Posts by druck 4199 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
FutureShock999 wrote:
To date, nuclear accidents have regrettably killed probably 5000 to 6000 thousand people, including Chernobyl, Fukushima, TMI, and others.
What references do you have for figures 100x times greater than generally acknowledged? This mysterious others?
If the liquid sodium reactor near Detroit had actually gone critical (it came very close), many more would have been added to that list. If Indian Point had ever had a massive accident that it has always seemed close to...more yet again.
But none of that happened, did it.
Ledswiger; the EDF deal is for energy prices in 10 years time, and is quite a bit cheaper than we are paying for the least expensive renewable - onshore wind - right now.
In 10 years there will be no more onshore wind locations, leaving only offshore wind which is currently over twice cost, and even more ridiculously inefficient solar. With coal having been banned by then, and then being at the mercy of foreign supplied gas, that nuclear deal is going to look like the bargain of the century.
itzman is correct. Our local gas power station has just been upgraded at great expense to bring up it's efficiency to close to 60%, however with cheap coal taking up the base load and having to drop out any time wind become available, it is no longer viable to run continuously, but is now powering up and down on a daily cycle. This means it spends a large proportion of its time only running at around 30% efficiency (the same as coal), completely negating any CO2 savings from the wind.
The cost is enormous, not just from the obscene subsidy paid for that tiny amount of wind, but at the same time running cost of the gas plant increases due to reduced life of components from continued cycling, the staff all need to be paid whether its generating or not. Just to top it off when the wind stops during very cold calm spells in the winter, some of the energy from the gas plant has to go back to the wind farm to heat the blades so they don't ice up.
Let me help you out here:-
I'll never use <insert manufacturer 1> drives again as I've had <insert infeasibly large number> of them fail, but I've never had any from <insert manufacturer 2> failing in <insert infeasibly large number> years.
Then repeat the post swapping manufacturer 1 and 2 around, ad infinitum.
My experience of soft sciences, (gained from having to explain how to work word processors and printers to people), is that the bulk of the degree is producing dissertations which consist of endless references to other peoples work in books and journals, with a very small amount of original wording to glue it together.
Given the poor quality of IT graduates I've seen recently, perhaps these days they too can get their degrees by writing a hundred lines of code, and cut and pasting large chunks of standard libraries in to their source.
phear46 wrote:
I have an eee pc 901 (linux variant, naturally) and would love to see something in this form factor with a little more umph.
i5, 8gb ram, 128gb ssd and a 9inch screen. No fancy graphics, just a portable workhorse.
Few usb 3 ports, an SD slot and hdmi out(and in?)
Oh, and not stupidly expensive!
Closest I could find was the ASUS Vivobook S200, 11.6" touch screen, 3 USB including one USB 3.0, with both VGA and HDMI out for less than £400. It's only an i3, but plenty fast enough for everything I've tried. The only real concern is the fixed 4GB of RAM, but I've only hit that running VMs. There is the 13.3" S400 which can take up to 8GB, but I wanted the smaller form factor.
The snag Microsoft faces with Surface 2 is nobody uses them without having a keyboard cover to hand.
Meaning what they really wanted was a notebook rather than a tablet.
Perhaps something like an Asus S200, 11.6" touch screen display, proper keyboard, runs Windows 8.1, all for a lot less than £400 these days.
With some tinkering you can enable the Aero-lite theme on Windows 8 to make it less dull and flat.
Only trouble is by the second time WIndows 8 has thrown a wobbly and dumped you in a temporary profile, causing you to have to create a new profile and re-do all of your windows and application settings, you'll have forgotten how to do it.
That's a compatibility throwback to the ARM1 & ARM 2 which had a 3 stage fetch/decode/execute pipeline, so the program counter set by the fetch stage would be two instructions ahead when read in the execute state. Modern ARMs have far longer pipelines, but the 8 byte offset is always maintained (except for the one place it's PC+12) to make it architecturally independent.
Rob wrote: Sounds like it, you can pick up a decent WiFi IP camera with IR (night vision) from Amazon for £40 that has a ball joint mount and motorised movement with motion sensing that will do a far better job
No, what you'll get for 40 quid is a Chinese knock off of a Chinese knock off. After taking 5 minutes to boot up, you'll get a few seconds of stuttering video claiming to be 720p, but actually the same number of pixels as hens teeth, before it crashes as you attempt to pan. The IR lights wont work, the sound in or out wont work. When the vendor eventually replies in pigeon English, he'll try and convince you a firmware update will fix it, but that will just brick the unit. You may be lucky and get the purchase price and return postage refunded though.
You don't need a smart meter to have smart appliances like fridges which turn themselves off temporarily when demand is high. They easily can do that now by monitoring the frequency of the mains, it decreases from nominal by a fraction of a Hz when demand is high, and increases when demand is low. See http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Frequency/Freq60.htm
AC Wrote:-
Re: It Boggles The Mind
"I mean seriously, these people must be dumb as rocks."
Presumably they were Americans, so not so surprising.
Well as only 1 in 5 Americans believe in pure evolution, it's probably the other 4.
Nigel11 wrote: There's nothing stopping Intel from taking out an ARM License. Their process technology would mean that Intel-fabbed Arm would be the best of class.
They already have a licence, and not just a manufacturing licence, but an architecture licence, allowing them to change the design of the processor core.
However, they'd regard that as losing because they'd have to split the profit with ARM. They'd rather keep 100% of the profit, if they can.
It's not splitting profits with ARM who only take a minuscule amount per chip, it's not being able to charge obscene margins when competing every other ARM licensee.
