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good point, See Dewalt... they have a trademark on their design as well which also includes a Yellow color scheme.

(from http://www.dewalt.com/) The following are trademarks for one or more DEWALT Power Tools and Accessories: The yellow and black color scheme; the "D"-shaped air intake grill; the array of pyramids on the handgrip; the kit box configuration; and the array of lozenge-shaped humps on the surface of the tool.

Yeah, but they're no DEWALT. http://www.dewalt.com/us/products/tool_detail_listing.asp?categoryID=350 "Good for Wood, Concrete, thin metal, and SKULLS"

First, The distinction of Li-Poly from the general chemistry of Li-Ion is in the electrolyte. Instead of a liquid or gel electrolyte, the Li-Poly cell uses a thin sheet of conductive polymer doped with ionic compounds. Now while this polymer electrolyte has less mobility than a liquid, resulting in a lower energy density (J/cm^3) and power density (W/cm^3), in practice the manufactured shapes can be more complex than the coin or cylindrical shapes imposed by liquid electrolytes. Therefore more "battery cell" can be stuffed into otherwise unused volumes, and in many applications this maximizes the effective energy density beyond what can be achieved using cylindrical cells.

Second, any Lithium chemistry cell using a Cobalt-alloy cathode (virtually all of them on the market today) is subject to a thermal runaway condition if the internal cell temperature exceeds 130C. This includes Li-Poly cells.

Valence corp has patented a Lithium-Iron-Phosphate cathode chemistry that has less energy density, similar to NiCd, however the change to a Iron cathode eliminates the thermal runaway possiblity, making the cells much safer. These will soon be available commercially from DeWalt as battery packs for their cordless power tools. Here is a press release... note that Valence later bought the company referenced therein, A123 Systems. (I wonder if there's been a delay somewhere - DeWalt was marketing this much more heavily just a few months ago, now you have to do a search on their site to find any reference of it.)

Another company, Altair Nanotechnologies, has patented a Litium Titanate Spinel anode technology that also claims to eliminate the risk of fire and improve on both the Energy Density and Power Density of vanilla Li-Ion. However they have yet to actually deliver cells (to me anyway, despite many requests). And this chemistry is not exclusive to the Iron Phosphate cathode, meaning someone with all of the proper patent licenses could combine the two and make a high energy-density, non-exploding laptop battery that does even better than the Li-Poly battery I'm using in my MacBook Pro right now.

Finally, here's a link to the "Safety Concerns" page of the "Battery University" site which is an excellent user's reference for Li-Ion secondary batteries, among others. And here is a link to a Valence Corp white paper that describes their LIP cells. Lastly, here is a PDF of Altair Nano's marketing material describing their claims of safety advantages their Titanium spinel material offers to commercial batteries.

Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement.

Several companies sell products specifically geared toward fixing this problem.

Here is one of my favorites. There have also been certain times when exreme measures have been needed.

Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement.

Several companies sell products specifically geared toward fixing this problem.

Here is one of my favorites. There have also been certain times when exreme measures have been needed.

You might want to try this, or if that's to puny you might try this.

This might void your warranty, though...

You might want to try this, or if that's to puny you might try this.

This might void your warranty, though...

A screwdriver's interface has remained unchanged for centuries and it doesn't need a new concept.

bah!

However, these languages are very difficult to learn and this can get in the way of learning other facets of programming and computer science. This learning curve impacts the learning of the general problem solving skills needed to work outside the limited world of discrete finite machines, such as in networking or inter-personal spaces. Java solves some of the problem in the OU cirricula by providing a "lite" language. It is a language that does impressive things very easily and that gaurds the programmer against some nasty complexities like platform/compile/library incompatabilities. These are also the reasons it is popular in industry. Languages such as Fortran and Cobol hold on in our Science and Business colleges because of legacy code and the personal perceptions of the faculty. Unfortunately you can improperly teach the problem solving ciritcal to progammin in any language, just as you can properly teach without a language. Classes that focus on getting design and thought about a problem started at least during if not before a project would be much more helpful. Systems such as OO pattern and tools like UML provide much help to the Software Engineer and Computer Scientist alike.

I've worked in the *real world* Perl, C, C++, Z80 assembler (in embedded and non-embedded environments) and Java. Each has a different goal and a different way of getting their. However, irregardless of the path taken, they achieve those golas to a limited degree. Oak, the language that became Java, was designed to be a simple extension of real OOP with a C syntax. Like other embedded languages, most of which are either assemblers or functional strangely enough, it has grown to include methods of getting at the machine and conecpts such as closures. If it adopted lamda calculus syntax extensions, you could use it to teach mathematical therom proving.

However you choose to view the language, as toy, irritant, the next wave, the last wave, et cetera, it is in our CompSci cirricula and it can be taught and taught well. When I went on to my second year of classes I was exposed to C++ for Data Structures and Java for a Programming Abstractions course. Data Structures became a waste of a class trying while to work with a professor who was new to the lanugage. The Programming Abstractions professor knew what was up with Java and so taught us a lot about OO design before delving into the language. I didn't get a lot of help from my time learning Haskel, wich in turn had severly limited my time working with C before moving onto C++.

For what it's worth, learning RCS, and later CVS and UML, helped with my programming more than any of the languages I in which I learned or worked. In the end, these languages proved that they are just tools. Like all tools - Craftsman, DeWALT, GNU liscenses, Sun.Java.*, there will be proponents and detractors and teachers and charlitans. You mileage may vary.

Here's to 5 years of CompSci and counting (with 1 year to go.)