Very true. However, with current hydrogen techniques, you just move the CO2 burning to the electric plant.
I'd rather see higher capacity batteries. No, it won't approach the energy density of hydrogen, but by replacing the wasteful Otto cycle engines with electric motors, a battery technology within an order of magnitude of gasoline for energy density per volume may be "good enough".
With batteries, energy production is completely decoupled. The battery charger can be powered by a wood pellet stove, a solar panel, a wind turbine, hydroelectric... you name it. CO2 is no longer a "mandatory" part of the equation.
To me, why not just use a natural gas or propane fuel cell? It would save having to make hydrogen from CNG.
If the fuel cell could handle both CNG and LP gas, the technology for storing propane is fairly mature, so it would be useful, not just for keeping an electric car's batteries topped off, but for a UPS or emergency backup generator.
I read a lot of hype about hydrogen, but that is an expensive road, and I wonder if the gains from it are worth it compared to better electric grids and higher capacity batteries.
They have their uses. A Prius is nice in the city because you are not grinding away fuel when stopped at lights or in a traffic jam. Plus, it does work well as an emergency generator in a pinch. Priuses won't win any drag races... but in a crowded city, the point is moot anyway.
Now, if they would bother selling the plug-in models in my neck of the woods, it would be great.
The closest I got to being able to find tune exactly -my- DPS style was the soul system in Rift. It was fun to actually fine-tune one specification just to excel at a raid boss.
Now that you can buy raid gear for real life money ($300 or so per item), I just threw in the towel, surrendered, and went back to EQ2, with all its foibles [1]. At least there is some custom tuning one can do with EQ2's AA specs, although not as much as in the past.
WoW used to have some customizability. Now, you get one class, three (or for the druid, four) talent trees, and a choice of some option (with Icy Veins having a good guide of which to take versus which to avoid). In reality, there isn't much freedom of how to play -- you do it the EJ way, or no way, be it spec, spells chosen, gear in what slots, enchants, and so on.
[1]: The "free" level 85 character is nice, as it allows one to figure out which class they might want take the time to finish leveling to endgame.
Neverwinter went F2P (dunno about P2W, but might give it a look see.)
I wished they could have done another NWN iteration allowing for persistant worlds and private servers. It sort of was a nice combination of the MUDs of yore with original stuff, coupled with (for the day) modern graphics.
Maybe it would be something that would succeed on Kickstarter, if someone proposed a NWN/NWN2 successor that was a single/multiplayer game, not a MMO.
The one thing I will miss is the fact that Winamp's desktop application and the Winamp Android app can sync with each other. The $30 bones for Winamp premium was well worth it.
On the desktop, other players and managers have slowly eclipsed it (for example, I've switched to MediaMonkey for general MP3 tagging stuff), but it being gone will definitely leave a gap in the Android audio player market. Hopefully something as good or better can come along (be it free, "freemium", or a commercial app.)
I'd say computers are good enough for today's tasks... but what about tomorrow's?
With the advent of harder hitting ransomware, we might need to move to better snapshotting/backup systems to preserve documents against malicious overwrites which are made worse with SSD (TRIM zeroes out stuff, no recovery, no way.)
Network bandwidth also is changing. LANs are gaining bandwidth, while WANs are stagnant. So, caching, CDN services, and such will be needing to improve. WAN bandwidth isn't gaining anything but more fees here in the US.
Right now, the basic computer is sort of stagnant, but if fast WAN links become usable, this can easily change.
I wonder if the next breakthrough would be using FPGAs and configuring the instruction set for the task at hand. For example, a core gets a large AES encryption task, so it gets set to an instruction set optimized for array shifting. Another core gets another job, so shifts to a set optimized for handling trig functions. Still another set deals with large amounts of I/O, so ends up having a lot of registers to help with transforms, and so on.
Of course, fiber from chip to chip may be the next thing. This isn't new tech (the PPC 603 had this), but it might be what is needed to allow for CPUs to communicate closely coupled, but have signal path lengths be not as big an engineering issue. Similar with the CPU and RAM.
Then there are other bottlenecks. We have a lot of technologies that are slower than RAM but faster than disk. Those can be used for virtual memory or a cache to speed things up, or at least get data in the pipeline to the HDD so the machine can go onto other tasks, especially if a subsequent read can fetch data no matter where it lies in that I/O pipeline.
Long term, photonics will be the next breakthrough that propels things forward. That and the Holy Grail of storage -- holographic storage, which promises a lot, but has left many a company (Tamarak, InPhase) on the side of the road, broken and mutilated without mercy.
Thanks for the correction. I got the Teradata/NetApp info from an article of when their data center originally opened, and it was claimed that was their mainstay for storage.
If tests are easier to get and use, I can see going in fairly often just to make sure a diet is working or that an exercise regimen is actually taking care of stuff. Plus, it might be useful checking if one has cold or flu, and treating it accordingly.
Interesting, if done right, it could be a decent desktop replacement (I assume one isn't locked into UEFI secure boot on x86.) Even more so if it had Thunderbolt and USB 3.5 capabilities. Use it as a desktop with a BT keyboard, then take it on the road.
Then there are mentions of BitCoin, pro, and against. Before that, it was goatse, then before that, Natalie Portman statues, hot grits, and cold containers of diluted diesel exhaust fluid.
That is my question... how does a large organization like a German city function without Exchange or being beholden to a SaaS for E-mail and other items? Some larger organizations (IBM) have their own infrastructure, but for a lot of things, Exchange is the only game in town once a place expands beyond what a single mail server can handle.
Is there a reputable F/OSS utility that is a drop-in replacement for Exchange (especially with dealing with multiple mail databases and e-Discovery rules) that has "earned its bones" in the enterprise? I've read about a few, but after a few months, they seem to drop off the planet, or get very poor reviews.
The problem is that Google's model works for people who know what they are doing.
However, one reason iOS is so successful is the perception that you don't have to watch anything. If it is on Apple's store, it is safe for human consumption.
The majority of the people out there will not look at the permissions an app wants, and just tap "accept". Android's model works with savvy users, but for the teen texter who barely can type while holding the steering wheel, it has its issues.
Two ways to fix this: Go with additional permission requests upon first use like Apple or Blackberry's offerings, go with a tier of Play Store which is heavily curated, or both.
To help mitigate things with dodgy apps, I use Droidwall configured to block by default. Droidwall needs a facelift, but it is a decent front end for iptables.
Android needs to keep its permission model, but add additional permissions similar to iOS 6+ where when the first time an app asks for access to contacts/camera/phone/SMS/photos/music/etc., it pops up a dialog where the user can confirm or deny permissions. Blackberry has had this model for over a decade, and it has been quite good.
I have mentioned this before, but Google needs to section off its store. One tier being the existing, "well, if not banned, it is allowed" free-for-all (which is a good thing for savvy users), but Google needs to have a tier similar to Amazon's store. Approval is a must, brutal approval guidelines, and no mercy with the banhammer.
This strategy has worked amazingly well for Apple. iOS can be argued to be less secure than Android because the entire OS depends on the jail mechanism. However, because the only [1] way for an app to install on an iDevice is through Apple's store, Apple's strong gatekeeper strategy has proven itself.
Google should see about having a tier or subset with heavy moderation. Then, have an option fairly hidden on the phone to allow access to the free-for-all tier. That way, users who just want to grab Angry Birds, and not Angry Birds + SMS Spammer will get the app they want.
[1]: Of course, there is the enterprise and beta mechanisms for adding apps, but this is not doable for most of Apple's base.
What I see that counteracts the thinner slices is the fact that advertisers keep offering to give more and more data out, from tracking mouseovers to intercepting E-mail, to supercookies, and other permanent identifiers.
However, there is only so much people will take, especially if the info sold causes negative consequences to people, and that is when the ad-based ecosystem will start hitting the skids. That, and when there is no more to sell to advertisers, after the cameras are turned on, and the subscriber's computers miked. Then, the bubble will burst.
If I were to make a startup, I'd take advantage of people and companies waking up to actually needing security and backups (and no, the cloud is just a form of media, it isn't a comprehensive backup solution.) Old and boring stuff, but really needed.
It is just statistics. More Tesla cars on the roads, the higher the chance of one of them getting hit. This is just me, but I'm still pretty impressed by their crash record.
The one thing I'm really curious about is how many Priuses catch fire in wrecks. Priuses tend to be the mainstream vehicle, in terms of popularity, with an EV subsystem, so they should be the standard of how much damage causes a fire or not.
I've tried that, with varying success. A lot of readers will not work with the larger QR codes (which would be needed for decoding a 2048-4096 bit key block), and other readers just give up with regards to alignment if the block is too big.
If there is very standard code system which would work for this (a QR variant, since it does have built in error correction), it is a good thing to have included with a human readable (and retypable) output.
Eventually appliances that have an Internet connection will require one. Consoles come to mind, and the only thing one can do is not buy one. It would not be surprising for TV makers to require an Internet connection for some "always on" next-gen DRM.
This DRM could constantly monitor (with facial recognition uploads) how many people are in the room, to shut off a video if more than a certain amount are watching a movie, of it someone banned from a service enters the room.
If you give an inch, they will take a mile. The fewer devices with Internet access, the better.
Of course, there are security ramifications. A criminal organization would score the jackpot if they knew where everyone's kid is and when people were not at home, if they could tap into the TVs themselves or the data aggregating machines.
Probably the long term answer is a solid internal firewall, or putting the smart TV on its own subnet. Eventually all TVs will be "smart" ones, perhaps even not working unless they have an always-on connection, so I can see emulators being written to make the TV think its phoning home, except it is just communicating with a fancy/dev/null.
We have gone through a first round of startups which were actually pioneering, back in the dot com days.
The next boom are startups which really don't offer much in the way of breaking ground. What they offer is the fact that their customers and their product are totally different groups. FB, Twitter, SnapChat, and many more follow this model.
The problem is that there is only so much money advertisers will pay, and only so much data they can squeeze out of their subscribers before they give the middle finger and move on. This is a bubble waiting to happen, because long-term, there isn't really any product, and their services are essentially fungible. Someone else can come out with a virtually identical service and wrest the userbase away, just like Facebook wrested MySpace's userbase away.
I can understand why people invest in these companies on the short term, but long term, what product do they have over time? Cable at least has fiber in the ground guaranteeing they will be around. Same with wireless providers and spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. However, with current hydrogen techniques, you just move the CO2 burning to the electric plant.
I'd rather see higher capacity batteries. No, it won't approach the energy density of hydrogen, but by replacing the wasteful Otto cycle engines with electric motors, a battery technology within an order of magnitude of gasoline for energy density per volume may be "good enough".
With batteries, energy production is completely decoupled. The battery charger can be powered by a wood pellet stove, a solar panel, a wind turbine, hydroelectric... you name it. CO2 is no longer a "mandatory" part of the equation.
To me, why not just use a natural gas or propane fuel cell? It would save having to make hydrogen from CNG.
If the fuel cell could handle both CNG and LP gas, the technology for storing propane is fairly mature, so it would be useful, not just for keeping an electric car's batteries topped off, but for a UPS or emergency backup generator.
I read a lot of hype about hydrogen, but that is an expensive road, and I wonder if the gains from it are worth it compared to better electric grids and higher capacity batteries.
They have their uses. A Prius is nice in the city because you are not grinding away fuel when stopped at lights or in a traffic jam. Plus, it does work well as an emergency generator in a pinch. Priuses won't win any drag races... but in a crowded city, the point is moot anyway.
Now, if they would bother selling the plug-in models in my neck of the woods, it would be great.
Understood. Similar to the Matrix and Highlander having no sequels.
The closest I got to being able to find tune exactly -my- DPS style was the soul system in Rift. It was fun to actually fine-tune one specification just to excel at a raid boss.
Now that you can buy raid gear for real life money ($300 or so per item), I just threw in the towel, surrendered, and went back to EQ2, with all its foibles [1]. At least there is some custom tuning one can do with EQ2's AA specs, although not as much as in the past.
WoW used to have some customizability. Now, you get one class, three (or for the druid, four) talent trees, and a choice of some option (with Icy Veins having a good guide of which to take versus which to avoid). In reality, there isn't much freedom of how to play -- you do it the EJ way, or no way, be it spec, spells chosen, gear in what slots, enchants, and so on.
[1]: The "free" level 85 character is nice, as it allows one to figure out which class they might want take the time to finish leveling to endgame.
Neverwinter went F2P (dunno about P2W, but might give it a look see.)
I wished they could have done another NWN iteration allowing for persistant worlds and private servers. It sort of was a nice combination of the MUDs of yore with original stuff, coupled with (for the day) modern graphics.
Maybe it would be something that would succeed on Kickstarter, if someone proposed a NWN/NWN2 successor that was a single/multiplayer game, not a MMO.
Just an updated version of NSIS that supported MSI, MSP and MSU files would make NullSoft a profitable company within months.
The one thing I will miss is the fact that Winamp's desktop application and the Winamp Android app can sync with each other. The $30 bones for Winamp premium was well worth it.
On the desktop, other players and managers have slowly eclipsed it (for example, I've switched to MediaMonkey for general MP3 tagging stuff), but it being gone will definitely leave a gap in the Android audio player market. Hopefully something as good or better can come along (be it free, "freemium", or a commercial app.)
It is amazing it survived this long.
I'd say computers are good enough for today's tasks... but what about tomorrow's?
With the advent of harder hitting ransomware, we might need to move to better snapshotting/backup systems to preserve documents against malicious overwrites which are made worse with SSD (TRIM zeroes out stuff, no recovery, no way.)
Network bandwidth also is changing. LANs are gaining bandwidth, while WANs are stagnant. So, caching, CDN services, and such will be needing to improve. WAN bandwidth isn't gaining anything but more fees here in the US.
Right now, the basic computer is sort of stagnant, but if fast WAN links become usable, this can easily change.
I wonder if the next breakthrough would be using FPGAs and configuring the instruction set for the task at hand. For example, a core gets a large AES encryption task, so it gets set to an instruction set optimized for array shifting. Another core gets another job, so shifts to a set optimized for handling trig functions. Still another set deals with large amounts of I/O, so ends up having a lot of registers to help with transforms, and so on.
Of course, fiber from chip to chip may be the next thing. This isn't new tech (the PPC 603 had this), but it might be what is needed to allow for CPUs to communicate closely coupled, but have signal path lengths be not as big an engineering issue. Similar with the CPU and RAM.
Then there are other bottlenecks. We have a lot of technologies that are slower than RAM but faster than disk. Those can be used for virtual memory or a cache to speed things up, or at least get data in the pipeline to the HDD so the machine can go onto other tasks, especially if a subsequent read can fetch data no matter where it lies in that I/O pipeline.
Long term, photonics will be the next breakthrough that propels things forward. That and the Holy Grail of storage -- holographic storage, which promises a lot, but has left many a company (Tamarak, InPhase) on the side of the road, broken and mutilated without mercy.
Thanks for the correction. I got the Teradata/NetApp info from an article of when their data center originally opened, and it was claimed that was their mainstay for storage.
If tests are easier to get and use, I can see going in fairly often just to make sure a diet is working or that an exercise regimen is actually taking care of stuff. Plus, it might be useful checking if one has cold or flu, and treating it accordingly.
Interesting, if done right, it could be a decent desktop replacement (I assume one isn't locked into UEFI secure boot on x86.) Even more so if it had Thunderbolt and USB 3.5 capabilities. Use it as a desktop with a BT keyboard, then take it on the road.
This is how MS should have sold the Surface Pro.
Then there are mentions of BitCoin, pro, and against. Before that, it was goatse, then before that, Natalie Portman statues, hot grits, and cold containers of diluted diesel exhaust fluid.
That's a bad thing?
That is my question... how does a large organization like a German city function without Exchange or being beholden to a SaaS for E-mail and other items? Some larger organizations (IBM) have their own infrastructure, but for a lot of things, Exchange is the only game in town once a place expands beyond what a single mail server can handle.
Is there a reputable F/OSS utility that is a drop-in replacement for Exchange (especially with dealing with multiple mail databases and e-Discovery rules) that has "earned its bones" in the enterprise? I've read about a few, but after a few months, they seem to drop off the planet, or get very poor reviews.
The problem is that Google's model works for people who know what they are doing.
However, one reason iOS is so successful is the perception that you don't have to watch anything. If it is on Apple's store, it is safe for human consumption.
The majority of the people out there will not look at the permissions an app wants, and just tap "accept". Android's model works with savvy users, but for the teen texter who barely can type while holding the steering wheel, it has its issues.
Two ways to fix this: Go with additional permission requests upon first use like Apple or Blackberry's offerings, go with a tier of Play Store which is heavily curated, or both.
To help mitigate things with dodgy apps, I use Droidwall configured to block by default. Droidwall needs a facelift, but it is a decent front end for iptables.
Android needs to keep its permission model, but add additional permissions similar to iOS 6+ where when the first time an app asks for access to contacts/camera/phone/SMS/photos/music/etc., it pops up a dialog where the user can confirm or deny permissions. Blackberry has had this model for over a decade, and it has been quite good.
I have mentioned this before, but Google needs to section off its store. One tier being the existing, "well, if not banned, it is allowed" free-for-all (which is a good thing for savvy users), but Google needs to have a tier similar to Amazon's store. Approval is a must, brutal approval guidelines, and no mercy with the banhammer.
This strategy has worked amazingly well for Apple. iOS can be argued to be less secure than Android because the entire OS depends on the jail mechanism. However, because the only [1] way for an app to install on an iDevice is through Apple's store, Apple's strong gatekeeper strategy has proven itself.
Google should see about having a tier or subset with heavy moderation. Then, have an option fairly hidden on the phone to allow access to the free-for-all tier. That way, users who just want to grab Angry Birds, and not Angry Birds + SMS Spammer will get the app they want.
[1]: Of course, there is the enterprise and beta mechanisms for adding apps, but this is not doable for most of Apple's base.
What I see that counteracts the thinner slices is the fact that advertisers keep offering to give more and more data out, from tracking mouseovers to intercepting E-mail, to supercookies, and other permanent identifiers.
However, there is only so much people will take, especially if the info sold causes negative consequences to people, and that is when the ad-based ecosystem will start hitting the skids. That, and when there is no more to sell to advertisers, after the cameras are turned on, and the subscriber's computers miked. Then, the bubble will burst.
If I were to make a startup, I'd take advantage of people and companies waking up to actually needing security and backups (and no, the cloud is just a form of media, it isn't a comprehensive backup solution.) Old and boring stuff, but really needed.
It is just statistics. More Tesla cars on the roads, the higher the chance of one of them getting hit. This is just me, but I'm still pretty impressed by their crash record.
The one thing I'm really curious about is how many Priuses catch fire in wrecks. Priuses tend to be the mainstream vehicle, in terms of popularity, with an EV subsystem, so they should be the standard of how much damage causes a fire or not.
I've tried that, with varying success. A lot of readers will not work with the larger QR codes (which would be needed for decoding a 2048-4096 bit key block), and other readers just give up with regards to alignment if the block is too big.
If there is very standard code system which would work for this (a QR variant, since it does have built in error correction), it is a good thing to have included with a human readable (and retypable) output.
Eventually appliances that have an Internet connection will require one. Consoles come to mind, and the only thing one can do is not buy one. It would not be surprising for TV makers to require an Internet connection for some "always on" next-gen DRM.
This DRM could constantly monitor (with facial recognition uploads) how many people are in the room, to shut off a video if more than a certain amount are watching a movie, of it someone banned from a service enters the room.
If you give an inch, they will take a mile. The fewer devices with Internet access, the better.
Of course, there are security ramifications. A criminal organization would score the jackpot if they knew where everyone's kid is and when people were not at home, if they could tap into the TVs themselves or the data aggregating machines.
Probably the long term answer is a solid internal firewall, or putting the smart TV on its own subnet. Eventually all TVs will be "smart" ones, perhaps even not working unless they have an always-on connection, so I can see emulators being written to make the TV think its phoning home, except it is just communicating with a fancy /dev/null.
We have gone through a first round of startups which were actually pioneering, back in the dot com days.
The next boom are startups which really don't offer much in the way of breaking ground. What they offer is the fact that their customers and their product are totally different groups. FB, Twitter, SnapChat, and many more follow this model.
The problem is that there is only so much money advertisers will pay, and only so much data they can squeeze out of their subscribers before they give the middle finger and move on. This is a bubble waiting to happen, because long-term, there isn't really any product, and their services are essentially fungible. Someone else can come out with a virtually identical service and wrest the userbase away, just like Facebook wrested MySpace's userbase away.
I can understand why people invest in these companies on the short term, but long term, what product do they have over time? Cable at least has fiber in the ground guaranteeing they will be around. Same with wireless providers and spectrum.