This means that when your computer needs 200W the former will draw 266W while the later will draw 500W from the grid...)
I have to admit, that would be a terrific reason to buy an expensive power supply. I didn't see anything in the advertisement about efficiency, though. But I agree that is a real factor.
Precision electronics such as what you find in your computer don't like out of specs tensions
You said it. Which is why you buy a power supply that works within spec and don't waste your money on something overpriced that's even more within the spec that what you've already got. Why is it that everybody argues with my argument by using my argument?
Me: There's no point in buying something better than a supply which gives you acceptable noise limits.
Somebody else: You're an idiot. You need a power supply that operates within the limits of the electronics.
You said you need this and you need that, but you never said why. So, I'll ask: Exactly why does it hurt digital electronics to have small amounts of noise in the rails. For example, if there's a small (say 2%) 60 Hz fluctuation left in the power rails, such that the logic isn't affected, tell me why that will damage the electronics or affect anything badly, for that matter. You have a lot of bluster, but not much fact in your post. As far as I can tell, there's no reason you need "2 decimals precision" in your power rails, and you've given nothing to support that besides the assertion.
"Tension instability is what kills your electronics and fails your hardware." If that were true, then turning on your machine would be the worst thing in the world to do.
However, in PC's that critical value tends to be a lot higher than one expects. Far too often, PC power supplies get really noisy when pushed to anywhere near their maximum rating. The results can be very mysterious - all kinds of components from hard disks to ram "randomly" failing.
I've been lucky enough to never have had a computer fail due to component failure, and I've been using them with their cheap power supplies for about 25 years. But if you get a crappy power supply that is so bad you get failures, and I can certainly believe they exist, then just get a good enough supply. Getting the "best" there is is pointless. It's a power supply. Getting a really expensive power supply is like using a 50 calibre belt-fed machine gun to kill a spider.
He would take a garden-variety $30 NTSC capture card, replace the caps and a few other components in the power supply path and resell it for about $100. The end result was the cleanest video capture short of pro equipment in the $1K+ price range - all because of his improvements to the power circuitry on the cards.
Video capture is analog, so I'm not surprised a good power supply is important there.
In the submitter's defense, he does have a point. If that cheap (but bigass) PSU doesn't put out a clean DC voltage, you're going to see some weird (and possibly intermittent) blips happen to your hardware. Do you think AC turns into DC magically? You need a quality full wave rectifier.
Rectifier? I hardly knew her.
But seriously, folks. Getting DC sufficient for digital is really not that difficult. Any noise in the power supply will just translate into noise in the outputs of the transistors. And as long as that noise is within the margins of the logic, it disappears at the next transistor, so that the noise never "cascades" like it would with analog processing. That's the magic of digital. Hard to believe it would be hard to convince people of that on/. of all places, but I guess people loves them their pretty blue power supplies.
My point is that an inadequate or low-quality power supply with inadequate guage wires, poor current filtering, etc., will work only so long as it doesn't destroy your hardware.
Which was my point, too, so I guess we don't have an argument!:-) I don't think the company in the article is really touting their product as a way to keep your PC from destroying itself, however. I think they're trying to fool l88t 'users' into buying it thinking it will make their system better.
Yhat 100$ (never seen a 100$ one, but have seen quite a few 30$ cables) cable is important to some (in an audio system it can reduce transmission errors.
You can't reduce transmission errors if you've got zero transmission errors to begin with!
That's exactly what you're going to get with even the cheap cables. We're talking about transmitting low bit-rate optical data over a few feet. The noise margin is so high there's really no point for a good cable. To test this theory, I was able to get a digital lock on my reciever by just holding the cable in my hand a few millimeters from the output port on my DVD. Single-mode 40 GB/s long-haul optics this isn't!
If anybody spends the money on expensive digital cables (i.e. Monster) they are getting snookered. They'll buy the digital system and listen to the sales guy when he says "Digital is great, you get perfect transmission through the various components of your system" and then they'll turn around and buy the high-end cables from the same guy when he contradicts himself and says "you need Monster cables, dude, they preserve the full integrity of your sensitive digital signals."
Anyhow, in a computer system, especially one with a high end video card and the latest CPU, a PSU with a tonne of rock solid stable rails is important, particulary if you enjoy overclocking.
Give me a break. If power supplies were the limiting factor to processor performance, I assure you Intel would be putting their research into power supplies instead of busting their balls to improve clock speed by building billion dollar fabs.
Regardless, it's irrelevent to my argument. I simply said that as long as you have a power supply that is functioning adequately, you're not going to get any better performance from a "better" power supply. Do you not agree?
I'm not being naive, but somebody is if they think they are going to replace their adequately functioning power supply and somehow get a performance boost. You simply argued that you saw a case where a power supply was below the threshold for minimum performance. That doesn't refute my argument one iota. My point was that for a given digital system you can divide power supplies into two groups: those that work and those that don't. There's no point in doing anything other than picking the cheapest one from the former category. These guys are selling snake oil, plain and simple.
It seems to me that one of the whole points of digital is that as long as the power rails are above some sufficient level of performance, any improvement in performance is pointless. Power supply noise isn't an issue below some critical value. This reminds me of the crooks who try to sell people on $100 digital audio fiber optic cable for "higher fidelity."
Don't you ever get tired of looking for ways to blame the parents. You do realize that no matter how much you try to educate someone there is always the possibility that no matter what they will end up doing exactly what you told them not to.
True, but probably irrelevent in the present context. Any change in habits between generations can certainly be attributed (at least as a possibility) to parenting or society given that we're probably not evolving as a species on a time scale of 50 years. So if there is an increase in kids driving drunk (which actually hasn't even been discussed here yet) blaming shitty parenting is probably a good place to start.
That's a terrible analogy, and quoting it from somebody else doesn't change that. Nobody is saying you do nothing. People were saying that no OS is perfect and there will always be attacks as long as there are users. A better analogy would be "It doesn't matter which brand safe you use since none of them will protect you if you're stupid and leave the door open."
90% 85% 95%.. doesn't matter. The market share IE enjoys in no way reflective of it's quality. I know a bunch of supply-sidings free market zealots on slashdot will moan about it, "Let the market decide which is the better *product*." If that were the case here, IE would have a 1% share of the browser market.
I love how this tripe is modded up, but if somebody writes a thoughtful comment that doesn't stroke the/. orthodoxy, it gets modded down as flamebait. Consider the possibility that the reason IE is still around is that it's a pretty good browser and Firefox isn't such a mind blowing work of genius that everybody can't help but upgrade. I hate Microsoft, too, but have to admit that Firefox has its problems, such as the fact that it leaks memory like crazy. Firefox often shows over 100 MB usage after a few hours, whereas IE never seems to grow much past 40 MB.
It's telling that in the face of dominance by something you hate, you resort to conspiracy and failure of our economic system before considering the possibility that your assumptions are wrong. What's the definition of zealot, again?
What in the crap is this, Slashdot? Moderators on...something much worse than crack?
Thanks for pointing it out, it is a little frustrating. Some of my best posts have been modded up, and then modded down by people with agendas. I think we need to keep moderation, but quit making it anonymous. You should be able to know your accuser. I don't think my post was flamebait, and it certainly wasn't meant to be.
I don't share the grandparent's cynicism, because I do think it has a chance of working. His position isn't entirely unreasonable, though, just looking at the facts.
For the record, I think it will work, too. I just don't think it will happen in our lifetimes. Looking at the rate of progress to date at getting coherently entangled systems, I think that's warranted. The NMR guys are tapped out, and right now I don't think the atom guys have more than a few bits working. I'm not being critical of those in the field; they are all smarter than me and working on an unbelievably hard problem. I was just trying to make a statement about the challenge, as well as a statement about the way scientists game funding agencies. And we do, all the time. I figured people would appreciate somebody being honest about the fact that public money is often awarded based on who can shift with the hype the fastest. (Look at how many electrical engineers have suddenly become "bioengineers," and how quickly materials scientists doing the same research they've always done are now doing "nanomaterials," as if crystals suddenly changed their dimensions in the mid-nineties.)
Well, actually I meant prime factoring, i.e. factoring any integer into its constituent primes. You are right that what I wrote is technically trivial.
What I want to know is, how much further? How can we increase the multiples more? For example, what happened to quantum processing and multiple states for a bit instead of 0 and 1? When can I count my bits 0, 1 and.5? Any supercomputer geeks care to postulate?
Don't worry about quantum computing. It's only going to help the NSA as there are only a limited number of algorithms which will be worth it, namely factoring prime numbers. The power requirements are going to be huge, and by the time they figure out how to keep more than 128 qubits coherent long enough to do a computation, you'll be long dead.
Quantum computing is just a clever way for physicists to get money out of the government to study the kinds of stuff they really want to study. They just mention that their project could eventually be used to build a quantum computer (which covers about 90% of physics research) and the Feds throw money at them like it was cookies.
Physicists aren't dumb, you know, but the people working for funding agencies are. So just because you hear the latest buzzwords, be it, "quantum computing" or "nano-blah-blah-blah" just remember that it's probably just scientists gaming the funding system. The research changes very little, but the hype is always moving.
Man, there's a lot of shitty physics in this thread. The water will automatically get to sea level for free, even if it comes from the bottom of the ocean. Then all you'd have to do is pump it the rest of the way to the final location, which for most of the country is only a few hundred feet or so.
Did anybody else notice that the "uber" keyboard looks suspiciously like one of the old IBM PC keyboards from the green screen days?
I think they found an old warehouse full of them and one of them said "I bet you I can sell these things." "No way, $1000 says you can't sell em." "Shit, double or nothing I can sell them for $80 each." "You're on, fool"
If it's really that remote, how the hell does he get power? Does he have a solar powered PC? That would be pretty cool. Surfing the net off the grid has a certain cache, if you ask me.
You're wrong. Read what i wrote again and find the logical mistake in your proposition.
Why don't you indulge me and just tell me what you think my logical mistake was. Obviously, I'm incapable of such an analysis, or I would've corrected it myself.
The fact that US's military can kick everyone else's ass is really not that cool. As a matter of fact, it's one among many reasons that provide terrorists with motivation.
You have no idea what you're talking about. We've been a military hegemon for half a century, and only a target of muslim extremists for a few decades. The reason the islamofascists want us dead has to do with our intervention in the middle east, for the most part.
Although tempted to say "grow up", i'll refrain myself from doing so, just so that I don't become a childish ass and someone else can actually read what i wrote instead of flaming me.
You didn't refrain from saying it. That was about the dumbest thing I've ever read on slashdot, and that's saying a lot. But I'll refrain from saying that.
If their server couldn't handle it, then perhaps we can see why IBM can afford to fire these guys. Perhaps they did as good an IT job for IBM as they did for the union.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are the assholes that mod down my posts as flamebait? This shit gets modded up?
I have to admit, that would be a terrific reason to buy an expensive power supply. I didn't see anything in the advertisement about efficiency, though. But I agree that is a real factor.
Precision electronics such as what you find in your computer don't like out of specs tensions
You said it. Which is why you buy a power supply that works within spec and don't waste your money on something overpriced that's even more within the spec that what you've already got. Why is it that everybody argues with my argument by using my argument?
Me: There's no point in buying something better than a supply which gives you acceptable noise limits.
Somebody else: You're an idiot. You need a power supply that operates within the limits of the electronics.
You said you need this and you need that, but you never said why. So, I'll ask: Exactly why does it hurt digital electronics to have small amounts of noise in the rails. For example, if there's a small (say 2%) 60 Hz fluctuation left in the power rails, such that the logic isn't affected, tell me why that will damage the electronics or affect anything badly, for that matter. You have a lot of bluster, but not much fact in your post. As far as I can tell, there's no reason you need "2 decimals precision" in your power rails, and you've given nothing to support that besides the assertion.
"Tension instability is what kills your electronics and fails your hardware." If that were true, then turning on your machine would be the worst thing in the world to do.
I've been lucky enough to never have had a computer fail due to component failure, and I've been using them with their cheap power supplies for about 25 years. But if you get a crappy power supply that is so bad you get failures, and I can certainly believe they exist, then just get a good enough supply. Getting the "best" there is is pointless. It's a power supply. Getting a really expensive power supply is like using a 50 calibre belt-fed machine gun to kill a spider.
He would take a garden-variety $30 NTSC capture card, replace the caps and a few other components in the power supply path and resell it for about $100. The end result was the cleanest video capture short of pro equipment in the $1K+ price range - all because of his improvements to the power circuitry on the cards.
Video capture is analog, so I'm not surprised a good power supply is important there.
Rectifier? I hardly knew her.
But seriously, folks. Getting DC sufficient for digital is really not that difficult. Any noise in the power supply will just translate into noise in the outputs of the transistors. And as long as that noise is within the margins of the logic, it disappears at the next transistor, so that the noise never "cascades" like it would with analog processing. That's the magic of digital. Hard to believe it would be hard to convince people of that on /. of all places, but I guess people loves them their pretty blue power supplies.
Which was my point, too, so I guess we don't have an argument!
You can't reduce transmission errors if you've got zero transmission errors to begin with!
That's exactly what you're going to get with even the cheap cables. We're talking about transmitting low bit-rate optical data over a few feet. The noise margin is so high there's really no point for a good cable. To test this theory, I was able to get a digital lock on my reciever by just holding the cable in my hand a few millimeters from the output port on my DVD. Single-mode 40 GB/s long-haul optics this isn't!
If anybody spends the money on expensive digital cables (i.e. Monster) they are getting snookered. They'll buy the digital system and listen to the sales guy when he says "Digital is great, you get perfect transmission through the various components of your system" and then they'll turn around and buy the high-end cables from the same guy when he contradicts himself and says "you need Monster cables, dude, they preserve the full integrity of your sensitive digital signals."
Anyhow, in a computer system, especially one with a high end video card and the latest CPU, a PSU with a tonne of rock solid stable rails is important, particulary if you enjoy overclocking.
Give me a break. If power supplies were the limiting factor to processor performance, I assure you Intel would be putting their research into power supplies instead of busting their balls to improve clock speed by building billion dollar fabs.
Regardless, it's irrelevent to my argument. I simply said that as long as you have a power supply that is functioning adequately, you're not going to get any better performance from a "better" power supply. Do you not agree?
I'm not being naive, but somebody is if they think they are going to replace their adequately functioning power supply and somehow get a performance boost. You simply argued that you saw a case where a power supply was below the threshold for minimum performance. That doesn't refute my argument one iota. My point was that for a given digital system you can divide power supplies into two groups: those that work and those that don't. There's no point in doing anything other than picking the cheapest one from the former category. These guys are selling snake oil, plain and simple.
It seems to me that one of the whole points of digital is that as long as the power rails are above some sufficient level of performance, any improvement in performance is pointless. Power supply noise isn't an issue below some critical value. This reminds me of the crooks who try to sell people on $100 digital audio fiber optic cable for "higher fidelity."
True, but probably irrelevent in the present context. Any change in habits between generations can certainly be attributed (at least as a possibility) to parenting or society given that we're probably not evolving as a species on a time scale of 50 years. So if there is an increase in kids driving drunk (which actually hasn't even been discussed here yet) blaming shitty parenting is probably a good place to start.
That's a terrible analogy, and quoting it from somebody else doesn't change that. Nobody is saying you do nothing. People were saying that no OS is perfect and there will always be attacks as long as there are users. A better analogy would be "It doesn't matter which brand safe you use since none of them will protect you if you're stupid and leave the door open."
I love how this tripe is modded up, but if somebody writes a thoughtful comment that doesn't stroke the /. orthodoxy, it gets modded down as flamebait. Consider the possibility that the reason IE is still around is that it's a pretty good browser and Firefox isn't such a mind blowing work of genius that everybody can't help but upgrade. I hate Microsoft, too, but have to admit that Firefox has its problems, such as the fact that it leaks memory like crazy. Firefox often shows over 100 MB usage after a few hours, whereas IE never seems to grow much past 40 MB.
It's telling that in the face of dominance by something you hate, you resort to conspiracy and failure of our economic system before considering the possibility that your assumptions are wrong. What's the definition of zealot, again?
Thanks for pointing it out, it is a little frustrating. Some of my best posts have been modded up, and then modded down by people with agendas. I think we need to keep moderation, but quit making it anonymous. You should be able to know your accuser. I don't think my post was flamebait, and it certainly wasn't meant to be.
I don't share the grandparent's cynicism, because I do think it has a chance of working. His position isn't entirely unreasonable, though, just looking at the facts.
For the record, I think it will work, too. I just don't think it will happen in our lifetimes. Looking at the rate of progress to date at getting coherently entangled systems, I think that's warranted. The NMR guys are tapped out, and right now I don't think the atom guys have more than a few bits working. I'm not being critical of those in the field; they are all smarter than me and working on an unbelievably hard problem. I was just trying to make a statement about the challenge, as well as a statement about the way scientists game funding agencies. And we do, all the time. I figured people would appreciate somebody being honest about the fact that public money is often awarded based on who can shift with the hype the fastest. (Look at how many electrical engineers have suddenly become "bioengineers," and how quickly materials scientists doing the same research they've always done are now doing "nanomaterials," as if crystals suddenly changed their dimensions in the mid-nineties.)
Well, actually I meant prime factoring, i.e. factoring any integer into its constituent primes. You are right that what I wrote is technically trivial.
Don't worry about quantum computing. It's only going to help the NSA as there are only a limited number of algorithms which will be worth it, namely factoring prime numbers. The power requirements are going to be huge, and by the time they figure out how to keep more than 128 qubits coherent long enough to do a computation, you'll be long dead.
Quantum computing is just a clever way for physicists to get money out of the government to study the kinds of stuff they really want to study. They just mention that their project could eventually be used to build a quantum computer (which covers about 90% of physics research) and the Feds throw money at them like it was cookies.
Physicists aren't dumb, you know, but the people working for funding agencies are. So just because you hear the latest buzzwords, be it, "quantum computing" or "nano-blah-blah-blah" just remember that it's probably just scientists gaming the funding system. The research changes very little, but the hype is always moving.
No, discharging sewage into the ocean can have unintended effects. That's the real problem.
Man, there's a lot of shitty physics in this thread. The water will automatically get to sea level for free, even if it comes from the bottom of the ocean. Then all you'd have to do is pump it the rest of the way to the final location, which for most of the country is only a few hundred feet or so.
You've apparently never visited Boston.
Did anybody else notice that the "uber" keyboard looks suspiciously like one of the old IBM PC keyboards from the green screen days?
I think they found an old warehouse full of them and one of them said
"I bet you I can sell these things."
"No way, $1000 says you can't sell em."
"Shit, double or nothing I can sell them for $80 each."
"You're on, fool"
If it's really that remote, how the hell does he get power? Does he have a solar powered PC? That would be pretty cool. Surfing the net off the grid has a certain cache, if you ask me.
Am I the only guy that can't help but read "ROTS" as "Rolling on the Sith"?
Why don't you indulge me and just tell me what you think my logical mistake was. Obviously, I'm incapable of such an analysis, or I would've corrected it myself.
You have no idea what you're talking about. We've been a military hegemon for half a century, and only a target of muslim extremists for a few decades. The reason the islamofascists want us dead has to do with our intervention in the middle east, for the most part.
Although tempted to say "grow up", i'll refrain myself from doing so, just so that I don't become a childish ass and someone else can actually read what i wrote instead of flaming me.
You didn't refrain from saying it. That was about the dumbest thing I've ever read on slashdot, and that's saying a lot. But I'll refrain from saying that.
My guess is seismographs worldwide will hear two booms, spaced a few seconds apart. The second one will be China or India.
If their server couldn't handle it, then perhaps we can see why IBM can afford to fire these guys. Perhaps they did as good an IT job for IBM as they did for the union.