You're misunderstanding what they mean by that comment.
Since 8.04 is a long term support (LTS) release which will be supported for years, they don't want to include the still incomplete KDE4. So the only version you can choose to buy commercial support for will use KDE 3. And since a lot of their users don't care about commercial support, there is still the unsupportable KDE4 option.
In short, Kubutu with KDE 4 is missing features because KDE 4 is missing features, not so that Canonical can make money. Both versions are available for free (without paid support).
I suspect your reasoning is right, but it is also forward looking to have a 100MPH top speed. As more automated controls are added to cars, highway speeds of 100MPH would be reasonable.
According to a report on NPR the other week, a large amount of the contamination comes from people flushing unused pills down the drain. It is the recommended disposal method by many drug companies. There is a movement to force drug companies to provide drug recycling facilities. I highly doubt that the cost of all this is worth the risks however. A better solution is to stop over medicating our population.
"well, I'm not sure how it works, but I tried a bunch of things before which didn't work, and this seemed to work."
Sadly, I've actually watched several students program by changing random letters until it magically works. Of course, this deserves a failing mark (for their own protection!) almost as much as plagiarism.
Also, with most Linux distributions now you can use a Live CD first to make sure your video card will work before wiping the harddrive. I've never had much trouble with video drivers in Windows, but I've had far more trouble with Wireless cards than I ever do in Linux.
If I have to have a special prepaid card for the coffee just to use the wifi, it isn't free. It is lock-in. Free would be including a 1 use code on the receipt with every purchase.
The other week I missed my bus so decided to take refuge from the cold in the Starbucks across the way, bought a coffee and tried play with my new internet tablet for half an hour. Turns out Starbucks doesn't have free wifi. I won't be going back. It is bad enough that the coffee is mediocre, but no wifi??
In some of the other youtube videos he has a power meter with voltage, current and instantaneous power displayed, which shows the power to the motor decreasing while it accelerates. There is probably stored energy in the coils causing the wheel to accelerate when he shorts them.
This guy is a pretty good tinkerer, in the sense that he spent a bunch of money to build something dangerous and hasn't killed himself, but not much of an experimentalist. The youtube videos he posted don't do many of the simple things that are necessary to figure out what is going on. I suspect what he is demonstrating is that an induction motor is more efficient when there is more magnetic field, and he is charging up the coils with them open and then shorting them. The discharge current would create a field that couples through the shaft and increases the magnetic field. This would only last a little while though, and he doesn't run long enough for us to see that. Those coils are huge, they could store a lot of energy.
Its complicated.. in short, power is always equal to voltage times current. In deep subthreshold, the transistors don't turn off very well and so there is more leakage current. This relative current goes up exponentially as the voltage drops, where as the voltage is dropping linearly, so the energy lost to leakage does not drop as fast. The active power (power used to switch transistors) does continue to drop, but the gate delay increases. At some point, dependent on the process, the two curves cross and you start to use more energy per operation instead of less.
For a complete run down (if you have access), the paper 'Theoretical and practical limits of dynamic voltage scaling'
Zhai, B.; Blaauw, D.; Sylvester, D.; Flautner in Proceedings 2004. Design Automation Conference
goes over the details.
(I am not one of the authors nor affiliated with the research group, I did go to the first author's Thesis defense).
self correction/clarification: in subthreshold leakage current beings to become more important, eventually you stop gaining from dropping the voltage. That can be well into subthreshold, I've seen chips which run at 0.2V (a 45nm process has a threshold on the order of 0.5V). I didn't mean to imply that any drop into subthreshold was self defeating.
That's why not every chip runs on 1E-20 Volts, Mr. Anonymous Idiot.
At subthreshold, power draw from leakage current begins to become more important than transient switching power and the V^2 factor no longer dominates. Then further dropping the voltage increases the energy used to accomplish tasks.
Everything 'likes' super-threshold, the question is will they work. I admit I am an analog person and my digital design classes were a long time ago (in internet years). Sorry if my information is out of date.
I also think these small super low power chips are far and away more interesting, and more important to our future lifestyles, than speed demon behemoths.
I believe my bios is currently capable of scaling the processor voltage based on demand.
Your current multigigahertz processor relies on dynamic logic. Dynamic logic does not work at subthreshold (roughly below 1V). This chip almost certainly uses static logic and will not be as fast as a modern CPU no matter what the voltage. It is probably designed to be tied to low speed sensors where the chip never needs to run faster than the sensor can produce data, which may mean an upper limit of 1MHz (and the idle will be in the 10s of kHz range). That makes this roughly equivalent in clock rate to Eniac in 'low power mode', except it is running on microwatts instead of kilowatts and taking up the space of a pin head instead of a large room.
Nothing here is revolutionary, MIT is not the first group to do this. The interesting part is that they are teaming with TI to bring the design to market.
Yes, there is hardware that doesn't work well in Linux. I have a very similar story about trying to get wireless cards working reliably. I wasted tons of time on it. In the end I just gave up, put the wireless cards in a Linux box instead, where there were native drivers. The I used the built in forwarding to provide an internet connection for the Windows PCs.
ndiswrapper is a command line app, which is nice because I can tell you how to use it (type sudo ndiswrapper -i driver.inf) instead of having to make a 3 page document with screen shots of how to install a driver in Windows. The overhead is minimal, it would be interesting to see some benchmarks.
I wouldn't say only people under 20... here in Detroit the Mayor is being investigated for perjury for SMS messages sent to his assistant/lover (depending on who you believe). Now there is an application an investigator would be interested in.
The depth and width are the same and it is only half an inch taller and less than a pound heavier. That that makes it roughly 80% thicker and 33% heavier. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the air book is worth the money, but I'm wouldn't argue with the price.
I have a few USB Ethernet adapters, picked them up at garage sales for under a dollar. You're certainly going to end up carrying around a mini usb hub with this thing, plus spend an extra $100 on bluetooth headphones and mouse. Too bad my D600 still seems to have a few more decades of use in it. Damn I hate Linux, it doesn't give me an excuse to constantly update my hardware.
Of course, Apple isn't interested in frugal people.
drop the 'I don't have time to refine' attitude. If you want to make money, you have time to do whatever your clients require Exactly. No company is going to use a non-trivial financial application without the ability to pay for support. That said, you don't have to do this full time either. My dad is a tax preparer, handyman and part time programmer. All of his clients have access to his code and pay him because he can make the changes they need quickly.
One quarter the storage and 10% of the power requirements. Sounds great! Plus, just about every used laptop I've seen comes with the 'battery holds charge, but not long' disclaimer.
And it is outdoor readable.
And small enough for a kid to carry around (unlike the pile of 10 pound Thinkpads in my closet).
One point of the OLPC project is that the traditional measurement of computer quality doesn't match the needs of an education laptop.
i can tell you from experience that people stay poor through their own stupidity and ignorance.
Ignorance is exactly the problem. America does not devote nearly enough resources to education, and does not use what resources there are very efficiently. "No Child Left Behind" seems to be a wrong headed unfunded mandate, diverting both resources and priorities. Important programs like Headstart are being cut to fund tax cuts which do not help the poor in any way.
P.S. it seems microsoftnews.com is still available, I just checked to see if it was a RedHat-run covert operation;-) You mean it was available. And still is for the low low price of $666!
The efficiency of the Seebeck effect is limited by the thermal isolation of the heat source and heat sink. In a macroscale system, this generally isn't very good. In a microsystem it can be extremely good. Vacuum packaging would help even more, but that is probably overkill here.
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Since 8.04 is a long term support (LTS) release which will be supported for years, they don't want to include the still incomplete KDE4. So the only version you can choose to buy commercial support for will use KDE 3. And since a lot of their users don't care about commercial support, there is still the unsupportable KDE4 option.
In short, Kubutu with KDE 4 is missing features because KDE 4 is missing features, not so that Canonical can make money. Both versions are available for free (without paid support).
I suspect your reasoning is right, but it is also forward looking to have a 100MPH top speed. As more automated controls are added to cars, highway speeds of 100MPH would be reasonable.
Simulating the robots is easy, you know all their rules. But no simulation is going to account for every aspect of the environment.
According to a report on NPR the other week, a large amount of the contamination comes from people flushing unused pills down the drain. It is the recommended disposal method by many drug companies. There is a movement to force drug companies to provide drug recycling facilities. I highly doubt that the cost of all this is worth the risks however. A better solution is to stop over medicating our population.
Sadly, I've actually watched several students program by changing random letters until it magically works. Of course, this deserves a failing mark (for their own protection!) almost as much as plagiarism.
Also, with most Linux distributions now you can use a Live CD first to make sure your video card will work before wiping the harddrive. I've never had much trouble with video drivers in Windows, but I've had far more trouble with Wireless cards than I ever do in Linux.
If I have to have a special prepaid card for the coffee just to use the wifi, it isn't free. It is lock-in. Free would be including a 1 use code on the receipt with every purchase.
The other week I missed my bus so decided to take refuge from the cold in the Starbucks across the way, bought a coffee and tried play with my new internet tablet for half an hour. Turns out Starbucks doesn't have free wifi. I won't be going back. It is bad enough that the coffee is mediocre, but no wifi??
In some of the other youtube videos he has a power meter with voltage, current and instantaneous power displayed, which shows the power to the motor decreasing while it accelerates. There is probably stored energy in the coils causing the wheel to accelerate when he shorts them.
This guy is a pretty good tinkerer, in the sense that he spent a bunch of money to build something dangerous and hasn't killed himself, but not much of an experimentalist. The youtube videos he posted don't do many of the simple things that are necessary to figure out what is going on. I suspect what he is demonstrating is that an induction motor is more efficient when there is more magnetic field, and he is charging up the coils with them open and then shorting them. The discharge current would create a field that couples through the shaft and increases the magnetic field. This would only last a little while though, and he doesn't run long enough for us to see that. Those coils are huge, they could store a lot of energy.
For a complete run down (if you have access), the paper 'Theoretical and practical limits of dynamic voltage scaling' Zhai, B.; Blaauw, D.; Sylvester, D.; Flautner in Proceedings 2004. Design Automation Conference goes over the details.
(I am not one of the authors nor affiliated with the research group, I did go to the first author's Thesis defense).
self correction/clarification: in subthreshold leakage current beings to become more important, eventually you stop gaining from dropping the voltage. That can be well into subthreshold, I've seen chips which run at 0.2V (a 45nm process has a threshold on the order of 0.5V). I didn't mean to imply that any drop into subthreshold was self defeating.
At subthreshold, power draw from leakage current begins to become more important than transient switching power and the V^2 factor no longer dominates. Then further dropping the voltage increases the energy used to accomplish tasks.
I also think these small super low power chips are far and away more interesting, and more important to our future lifestyles, than speed demon behemoths.
Your current multigigahertz processor relies on dynamic logic. Dynamic logic does not work at subthreshold (roughly below 1V). This chip almost certainly uses static logic and will not be as fast as a modern CPU no matter what the voltage. It is probably designed to be tied to low speed sensors where the chip never needs to run faster than the sensor can produce data, which may mean an upper limit of 1MHz (and the idle will be in the 10s of kHz range). That makes this roughly equivalent in clock rate to Eniac in 'low power mode', except it is running on microwatts instead of kilowatts and taking up the space of a pin head instead of a large room.
Nothing here is revolutionary, MIT is not the first group to do this. The interesting part is that they are teaming with TI to bring the design to market.
Yes, there is hardware that doesn't work well in Linux. I have a very similar story about trying to get wireless cards working reliably. I wasted tons of time on it. In the end I just gave up, put the wireless cards in a Linux box instead, where there were native drivers. The I used the built in forwarding to provide an internet connection for the Windows PCs. ndiswrapper is a command line app, which is nice because I can tell you how to use it (type sudo ndiswrapper -i driver.inf) instead of having to make a 3 page document with screen shots of how to install a driver in Windows. The overhead is minimal, it would be interesting to see some benchmarks.
I wouldn't say only people under 20 ... here in Detroit the Mayor is being investigated for perjury for SMS messages sent to his assistant/lover (depending on who you believe). Now there is an application an investigator would be interested in.
Of course, Apple isn't interested in frugal people.
And it is outdoor readable.
And small enough for a kid to carry around (unlike the pile of 10 pound Thinkpads in my closet).
One point of the OLPC project is that the traditional measurement of computer quality doesn't match the needs of an education laptop.
That their CTO left to start a for-profit is great news if it brings these technologies to the computer store.
Ignorance is exactly the problem. America does not devote nearly enough resources to education, and does not use what resources there are very efficiently. "No Child Left Behind" seems to be a wrong headed unfunded mandate, diverting both resources and priorities. Important programs like Headstart are being cut to fund tax cuts which do not help the poor in any way.
I kid, I kid.
The efficiency of the Seebeck effect is limited by the thermal isolation of the heat source and heat sink. In a macroscale system, this generally isn't very good. In a microsystem it can be extremely good. Vacuum packaging would help even more, but that is probably overkill here.