Look, I know you don't see many toasters with fuzzy logic memory, or espresso machines or coffee machines, but you live where you live and see what you see. There are entire countries and continents where they're very common - Japan, Hong Kong, Europe.
We have flash USB devices in use at our campus and more advanced ones in development. In fact, they are used for fancy toasters (especially used in Asian communities) which have individual settings and adjustments. The first ones had to be kept plugged in as they used a minor charge to power memory storage - more recent ones can be unplugged as they have longer standby and in fact some use flash to store each user's bread/toast/bagel/etc setting. Just because you don't care about this and fail to understand why someone would want it (I don't, I have a simple toaster and just use a slide bar to adjust it, a simple lever mechanism), doesn't mean that you are everyone.
Pick up a copy of some glam magazine for condo dwellers in NYC or Seattle or San Fran or LA if you don't believe me - LOOK at the ads, read the text - they buy these things.
I buy a simple espresso machine - they buy fancy doodad ones.
Again - READ the source scientific paper for this - it's on Science Direct - these things are actually referred to in the paper. You're going off an article (or summary of an article) about a paper - the paper is much much longer and much more detailed.
I think the grandparent poster is right on that this should be thought of as a medium-long term goal. Get all of the manufacturers to switch over soon, and let natural attrition shrink the "old power supply" pool while increasing the efficent pool. Eco-hippies can be early adopters if they like, but from a financal standpoint it will take a rather large increase in the cost of power or a significant drop in the cost of efficent power supplies to make this worthwhile.
In the original scientific paper on which this was based, they actually went into detail on anticipated aging and replacement of power supplies. The paper pointed out that, failing incentives, they tended to be swapped out much more slowly than thought, and were recycled far more often than people realize. This applied especially to industrial and large commercial usage. I remember working on mercury and PCB-based transformers, for example, in industrial uses, which had been in operation or kept for temporary standy usage, even though they were many decades old, at the time that more modern transformers were still being brought in based on designs finalized and manufactured eight years beforehand.
Details at Science Direct (institutional subscription required, at most universities/colleges/libraries).
1. Those of us who don't unplug devices in between uses, such as coffee makers and toasters, put a heavier load on the line than when nothing is plugged in (in general, but not always).
Wrong. Most simple appliances like these don't use any power at all when they're not in use. Now if you're talking about these fancy new overpriced toasters with microprocessors in them, you might be right, but my perfectly good $10 toaster has a browning control and a lever; when the lever is up, the toaster is off.
Again, I said in general, but not always. I have a toaster and an espresso machine I unplug, but if you have one that has fuzzy logic toasting circuits ("Would you like toast with your hot cocoa?"), then unplugging it unlearns it. If it uses flash memory (very new expensive ones) this is not a problem, but I've seen many devices with clocks, user settings, and non-flash storage.
3. The number of USB ports on your computer probably has no measurable affect on your power consumption. Don't be silly.
And what the hell are you talking about here with cars? Do you not understand the meaning of "efficient"? North American cars are inefficient, especially larger vehicles. More horsepower leads directly to lower fuel economy.
Again, you fail to understand. The number of USB ports means you have more bus circuits to interface, more clock cycle checks, more total power supply to handle possible loads, and the increased mass makes it harder to cool the laptop.
As to cars, my point is we could have chosen to just increase fuel economy without increasing power (HP), but we went the other way, getting more HP per gallon. We do this with many things - just look at the giant HDTV screens. The only good thing about the bigger screens is we dumped CRT technology and now use lower-energy screens that actually use less energy than the smaller ones, and since they kick out less heat (inefficiency usually means heat) they have less cooling power needs as well.
Technically, we could build 100 mpg cars today if we didn't make them have as many HP as they do.
As to your reply to 4, flash media is in fact useful for many data storage uses where the data need not respond instantaneously and is not frequently accessed, but must be readily available. A drive has a delay time and a motor, and the mass makes it harder to cool. Proper data storage media usage can cut power consumption dramatically. Just realizing that putting it underground with air circulation used to heat other systems that use heat has decreased energy consumption on many Air Force Bases and Army Bases.
Yeah nice one. Now you're just spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Unless you and/or your employer signed up for wind generated power, your laptop runs on electricity probably generated by one of these 3 things: 1) A nuclear power plant, 2) a coal fired plant that generates steam that then runs turbines to generate electricity, 3) another power plant with coal replaced by natural gas.
Or, you live in the Pacific Northwest - British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon - and get 90 percent of your power from hydroelectricity, and you can buy green power (wind or solar) to replace the last 10 percent.
Or, you live in Ontario, Quebec, Vermont and other places that buy cheap hydropower from Quebec.
1. Those of us who don't unplug devices in between uses, such as coffee makers and toasters, put a heavier load on the line than when nothing is plugged in (in general, but not always).
2. Keeping our old Win PCs as Linux boxen may have been cool, but when you think of the load for the internal fans, power supplies - usually we buy heavy duty overpowered ones - and other parts, you may want to consider recycling the oldest ones so that China can get the lead pollution (except in the EU).
3. One reason we have a gas crisis is when they made cars, Americans (and Canadians) tended to buy a much more powerful car that was more efficient, so instead of a lower horsepower car getting 60 to 100 mpg, we get more efficient more powerful higher horsepower cars that get the same mileage as before - this psychology is frequently at work on many of us, in terms of computers. I have way more USB ports than I probably need.
4. Most of the drain is really server farms used for commercial reasons, and the cooling power for them - If we moved to more flash media and related technology we might make more of an impact in this area, just as realizing more RAM is usually more efficient than more disk space.
Another thing. Have you ever watched someone play video games with a regular controller. Most people look pretty stupid.
"A slack jaw, and not much to say..." (song lyrics)
Yeah, I'd rather have people look in my window and see me getting a bit of exercise than resemble Cartman on the World of Warcraft episode of South Park.
Quite frankly, hearing that the Wii controller is sturdy enough is great, as half of why I'm so interested is that it forces me or my son (and friends) to get up off the couch to play. Don't think we'll be diving behind the couch like they show in a lot of the trailers and movies, though.
But I will have to vacuum and pick up a lot more regularly - there goes my stack of magazines...
You can't pop down the street to the cafe and surf the net to see how many hours it will be before the fire truck you paid for with your Seattle taxes actually shows up.
Especially if you're blind or vision-disabled, as graphics won't work properly with their new system.
So, if you're a blind Seattleite, it's NOT an "improvement".
In Seattle wireless joe, we post from our laptops as we wait outside game stops drinking coffee from the next door starbucks.
Exactly. I guess the rest of America doesn't have wireless everywhere - about half the city has pretty much free wireless or you can buy coffee and use it. Most of us have laptops with wireless or blackberry or something.
When I dropped of my son at Pacific Place for the EBX line there, there were about 20 people, probably half of them had laptops.
I agree, I bought a number of consoles on game day launch at Costco. Plus, they tended to sell them in a bundle with a few extra games, so it was usually worth it.
If you miss out on the EBX/Gamestop preorder, plan on going to Costco or Toys-R-Us or Target on launch day in the morning - head straight for the game area - this includes Fred Meyer (yes, they sell games). Price is usually the same, but less lines.
Nintendo plans on having 10 million units ready by Christmas, well over there expected original estimate of 7 million. In contrast the 360 had 250,000 units ready last year and the PS3 only 400,000 expected by christmas.
In the duplicate slashdot submission I made about the EBX and Gamestop preorders yesterday, I mentioned that Nintendo has 10 million units worldwide, but only 4 million for the US market.
Gamestop and EBX only get some of the allocation. Target, Best Buy, and Costco have their own allocations. If you can't get a preorder from EBX or Gamestop (same company, same allocation), you should be able to get them from any of the other game console sellers.
Worst case - phone up all the stores in your area and see WHO is selling them on launch day - and go to one of the less popular ones. People tend to queue up at the fancy mall stores, so think about going to a smaller outlet instead.
and also gave links to some of the WSJ and Fortune articles about how the Sony PS3 parts shortage means it will be harder to get a PS3 than to get a Wii, but that the Wii is still in every game store's top three anticipated hot sellers this year.
My son's down there with a friend from high school lined up to preorder a Wii - $50 at EBX at Pacific Place in Seattle - they had 8 people lined up outside the mall at 2 am (friend's older brother is 8th in line) and there were about 20 when I dropped my son and his friend off to wait for the 10 am store opening.
There's another store 2 blocks away, just in case, at Westlake Mall, but they open doors later, but same store opening time.
Don't worry, you can always get it at Target, Best Buy, Costco, and other stores if you miss out on the pre-order for this one.
If it's measured in units, then every person using a Windows box to run Firefox or Opera is also counted as an IE user. And, if you update for bug fixes on a Windows box, that counts as "using IE" (just did that today, even though I never use IE for anything else).
If it's measured in dollars, the figures are wrong, as IE is "free" so Opera has the largest "paid" marketshare.
And if it's measured in lupins per square inch, well then tickle me twice and call me a pumpkin internet generator!
Cost of WinVista Kernel DRM - part of the $300 price of WinVista Cost of hair torn out by DRM refusing to let you do what the Constitution explicity permits - $1000 for hair plugs Cost of WinVista hack to "fix" Kernal DRM - priceless
If I were looking for early-adopter flaws, I'd select some that have actually been fixed. Even slimline PS2s suffer more drive failures than any other optical-drive console I've ever used.
Well, yeah, but if you didn't leave it on the rug where your cat sleeps, it would probably last a bit longer.
Oh, wait, it's an overpriced PS3 with DRM Blu-Ray.
Never mind. Wasn't going to even think about those until the price dropped to $250 US anyways.
Besides, have you noticed Microsoft is pushing Japanese games for the 360? Between that and the Wii the only "demand" for PS3 is due to the artificial shortage created when they decreased the number of units shipped to one-quarter of the firm demand levels.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I know you don't see many toasters with fuzzy logic memory, or espresso machines or coffee machines, but you live where you live and see what you see. There are entire countries and continents where they're very common - Japan, Hong Kong, Europe.
We have flash USB devices in use at our campus and more advanced ones in development. In fact, they are used for fancy toasters (especially used in Asian communities) which have individual settings and adjustments. The first ones had to be kept plugged in as they used a minor charge to power memory storage - more recent ones can be unplugged as they have longer standby and in fact some use flash to store each user's bread/toast/bagel/etc setting. Just because you don't care about this and fail to understand why someone would want it (I don't, I have a simple toaster and just use a slide bar to adjust it, a simple lever mechanism), doesn't mean that you are everyone.
Pick up a copy of some glam magazine for condo dwellers in NYC or Seattle or San Fran or LA if you don't believe me - LOOK at the ads, read the text - they buy these things.
I buy a simple espresso machine - they buy fancy doodad ones.
Again - READ the source scientific paper for this - it's on Science Direct - these things are actually referred to in the paper. You're going off an article (or summary of an article) about a paper - the paper is much much longer and much more detailed.
I think the grandparent poster is right on that this should be thought of as a medium-long term goal. Get all of the manufacturers to switch over soon, and let natural attrition shrink the "old power supply" pool while increasing the efficent pool. Eco-hippies can be early adopters if they like, but from a financal standpoint it will take a rather large increase in the cost of power or a significant drop in the cost of efficent power supplies to make this worthwhile.
In the original scientific paper on which this was based, they actually went into detail on anticipated aging and replacement of power supplies. The paper pointed out that, failing incentives, they tended to be swapped out much more slowly than thought, and were recycled far more often than people realize. This applied especially to industrial and large commercial usage. I remember working on mercury and PCB-based transformers, for example, in industrial uses, which had been in operation or kept for temporary standy usage, even though they were many decades old, at the time that more modern transformers were still being brought in based on designs finalized and manufactured eight years beforehand.
Details at Science Direct (institutional subscription required, at most universities/colleges/libraries).
1. Those of us who don't unplug devices in between uses, such as coffee makers and toasters, put a heavier load on the line than when nothing is plugged in (in general, but not always).
Wrong. Most simple appliances like these don't use any power at all when they're not in use. Now if you're talking about these fancy new overpriced toasters with microprocessors in them, you might be right, but my perfectly good $10 toaster has a browning control and a lever; when the lever is up, the toaster is off.
Again, I said in general, but not always. I have a toaster and an espresso machine I unplug, but if you have one that has fuzzy logic toasting circuits ("Would you like toast with your hot cocoa?"), then unplugging it unlearns it. If it uses flash memory (very new expensive ones) this is not a problem, but I've seen many devices with clocks, user settings, and non-flash storage.
3. The number of USB ports on your computer probably has no measurable affect on your power consumption. Don't be silly.
And what the hell are you talking about here with cars? Do you not understand the meaning of "efficient"? North American cars are inefficient, especially larger vehicles. More horsepower leads directly to lower fuel economy.
Again, you fail to understand. The number of USB ports means you have more bus circuits to interface, more clock cycle checks, more total power supply to handle possible loads, and the increased mass makes it harder to cool the laptop.
As to cars, my point is we could have chosen to just increase fuel economy without increasing power (HP), but we went the other way, getting more HP per gallon. We do this with many things - just look at the giant HDTV screens. The only good thing about the bigger screens is we dumped CRT technology and now use lower-energy screens that actually use less energy than the smaller ones, and since they kick out less heat (inefficiency usually means heat) they have less cooling power needs as well.
Technically, we could build 100 mpg cars today if we didn't make them have as many HP as they do.
As to your reply to 4, flash media is in fact useful for many data storage uses where the data need not respond instantaneously and is not frequently accessed, but must be readily available. A drive has a delay time and a motor, and the mass makes it harder to cool. Proper data storage media usage can cut power consumption dramatically. Just realizing that putting it underground with air circulation used to heat other systems that use heat has decreased energy consumption on many Air Force Bases and Army Bases.
Yeah nice one. Now you're just spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
Unless you and/or your employer signed up for wind generated power, your laptop runs on electricity probably generated by one of these 3 things:
1) A nuclear power plant,
2) a coal fired plant that generates steam that then runs turbines to generate electricity,
3) another power plant with coal replaced by natural gas.
Or, you live in the Pacific Northwest - British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon - and get 90 percent of your power from hydroelectricity, and you can buy green power (wind or solar) to replace the last 10 percent.
Or, you live in Ontario, Quebec, Vermont and other places that buy cheap hydropower from Quebec.
1. Those of us who don't unplug devices in between uses, such as coffee makers and toasters, put a heavier load on the line than when nothing is plugged in (in general, but not always).
2. Keeping our old Win PCs as Linux boxen may have been cool, but when you think of the load for the internal fans, power supplies - usually we buy heavy duty overpowered ones - and other parts, you may want to consider recycling the oldest ones so that China can get the lead pollution (except in the EU).
3. One reason we have a gas crisis is when they made cars, Americans (and Canadians) tended to buy a much more powerful car that was more efficient, so instead of a lower horsepower car getting 60 to 100 mpg, we get more efficient more powerful higher horsepower cars that get the same mileage as before - this psychology is frequently at work on many of us, in terms of computers. I have way more USB ports than I probably need.
4. Most of the drain is really server farms used for commercial reasons, and the cooling power for them - If we moved to more flash media and related technology we might make more of an impact in this area, just as realizing more RAM is usually more efficient than more disk space.
Ah. Ok. But where's Rayman's Rabid Rabbits?
Another thing. Have you ever watched someone play video games with a regular controller. Most people look pretty stupid.
..." (song lyrics)
"A slack jaw, and not much to say
Yeah, I'd rather have people look in my window and see me getting a bit of exercise than resemble Cartman on the World of Warcraft episode of South Park.
Quite frankly, hearing that the Wii controller is sturdy enough is great, as half of why I'm so interested is that it forces me or my son (and friends) to get up off the couch to play. Don't think we'll be diving behind the couch like they show in a lot of the trailers and movies, though.
...
But I will have to vacuum and pick up a lot more regularly - there goes my stack of magazines
good point. If they disabled the ADA-required text version (which can be used for data), they're in violation of federal requirements.
You can't pop down the street to the cafe and surf the net to see how many hours it will be before the fire truck you paid for with your Seattle taxes actually shows up.
Especially if you're blind or vision-disabled, as graphics won't work properly with their new system.
So, if you're a blind Seattleite, it's NOT an "improvement".
This little gamer got none.
This little gamer cried "Wii Wii Wii" all the way home.
And this little gamer went to Costco, Toys-R-Us, Kmart, Target, Fred Meyer on release day and got a bundled Wii for less.
In Seattle wireless joe, we post from our laptops as we wait outside game stops drinking coffee from the next door starbucks.
Exactly. I guess the rest of America doesn't have wireless everywhere - about half the city has pretty much free wireless or you can buy coffee and use it. Most of us have laptops with wireless or blackberry or something.
When I dropped of my son at Pacific Place for the EBX line there, there were about 20 people, probably half of them had laptops.
I agree, I bought a number of consoles on game day launch at Costco. Plus, they tended to sell them in a bundle with a few extra games, so it was usually worth it.
If you miss out on the EBX/Gamestop preorder, plan on going to Costco or Toys-R-Us or Target on launch day in the morning - head straight for the game area - this includes Fred Meyer (yes, they sell games). Price is usually the same, but less lines.
Nintendo plans on having 10 million units ready by Christmas, well over there expected original estimate of 7 million. In contrast the 360 had 250,000 units ready last year and the PS3 only 400,000 expected by christmas.
In the duplicate slashdot submission I made about the EBX and Gamestop preorders yesterday, I mentioned that Nintendo has 10 million units worldwide, but only 4 million for the US market.
Gamestop and EBX only get some of the allocation. Target, Best Buy, and Costco have their own allocations. If you can't get a preorder from EBX or Gamestop (same company, same allocation), you should be able to get them from any of the other game console sellers.
Worst case - phone up all the stores in your area and see WHO is selling them on launch day - and go to one of the less popular ones. People tend to queue up at the fancy mall stores, so think about going to a smaller outlet instead.
dude, you forgot to preorder Mario Galaxy and Spore!
and also gave links to some of the WSJ and Fortune articles about how the Sony PS3 parts shortage means it will be harder to get a PS3 than to get a Wii, but that the Wii is still in every game store's top three anticipated hot sellers this year.
My son's down there with a friend from high school lined up to preorder a Wii - $50 at EBX at Pacific Place in Seattle - they had 8 people lined up outside the mall at 2 am (friend's older brother is 8th in line) and there were about 20 when I dropped my son and his friend off to wait for the 10 am store opening.
There's another store 2 blocks away, just in case, at Westlake Mall, but they open doors later, but same store opening time.
Don't worry, you can always get it at Target, Best Buy, Costco, and other stores if you miss out on the pre-order for this one.
If it's measured in users, it makes sense.
If it's measured in units, then every person using a Windows box to run Firefox or Opera is also counted as an IE user. And, if you update for bug fixes on a Windows box, that counts as "using IE" (just did that today, even though I never use IE for anything else).
If it's measured in dollars, the figures are wrong, as IE is "free" so Opera has the largest "paid" marketshare.
And if it's measured in lupins per square inch, well then tickle me twice and call me a pumpkin internet generator!
Cost of WinVista Kernel DRM - part of the $300 price of WinVista
Cost of hair torn out by DRM refusing to let you do what the Constitution explicity permits - $1000 for hair plugs
Cost of WinVista hack to "fix" Kernal DRM - priceless
If I were looking for early-adopter flaws, I'd select some that have actually been fixed. Even slimline PS2s suffer more drive failures than any other optical-drive console I've ever used.
Well, yeah, but if you didn't leave it on the rug where your cat sleeps, it would probably last a bit longer.
then why were all the n00bz camped out for the PS3 this week?
Are they buying a PS3, reselling it for profit, and using the cash to pick up a Wii with a killer load of titles?
Or don't they know the OS still has bugs in it, according to the latest slashdot news?
Not according to the print editions of the Wall Street Journal and Fortune that I read.
...
Full capacity is determined by supply of parts - if you choke off purchases of parts and all
Yeah, my son want to get the Zelda title too. Not sure what we'll get at first.
How long until Animal Crossing: Revenge of the Hampster comes out?
Well, first I have to get my skilz up at playing tennis, golf, fishing, and all that with the bundled Sports.
You have to walk before you can leap from star to star!
Oh, wait, it's an overpriced PS3 with DRM Blu-Ray.
Never mind. Wasn't going to even think about those until the price dropped to $250 US anyways.
Besides, have you noticed Microsoft is pushing Japanese games for the 360? Between that and the Wii the only "demand" for PS3 is due to the artificial shortage created when they decreased the number of units shipped to one-quarter of the firm demand levels.
I'll be happily playing Mario Galaxy, thanks.
Maybe he shouldn't have said "let there be light" ...