Back when Dreamcast was starting up, MS offered up their Windows CE as a platform to Sega as the DC OS. It came in late, so the first games didn't use it. But Sega was pressing their developers to use it, and MS was helping out a lot. Japanese DCs came with the text "designed for Windows CE" on the front.
But something happened, Sega got word MS was doing all this because they were working on a gaming machine of their own, a "super Dreamcast". And MS was offering up CE so that when MS' box came out they would have a lineup of games ready to go, or at least easy to port. It would give them a huge legup on all the other competitors in the video game market (including Sega).
So Sega immediately told their developers not to use Windows CE. Only one game came out with Windows CE, Sega Rally (the browser also used CE). And US Dreamcasts say "compatible with Windows CE" on the front.
And not too long after, MS released their machine with a controller which was very similar to the DC controller. Same basic layout, with two additional buttons and the hole in the top for the memory unit display covered (Sega had moved away from the memory cards with displays by that time too).
So, Xbox really was a super Dreamcast, or a Dreamcast 2.0 if you wish.
You have to understand what RAID meant when it was created.
The alternative to RAID was special rack-mount drives, like a Control Data Corporation SMD Sabre drive. These would cost $10K or something because they were special high-capacity units made to a higher reliability spec. Why not use a group of cheaper SCSI or ESDI drives meant for a workstation or even a PC? Since these were only $1K or something, you could put a few of them together in the right combinations to get the amount of storage with the right level of reliability you needed.
This is what Patterson and Katz were thinking, and they were right. Really, the idea of using mass production subassemblies to create systems capable of replacing "big iron" spread out and permeated the entire business. All but themost exotic high-performance systems use the same DIMMs, disks and even processors (well, families) as commodity systems now.
So, even a 15K drive still isn't outside the world of RAID. If the drive had its custom form factor, platter size and possibly its own attachment interface, then it would be non-RAID.
RAID 0 has no redundancy. You have to read each sector from the one point it is on each disk. That means you must seek each disk to the place and then read.
You can do all the seeks in parallel, but without spinding locking, you're gonna need to wait longer (on average) for the sectors you need to rotate under the heads, because you're going to need every read to rotate under the heads, not just half of them.
This is very similar for any RAID other than 1. I mean, with RAID 4 or 5 you still need to bring virtually all the sectors under the head (80% in a system with one parity drive per 4 drives).
I guess in theory with RAID 1 you only have to wait for the first sector of each pair to come under the head. If controllers do that, good on them. I can't imagine they all do. I mean, the overhead in cancelling half your operations once the first of each is completed would be non-trivial.
So I did some numbers. My electric bill is about $40/mo from PG&E. I use about 353KWh/month.
I figured that there are about 6 effective peak hours of generation per day. That is, I get about 12 hours, but if you average it all hour, it's like I get peak sun for 6 hours (Solarbuzz says 5.5) in my area.
Okay, so that means for each $5.20 I spend, I get 6 WH per day. Since I use 11.8KWH/day, that means I need about 2000 peak watts of generation. That means I'd have to spend about $10K on cells (not including tax, and solarbuzz says the PV array is only half the cost of the system). At $40/month, that means it will take me 20 years to get my money back (really, double this), hopefully my cost of new lead-acid batteries every 4 years or so won't turn that 20 years into never.
And that's in sunny California, if I chop down the trees that shade my house and keep it cool. Oh, and I don't even have A/C!
So, what did I do wrong? Where's the magic of solar power here? Sounds like I'd have to take a huge bath to go solar.
"Strategic spot lighting using 12 volt halogen bulbs rather than bathing entire rooms in light minimizes the impact on energy reserves."
Halogen lighting is absurdly inefficient. Incandescent lighting in general is. Imagine if they used fluorescent lighting in their house? Heck, even LED or HID would be much more efficient.
I've never heard of a super-efficent 12V fridge either. Many 12V "fridges" (more like coolers) are god-awful Peltier devices which are about 10% as efficient as a compressor-based system. Even of the compressor-based systems, I'd imagine a 120V one would be more efficient anyway due to fact that high voltages work better for high-load uses.
I don't get why 12V is considered a good thing here. Power loss in a line is proportional to the current through the line. To deliver the same power at 12V as at 120V, you have to run 10X as many amps and thus lose 10X as much power in line losses.
I do agree people could use a lot less power (I am very power usage conscious) and I know conservation is the biggest part of solving our problems with providing energy for the future.
But I also know that not every house is willing to go without refrigeration and ice. What if you have medicines you need to keep?
Finally, having looked lately, it is amazing how much the power coming from the sun varies. Did you know that if the sun is blocked by a cloud the power falling on a panel (and thus the power generated) falles to 10% of full sunlight numbers? And if it's a heavy overcast, it's even worse. This combines to mean that just in much of the country (I think of Michigan, where I grew up), solar power is not viable at this time. We'll know solar power is viable in those parts of the country when people in areas like California and Arizona can't afford not to install cells.
I mean, think of it like this. My monthly electric bill is about $40. If I had sells capable of covering my electric bill in Michigan, I could take the same cells to California where they generate $400 of power per month and sell back $360 worth of power per month! They'd pay themselves back in 18 months.
Well, I don't see every house sprouting solar cells in California yet (although I saw a new PV setup appear on my commute in the last month, I'm jealous), so I know solar power isn't ready for prime time.
And then of course, all this idea of solar houses is predicated on the idea that everyone owns a single-family home. So in order to save power, you have to move to the suburbs and thus drive 14,000 miles a year (at least) in commute plus puttering to the supermarket to get groceries, when in a more efficient city environment you'd use less energy overall.
I have a friend who owns an entire mountain nearby (small one), with a house, entirely off the grid, much as for your friends, running electricity from the grid wasn't very cost-effective. Alternative energy is a reality for him for sure. Of course, just the PV array cost him $30K. I don't know how much cheaper it would be now, I'd hope it would be significantly cheaper.
I've bought WDs almost exclusively for the last 3 years or so. No problems, with drive in all kinds of devices, including 4 of my computers.
I've never been happy with Maxtor, ever since I first had problems with their 330MB and 660MB 5.25" drives back in 1988 ('89?). Their first 3.5" drive (200MB, I believe) was a loser too.
The boxes you talk about with analog and such are not ATSC boxes, they're cable boxes. ATSC is pure digital.
As to ATSC being parochial and backwards, don't confuse popularity with superiority. Cheapness of DVB chips is because DVB is popular. But the popularity of DVB no longer means it is superior to ATSC than the popularity of VHS meant it was better than Beta. I do find the 6MHz fixation of ATSC odd, but that's not that big a problem.
And it isn't parochial either. ATSC was created in 1995. DVB-T was ratified in 1997. This falls along the same lines as saying the US is remiss in that we use phones that are incompatible with GSM. What these people don't understand is we had cell phones before GSM. I personally had a cell phone before GSM was activated anywhere in the world. The GSM people deciced to make a new standard that was incompatible with what the Americans had already done. (The US has since created at least 3 digital systems that are compatible with the existing analog setups.) And in this case, it's perhaps a bit of that. The EU could have embraced ATSC, instead they decided to create another new standard, although I can see that leveraging from the previous (satellite only) DVB standards had some value too.
I'm not a fan of SCART. I've used it. It's a standard connector, but I'm not a big fan of it. It's a big connector, a big cable, and even though the connector is standard doesn't mean the device you are attaching to will work anyway! Some device use SCART but only accept (or emit!) composite. That's probably less likely nowadays. Anyway, I know that RCA jacks aren't wonderful either.
US digital (as you see it) is taking off slower because few people use over the air here, and the FCC decided cable systems didn't have to carry the digital versions of TV channels. Cable systems view their digital offerings as premium, and they know customers prefer to use the tuners in their TVs over an external one. It's too bad no one (including the UK) standardized a tuner control interface so you could use an external tuner as easily as built-in one. Actually, I guess we just standardized that stuff with CableCARD in the US, although it isn't taking off.
Where digital has taken off in the US is in satellite. We've embraced that quite well, you just don't see that probably since DTV doesn't use standard boxes (yet).
Thanks for the info on the UK licensing. The website didn't make it clear. I assumed that since there were separate fees for B/W and color that you had to pay per TV. The site just didn't make it clear.
So apparently lumping them all together as surely acting that way because they were once colonies isn't necessarily accurate.
Canada uses the British "s" and "u" rules, but they also use a lot of Americanisms, like "sidewalk", "fall" and "mad" to mean angry.
It's pretty funny. The American rules are basically the British rules at the moment the two countries started to drift apart. But yet the British get all mighty like we're the ones who do things wrong. Many people (some even linguists!) also say that American accents (I don't know which one they mean) are also just versions of British accents from the colonial days frozen in time.
Finally, an editor is supposed to make the text understandable by all. That might mean switching "pavement" to "sidewalk". It might mean changing "aubergine" to "eggplant". And it might mean switching "colour" to "color" and "standardize" to "standardise".
It has a cop from Kentucky, USA saying "At a distance it looks like a real bill, it's got the green colour,". Why would the BBC put a u in color? This is an American speaking. The word as the speaker knows it is "color". The BBC translated it for the reader, just like slashdot did.
Here's my main point on all this:
If you don't like it, start your own site.
If it makes you feel better, the new version of Grand Theft Auto from Rockstar (Leeds) seems to be permanently in metric and use "u" variants of words, despite being set in America.
Yeah, one processor could talk to something else theoretically. But there's really nothing else to talk to. Back then, perhaps the graphics card. Nowadays, the graphics card does most of its own work. And most I/O goes over DMA and bypasses the CPU completely, besides that, DMA all goes in and out of RAM anyway. So you're still stuck talking about the RAM bandwidth.
When my post's title was "you mean to RAM", that you replied to (and kept the title), you simply could have said "Well, it's not necessarily to RAM" instead of "it doesn't have an integrated memory controller".
Anyway, I thought it was clear in the post you responded originally that the poster was referring to the poor performance of the Athlon systems of the time due to poor memory bandwidth, not because the CPU couldn't talk to the floppy disk controller fast enough. And even if these busses were operating independently at any given time, the memory bandwidth was still very poor. An Intel system with 800FSB and dual-channels could theoretically transfer 6.4GB/sec. The AMD with 266FSB and only one channel only could transfer 1.066GB/sec.
That was the performance problem, and parallel channels from the processors to the memory controller didn't do anything to alleviate it.
I have an additional question. If these two busses were truly independent, how would the processors keep their caches in sync with each other? I mean, if one processor is talking to the ethernet controller (for setup, data is DMAed) and the other tries to talk to RAM, how does the first find out what data the other processor is getting from RAM (or even that it is doing it) so that it can snoop and keep its caches valid? I mean, this kind of problem is what hurts Intel right now in their MP systems, there's no reason to think it didn't limit the ability of Athlons to access memory concurrently back when AMD used that architecture.
There's only access path to RAM. Two devices cannot access RAM at the same time. It's axiomatic.
You're saying something akin to "I have two telephone lines in my house, so I can carry on two conversations at once!". It isn't true. There's only one of you, so adding phone lines doesn't mean you suddenly can talk to more people at once (at least not efficiently).
Look at it this way. If a company does phone support and has only one employee and one phone line, how many customers can they serve at once? One. Now if they upgrade to 10 phone lines, how many customers can they serve at once? One. How much does the system throughput here go up when you added more parallel phone lines? Not at all. If things worked like you said, then companies who do phone support would only have one employee, and 1,000 phone lines!
You can have parallel 300 busses in your system which are used to conduct data to and from the RAM. But in the end all those busses are dependent on getting onto the RAM bus. So, if you have only one RAM subsystem (as these machines had), you all your busses leading to RAM are dependent on each other.
Some recent Athlon 64 systems have multiple RAM subsystems. These older Athlon systems did not.
I get 24 digital channels I guess, one is a bit glitchy (I need to turn my antenna). But the asterisked channels are useless channels that have no real content other than infomercials. Some also are in foreign languages. The eleven (H)s have HDTV content at times (mostly primetime and weekends). If I lived in San Franccisco proper, I'd get all but about 4 of these with "rabbit ears" on the TV top.
I didn't count them all before, because I don't watch most of them.
As to us falling behind in digital television, other than using 8VSB, I don't see how we're behind at all. There simply aren't 80 channels worth of content to have on free TV, that's just not how it works in this country. For starters, it is not allowed to bring in signals from remote areas and rebroadcast them. So operators cannot pad their channel lineup with "BBC1 London" or such.
As the other poster mentioned, most people in this country get about 3-5 channels. How many local channels do people get in Anglia, the Midlands or Cornwall? Here you have to pay to get more channels (cable or satellite), and I have 256 of those (I just counted), not counting about 200 pay-pre-view channels or 50+ audio channels. And a bunch of channels I cut because I don't like home shopping or country music. Do you have any free TV there? My understanding is you have to pay to even own a TV.
I'm glad you get a lot of free digital channels. People in big cities in the US also get a good number of digital channels with small antenna, although sadly our digital receivers cost significantly more than yours do (more like $300 instead of $100). However, for perhaps a bit more than they could spend on your license fee ($210/TV) an American two-TV household could get a decent cable lineup with 80 channels or so, and the digital decoder is included. Still, we can't do it just by putting an antenna up, they have to run a cable to your house.
Unpossible. There was only one bank/group of RAM. One bank of RAM means one channel to RAM, that means only one processor can access the RAM at the same time. So the busses have to be dependent on each other (stay out of each other's way).
I'm gonna have to go with the grandparent. There were few positive attributes to the Athlons at that time other than them not using RDRAM.
I just retired my Athlon XP about two months ago. I'm glad to be rid of it. They ran hot and were quite power hungry. And they had just followed the first Athlons (pre-XP) which were far worse. Between their massive heat output and the wonky heatsink attachment system, many Athlons were overheated or cracked and destroyed (mine included, which is why I ended up with an XP shortly thereafter).
Also, as the grandparent posted, the Athlon still had a measly 266FSB when the Pentium 4 had an 800FSB. The performance difference in any app that used memory even moderately was very large.
It wasn't their brightest day, but most importantly, AMD was at least trying to produce what the customer wanted (unlike Intel, who was in bed with RAMBUS) and over time, that has put them where they are today. Strong innovation and a customer focus put AMD on top.
I have an antenna in my attic, and I pick up 8 UHF stations from 40 miles away perfectly. This is IMPOSSIBLE with analog. They break up maybe once every couple hours. If I look at the analog versions, they're very snowy and ghosty all the time.
I know digital goes abruptly from great to nothing, but in my experience, it is still great when analog is so ugly as to be bothersome.
As to digital TV being obsolete when it started out, it's just not true. You were never going to get HDTV over analog, giving over 5 channel slots to a single channel wasn't an option. So digital brings you HDTV and analog does not. That's a huge advantage.
Are you perhaps in a country that uses other than ATSC TV (the US uses ATSC over 8VSB for over-the-air reception, I hear ATSC over CODFM is even better)?
I know 8VSB is sensitive to multipath, it's a bit annoying. Getting a directional antenna should fix this for you though. The path to the transmitter I am pointing at has 1500+ft mountain ranges running parallel to it, so I figure I'm a pretty bad case for multipath and it works great for me.
It has an 89W cooling solution on it, true. But so does the 4200+. Starting at the 4400+, the chips come with a 110W cooling solution, you never hear AMD fans trumpeting that!. But anyway, if the 4200+ takes 89W, tops, then the 3800+, which runs only 91% as fast and is the same die must use even less.
I expressed similar questions when reading the previous articles. Why not a barcode? An RFID system only has an identifier, a key ot a database. A barcode could have actual data on it.
From one of the responses to the previous articles of this sort, I understand that the system here is a bit different than regular RFID. One is that this system actually does have information in it, not just an ID. That doesn't relate to your question, but I found it very enlightening.
Another thing this system does is it is a challenge-response system. That is, it has information in it that is not emitted until you give the right information to it. Perhaps this is the information in that barcode on the password, I dunno. Anyway, a barcode is there for everyone to read, it cannot hide itself until the right key is given to it. The content could be encrypted, but once you take a picture of the barcode, you have its data, you could work on cracking it later, and the "owner" of the barcode wouldn't even know you were doing it. With this system, you can only work on extracting its secrets when you are in proximity to the chip. In addition, it is possible for the chip to monitor and know that you successfully passed its test and got its info. So you will at least know if you've been had when the "successful reads" counter (if it has one) is higher than you expected.
All in all, it seemed like a reasonable system to me. The actual presence of data (as opposed to just a key), the tinfoil cover and the requirement to read the barcode optically before you can get the data (other than ID) out all just adds up to a pretty good system to me. Definitely far better than the representations of it I had seen earlier.
Doesn't not giving up my password come under the right to not self-incriminate (5th Ammendment)? I mean it's not my job to make the government's case for them.
Look, the 360 has been on a short launch cycle. There just aren't going to be a lot of good games for it at launch. Just like for Xbox, PSP or DS (three consoles that launched in the US simultaneously, instead of building up a title database with an early Japanese launch before coming here).
Would you like to have everyone able to buy one, have them buy two games, realize at least one sucks, and there aren't even any other ones to buy? Then they turn the unit off for weeks and you have to "relaunch" the unit to get them buying titles again. Like with Xbox (relaunched in the Halo era and again in the Mechassault/Live era).
Or would you like to have a lot of people wishing they could get one, not knowing that if they did have one, they'd be not using it anyway due to the bad titles available? Those people generate tons of angst buzz, and once more titles become ready, you open the gates a bit and they buy one and get some titles and all is well.
Yeah, it's a scam to create artificial buzz. But MS didn't invent it, and it isn't really going to hurt anyone.
BTW, the stores seem to already have gotten the message. Some stores are calling pre-order people and explaining how "with the shortage" they might not get theirs first day if they don't pre-purchase (as opposed to pre-order) it. I find this lame, although I had pre-purchased mine.
The iPod? You mean the initial sale? The original iPod only sold like 300,000 units in 7 months. There was no shortage. You mean the recent launches? That nano? The one where an "analyst" wrote an article that said the nano must not be selling well because they were still on hand in stores a week after it came out?
The GBA? You mean the original GBA launch? Or the SP launch? I bought both at Toys R Us the first day with no pre-order, and there were just stacks of them behind the counter. I even exchanged my original GBA on the first day late in the day (because it didn't work) and they still had stacks of them back there.
I'm not saying MS is evil for doing this, and I'm not saying it has never been done before. Some say the N64 launch was like this, and on purpose.
But I find your examples questionable.
Another poster covered it well below. The PSP has produced zero buzz because you could find one anywhere, any time. It failed to be interesting. Now, the best way to be interesting is to have good games, but often consoles don't have that option on launch day (PSP, DS, Xbox, 360), so maybe creating a little fake shortage is the best way to get buzz.
You paid money for their disc. Then you had to work extra hard just to use it.
How do you see Sony as scoring 0 here? They still got your money.
Don't buy DRM CDs. If you do, the only things available will be DRM CDs. And eventually, they'll get the DRM right (or right enough) that you can't get the stuff off. Then where will you be?
I didn't get very weird dreams, but I did hallucinate a bit while awake! Basically, things around me seemed to be moving in weird ways. A better look showed they really weren't moving, but it was clearly a mild form of hallucination.
I was back in the US at that time, under the "keep taking it for two or three weeks" directive. Well, I didn't. I stopped taking it immediately.
What's really even stranger is a very small percentage of people who take Lariam go out to lunch and don't come back EVER. Now, that'd be fine if this pill saved you from heart attacks or something and there was no alternative. But there are alternatives, and for many people, the risk of getting Malaria may be low enough (as it was for me in rural Botswana) that it isn't worth the risk of taking Lariam.
At the time, Malarone wasn't available in the US. It is now. If I had to take medication for Malaria now, there is zero chance I'd take Lariam again.
Those investments represent about $200M. The foundation is capitalized at $24B. Thus these represent about 0.8% of the investment of the foundation.
Also, this money is to go to vaccinations. If he were to invest in health scammery, I would imagine he would work towards chronic treatments for maximum return, not vaccinations, which you only buy once and at a price typically of less than a few years' treatments would cost.
Additionally, your link is ridiculous. It says Bill G is scamming, all health companies are scamming and the real solution is belief in Jah. Um, I'm a little to much of a believer in science to fall for this.
Finally, to respond to another poster, the use of the word "grant" here doesn't mean that the money given wasn't cash. Grant is simply the right word. I couldn't say the grants are cash (they likely are not), but even if they aren't I don't see any real evidence Bill G is going to clean up on this kind of thing. Even if this caused his investments in Pharma to triple, it would only increase the money there by 3%. I would think if Bill G were going to pull a scam, he could do a lot better than that.
I do know DDT essentially eradicated Malaria in the Panama canal zone years ago. But I'm not a big fan of the environmental fallout. I'm glad I don't have to make tough decisions like choosing between those two things.
I bought a CD from Amazon that was protected 2 or 3 years ago (it was imported from Germany, US didn't have protected discs yet). Amazon didn't say it was protected. When I got it, I saw it was protected, so I didn't open it, I returned it. Then I went to Amazon and posted a review that said don't buy this, it is protected, you can't use it with your iPod (not that that meant that much back them). Amazon deleted my review!
I'm glad to see Amazon now not only allows these reviews, but marks the CDs as protected at the top. I will not buy protected CDs.
Really, it's important we not buy protected CDs from retailers. And return each one we buy by accident, even if you think you can beat the protection. Our only hope to stop the sale of protected CDs is if retailers stop stocking them because they don't make them any money.
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Xbox 360 would be Dreamcast 3.0.
Back when Dreamcast was starting up, MS offered up their Windows CE as a platform to Sega as the DC OS. It came in late, so the first games didn't use it. But Sega was pressing their developers to use it, and MS was helping out a lot. Japanese DCs came with the text "designed for Windows CE" on the front.
But something happened, Sega got word MS was doing all this because they were working on a gaming machine of their own, a "super Dreamcast". And MS was offering up CE so that when MS' box came out they would have a lineup of games ready to go, or at least easy to port. It would give them a huge legup on all the other competitors in the video game market (including Sega).
So Sega immediately told their developers not to use Windows CE. Only one game came out with Windows CE, Sega Rally (the browser also used CE). And US Dreamcasts say "compatible with Windows CE" on the front.
And not too long after, MS released their machine with a controller which was very similar to the DC controller. Same basic layout, with two additional buttons and the hole in the top for the memory unit display covered (Sega had moved away from the memory cards with displays by that time too).
So, Xbox really was a super Dreamcast, or a Dreamcast 2.0 if you wish.
You have to understand what RAID meant when it was created.
The alternative to RAID was special rack-mount drives, like a Control Data Corporation SMD Sabre drive. These would cost $10K or something because they were special high-capacity units made to a higher reliability spec. Why not use a group of cheaper SCSI or ESDI drives meant for a workstation or even a PC? Since these were only $1K or something, you could put a few of them together in the right combinations to get the amount of storage with the right level of reliability you needed.
This is what Patterson and Katz were thinking, and they were right. Really, the idea of using mass production subassemblies to create systems capable of replacing "big iron" spread out and permeated the entire business. All but themost exotic high-performance systems use the same DIMMs, disks and even processors (well, families) as commodity systems now.
So, even a 15K drive still isn't outside the world of RAID. If the drive had its custom form factor, platter size and possibly its own attachment interface, then it would be non-RAID.
RAID 0 has no redundancy. You have to read each sector from the one point it is on each disk. That means you must seek each disk to the place and then read.
You can do all the seeks in parallel, but without spinding locking, you're gonna need to wait longer (on average) for the sectors you need to rotate under the heads, because you're going to need every read to rotate under the heads, not just half of them.
This is very similar for any RAID other than 1. I mean, with RAID 4 or 5 you still need to bring virtually all the sectors under the head (80% in a system with one parity drive per 4 drives).
I guess in theory with RAID 1 you only have to wait for the first sector of each pair to come under the head. If controllers do that, good on them. I can't imagine they all do. I mean, the overhead in cancelling half your operations once the first of each is completed would be non-trivial.
I used the numbers from solarbuzz.com. http://solarbuzz.com/ Cost of a panel right now is $5.20 per peak Watt. For more facts, also see http://www.solarbuzz.com/Consumer/FastFacts.htm.
So I did some numbers. My electric bill is about $40/mo from PG&E. I use about 353KWh/month.
I figured that there are about 6 effective peak hours of generation per day. That is, I get about 12 hours, but if you average it all hour, it's like I get peak sun for 6 hours (Solarbuzz says 5.5) in my area.
Okay, so that means for each $5.20 I spend, I get 6 WH per day. Since I use 11.8KWH/day, that means I need about 2000 peak watts of generation. That means I'd have to spend about $10K on cells (not including tax, and solarbuzz says the PV array is only half the cost of the system). At $40/month, that means it will take me 20 years to get my money back (really, double this), hopefully my cost of new lead-acid batteries every 4 years or so won't turn that 20 years into never.
And that's in sunny California, if I chop down the trees that shade my house and keep it cool. Oh, and I don't even have A/C!
So, what did I do wrong? Where's the magic of solar power here? Sounds like I'd have to take a huge bath to go solar.
Were just referring to ROI on energy put in?
"Strategic spot lighting using 12 volt halogen bulbs rather than bathing entire rooms in light minimizes the impact on energy reserves."
Halogen lighting is absurdly inefficient. Incandescent lighting in general is. Imagine if they used fluorescent lighting in their house? Heck, even LED or HID would be much more efficient.
I've never heard of a super-efficent 12V fridge either. Many 12V "fridges" (more like coolers) are god-awful Peltier devices which are about 10% as efficient as a compressor-based system. Even of the compressor-based systems, I'd imagine a 120V one would be more efficient anyway due to fact that high voltages work better for high-load uses.
I don't get why 12V is considered a good thing here. Power loss in a line is proportional to the current through the line. To deliver the same power at 12V as at 120V, you have to run 10X as many amps and thus lose 10X as much power in line losses.
I do agree people could use a lot less power (I am very power usage conscious) and I know conservation is the biggest part of solving our problems with providing energy for the future.
But I also know that not every house is willing to go without refrigeration and ice. What if you have medicines you need to keep?
Finally, having looked lately, it is amazing how much the power coming from the sun varies. Did you know that if the sun is blocked by a cloud the power falling on a panel (and thus the power generated) falles to 10% of full sunlight numbers? And if it's a heavy overcast, it's even worse. This combines to mean that just in much of the country (I think of Michigan, where I grew up), solar power is not viable at this time. We'll know solar power is viable in those parts of the country when people in areas like California and Arizona can't afford not to install cells.
I mean, think of it like this. My monthly electric bill is about $40. If I had sells capable of covering my electric bill in Michigan, I could take the same cells to California where they generate $400 of power per month and sell back $360 worth of power per month! They'd pay themselves back in 18 months.
Well, I don't see every house sprouting solar cells in California yet (although I saw a new PV setup appear on my commute in the last month, I'm jealous), so I know solar power isn't ready for prime time.
And then of course, all this idea of solar houses is predicated on the idea that everyone owns a single-family home. So in order to save power, you have to move to the suburbs and thus drive 14,000 miles a year (at least) in commute plus puttering to the supermarket to get groceries, when in a more efficient city environment you'd use less energy overall.
I have a friend who owns an entire mountain nearby (small one), with a house, entirely off the grid, much as for your friends, running electricity from the grid wasn't very cost-effective. Alternative energy is a reality for him for sure. Of course, just the PV array cost him $30K. I don't know how much cheaper it would be now, I'd hope it would be significantly cheaper.
Ah, can never get enough of that. If a person disagrees with me, they're stupid. In this case apparently I like losing data.
But no actually, it's been that I have had great experiences with WD over the past 5 years, basically since the Caviar series came around.
I've never had a Samsung drive. Nothing against them, just happen to have never had one.
I've bought WDs almost exclusively for the last 3 years or so. No problems, with drive in all kinds of devices, including 4 of my computers.
I've never been happy with Maxtor, ever since I first had problems with their 330MB and 660MB 5.25" drives back in 1988 ('89?). Their first 3.5" drive (200MB, I believe) was a loser too.
The boxes you talk about with analog and such are not ATSC boxes, they're cable boxes. ATSC is pure digital.
As to ATSC being parochial and backwards, don't confuse popularity with superiority. Cheapness of DVB chips is because DVB is popular. But the popularity of DVB no longer means it is superior to ATSC than the popularity of VHS meant it was better than Beta. I do find the 6MHz fixation of ATSC odd, but that's not that big a problem.
And it isn't parochial either. ATSC was created in 1995. DVB-T was ratified in 1997. This falls along the same lines as saying the US is remiss in that we use phones that are incompatible with GSM. What these people don't understand is we had cell phones before GSM. I personally had a cell phone before GSM was activated anywhere in the world. The GSM people deciced to make a new standard that was incompatible with what the Americans had already done. (The US has since created at least 3 digital systems that are compatible with the existing analog setups.) And in this case, it's perhaps a bit of that. The EU could have embraced ATSC, instead they decided to create another new standard, although I can see that leveraging from the previous (satellite only) DVB standards had some value too.
I'm not a fan of SCART. I've used it. It's a standard connector, but I'm not a big fan of it. It's a big connector, a big cable, and even though the connector is standard doesn't mean the device you are attaching to will work anyway! Some device use SCART but only accept (or emit!) composite. That's probably less likely nowadays. Anyway, I know that RCA jacks aren't wonderful either.
US digital (as you see it) is taking off slower because few people use over the air here, and the FCC decided cable systems didn't have to carry the digital versions of TV channels. Cable systems view their digital offerings as premium, and they know customers prefer to use the tuners in their TVs over an external one. It's too bad no one (including the UK) standardized a tuner control interface so you could use an external tuner as easily as built-in one. Actually, I guess we just standardized that stuff with CableCARD in the US, although it isn't taking off.
Where digital has taken off in the US is in satellite. We've embraced that quite well, you just don't see that probably since DTV doesn't use standard boxes (yet).
Thanks for the info on the UK licensing. The website didn't make it clear. I assumed that since there were separate fees for B/W and color that you had to pay per TV. The site just didn't make it clear.
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information
So apparently lumping them all together as surely acting that way because they were once colonies isn't necessarily accurate.
. stm
Canada uses the British "s" and "u" rules, but they also use a lot of Americanisms, like "sidewalk", "fall" and "mad" to mean angry.
It's pretty funny. The American rules are basically the British rules at the moment the two countries started to drift apart. But yet the British get all mighty like we're the ones who do things wrong. Many people (some even linguists!) also say that American accents (I don't know which one they mean) are also just versions of British accents from the colonial days frozen in time.
Finally, an editor is supposed to make the text understandable by all. That might mean switching "pavement" to "sidewalk". It might mean changing "aubergine" to "eggplant". And it might mean switching "colour" to "color" and "standardize" to "standardise".
Look at the site below, the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1147246
It has a cop from Kentucky, USA saying "At a distance it looks like a real bill, it's got the green colour,". Why would the BBC put a u in color? This is an American speaking. The word as the speaker knows it is "color". The BBC translated it for the reader, just like slashdot did.
Here's my main point on all this:
If you don't like it, start your own site.
If it makes you feel better, the new version of Grand Theft Auto from Rockstar (Leeds) seems to be permanently in metric and use "u" variants of words, despite being set in America.
Yeah, one processor could talk to something else theoretically. But there's really nothing else to talk to. Back then, perhaps the graphics card. Nowadays, the graphics card does most of its own work. And most I/O goes over DMA and bypasses the CPU completely, besides that, DMA all goes in and out of RAM anyway. So you're still stuck talking about the RAM bandwidth.
When my post's title was "you mean to RAM", that you replied to (and kept the title), you simply could have said "Well, it's not necessarily to RAM" instead of "it doesn't have an integrated memory controller".
Anyway, I thought it was clear in the post you responded originally that the poster was referring to the poor performance of the Athlon systems of the time due to poor memory bandwidth, not because the CPU couldn't talk to the floppy disk controller fast enough. And even if these busses were operating independently at any given time, the memory bandwidth was still very poor. An Intel system with 800FSB and dual-channels could theoretically transfer 6.4GB/sec. The AMD with 266FSB and only one channel only could transfer 1.066GB/sec.
That was the performance problem, and parallel channels from the processors to the memory controller didn't do anything to alleviate it.
I have an additional question. If these two busses were truly independent, how would the processors keep their caches in sync with each other? I mean, if one processor is talking to the ethernet controller (for setup, data is DMAed) and the other tries to talk to RAM, how does the first find out what data the other processor is getting from RAM (or even that it is doing it) so that it can snoop and keep its caches valid? I mean, this kind of problem is what hurts Intel right now in their MP systems, there's no reason to think it didn't limit the ability of Athlons to access memory concurrently back when AMD used that architecture.
Do you know how AMD got around this?
There's only access path to RAM. Two devices cannot access RAM at the same time. It's axiomatic.
You're saying something akin to "I have two telephone lines in my house, so I can carry on two conversations at once!". It isn't true. There's only one of you, so adding phone lines doesn't mean you suddenly can talk to more people at once (at least not efficiently).
Look at it this way. If a company does phone support and has only one employee and one phone line, how many customers can they serve at once? One. Now if they upgrade to 10 phone lines, how many customers can they serve at once? One. How much does the system throughput here go up when you added more parallel phone lines? Not at all. If things worked like you said, then companies who do phone support would only have one employee, and 1,000 phone lines!
You can have parallel 300 busses in your system which are used to conduct data to and from the RAM. But in the end all those busses are dependent on getting onto the RAM bus. So, if you have only one RAM subsystem (as these machines had), you all your busses leading to RAM are dependent on each other.
Some recent Athlon 64 systems have multiple RAM subsystems. These older Athlon systems did not.
I get
2-1 (H)
4-1 (H)
4-2 (H)
5-1 (H)
7-1 (H)
7-2*
9-1 (H)
9-2
9-3
9-4
9-5
11-1 (H)
11-2*
14-1
20-1 (H)
26-1
32-1
36-1 (H)
43-1
44-1 (H)
48-1 (H)
54-1
65-1
66-1
I get 24 digital channels I guess, one is a bit glitchy (I need to turn my antenna). But the asterisked channels are useless channels that have no real content other than infomercials. Some also are in foreign languages. The eleven (H)s have HDTV content at times (mostly primetime and weekends). If I lived in San Franccisco proper, I'd get all but about 4 of these with "rabbit ears" on the TV top.
I didn't count them all before, because I don't watch most of them.
As to us falling behind in digital television, other than using 8VSB, I don't see how we're behind at all. There simply aren't 80 channels worth of content to have on free TV, that's just not how it works in this country. For starters, it is not allowed to bring in signals from remote areas and rebroadcast them. So operators cannot pad their channel lineup with "BBC1 London" or such.
As the other poster mentioned, most people in this country get about 3-5 channels. How many local channels do people get in Anglia, the Midlands or Cornwall? Here you have to pay to get more channels (cable or satellite), and I have 256 of those (I just counted), not counting about 200 pay-pre-view channels or 50+ audio channels. And a bunch of channels I cut because I don't like home shopping or country music. Do you have any free TV there? My understanding is you have to pay to even own a TV.
I'm glad you get a lot of free digital channels. People in big cities in the US also get a good number of digital channels with small antenna, although sadly our digital receivers cost significantly more than yours do (more like $300 instead of $100). However, for perhaps a bit more than they could spend on your license fee ($210/TV) an American two-TV household could get a decent cable lineup with 80 channels or so, and the digital decoder is included. Still, we can't do it just by putting an antenna up, they have to run a cable to your house.
Unpossible. There was only one bank/group of RAM. One bank of RAM means one channel to RAM, that means only one processor can access the RAM at the same time. So the busses have to be dependent on each other (stay out of each other's way).
I'm gonna have to go with the grandparent. There were few positive attributes to the Athlons at that time other than them not using RDRAM.
I just retired my Athlon XP about two months ago. I'm glad to be rid of it. They ran hot and were quite power hungry. And they had just followed the first Athlons (pre-XP) which were far worse. Between their massive heat output and the wonky heatsink attachment system, many Athlons were overheated or cracked and destroyed (mine included, which is why I ended up with an XP shortly thereafter).
Also, as the grandparent posted, the Athlon still had a measly 266FSB when the Pentium 4 had an 800FSB. The performance difference in any app that used memory even moderately was very large.
It wasn't their brightest day, but most importantly, AMD was at least trying to produce what the customer wanted (unlike Intel, who was in bed with RAMBUS) and over time, that has put them where they are today. Strong innovation and a customer focus put AMD on top.
I hear these stories and I am rather surprised.
I have an antenna in my attic, and I pick up 8 UHF stations from 40 miles away perfectly. This is IMPOSSIBLE with analog. They break up maybe once every couple hours. If I look at the analog versions, they're very snowy and ghosty all the time.
I know digital goes abruptly from great to nothing, but in my experience, it is still great when analog is so ugly as to be bothersome.
As to digital TV being obsolete when it started out, it's just not true. You were never going to get HDTV over analog, giving over 5 channel slots to a single channel wasn't an option. So digital brings you HDTV and analog does not. That's a huge advantage.
Are you perhaps in a country that uses other than ATSC TV (the US uses ATSC over 8VSB for over-the-air reception, I hear ATSC over CODFM is even better)?
I know 8VSB is sensitive to multipath, it's a bit annoying. Getting a directional antenna should fix this for you though. The path to the transmitter I am pointing at has 1500+ft mountain ranges running parallel to it, so I figure I'm a pretty bad case for multipath and it works great for me.
It has an 89W cooling solution on it, true. But so does the 4200+. Starting at the 4400+, the chips come with a 110W cooling solution, you never hear AMD fans trumpeting that!. But anyway, if the 4200+ takes 89W, tops, then the 3800+, which runs only 91% as fast and is the same die must use even less.
I expressed similar questions when reading the previous articles. Why not a barcode? An RFID system only has an identifier, a key ot a database. A barcode could have actual data on it.
From one of the responses to the previous articles of this sort, I understand that the system here is a bit different than regular RFID. One is that this system actually does have information in it, not just an ID. That doesn't relate to your question, but I found it very enlightening.
Another thing this system does is it is a challenge-response system. That is, it has information in it that is not emitted until you give the right information to it. Perhaps this is the information in that barcode on the password, I dunno. Anyway, a barcode is there for everyone to read, it cannot hide itself until the right key is given to it. The content could be encrypted, but once you take a picture of the barcode, you have its data, you could work on cracking it later, and the "owner" of the barcode wouldn't even know you were doing it. With this system, you can only work on extracting its secrets when you are in proximity to the chip. In addition, it is possible for the chip to monitor and know that you successfully passed its test and got its info. So you will at least know if you've been had when the "successful reads" counter (if it has one) is higher than you expected.
All in all, it seemed like a reasonable system to me. The actual presence of data (as opposed to just a key), the tinfoil cover and the requirement to read the barcode optically before you can get the data (other than ID) out all just adds up to a pretty good system to me. Definitely far better than the representations of it I had seen earlier.
In the US too?
Doesn't not giving up my password come under the right to not self-incriminate (5th Ammendment)? I mean it's not my job to make the government's case for them.
"Sir, we've made the new digital systems so restrictive that people would rather stick with older systems they actually had some control over..."
"Okay, we'll have to cripple those too."
Completely disgusting. And our Congress? They'll roll right over and do it too.
Look, the 360 has been on a short launch cycle. There just aren't going to be a lot of good games for it at launch. Just like for Xbox, PSP or DS (three consoles that launched in the US simultaneously, instead of building up a title database with an early Japanese launch before coming here).
Would you like to have everyone able to buy one, have them buy two games, realize at least one sucks, and there aren't even any other ones to buy? Then they turn the unit off for weeks and you have to "relaunch" the unit to get them buying titles again. Like with Xbox (relaunched in the Halo era and again in the Mechassault/Live era).
Or would you like to have a lot of people wishing they could get one, not knowing that if they did have one, they'd be not using it anyway due to the bad titles available? Those people generate tons of angst buzz, and once more titles become ready, you open the gates a bit and they buy one and get some titles and all is well.
Yeah, it's a scam to create artificial buzz. But MS didn't invent it, and it isn't really going to hurt anyone.
BTW, the stores seem to already have gotten the message. Some stores are calling pre-order people and explaining how "with the shortage" they might not get theirs first day if they don't pre-purchase (as opposed to pre-order) it. I find this lame, although I had pre-purchased mine.
The iPod? You mean the initial sale? The original iPod only sold like 300,000 units in 7 months. There was no shortage. You mean the recent launches? That nano? The one where an "analyst" wrote an article that said the nano must not be selling well because they were still on hand in stores a week after it came out?
The GBA? You mean the original GBA launch? Or the SP launch? I bought both at Toys R Us the first day with no pre-order, and there were just stacks of them behind the counter. I even exchanged my original GBA on the first day late in the day (because it didn't work) and they still had stacks of them back there.
I'm not saying MS is evil for doing this, and I'm not saying it has never been done before. Some say the N64 launch was like this, and on purpose.
But I find your examples questionable.
Another poster covered it well below. The PSP has produced zero buzz because you could find one anywhere, any time. It failed to be interesting. Now, the best way to be interesting is to have good games, but often consoles don't have that option on launch day (PSP, DS, Xbox, 360), so maybe creating a little fake shortage is the best way to get buzz.
You paid money for their disc. Then you had to work extra hard just to use it.
How do you see Sony as scoring 0 here? They still got your money.
Don't buy DRM CDs. If you do, the only things available will be DRM CDs. And eventually, they'll get the DRM right (or right enough) that you can't get the stuff off. Then where will you be?
I didn't get very weird dreams, but I did hallucinate a bit while awake! Basically, things around me seemed to be moving in weird ways. A better look showed they really weren't moving, but it was clearly a mild form of hallucination.
I was back in the US at that time, under the "keep taking it for two or three weeks" directive. Well, I didn't. I stopped taking it immediately.
What's really even stranger is a very small percentage of people who take Lariam go out to lunch and don't come back EVER. Now, that'd be fine if this pill saved you from heart attacks or something and there was no alternative. But there are alternatives, and for many people, the risk of getting Malaria may be low enough (as it was for me in rural Botswana) that it isn't worth the risk of taking Lariam.
At the time, Malarone wasn't available in the US. It is now. If I had to take medication for Malaria now, there is zero chance I'd take Lariam again.
Those investments represent about $200M. The foundation is capitalized at $24B. Thus these represent about 0.8% of the investment of the foundation.
Also, this money is to go to vaccinations. If he were to invest in health scammery, I would imagine he would work towards chronic treatments for maximum return, not vaccinations, which you only buy once and at a price typically of less than a few years' treatments would cost.
Additionally, your link is ridiculous. It says Bill G is scamming, all health companies are scamming and the real solution is belief in Jah. Um, I'm a little to much of a believer in science to fall for this.
Finally, to respond to another poster, the use of the word "grant" here doesn't mean that the money given wasn't cash. Grant is simply the right word. I couldn't say the grants are cash (they likely are not), but even if they aren't I don't see any real evidence Bill G is going to clean up on this kind of thing. Even if this caused his investments in Pharma to triple, it would only increase the money there by 3%. I would think if Bill G were going to pull a scam, he could do a lot better than that.
So I guess they agree with you.
I do know DDT essentially eradicated Malaria in the Panama canal zone years ago. But I'm not a big fan of the environmental fallout. I'm glad I don't have to make tough decisions like choosing between those two things.
I bought a CD from Amazon that was protected 2 or 3 years ago (it was imported from Germany, US didn't have protected discs yet). Amazon didn't say it was protected. When I got it, I saw it was protected, so I didn't open it, I returned it. Then I went to Amazon and posted a review that said don't buy this, it is protected, you can't use it with your iPod (not that that meant that much back them). Amazon deleted my review!
I'm glad to see Amazon now not only allows these reviews, but marks the CDs as protected at the top. I will not buy protected CDs.
Really, it's important we not buy protected CDs from retailers. And return each one we buy by accident, even if you think you can beat the protection. Our only hope to stop the sale of protected CDs is if retailers stop stocking them because they don't make them any money.
SO DON'T BUY PROTECTED CDs!