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Fuel Cell Laptop announced by Toshiba
Steve writes "Following on from the Fuel Cells approved for airline cabins story a week or so back, it would seem there will soon be a need for that approval:
Toshiba has announced a fuelcell powered laptop for 2004,and possibly a PDA."
It's still only 10 hours. I betcha that the price difference for this baby will be a lot more than if you just stock up on extra batteries. I'll keep my ineffiecent Dell for now.
If a and b in c, and a can create b, and a can create a, and b can create b, and b cannot create a, then a created c.
This sounds pretty sweet. I do wonder if the cartridges would be refillable though. Changing them out and replacing them every other day could lead to a large pile of empty cans very quickly, even moreso if the technology catches on. While they are far better then dumping Li-ion batteries into landfills, refillible would still be better yet.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
That's not true. I was searched by a helpful, if not portly, security lady. She politely informed me that I was allowed to have only one lighter, not the two she found in my laptop bag. Helpfully, she allowed me to choose which of my two lighters I'd like to give to her. I chose the older one, as I am not the sentimental type and it was nearly out of butane. I was then allowed to board the aircraft and proceed safely to my destination.
So, you can take a butane lighter on board a plane, but only one at a time. On the other hand, you can easily order several alcoholic drinks like vodka which would combust very nicely from the comfort of your spacious seat.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
That's nice.
:P
:P)
:P) I'd be willing to go all fuelcell, save a small battery that would let me change carts without rebooting :P
Anyway, this is pretty cool. Although we'll have to see how the fueling method works. Some people mentioned a 'cigarett lighter' type thing you could buy, but we'll have to see how much of a 'revineu source' these companies consider it... It would kind of suck if they cost as much as the ink cartrages for most printers
Even if the price is down to $2-$3 a cart, I'd still rather go with the practicaly free eletrical power from an outlet then disposable carts.
And finaly, eletrical power is so cheap that most people don't mind if you just plug your stuff in. When I bring my laptop just about anywhere, I can feel confident I'll be able to find an outlet to plug it into. I could even get an adapter for my car (actualy, an 9vdc->120vac to plug my 120vac ->12vdc power brick, but hey it works
With these things, you're SOL. Personaly, I think it would be cool to combine the two into a hybrid solution, a 30min/1hr battery that you can charge while using via a plug or via the fuel cell system. That would really give you the best of both worlds.
Of course, when we can get fuel cell's for $0.20 and fill them up anywhere (say, people put natural gas taps in their kitchen or something
(oh, btw. I'm tying this in on a server machine, that dosn't happen to have any spell checking software installed. Now you can all see my horrible spelling in it's full glory!!!)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Battery life could be a lot better today, if people put less *crap* in their laptops. Let's do a rundown:
* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power.
* Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar).
* Do not use an x86 processor. Repeat after me. Intel and AMD both make processors completely unsuited for laptop use.
* Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more.
* Axe the 3d hardware and extra video crap. No one is going to play Quake on their laptop anyway -- lousy form factor, and trackballs, trackpads, and nipples are all awful at Quake control.
* Have "premium" batteries. It costs more to make fancier, longer lasting batteries? Okay, do so and then offer both fancy and less fancy as an option.
May we never see th