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Comment Re:Interesting... (Score 1) 115

Well, for what it's worth, the only thing the camera in the video seems to be doing is threshold compare on a pixel by pixel basis, ie if each pixel changes from the previous frame by more than a certain amount then it's highlighted, which is a pretty simple operation. Still, it's a cool proof of concept.

Comment LTspice & TINA-spice (Score 2, Informative) 211

I've actually been in the same situation myself, two free (as in beer) SPICE derivatives I've found to work well are LTspice and TINA-spice (from linear and Texas Instruments respectively). They are windows binaries but function very well in WINE (in fact the developer(s) for LTspice have designed it to function as well as possible with WINE).

I've mostly used LTspice and it works very well and has a low learning threshold. Of course you can insert spice directives in the schematic to do more advanced functions like basic parameter sweeps as well as monte-carlo simulations and so on and so forth. Check out LTspice's yahoo group for a bunch of documentation.

As far as other recommendations for eagle go I doubt that's what you're looking for as eagle is solely for schematic capture and pcb design, there are no simulation capabilities in it.
Software

Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester 367

An anonymous reader writes "A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option." Microsoft surely knows that some other options are creeping slowly into the view of even the most Word-centric users, though. User I dream about smoking writes "Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs. Microsoft will start beta testing an updated version of Live Workspace later this year that allows users to create and edit new documents online."

Comment Unlikely numbers (Score 2, Interesting) 516

I don't buy these numbers. Assuming the summary is correct and one search uses as much energy as boiling half a cup of water, then the total energy dissipated is;

W=delta_T*specific_energy*mass
Which for water gives (assuming 80 degrees of temperature difference and 75g of water, or about half a small cup of tea);
80*4.18*75=25kJ

A few google searches I just did took on average 0.2 seconds each, as reported by google.
This would give a power draw of 125kW, for just running the services that handled my single request!

Now, I must say that I don't now a lot pertaining to how much power google's servers draw, and of course running the search engine servers ism't enough, google needs to update it's database and do lots of other maintanence. All in all this strikes me as far too much.

Does anyone happen to have any real knowledge about this?

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