Seriously, though, these are fascinating little beasts. It looks as if the concept has its roots in the Transputer, which also relied on fast and narrow point to point external links. When I first read the blurb I guessed from the description that there were 4 cores per chip and the bad ones were disabled to get the yield up, but clearly the yield is much much better than that. However, anybody silly enough to think about overclocking will need to note that the working CPU voltage is hard coded; it looks like, to get the yield at the clock speed, each device has to be individually tuned. Which suggests that the tolerances for reliable functioning are tight. Perhaps the overall error rate is not good enough for a truly general purpose computer which needs to be able to tolerate a range of operating conditions without significant error. Which doesn't suggest a range of motherboards and retail boxed processors any time soon. Just like Apple, in fact. This reminds me of good old ECL based computers (whose CPU voltage had to be adjusted on the fly for reliable operation rather than set up once for all, but I'm sure you take the point).
It's perhaps a pity that the design teams for the Mac Mini and the XBox couldn't be locked up in a development lab with a progressively increasing caffeine level in the coffee until they create the hybrid that would really be the future of home computing. Apple's thermal management and sound level control, IBMs obvious chip development capability, and Microsoft's willingness to spend some of its cash pile would be a formidable combination. The trouble is, you'd probably end up with Apple's's ability to design chips, IBMs willingness to lose money, and Microsoft's thermal management and general aesthetics.
Doing chemistry is safe, much safer than driving a car. A chemistry laboratory is about the safest place in a school or university, far safer than the sports field. It is only by ceaseless vigilance and attention to safety that it remains so.
It makes a huge difference what state of chemical combination mercury is in when it is ingested. Otherwise most of us would be dead from our tooth fillings. Somebody killing themselves using an extremely dangerous form of mercury is hardly news.
As my physics teacher used to say, if the things physicists work with are really as dangerous as that, why do physicists have above average life expectancy?
The answer of course is that most of these hazards are serious for people who are exposed to them continuously as a result of work or environment (e.g. asbestos, radon.) Occasional exposure to a small amount of mercury is unlikely to do you a lot of harm; it might even kill a bacterial infection you didn't know you had. Working continuously in an environment containing detectable levels of mercury vapour could be very bad indeed.
When the enemy has absolute power there is nothing to lose. The current crop of "bad guys" know all too well that you are unable to eliminate them; they hide in civilian populations, they have no centres of population to hit with air strikes. If you attack other countries because they harbour terrorists unwillingly, you do not just lose trust or credibility. You lose trade. You lose security. Americans are put in danger everywhere because they are seen as oppressors. Making the world a desert and calling it peace will not advance American power in any long term.
Real sovereigns know when to be bound by treaties, and when to acknowledge other powers. They understand that there have to be checks and balances in the world, just as in the US Constitution. If you knew any history, and clearly you don't know any at all, you would know that rogue states - treaty breakers, states that declare their absolute sovereignty and seek to expand continually - end up being pushed back and crushed. Militant Islam was stopped in the passes of Spain thirteen hundred years ago. The Turks, whose foreign policy yo-yoed wildly, had to be stopped in the Near East and were stopped after Lepanto. Japan and Germany were stopped in the 1940s. The Soviet Empire was stopped in Europe and eventually collapsed. What makes you think that, if the US becomes sufficiently unpopular, the same thing will not happen again?
Fortunately, you are not in charge of US foreign policy. And, in the long term, nor will the likes of Wolfowitz and Cheney be. In the meantime, we are living in dangerous times.
We suines are much less offensive than entertainment industry executives. We do not snort massive quantities of cocaine, we do not pay ourselves vast sums of money to hand out brown envelopes to opinion formers, and we do not pay talentless bands ridiculous amounts of money to shut up and keep miming to pap. If record industry execs were replaced with pigs, the world would be a better place
Well, no, they aren't arbitrary, except in the pedantic sense that arbitrary means by making a judgement - as in the word "arbitration", and not in its modern sense of "just one person's opinion". They are based around the understanding of taxonomy available at the time. (And, ultimately, from the religious concept of the chain of being - it's remarkable that current Christian fundamentalism is actually regressive compared to 17th and 18th century Protestantism, and proof that society goes backwards as well as forwards.)
The whole area of the filing of lifeforms - taxonomy - is in a state of flux, and the best way to get a grip on it is to read the popular writings of Jay Gould, who is so sadly no longer with us. Classification with genetics is at an early stage and we still do not know how to measure genetic difference reliably - which is why there is now disagreement over how closely human beings and chimpanzees are related. We can measure very small genetic divergences in the same species, but measuring the size and significance of genetic diferences between related species is very hard.
Disclaimer - I am not a taxonomist, just someone who is interested in the subject. Which is why I urge you to read Jay Gould. Even if you aren't really that interested in the subject, his writings should be familiar to any reasonably well informed slashdot reader.
I suspect flat tax rates will prove a con too, but in principle they are better than the present system which actually means that poorer people pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than the rich do (regressive taxation.) I suspect too that I will be disappointed again...but who else is going to provide a credible opposition to the free holiday scrounger and Berlusconi's mate who always has the door open for the likes of Ecclestone( - there's a monopolist if there ever was one)?
I am not so optimistic. Brown is an uncritical supporter of the US ways of doing things. He also sucks up to big business on the same massive scale as his boss. I never thought I would find myself writing this, but IF David Cameron becomes leader of the Conservative Party, and IF he manages to fight off the right wing, he might be a better bet for the next Prime Minister. Although the Conservatives tend to euro-scepticism they also do have a healthy tendency towards US-scepticism. And some Conservatives in the past have strongly opposed vested interests; I was at a lunch once with Michael Heseltine (centrist Conservative) where he likened many industry bodies to the Trade Unions and said that if Britain was to modernise they had to be defeated just as much as the miners and the print unions had to. My intention, if Cameron wins tomorrow, is to start writing to any modernising Conservative who will listen explaining why over-long intellectual property rights are ultimately a bad thing, and asking why a patent for a real invention lasts less than 20 years, but copyright in a book or musical performance goes on for 70 years beyond the death of the copyright holder. Why should Paul McCartney's descendents derive an income from his work after his death when the children of, say, James Dyson will not, simply because one is a musician (sort of) and the other is an industrial designer?
Two genuine cases that illustrate your point: The trainee we once had who failed school, started on the shop floor, went to night school and now has an engineering degree - because none of his teachers realised that book learning was of no interest to him because they had not explained the relevance to him. There was no-one in his school who explained to him that you needed maths and physics to be a development engineer. And the other one? I have seen from personal experience that it can be easier to make a psychologist into a high school maths teacher than a mathematician. Because mathematicians cannot understand that other people find maths difficult, whereas psychologists know all about it. You do not need to be a graduate mathematician to teach in high school, but you do need to understand and motivate children. Unfortunately I disagree on using Ed Ds to teach in college. They know about education. Expecting them to teach a subject would be like expecting one of AutoDesk's programmers to run an engineering design shop. What is true is that teachers need to be taught to teach regardless of the level. I was taught thermodynaimcs by a Nobel prizewinner, which is why I had to learn thermodynamics again when I graduated and started work.
I have a long time interest in liquid fuelled small devices. The Origo company in Sweden still makes alcohol fuelled stoves for boats and campers, and the fuel is held in an absorbent matrix in the tank which allows it to be inverted without spilling. The same goes for the traditional kerosene powered miner's lamp; I have one of these pieces of very low tech, and unlike a battery torch it can safely be refuelled while still burning. Now try having your only battery powered torch start to die on you and try to find the batteries in the dark.
However, all these devices run off ethanol and kerosene, which are relatively nontoxic. Methanol is very volatile and very toxic. I wouldn't want any kind of atmosphere vented storage system for methanol kept indoors. During the oil crisis of the 70s I briefly ran my motorcycle on methanol, and it is a real pig to handle. Years of research have gone into handling gasoline, as a result of which its use in cars is pretty safe, but it was originally a very dangerous fuel indeed.
My own preference would be a system like that for LPG where you have reusable cartridges which are refilled either at the retailer using a purpose designed system, or returned to a central depot. My guess is that it will be a repeat of the ink cartridge scam^h^h^h^hmarketing opportunity, with disposable cartridges containing methanol and a small pressure bladder to force it out, sold for a price just slightly more attractive than additional lithium cells.
Sorry, couldn't resist it. We all know Microsoft's branding concept of taking the most vanilla, generic words imaginable (windows, office, sql server) and trying to turn them into brands. Live must have seen like a natural extension of this approach. But with Google's "don't be evil" those 4 little letters seem to cover a multitude of cultural references. I just can't be bothered to check if evilbackwards.com is taken, if not buy it, and wait for the C&D.
November Scientific American makes it clear that, owing to bad decisions made by the Army Corps of Engineers years ago, the timescale to solve the problems of New Orleans could be many years. Improving communications throughout the city will not make a significant dent in the funds available to solve the delta problems - which could run into tens of billions of dollars.
That the long term threat will be China, and your close launch system will not apply.
Mod this how you like or not at all, but when a competitor arises for a dominant superpower, the result is war. The Soviet Union never really competed with the US where it counted; the theatre wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam did not threaten the US (and Europe) the way Chinese power and hegemony over the Far East will. I am sure that the planners in the Pentagon have been replaying WW3 for years, and this program is part of what has come out of that.
Yes, I was being quite serious. I do apologise (a bit) for being a nerd, but as it's kept me gainfully employed for the last 25 years, why complain? If minority laguages are to survive (which is a good thing in my view) they need to adapt rather than fossilise. Perhaps Slashdot isn't the obvious place to discuss the evolution of grammar and how easy to learn languages tend to create cultural domination, but it is as true of computer languages as of human language.
Anyway, thanks for taking the comment the way it was intended. As for the moderator, well, at the risk of finding he has more mod points and a vengeful attitude, it looks like he is determined to reinforce the negative stereotype of Northern European behaviour. I say this...my real surname is a Grimm shift of the word "Viking".
Years ago I did get such an assessment. It was actually paid for by a company I had applied to. I didn't get the job but the agency wanted to discuss the report with me. Why? Because it said that I was in the top 2% of white collar workers for management aptitude but was more suited to a small company. That was 10 years ago and it was the best advice I ever got. I moved to a small company, was on the board after just a few months, did almost everything, then moved into consulting, still in a small company environment. I didn't get rich (though I am today a lot better off than if I had stayed in large corporates) but I have had a very interesting ten years doing stuff I enjoyed. I would recommend anyone unsure of their job path to get a professional assessment.
First, there is an obvious answer to this. If you are developing a site and you want this HTML 4 compliance, do it yourself and contribute to the project, or fund someone to do it. You must be spending a lot on the site design, a little community investment would do no harm.
Second, on a philosophical note, the compound nouns in Scandinavian/Teutonic languages are examples of bad linguistic design, which is why soft hyphenation is needed. The typical answer used in other languages is to alias definition phrases to a dictionary noun or acronym. With the rise of search engines, it makes more sense for the languages to evolve either to use this approach, or adopt hard hypenation or breaking up portmanteau words, for the sake of readability and searchability. Languages which are not dead or dying mutate with time. Live with it.
You had to do subroutine call and return in actual code. It wasn't until the 1805 that you got a very slow microcoded call and return and that you got to be able to load and save those registers to the stack without programming (RSXA and RLDX). The trouble with the 1802 was its microarchitecture was just too exposed to the programmer - like the PDP-8. I really don't want to go there again.
Another horrible early processor was the TMS9900, which pretended to have 16 16-bit registers but they were just mapped memory. And that too didn't have a proper subroutine call and return. It really wasn't better in the old days.
Only the names omitted. Years ago I worked for a company which supplied a maker of set top boxes. The customer complained that our component kept failing. I spent time in their lab trying to understand what was happening, went back and did extensive tests in our own lab, and could only conclude that the component was overheating badly.
I went back to report and had a very hard time from the product manager (it was in fact so bad that half way through the meeting I told him I had to switch out of the language we were using back to my native English because I did not want a grammatical error to turn into an "admission" in a court of law.) But in the end he gave up.
The engineers then gave me lunch and told me that everybody knew that the project manager had specified to the PSU manaufacturer that the unit had to work up to 35C free air - completely failing to allow for its being used on a carpet, on top of a hot TV, or even on top of the TV covered in magazines. Nobody could understand what sort of a house he must live in that he was unaware of how the box was actually likely to be used.
One thing I have never understood is why wireless mice do not seem to have battery on/off switches. Although they go to a low power mode after a while, some of them get retriggered when moving around in a briefcase, and the battery life is shorter than it needs to be. Is a physical switch really that difficult?
Only 100G of RAM to 128 CPUs? That's less per CPU than we specify for development boxes today. Or is that L2 cache? And if you had 30 sq metres of floorspace, you wouldn't need the liquid nitrogen cooling. You could use blown air.
By the time Windows Cluster System Edition comes out, your spec will be considered on the low side for a PDA.
Going to file suit and demand that Mrs. Ritchie stop using their long term established brand name "Madonna" because it brings the brand owner into disrepute? Or have they just left it too late? I would really love to see a shootout between the RIAA and the people who gave the word "Propaganda" its modern meaning. Truth is, these "artists" have all stolen other people's words for their names - so how did they acquire rights in them?
As people have already pointed out, if the article is correct this is a device that claims to disobey the laws of physics. (And BTW the microwave conversion will be much less than 100% efficient, so it should work considerably worse than resistance heating.) However, there is al alternative possibility, and its based on the reference to legionella.
Although the actual temperature needed for bath or shower water is only around 40-45C, running at that temperature with a conventional system is dangerous because it allows the growth of bacteria in the system, including legionella. Using microwaves will disrupt all the bacteria and mean that low temperature operation is possible, exactly like using a suspended UV lamp in a conventional cold water recirculating system. If the water has only to be heated to around 45C rather than the usual 60, there will be less energy loss and the volume of water that can be heated will be greater.
However, at the end of the day unless you have a renewables (wind,solar,water) generator, using electricity to heat water is a Bad Thing. By the time it reaches you, the generation efficiency is down to around 30-35% allowing for losses, which means it will always suck badly compared to gas, oil or solid fuel water heating. In terms of sheer efficiency nothing beats a thermo syphonic system running on anthracite - no electricity used, and no water vapor created by combustion to remove latent heat up the stack in steam. A condensing boiler is nearly as good but rarely installed properly. I personally feel the long term energy saving solution lies in more efficient tank heat exchangers with better insulation, and certainly there have been a lot of developments in recent years.
Unless it's huge, that is. Most UPS are far too small to run the controller through a serious power fail.
Being totally serious, I recommend:
4 off 110AH or equivalent open lead acid batteries
3 or 4 step battery charger (can be quite low rated e.g. 4A, but you must have the multistep ones that do not destroy your cells if left on)
Proper sine or modified sine inverter rated at least 500W
Join the batteries in parallel using 25mm sq flexible cable (you will need a serious crimp tool for the terminals, hire or buy but do not miss out on this step) for the batteries and the inverter, with a Littelfuse 100A mega fuse in holder in the inverter circuit. The battery charger does not need big cable.
You could use smaller cable but this is fairly expensive kit and it is not worth economising as the thicker the cable the lower the volt drop and so the better the efficiency.
Reckon on the batteries lasting 5 years, and remember that if you more than 25% discharge them life starts to be affected. If you only get two or three power cuts a winter you can go down to 50% discharge.
This design is typical of boat circuits (that's where mine is installed, though it normally charges from the alternator rather than shorepower) and it will run a 200W central heating electrical system for up to 5 hours without problems. A computer UPS is a toy by comparison. The entire kit does weigh a bit (350lb) but is far cheaper than an equivalent UPS (around $500-700 depending on where you are). And it is cheaper and safer than a suitcase generator, and much easier to repair.
I hate to tell you this (not at all, really) but geeks get married, have sex and have kids just like everybody else. It's just that, in my experience (and I'm over 50, so I have quite a lot of it) they tend to be more responsible than the average, marry later and stay married to the same person for longer. Female as well as male...
You may be aware that Scott Adams actually had hundreds of letters from women saying, in effect, that they were either married to a Dilbert or would like to marry one. Marrying a jock is fine till he (a) just starts playing around (b) has his mid-life crisis (c) the boiler fails and he's helpless while the geek just gets in there, criticises the design of the controller and the user interface and fixes it in thirty minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, these are fascinating little beasts. It looks as if the concept has its roots in the Transputer, which also relied on fast and narrow point to point external links. When I first read the blurb I guessed from the description that there were 4 cores per chip and the bad ones were disabled to get the yield up, but clearly the yield is much much better than that. However, anybody silly enough to think about overclocking will need to note that the working CPU voltage is hard coded; it looks like, to get the yield at the clock speed, each device has to be individually tuned. Which suggests that the tolerances for reliable functioning are tight. Perhaps the overall error rate is not good enough for a truly general purpose computer which needs to be able to tolerate a range of operating conditions without significant error. Which doesn't suggest a range of motherboards and retail boxed processors any time soon. Just like Apple, in fact. This reminds me of good old ECL based computers (whose CPU voltage had to be adjusted on the fly for reliable operation rather than set up once for all, but I'm sure you take the point).
It's perhaps a pity that the design teams for the Mac Mini and the XBox couldn't be locked up in a development lab with a progressively increasing caffeine level in the coffee until they create the hybrid that would really be the future of home computing. Apple's thermal management and sound level control, IBMs obvious chip development capability, and Microsoft's willingness to spend some of its cash pile would be a formidable combination. The trouble is, you'd probably end up with Apple's's ability to design chips, IBMs willingness to lose money, and Microsoft's thermal management and general aesthetics.
Doing chemistry is safe, much safer than driving a car. A chemistry laboratory is about the safest place in a school or university, far safer than the sports field. It is only by ceaseless vigilance and attention to safety that it remains so.
It makes a huge difference what state of chemical combination mercury is in when it is ingested. Otherwise most of us would be dead from our tooth fillings. Somebody killing themselves using an extremely dangerous form of mercury is hardly news.
The answer of course is that most of these hazards are serious for people who are exposed to them continuously as a result of work or environment (e.g. asbestos, radon.) Occasional exposure to a small amount of mercury is unlikely to do you a lot of harm; it might even kill a bacterial infection you didn't know you had. Working continuously in an environment containing detectable levels of mercury vapour could be very bad indeed.
Real sovereigns know when to be bound by treaties, and when to acknowledge other powers. They understand that there have to be checks and balances in the world, just as in the US Constitution. If you knew any history, and clearly you don't know any at all, you would know that rogue states - treaty breakers, states that declare their absolute sovereignty and seek to expand continually - end up being pushed back and crushed. Militant Islam was stopped in the passes of Spain thirteen hundred years ago. The Turks, whose foreign policy yo-yoed wildly, had to be stopped in the Near East and were stopped after Lepanto. Japan and Germany were stopped in the 1940s. The Soviet Empire was stopped in Europe and eventually collapsed. What makes you think that, if the US becomes sufficiently unpopular, the same thing will not happen again?
Fortunately, you are not in charge of US foreign policy. And, in the long term, nor will the likes of Wolfowitz and Cheney be. In the meantime, we are living in dangerous times.
We suines are much less offensive than entertainment industry executives. We do not snort massive quantities of cocaine, we do not pay ourselves vast sums of money to hand out brown envelopes to opinion formers, and we do not pay talentless bands ridiculous amounts of money to shut up and keep miming to pap. If record industry execs were replaced with pigs, the world would be a better place
The whole area of the filing of lifeforms - taxonomy - is in a state of flux, and the best way to get a grip on it is to read the popular writings of Jay Gould, who is so sadly no longer with us. Classification with genetics is at an early stage and we still do not know how to measure genetic difference reliably - which is why there is now disagreement over how closely human beings and chimpanzees are related. We can measure very small genetic divergences in the same species, but measuring the size and significance of genetic diferences between related species is very hard.
Disclaimer - I am not a taxonomist, just someone who is interested in the subject. Which is why I urge you to read Jay Gould. Even if you aren't really that interested in the subject, his writings should be familiar to any reasonably well informed slashdot reader.
I suspect flat tax rates will prove a con too, but in principle they are better than the present system which actually means that poorer people pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than the rich do (regressive taxation.)
I suspect too that I will be disappointed again...but who else is going to provide a credible opposition to the free holiday scrounger and Berlusconi's mate who always has the door open for the likes of Ecclestone( - there's a monopolist if there ever was one)?
I am not so optimistic. Brown is an uncritical supporter of the US ways of doing things. He also sucks up to big business on the same massive scale as his boss. I never thought I would find myself writing this, but IF David Cameron becomes leader of the Conservative Party, and IF he manages to fight off the right wing, he might be a better bet for the next Prime Minister. Although the Conservatives tend to euro-scepticism they also do have a healthy tendency towards US-scepticism. And some Conservatives in the past have strongly opposed vested interests; I was at a lunch once with Michael Heseltine (centrist Conservative) where he likened many industry bodies to the Trade Unions and said that if Britain was to modernise they had to be defeated just as much as the miners and the print unions had to. My intention, if Cameron wins tomorrow, is to start writing to any modernising Conservative who will listen explaining why over-long intellectual property rights are ultimately a bad thing, and asking why a patent for a real invention lasts less than 20 years, but copyright in a book or musical performance goes on for 70 years beyond the death of the copyright holder. Why should Paul McCartney's descendents derive an income from his work after his death when the children of, say, James Dyson will not, simply because one is a musician (sort of) and the other is an industrial designer?
Two genuine cases that illustrate your point: The trainee we once had who failed school, started on the shop floor, went to night school and now has an engineering degree - because none of his teachers realised that book learning was of no interest to him because they had not explained the relevance to him. There was no-one in his school who explained to him that you needed maths and physics to be a development engineer. And the other one? I have seen from personal experience that it can be easier to make a psychologist into a high school maths teacher than a mathematician. Because mathematicians cannot understand that other people find maths difficult, whereas psychologists know all about it. You do not need to be a graduate mathematician to teach in high school, but you do need to understand and motivate children. Unfortunately I disagree on using Ed Ds to teach in college. They know about education. Expecting them to teach a subject would be like expecting one of AutoDesk's programmers to run an engineering design shop. What is true is that teachers need to be taught to teach regardless of the level. I was taught thermodynaimcs by a Nobel prizewinner, which is why I had to learn thermodynamics again when I graduated and started work.
However, all these devices run off ethanol and kerosene, which are relatively nontoxic. Methanol is very volatile and very toxic. I wouldn't want any kind of atmosphere vented storage system for methanol kept indoors. During the oil crisis of the 70s I briefly ran my motorcycle on methanol, and it is a real pig to handle. Years of research have gone into handling gasoline, as a result of which its use in cars is pretty safe, but it was originally a very dangerous fuel indeed.
My own preference would be a system like that for LPG where you have reusable cartridges which are refilled either at the retailer using a purpose designed system, or returned to a central depot. My guess is that it will be a repeat of the ink cartridge scam^h^h^h^hmarketing opportunity, with disposable cartridges containing methanol and a small pressure bladder to force it out, sold for a price just slightly more attractive than additional lithium cells.
Sorry, couldn't resist it. We all know Microsoft's branding concept of taking the most vanilla, generic words imaginable (windows, office, sql server) and trying to turn them into brands. Live must have seen like a natural extension of this approach. But with Google's "don't be evil" those 4 little letters seem to cover a multitude of cultural references. I just can't be bothered to check if evilbackwards.com is taken, if not buy it, and wait for the C&D.
November Scientific American makes it clear that, owing to bad decisions made by the Army Corps of Engineers years ago, the timescale to solve the problems of New Orleans could be many years. Improving communications throughout the city will not make a significant dent in the funds available to solve the delta problems - which could run into tens of billions of dollars.
Mod this how you like or not at all, but when a competitor arises for a dominant superpower, the result is war. The Soviet Union never really competed with the US where it counted; the theatre wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam did not threaten the US (and Europe) the way Chinese power and hegemony over the Far East will. I am sure that the planners in the Pentagon have been replaying WW3 for years, and this program is part of what has come out of that.
Anyway, thanks for taking the comment the way it was intended. As for the moderator, well, at the risk of finding he has more mod points and a vengeful attitude, it looks like he is determined to reinforce the negative stereotype of Northern European behaviour. I say this...my real surname is a Grimm shift of the word "Viking".
Years ago I did get such an assessment. It was actually paid for by a company I had applied to. I didn't get the job but the agency wanted to discuss the report with me. Why? Because it said that I was in the top 2% of white collar workers for management aptitude but was more suited to a small company. That was 10 years ago and it was the best advice I ever got. I moved to a small company, was on the board after just a few months, did almost everything, then moved into consulting, still in a small company environment. I didn't get rich (though I am today a lot better off than if I had stayed in large corporates) but I have had a very interesting ten years doing stuff I enjoyed. I would recommend anyone unsure of their job path to get a professional assessment.
Second, on a philosophical note, the compound nouns in Scandinavian/Teutonic languages are examples of bad linguistic design, which is why soft hyphenation is needed. The typical answer used in other languages is to alias definition phrases to a dictionary noun or acronym. With the rise of search engines, it makes more sense for the languages to evolve either to use this approach, or adopt hard hypenation or breaking up portmanteau words, for the sake of readability and searchability. Languages which are not dead or dying mutate with time. Live with it.
Another horrible early processor was the TMS9900, which pretended to have 16 16-bit registers but they were just mapped memory. And that too didn't have a proper subroutine call and return. It really wasn't better in the old days.
Not hugely fast but not bad. And yes, I do also have an athlon 64 (you insensitive clod). It really is not a very demanding application.
I went back to report and had a very hard time from the product manager (it was in fact so bad that half way through the meeting I told him I had to switch out of the language we were using back to my native English because I did not want a grammatical error to turn into an "admission" in a court of law.) But in the end he gave up.
The engineers then gave me lunch and told me that everybody knew that the project manager had specified to the PSU manaufacturer that the unit had to work up to 35C free air - completely failing to allow for its being used on a carpet, on top of a hot TV, or even on top of the TV covered in magazines. Nobody could understand what sort of a house he must live in that he was unaware of how the box was actually likely to be used.
One thing I have never understood is why wireless mice do not seem to have battery on/off switches. Although they go to a low power mode after a while, some of them get retriggered when moving around in a briefcase, and the battery life is shorter than it needs to be. Is a physical switch really that difficult?
And if you had 30 sq metres of floorspace, you wouldn't need the liquid nitrogen cooling. You could use blown air.
By the time Windows Cluster System Edition comes out, your spec will be considered on the low side for a PDA.
Going to file suit and demand that Mrs. Ritchie stop using their long term established brand name "Madonna" because it brings the brand owner into disrepute? Or have they just left it too late? I would really love to see a shootout between the RIAA and the people who gave the word "Propaganda" its modern meaning. Truth is, these "artists" have all stolen other people's words for their names - so how did they acquire rights in them?
Although the actual temperature needed for bath or shower water is only around 40-45C, running at that temperature with a conventional system is dangerous because it allows the growth of bacteria in the system, including legionella. Using microwaves will disrupt all the bacteria and mean that low temperature operation is possible, exactly like using a suspended UV lamp in a conventional cold water recirculating system. If the water has only to be heated to around 45C rather than the usual 60, there will be less energy loss and the volume of water that can be heated will be greater.
However, at the end of the day unless you have a renewables (wind,solar,water) generator, using electricity to heat water is a Bad Thing. By the time it reaches you, the generation efficiency is down to around 30-35% allowing for losses, which means it will always suck badly compared to gas, oil or solid fuel water heating. In terms of sheer efficiency nothing beats a thermo syphonic system running on anthracite - no electricity used, and no water vapor created by combustion to remove latent heat up the stack in steam. A condensing boiler is nearly as good but rarely installed properly. I personally feel the long term energy saving solution lies in more efficient tank heat exchangers with better insulation, and certainly there have been a lot of developments in recent years.
Being totally serious, I recommend:
4 off 110AH or equivalent open lead acid batteries
3 or 4 step battery charger (can be quite low rated e.g. 4A, but you must have the multistep ones that do not destroy your cells if left on)
Proper sine or modified sine inverter rated at least 500W
Join the batteries in parallel using 25mm sq flexible cable (you will need a serious crimp tool for the terminals, hire or buy but do not miss out on this step) for the batteries and the inverter, with a Littelfuse 100A mega fuse in holder in the inverter circuit. The battery charger does not need big cable.
You could use smaller cable but this is fairly expensive kit and it is not worth economising as the thicker the cable the lower the volt drop and so the better the efficiency.
Reckon on the batteries lasting 5 years, and remember that if you more than 25% discharge them life starts to be affected. If you only get two or three power cuts a winter you can go down to 50% discharge.
This design is typical of boat circuits (that's where mine is installed, though it normally charges from the alternator rather than shorepower) and it will run a 200W central heating electrical system for up to 5 hours without problems. A computer UPS is a toy by comparison. The entire kit does weigh a bit (350lb) but is far cheaper than an equivalent UPS (around $500-700 depending on where you are). And it is cheaper and safer than a suitcase generator, and much easier to repair.
You may be aware that Scott Adams actually had hundreds of letters from women saying, in effect, that they were either married to a Dilbert or would like to marry one. Marrying a jock is fine till he (a) just starts playing around (b) has his mid-life crisis (c) the boiler fails and he's helpless while the geek just gets in there, criticises the design of the controller and the user interface and fixes it in thirty minutes.