the next day.
Were it not for the potentially questionable motives behind ripping, some clubs would happily offer half-price rentals for people who rip on-site using their laptops.
There are many nearly perfect crimes that are solved due to one single clue... like leaving residue of specialty clay used to make masks when there is only one theatrical shop worldwide that makes and sells that specific mix, something the criminals did not know beforehand.
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An idle P4 wastes 10-15W of static power (maintaining its current state, like when the computer is in standby/sleep mode... this is why we have suspend-to-RAM and hibernate), 15-30W in clock distribution and uses 30-60W more for switching transistors while doing useful work.
Since a CPU is not operating at full-speed and full-load 100% of the time, reducing the average quiescent+clock power by 10X could already extend battery life by a substantial amount - how many people run SETI (or comparable non-essential extensive computational load) on their laptops while operating on battery power?
So, if static power and idle clock power are reduced to practically nothing, even if that power accounts for only half of the chip's budget it can decrease the CPU's average power by 10X, assuming the CPU spends ~90% of its time idling on average.
BTW, if you look at typical battery discharge curves, you will see that the effective AH rating depends on load current... so a 50% reduction in system power would come with a ~10% bonus in usable battery capacity. (Batteries are usually rated for 20H discharge and 12AH batteries typically have an effective rating of 7-9AH when drained at ~50A.)
I still have a radio alarm clock I use every morning... but I only pay attention to news, traffic reports and weather since most of the music that airs is not worth listening to.
And with the likes of WiMax and municipal WiFi under way, radio's days as an information service are also nearing the end.
Anyway, I see nothing wrong with the RIAA&all wasting money on technical dead-ends and non-issues... that's better than spending an equivalent amount on going after disabled people on wellfare and unemployed students.
At what speed can you stop a 1500kg car in less than 10m when the highway is covered with ice and snow?
Driving below 70km/h on a 100km/h highway for any reason is basically suicidal if what I see is any indication. Even in snowstorms, quite a few people still go at 100+km/h and zoom right past me.
Common sense is deprecated, I'm simply not taking chances!
With the orbital elevator, the ground base was already expected to be problematic even with most of the weight balanced around synchronous orbit.
At the poles, the whole weight would be on the ground.
For the orbital elevators, centrifugal force will counter gravity. Around a specific altitude, there will be zero/micro-gravity and a nearly indefinitely large station can be built there. For the polar elevators, the pillar would have to support their own weight and whatever goes on top. Also, failure to keep a polar elevator perfectly straight (during construction and operation, which may be tough since earth's rotation axis shifts a little every now and then) would eventually cause it to snap. Assuming it did not snap, the wobble would eventually cause the poles to shift towards the equator.
So, if the orbital elevator seemed like a bad idea, the polar elevator must be a double-plus ungood idea.
I wonder how many people would bother with watching wobbly 15fps low-res feature-length movies stitched together from multiple camera phones.
BTW, most digital photo cameras cannot record more than 30 seconds at a time and 30 seconds of a movie is generally accepted as fair use.
The entertainment industry is turning completely paranoid. It is losing control and instead of reinventing itself, it opted for making a jack-ass of itself by doing everything possible and not to keep itself afloat.
I wonder how long it will be until breaking point.
Give me a relatively inexpensive, rollable, 11x17 display with 200dpi or better resolution, fast updates (at least as fast as flipping pages) and then I might start being interested.
One reason people like paper is for sharp text and graphics. Low-end laser printer do 600dpi while urrent eReader devices use the lowest resolution they can get away with and that puts most of them under 100dpi.
Add the facts that eReader documents can be DRM'd or otherwise uncopiable/undistributable.
Paper simply always works. Until eReaders allow people to do everything they can do with paper just as freely and intuitively, paper will remain a preferred reading medium.
BTW, I hate scrolling and tabbing through indexes... given the choice between a free online document and a $40 printed version of the same, I often go for the printed version after verifying that the book covers enough interesting/relevant topics.
Try putting your hands near a 5kV AC electric field... you should feel a slight tingle/tickle from the electric field (mostly from hairs being pulled/pushed) some time before getting zapped.
A relatively small-scale and short-term deployment is not indicative of how a full-scale deployment would fare in the long-term.
Projects are initiated to reduce costs or generate profits. Right now, this looks like a partitioned central database but 20 years down the road (after the initial complaints are forgotten), they may decide to give more agencies full access.
Power and intentions shift when money is involved. Abuse is only a matter of time.
I would be far more concerned about the combination of vibrations and more-or-less good soldering... I have also seen electronics fail due to bad component plating.
I would be also more concerned about cracked housings than radiation, cosmic rays and electrical noise. Each electronic box in a car has its own voltage regulator so little to no electrical noise will ever reach the electronics. Since microcontrollers are typically built on older processes and use SRAM and ROM for memory instead of DRAM and the smallest process available, they are much less susceptible to noise/radiation/rays-induced bit-flipping. Since most automotive controllers handle simple cyclic stuff like injection and ignition, any soft glitch's effect would be bounded by the next sensor check.
What really annoys me with wired engines is that any minor failure can potentially strand you. With fully mechanical engines, you can drive until it burns out... or at least to the nearest garage so you do not have to pay for towing.
But if GM actually had cameras in their vehicles and did not disclose them in their documentation, they would eventually end up facing class action suits from privacy-concerned people.
There is an XP Starter Edition... and if Vista Starter is like it, it should be renamed "Vista Unusable Edition": XP Starter has artificial limits on maximum usable RAM, HDD size, display resolution, number of processes and many other things.
When I see M$ artificially fragment and cripple Windows like this, it makes me feel like I should start considering a Linux migration.
What I had in mind was a cheaper and renewable resource...
I thought such a medal would be made of some other common dark-brown soft and squishy "material".
I wouldn't care much for a flashing mouse... IIRC, ACPI already contains provision for flashing the power light for exactly this sort of thing.
So, the software industry sells/buys souls to get software patents and now, the software industry is starting to simply sign off their patents to the commons.
If this trend picks up, software patents will become one of the silliest things around... like the silly idea software patents rightfully was.
BSD is almost a free-for-all. You can take the code base and build some proprietary closed-source software around it. This is exactly what the GPL is opposing... the GPL even goes so far as to forbid static linking and a bunch of other things. It is highly unlikely that any GPL revision will ever stray this far from GPL1's spirit.
New GPL versions usually add more restrictions and define special cases.
How do you BSD something that was already GPL 3.0'd? That would at least require written authorization from all contributors, which may not be possible for many of the larger and more active projects.
Exactly.
I too was in the "yuck" camp when I first saw and eventually played WindWaker... but once I got in the game and quit paying attention to the unusual styles, it turned out to be a fairly decent Zelda. My main real issue with it is the excruciatingly slow pacing until you get the cyclones and the way you are initially forced to go after the first two pearls... I wanted to at least visit the northern wallet fairy early in my gold game.
What costs the most power in an LCD display is the backlight. The next most costly item is ultra-fast high-current drivers with pre- and post-emphasis necessary to achieve sub-20ms response times... but not all LCDs need to be that fast and sophisticated. Slow low-resolution LCD drivers use far less power than super-fast high-resolution ones.
BTW, ePaper still needs a lighting source for dark environments. Since the backlight is by far the biggest power hog on slow LCD displays, this already kills most of ePaper's relevance for many devices. Since ePaper is incredibly slow to update, scrolling on an MP3 player's display would prossibly be unbearable compared to low-speed LCDs.
The only place where ePaper truly makes sense is for device that only wake up to update an otherwise practically static display... like eBook readers where full-page updates are only necessary when flipping pages.
The GP did not say 1.22, it said "1. 22" as in "1) 22MJ"... 10kg of water.
So, I always keep a 11F capacitor charged to 2kV for those occasions where I want my 1L of water boiled *NOW*.
2.2MJ may not seem like much but it does take 20 minutes to build up 2.2MJ off a single 120V/15A circuit. As far as domestic stuff goes, this is a fair amount of energy.
I browse the net with my disk-less Xbox2, PS3 and PSP... no permanent history, problem solved by pushing the reset or power switch.
Not really, it is possible to patent improvements to previously patented stuff... so unless you decide to always work with 20+ years old technology, chances are that newer technology is covered by "upgraded" patents.
What Creative basically did was patent a graphical representation of a file system (or any other obviously hierarchical data structure) and a method of navigating it... sounds like a pretty damn weak patent.
Ripping makes "three for the price of two" rentals much more convenient... being otherwise "forced" to watch three movies in a 24h period sucks and ripping removes this restriction.
Now, why do rentals typically last only 24h? Because the video club cannot own an infinite number of copies of everything. Shorter rentals cut down on the number of required copies, physical storage space and operating costs. Some clubs are even refunding $1 (or crediting on the next rental) when rentals are returned within 12h or before noon the next day.
Were it not for the potentially questionable motives behind ripping, some clubs would happily offer half-price rentals for people who rip on-site using their laptops.
Most of the time.
There are many nearly perfect crimes that are solved due to one single clue... like leaving residue of specialty clay used to make masks when there is only one theatrical shop worldwide that makes and sells that specific mix, something the criminals did not know beforehand.