They use actually use them to heat in the winter, which is more challenging.
The most important thing to remember is that caves and the like have a fairly constant, bearable temperature all year round and at any latitude, and your house can too if you have lots of insulation and a heat pump. If you do it right, you should end up just needing to pump liquid around to get a ultra low thermal resistance to a cave like environment, and lots of insulation to get a ultra high thermal resistance to the too hot/too cold outside.
Actually, I looked it up, and caves have a temperature close to the the mean surface temperature, which is probably quite good for people, certainly much better than outside which has +-25 degree Celsius swings.
If you live somewhere like California, you'd be more interested in cooling in the summer of course, but in the long run you have the advantage over the Swedes that solar power is more practical at the time of year that you need to run the system on full power, which is definitely not true for them. Even if you don't have solar panels yourself, you should still see a drop in electricity spot prices caused by solar electricity flooding the market. In Germany (not sure about Sweden), they have a law that forces electricity companies to buy power back at the same price they sell it to encourage this sort of thing. Solar power is too expensive at the moment for any of this to matter much and none of these countries have particularly open markets for electricity, but I suspect that won't be the case for much longer.
I wonder if Intel OEMs can get away with calling an Intel® Core Duo T2400 an "Intel Pentium M Dual Core T2400 1.83GHz Processor"
If I were Intel, I'd set the Bunny People on 'em. And nix their allocation for Merom too. OEMs, especially small ones without that bastard Jobs in charge need to learn some damn Respect.
Notably, this comes during a record breaking heat wave here in the US. So has the day finally arrived where I can run my AC off of all that heat outdoors
I guess you're making a perpetual motion joke, but the strange thing is it's not a daft as it sounds.
You could have an electrically powered heat pump to pump heat into the ground in summer, and back out again in winter.
If you insulate your house enough, the energy required to heat or cool it is pretty minimal, so you could generate it from solar panels, at least in the summer. And heat pumps are 3 to 4 times more than resistive electric heaters.
When used for heating on a mild day, a typical heat pump has a COP of three to four, whereas a typical resistive electric heater has a COP of one. That is, one joule of electrical energy will cause a conventional heater to give off one joule of warmth, while under ideal conditions, one joule of electrical energy can cause a heat pump to move more than one joule of heat from a cooler place to a warmer place. Sometimes this is expressed as an efficiency value greater than 100%, as in the statement, "XYZ brand heat pumps operate at up to 400% efficiency!" This is not quite accurate, since the work does not make heat, but moves existing heat "upstream". This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, because it takes less work to move the heat than to make the heat.
I think they mean a singularity in the boingboing sense.
BTW, have you seen my new iBook? I have it engraved with a load of Web 2.0 buzzwords. Singularity is in there somewhere, I'm sure. Now, if you excuse me, I'm off to download a mashup of Ray Kurzweil's lectures with some thrash metal off bitorrent. I got some bluetooth wireless speakers for the iBook the other day, they're in the shape of an old 1940's wireless, so I'll listen to it on that.
Not if they use wear levelling they don't. Each 512 byte sector can be anywhere on the physical media, and there's a clever translation mechanism to keep track of this. So the FAT filesystem may write sector 1 very frequently, sector 1 moves all over the physical media.
So rather than 10000 pictures, you should get 10000*(Media_Size) / (Picture_Size)
You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price. The odds are that the neither will notice the difference in performance given the volume of pictures they take.
It seems to me as if nerds, with a natural ability with details are vulnerable to decommoditization of hardware, something which they're paranoid about in software.
The idea is that you can sell a generic performance product $x and a 'high end product for discerning consumers' at $2x. The high end product may actually have a lower performance for price one, but everyone wants to a be a 'discerning consumer', 'early adopter' and so on.
Is there really any difference between someone who willingly overspends by several hundred percent on ultra high end storage devices, so they can transfer the few pictures they take a year a second or so quicker and someone who does the same on sports shoes so they can pose in the mall?
Because Microsoft must be destroyed! All their employees must be killed, their headquarters in Redmond must be bulldozed, and the earth doused with water blessed by RMS. That's what the conflict of interest is.
The first few will be a bit borked it's true. Give the scientists time and they'll surely get it right eventually.
And there are lots of jobs now that can be done with abnormal growth patterns and breathing difficulties. Really, how fit do you need to work in an office.
If we can figure out a way to make some of them have a _much_ higher boredom threshold, we'd have a perfect society.
Intel? Don'tcha just love 'em? Conroe is wiping the floor with AMD's aging Athlon 64 Chips right now at 2.6Ghz. Intel will really put the MEGAHURTS (Geddit?) on AMD with the 3Ghz Core Extreme. And Woodcrest and Merom should be 20% faster.
Intel? Don'tcha just hate them. Faced with the failure of the Netburst, they've dug out the aging Pentium 3, and revamped it a bit. Now they're releasing benchmarks for unreleased chips, claiming they'll be faster than a high end AMD64. Doesn't anyone remember Intel leaking outrageously exaggerated benchmarks long before a chip release to limit sales of a competitor's faster chip that's actually available now.
British pounds do score points for having a picture of the Queen on them though. Also, a well thrown £1 or £2 coin can be lethal. And we have a cool symbol, £.
But actually, the real strength of the £ over the Euro is that it's much easier to match interest rates to an economic area the size of the UK than it is to match them to the whole eurozone.
I've noticed the reverse effect for more right wing stuff.
E.g. I can find half a dozen blogs and online essays about how intellectual property rights are a bad thing. I've read some well written stuff about how it's a good idea, but mostly in books / magazines that aren't linkable to.
It's actually pretty wierd to compare conventional wisdom as indexed by Google, with what most economists believe for example. There is some overlap, but they are close to being opposites.
When the system ships, both the OS and the callers use BLOCK_DEV_OP with 32 bit sector numbers. Later on the system supports both and the callers use a mixture. Old callers still use the old one, new callers use the _EX one. The OS can tell which is which from the size parameter.
It's a pity that most people who used purely open source stuff at college never learn about binary compatibility techniques like this.
That's not true. Accesing a contiguous file is faster than accessing a fragmented one no matter what filesystem you use. If you're accessing a lot of files, elevator seeking helps a bit, but it only helps the system performance, not the performance per process. Actually, if the file you need to access is the pagefile, elevator seeking might make things worse for the system, since it has to wait while the disk drive head stops to read other less important data when it should have just gone straight to the pagefile.
And if you have interleaved writes, it's almost impossible to keep files contiguous, since the filesystem can't see the future perfectly.
Of course, better system design, like inode based filesystems, elevator seeking the block io layer, caching, read ahead, and pre allocating make modern OS's less sensitive than old ones, but if you hammer the filesystem and it fragments, it will slow down no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
That bag of meat contains about 6 billion bits of data that's probably pretty important to him.
Yeah, but then he wouldn't have got the +5 mod for mentioning GNU Units.
I heard it's Sodium Nitrite
Some god...
Maybe "god" needs an upgrade or two?
Looks like he's got mod points though doesn't it?
They use actually use them to heat in the winter, which is more challenging.
The most important thing to remember is that caves and the like have a fairly constant, bearable temperature all year round and at any latitude, and your house can too if you have lots of insulation and a heat pump. If you do it right, you should end up just needing to pump liquid around to get a ultra low thermal resistance to a cave like environment, and lots of insulation to get a ultra high thermal resistance to the too hot/too cold outside.
Actually, I looked it up, and caves have a temperature close to the the mean surface temperature, which is probably quite good for people, certainly much better than outside which has +-25 degree Celsius swings.
If you live somewhere like California, you'd be more interested in cooling in the summer of course, but in the long run you have the advantage over the Swedes that solar power is more practical at the time of year that you need to run the system on full power, which is definitely not true for them. Even if you don't have solar panels yourself, you should still see a drop in electricity spot prices caused by solar electricity flooding the market. In Germany (not sure about Sweden), they have a law that forces electricity companies to buy power back at the same price they sell it to encourage this sort of thing. Solar power is too expensive at the moment for any of this to matter much and none of these countries have particularly open markets for electricity, but I suspect that won't be the case for much longer.
I wonder if Intel OEMs can get away with calling an Intel® Core Duo T2400 an "Intel Pentium M Dual Core T2400 1.83GHz Processor"
If I were Intel, I'd set the Bunny People on 'em. And nix their allocation for Merom too. OEMs, especially small ones without that bastard Jobs in charge need to learn some damn Respect.
Notably, this comes during a record breaking heat wave here in the US. So has the day finally arrived where I can run my AC off of all that heat outdoors
I guess you're making a perpetual motion joke, but the strange thing is it's not a daft as it sounds.
You could have an electrically powered heat pump to pump heat into the ground in summer, and back out again in winter.
http://www.igshpa.okstate.edu/geothermal/geotherm
Very popular here in Sweden.
If you insulate your house enough, the energy required to heat or cool it is pretty minimal, so you could generate it from solar panels, at least in the summer. And heat pumps are 3 to 4 times more than resistive electric heaters.
As wikipedia puts it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
When used for heating on a mild day, a typical heat pump has a COP of three to four, whereas a typical resistive electric heater has a COP of one. That is, one joule of electrical energy will cause a conventional heater to give off one joule of warmth, while under ideal conditions, one joule of electrical energy can cause a heat pump to move more than one joule of heat from a cooler place to a warmer place. Sometimes this is expressed as an efficiency value greater than 100%, as in the statement, "XYZ brand heat pumps operate at up to 400% efficiency!" This is not quite accurate, since the work does not make heat, but moves existing heat "upstream". This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, because it takes less work to move the heat than to make the heat.
I realize you intended it to be annoying, so well done!
It was supposed to be satire on boingboing's habit of picking up on memes which seem to fit their preconceptions without considering them too deeply.
I think they mean a singularity in the boingboing sense.
e nse/
BTW, have you seen my new iBook? I have it engraved with a load of Web 2.0 buzzwords. Singularity is in there somewhere, I'm sure. Now, if you excuse me, I'm off to download a mashup of Ray Kurzweil's lectures with some thrash metal off bitorrent. I got some bluetooth wireless speakers for the iBook the other day, they're in the shape of an old 1940's wireless, so I'll listen to it on that.
You're right, calling it a singularity is pretty bogus
http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_singularity_is_nons
Not if they use wear levelling they don't. Each 512 byte sector can be anywhere on the physical media, and there's a clever translation mechanism to keep track of this. So the FAT filesystem may write sector 1 very frequently, sector 1 moves all over the physical media.
So rather than 10000 pictures, you should get 10000*(Media_Size) / (Picture_Size)
Which gives some fairly non intuitive lifetimes
You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price. The odds are that the neither will notice the difference in performance given the volume of pictures they take.
It seems to me as if nerds, with a natural ability with details are vulnerable to decommoditization of hardware, something which they're paranoid about in software.
http://www.levien.com/free/decommoditizing.html
The idea is that you can sell a generic performance product $x and a 'high end product for discerning consumers' at $2x. The high end product may actually have a lower performance for price one, but everyone wants to a be a 'discerning consumer', 'early adopter' and so on.
Is there really any difference between someone who willingly overspends by several hundred percent on ultra high end storage devices, so they can transfer the few pictures they take a year a second or so quicker and someone who does the same on sports shoes so they can pose in the mall?
Because Microsoft must be destroyed! All their employees must be killed, their headquarters in Redmond must be bulldozed, and the earth doused with water blessed by RMS. That's what the conflict of interest is.
You must be new here.
How do you know that?
r eviews.detail/book_id/1191
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/
Exactly, small but CPU intensive code is a perfect fit for the SPE's in a cell, or in the instruction cache of one the XBOX 360's 3 PowerPC cores.
Or the mice replace the men, women and robots with more mice.
Not if you look at it from the point of view of their genes.
The first few will be a bit borked it's true. Give the scientists time and they'll surely get it right eventually.
And there are lots of jobs now that can be done with abnormal growth patterns and breathing difficulties. Really, how fit do you need to work in an office.
If we can figure out a way to make some of them have a _much_ higher boredom threshold, we'd have a perfect society.
Quality control is just a euphemism for censorship.
A true GPL Jedi seeks not these things.
Intel? Don'tcha just love 'em? Conroe is wiping the floor with AMD's aging Athlon 64 Chips right now at 2.6Ghz. Intel will really put the MEGAHURTS (Geddit?) on AMD with the 3Ghz Core Extreme. And Woodcrest and Merom should be 20% faster.
Intel? Don'tcha just hate them. Faced with the failure of the Netburst, they've dug out the aging Pentium 3, and revamped it a bit. Now they're releasing benchmarks for unreleased chips, claiming they'll be faster than a high end AMD64. Doesn't anyone remember Intel leaking outrageously exaggerated benchmarks long before a chip release to limit sales of a competitor's faster chip that's actually available now.
British pounds do score points for having a picture of the Queen on them though. Also, a well thrown £1 or £2 coin can be lethal. And we have a cool symbol, £.
But actually, the real strength of the £ over the Euro is that it's much easier to match interest rates to an economic area the size of the UK than it is to match them to the whole eurozone.
I've noticed the reverse effect for more right wing stuff.
E.g. I can find half a dozen blogs and online essays about how intellectual property rights are a bad thing. I've read some well written stuff about how it's a good idea, but mostly in books / magazines that aren't linkable to.
It's actually pretty wierd to compare conventional wisdom as indexed by Google, with what most economists believe for example. There is some overlap, but they are close to being opposites.
Having a size parameter is for versioning. E.g.
BLOCK_DEV_OP
{
UINT32 Size;
UINT32 Function;
UINT32 SectorNumber;
void * pData;
}
There's a size parameter, a function code (e.g. 0 for read, 1 for write), and a sector number.
BLOCK_DEV_OP_EX
{
UINT32 Size;
UINT32 Function;
UINT64 Sector;
void * pData;
}
When the system ships, both the OS and the callers use BLOCK_DEV_OP with 32 bit sector numbers. Later on the system supports both and the callers use a mixture. Old callers still use the old one, new callers use the _EX one. The OS can tell which is which from the size parameter.
It's a pity that most people who used purely open source stuff at college never learn about binary compatibility techniques like this.
That's not true. Accesing a contiguous file is faster than accessing a fragmented one no matter what filesystem you use. If you're accessing a lot of files, elevator seeking helps a bit, but it only helps the system performance, not the performance per process. Actually, if the file you need to access is the pagefile, elevator seeking might make things worse for the system, since it has to wait while the disk drive head stops to read other less important data when it should have just gone straight to the pagefile.
And if you have interleaved writes, it's almost impossible to keep files contiguous, since the filesystem can't see the future perfectly.
Of course, better system design, like inode based filesystems, elevator seeking the block io layer, caching, read ahead, and pre allocating make modern OS's less sensitive than old ones, but if you hammer the filesystem and it fragments, it will slow down no matter what.
I need a drink
We only have thimbles of fine wine, or one gallon containers of Budweiser. What do you want?
sed "s/V1@gra/phosphod1esterase inhib1tors/g" spam_template_v109.txt > spam_template_v110.txt
Hmm, and people say reading slashdot is a waste of time.