This is a VERY boring trope. If you only want completely finished consumer grade tech then stop reading/. and go read a product catalogue, maybe on paper, and stop wasting our time on your public masturbation/trolling.
And yes those more efficient PV cells are emerging in several different directions depending on application, and I'm been installing some of them. In terms of W/$ (thus J/$) I've recently put up stuff that cost me 1/10th of what went on my roof a few short years ago.
So if you would bother using your favourite search engine or paying attention to the field rather than whining, you'd know about them. The improvement in PV has been a science and engineering wonder possibly only eclipsed by CPU performance.
And here is probably the best-known pretty chart from NREL, easily found with a search for (wait for it)... "chart of solar PV efficiency":
Outer space is on average at about 3K/-270C. So if you can freely radiate energy away to it from a surface then that surface can nominally get to, or close to, that temperature. Having that that as the cold end of a Carnot heat engine, such as a thermal electricity generation plant, would do amazing things for efficiency in principle. Never mind aircon and PV.
So it's not crap.
And you can experience a similar effect in the opposite direction standing some distance from a bonfire on a cold night: you can feel the heat on your face even while the air around you is a very different temperature to your skin and the bonfire.
It's called physics, even if you don't find it interesting.
1) Letting visible light through in principle lets the PV work while keeping it cool. The increase in output with lower temperatures is quite significant, thus the presence on the market of combined PV/Thermal panels for example. (And absorbing more of the visible light and removing the energy as electricity rather than letting it turn into heat would be good too, natch, and that one is being worked on.)
2) Outer space is at ~3K/-270C: having that as your cold sink *day and night* is really quite significant. What I cannot work out is if clouds are transparent at the same wavelengths, eg if this could be used to make the cold end of a Seebeck device even under cloudy skies: that would allow a small amount of power generation day and night also, if so.
This looks plausible to me and and an astonishingly good thing if it works even a 1/10th as well as the researchers hope.
Sometimes the science is good before the marketing people get to it.
Really, no. The word just implies that there is a problem with something.
I use it all the time when talking about software or hardware bugs or latent ones, ie that may lead to or have already caused a problem. How on earth would that be what you claim?
If you want "dog whistles" then let's try "dog whistle" and "SJW" as loaded terms...
We agonised for years about renting a PET with 4k (?) of memory, but it was beyond us and we never got one. Those machines were spread over many years.
Did you actually read the poster's words before jumping in? Nowhere does Higaran even use the word "difficult" or moan at all; it's all mildly positive and comparative in fact.
I do think it is unkind to make the effort to post only to tell someone that they are a fool for something... they didn't even say.
Go and read that Slashdot story I linked about aggressive/trollish posting. Of course you may be a deliberate troll and I'm feeding you, or you may be a sociopath and actually unable to recognise why your behaviour is unnecessary and unkind.
Or you may be a normal human being and coming across badly on this one occasion for some random reason.
I had various Z80 and 6502 based machines (eg MZ80K, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro). The BBC's OS was a thing of beauty!
And now all this time later I'm working with a microcontroller (ATMega328P) which for my purposes has much the same performance at ~1MIP (though on as little as microamps rather than an amp or so), but with nice hardware multiply and GPIO!
Are you saying that I *don't* get that many SPAM attempts or that you get many more, or that I should count your post as troll/SPAM and make is 10,001 for today?
Sometimes, only through extensive use in a huge variety of use cases, does it become clear that the previously-thought-simple 'cache for a bit' needs rather more nuance...
Can this be cached only if public?
What if a different language was requested the second time?
What if different content encodings are acceptable to my next cache user?
Can I continue to show a slightly stale copy for a while rather than failing completely, and if so how long?
Can I see if the meaning of this page is unchanged and show it from cache, even if some unimportant aspects have changed (such as ads)?
These are all real cases, and I've sweated over the code and HTTP headers to get them right, and it can make a real difference to perceived response and actual resources consumed.
I'm the systems guy who loves to design that non-determinism in eg to avoid accidental deadly embraces, and to give bad actors a harder time, so thank you!
And yes, for embedded devices, I'd put sensor least-significant bits and jitter between different clock sources high on my list of genuine entropy sources, and I'll count radio (eg RSSI measurements) in the first category.
FWIW I think that companies (and clubs etc) are collective nouns and therefore singular.
* Microsoft is known for a rather off-hand attitude to security in the past. * England is a football team that never quite makes it to the top. * 10 Downing Street said yesterday through its spokesperson that... * A club/team/company does X
However: * The greenhorns that Microsoft used to hire had never been bitten by others' bad code so they didn't understand. * England's players are quite decent. * 10 Downing Street's spokespeople said "Where there's muck there's brass." * A club's/team's/company's members/players/staff do things.
Um, I don't think it's about CPU performance in general (server and supercomputer CPUs continue to exist and generally outperform desktops in many metrics) but about the dynamics of one *segment* of the CPU market, one that used to be dominant.
and I target my primary code to 8-bit MCUs similar to a Z80A form 30Y ago in power, running some nice slim highly-optimised distributed coding.
You forgot to add 'up and down hills for 100 miles in the snow on a bicycle backwards while on your way to school.':) It sounds like what you're working on is mostly text. While a Tablet, phone or laptop can certainly host a terminal window, typing speed is still much faster with a proper keyboard. imho.
I am actually from Yorkshire and resemble that remark! We fought over our holes in ground...
But again, my MBAir keyboard is one of the better ones I've used, and I do a lot of typing (including code and words for a living). Laptop ergonomics are not great, but in any case to come back to the original point of the fine article, that hardly has a very strong connection with the CPU type. Or am I misunderstanding you?
I do live my terminal windows and vi though!
Cut your suit to fit your cloth.
Very interesting quote.Following that comparison I wonder how much our smart phones clothe us today?
If the amount and quality of clothing were expressed in computing power then the first astronauts to land on the moon did so wearing loincloths. now there's a mental visual!
Very very scanty string thongs.
The first (Cray X?) supercompter replacements I looked after for an oil major ~20Y ago were ~30MHz CPU and ~256MB of memory (IBM and Sun *nix servers). My not-hugely-smartphone beats those parameters by at least an order of magnitude.
Quite a lot of what I paid attention to in banking work was that bottleneck, and it has been an issue since the earliest days of computing (my old prof would roll his eyes and talk about data stalls on the MU5...).
So one job of making stuff run well is to cut bloat and make more of it fit in cache, have fewer branches/misses in inner loops, and reduce data flows generally where possible.
Actually, I'm enjoying the ATMega328P with NO caches and a whole 2k of RAM! B^>
So I can get my work done at my desk or kitchen table or on the sofa or in bed, as well as on the train and when hot-desking (since my company doesn't have 'an' office, so we meet up ~1/week). Having a desktop in all of those places would be... impractical.
And as to the GP point about "getting it done", yes bigger more ergonomic displays would be good sometimes, but impractical in many of the places I work, as before.
And in terms of keeping me waiting: I often find that the work can be tuned or partitioned to keep run time fast enough to avoid being annoying. (First make it run, them make it run right, then make it run fast enough not to get in the way!)
The harsh / glorious reality hasn't changed. If you want to get real work done it's going to be on a desktop.
Depends what you mean by "real". Yes, I got paid megabuck(s) in banking to optimise quant algos across cores, CPUs and servers in (eg) the Credit dept at Lehman's, but I find my nominally underpowered MacBook Air (the saleswoman was slightly reluctant to sell it to me when I said I was a dev) to generally be damn good for what I need, including some decent data driven models and analysis, wrapped in not-even-optimised C++ unit tests, and running within a Java-based IDE!
So, horses for courses.
Also, I am the happy owner of an RPi that does all the work a Sun server farm used to do for me:
Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older.
While being smug and rude about $SOCIAL_PLATFORM_DU_JOUR is kinda amusing, for the record I have received plenty of important (to me) items of news via Twitter that took a long time to make it via conventional media, if at all, such as the death of a (non-celeb) hero of mine.
Slashdot Mirror
If you deliberately invoke a very tiresome trope then you are being a troll. A low-grade version of shouting FIRE in a crowded space. Please don't.
My solar PV wouldn't work very well underground, and my g/f and kids do need to be above ground also for things like shopping and school.
Damon
This is a VERY boring trope. If you only want completely finished consumer grade tech then stop reading /. and go read a product catalogue, maybe on paper, and stop wasting our time on your public masturbation/trolling.
For example, on another topic:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
And yes those more efficient PV cells are emerging in several different directions depending on application, and I'm been installing some of them. In terms of W/$ (thus J/$) I've recently put up stuff that cost me 1/10th of what went on my roof a few short years ago.
So if you would bother using your favourite search engine or paying attention to the field rather than whining, you'd know about them. The improvement in PV has been a science and engineering wonder possibly only eclipsed by CPU performance.
And here is probably the best-known pretty chart from NREL, easily found with a search for (wait for it)... "chart of solar PV efficiency":
https://www.nrel.gov/pv/assets...
Damon
It's called physics.
Outer space is on average at about 3K/-270C. So if you can freely radiate energy away to it from a surface then that surface can nominally get to, or close to, that temperature. Having that that as the cold end of a Carnot heat engine, such as a thermal electricity generation plant, would do amazing things for efficiency in principle. Never mind aircon and PV.
So it's not crap.
And you can experience a similar effect in the opposite direction standing some distance from a bonfire on a cold night: you can feel the heat on your face even while the air around you is a very different temperature to your skin and the bonfire.
Rgds
Damon
It's called physics, even if you don't find it interesting.
1) Letting visible light through in principle lets the PV work while keeping it cool. The increase in output with lower temperatures is quite significant, thus the presence on the market of combined PV/Thermal panels for example. (And absorbing more of the visible light and removing the energy as electricity rather than letting it turn into heat would be good too, natch, and that one is being worked on.)
2) Outer space is at ~3K/-270C: having that as your cold sink *day and night* is really quite significant. What I cannot work out is if clouds are transparent at the same wavelengths, eg if this could be used to make the cold end of a Seebeck device even under cloudy skies: that would allow a small amount of power generation day and night also, if so.
This looks plausible to me and and an astonishingly good thing if it works even a 1/10th as well as the researchers hope.
Sometimes the science is good before the marketing people get to it.
Rgds
Damon
Really, no. The word just implies that there is a problem with something.
I use it all the time when talking about software or hardware bugs or latent ones, ie that may lead to or have already caused a problem. How on earth would that be what you claim?
If you want "dog whistles" then let's try "dog whistle" and "SJW" as loaded terms...
Rgds
Damon
Nope.
We agonised for years about renting a PET with 4k (?) of memory, but it was beyond us and we never got one. Those machines were spread over many years.
Rgds
Damon
Did you actually read the poster's words before jumping in? Nowhere does Higaran even use the word "difficult" or moan at all; it's all mildly positive and comparative in fact.
I do think it is unkind to make the effort to post only to tell someone that they are a fool for something ... they didn't even say.
Go and read that Slashdot story I linked about aggressive/trollish posting. Of course you may be a deliberate troll and I'm feeding you, or you may be a sociopath and actually unable to recognise why your behaviour is unnecessary and unkind.
Or you may be a normal human being and coming across badly on this one occasion for some random reason.
Damon
...and I refer you to your prize for tonight!
https://ask.slashdot.org/story...
Why bother to log in to belittle someone? You're not adding anything, so maybe your soul is the one worth inspecting...
Damon
*Bzzzzt* thank you for playing!
I had various Z80 and 6502 based machines (eg MZ80K, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro). The BBC's OS was a thing of beauty!
And now all this time later I'm working with a microcontroller (ATMega328P) which for my purposes has much the same performance at ~1MIP (though on as little as microamps rather than an amp or so), but with nice hardware multiply and GPIO!
Rgds
Damon
This contributes to meaningful debate how?
Are you saying that I *don't* get that many SPAM attempts or that you get many more, or that I should count your post as troll/SPAM and make is 10,001 for today?
Damon
Whenever I count I see 10,000 SPAM attempts per day at one mail server that would otherwise reach me.
Rgds
Damon
And we have not even started to tackle the problem of dismantling non-melted down reactors and storing spend fuel.
I don't understand your claim "not even started".
What about (say) Dounreay and the work of the NDA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Rgds
Damon
@ULR: ^H ^C ^Z
Can we skip option 3 please? B^>
Rgds
Damon
I don't think that that's entirely fair.
Sometimes, only through extensive use in a huge variety of use cases, does it become clear that the previously-thought-simple 'cache for a bit' needs rather more nuance...
Can this be cached only if public?
What if a different language was requested the second time?
What if different content encodings are acceptable to my next cache user?
Can I continue to show a slightly stale copy for a while rather than failing completely, and if so how long?
Can I see if the meaning of this page is unchanged and show it from cache, even if some unimportant aspects have changed (such as ads)?
These are all real cases, and I've sweated over the code and HTTP headers to get them right, and it can make a real difference to perceived response and actual resources consumed.
Rgds
Damon
I think it's much more to to with margins and spreads often being sub-1%, so talking about them in 'bips' is easier...
Rgds
Damon
I'm the systems guy who loves to design that non-determinism in eg to avoid accidental deadly embraces, and to give bad actors a harder time, so thank you!
And yes, for embedded devices, I'd put sensor least-significant bits and jitter between different clock sources high on my list of genuine entropy sources, and I'll count radio (eg RSSI measurements) in the first category.
Rgds
Damon
FWIW I think that companies (and clubs etc) are collective nouns and therefore singular.
* Microsoft is known for a rather off-hand attitude to security in the past. ...
* England is a football team that never quite makes it to the top.
* 10 Downing Street said yesterday through its spokesperson that
* A club/team/company does X
However:
* The greenhorns that Microsoft used to hire had never been bitten by others' bad code so they didn't understand.
* England's players are quite decent.
* 10 Downing Street's spokespeople said "Where there's muck there's brass."
* A club's/team's/company's members/players/staff do things.
Rgds
Damon
Um, I don't think it's about CPU performance in general (server and supercomputer CPUs continue to exist and generally outperform desktops in many metrics) but about the dynamics of one *segment* of the CPU market, one that used to be dominant.
Or am I reading it wrong, too?
Rgds
Damon
and I target my primary code to 8-bit MCUs similar to a Z80A form 30Y ago in power, running some nice slim highly-optimised distributed coding.
You forgot to add 'up and down hills for 100 miles in the snow on a bicycle backwards while on your way to school.' :) It sounds like what you're working on is mostly text. While a Tablet, phone or laptop can certainly host a terminal window, typing speed is still much faster with a proper keyboard. imho.
I am actually from Yorkshire and resemble that remark! We fought over our holes in ground...
But again, my MBAir keyboard is one of the better ones I've used, and I do a lot of typing (including code and words for a living). Laptop ergonomics are not great, but in any case to come back to the original point of the fine article, that hardly has a very strong connection with the CPU type. Or am I misunderstanding you?
I do live my terminal windows and vi though!
Cut your suit to fit your cloth.
Very interesting quote.Following that comparison I wonder how much our smart phones clothe us today?
If the amount and quality of clothing were expressed in computing power then the first astronauts to land on the moon did so wearing loincloths. now there's a mental visual!
Very very scanty string thongs.
The first (Cray X?) supercompter replacements I looked after for an oil major ~20Y ago were ~30MHz CPU and ~256MB of memory (IBM and Sun *nix servers). My not-hugely-smartphone beats those parameters by at least an order of magnitude.
Rgds
Damon
Quite a lot of what I paid attention to in banking work was that bottleneck, and it has been an issue since the earliest days of computing (my old prof would roll his eyes and talk about data stalls on the MU5...).
So one job of making stuff run well is to cut bloat and make more of it fit in cache, have fewer branches/misses in inner loops, and reduce data flows generally where possible.
Actually, I'm enjoying the ATMega328P with NO caches and a whole 2k of RAM! B^>
Rgds
Damon
Well, there's a good point, yes.
So I can get my work done at my desk or kitchen table or on the sofa or in bed, as well as on the train and when hot-desking (since my company doesn't have 'an' office, so we meet up ~1/week). Having a desktop in all of those places would be ... impractical.
And as to the GP point about "getting it done", yes bigger more ergonomic displays would be good sometimes, but impractical in many of the places I work, as before.
And in terms of keeping me waiting: I often find that the work can be tuned or partitioned to keep run time fast enough to avoid being annoying. (First make it run, them make it run right, then make it run fast enough not to get in the way!)
Rgds
Damon
The harsh / glorious reality hasn't changed. If you want to get real work done it's going to be on a desktop.
Depends what you mean by "real". Yes, I got paid megabuck(s) in banking to optimise quant algos across cores, CPUs and servers in (eg) the Credit dept at Lehman's, but I find my nominally underpowered MacBook Air (the saleswoman was slightly reluctant to sell it to me when I said I was a dev) to generally be damn good for what I need, including some decent data driven models and analysis, wrapped in not-even-optimised C++ unit tests, and running within a Java-based IDE!
So, horses for courses.
Also, I am the happy owner of an RPi that does all the work a Sun server farm used to do for me:
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o...
and I target my primary code to 8-bit MCUs similar to a Z80A form 30Y ago in power, running some nice slim highly-optimised distributed coding.
Cut your suit to fit your cloth.
Rgds
Damon
I quote:
Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Rgds
Damon
Actually bees can do well in cities, eg:
http://www.urbanbees.co.uk/
Rgds
Damon
While being smug and rude about $SOCIAL_PLATFORM_DU_JOUR is kinda amusing, for the record I have received plenty of important (to me) items of news via Twitter that took a long time to make it via conventional media, if at all, such as the death of a (non-celeb) hero of mine.
Rgds
Damon