Well, IAAEE (I am an electrical engineer) and I'm gunna have to say that the turbine is going to have to transform its output voltage somehow anyway. Not that transformers deplete much power at all, but still, it is almost certainly more efficient to use a transformer after the turbine than screwing with the turbine to produce different voltage / frequencies. Also, the tiny turbine is going to have to rectify to dc power also. AC power is the "natural" form of electricity produced by power plants. It always requires an extra step to get dc. Finally, there is an economy of scale involved. A small turbine is simply not going to be as efficient as a large one. I would expect one that small to be nowhere near as efficient as a power plant. I would expect that the difference in efficiency of turbines would more than equal out the benefit of avoiding transformation (which is a very efficient process, for good transformers at least).
The important question is actually, which one weighs more? Which one is cheaper to use? Seriously, who cares about the environmental effects. We have millions and millions of big engines in the form of cars, a few hundred thousand small gas turbines aren't going to matter much.
I know I'm making a big mistake responding to a troll, but he brings up an interesting issue that I have been thinking about recently. Some people consider The New York Times to be left wing. Some people also consider it to be the golden standard of reporting. There is no question that its editorial page has a left-leaning viewpoint.
On the other hand, some people think The Wall Street Journal is right wing. Some people think that it is the golden standard of reporting. There is no question that the editorial page has a right-leaning viewpoint.
Personally, I think that both newspapers are confronted with a problem and deal with it in different ways. I think that both have integrity that is lacking in a lot of news sources. But while they both try to eliminate political views from their articles, they sometimes come down to a tiny binary choice in places - whether to make it slightly left or slightly right. There's no way to get it perfectly in the center. And so the Times errs on the side of liberal, and the Journal errs on the side of conservative. They're both fine reads though.
Clearly you have not recently visited the land of hanna-lee, where a dragon resides by the sea. Dragons can also be found on other planets. Some of them sound a lot like Sean Connery! You should really do some research before posting on slashdot!
Wait! There was a charles in charge episode where they did basically the same thing! One of the sisters was writing to a columnist who had charles doing the letters that week, and he found out because of the dropped g's!
Wait! I need to go stab myself in the brain to get these memories out!
The immediate difference that I see is that this is out a year earlier, even if it is still in testing. By the time spotlight comes out, google search will be searching absolutely everything on the pc and maybe they'll have a mac version too. I don't know how interested google is in supporting macs though.
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground.... if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
Well, if you called it superwaste, from your supernuclear superplants, and you stored it supersuperunderground, then it wouldn't be different at all. It would be, well, super!
I hung out with some Christian Fundamentalists for awhile, and one of the funniest things I heard one of them say was "I think some Catholics are Christians too."
To which I responded, "I bet they would agree with you."
Ultimately though, Catholics are much more liberal on issues of spirituality than most Protestants. The only issue that they come down on the conservative side is abortion. And that's just a huge clusterfuck, so I can't entirely blame them.
So maybe instead of having people check how people are handling the votes, we should have programs checking how programs handle the vote. Instead of having your vote recorded by one program on one machine, have it recorded by 3 programs on 3 machines, all written by different companies / OSS or whatever. If they don't match up, then you have a problem.
I hit read more and/. told me "nothing to see here, please move along." which by coincidence was exactly what I was about to say. I've had a pvr / dvd burner for at least half a year now. This isn't new stuff, except that it can be hooked up to your computer. And then the article goes on to say that they are eliminating the computer from the personal media loop? Then why do they have connections for it? Is it too much to expect rational reporting, at least?
they're usable as either. All of the general purpose registers on the current x86 line can be used as either specialized registers (for example, one to hold a memory offset) or as general purpose registers. You can see the difference in different binaries that you use in linux - 386 binaries are going to have references to specialized registers, while 686 binaries will not. The 686 also has a larger instruction set, but that's neither here nor there.
Never mind the shortage of general purpose registers on x86 and the lack of a direct mapping between instruction sets
I won't, because the x86 line has lots of general purpose registers now. They just pretend to be whatever special purpose ones the programs need (if any). We've come a long way since the 386.
They're good at the game because they are able to quickly guess a good price for some commodity (in other commodities). So where one person might trade 1 wheat for 1 wool, these guys will know it is worth 1 wool and 1 wood. Or whatever. They can also guess what the worth would be of building a city vs building another settlement on new numbers. Assuming the city has more dots around it than the potential settlement, it still might not be worthwhile because having all of your stuff come from only a few numbers is much more volatile than having your numbers spread out. Or maybe it would be, especially if you are behind and you're just hoping to get lucky. So yeah, they've got the game down.
You don't have to be German to enjoy this game. I have a feeling that most slashdot readers will have played this game - it is a lot of fun and is a much more matured board game than something like monopoly. Also, it is constructive (you are trying to get 10 points) than destructive (you are trying to make everyone else bankrupt). A fantastic game, IMO. I happen to work at a commodities trading company, and people here play it every once in awhile. A word of advice: do not play this game against an actual commodities trader. They're crazy good.
However, thanks to decades of really clever engineering, the ISA hardly matters anymore in terms of performance.
This is the single most imporant post you made. The idea of register renaming allows a whole lot of general purpose registers to be used instead of special purpose registers (as it was in the earlier x86 line). Add that to the fact that you can make instructions into multiple commands on the processor ("you asked me to run a command that adds a number to a register and then stores it? I'll split it into two commands, one which adds and the other stores") and out of order instruction and all of the bullshit that came with the x86 line isn't too bad. I'd still never want to design one of the things, but the performance doesn't suffer.
I do doubt that multiple cores on a die will produce much of a performance increase. All modern processors are already superscalar - they execute many instructions at the same time. Some sort of fundamental barrier in processor speed is coming up. We'll see if 64 bit is the answer, or if something else is. But rest assured, the clever engineering will continue and someone will get past it.
Oh please tell me now, I simply cannot stand to wait! Oh the humanity! To wait several weeks for you to reveal the deepest secrets of both the makers or electric guitars, the makers of submachineguns, and crime!
it seems to randomly reset about once a month (it just turns off, strangest thing).
This could be a hardware watchdog reset. It probably means that your thing just crashed spectacularly or ended up in an infinite loop, and then it resets everything to fix that. Maybe if there are firmware upgrades you can avoid that in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Lo, I have seen the future, brother microTodd, and it is all goatse and tubgirl as far as the eye can see. Truly, the apocolypse is upon us! :-(
Well, IAAEE (I am an electrical engineer) and I'm gunna have to say that the turbine is going to have to transform its output voltage somehow anyway. Not that transformers deplete much power at all, but still, it is almost certainly more efficient to use a transformer after the turbine than screwing with the turbine to produce different voltage / frequencies. Also, the tiny turbine is going to have to rectify to dc power also. AC power is the "natural" form of electricity produced by power plants. It always requires an extra step to get dc. Finally, there is an economy of scale involved. A small turbine is simply not going to be as efficient as a large one. I would expect one that small to be nowhere near as efficient as a power plant. I would expect that the difference in efficiency of turbines would more than equal out the benefit of avoiding transformation (which is a very efficient process, for good transformers at least).
The important question is actually, which one weighs more? Which one is cheaper to use? Seriously, who cares about the environmental effects. We have millions and millions of big engines in the form of cars, a few hundred thousand small gas turbines aren't going to matter much.
I know I'm making a big mistake responding to a troll, but he brings up an interesting issue that I have been thinking about recently. Some people consider The New York Times to be left wing. Some people also consider it to be the golden standard of reporting. There is no question that its editorial page has a left-leaning viewpoint.
On the other hand, some people think The Wall Street Journal is right wing. Some people think that it is the golden standard of reporting. There is no question that the editorial page has a right-leaning viewpoint.
Personally, I think that both newspapers are confronted with a problem and deal with it in different ways. I think that both have integrity that is lacking in a lot of news sources. But while they both try to eliminate political views from their articles, they sometimes come down to a tiny binary choice in places - whether to make it slightly left or slightly right. There's no way to get it perfectly in the center. And so the Times errs on the side of liberal, and the Journal errs on the side of conservative. They're both fine reads though.
Scorchio is a dragon
Clearly you have not recently visited the land of hanna-lee, where a dragon resides by the sea. Dragons can also be found on other planets. Some of them sound a lot like Sean Connery! You should really do some research before posting on slashdot!
Am I the only one that thinks that slashdot needs a "+1, Oregon Trail" mod option?
Isn't it nice that you get a nice referrer bonus in that link? Nice.
Wait! There was a charles in charge episode where they did basically the same thing! One of the sisters was writing to a columnist who had charles doing the letters that week, and he found out because of the dropped g's!
Wait! I need to go stab myself in the brain to get these memories out!
what about software to collaberate our lives as well - not just our software endeavoures?
;-)
I think that's a great idea, but someone has already done it. Its called government.
The immediate difference that I see is that this is out a year earlier, even if it is still in testing. By the time spotlight comes out, google search will be searching absolutely everything on the pc and maybe they'll have a mac version too. I don't know how interested google is in supporting macs though.
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground.... if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
Well, if you called it superwaste, from your supernuclear superplants, and you stored it super superunderground, then it wouldn't be different at all. It would be, well, super!
That's why I said, "most Protestants." :-)
I hung out with some Christian Fundamentalists for awhile, and one of the funniest things I heard one of them say was "I think some Catholics are Christians too."
To which I responded, "I bet they would agree with you."
Ultimately though, Catholics are much more liberal on issues of spirituality than most Protestants. The only issue that they come down on the conservative side is abortion. And that's just a huge clusterfuck, so I can't entirely blame them.
So maybe instead of having people check how people are handling the votes, we should have programs checking how programs handle the vote. Instead of having your vote recorded by one program on one machine, have it recorded by 3 programs on 3 machines, all written by different companies / OSS or whatever. If they don't match up, then you have a problem.
Thank you. The link has already been slashdotted. That is one horrible article summary.
I hit read more and /. told me "nothing to see here, please move along." which by coincidence was exactly what I was about to say. I've had a pvr / dvd burner for at least half a year now. This isn't new stuff, except that it can be hooked up to your computer. And then the article goes on to say that they are eliminating the computer from the personal media loop? Then why do they have connections for it? Is it too much to expect rational reporting, at least?
they're usable as either. All of the general purpose registers on the current x86 line can be used as either specialized registers (for example, one to hold a memory offset) or as general purpose registers. You can see the difference in different binaries that you use in linux - 386 binaries are going to have references to specialized registers, while 686 binaries will not. The 686 also has a larger instruction set, but that's neither here nor there.
Never mind the shortage of general purpose registers on x86 and the lack of a direct mapping between instruction sets
I won't, because the x86 line has lots of general purpose registers now. They just pretend to be whatever special purpose ones the programs need (if any). We've come a long way since the 386.
They're good at the game because they are able to quickly guess a good price for some commodity (in other commodities). So where one person might trade 1 wheat for 1 wool, these guys will know it is worth 1 wool and 1 wood. Or whatever. They can also guess what the worth would be of building a city vs building another settlement on new numbers. Assuming the city has more dots around it than the potential settlement, it still might not be worthwhile because having all of your stuff come from only a few numbers is much more volatile than having your numbers spread out. Or maybe it would be, especially if you are behind and you're just hoping to get lucky. So yeah, they've got the game down.
You don't have to be German to enjoy this game. I have a feeling that most slashdot readers will have played this game - it is a lot of fun and is a much more matured board game than something like monopoly. Also, it is constructive (you are trying to get 10 points) than destructive (you are trying to make everyone else bankrupt). A fantastic game, IMO. I happen to work at a commodities trading company, and people here play it every once in awhile. A word of advice: do not play this game against an actual commodities trader. They're crazy good.
However, thanks to decades of really clever engineering, the ISA hardly matters anymore in terms of performance.
This is the single most imporant post you made. The idea of register renaming allows a whole lot of general purpose registers to be used instead of special purpose registers (as it was in the earlier x86 line). Add that to the fact that you can make instructions into multiple commands on the processor ("you asked me to run a command that adds a number to a register and then stores it? I'll split it into two commands, one which adds and the other stores") and out of order instruction and all of the bullshit that came with the x86 line isn't too bad. I'd still never want to design one of the things, but the performance doesn't suffer. I do doubt that multiple cores on a die will produce much of a performance increase. All modern processors are already superscalar - they execute many instructions at the same time. Some sort of fundamental barrier in processor speed is coming up. We'll see if 64 bit is the answer, or if something else is. But rest assured, the clever engineering will continue and someone will get past it.
Oh please tell me now, I simply cannot stand to wait! Oh the humanity! To wait several weeks for you to reveal the deepest secrets of both the makers or electric guitars, the makers of submachineguns, and crime!
It is easy to look at data and plot an exponential growth curve. It is hard to find one that actually fits.
Did anyone else read this as "this guy is a mormon?"
Egads, what is he doing on slashdot! Get him away!!
it seems to randomly reset about once a month (it just turns off, strangest thing).
This could be a hardware watchdog reset. It probably means that your thing just crashed spectacularly or ended up in an infinite loop, and then it resets everything to fix that. Maybe if there are firmware upgrades you can avoid that in the future.
I think this is one of those times when a troll has been posted to /.'s front page.