Just add a bridge rectifier to convert AC to DC if you want to power a bulb with it. They're very cheap and rugged. Of course, solid state diodes weren't available back then...
Why there are plenty of switch power supplies in your computer, some of which are outputting hundreds of amps on a mobo costing a modest amount seems like that could scale or even old fashioned motor-generators in the substations.
No, your regular computer power supply does not provide hundred of amps - tens, tops, and that is for a really power hungry system on a 110VAC line. Switching power supplies prices scale up rapidly with increasing power output.
And then again, how long does the average computer PSU runs before failure? Transformers are big, bulky, hard to build and expensive, but they're extremely rugged devices, with basically zero manteinance. 10-20 years life for an industrial transformer is common, and for household devices is even longer.
The US in particular made out like bandits so to speak, and the war ended up being a net economic gain in the long run, both in terms of technology gained and new markets established.
That's highly debatable. A lot of technology developements were accelerated during WWII, but at the cost of nearly 60 million1 human lives and the destruction of several cities and urban centers. There's no way of telling how many writers, artists, scientists (or anyone who could have made their contribution to mankind) were killed in that period.
Very true, and it's a crying shame. Tesla was one of the brightest men of his generation, and the number of inventions and research he left behind is beyond impressive. That, and he had this crazy-scientist image thing going along aswell:)
Most people answer with a blank stare whenever in mention the work of Tesla. While Edison's contribution is undeniable, he was more of a salesman than a scientist.
We're not considering the full system performance here. We're trying to figure out why something that has a seek time that's effectively zero isn't even maxing out the interface. A RAMDisk (those funny boards Gigabyte makes that use actual system RAM and a backup battery) has that same zero seek time and completely saturates the interface; why the hell is non-volatile storage so much slower?
Because you're making idealistic assumptions. Low density NAND modules usually quote 2ms block erase time and 300-500uS cell write time - since flash writes to cell in blocks, write speeds can be comparable (and even slower) to a HDD, let alone DRAM memory. Random access time, on the other hand, is arround 10uS (and even lower for serial access), which is much faster than any HDD available. The slow writing speed has to do with the physical process of storing the charge in the cell ("pushing" it through a dielectric) and the way cells are arranged for writing. Read speeds have gotten much better in the past years, but write speed are still abysmally slow in comparison.
Keep in mind that these are figures for low density flash modules; the ones used in SSD have a higher level of integration, so they can be even slower.
That's it, moving a file, network failure and poof, moved files deleted from the source. Most probably a bizarre coincidence, but after it happened a few times i now copy and then delete when working on a SMB network.
Some uses - like motors - can handle varying voltage, but what about electronics? How does a digital camera like 2V vs. 2.4V? What about 6V? or 1.4V?
Indeed, this is a problem, but easily solvable using a voltage-up device like a charge pumps. These are not normally used on battery-operated consumer devices since the discharge curve of a, say, li-ion battery is fairly flat for most of its discharge and falls sharply when near depletion.
Note: the distinguishing feature of ext3 is that it is backwards compatible with ext2, and there isn't much reason to care about that now, if there ever was.
I still use ext3 when i need guaranteed reliability. It's slow (very slow when compared to ReiserFS), yes, but being ext2 with journaling tackled on means that you get all the years of developement ext2 took plus the consistency of a modern journal system.
I've lost data using a number of filesystems, but never on ext3. Not that they're bad (most cases were related to hardware malfunctions), but after a few times i moved to ext3 for archiving.
Yup, that's the one. It's a damn nice phone - dirt cheap, small, sturdy, with good connection and long battery life. The thing is that the display is segmented, and this hinders usability a lot (specially when trying to SMS). I considered getting one just for the sake of it but this put me off; if they offered an upgrade with a dot matrix display i'd get two in a heartbeat.
I'm also glad that it appears that the majority of gamers are more concerned with good entertainment and discussions rather than simply addicted to cons.
So the majority of gamers are wannabe criminals!. Jack Thompson was right!
Vote selling is, sadly, a reality in Argentina
on
eBay The Vote
·
· Score: 1
And not only over eBay; political parties have been procuring votes for years with tools like, for example, the Plan Trabajar. A few people attempting to sell their vote through the net is a minor concern next to this reality, IMHO. The sad note is that this kind of stuff has been common on most South American countries for years now, mine (Argentina) included.
To add insult to injury, there's the generalized feeling that these elections are all about voting the "least worst" candidate - Cristina Kirchner (wife of the current president) is leading the polls, for example, and we're talking about a candidate who hasn't made a single statement of her government plans since the campaigns stated and has little to no support from mid and mid-upper social classes. We havetwo ex Ministers of economy with little political backup, a leftie candidate who appears to be running second place in the polls and a coupleassorted candidates with dubious pasts and connections to figures with corruption charges. Of all these the one i'm thinking to give my vote to is Lavagna, and this is only becase he is the only candidate who appeared in local media with concrete proposals and a government plan instead of political rhetoric.
It could be worse though, but with a rising inflation in the country (it's said to be arround 20%, but the government keeps publishing artificially lowered figures, combined with artificial measures to reduce good prices and control the peso-dolar ratio) these elections are more important than most people are giving them credit for. With that in mind, i find a crying shame that some people are willing to sell their votes, even if it's to make some kind of statement.
Then again, there has been some (good) stirring in the political map lately - Santa Fe (a province) had, for example, elected a socialist governor (first time in Argentinas' history) with over 50% of the polls and a rather good image from his period as a mayor of Rosario, one of the largest cities in Argentina.
The nice thing about microkernels is that the kernel itself it's completely isolated from the rest of the software running on it - even device drivers, which can (and are) a breaking point in common monolithic kernels. Instead of doing direct calls to the kernel, the software now uses a system of messages.
This, of course, works just fine and it makes the kernel rock solid, but makes system calls slower. I'm guessing that when Win7 is released hardware will be fast enough that this will be a non-issue (hell, it might even not be one now), but the point is, a "regular" kernel will almost always outperform it on the same hardware.
Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.
Basic is a great learning language, but i can't really think of a better introduction to programming (and geometry!) than Logo. Kids who might have problems dealing with variables, conditionals and even print statements can grasp rather quickly the "move forward, turn, move forward" simplicity of Logo.
I was taught Logo when i was about 10, and like you, i had already cutted my teeth with C64 basic. Still, it was a very fun language to use and i actually learned from it. Something as simple as drawing a n-side polygon involves understanding of angles, distances and basic programming skills.
What really bugs me is how much of the startup config is done serially. A lot of startup tasks take time, and step N+1 has to wait until step N is finished whether or not it depends on that step.
Gentoo allows for parallel startup of services - after the kernel is loaded, services are brought up in parallel if they have no dependency issues. It works fine, but it doesn't seem to do much for the boot time of my system.
The great shame with Commodore was the waste of many advanced ideas that landed on their laps - PET, C64 chipset, Amiga... Heck the C64 was still being sold with the *same* 1Mhz clock speed at the end in 1992, 10 years after release.
Which is a good idea - changing the clock speed would basically make it a different computer. I remember trying a gadget called Super-CPU which basically ran a 20MHz CPU compatible with the venerable 6502. GEOS was a dream, but most games and even application software became unusable.
But yes, i agree - Commodore had a lot of great ideas which ended up dead and rotten due to poor, poor management. Well, at least i keep my memories...:)
The only one i've heard of (for Windows) is Foxit PDF reader, which is about 2mb - never tried it myself though. On linux, Evince works great, and had no issues with everything i've thrown at it.
It's not that big - in fact, if you'd place it on the back of the device it wouldn't be much bigger that a regular LCD display. My guess the point of it is to emphasize the thinness of the device, even when it's due of moving the bulk of it somewhere else:) OLED displays can be very thin though, since you don't need then glass substrates and polarizers required for LCDs and such.
One thing I have wondered is if there is any RAM based solutions like this. Where a board or a box would allow a computer to treat a bunch of RAM as a drive.
You could always stuff more memory in your PC and use a ramdisk driver. Anyway, i know such devices exists (solid-state drives using DRAM), but i never got a chance to try one...
our childish "uh oh" introduction, your completely un-cited "a lot of issues" comment, and your vague "I recall" interruption reveal the fact that you're spouting off some crap on a subject you have no direct, real-world experience with. Find another subject with which to stroke your ego kid, because you're looking like a pompous dumbass on this one.
The specs for a 256Mb NAND flash memory chip by Samsung (which is by far the biggest NAND flash manufacturer today) quotes 100k millon write/erase cycles, and this is for an IC commonly used in USB pendrives. The figure usually tends to get worse with increased memory sizes since the memory "element" (float gate) becomes smaller. For example, Modern 16Mb chips, which are the ones i have experience with, usualy quote 1 million W/E cycles endurance.
But, it felt good stroking my ego a bit more:) Thanks!
*looks at his K6-III booting from a PCI-SATA card.*
That'd be a PCI SATA controller card? You can boot from them alright, but the article mentions that drivers are available for several platforms - if drivers are involved, it's most likely not using a regular ATA/SATA interfase.
Slashdot Mirror
Just add a bridge rectifier to convert AC to DC if you want to power a bulb with it. They're very cheap and rugged. Of course, solid state diodes weren't available back then...
Why there are plenty of switch power supplies in your computer, some of which are outputting hundreds of amps on a mobo costing a modest amount seems like that could scale or even old fashioned motor-generators in the substations.
No, your regular computer power supply does not provide hundred of amps - tens, tops, and that is for a really power hungry system on a 110VAC line. Switching power supplies prices scale up rapidly with increasing power output.
And then again, how long does the average computer PSU runs before failure? Transformers are big, bulky, hard to build and expensive, but they're extremely rugged devices, with basically zero manteinance. 10-20 years life for an industrial transformer is common, and for household devices is even longer.
Sorry, i misunderstood your post :)
The US in particular made out like bandits so to speak, and the war ended up being a net economic gain in the long run, both in terms of technology gained and new markets established.
That's highly debatable. A lot of technology developements were accelerated during WWII, but at the cost of nearly 60 million1 human lives and the destruction of several cities and urban centers. There's no way of telling how many writers, artists, scientists (or anyone who could have made their contribution to mankind) were killed in that period.
Very true, and it's a crying shame. Tesla was one of the brightest men of his generation, and the number of inventions and research he left behind is beyond impressive. That, and he had this crazy-scientist image thing going along aswell :)
Most people answer with a blank stare whenever in mention the work of Tesla. While Edison's contribution is undeniable, he was more of a salesman than a scientist.
We're not considering the full system performance here. We're trying to figure out why something that has a seek time that's effectively zero isn't even maxing out the interface. A RAMDisk (those funny boards Gigabyte makes that use actual system RAM and a backup battery) has that same zero seek time and completely saturates the interface; why the hell is non-volatile storage so much slower?
Because you're making idealistic assumptions. Low density NAND modules usually quote 2ms block erase time and 300-500uS cell write time - since flash writes to cell in blocks, write speeds can be comparable (and even slower) to a HDD, let alone DRAM memory. Random access time, on the other hand, is arround 10uS (and even lower for serial access), which is much faster than any HDD available.
The slow writing speed has to do with the physical process of storing the charge in the cell ("pushing" it through a dielectric) and the way cells are arranged for writing. Read speeds have gotten much better in the past years, but write speed are still abysmally slow in comparison.
Keep in mind that these are figures for low density flash modules; the ones used in SSD have a higher level of integration, so they can be even slower.
With $SOME_DISTRO running Firefox
Give the guy a break. He was googling the setup of his favorite OpenGL games.
That's it, moving a file, network failure and poof, moved files deleted from the source. Most probably a bizarre coincidence, but after it happened a few times i now copy and then delete when working on a SMB network.
(Or maybe Samba has something to do with it?)
Some uses - like motors - can handle varying voltage, but what about electronics? How does a digital camera like 2V vs. 2.4V? What about 6V? or 1.4V?
Indeed, this is a problem, but easily solvable using a voltage-up device like a charge pumps. These are not normally used on battery-operated consumer devices since the discharge curve of a, say, li-ion battery is fairly flat for most of its discharge and falls sharply when near depletion.
Note: the distinguishing feature of ext3 is that it is backwards compatible with ext2, and there isn't much reason to care about that now, if there ever was.
I still use ext3 when i need guaranteed reliability. It's slow (very slow when compared to ReiserFS), yes, but being ext2 with journaling tackled on means that you get all the years of developement ext2 took plus the consistency of a modern journal system.
I've lost data using a number of filesystems, but never on ext3. Not that they're bad (most cases were related to hardware malfunctions), but after a few times i moved to ext3 for archiving.
Yup, that's the one. It's a damn nice phone - dirt cheap, small, sturdy, with good connection and long battery life. The thing is that the display is segmented, and this hinders usability a lot (specially when trying to SMS). I considered getting one just for the sake of it but this put me off; if they offered an upgrade with a dot matrix display i'd get two in a heartbeat.
I'm also glad that it appears that the majority of gamers are more concerned with good entertainment and discussions rather than simply addicted to cons.
So the majority of gamers are wannabe criminals!. Jack Thompson was right!
And not only over eBay; political parties have been procuring votes for years with tools like, for example, the Plan Trabajar. A few people attempting to sell their vote through the net is a minor concern next to this reality, IMHO. The sad note is that this kind of stuff has been common on most South American countries for years now, mine (Argentina) included.
To add insult to injury, there's the generalized feeling that these elections are all about voting the "least worst" candidate - Cristina Kirchner (wife of the current president) is leading the polls, for example, and we're talking about a candidate who hasn't made a single statement of her government plans since the campaigns stated and has little to no support from mid and mid-upper social classes. We have two ex Ministers of economy with little political backup, a leftie candidate who appears to be running second place in the polls and a couple assorted candidates with dubious pasts and connections to figures with corruption charges. Of all these the one i'm thinking to give my vote to is Lavagna, and this is only becase he is the only candidate who appeared in local media with concrete proposals and a government plan instead of political rhetoric.
It could be worse though, but with a rising inflation in the country (it's said to be arround 20%, but the government keeps publishing artificially lowered figures, combined with artificial measures to reduce good prices and control the peso-dolar ratio) these elections are more important than most people are giving them credit for. With that in mind, i find a crying shame that some people are willing to sell their votes, even if it's to make some kind of statement.
Then again, there has been some (good) stirring in the political map lately - Santa Fe (a province) had, for example, elected a socialist governor (first time in Argentinas' history) with over 50% of the polls and a rather good image from his period as a mayor of Rosario, one of the largest cities in Argentina.
The nice thing about microkernels is that the kernel itself it's completely isolated from the rest of the software running on it - even device drivers, which can (and are) a breaking point in common monolithic kernels. Instead of doing direct calls to the kernel, the software now uses a system of messages.
This, of course, works just fine and it makes the kernel rock solid, but makes system calls slower. I'm guessing that when Win7 is released hardware will be fast enough that this will be a non-issue (hell, it might even not be one now), but the point is, a "regular" kernel will almost always outperform it on the same hardware.
There's no need to mention anything about SKUs. The story title summarized it perfectly.
Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.
Basic is a great learning language, but i can't really think of a better introduction to programming (and geometry!) than Logo. Kids who might have problems dealing with variables, conditionals and even print statements can grasp rather quickly the "move forward, turn, move forward" simplicity of Logo.
I was taught Logo when i was about 10, and like you, i had already cutted my teeth with C64 basic. Still, it was a very fun language to use and i actually learned from it. Something as simple as drawing a n-side polygon involves understanding of angles, distances and basic programming skills.
What really bugs me is how much of the startup config is done serially. A lot of startup tasks take time, and step N+1 has to wait until step N is finished whether or not it depends on that step.
Gentoo allows for parallel startup of services - after the kernel is loaded, services are brought up in parallel if they have no dependency issues. It works fine, but it doesn't seem to do much for the boot time of my system.
The great shame with Commodore was the waste of many advanced ideas that landed on their laps - PET, C64 chipset, Amiga... Heck the C64 was still being sold with the *same* 1Mhz clock speed at the end in 1992, 10 years after release.
:)
Which is a good idea - changing the clock speed would basically make it a different computer. I remember trying a gadget called Super-CPU which basically ran a 20MHz CPU compatible with the venerable 6502. GEOS was a dream, but most games and even application software became unusable.
But yes, i agree - Commodore had a lot of great ideas which ended up dead and rotten due to poor, poor management. Well, at least i keep my memories...
Like someone commented in another story... "xkcd on the frontpage? Hell, this is digg".
The only one i've heard of (for Windows) is Foxit PDF reader, which is about 2mb - never tried it myself though. On linux, Evince works great, and had no issues with everything i've thrown at it.
This whole idea of 'choice overload' is so much drivel, IMHO. And, no, I'm not trying to flame here.
:)
Ditto. You think too many choices of programming languages is a bad thing? Let's have two. And let one be Perl, that should be fun to watch.
(Yes, i do like Perl
It's not that big - in fact, if you'd place it on the back of the device it wouldn't be much bigger that a regular LCD display. My guess the point of it is to emphasize the thinness of the device, even when it's due of moving the bulk of it somewhere else :) OLED displays can be very thin though, since you don't need then glass substrates and polarizers required for LCDs and such.
One thing I have wondered is if there is any RAM based solutions like this.
Where a board or a box would allow a computer to treat a bunch of RAM as a drive.
You could always stuff more memory in your PC and use a ramdisk driver. Anyway, i know such devices exists (solid-state drives using DRAM), but i never got a chance to try one...
our childish "uh oh" introduction, your completely un-cited "a lot of issues" comment, and your vague "I recall" interruption reveal the fact that you're spouting off some crap on a subject you have no direct, real-world experience with. Find another subject with which to stroke your ego kid, because you're looking like a pompous dumbass on this one.
:) Thanks!
The specs for a 256Mb NAND flash memory chip by Samsung (which is by far the biggest NAND flash manufacturer today) quotes 100k millon write/erase cycles, and this is for an IC commonly used in USB pendrives. The figure usually tends to get worse with increased memory sizes since the memory "element" (float gate) becomes smaller. For example, Modern 16Mb chips, which are the ones i have experience with, usualy quote 1 million W/E cycles endurance.
But, it felt good stroking my ego a bit more
Funny...
*looks at his K6-III booting from a PCI-SATA card.*
That'd be a PCI SATA controller card? You can boot from them alright, but the article mentions that drivers are available for several platforms - if drivers are involved, it's most likely not using a regular ATA/SATA interfase.