And another benefit of radiant heating is that you can easily create zones. My current house has steam heat and it has only one thermostat to regulate the whole house. The thermostat is located in the living room where the windows are old and let a draft in. The boiler keeps firing to keep the drafty living room warm but the upper floors turn into a sauna (one night it went below zero and my room was no joke 95 degrees). The way I combat it is to cover up all the windows with plastic and turn down the thermostat a few degrees when its really cold. Works like a charm.
We also have a second getaway house that has hot water and its a real treat to have. Each bedroom has its own thermostat so unoccupied rooms can be turned down. They also have the benefit of being able to heat pools, deice driveways and even provide unlimited hotwater only when you need it. As for oil it is much easir to get natural gas (not propane) if it is availible. No tanks and deliveries to worry about.
How is commodity Intel hardware in an Apple box superior? What it boils down to is Apple having a few set hardware platforms to work with. They don't have to support a grab bag of chipsets, bios CPUs and manufactures that produce buggy and unstable motherboards. That is what might make the apple slightly more stable, less hardware to support. The PPC systems were more expensive to produce because of the low volume and unique chips.
To me the Apple Intel systems shouldn't be much more expensive then an equivalent Dell machine.
Apple invented fire wire not USB. It was proposed back in the 80's as an SCSI replacement. It was fully developed in the 90's and made it debut at nearly the same time USB did. I think USB was either first developed by Intel or adopted by Intel, can't say for sure. Fire wire never gained popularity over USB because Apple had a hefty per port license fee along with naming problems (Supposedly no one but Apple could call it Fire Wire). Apple used the name Fire Wire, Sony called it I-link and most others called it 1394. Imagine joe six pack presented with three names for the same thing. The only thin that really saved it was its wide adoption in the video world as the interface for most every DV cam.
Supposedly most current diesel engines will run bio diesel with no changes necessary. There was a point that bio-diesel was causing problems as it is a bit of a solvent and was ruining seals throughout the fuel system. It also lacked sulfur which acted as a lubricant in diesel fuel promoting less engine wear as the fuel is a lubricant as well. Those problems were worked out. Certain Ethanol fuels like e85 do not need any modification but as the mixture uses more ethanol you are going to need modifications. Larger injectors and cold starting systems are needed.
Its problems like that which drove a local arcade out of business. Rowdy kids ruined the whole thing. My brother's friend had a birthday party there and it ended with a brawl when a gang of 12 kids started with one of the partygoers. And I mean 14 and 15 year olds not 17-20 something's. The 17-20 something's hung outside drinking and smoking weed harassing everyone who entered the building. The best part about the place was the indoor laser tag arena. Worst part was when I herd that a fight broke out and some kid got his head bashed in with the laser tag gun. They did have security but they didn't deter the kids who just didn't give a shit. That arcade lasted about a year.
And I thought Microsoft has enough of a back eye with faulty power supplies, bad consoles and some people even having defective accessories like the hdd and wireless controllers. This 360 roll out looks to be seriously rushed in order to get a one up on Sony. Unfortunatly they keep tripping over there own feet.
This kinda sucks as my brother is flying back to Florida from NYC in a few days. He wants to take his Xbox 360 back with him (I got it for him as his Christmas gift). The plan was to pack it as carry on luggage but I guess I will go the safe route and Fedex it to him instead.
I will say one thing and that is SCREW EXTREMETECH. My reason is more personal and OT but hell I will tell it anyway. Few years back at PC Expo here in NYC Extremetech had a booth. They were offering a top of the line athlon PC to the winner of a contest. All you had to do was stand in line. Well the would-be contestants (including myself) all lined up for a chance. The slots quickly filled up and unfortunately I did not get a spot. The Extremetech staff then made the following announcement "There will be absolutely no more entries today come back tomorrow at 10am sharp for a chance". The contest was simple, a bare pc case with motherboard and power supply was given to each contestant along with ram, video card hdd etc. You then assembled all the parts as fast as you could and if the pc properly booted to windows 98 you won. Well the next day came and I was about number 13 on the line. After number 12 was given his slot the staff then informed the rest of us in line that the contest was now closed. Closed? Most of the people in line including myself asked why it closed so soon. The extreme tech guy then said that later on yesterday they started taking in more contestants. When I got home me and my brother put together a near exact setup they had on stage. My time in assembling was 1:46. The next day the winner's time was about 2:30 and was not only awarded the new fancy Athlon system but also a trip to California to appear on TechTV.
Yea I sound bitter but the people in line and I was all lied to due to there poor management. Plus the guy who won was a cocky prick (everyone in the crowd watching wanted to punch him). Mod me down if you like but I am just telling my little story.
oops man I messed up. A linear is worse than a switcher in terms of efficiency. as low as 40% and normally around 50% as high as 60 maybe. Its nearly 6am, I have the flu and I cant sleep:-p.
Switchers arent all that efficent. Have a look at this pdf http://www.switchpwr.com/gnx-250.pdf. And this info is from Antec's site for one of there 500W psu's: Efficiency Up to 85% 115V - Full load 76%; Typical load 82%, Light load 77.9% 230V - Full load 80%; Typical load 85%, Light load 79.45%
The higher the load the less efficent it becomes. At full load (120v) it wastes nearly 25% of the input power!
I want everyone to realise what efficency means. Simply put it means that if a powersupply is 90% efficent and you are drawing 90 watts on its output, you would be drawing 100W on the input. This is because of the 10% loss during the conversion, hence 90% efficiency. I guess you dont know the difference between a switcher and a linear. A power supply does indeed waste power but thats a given. Nothing is 100% efficent. There is an idle current so to speak but usually very very small. A power supply only draws what the load demands plus its own internal loss.
The switcher immediatly converts the ac line current to dc and takes the ripple out using 2 or 3 big fat capacitors. Thats why it sparks when you plug a cold switcher in, the caps charge up. The dc then feeds a transistor which is controlled by an oscillator and produces a 20+ KHz square wave. This feeds some high frequency transformers that kick the power down to the necessary voltages like 3.3, 5, and 12 volts. Each voltage gets its own transformer, more caps to filter out the high frequency and then to regulators for each voltage. Thats the benefit of a switcher, light weight and compact for the power it converts(although more complex and only a 70-80% efficiency). On a side note: If you ever wonderd why aircraft use 400Hz power here is your answer, smaller and lighter power systems.
A linear would take the 120/240v line power at 60/50HZ and put it strait through a big fat transformer made for 50/60 hz and lower it to 3.3, 5 and 12 volts then each to a set of smoothing caps and regulators. A 1 kw linear would weigh oh id guess 20-30 pounds! The higher the frequency, the less turns of wire and smaller core a transformer requires. Plus it would be more efficent then a switcher.
Each of those power supplies have there respective efficiencies but in no way does the linear waste it as you imply. Please if you dont know what you are talking about then dont post misinformation.
I hope you and everyone else reasises that it only draws 1kw if the total system load is 1kw. A powerful setup might burn 500W and thats about it.
"Benchmark 2006: How many drums of oil does your computer burn a year?"
I agree. While 1kw is a gimic really, I would like to see power consumption come down. My whole home has those compact flourescent light bulbs so right now my computer is the biggest power draw in the house. If I left most of the major lights on (about 18 bulbs) the draw would be only 250W.
As usual some self righteous green peace wannabe tries to relate something they view as inefficent to gas guzzling SUV's. BZZZT, try again. The power supply only draws 1kw if a 1kw load is hooked to it.
This is the third or fouth post from someone who did not notice the link to the next page buried in the ads. Earlier on I read the compression comparison, and it took me about 5 minutes of searching to find the link to the next page. Looks like another Roland Piquepaille like page that just lures in unsuspecting slashdotters to gain ad revenue. Useless content drowned in a sea of ads, the site aint called jakpot for nothin.
I guess you don't realize the amount of work that goes into the back end of an mmorpg. This isn't an FPS like half life where anyone can setup a simple server on a desktop machine and host games. We are talking about big iron or clusters of servers and a database with high speed storage to to handle all player stats and items. Think about it every time you open your inventory and move, sell, or aquire an item their data base has to handle it. The system also has to handle all the monsters, items dropped by them, timers on dungeons per player, exp and stats. The list goes on and on. Plus there are multiple installations like this to handle people from different geological locations so players can all enjoy low latency. Also these systems require human beings to constantly maintain them along with a team of developers that are constantly fixing bugs and adding more content.
Calling it a server tax is a very poor choice of words.
Hate to break it to ya but those arent PCI-X slots In a G4. They are regular PCI 64bit 33mhz slots. Twice as fast as normal pci 32bit/33mhz. You can tell because the notch in the 32 bit portion of the slot is for 5 volt operation. No PCI-X card or even PCI 64bit 66mhz card was 5 volts, only 3.3 volts. The G5 had PCI-X slots that are now being replaced with PCI Express slots. A PCI-X card might work in a 64/33 slot but check first, some dont work below 64/66.
The epia boards suck because the via cpu has poor preformane compared to AMD and Intel CPU's with the same rating. In my opinion try a laptop. They are designed for low power operation and have all the I/O you need built in. There are laptops with gigabit ethernet, wireless, fire wire 800, usb 2.0, and 32bit pc card slots. What the laptop doesnt have you can add on with a PC card. Raid systems can be setup using fire wire or usb hard drives in external boxes. The battery will act as a built in UPS in case of a power outage. Plus you dont even need a keyboard, mouse or monitor as they are all built in.
Not like a few hundered mA will really impact your fuel economy. Maybe if you charge your laptop/cell phone/pda or whatever the current will become somewhat of a load.
Bumper hitches are usually rated to tow a 500lb gross trailer weight. To tow more you get a proper hitch reciever that can allow you to tow up to a 15,000-16,000lb trailer but thats usually for 350 pickups and heavier trucks.
Your still not getting the point. It might not make sence to you but to others it does. These over the top cards are for people who want bragging rights as well as top preformance. And did I say I was impressed? I have a 6800GT and it runs most of todays cutting edge games just fine.
I dont mean to be an ass hole but who cares what you do with your computer? If you dont need that card then don't but it. End of story. Reguardless of what you say people will buy it. Just like the people who buy ferraries to drive around in Manhattan and suv owners who put rims and stereo systems in to drive themselves around town.
Ah don't worry about him. Sounds more like he is the jealous one working at Walmart on his bargain bin Lindows PC. Why else woule he cry that he doesent need that kind of expensive video card. It would be like posting on a car website and ranting about why I would spend $250,000 on a Ferrari when all I need is a Honda. Morons. If you have nothing to contribute then shut the hell up.
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And another benefit of radiant heating is that you can easily create zones. My current house has steam heat and it has only one thermostat to regulate the whole house. The thermostat is located in the living room where the windows are old and let a draft in. The boiler keeps firing to keep the drafty living room warm but the upper floors turn into a sauna (one night it went below zero and my room was no joke 95 degrees). The way I combat it is to cover up all the windows with plastic and turn down the thermostat a few degrees when its really cold. Works like a charm.
We also have a second getaway house that has hot water and its a real treat to have. Each bedroom has its own thermostat so unoccupied rooms can be turned down. They also have the benefit of being able to heat pools, deice driveways and even provide unlimited hotwater only when you need it. As for oil it is much easir to get natural gas (not propane) if it is availible. No tanks and deliveries to worry about.
How is commodity Intel hardware in an Apple box superior? What it boils down to is Apple having a few set hardware platforms to work with. They don't have to support a grab bag of chipsets, bios CPUs and manufactures that produce buggy and unstable motherboards. That is what might make the apple slightly more stable, less hardware to support. The PPC systems were more expensive to produce because of the low volume and unique chips.
To me the Apple Intel systems shouldn't be much more expensive then an equivalent Dell machine.
Apple invented fire wire not USB. It was proposed back in the 80's as an SCSI replacement. It was fully developed in the 90's and made it debut at nearly the same time USB did. I think USB was either first developed by Intel or adopted by Intel, can't say for sure. Fire wire never gained popularity over USB because Apple had a hefty per port license fee along with naming problems (Supposedly no one but Apple could call it Fire Wire). Apple used the name Fire Wire, Sony called it I-link and most others called it 1394. Imagine joe six pack presented with three names for the same thing. The only thin that really saved it was its wide adoption in the video world as the interface for most every DV cam.
Supposedly most current diesel engines will run bio diesel with no changes necessary. There was a point that bio-diesel was causing problems as it is a bit of a solvent and was ruining seals throughout the fuel system. It also lacked sulfur which acted as a lubricant in diesel fuel promoting less engine wear as the fuel is a lubricant as well. Those problems were worked out. Certain Ethanol fuels like e85 do not need any modification but as the mixture uses more ethanol you are going to need modifications. Larger injectors and cold starting systems are needed.
Its a little different here. We had slavery, Europe did not. If the country you lived in enslaved the Africans this overreaction would make sense.
Its problems like that which drove a local arcade out of business. Rowdy kids ruined the whole thing. My brother's friend had a birthday party there and it ended with a brawl when a gang of 12 kids started with one of the partygoers. And I mean 14 and 15 year olds not 17-20 something's. The 17-20 something's hung outside drinking and smoking weed harassing everyone who entered the building. The best part about the place was the indoor laser tag arena. Worst part was when I herd that a fight broke out and some kid got his head bashed in with the laser tag gun. They did have security but they didn't deter the kids who just didn't give a shit. That arcade lasted about a year.
And I thought Microsoft has enough of a back eye with faulty power supplies, bad consoles and some people even having defective accessories like the hdd and wireless controllers. This 360 roll out looks to be seriously rushed in order to get a one up on Sony. Unfortunatly they keep tripping over there own feet.
This kinda sucks as my brother is flying back to Florida from NYC in a few days. He wants to take his Xbox 360 back with him (I got it for him as his Christmas gift). The plan was to pack it as carry on luggage but I guess I will go the safe route and Fedex it to him instead.
I will say one thing and that is SCREW EXTREMETECH. My reason is more personal and OT but hell I will tell it anyway. Few years back at PC Expo here in NYC Extremetech had a booth. They were offering a top of the line athlon PC to the winner of a contest. All you had to do was stand in line. Well the would-be contestants (including myself) all lined up for a chance. The slots quickly filled up and unfortunately I did not get a spot. The Extremetech staff then made the following announcement "There will be absolutely no more entries today come back tomorrow at 10am sharp for a chance". The contest was simple, a bare pc case with motherboard and power supply was given to each contestant along with ram, video card hdd etc. You then assembled all the parts as fast as you could and if the pc properly booted to windows 98 you won. Well the next day came and I was about number 13 on the line. After number 12 was given his slot the staff then informed the rest of us in line that the contest was now closed. Closed? Most of the people in line including myself asked why it closed so soon. The extreme tech guy then said that later on yesterday they started taking in more contestants. When I got home me and my brother put together a near exact setup they had on stage. My time in assembling was 1:46. The next day the winner's time was about 2:30 and was not only awarded the new fancy Athlon system but also a trip to California to appear on TechTV.
Yea I sound bitter but the people in line and I was all lied to due to there poor management. Plus the guy who won was a cocky prick (everyone in the crowd watching wanted to punch him).
Mod me down if you like but I am just telling my little story.
I cant believe you have no sense of humor.
Forgot that bit. But its not continuous so it might average out less then the pc in the end.
oops man I messed up. A linear is worse than a switcher in terms of efficiency. as low as 40% and normally around 50% as high as 60 maybe. Its nearly 6am, I have the flu and I cant sleep :-p.
Switchers arent all that efficent. Have a look at this pdf http://www.switchpwr.com/gnx-250.pdf. And this info is from Antec's site for one of there 500W psu's:
Efficiency Up to 85%
115V - Full load 76%; Typical load 82%, Light load 77.9%
230V - Full load 80%; Typical load 85%, Light load 79.45%
The higher the load the less efficent it becomes. At full load (120v) it wastes nearly 25% of the input power!
I want everyone to realise what efficency means. Simply put it means that if a powersupply is 90% efficent and you are drawing 90 watts on its output, you would be drawing 100W on the input. This is because of the 10% loss during the conversion, hence 90% efficiency. I guess you dont know the difference between a switcher and a linear. A power supply does indeed waste power but thats a given. Nothing is 100% efficent. There is an idle current so to speak but usually very very small. A power supply only draws what the load demands plus its own internal loss.
The switcher immediatly converts the ac line current to dc and takes the ripple out using 2 or 3 big fat capacitors. Thats why it sparks when you plug a cold switcher in, the caps charge up. The dc then feeds a transistor which is controlled by an oscillator and produces a 20+ KHz square wave. This feeds some high frequency transformers that kick the power down to the necessary voltages like 3.3, 5, and 12 volts. Each voltage gets its own transformer, more caps to filter out the high frequency and then to regulators for each voltage. Thats the benefit of a switcher, light weight and compact for the power it converts(although more complex and only a 70-80% efficiency). On a side note: If you ever wonderd why aircraft use 400Hz power here is your answer, smaller and lighter power systems.
A linear would take the 120/240v line power at 60/50HZ and put it strait through a big fat transformer made for 50/60 hz and lower it to 3.3, 5 and 12 volts then each to a set of smoothing caps and regulators. A 1 kw linear would weigh oh id guess 20-30 pounds! The higher the frequency, the less turns of wire and smaller core a transformer requires. Plus it would be more efficent then a switcher.
Each of those power supplies have there respective efficiencies but in no way does the linear waste it as you imply. Please if you dont know what you are talking about then dont post misinformation.
Nah just call your power company and have em give you a 30 amp 13.8kv 3 phase feeder.
I hope you and everyone else reasises that it only draws 1kw if the total system load is 1kw. A powerful setup might burn 500W and thats about it.
"Benchmark 2006: How many drums of oil does your computer burn a year?"
I agree. While 1kw is a gimic really, I would like to see power consumption come down. My whole home has those compact flourescent light bulbs so right now my computer is the biggest power draw in the house. If I left most of the major lights on (about 18 bulbs) the draw would be only 250W.
As usual some self righteous green peace wannabe tries to relate something they view as inefficent to gas guzzling SUV's. BZZZT, try again. The power supply only draws 1kw if a 1kw load is hooked to it.
Here in New yourk City its about 14 cents USD. Thats 20.5 cents NZ!
This is the third or fouth post from someone who did not notice the link to the next page buried in the ads. Earlier on I read the compression comparison, and it took me about 5 minutes of searching to find the link to the next page. Looks like another Roland Piquepaille like page that just lures in unsuspecting slashdotters to gain ad revenue. Useless content drowned in a sea of ads, the site aint called jakpot for nothin.
I guess you don't realize the amount of work that goes into the back end of an mmorpg. This isn't an FPS like half life where anyone can setup a simple server on a desktop machine and host games. We are talking about big iron or clusters of servers and a database with high speed storage to to handle all player stats and items. Think about it every time you open your inventory and move, sell, or aquire an item their data base has to handle it. The system also has to handle all the monsters, items dropped by them, timers on dungeons per player, exp and stats. The list goes on and on. Plus there are multiple installations like this to handle people from different geological locations so players can all enjoy low latency. Also these systems require human beings to constantly maintain them along with a team of developers that are constantly fixing bugs and adding more content.
Calling it a server tax is a very poor choice of words.
Hate to break it to ya but those arent PCI-X slots In a G4. They are regular PCI 64bit 33mhz slots. Twice as fast as normal pci 32bit/33mhz. You can tell because the notch in the 32 bit portion of the slot is for 5 volt operation. No PCI-X card or even PCI 64bit 66mhz card was 5 volts, only 3.3 volts. The G5 had PCI-X slots that are now being replaced with PCI Express slots. A PCI-X card might work in a 64/33 slot but check first, some dont work below 64/66.
The epia boards suck because the via cpu has poor preformane compared to AMD and Intel CPU's with the same rating. In my opinion try a laptop. They are designed for low power operation and have all the I/O you need built in. There are laptops with gigabit ethernet, wireless, fire wire 800, usb 2.0, and 32bit pc card slots. What the laptop doesnt have you can add on with a PC card. Raid systems can be setup using fire wire or usb hard drives in external boxes. The battery will act as a built in UPS in case of a power outage. Plus you dont even need a keyboard, mouse or monitor as they are all built in.
Not like a few hundered mA will really impact your fuel economy. Maybe if you charge your laptop/cell phone/pda or whatever the current will become somewhat of a load.
Bumper hitches are usually rated to tow a 500lb gross trailer weight. To tow more you get a proper hitch reciever that can allow you to tow up to a 15,000-16,000lb trailer but thats usually for 350 pickups and heavier trucks.
Your still not getting the point. It might not make sence to you but to others it does. These over the top cards are for people who want bragging rights as well as top preformance.
And did I say I was impressed? I have a 6800GT and it runs most of todays cutting edge games just fine.
I dont mean to be an ass hole but who cares what you do with your computer? If you dont need that card then don't but it. End of story. Reguardless of what you say people will buy it. Just like the people who buy ferraries to drive around in Manhattan and suv owners who put rims and stereo systems in to drive themselves around town.
Ah don't worry about him. Sounds more like he is the jealous one working at Walmart on his bargain bin Lindows PC. Why else woule he cry that he doesent need that kind of expensive video card. It would be like posting on a car website and ranting about why I would spend $250,000 on a Ferrari when all I need is a Honda. Morons. If you have nothing to contribute then shut the hell up.