I think the idea is that a 0.5cm of snow on the road would prevent the asphalt from absorbing any sun. Use the panel to melt at least some of it, and the sun will do the rest. You aren't going to melt any snow drifts, but you might get rid of that light coating that will turn to ice in the dark.
We don't do that now because it requires a lot of additional infrastructure. This already has the infrastructure built in (assuming running electricity through a solar panel produces heat).
Of course, this doesn't do much for you at night, or when there is no sun, or when the temperatures are so low that you can't pump enough power in to melt an snow cone.
Either way, I have my doubts that they can produce a covering for the solar panels that are:
1. resilient 2. translucent 3. high traction 4. cost effective
I do have other questions, such as how would this compare, cost wise, to build a roof over all of the roads with cheap solar panels on top? A roof would provide shade in the summer and drier roads in the rain/snow, with the added benefit that protecting from the elements would increase the life span of the road. (Although roofs can have issues with wind.)
Still an interesting idea though, and I'm curious to see how the trial does.
It might be enough waste heat from the solar panels, but there will be less waste heat from solar panels than black asphalt. Black asphalt converts all absorbed sunlight to heat and then releases it over time, while the solar panels would only release 85%. The only way the solar panels would be better at melting snow is if you could pump energy back through them to warm them up.
85% of the loss on the photovoltaics is being released as heat. But with asphalt it is 100%. The only way these are going to be any better at melting snow is if you can send electricity back through them to heat them up.
One huge benefit of adding the ability for x64 compiling is that it forces developers to clean up their code. Even if there is no benefit to running a program in x64, just cleaning up the code to the point that it compiles properly can fix quite a number of bugs.
There is something that people forget when talking about the engine size of a hybrid. If you have a long uphill drive, you will quickly run out of battery power and be using only your gas engine. If you have a tiny engine then you will be stuck on a long uphill drive that you can't get your little car to exceed 30mph on. (This does happen.)
It makes more sense to have an engine sized large enough to be able to power the car by itself, charge the batteries with the engine, and turn it on/off as needed. That way you get efficiency, only add a hundred pounds to the weight, and you can survive more edge cases.
Concrete roads have been shown to have a significantly lower cost of ownership than asphalt for most areas. They cost more to put in place, but last so much longer and better that there are significant cost savings.
Lightweight cars (fuel efficient vehicles) have far less impact on the road than large vehicles. They create less stress on the road and less wear on the road. If everyone switched to more efficient cars, the roads would last longer.
(Of course, if they switched to concrete the roads would have a significantly lower cost over 50 years, and reduce temperatures as well.)
Okay, I dislike the governments bailouts as much as the next guy, but bringing Obama into this post just makes it lose a lot of impact. The EV-1 was junked many years ago, before anyone had heard the name "Obama".
Driving over a plate to charge by induction is a clever idea. I don't think it would work though because induction is very sensitive to distance. Trying to move the plate closer to your car (or vice-versa) would be a process I am guessing would be complex and/or prone to failure.
50 min/month? Really? I guess Americans must be chatter boxes because that is nothing. We have one guy in the office (I have to look at phone plan stuff) that uses more than 3000 min/month.
But you want median inhabitants per square kilometer, not average. You don't have to cover the edge cases of people living in the middle of nowhere, so they throw off the average in unrealistic ways. (Seeing a graph of population density would be best, but median should suffice.)
I think the comment about weather conditions was the US has more varied extremes due to its large size. For the past two and a half months we've had most days per week over 100F (38C), and I don't even live in one of the "hot" areas. I've lived near Death Valley California, and this is relatively cool. But we also have areas in the US that basically frozen tundra or a tornado alley.
If you are going to build cell towers in the US you either have to get a bunch of different kinds for the different kinds of weather, or over engineer them to handle all types. Either option adds significant costs.
Still, I'd go with "the US telecom companies are really screwing their customers" theory.
It's worth noting that while SSDs are just now trying to implement this, Linux and Windows 7 have supported it for at least 6 months, and its use has essentially been finalized for almost two years (draft in the specification). Adding this feature to SSDs is long overdue.
Even if they are staying afloat by selling off assets, I'm still amazed that they've been able to do so for so long. They don't sell many useful items, and what they do sell is priced so high that only the terminally stupid would buy it. The fact that they are still in business is some sort of engineering marvel.
I was in their recently as I was out of town and really needed an S-Video cable. I was willing to pay a premium for quick convenience, but they wanted $30 for a 6ft cable. Seriously? Fortunately they had a few cables with older packaging art that was being phased out so I picked one up for $10. A few days ago I ordered some online for another project for about $1 each. Had they not had the heavily discounted stock (which was still not a good price) I would have tried to find a Best Buy.
I feel for you, I really do. But these points are worth looking at.
1. If you pay someone $500 to cut off their arm, is it your fault if they do? In the end it makes you quite the bastard, and you'd hardly be blameless for the difficulties they encounter with one arm, but in the end it was their decision to accept the money and cut off the arm.
2. You get aid. Do you know when the last time was that someone gave my country aide? I'm not feeling any empathy about this. Still, I wouldn't trust your finance minister.
3. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for not giving Pakistan high tech equipment. There is little guarantee that it won't be used against us in a couple of years. At the same time I can understand why you wouldn't want the US military tromping through your country. I can't see a compromise both sides would be very happy with.
This has been my experience, although other commenters seem to have the opposite. Personally, I'm impressed that Germany has their own 24 letter word just for the law.
Doing the speed limit doesn't create dangerous conditions. Speeding and tailgating cause dangerous conditions.
This is incorrect. Go take a driving safety course where they will explain that driving slower than the people immediately behind you can be extremely unsafe. If the speed limit is 60, and everyone around you is going 65, go 65. If you are in the left lane and holding up traffic, get out of the way.
When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage.
That's what I've read too, but my experience has been different. I had two of the first affordable SSDs, made by OCZ and with the infamous JMicron controller. I was having serious issues with data corruption quite soon after OS installation and I wasn't sure if it was something with the controller and Linux. I ended up using some *nix utility designed to fill the drive with a byte combination and then read it back and see if it was correct. There was apparently a multi-megabyte section of the drive that would fail writing every other bit. (Writing 1111 would read back as 1010.) Because of the wear leveling, the location of the failure on the drive would change constantly, and the drive/OS never notified of a write failure. Silent data corruption.
The drive was eventually replaced by OCZ, and neither replacement nor the other original showed similar issues so it may have just been a fluke. But it's very possible that the possibility of write failures is very much being glazed over by manufacturers. I have also seen flash devices like USB thumb drives and flash cards fail catastrophically to read written data, so I am pretty skeptical of these claims.
Still, it's not any worse than my experience with hard disk drives.
You might consider adding the ability to distinguish nearline storage. That way you could add computers around the home as devices that could be backed up to and restored from quickly, but that there would still be remote computers will full copies of the backup.
I'm curious how you are doing rsync diffs for encrypted Reed-Solomon fragments.
I'm also curious why the decision to break up files into three pieces and create three parity pieces. Is there a benefit/disadvantage to using this over pieces of fixed size (say 1MB)? If you have more peers, can you create more parity pieces? What about creating more parity pieces initially and using them if you add more peers (or is that too bandwidth inefficient)?
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I think the idea is that a 0.5cm of snow on the road would prevent the asphalt from absorbing any sun. Use the panel to melt at least some of it, and the sun will do the rest. You aren't going to melt any snow drifts, but you might get rid of that light coating that will turn to ice in the dark.
We don't do that now because it requires a lot of additional infrastructure. This already has the infrastructure built in (assuming running electricity through a solar panel produces heat).
Of course, this doesn't do much for you at night, or when there is no sun, or when the temperatures are so low that you can't pump enough power in to melt an snow cone.
Either way, I have my doubts that they can produce a covering for the solar panels that are:
1. resilient
2. translucent
3. high traction
4. cost effective
I do have other questions, such as how would this compare, cost wise, to build a roof over all of the roads with cheap solar panels on top? A roof would provide shade in the summer and drier roads in the rain/snow, with the added benefit that protecting from the elements would increase the life span of the road. (Although roofs can have issues with wind.)
Still an interesting idea though, and I'm curious to see how the trial does.
It might be enough waste heat from the solar panels, but there will be less waste heat from solar panels than black asphalt. Black asphalt converts all absorbed sunlight to heat and then releases it over time, while the solar panels would only release 85%. The only way the solar panels would be better at melting snow is if you could pump energy back through them to warm them up.
85% of the loss on the photovoltaics is being released as heat. But with asphalt it is 100%. The only way these are going to be any better at melting snow is if you can send electricity back through them to heat them up.
One huge benefit of adding the ability for x64 compiling is that it forces developers to clean up their code. Even if there is no benefit to running a program in x64, just cleaning up the code to the point that it compiles properly can fix quite a number of bugs.
There is something that people forget when talking about the engine size of a hybrid. If you have a long uphill drive, you will quickly run out of battery power and be using only your gas engine. If you have a tiny engine then you will be stuck on a long uphill drive that you can't get your little car to exceed 30mph on. (This does happen.)
It makes more sense to have an engine sized large enough to be able to power the car by itself, charge the batteries with the engine, and turn it on/off as needed. That way you get efficiency, only add a hundred pounds to the weight, and you can survive more edge cases.
Concrete roads have been shown to have a significantly lower cost of ownership than asphalt for most areas. They cost more to put in place, but last so much longer and better that there are significant cost savings.
You really munged that last bit.
Lightweight cars (fuel efficient vehicles) have far less impact on the road than large vehicles. They create less stress on the road and less wear on the road. If everyone switched to more efficient cars, the roads would last longer.
(Of course, if they switched to concrete the roads would have a significantly lower cost over 50 years, and reduce temperatures as well.)
Would you provide a link to the article revisions? I'm really curious about this.
Okay, I dislike the governments bailouts as much as the next guy, but bringing Obama into this post just makes it lose a lot of impact. The EV-1 was junked many years ago, before anyone had heard the name "Obama".
But yeah, everything was spot on.
Driving over a plate to charge by induction is a clever idea. I don't think it would work though because induction is very sensitive to distance. Trying to move the plate closer to your car (or vice-versa) would be a process I am guessing would be complex and/or prone to failure.
50 min/month? Really? I guess Americans must be chatter boxes because that is nothing. We have one guy in the office (I have to look at phone plan stuff) that uses more than 3000 min/month.
Take the median, not the average. People in the middle of nowhere don't have cell coverage and screw up the statistics.
But you want median inhabitants per square kilometer, not average. You don't have to cover the edge cases of people living in the middle of nowhere, so they throw off the average in unrealistic ways. (Seeing a graph of population density would be best, but median should suffice.)
I think the comment about weather conditions was the US has more varied extremes due to its large size. For the past two and a half months we've had most days per week over 100F (38C), and I don't even live in one of the "hot" areas. I've lived near Death Valley California, and this is relatively cool. But we also have areas in the US that basically frozen tundra or a tornado alley.
If you are going to build cell towers in the US you either have to get a bunch of different kinds for the different kinds of weather, or over engineer them to handle all types. Either option adds significant costs.
Still, I'd go with "the US telecom companies are really screwing their customers" theory.
Nice posts, but you should probably introduce the concept of paragraphs at some point.
Is there any information about when TRIM support will be added? It's nice to be able to undelete files, but most of us are fine with the consequences.
It's worth noting that while SSDs are just now trying to implement this, Linux and Windows 7 have supported it for at least 6 months, and its use has essentially been finalized for almost two years (draft in the specification). Adding this feature to SSDs is long overdue.
I was wondering if anyone was going to mention the TRIM command.
If the OS and the SSD both support the TRIM command, the problem is solved. Next news item please.
Even if they are staying afloat by selling off assets, I'm still amazed that they've been able to do so for so long. They don't sell many useful items, and what they do sell is priced so high that only the terminally stupid would buy it. The fact that they are still in business is some sort of engineering marvel.
I was in their recently as I was out of town and really needed an S-Video cable. I was willing to pay a premium for quick convenience, but they wanted $30 for a 6ft cable. Seriously? Fortunately they had a few cables with older packaging art that was being phased out so I picked one up for $10. A few days ago I ordered some online for another project for about $1 each. Had they not had the heavily discounted stock (which was still not a good price) I would have tried to find a Best Buy.
I feel for you, I really do. But these points are worth looking at.
1. If you pay someone $500 to cut off their arm, is it your fault if they do? In the end it makes you quite the bastard, and you'd hardly be blameless for the difficulties they encounter with one arm, but in the end it was their decision to accept the money and cut off the arm.
2. You get aid. Do you know when the last time was that someone gave my country aide? I'm not feeling any empathy about this. Still, I wouldn't trust your finance minister.
3. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for not giving Pakistan high tech equipment. There is little guarantee that it won't be used against us in a couple of years. At the same time I can understand why you wouldn't want the US military tromping through your country. I can't see a compromise both sides would be very happy with.
4. I'd feel the same way.
This has been my experience, although other commenters seem to have the opposite. Personally, I'm impressed that Germany has their own 24 letter word just for the law.
Because when the limit is 55 and everyone else is going 70-75, it probably isn't safe to not speed.
According to drivers safety courses I have taken, this is correct.
Doing the speed limit doesn't create dangerous conditions. Speeding and tailgating cause dangerous conditions.
This is incorrect. Go take a driving safety course where they will explain that driving slower than the people immediately behind you can be extremely unsafe. If the speed limit is 60, and everyone around you is going 65, go 65. If you are in the left lane and holding up traffic, get out of the way.
When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage.
That's what I've read too, but my experience has been different. I had two of the first affordable SSDs, made by OCZ and with the infamous JMicron controller. I was having serious issues with data corruption quite soon after OS installation and I wasn't sure if it was something with the controller and Linux. I ended up using some *nix utility designed to fill the drive with a byte combination and then read it back and see if it was correct. There was apparently a multi-megabyte section of the drive that would fail writing every other bit. (Writing 1111 would read back as 1010.) Because of the wear leveling, the location of the failure on the drive would change constantly, and the drive/OS never notified of a write failure. Silent data corruption.
The drive was eventually replaced by OCZ, and neither replacement nor the other original showed similar issues so it may have just been a fluke. But it's very possible that the possibility of write failures is very much being glazed over by manufacturers. I have also seen flash devices like USB thumb drives and flash cards fail catastrophically to read written data, so I am pretty skeptical of these claims.
Still, it's not any worse than my experience with hard disk drives.
You might consider adding the ability to distinguish nearline storage. That way you could add computers around the home as devices that could be backed up to and restored from quickly, but that there would still be remote computers will full copies of the backup.
I'm curious how you are doing rsync diffs for encrypted Reed-Solomon fragments.
I'm also curious why the decision to break up files into three pieces and create three parity pieces. Is there a benefit/disadvantage to using this over pieces of fixed size (say 1MB)? If you have more peers, can you create more parity pieces? What about creating more parity pieces initially and using them if you add more peers (or is that too bandwidth inefficient)?
Would it really be so difficult to add the ability to pass it a DOM tree?