6 ms·
Waste of sand. You want liquid nitrogen on your desk? Where's the utility?
by underlogic 3y ago
Waste of sand. You want liquid nitrogen on your desk? Where's the utility?
- htag 3y agoIt's liquid helium, which I imagine just evaporates into the air.
- bee_rider 3y agoAlthough, wouldn’t liquid nitrogen also evaporate? The atmosphere has lots of nitrogen.
- olliej 3y agoThe bigger issue is that helium is a functionally finite resource, and does not remain in the atmosphere (at least IIRC it literally just floats up until it gets blown into space). The bigger local issue you run into with liquid helium and liquid nitrogen is having it evaporate in an enclosed space. You can "easily" create an environment leading to inert gas suffocation (a real hazard in some industrial cases) - in reality any simple case like this is unlikely to be using enough of N or He, and is unlikely to be sufficiently enclosed, but in principle it would be possible - maybe if you were in a basement and spilled an inexplicably large thermos of them it could do it.
- lathiat 3y agoYou can definitely cause problems by spilling an entire dewer into a smaller room. Had to calculate this for the safety part of a LAN party event application. Fortunately we had a very big room.
- olliej 3y agoDewer! thanks, I knew there was an actual name for those heavy duty thermoses but it completely escaped me :D
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoDewar, actually. Originally Dewar flask, after Sir James Dewar.
- apantel 3y agoIt’s a sport. It’s like drag racing. Nobody is going to drive a drag racer to work, but that’s not the point of the car.
- arcanemachiner 3y agoWaste of cars. You want liquid nitromethane on your roads? Where's the utility?
- rgmerk 3y agoBut at least drag racing is a spectacle. Not my thing, but it is a spectacle. This? You push a button and a number comes up.
- lostlogin 3y agoBenchmarking hardware has been a thing forever, and applies to a vast swathe of things. Graphics cards, ram, hard drives, network cards etc. Then you look further and see that it’s done with coffee machines, motors (of all sorts), and just about any other device you can find, make or name. Wanting a fast/strong/powerful/quick X is a fairly common thing for many of us.
- steve_rambo 3y agoAre you sure you haven't visited hacker news by mistake? Hardware overclocking requires a decent amount of knowledge, most of it obtainable only through months of trial and error, and a lot of tuning to push dozens of often conflicting parameters just right. Extreme overclocking requires that much more. If what they're doing is simply "pushing a button", then programming and system administration can be reduced to that too, along with many other things. You simply can't get full performance from modern systems without some amount of overclocking, and things like PBO and XMP/EXPO profiles are far from what your hardware can achieve because they have to be very conservative, or many systems won't run without additional manual tuning, which most consumers won't do. (Except for closed systems like Apple's where your hardware doesn't belong to you and you can't change anything anyway.) So one immediate thing overclockers provide are general guidance on what you can expect to achieve and what thing to tune which way to get close to maximum performance from your hardware without spending months on it like they did. I heavily rely on such information. My system would be at least 25% slower if not for these "button pushers".