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MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
StoneLion writes "At Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week, speakers in various disciplines provided fascinating glimpses of future technology, including exotica like hydrogen energy and smart dust. NewsForge has a conference report." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
We are Borg?
To determine what businesses his company wants to be in, Dell looks for large markets where there are inefficiencies or high mark-ups. He looks for standards, because markets don't usually become high-volume until standards exist. Dell said standards benefit users, while proprietary hardware benefits only the company selling it.
+4 insightful to Dell there.
i wish the presentations from MIT Emerging Technologies Conference, LinuxWorld, and Apache be available on the internet for free. I can't go to all of them. i only have money to goto to ApacheCon :(
Video taping them, and making them available on the internet or on a CD for a charge could be also beneficial. Just a thought.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Does this mean my appartment will become self aware ?
I've had a guy from ah-ha.com call me three days in a row wanting to sell me pop unders and large banners on search engines that wrap google's results with their advertising.
Just hung up on a telemarketer who was reading from her screen about 'being very impressed with my site' and would like to improve it's rankings.
There is money in this market.
This caught my eye.
Dell words of wisdom
To determine what businesses his company wants to be in, Dell looks for large markets where there are inefficiencies or high mark-ups. He looks for standards, because markets don't usually become high-volume until standards exist. Dell said standards benefit users, while proprietary hardware benefits only the company selling it.
Which is interesting in light of the anouncement of the music service, since the music industry is a glarring example of high mark ups.
Or are you just glad to see me?
15 months to get there? What, are they letting one of the blue hairs from Sun City (a retirement community near Phoenix) drive?
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
While Dell is a successful company, I don't think of them when it comes to emerging technologies. As he said, "Dell looks for large markets where there are inefficiencies or high mark-ups..." This sounds like the stable, mature technologies. Wouldn't some company on the bleeding edge been a better choice?
those specially designed surfaces that deflect all dirt, water, etc. When combined with paper display technolgy, you'll have a tactile user interface on any piece of paper or surface, and it won't even become dirty.
Unfortunately, last time I checked Hydrogen just wasn't particularly practical. Why? It takes up too much space for one thing; unles you're going to use Liquid Hydrogen which takes a lot of energy to keep cool. Secondly how do you make the stuff? Electrolosis with water right? This is all based on articles I saw years ago, but I remember you needed roughly twice the electricity to make the Hydrogen than you get back when you run the car. That's fine if you're running on Hydroelectric dams, but what about all the cars in areas where they have coal or Nuclear Power Plants?
Having sat in on a few meetings with Intel and Dell guys, I can say for certain that they are really sharp. I am thrilled to see that Dell has stepped up to the hardware standards intelligence, and realized that benefitting the consumer in the end benefits the company, while creating things purely for profit inevitably ends in disaster :)
stuff |
...will automatically alter themselves as fashion dictates (and waistlines demand)
Or we need to make some of the important older new ideas, like fusion power, work. We desperately need a new power source. If we don't get one, we're headed back to a coal economy.
You bet it will be big.
Non stick baking pans are just the beginning.
No wax cars.
No clean windows, HUGE issue on skyscrapers
Oh yeah, and the fact it will mean a significant breakthrough in technology is nice too.
Well, that certainly puts to shame the troll comment that first came to my mind.
Around here, one of the euphemisms for using the potty (i.e. "dropping the kids off at the pool", "downloading some files", etc.) is "going to a conference on emerging technologies".
Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of General Electric: "China and India will be strong international competitors, while the Internet levels the playing field for price."
...he already makes $6.9 million in bonuses and salary...
Part of leadership is personal. Immelt said, "People in the organization need to feel you're a part of their life, that they're a phone call away from the top of the company. They need to be able to trust the organization's command chain to pass information in an unfiltered way."
As a former GE employee I can say GE is an innovator in outsourcing competition to China and India. I'd like to make a phone call to the top of the company: "Hey, could you please stop sending American jobs overseas?"
The board will award Immelt 250,000 performance share units (PSUs) with a present value of $7.5 million -- 8.5% more than Immelt's 2002 salary and bonus.
Source: RatcliffeBlog
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Where are the flying cars? I want my flying cars!!!
-CowboyNick
OK... you can store hydrogen densly in metal matrix form, IIRC. I think you have to heat the matrix to release it, but it's been ages since I looked at it. You may not need to "get back" the electricity if you burn it as a fuel, eg BMW's H2 powered 7-series of many years ago. There's plenty of other way s to generate power too, solar, wind, and wave come to mind.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I got enough "dumb" dust to last so long I don't know when I'll need "smart" dust!
I want my flying cars and my person spaceship.
This is my sig.
talk about nice use of human waste.
take a crap and you are contributing to out energy stores.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
here under Photo Gallery. I'll let you pass your own judgement.
you are WAY behind the times.
the point of hydrogen is not a source of energy, but a place to store energy. so we make hydrogen by electrolosys at some huge nuclear facility. then we can turn that huge energy source into a portable energy source. we can make it even more practicle by making a metalic hydride, then just pump the hydride dust into your tank and boom, you have power.
another alternative to hydrogen would be the use of fast growing plants to create ethanol and then use the enthanol in the fuel cells. the net carbon placed into the atmosphear this way would be 0 since the plants need it to grow each season any way.
I personaly like the latter option, but we need to find a way to make a ton of ethanol with out impacting on the land a whole lot. hydroponics mabye?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
the most efficent way of making solor power would be to tunr a seasonal plant into ethanol. the net effect on carbon levels is zero since you are just replacing the carbon that was used during growth, and if you have a continuous growth cycle that keeps up with energy demands, then you are not affecting the environment in any way at all. it takes carbon to make plants, perhaps grass would be a good choice since it grows like crazy, or mabye bamboo since it can make a huge regrowth in a few weeks giving you a lot of hydrocarbons in a short time.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
True. IIRC, rapeseed and sun-flowers and similar are apparently the shiznit for producing bio-diesel, and there's no reason that the same can't happen for ethanol with other fuels.
It makes a lot of sense, hugely reduces processing, is cleaner, and is renewable.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
dont forget hemp/marijuana seeds. they can be used as an easy source of bio fuel. and it would be easy to grow huge amounts of. i know that a year or 2 ago there was a mercedes crusing the U.S. running on bio fuel from hemp. it was original a diesel engine, and i guess it took very few modifications to convert.
Please don't use the word "boom" when talking about hydrogen. ;-)
Around here, one of the euphemisms for using the potty (i.e. "dropping the kids off at the pool", "downloading some files", etc.) is "going to a conference on emerging technologies".
And don't forget "dumping core"...
we need to find a way to make a ton of ethanol with out impacting on the land a whole lot
Get frat boys to donate blood?
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
The simple fact is that patnets have no place in the future of commerce and business. In fact, even today they are rarely good for anything but defensive purposes against useless litigation and cross licensing. Just like the PC era exploded specifically because nobody could patent interfaces, the next generation of technology is going to take the same route.
Let's put forth the abolish-patents (and copyright) meme for every related story (about one in two here).
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Yes, I agree with another poster saying this is way behind the times. Always remember there were times when people questioned the practicality of all technology, even the computer you are using to see this and participate at Slashdot. Cars and traffic control, electric street lights in every town, etc., all had problems and issues and have been handled in some way.
During the last great black out, there was a business that still had power in southern Ontario. Stuart Energy Systems. It was from a hydrogen powered UPS system they develop and sell. Check them out:
http://www.stuartenergy.com
Also check out Ballard Power systems:
http://www.ballard.com
These companies have been around for a number of years now. It is emerging, only on the sense that it is about to become a more consumer level product, but these things have been field tested and there are city buses running on hydrogen fuel cells, etc.
Fuel cells are far more efficient at energy transformation than internal combustion engines. I don't have the exact figures on hand but I believe I've heard that a gasoline engine is about 26% efficient while fuel cell provides about 90% efficiency.
Electricity generation is a different issue. There are many ways to generate it. Hydrogen power is about storing and transporting this energy, not about generating it.
You could argue that we should just use oil and gas, but I happen to have heard there is a finite amount of this.
"We have already evolved so much, our actions would be incomprehensible to a human from a thousand years ago, it's the evolution revolution. Tomorrow we speed up the process, all sectors, all species. Only the strong shall evolve."
--Trevor Goodchild
char *mySig;
I find it sad that nobody has modded you up yet.
testing out my trending skills
If replication is so easy, why hasn't a replicator been built at the macro scale?
This is one of the key questions. So far as I can tell the key problem is that, unless you specify your feed-stock / parts-supply you haven't really defined the problem.
For example, it would be relatively easy to build a replicator to function in an envirionment that consisted of a 50/50 mixture of tested-snap-together-replicator-tops and tested-snap-together-replicator-bottoms (batteries included). But there's no point to doing this. (A fact which hasn't stopped people from doing it.)
On the other extreme, so far as we know it would be impossible to build a replicator that used nothing but vacuum for parts.
So what makes a useful feed stock? Modular parts that are 1) well standardized, 2) easy to manipulate, 3) hard to damage, 4) cheaply and readily availible to the replicator, to start with. Further, at least some of the parts need to be able to able to store and convert energy, and some of them need to be able to store and process information. All of the replicators we know of build themselves from parts that meet these criteria, which occur naturally in their environment. (For example: fax-humour-pages replicate by using paper, ink, people, and fax machines--all of which are more or less standardized, easy to manipulate, hard to damage (from the perspective of a fax-joke), and cheaply & readily available. I'll leave it up to you to decide where the energy and information processing comes from.)
But the "why hasn't a replicator been built at the macro scale" question is really asking "why hasn't a replicator that uses primative raw materials been built at the macro scale" and the answer is that primative raw materials at the macro scale don't meet the critera for good feed stock. Atoms do (which is why we should expect nanotechnology), provided that the replicator is small enough that atoms are easy for it to manipulate.
Thus we should not expect to see any macro scale replicators using primative parts, and we don't. Ellephants, for example, rely of feed-stock produced by other organisms. Note that they are not even big replicators; they are big vehicles built by (and serving the interests of) nano-scale replicators.
-- MarkusQ
CEO Dell said Dell Corp. doesn't want to reinvent technology it can get from partners.
And then he goes off and builds an MP3 player and a music store. No other companies that have done THAT yet, eh Mr. Dell? Guess he doesn't want to share as much as the quote above would indicate.
The funny thing is that they mention the new music service and consumer devices just two paragraphs later!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Solomon envisions micropayments to network service providers attached to every email message as a means of defeating spam."
;-)
How much would he like to charge for useless Slashdot posts ?
I was wondering that too... but I'd consider things like vast arrays of floating solar cells, you can pepper miles upon miles of ocean with'em (not enough for a person to walk on, just enough to capture the sun light), and have them somehow grid the generated elecriticy to where it will be used to generate hydrogen.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
It takes up too much space for one thing; unles you're going to use Liquid Hydrogen which takes a lot of energy to keep cool.
Er, why do you need to cool the H2 to minimise volume? Why not just keep it under pressure?
but I remember you needed roughly twice the electricity to make the Hydrogen than you get back when you run the car. That's fine if you're running on Hydroelectric dams, but what about all the cars in areas where they have coal or Nuclear Power Plants?
You have to compare this ratio to the amount of energy you can extract from the tank of dead dinosaur in a car. Generating power centrally in power stations should in theory be more efficient at extracting energy, and also means that there are individual sources where pollution can be more easily controlled - hopefully meaning that pollution can both be reduced and directed where it is least harmful.
use direct sunlight?
My idea (use it distribute it for the greater good if it is worth it):
Rather than convert to electricity using solar cells (adding an expensive inefficient step) why simply focus sunlight using molded plastic panels (over the ocean) that let sea water seep in the bottom with a collecting station sucking in the hydrogen oxygen mix - at about 1500degC water dissociates (IIRC). Only real problem is keeping the H and O separate until you can store them separately. Then pipe ashore to markets. Reuse them oil rigs and pipeline infrastructure.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
I submitted a story on using Boron as an alternative energy carrier, but it was rejected. Woe is me. Anyway, here's the interesting link:m l
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.ht
Boron is inert both in energetic form (boron) and dead form (boron oxide glass). It is very energy dense and you can recycle the combustion product using a straightforward sequence of reactions.
Yah, weed and ethanol-bearing plants grown in the same facility! Err... scratch that. I'm opening a hydroponics facility right now so that I can grow some... uhmm... plants... to... uhmm... make some... uhmm... ethanol so I can get... uhmm... h... uhmm... to work... ok? Oh, that? That's a special type of fern!
Error 666 - Satanic SCO code found in your Linux kernel.
... of gentoo are they running???
... yet, when i type emerge -s Technologies Conference
:(
:D
MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
i don't get any results
maybe i need to emerge sync.. hmm ill try that
-judging another only defines yourself
By the way, I'll be sending you an invoice for using my idea linking slavery to "intellectual property". I patented it! I think the slavery angle is so dead-on in many ways. The opponents calling us unrealistic utopians. The compromisers. Others are using it too. Let this meme catch on!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist