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… i want you back. really. i’ve lived too long with my DRAM, though very fast too, but it’s the latency that makes me wait a lot longer than necessary. even if you want to minimize the tracelines on the PCB and still use standard chipset timings/layouts – fine – use the CAS / RAS access schemes, but get rid of the latency and precharges and all that!
with structures of .25 microns now you can fit a lot of sram cells on a die and still have a decent pricepoint. think of flash – you’ll get 8GB for $30 on sale, that needs about 6 times the area, and even more if it’s multilevel, but still, you could get a GB of SRAM for the same price. and that’ll fit all the programs you usually need (kernels, drivers) and some of the userdata as well
i’d rather have some SRAM in my system than SSD – the loading times don’t bug me as much as wasted performance while i’m running an app! and even 12MB cache in the latest CPU isn’t doing it for me. i want my SRAM back!!!
i’ve been playing a lot with panasonic bl-c1 cameras, they get you about 4 fps on a 640×480 resolution with best quality (‘precision’ setting). there are 11 with half-duplex 100Mb network, i use the 4 other strands for power. about $100 a piece. server P4-1800-400-512 can do about 1fps per 5% cpu, fast enough for the purpose. needs 80MB RAM per cam to buffer!
what i’m missing though is a setting to pull BMP etc off the cams – it doesn’t make sense on the LAN to compress the pics, then transfer to the server, and uncompress them to analyse for motion. bandwith on the LAN is plenty, and cheap, but compression takes time and power ( = heat and $) … maybe some firmware change?
why don’t we have underground water storage tanks for rainwater? or ‘clean’ wastewater?
1. it’s FREE
2. for fires it might be useful
3. it ‘collects’ energy – hot or cold
with a heat pump you could draw lots of energy from it, or ‘dump’ heat if you need to (eg from airconditioning)
also think about all the waste water from a hot shower or a bath! besides you could reuse the water for the toilet flush – i know it’s done already. My idea is that you ‘tell’ your wastewater system how dirty your water is – eg it’s fairly clean from the rinse cycle of your dishwasher! Or just let the system analyze the waste and decide!
All the systems in your house need to ‘talk’ to each other to use water and electricity more efficiently.
you do this every day many times over: type a username, then a password
but why? it’s all just letters and numbers, right?
it is known that most smart attacks involve some kind of social engineering e.g. the attacker knows the victims name, and tries a list of well known passwords (like 1234, admin, test etc) from a list – sometimes a dictionary helps, too, with the most common names, or combinations of username with birthyear etc (like john1975)
and then it’s up to the password to keep you safe – so you ought to choose one that’s long and has special characters in it (like #<*). if that doesn’t work the attacker digs deeper and calls coworkers, pretending to be a friend, super, lawenforcer or other coworker to obtain more infos.
BUT the name is still fairly simple to guess. so WHY NOT get rid of it?
let’s say your username has 10 letters, and the password is another 10 – that’s 20 letters to type, and in between you gotta use the mouse to move from field to field (or the cursor or tab)
the first 10 though are almost a waste of time, and the next 10 are supposed to be very difficult to guess (if you can’t find the post-it-note next to the screen!) – so sometimes people put a post-it up on their monitor with that info …
what about if you just enter a (complicated) 15 letter ‘access code’ that might have some personal meaning to the user? eg FOOL1975=>JOHN!
hard to guess, in NO dictionary, personalized, shorter than 20, and safer!
almost as safe as certificates – but who remembers a sha1 hash with 40 characters? besides, the # of wrong logins and attempts per timeunit has to be limited anyways
you’ve seen this a million times: start an installer, click through the fine print, the ‘agree’ buttons, the choosing of the options, install directory etc etc – what is the CPU doing during all this time? nothing!!!
THEN after all this we gotta wait to uncompress the CAB files etc, copy data to the disk, check for updates etc … what a waste of time!
why not have the CPU do all this WHILE we (maybe) read through the legalese etc – once you hit ‘agree’ the already waiting files get linked into the filesystem, and that’s it! would save countless hours of waiting for us and the CPU, besides doing an install faster is MORE productive, and SAVES electricity – you’re able to switch off the machine right away!
modern multi-cores should be even fast enough to uncompress ‘on the fly’ while the data/updates are read off the CD/DVD or downloaded
… takes time, some paper i read mentioned between 3 and 5 percent overhead for a 1000Hz tick on a new chip -
why not run the whole scheduler in L2 or L3 cache, in a protected area – 1 or 2 MB would do the trick?
switching tasks could be done in a few cycles, and even within the time it takes to get a byte from the disk – or even a page from RAM (filling a cache line)
i always feel like my CPU is bored and useless whenever i hear the disks rattle!
PS i know there are microkernels, but AFAIK they are ‘normal’ pieces of code, very compact, but they can be thrown out of the L1/L2 cache when needed. my thinking is there;s gotta be a protected area inside where 1-2 MB reside and run the task scheduling with almost no swapping or overhead
the catch with virtual machines is that (at least) a hundred times a second everything gets thrown out and a new task ‘moves in’ … ok that’ll be only a few percent of the whole CPU time, but what if you could switch seamless whenever one CPU is waiting e.g. for memory swapping (a whole 4k page!) or even worse, disk I/O
Intels approach now is that they started integration mem controllers in the CPU (a few years after AMD), but they work in parallel, and the mem is not managed (or has no affinity with a certain task), so everything gets scrambled around anyways!
… that’s the solution to many problems! only the OS (and somehow the user that might be in charge here) would know the following:
–> what files need to be accessed quickly (in how many milliseconds) e.g. logfiles, config files, databases etc
if needed the OS could create several copies all over the disk (coherency problems!) so you can reach the file within a “short stroke” (make a note in RAM that IF you’re not busy all copies need updating)
–> what files need to have fast transfers (in bytes per second) e.g. for hibernating, video-editing (HD demands!)
look for some nice real estate around the outer cylinders, and do NOT allow remapping to ruin the dataflow
–> what files are important e.g. email, OS files etc so that the OS can make sure those are safe areas (NO read or ECC errors in the past, check frequently, make auto-backup copies someplace else)
a normal disk controller would not know anything about the quality of the data that gets sent to him. several categories need to be established, see above, e.g. transferspeed/reliability/accesstime with different weights so an intelligent choice could be made even if the disk is getting totally filled up
the OS needs to make the decision to remap or not, or how to use the remapped areas, e.g. for unimportant files that gets accessed only once in a while
disk controllers could be smaller, cheaper, and overall you get more flexibility and speed!
even SSDs would benefit: low speed, high capacity areas are cheaper (smaller) to make than high speed areas, so even within the same die you could seperate the two and offer the OS to choose
that’s the only really safe thing to do – when you’re in trouble, or you got a worm/trojan/virus/hacker etc (or, more recent, the conficker-virus, about 5M victims)
as long as you’re unplugged, you can do ALL the troubleshooting, pinging, DNSing etc that you want to do, mostly without messing things up more than they are already
most admins are somehow helpless without any network, but for that case you carry a few different Boot-CD/DVD with you (with various OS, just in case one won’t boot because of some BIOS compability issue etc)
unfortunately the whole activation/serial number issue is keeping admins from doing their work – being online is dangerous with an unpatched system, but to fully run the system you need to activate, but to do that you gotta be online … don’t you just learn to love linux?
most schematics i’ve seen recently convert the 110V AC into DC right away and then go thru capacitors & inductive circuits to go down in voltage. from what i’ve read some bricks would work on DC right away – if the voltage is high enough … i’ll run some tests here
would be great if we had some 24V DC outlets in our homes (easy 2 car batteries in line for backup!) – that seems to be the highest volts any of my PC/laptop/screens/mp3/DVD player needs … and that nicely coinicides with the 26V from the solar panels :)
think how much gets lost thru conversion:
12V backup battery -> 110V AC upconverter -> powerbrick to 19V DC -> internal 1.2/3.3/5V DC for the circuits
let’s say you got 3 conversions with 90% efficiency each: overall you got .9 x .9 x .9 = .729 means you got about 73% at the end! the rest is HEAT
my favorite panel comes from kyocera with a 200W rating – at a max of 26.3V at 7.6A. the thing has 6×9 little segments. so why can’t we have several outputs to switch the Voltage so your home does NOT require ANY switching power supply to charge your in-house batteries etc – the efficiency might improve since there’s no conversion necessary? i think you can have several different power supply voltages thrughout the home – e.g. for A/C, computers, flatscreen, heaters – 5,12,24,110 V
that would work best if every segment had it’s own connector, i admit, and here you would have 108 wires sticking out … but let’s say you got only 9×2, one pair per stripe on the panel, and you got 10 panels on your roof (for max 2kw), that’ll give you some possibilities to switch the array according to the needs
think of it as a smart power-grid that gets reconfigured as needed!
wiki tells you that each cell has about .4-.6 V, so i guess here all 54 cells are ‘in line’ to reach the 26.3 V
real security needs advanced software solutions: just a simple firewall and blocking a few ports here and there will slow down the casual scriptkid, and slow down portscans, but you’ve gotta have open ones IF you care to have some data go thru
my guess is that either deep packets inspection will do the trick, or some kind of AI … that might be some years away. IF my provider would scan packets (i encrypt if i care for privacy!) they could compare thousands of IP/port combinations for usage patterns and prevent DDoS etc. like a spam filter works best if you can scan thousands of email adresses. of course the hacker comes up with some randomization, but what hosts send random packets on random ports to MY systems without me requesting data from those???
most security solutions require smart endpoints in the infrastructure, so every system has to scan its own packets, but has no comparison to what other attacks are going on in the neighborhood!
finally the price of gas went back to 1.79 usd per gallon (here in CA), went back up to 1.99 right now …
but there are still more and more people in the world that want to get cars, lights, computers, heaters etc – and i guess we’ll be at about 10 billion people in 20 to 30 years from now – so where will all the energy come from???
due to the rapid increase in population just saveing energy will NOT solve the problems – besides you just can’t throw out ALL energy consuming devices (incl homes and factories) and replace them with better ones that consume 30-80 percent less – where will you get all the material from (and the energy/materials to do all this)???
the real solution is GENERATION!!! got to admit, solar panels/mirrors/troughs/towers etc need some building material too, but once it’s in place you could use the devices AND the infrastructure (mounts/cables/converters) for a long long time – maybe replace your solar panels in 20 years with better working/smaller/nicer looking ones?
maybe someone could find the courage to employ auto-workers that lost their jobs in the solar business?
if you look at energy demand in your home, there are several big consumers – some to heat, some to cool, some to illuminate, and the rest for TV, PC, VCR, Cooking etc
why not have a BIG source of HOT water, COLD water and the rest in electricity?
for example, the ‘cold’ source could consist of a large block of ice, and gets used for your fridge as well as your A/C. the heat gets drawn from it with a heat-pump, into the ‘hot’ source, that consists of a very large tank filled with very hot water, that supplies you with water for your shower and acts as a storage for your heating needs during a cold night
in short: all systems should work together – one’s waste-heat could be another’s heat-source!
looking at several DC/AC converters etc i think one should generate DC power with solar panels, store it as DC, and use it as DC
every half-way decent and affordable converter comes only with some 80-90% efficiency, and the waste is always heat! that’s ok in winter, but realistically: who will heat their water or room with that heat?
one could easily have their A/C rebuilt using a DC motor, use DC for lighting with LED lights, install a DC outlet for the computers etc – apparently a regular PC powersupply can work with a (higher voltage) DC input as they are right now, even without any changes! (got to verify that though)
finally they had some mercy … and got us V 2.0, which was available in europe for a few months now
installation took forever – first you download a 500kB setup file, then another 40+MB, and after a few scans, reboots, backups etc it works – i think better than before
unfortunately the whole process took an hour, on a 1.6GHz machine!
one could save some gas if:
-charge the battery only if the car is in a ‘pushed’ state, e.g. rolling downhill with no foot on the accelerator
-run the A/C compressor s.above, have a bigger reservoir for the liquid coolant
- have a little electric motor run the water pump only really fast when necessary (got to run a little bit all the time to equalize temps)
- run the power steering only when necessary (speed adaptible, already done in some cars)
- replace DRL (daytime running lights) with CFL or LED, cause during the day it doesn’t matter so much where exactly the light goes, it’s just to increase the chances someone else sees you
- have a bigger battery to store electricity (in pushed state) to run the radio, fan etc off it
- have a solar panel, you need about 8 sqft for 100W, could be enough to replenish the battery to run a cooling fan before you start the car (=less A/C needed)
- have a remote that starts a fan (s.above) a few minutes before you get to the car, so it’s already cooler when you get there
- is it possible to run a little steam turbine on the exhaust heat, e.g. some working liquid that boils at a much lower temp than water?
- better coating on the windows to keep infrared out = less heat to get rid off thru the A/C
- have a full flow radiator w/o a thermostat ( = less resistance for the pump ), and regulate the air flow into it, so if no air is needed there will be less drag
why do we have fridges that pump their hot air exhaust into the cool indoor air, that gets cooled by an A/C??? one needs a fridge that 1) in summer ventilates to the outside and 2) in winter into the house to help warm it up!
also we could need heat pumps that extract heat from our waste-water before it enters the pipes outside: it would enable you to save gas for the water-heater and also reduce smells from the gutter cause the temp down there is lower and therefore bacteria work less hard!
if one would have two water heaters, one for low-temp water that gets heated thru roof panels or heat-pumps, and then the water goes into the gas-water-heater to gain a few more degrees … water comes into our house at around 50F, so going from 50 to 80 is a lot of energy needed right there!
it seems to be peak demand for electricity is between 12pm and 4pm – whether for cooking lunch or your A/C to keep you cool. those are exactly the times solar panels could provide you with their peak output, and some could come from batteries that get charged at other times during the day
also worth exploring: other ways of storing energy! for example one could built A/C units that use el. at night to freeze water (like beer-dispensers) and circulate a liquid thru it during the day extract heat from the indoor rooms … or one sets his freezer on a timer that is is colder at night and only runs at daytime if really necessary
my parents home has a heater that consists of half a ton of vulcanic rock that gets heated electrically at night to a max 1000F and during the day a fan transfers hot air into the house’s heating pipes – it’s built in 1979! no need for fancy batteries etc!
there’s an article in this month’s weird magazine about the startup called “better place”, by agassi (formerly sap)
in general they adress the issue of how/when/howmuch you gotta charge your batteries, and manage the charge dynamically depending on where you are and how far you want to go
the problem i see is that when one drives his/her car you never know exactly how the traffic conditions are, if you may want to stop to grab some food, or you run into a friend and change plans “on the go” – then you would have to tell your car about the change of plans, and it would reroute you depending on the “new” plans? also how would the computer determine if the planned stop is in an area where you feel comfortable going to? there have to be fill-up/battery-change stations even in bad neighborhoods to serve the not-so-well-off clients in the future!
besides i think if you have the chance to charge your batteries over night, you would choose to fully charge them – for your own peace of mind and security (so you don’t get stuck someplace). there is no advantage of charging it only partially (reduction in weight and therefore better mileage) – only disadvantages!
i don’t know how much sun a regular panel can take before it gets damaged, i’m sure there’s a limit due to the heat and UV etc rays (breakdown the material?) … but what about mirrors that tilt and shuffle more sunlight on the panel? at noon the mirrors would be turned away to avoid overload, later in the day you get 2 or 3 times the light, so the power output stays the same (at max hopefully) till late in the day
that way you get more max peak hours out of one panel, and mirrors are soo much cheaper (though not 100% effective). besides one could get even peak power on a cloudy day with all light on the panel?
there are companies that built lenses (e.g. fresnel) for panels to get more power per sqft, but i think a plain old mirror is cheaper to make – except the tracking might be more $
think of those old cardboard box type thingys that are coated with aluminum foil and wrap around your face to give you a really good tan!
well everybody knows that converter will never reach 100% efficiency, but now the good ones are above 80-85%. why can’t one built one with 95%? a 10% increase would do the same as either makeing the device 10% more efficient, or cutting 10% off the power uptake … or reducing waste heat by 10%
the problem seem to be the MOSFETs and capacitys inside. if you have only a few microF’s and switch at a few hundred kHz that charge is wasted – as heat. also the capacitors never give back what they got!
one should design a circuit that uses the capacitys by bouncing them around and redirecting them so that the electrons are not wasted, but ‘recycled, maybe as supply for a lower output voltage (e.g. use the 12V waste for the 5V supply)
i would compare it to waste heat from a powerplant – the temp and pressures go down, but then there are other stages that can make use of it (high press/low press turbines). some waste however will always be there, so there will be no 100% efficiency possible
- is it really necessary? why can’t we have nice, well programmed applications and drivers, that surrender control graciously to others after they got their job done?
or maybe just a simple time-slicing mechanism, that checks every few milliseconds that everything runs smoothly, and if need would be, takes control away from a non-nice app?
printer drivers etc could have just a simple file (let’s say a DLL), a spool file, and a log-file where they and the user looks if the print job get done …
i don’t know how the next M$-OS will look like, apparently they realized that vista is not such a wonderful development, but even the apple OS gets bigger and bigger and more complex (10.5 came as 7.5GB disk, took 90 min to install on an 1GHz G4, and uses almost 400MB RAM just to run with a few gadgets) … and my ubuntu is not much smaller (if you want KDE,QT,CUPS,ALSA,SAMBA …)
but of course, space is cheap now (4GB RAM is $60), but my fear is the millions of line of code that have thousands of errors in them, that take years and a few hacker scares to discover. the OSs now are too complex to fully troubleshoot and understand!
many many times it was bugging me in the past but today it almost pushed me over the edge: try using that backup feature on a network drive – it does NOT let you choose any of the other 5 or 6 in my LAN but only goes to the first one … so i had to rename existing folders, check permissions etc
oh yes, i’m still at the V1 and did not get a free V2 upgrade (was given to users in europe as a promo!) … let’s hope that NIS 2009/2010/2525 will be better
… should not be wasted, and used only where it can not be replaced by other means e.g. airplanes/spacecraft where every pound of weight counts! everything else could carry a few more pounds of weight, e.g. a car that has 100lb more because of high-pressure-tanks for CNG looses a bit of efficiency, or a train that has to carry one car extra devoted to CNG but still weighs a few million lbs … or even ships, one could replace highly unhealthy sulfuric oil with CNG tanks (and install sails!)(old fashioned but cheap!) and not loose significant storage room/weight. exceptions could be small craft (mopeds), tractors, emergency vehicles etc (like a firetruck should carry water NOT fuel)
analogy: it’s easier to loose a few pounds of bodyfat than spending a few thousand $ on a bicyle that is lighter …
tried really hard to find anything to built a forum/blog on joomla, but besides some commercial solutions i did not find anything promising so far
maybe it’s just easier to link to some PHP/JS/CGI solution that can use the mysql that my host offers, and have the content created seperately? but if i want to have my article as a starting point in a forum i should be able to just allow comments from others without cut/paste the same words a couple of times … frustrating!
i think we should stay in DC … not washington, but Direct Current. back in the old days it was better to have your power transmitted and up/down-converted thru transformers etc. in the last 10-15 years more and more DC/DC converters were engineered, and the efficiencies went up to (i believe) the low 90% range.
think about your PC: AC comes in, gets immediately converted into DC, and thru switches and coils/capacitors downconverted to -12/-5/+3.3/+5/+12 V DC with a max power of 200-350W for a typical desktop PC, and then even your motherboard does a little bit of switching itself and supplies the CPU/RAM/PCIe etc with anything from .9V to 3.3V … everytime you convert you loose. so why not do everything in DC, and switch only once or twice?
once could built a DC system powered by solar panels, that uses e.g. 28V DC … at let’s say 100A – it’s easy to charge batteries at 26-27V, and it’s not really lethal if you should touch a wire. i’m convinced one could even change an A/C compressor to run on that! besides it’s easier to go down in Voltage than up, and not to care about a nice clean filtered sine wave – and there are RV appliances that already run on battery power!
according to an article in “solar power” magazine you end up with almost $10 per W installed: the panels are $5, install $3.80, inverters $1.20
in bigger installs the costs are down since bigger inverters cost less per W and installers can work quicker (it’s more repetition!)
my thought: pre-fabricate connectors with inverters, so the whole thing is as simple as drilling holes, plugging cables in and turning on the master switch!
another thought of course … cconserving electricity … getting better lights, newer A/C units … and improving ventilation (a little fan can help a lot)
besides i always wonder why the panels have costly aluminum all around, why not have glass plates that are held by brackets that mount it somewhere … and a few mirrors that can help getting more sunlight on the panel (cheap, cheaper …)
also why can’t we power an A/C unit with 26V DC … and 50 A … so you don’t loose anything thru the converters? at least try to use only DC/DC, i think getting a nice sine wave is cool but really not necessary in most cases
after some googling’ one finds that you’ll need about 75-80 square feet for 1 kW … and the modules are at least $ 4.75 per W. some kyocera come rated at 26V 8A for a 200W module. more $ than i expected, but maybe the $ 3.75 was only the silicon. one should produce inverters etc, or mirrors that increase output without rotating the whole assembly, which is only good on a flat rooftop!
some more numbers here: we here in the west get about 6-7 kWh max out of a 1kW panel per day, that’s about a dollar a day. without an electric-increase you got a breakeven after 10 years …
let’s say electricity prices increase 5% per year – 1.05 to the 10th is 1.63, meaning those 16 cents would turn into 26 cents
right now i would buy some panels to get started, place them in a way that will allow expansion, and not get batteries – i’d buy electricity at night or if my demand is very high. battery development will get much faster in the next years, and inverters/chargers are very expensive. as prices for panels fall i’d buy more, or some (better) batteries
i’ve seen inverters for $2k rated 3kW, that price will come down easier than the panel. of course an old fashioned lead-acid car battery is very cheap, too
utilities were asking for a 30% price-increase lately. we pay about 17 cents per kWh (incl all taxes, fees, charges etc they can come up with!). solar panels are about $ 3.75 per W, plus inverter costs etc you end up with about $4000 per kW right now. if you do the math you’ll see that even today it would pay for itself after 6-8 years, even w/o an increase! also production of silicon for cells will increase 4 fold over the next 3 years (businessweek article), could get cheaper though greater demand may stabilize the prices … but 30% more for a kWh is a LOT! guess it’s really time now to invest, at least get part of your demand covered
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