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IEEE's Technology Winners & Losers of 2006
eldavojohn writes "As far as technologies go, there are clear winners and clear losers. This month's IEEE Spectrum issue contains an interesting list of winners and losers from 2006. Among the winners are a new radio technology, IP phone networks & memory technologies along with ethanol from sugarcane. Among the losers are tongue vision, LEDs in clothes, a flying car and ethanol from corn."
Among the losers are [...] a flying car
Hopefully the day they become reality won't involve Emmett Brown jumping of a DeLorean and taking us Back To The Future.
An Aston Martin DB9 though...
Summation 2
These have to be the best winner ever... I'm sure everyone else here wants a virtual flock of 16000 chickens.
:(){
Moonshiners have been doing that for hundreds of years. What is so new???
NOTHING.
Nice to see "The Omnivorous Engine" in TA. There are a lot of brilliant minds here.
:)
Ethanol is cheap and it's very common here.
The only problem comes from the use of natural gas, since most of it comes from Bolivia, and we're having some problems with their new government claiming that Petrobras (government-owned Brazilian oil) has no right over their natural gas.
And of course... we're also self-sufficiency in petroleum.
The blurb on parallel constructs is well said. This has been said on Slashdot before, but with more and more computers getting multicore CPUs, it behooves us to figure out ways to get apps to use multiple threads of execution.
We can do this by multithreading in a single process, which the latest release of PMD does. This is kind of complicated, although using a good concurrency library certainly helps. Or we can separate concerns, like moving the user interface into a separate process like we do with indi. Either way, no sense in leaving CPU power on the table...
The Army reading list
One of the largest issues with ethanol, especially derived from corn, is the fact that if widely adopted it will be so appealing to developing nations to start producing it that we will see some major environmental consequences.
Many developing/3rd world nations will have two options: Convert current crop fields to corn fields or cut down rainforest for crop space. It's obvious why cutting down rainforest is bad, but converting current crop fields (or even using available crop land) for corn couls be disasterous for the development of these countries. Not only would it make them more reliant on the rest of the world for produce, it would ruin their farmlands. Corn will ruin farmland. It syphons more nutrients from the soil than practically any other crop. It renders the land it's grown on useless for years, much more so than other crops. So, when they have to rotate crop fields to grow more corn, they end up with useless land.
As was stated in the article, using corn over sugar cane is silly to begin with, and the fuel savings/environmental impact savings aren't as high as one would be made to believe, and can actually be worse without planning. This is another concern with third world nation production of ethanol, all the possible steps probably won't be taken to reduce environmental impact. It will be about turning the most profit, not about being eco friendly.
There are a lot of good articles out there about how the cons of ethanol outweigh the pro's and how, when it comes down to it, we're spinning out wheels on a solutions that's not THAT much better than gasoline to begin with. It's hardly even a good transitionary fuel source.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
This was a winner during the Christmas Season in Portland and at Breitenbush!
http://www.allyn.com/
Cleara
I couldn't disagree more with the choice of BT as the leading company because of its 21CN network. As such it is in interesting choice of BT to go to Ethernet IP for its entire network. There are at least two other incumbents who are doing the same thing. KPN has a project called ALL-IP and and Telstra has a project called the Common Network.
1 77-1212162_9475_1132326712652-Op_weg_naar_All-IP_1 81105.pdf9 419&print=true
o n6 (minute 25 and onwards)
However KPN is doing something more than just changing the backbone. KPN will roll-out VDSL2+ to the end-users as well. This will all be Ethernet/IP based for the backhaul and VDSL2+ for the last 450 meters, allowing 50/20mbit down/up. KPN will close 1350 swithch locations and roll out 28000 street cabinets to deliver the speeds to the end-user.
http://www.kpn.com/upload/1215076_9475_1132830598
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=6
(the lightreading article forgets the vdsl2+ bit, see presentation for that)
In contrast BT will only do ADSL in its network, they will not reach speeds above 24 mbit and in response to a question on access networks he says, that it is very hard to understand what a user will want to do with more than 24mbit. (hereby forgetting that most of the UK will not be living close enough to a dslam to actually get this 24mbit). He doesn't see a reason for fiber to the home or any other kind of access networks. This was said by its Chairman Ben Verwaayen at a recent Ofcom Event on convergence. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/event/presentations/sessi
Use Adsense for Charity
The process assumes the price of corn will be relatively cheap. What's going to happen over the next few years as many new ethanol plants come on line and suck up any surplus corn?
There's also the fact that ethanol plants use *lots* of water. Many of them are being built in the midwest, where there's lots of corn, but unfortunately there's often not a lot of water.
Since there are so many ethanol plants in the pipeline, I'll be surprised if everything in the planning stages gets completed. Out here in the midwest, most local communities see an ethanol plant as a good source of jobs so there's still a big push to build them. It will be interesting to see what happens to the industry when the laws of supply and demand really start to kick in.
IANAF but where I grew up in Wisconsin you see the same fields growing corn every year for some 30 years. Never left fallow or even rotated to soybeans. Is that because of the level of fertilizers dumped on them or what?
Fertilizers in large doses, and a non-trivial ammount leeches out of the soil and is carried away to cause trouble in other areas.
Blar.
Oh, and IAAF. Got the corn/soybean monkey off my back about 5 years ago and put in an organic vineyard.
Did the real 21st century just arrive?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Imagine the diprod who cut you off yesterday, or the numbnut who almost hit you last week. Now imagine them flying overhead in a ton or so of metal contraption. No thanks.
Actually, there may be a better solution than having to waste massive amounts of arable farmload to grow corn or sugar cane for ethanol.
If you've read up on what GreenFuel Technologies is working on by growing oil-laden algae in vertical tanks fed by the exhaust gases of coal-fired/natural gas-fired powerplants, one nice thing is that the "waste" from the processing of the algae into diesel fuel/heating oil can be easily processed further into ethanol. This could make it possible to increase biodiesel and ethanol production to a scale that no one could imagine even now....
Not to mention that the massive increases now and coming soon in ethanol plants using corn will drive up corn prices which will affect things downstream such as meat and eggs (grain feed) and products made from them. Increasing corn production would come at the expense of other crops which would just pass price increases onto a different agricultural sector. I doubt new agricultural land is being added in any large amounts in this country to offset this. Instead, I think it is safe to say, from what I've personally seen, that large amounts of agricultural land are being lost to development. Productivity per acre is already being pushed to the limit with heavy fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide use with the problems they cause for human health, fishing, and the environment.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Tongue Vision? Now I can watch a movie while performing oral sex! Does it come in high def or do I need seperate Tonsil Tuners?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Both you and the article rightly take issue with the fact that fossil fuels are burned to power the ethanol conversion process. Clearly this is a stupid thing to do.
What I wonder is why these plants can't skim a bit of their own ethanol to power the process? The answer, I take it, is that they can, but fossil fuels are still cheaper so, as usual, until CO2 is a controlled emission in the US is will be more cost efficient to burn dirty coal to produce ethanol than to make the process self-sustaining.
Weak.
caritj.org
"LEDs in Clothes" is a loser? I'm guessing the authors haven't purchased young kids shoes recently; it's hard to find a pair of athletic shoes that DON'T come with LEDs.
It has nothing to do with stupidity. Corn ethanol is pushed mainly by corn subsidies to support midwestern states (for votes) and from lobbying by companies like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland). Unless people are willing to change their lifestyle (probably won't do willingly) then technological solutions have to be hunted for and many of them will turn out to be dead ends. It is no different than any other line of research.
Cellulose to ethanol would be a better route if they got the process working.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Modern cellphones adjust the transmit power based on the Signal-Noise Ration. If there are a lot of cellphones around, then the noise is high, so the phone has to increase the transmit power (reducing battery life). If the cell phone is able to find a frequency with very little noise, it can transmit with very little power, and still have the same quality. If a software radio is used, the number of possible frequencies becomes much larger.
The gains from using this method should more than offset the losses from the slightly less efficient analog stages and higher-speed digital processors and converters.
An ARM brand CPU core will often fit inside an ASIC, and an 8-bit microcontroller fits on FPGAs nowadays.