Domain: bobpaul.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to bobpaul.org.
Comments · 51
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Holy fucking shit (NT)
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Re:The $sys$ prefixing thing was apparently wrong
If by excellent you mean ass slow... KQEMU is a huge help, but it's no VMware... VMWare has support for 3D hardware acceleration, finally, too..
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OOPS
OOPS! I just picked up the meaning of your sentence as I was hitting submit
:oops:
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Regardless, it's pretend open
Well, so maybe they're making it pure XML now. That doesn't mean competitors can actually use it in their product. MS isn't charging money to integrate support (royalty free) but their license is very specific about who can legally use it and how.
That's pretend open.
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Video Game consoles
But... they are sold at a loss.
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Refuse to join sides???
If we all just refused to join sides and went with using both or a third browser
"If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent those last few years in college."
--Lewis Black
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Reinventing the wheel?
Recall that OpenOffice includes its own GUI toolkit and app framework
Wouldn't they save a lot of time if they didn't code their own middleware?
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Re:Few questions.
How the distilled water will be kept liquid during the night?
Electrolosis of distilled water is horribly inefficient. In order to boost efficiency of to the 70-80% area they add lots of scary chemicals that act as catylists (Potasium salts, etc). These will prevent the water from even considering freezing.
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That's all well and good, except for...
the obvious point that putting more electrical load on the alternator means a heavier mechanical load on the engine, so there goes your power savings.
Ever jump started someones car? It goes like this:
1) Start your engine
2) Hook up the cables to your car
3) Hook up the cables to their car
4) Hear your car rev up? That's your engine working harder to charge their battery.
5) Start their car. Notice how your car rev'd even harder? Again, greater electrical load=greater mechanical load.
6) Unhook the cables and loo loo loo.
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Whaa?
What about the situation I recall reading recently about hydrogen combustion being worse for the environment than gasolene?
What article was that? Hydrogen compusts to form water. That's it. Very clean
There are many claims that since production of hydrogen is not 100% efficient, that more energy would be required to power the current state of the earth (and thus more fossil fuels or alternative sources) if hydrogen became the main conduit, and this is very true, so fueling cars entirely off hydrogen could be worse, (but that's not at all what this article is talking about, now is it?)
However, I subscribe to the belief that 1 electrical plant is way more efficient than the sum of the 10,000 cars it's powering via hydrogen production had they been running on gasoline, and it's easier to put bulky polution control systems on a stationary power plant than to try and minimize those solutions to install in every single car on the road, so fueling cars entirely with H2 would probably be better for the environment.
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Re:BT protocol flaw?
Seems kinda dumb that BT trackers rely on the clients to honestly report their ratios/upload amounts. Is it just this tracker implementation, or does the BT protocol work that way?
The BT protocol doesn't rely on this. This is a well known issue that effects tracker server logs and stats only. The actual BT Protocol for downloading makes decisions about who to upload to entirely in the client without requesting stats from any other client or tracker.
This "vulnerability" affects torent sites that enforce upload ratios in order to earn access to more torrents, and that's it.
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Re:Was it good to publicise this?
neither do people who consider themselves having an IQ greater than 50.
Replace "having an IQ greater than 50" with "pretentious blowhards" and the statement is true.
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Re:~23 miles per gallon
not 23 miles per gallon. 320 miles per fill up.
Since the 23 gallons of H2 using this storage method only contains about half the energy of 23 gallons of gas, this is about 46 miles per gallon if it was gas.
Can your gasoline car do 320 miles on half a tank of gas? Can it get 46 MPG? These are the comparisons you must make due to differing energy densities.
Also, we don't produce the hydrogen in the car, we do that in a large plant to maximize efficiency of the hydrogen. Hydrogen is basically a battery, while oil is a source. But hydrogen can be a much better battery than LithiumIon (current best/weight) and there are lots of other sources of electricity that will become more and more viable over the years.
Go ahead and try to mandate that ever car must include scrubbers to limit carbon output. Now do the same on a giant plant producing hydrogen to put on those cars. Which is cheaper to do cleanly?
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Gallons of Hydrogen is irrelevant
That would be 311 miles in 13.2 gallons.
Who cares how many gallons? Gas and Hydrogen have different energy densities, and gas is a liquid while hydrogen has no fixed volume.
Instead think of it as 311 miles on a tank of gas, or between fill-ups.
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Gasoline != Hydrogen
50L to go 500kM is 10kM to the liter. Or about 23MPG. Not good.
Hydrogen is a gas. Gasses do not have a constant volume (as liquids and solids) so you can't compare hydrogen to gas directly by volume, but you can compare energy contents by weight.
Remeber, it doesn't take 1 gallon of gas to make 1 gallon of hydrogen. Since hydrogen by weight stores less energy, you can (gasp) produce more of it per gallon of gas you burn.
Gasoline holds roughly 2.5x more power/gallon than hydrogen stored in this method. Even at 75% conversion efficiency, if we used gasoline as the source to produce hydrogen we're still talking some 47 MPG for an equal comparison if we stored hydrogen in this method, which seems to put the most of it in the tightest volume. But we wouldn't be using gas. We'd be using coal, wind, nuclear, or some other high efficiency electrical generation.
Also, it wouldn't cost you $3/"gallon" of hydrogen. And they'd probably sell it by the pound, like propane.
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Better than the alternative
You don't swap pellets. You resaturate them by pumping more hydrogen across them.
The extra weight of the pellets is nominal since it's lighter than storing the same amount of energy in a thick bodied high-pressure tank, thus the less weight of the pellets (due to the thin walled tank) would be better than the other option.
The pellets are less flamable than hydrogen on it's own, since the pellets hold the hydrogen except under the right release conditions, so you wouldn't be dumping a full tank like you would in a high-pressure tank rupture.
Gasoline is also flamable, but cars only explode in the movies. It looks like pellets makes the same true for hydrogen cars.
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And then it would be gone
gasoline would be at a more reasonable price.
You forgot "prompting the world to buy so much of it that we'd be out of it in 10 years"
What do you think prompted OPEC to form in the first place? You don't think it was the realization that they were going to run out of oil eventually and only through monopoly can they control the supply/demand curves to ensure they have oil through 2050. Maybe not, but the OPEC nations seem to think so... At least that's their public statement...
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Ethonal from wheat
Or you could do ethonal from wheat. Not sure how it compares to soy, but it's way better than ethonal from corn.
Also, if you're using bio-anything fuel you don't have to worry about emissions. Petro-diesel is worse due to heavy metals (not in biodiesel) that are cleaned out with scrubbers in modern exhaust systems. Gas "equivilants" don't have the heavy metals, but are a little less efficient. Both pump out CO2.
Bio-anything has no heavy metals and pumps out CO2 that came from current plants, ie it'll be no probablem for new plants to aborb that carbon as part of the natural cycle.
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Re:How does it come out?
plant where otherwise wasted hi temperatures and electricity (you can't turn off the reator at night)
Why the hell would you turn the reactor off at night? Nobody turns off (or even slows) their coal electric generators at night...
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Hydrogen is to gasoline as the sun is to battery.
Converting water to hydrogen and oxygen is roughly 75% efficient (90% at best, but cost prohibitive catalysts needed). Converting hydrogen to electricity is roughly 80% efficient and improving. We get out about 60% of the energy we put in.
But here you're comparing a source (like fossil fuels and the sun) to a carrier (like hydrogen/fuelcell mix and batteries)
Now, if you compare the efficiency of fuelcells to batteries (and factor in fuel economy of the overall system when including the weights of the two devices) you'll find fuelcells tend to come out on top.
Fuelcells are the large battery replacement, not a coal/oil replacement. But without fuelcells we'll probably never have decent electric cars and thus will never cut dependence on oil.
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Not really a dupe
Not actually a dupe!
The origional story said "hitachi will do this in a month"
The current story says "hitachi it's, and it costs this much". The story should have had a "previously mentioned" but that doesn't make it a dupe
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Re:Battery life?
Since a compressed JPEG image is around 400Kbytes, you could easy take and send a picture within a second. Even an uncompressed image might only take a second. Compare that speed to a flashcard which takes several seconds to save a compressed JPEG image.
Don't forget that you still need to locate a wireless access point, associate with that wireless accespoint, and then encapulsate the data for transmission over a network. Oh, and provide some 20-30mW of transmission power to achieve the normal range seen by 802.11b/g products...
Yes, yes I do think that this will use more power than a 1.7~2.0v flash card.
Not to mention that that several seconds you're quoting is probably saving a LOT more than 400kb of image, which a camera high-end enough to include wifi is bound to also do. Few of the JPEG images on my camera are under 1MB, and mine is hardly pro-sumer.
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Re:Don't Buy It
I guess I assumed they still got their standard per copy royalty in addition to the millions up front to make EA exclusive. The NFL was the big guy entering that contract deal, I don't see why they would have made it any different from the standard deal other than making EA pay even more for exclusitivity, otherwise they would have stood to make more leaving the market open.
But then, I really don't know any of the specifics.
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Games suck ;)
Meh.. I won't buy it...
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Don't Buy It
If sales drop, maybe the NFL will look to renegotiate their deal
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And wouldn't this be a good thing?
I'm not justifying pornography, in fact... I find much of it is deplorable. BUT, doesn't the Constitution afford us freedom of speech/ press? It seems to me the government trying to thwart the
.xxx campaign, is flirting dangerously close to being unconstitutional.
Not only that, but wouldn't it be much easier to filter pornography if the majority of it existed as .xxx sites? Most broadband routers have content filtering and it would be super easy for parents just to block access to .xxx hosted sites rather than a list of pornography.com, smoking-hotties.com, etc
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And the way to do that is...
that bounces about 4-5 times around the world through various mix of nym servers and mixmaster ones...encrypted each leg of the way individually to each server..headers stripped each time.
Get TOR or i2p and use one of the anonymous e-mail services that exist on those networks
What you've just described is basically Onion Routing, TOR and i2p being the most well known onion routing networks.
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Onion Routing & Hidden Pages
The newspaper and the source could communicate via a blog or wiki hosted on TOR. It would be impossible to find where the actual server was, and if the source never provides his/her name and other information the newspaper could never find it, nor could prosicuters.
The newspaper itself could even host the wiki/blog and provide the public with the Tor Rendevous address. The government could force the paper to open it's page but there would be no logs available and the paper itself would never know who the informant is.
An example would be the Hidden Wiki available only to those using TOR.
i2p would also work, but requires open ports so won't work behind a firewall/NAT without configuration.
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And Further More
Those who work with a FOSS OS however are more than likely more proficient in one if not both of these.
In addition, if all the windows users in the world converted to linux (good thing) they still wouldn't have the program skills or the knowledge to submit bug fixes and you'd just have the problem that most of your user base doesn't know what's wrong with the software.
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Re:now correct me if im wrong
Months are supposed to reflect lunar cycles and there are 13 of them a year
Who the says months are supposed to reflect lunar cycles? Humans were smart enough 2000 years ago to figure out lunar cycles. If they wanted them to match, each month would be EXACTLY 28 days. Oh, but it takes a day and a quarter longer than 364 days to rotate the sun, so we'd be off anyway. Guess they were smart enough 2000 years ago to know that months CAN'T reflect the lunar cycles without screwing things up.
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Network Time?
From article:
But adding these ad hoc "leap seconds" -- the last one was tacked on in 1998 -- can be a big hassle for computers operating with software programs that never allowed for a 61-second minute, leading to glitches when the extra second passes.
Why would anyone need to set a 61-second minute to account for leap time other than the guys at NIST in charge of the official time? Just set all your computerized clocks to network sync. We have a network time server that re-syncs itself ever hour and then everything else checks that occasionaly. I've never had to do anything about a leap second except maybe be off by a second for a few hours until time resets itself...
That 0.01% of businesses that require absolute perfect time need to hire better software programmers rather than fscking with how we define time.
"OMGZ! Motorolla screwed up in 2003, and some Russians did the same in 1997! Let's pass a law to protect them!!!"
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Re:Get your numbers right
Someone (Toshiba I think?) did a test with a blue ray disk that had 1 layer of standard DVD and then 2 layers of blue ray. This would allow the movie only on the standard DVD layer (4.5gb) but allow for the full range of extras on the other layer.
The HD-DVD camp did a test that had a Single layer of normal DVD and then a single layer of the HD-DVD. Now that they're up to 3 layers, I would imagine they could do a 1 and 2 just like the blue ray camp did.
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Re:Paperless office?
Not sure that qualifies as a paperless toilet. I'm sure you could still use toilet paper. It's definately a waterless toilet, and looks like a grosser toilet.
Flush toilets are better than outhouses, and even outhouses and portapoties sound better than crapping in a Vase and dumping it out back (or where ever)
No thanks!
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Get your numbers right
45GB for HD-DVD vs. 50GB for Blu-ray isn't that big a difference...
No, 5GB isn't that big of a difference. The problem is that in order to do 45GB, HD-DVD's need to use 3 layers, while they were only intended to ever do 2 layers. Yes, they did recently hit 3 layers, but they will probably never get to 4 layers and they will only be sold as 2 layers when they first come out.
Blue Ray was intended, right out of box to get to 8 layers. Right now with 2 layers they're at 50GB. They've already done 4 layers (100 GB) and wholey expect to get to the 8 layers in the future. This is a format with room to grow. HD-DVD just BARELY squeezed in 3 layers and still doesn't reach the capacity of a 2 layer Blu-Ray disk.
It's no contest.
200GB > 100GB > 50GB > 45GB > 30GB. (The two at the bottom are 3 and 2 layer HD-DVD respectively)
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Software Patent
According to the ChatCord website, they're patenting the idea. Once that happens, home-made ChatCords will be in violation of the company's intellectual property rights.
There's way too much prior art on something like this for them to get a patent. It'd be almost like trying to patent the telephone or the 600 Ohm 1:1 transformer or something.
If anything, they are going to patent the software and/or the solution as a whole so that you would only be infringing if you sold a product identical marketed for VOIP use, since that's the only somewhat novel thing they did.
In any event, note that their patent is PENDING, not granted. I wouldn't worry. (or care... just don't sell your home made ones)
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Re:Real Stuff
I realize you were trolling and all, but it's completely obvious.
No, not trolling... providing a sardonic commentary. I don't feel there's any place for the bat suit on howstuffworks.com. It doesn't work, it's not real. End of Story.
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Real Stuff
I remember back in the glory days when howstuffworks.com used to have articles about actual products and phenomena. They still do that sometimes, right?
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Because it prevents Ilicit Uses
That means companies like Broadcom (they tend to not have any drivers for linux) won't get chosen by anyone wanting to run Linux, and thus will lose money as people will chose non-Broadcom hardware.
I'm not sure about all hardware, but I'm sure part of the reason Broadcom doesn't openly document their WiFi hardware is because they use software radios, where all of the channel number to frequency conversion is done in the driver and not in the hardware.
This would mean that someone writing an open source driver would have to properly tell the hardware what frequencies to use--something that shouldn't be a problem.
However, it also means that you could easily tell the radio to broadcast in frequencies (and possibly powers) that aren't within the spectrum their FCC license covers. IE, people could do things they aren't supposed to and maybe Broadcomm is worried about law suits.
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Not all that relevant, though...
This is a huge blow to PowerPC's credibility, though.
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By contrast, the chips I.B.M. makes for Apple represent less than 2 percent of chip production at its largest factory in East Fishkill,... And ... it is a small part of the revenue of a company that increasingly focuses on services
What does this have to do with PowerPC's credibility? The parent didn't say "WOW!! IBM is /so/ screwed!" He said "There goes PowerPC's credibility." And he's right.
While Apple may only account for 2 percent of IBM's chip production, I can guarentee it accounts for much more than that percentage of it's PowerPC production. Apple was one of IBM's largest PowerPC consumers.
Now, IBM's Power5 and Cell processors still have a huge future, I would predict, but I wouldn't expect to see very much more to do with the PowerPC.
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Re:Welch?
A: He wanted to take a leek.
The vegetable??
No, seriously. I don't get it
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FAQ
Godwin's Law invoked PRIOR to the first post!
This is incredible! Someone obviously has the FAQ
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They already have
...untill they run out of addresses
They already have.
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Cruelty to animals
Isn't it cruel to use a cockroach like this?
[snip] The insects I use lead normal, healthy lives: if you don't believe me, send me your address and I'll slip some eggs under your front door.
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Re:Not that risky
1 The earth is mostly empty land.
Most of the land is empty, yes, but overwhelmingly the earth is empty water. Without any planning what-so-ever, you'd likely end up in an ocean, which woudlnt' hurt anyone.
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MOD PARENT UP
Normally I don't make frivolous requests like this to the moderators, but seriosly.
MOD THE PARENT UP
Don't piss and moan (and mod down) because some fucking loud mouth got a little fucking passionate and said the fucking F-word a few fucking times!
I mean fuck! Did you read his post, or just mod down because he said fuck? Sometimes even arrogant insults can contain painfully valid points!
"Remember: When moderating, try to focus on modding up rather than modding down."
--Slashdot Moderator Guide
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Re:Potential vs Actual
I don't think that's true with people buying computers. I think most people who buy computers turn immediately to the Dell's and HP's, maybe a Gateway, or similar. Basically, they buy what PCMagazine tells them to, or stop into BestBuy (or similar) to browse the product, but never even consider a Mac.
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Potential vs Actual
The *potential* market for Apple computers is anyone looking for a computer (100%), and they get 5% of them. The potential market for Yahoo is 20%, and they will then get some fraction of that.
You make a very valid point, but why is the potential for Apple computers 100% when the potential for Yahoo is 20%?
Obviously I understand that the Apple iPod accounts for nearly 80% of the market that Yahoo is entering, but IBM compatibles account for much more than that in the market Apple computer competes.
Just as I would never consider a WMA based MP3 player at this time (I love my ipod, what can I say?) I would also never consider buying a mac. I only buy computers in part form, something Apple doesn't really facilitate.
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NO TROLL
Just because you don't agree with someone's comment does not mean they are a troll.
He makes a very valid point. US trade laws are enforcing not just copyright laws on other nations, but the horrid mess that is the DMCA. I'm all for protecting publishers writes and all and feel that US trading partners should do the same, but it's bad enough the DMCA is in america. We don't need to spread this anywhere else.
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Fills the gap for Joe Shmoe Blogger
Why the need for decentralized trackers? I don't get it! Bittorrent is supposed to be a haven for law-abiding citizens to trade Linux ISOs and Project Gutenberg text files.
One of the things that's long made Azureus great was the integrated tracker.
So, in the old system JoeSmoe Blogger could upload a torrent to a homemovie and both seed the torrent and track the torrent using Azureus. However, on a cable/dsl modem, if you get enough people downloading eventually you'll out strip your ability to effectively track, let alone seed (which by this point, hopefully others will take over)
With the P2P tracker, you can start by tracking and seeding yourself, and then eventually drop back to "Only Seed if the number of copies on the network is less than x" and not even worry about tracking. You could even drop out all together and hope the community maintains your torrent...
I'm sure a centrally hosted tracker would be much more efficient, but Joe Shmoe blogger doesn't have access to a webserver, and blogger.com doesn't host torrents AFAIK, and a lot of the public trackers stop tracking torrents after a couple of weeks (so all the late commers are stuck with a 1 gig file half done. This fills the gap.
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Re:I'm no market analyst, just a movie watcher...
Stupid public terminals.... you hit the back button and slashdot logs you out! grrr..
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