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Interesting critique of ITER. However, it misses one important point. Fusion power plants, assuming we ever manage to control the reaction, will have to be designed differently simply because they'll have a different output requirement from ITER. As the author points out multiple times, ITER is a research project and not designed to generate power. Fusion power will have to build on what's learned by ITER and other research facilities but they'll have a different goal - to produce power.
Where I think the author is right is in something he implied - fusion research so far has been nothing more than learning how to manage and control high temperature/high pressure plasmas.
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The proud declaration “ITER will produce 500 megawatts of output power with an input power of 50 megawatts” as the author explains is a falsehood This suggests to me the project is corrupt and therefore doomed
A successful fusion power plant will of course have to be designed differently from ITER as according to the author ITER is doomed to failure due to its many "irremediable drawbacks"
Perhaps inertial confinement will succeed - Cheerio
"I once put instant coffee into the microwave and went back in time." - Steven Wright
"Shut up and calculate" - apparently N. David Mermin possibly Richard Feynman
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So because the first one that actually has a chance of working will be a messy, expsensive, oversized string and duct tape affair that probably won't live up to the hyperbole, we should not bother?
Imagine if the Wright brothers felt the same.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well, the guy waiting for his bicycle to be repaired certainly felt that way. 
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Perhaps instead of "irremediable drawbacks" I should have said "apparent irremediable drawbacks which perhaps will be overcome in one-hundred or two-hundred or three-hundred years"
I am all for research of course I would be kinder to ITER if instead of their bold false deliberately misleading claim of unlimited energy they instead proclaimed "Maybe in a few hundred years this will work" Hopefully by then we will be running on wind solar tidal and who know what else Perhaps ITER will be useful then so yes we should press on with it but some honesty of ITERs' part would be appreciated - Cheerio
"I once put instant coffee into the microwave and went back in time." - Steven Wright
"Shut up and calculate" - apparently N. David Mermin possibly Richard Feynman
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I currently have the Power Pavilion, but as it is on its last legs after 4 years of loyal service (including a self-done battery replacement that has left the video a bit shaky  ), it's time for me to get replacement. It seems that the Wikipedia article for the Envy says that it is the successor to the Pavilion, and I suppose that the Envy models that have a gaming video card are basically the Power Pavilion.
I should say that I am a dedicated HP user - not because I like the current company (which is not as bad since Carly Fiorina got fired), but because it seems to have the only touch pad (that I know of) that allows for physical depressment. I also like that it is a fully American company as I can complain about setting it up in English (I always buy mine abroad so as to get a combo-Cyrillic keyboard).
On a side note, I see that all notebooks seem to come with a SSD drive. Is this more reliable than the HDD? Is it recoverable if it goes down, so I need to do an emergency excision of the drive for a new system?
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If the notebook does not come with a M.2 NVMe SSD: Stay away: It's old stock on the way out. NVMe SSDs are many - many times faster than old HDDs or even old SATA SSDs. They plug directly into the PCIe bus, so they are not limited by the slow speed of old serial SATA buses. PCIe buses transmit up to 16 bits in parallel. SATA transmits one bit at a time in a serial stream. You do the math! I have used several Samsung NVMes for several years without a single failure. Good luck!
PCIe lanes explained - how many do you need on a motherboard?[^]
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
modified 6-Sep-21 19:41pm.
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If you're going to tell someone to do that math; at least do it vaguely right.
A. m.2 is a maximum of 4 PCIe lanes wide.
B. That's only half the equation though; you also have to factor in the bit rate (PCIe3 is about 1.5x as fast/lane as SATA, PCIe4 about 3x as fast; but AFAIK still uncommon on laptops due to diminishing returns and power consumption).
Telling someone to do the math also ignores the fact that:
- The main advantage of SSDs vs spinning rust is in random IO where the former doesn't have to do a 10ms seek before starting to read; or that within SSDs.
- The main advantage of PCIe vs SATA is that the NVME interface was designed around how SSDs function not how HDDs do and is much more efficient as a result.
- Low end PCIe SSDs are nowhere near as fast.
VI. But I wouldn't have bothered posting B-5 if it wasn't for the  level mistake of A.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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I have tested the relative speed for NVMes versus traditional SATA SSDs. NVMes are much much faster, especially when reading or writing large files. When dealing with a large number of smaller files, the difference becomes much less significant. By the way, I tested only Samsung products of both types.
That is what is important: The relative speed, not the number of PCIe lanes they occupy.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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I have an HP Envy, but it's a printer!?!?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Everyone buys HPs today. Dell tripped and Hp overtook them.
All computers are now made as cheap as possible in china.
Backup all drives SSDs or otherwise with an imager like Acronis or others to a usb drive religiously unless you fancy reinstalling you dev environment brick by brick more than once.
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I splashed out and replaced my 9 year old huge tower PC with an HP EliteDesk 800 G5 Mini with i7 at the beginning of the year.
While, at times, the fan can be audible I am very happy with it, it's nice to have the space back too.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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I don't know about successor. I've had an HP Envy m7 laptop for about 6 years. It had pretty good specs when I bought it for only $700 and I upgraded the OS and the HDD twice since then...once cloning to a 480GB SSD (huge improvement), then a clean install on a 1TB SSD. (another huge improvement)
After all these years, it's still a great laptop that is still snappy and actually compiles faster than my 3y/0 desktop system with better specs. I'd recommend it or a successor but would also advise for a clean install on the biggest SSD I could afford before actually loading it with dev components.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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I'm surprised that Python doesn't have a format specifier for engineering notation. Oddly, the scientific notation is :e or :E depending on the lower/upper case desired for the exponent "E".
Does anyone actually use engineering notation anymore?
Odd duck. "You bloody fool." 
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Marc Clifton wrote: Does anyone actually use engineering notation anymore?
I thought all the IT people use it, but actually use it wrong (had to look it up   )
We use the decimal prefixes when we should use the -bi for the binary basis
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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It is the same except that the exponents are limited to numbers that are divisible by 3, which makes sense for both engineers and scientists. 
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Quote: Does anyone actually use engineering notation anymore?
Now you've done gone bring up memories from my evil past.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Yes, I think in Engineering notation. This comes from a lifetime of electronics engineering, where most calculations require one-and-a-bit significant digits precision and a huge exponential range. (In the good old days, a slide rule did the mantissa and you carried the exponent in your head.)
milli-ohms to megohms.
picofarads to farads.
... etc
A kilohm.nanofarad is a microsecond,for example.
So to me, 100,000 is really 0.1e6, not 1.0e5 (my mental mantissas range from 0.1 to 99).
In the dim distant past I wrote a couple of printf helpers to display numbers "my way".
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Guido needs a good talking to when it comes to representing i as j.
What I mean: a complex number a + bi is written in Python as a + bj
cheers
Chris Maunder
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This would be a lot more convincing if it was accompanied by a video of said duck.
This could be anything.
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Are dice games banned in Germany in case you become a Yahtzee sympathiser?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Now you're really göring someone's ox.
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Coming up with that one Griff... must've taken some concentration.
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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