agentrnge

With speedfan on my Asus board I am unable to control fan speeds unless Q-Fan was disabled in my bios ( Asus ). It would run either way and get temp and rpm polling data. So that might have nothing to do with your issue. I also realized that speedfan really doesn't do anything other than monitor and slow down fans. I installed it initially wanting to speed the fans up to keep things cooler. But it sounds like that is exactly what you were using it for to slow them down to 50%. As for the linux install. I regularly need to either disable APIC power stuff in the bios, OR pass some options to the kernel boot loader thingy something like "boot noapic" at the installer prompt. Same kind of wierd boot up to random places and hang. I have seen this issue on almost every PC and almost every linux flavor. Another issue I have with my HD4890 GPU is anytime Ubuntu does an update that happens to touch the kernel/gpu driver stuff, I loose my graphics drivers and the system hangs as soon as it fires up X windows. In this case, I have been able to reliably boot Ubuntu into recovery mode, root console with network access and re-install the ATI driver. Reboot, and all is well. Within ubuntu you can use lm_sensors to check temperatures and fan rpms, ( but not change them ) AFAIK. The Software center installs it easy. About the GPU fan, in XP, speedfan couldn't change mine, but the ATI driver package could, but not in linux. Either way linux is not stopping the fan. It sounds like its running around ~30-35% which is what I normally run it at. lm-sensors does not pick up my gpu temp :\ I hope linux is not killing your computer. Off topic maybe .. Depending on how much back and forth you do between windows and linux could a VM setup help you out at all? I just tried Sun Virtual Box for the first time. Seems ok. As im sure you know VMs are not the way to go for everything, but they arent as bad as I always wanted to think they were. I need XP 32 bit to connect to my work VPN. A small VM for running XP for a simple desktop, email, web and putty does the job well.

I dont think the brain needs to be dreaming/unconscious for properly formed input to be usable. That is all the brain does all day is use input that organs send to it as well as its own feedback. But in a dream state, a lot of brain components that would normally (in a waking state) try to rectify nonsense would be turned off, (thus the ability to have awesome nonsensical dreams) and maybe malformed/noisy/way-off input could be perceived more easily. even if its bonkers input.

Its not a significant difference so long as your not vegetating in front of the TV for 8 hours a day. I got my large display for movies and a show here and there. I'm very energy conscious... My DLP/LED @63" only draws about 200 watts on and just 1 when off. And its only on maybe 10 hours a week. And either way I still cant stand LCDs for movies. They do a lousy job of presenting a film-look to movies. And they so an even lousier job of displaying non-native resolution content. </lol_off_topic.>

Dune ( I have read only the original trilogy ) Hitchhikers Guide series Neuromancer Diaspora Schild's Ladder Singularity Sky 1984

Just a thought. With the sail boat scenario the largest issue is the needed surface area and cost of the solar panels. The weight of the batteries is trivial ( the expense is not ) .. Well maybe it is trivial compared to the cost of a 10 meter sail boat With the weight being less a concern maybe cheaper/heavier batteries would make sense. What if the solar panels were ditched completely. What if the batteries were charged by a small turbine/prop in the water. Normally if the vessel was providing its own locomotion that would just be counterproductive. But lets say the ship allowed a small percentage of the usable wind energy its getting to instead counteract the added drag of a small submerged turbine. When the boat is moving through the water it can be keeping the battery topped off. Of course if you have no wind for an extended period of time, but plenty of sunshine, those on board would surely be wishing they had went for the solar panel array. Preemptively apologizing if this is considered a thread-jack.

A general computer science regimen should inform you enough. I wouldnt bash them as all non-sense and not worth learning. They teach you understanding of computing, not "how to do X in Y application so you can get a job doing X and Y" Now, yes some programs to focus on applications and software. Especially IT/IS programs. And they are more about job placement than furthering understanding. You dont need to be in a school program either. Some good books/topics ide recommend ( that I used with my comp sci classes ) 1: Computer Organization.and Design. This deal with lower level structures, OS interfaces to the hardware. Memory structures. Some assembler. Non-OS and non-platform specific understanding of computers in general. 2: Digital logic / "Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals" Logic. How mathematical operations are implemented with physical circuit logic gates. 3: Data Structures. hundreds of books out there. I read "Data Structures and Algorithms in C++", by Drozdek. 4: Discrete math: plenty of books, more logic and understanding that would pay off especially so if you ever lean towards database design work. In general mathematics will come in handy for anything worth doing in computer science. There is a reason every comp sci program has a strong math requirement. With a solid understanding of the science and architecture you should be able to develop in any language.platform you want to get those big ideas out there one day. I wish you the very best of luck!

Agree on size issues with LED pixels. You need to fit at least 300 ( 100 r/g/b) per inch for a monitor, and maybe 50-100 per inch for a larger tv. +1 what the Cap'n says. They have used LED subpixel displays for years for -very- large -very- bright outdoor displays/billboards/timesquare/sports arenas and the likes. Positives: probably-possibly blindingly bright; likely very good viewing from a wide range of angles. Most cheap LEDs tend to pulse at 60hz, but that might just be a function of being a cheap LED with no special electronics in between and being driven by a 60hz power feed ( think Christmas light LEDs ) I am not sure how well all LEDs handle variable intensity. You might end up with an emitter unit that can only appear to be a few discrete levels of intensity, and none below a threshold to turn the LED on. I am not even close to an expert on these things. Just noting observations of LEDs i have seen in the past. Also agree that LCD tvs generally suck. The seething masses have spoken and keep buying them more than anything else tho. Plasmas are pretty sweet, and reasonable cheap now. I still like my LED/DLP rear projection the best tho.

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I always wanted/still want underground tunnels/fortress/compound/lair. It is neat how common this desire is. Perhaps the collective gene pool preparing for the nuclear-zombie-plague-apocalypse. In all seriousness tho it will not happen unless you have some silly amounts of expendable cash for equipment, tools and time.

Ahoy! I hope I can learn form, and share with you all. Cheers.

Insulin allows your body to use sugar in the bloodstream. It also allows storage of unburned energy in the form of fat. The idea behind low carb diets is that your food intake presents a very low glycemic load to your body, so your pancreas produces insulin at a much slower rate. Every calorie you consume is eventually broken down to sugar for energy. It happens slower with proteins and fats than it does with carbohydrates. So on a low carb diet you have a better chance of burning your food energy as it is only provided in a usable form to your body at a lower rate. I also dont think that insulin will directly inhibit the burning of fat storage. Its just that when you have food-sugar-energy available, and insulin to make use of it at the cellular level, there will be no reason for your body to need to use fat storage. As far as how long naturally generated insulin is in your body, i am not sure about. I would wager that in a non-diabetic and otherwise healthy person insulin levels would be well regulated. That is there shouldnt be "extra" insulin laying around making you fat. Your blood sugar level reaches point X, and your pancreas knows to release Y amount of insulin. There is a steady feedback adjustment of what is needed. It is not the equivalent of a diabetic person taking a big injection that lasts and trails off for hours. For the record, I would not recommend doing the Atkins diet. I must say that it worked for me tho. I did it very strictly for a month and lost 25 pounds. I was exercising pretty regularly at the time too. I felt very unhealthy, but was slimmer. I will never do it again. All in all, cut your calories and your body will need to start using stored fat for energy.

I had purchased large filter sheets for a home air filter. These charcoal/pre filter sheets are cut to size and wrap around a circular central HEPA filter cartridge. It is very high flow material. I used the excess material and have it taped in place over all my computers intake areas. I vacuum the intakes every few weeks. Inside of the PCs are staying much cleaner. Reduces the gook making it in by 90%. Better filter material would trap more, possibly flow better. A high surface area / high flow filter, like a car intake air filter would probably be optimal, and not all that expensive. I also placed sheets of the same material in front of my window unit air conditioners. I think stockings/socks/tights would be too restrictive of air flow and likely cause some heat problems. and probably cost more than actual filter material. I used leftover stuff like this: http://www.filtersfast.com/Honeywell-38002-Air-Filter.asp

Lol. Well, all joking aside. Porn and advertisements have driven the explosion of internet technology. So its likely that the pursuit of better targeted ads and ever more realistic virtual porn will lead enough investors to invest in enough cool new tech. And slightly more seriously, Imagine being free of at least some constraints of reality. Imagine natively "seeing" 4+ dimensional space? It blows my future augmented cyberized brain! For fun reading, check out Greg Egan. And for fun watching ( and or reading ) Check out the Ghost in the Shell movies/series/manga.

Teleportation is not the problem to be solved. The direction I think/hope we will take, when brain/computer interfaces become better and better, we will become less dependent on our bodies. Our brains do a great job of learning what incoming patterns are. Those patterns don't need to come from our body. A "visual" signal, a "touch" signal, a "sound" signal is just nerve pulses that make there way throughout our brains. Fast forward through some crazy brain-computer interface development. Consider a living physical brain, kept bathed in a flow of blood or something functionally equivalent to deliver oxygen/glucose/proteins and remove waste/CO2 but otherwise a "brain in a jar". It is connected to an array of input/output gear into 1) a prosthetic body, or 2) a simulated virtual experience that only exists digitally. Would the brain know the difference? How much of the physical brain can be removed and replaced with more or less "normal" computational/deterministic hardware? Would we want to be living "in" cyberspace? Immortality might involve an endless sea of user aware advertisements. lol.

I just gave Ubuntu a shot. The new shiny v10.10. I am liking it. I previously ran with slackware on my server and windows on my workstation/gamer. Ubuntu has replaced windows for the workstation. It was not without troubles getting it installed. But worth the time I spent. It was mostly due to flaky APIC stuff durring install. Dissabled/Install/Re-enable. All good. Ubuntu is the least UNIX like of any distro ive used. But thats fine. Its got the unixy stuff there and all available, but it seems you can do just about everything without touching a cli. And if you are sick of sudoing all the time.. Just sudo passwd root and create an actual root password. But.. its ot at all a good idea to just run as root all day long tho if that's what you were thinking ( Xitten ) Its worth it for any person of science to learn their way around a unix/linux system. Its always good to have under your belt. And yes, there are great science tools, programming languages, testing environments out there that are built for unix on that just dont translate correctly to a windows environment.