Wait, you really don't believe this? I have a kill-a-watt and can assure you he speaks the truth. I don't have a ridiculously high end computer, but I can get its power consumption to vary by more than 300W between it being idle + LCD's in DPMS power save and me actively pushing the cpu and gpu with something. Putting it into S3 suspend will break off another 50W or so.

Now 10 year old hardware pushing 40W delta between unloaded and loaded not including a CRT going to sleep or something? Doubtful. Maybe 15-20W tops. But then again some of that school district's hardware was much newer and $0.06/kWh is a pretty decent utility rate too. I'd say $1 million is a pretty good round number here even though it probably represents a modest 10-20% increase over the bill were 5000 machines simply left on and idle. But consider if this guy who had enough control to install software on 5000 machines had simply set them to go to S3 after a couple hours of not being used? He could have saved the school district millions on power just as easily as he wasted it.

The real answer here is it depends a great deal on the GPS itself, then it depends on how whatever software is reporting and logging this information post processes it.

GPS itself is capable of reporting an instantaneous velocity vector calculated by measuring the doppler shift from each satellite. (Comes in as a GPVTG sentence in the NMEA data) So if the receiver is tracking a lot of satellites with a good distribution and there isnt a lot of multipath problems, the accuracy of this vector is ridiculously good. Also, a receiver may not support GPVTG.

Now you can also get velocity data from a GPRMC (ie normal position data) sentence too. According to the specification, the bearing here is supposed to be calculated based on position track angle (presumably so that you dont have to be moving to have a GPS bearing).. The spec seems silent to the origin of the speed reported in this sentence -- seems like it could be calculated as track speed (average speed over the interval) but could easily be reported as instantaneous speed as well.

Of course I haven't tested any, but I imagine in practice, GPS receivers would normally report track/position averaged data in GPRMC and instantaneous data in GPVTG. Any software that is supposed to present this data to a user would have to determine how to aggregate and filter it to provide for its intended purpose. If you really intend to beat a speeding ticket with GPS I would suggest that you need data points of either type (instantaneous or averaged) with at least 1Hz if not 5Hz granularity along with knowledge of what the data represents and how the raw data is filtered and processed. This 30s interval business in this case is just dumb, and nobody ever bothered to determine anything about the nature of the data it seems.

Thank you; very good information here; I didnt realize a station had to reply inside of the same frame. There IS therefore a timing issue but the BSS could counteract it obviously as you said by maintaining an additional frame offset internally. So this explains a 35km limit on GSM itself but do the 3g GSM technologies attempt to pack additional data in by shortening the guard period? If so that would explain a smaller distance limit, but I don't think data would be rejected; seems you'd just fall back to EDGE or GPRS?

You are sure of this? Can you give some reference material? I would really like to know how or why this is true. I have hit EDGE data over some pretty impressive distances (10 miles) with the proper equipment. I really can't see how the BSS would reject a distant signal if it were good enough. The distances aren't great enough to cause any timing issues.

Since the Linux kernel only interfaces with the virtualized devices presented by the PS3 hypervisor, and since this hypervisor presents exactly the same interfaces to GameOS as it does to OtherOS (where it simply blocks many hypervisor calls) this is exactly what I'm suggesting. No shit!

If Sony is actually realizing cost savings by dropping this feature, it's certainly not happening in development, but in QA, Support, and Legal. It's still sad to see it go, and I hope they bring it back.

They still have to support the feature on "Fat" ps3's so the software engineering and support cost is there regardless of the new model. The Hypervisor itself is at the absolute core of the PS3 regardless of whether or not it's hosting the XMB, GameOS, or OtherOS, so the software is basically running on the PS3 Slim already. I believe very strongly that there has not been a hardware change that would have affected supporting the OtherOS install and that this is a deliberate move by Sony to remove a popular feature. With the PS2 slim at least they were able to pass off dropping Linux support as a semi-legitimate hardware problem.

As to why they did it, I can only speculate. First, I think that Sony may believe that an exploit may be discovered in the Hypervisor that could open the door to piracy (a la the PSP). Secondly, the rumor is they are still losing money on the hardware. If this is true, given the price reduction, smaller size, and lower power requirements of the PS3 slim, it actually becomes more attractive to build into HPC clusters. Sony may not in this economy wish to hemorrhage millions of dollars building these inexpensive supercomputing clusters all over the place.

Not only can you enable it, but it's enabled by default. You can actually boost performance (significantly) on the versions of windows that are capped at 4gb by disabling it, since accessing memory using PAE requires an extra clock cycle (3 instead of 2, for direct access)

I think the point is probably that the "base" fee currently charged to all customers is likely not indicative of the true cost of the connection and some of that cost is incorporated into the kWh fees to more fairly distribute the charges to customers of different sizes. For example, a commercial business with 200A service actually costs about the same to connect to the grid as a residence with 200A service, only their actual usage might be 4 times higher. Likewise the cost to connect a single rural customer with 200A service might be astronomical even if actual usage is minimal.

I would think a better model might be to establish minimum fees that more closely resemble the true costs of connection. Say your "base fee" is $20 but your connectivity actually costs about $100 net to the power company -- Well you are going to need to offset this difference some way -- either by buying $80 of power from them or by giving them $80. In the case of solar customers, this would be an incentive to reduce their grid connection by taking smaller grid service (or no service) or reducing their energy consumption in order to put enough power back onto the grid to offset the fee.

In your analogy, please don't forget that you'd also be obligated to buy my leftover groceries. However, since you don't know how much I might send back, you have to pay to mail me a big box every week, which I may or may not return.

This is a little misleading because he didn't hope to build his own transmission lines; that was never in the cards. He hoped that he could force utility companies and taxpayers to build them for him. That was the reason for his massive ad campaign. His project would only be able to turn a profit if the public had been willing to waste a hundred billion dollars or more on infrastructure to support it.

As great as wind power might be, if we as taxpayers want to spend that kind of money on sustainable energy, there are far more sensible investments.

FWIW I hope he loses his shirt selling the turbines. For pennies on the dollar, they will be a good buy and arguably far more useful spread around to places where installing them is economically sensible.

I honestly think this would be a better topic for Penn&Teller Bullshit to cover, particularly text messaging charges.

I did however dig out my cellphone bill from about 15 years ago. Somehow I don't remember things being as bad as they were because my bills in 1994 dwarfed my bill today.

You're telling me; I start getting reports from users all around the office that sites are failing to respond -- looks like a bigtime BGP barf, but then I realize it's all google ads and google analytics hanging pages all over creation. I couldn't think of a good way to mitigate this other than to blackhole Google's Georgia datacenter, and I figured by the time I did that, Google would have it fixed. Imagine my surprise when they didn't after a few hours. I guess there's a first time for everything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy

If the data there is current, LED's max around 100 lm/W (15%), CFL's around 72 lm/W (11%), high efficiency fluorescent around 120 lm/W (18%) and things like low pressure sodium (orange-hued street lamps and the like) around 200 lm/W (29%). Incandescent hang out in the 5 - 18 lm/W range (~ 2.5%)

So right now in commercial products, the expensive LED based bulbs built with very good LEDs offer about the same performance as CFL's and usually are outperformed by your standard fluorescent fixtures. They do actually last a great deal longer and are arguably more environmentally friendly. They are easily justified by any installation where changing a bulb costs considerably more than the bulb (such as commercial installations requiring scaffolding to accomplish the feat). However the LED bulbs you can find in the retail stores these days that represent that a 5W LED bulb compares to a 13W CFL and a 100W incandescent are telling absolute lies. Then again, most retailers wouldnt dare put a decent $120 LED bulb on the shelf either - it simply wouldn't sell.

IMO the whole system for advertising bulbs is broken. If there's going to be any change to the laws about lighting it should not be to ban the sale of incandescents but to require better labeling. If bulb packaging were required to display the luminous output, the power consumption, and the color temperature we'd all be better off. There is some other useful information they could put in there too such as PF, weight, hazmat, lifetime, etc. -- sort of a "Nutritional Information" for bulbs. They already require similar labeling on appliances but I could see this type of requirement really helping out on power consumption. Once that garbage battery charger has to actually put a label on its box that says it ships with a crap 10% efficient wall wart that draws 300mA idle is the day it will instead start shipping with a better power supply.

The CA certificate system isn't supposed to be a 'web of trust' though. It COULD be but honestly users wouldn't make the effort. Most PGP users don't bother with the 'web of trust' either anymore which is why it's all but dead. Allowing companies to become authoritative CAs for their own domains is a good solution in theory, but the end user still needs someone to step in and help them do the identity proofing because, again, they won't make the effort; plus how do you secure it? DNS? Whois? Have them buy CA certs? All of these have flaws. Does the current system suck? A little bit - maybe about as much as the current system for domain registration, but

A company can already become a CA if it wants to and have users choose to trust them or install their CA certs on end users machines or use them within their own applications. Many enterprises run internal CAs anyway. In your example there is really nothing preventing capitalone from distributing a small installer that makes them a trusted CA same as Verisign or any of the others whose CA certs are bundled with the browsers. But if you think that these companies who are too already too disorganized to correctly author and secure their current web apps are going to go through the rigamarole of running their own CA and talking their users through trusting them? You are just talking crazy.

FWIW there is apparently malware that already does this -- a CA cert, a hostfile entry and suddenly paypal.com is showing green bars on nigerian servers no problem.