To cool, you have to vaporise water. Not condense it: this system should generate heat.
Using water to cool is done a lot already, in big scale with cooling towers you see at power plants, and on smaller scale for air conditioning systems. The disadvantage is of course that you can not cool to low temperatures, as water doesn't evaporate any more. So it works best for cooling down higher temperatures, like those in a power plant.
Of course, there are also dehumidifiers around. They're being sold where I live big time - especially in summer where you have those 100% humidity weeks (one time we had laundry hanging out for three days, it was 28-30C during the day, but after three days it was still not dry and we took it to the laundry shop to have it tumble dried! That's how bad it can get!). One objection I have is that those things use quite some electricity, or chemicals to attract water and that have to be replaced all the time.
This sounds like a solution that does not need any external power input, nor does it need any additional chemicals. That's great, and if they can make it work would be a huge improvement. Both for creating drinking water where there is none available, and for getting the humidity down in your home when there is simply too much water in the air.
So there is a non-existing island on the map, happens.
What is stranger is that on Google maps' satellite view at that exact location there is a black area, which looks like as if someone has gone over it with an eraser, wiping out a part of the image. Roughly the size of the land mass indicated on the normal map.
That are normally dead-end streets in the middle of nowhere that are not likely to cause any issues other than raised eyebrows, and someone thinking "oh, a piece of road to no-where gone". Putting a complete island on a map where the sea is supposedly 1400m deep, that's a totally different thing. Such an island could be used as orientation point: a single island in the vast ocean is great for that. Not finding an island where it's expected, can give serious problems.
Whether it is closed or open source is totally irrelevant for probably >99% of the buyers. Most buyers don't even know whether it's open or closed source, and if they do, they don't care. They want a nice phone, one that works, and that has lots of apps available. That is far more important than whether the source to the OS is open or closed.
Rescue is a third, hidden partition. The D: was actually some 220 GB vs the 70 GB for the C: partition. Very convenient to install Linux alongside Windows:-)
She's going to have a hell of a time finding a job after finishing school... as nowadays most companies, at least those with 20+ employees, have their staff wear badges.
The school's authority (and responsibility) normally ends with school hours, possibly extended with the time spent on a school bus. After that a school has no business telling their students to wear ID badges or whatever. So "at all times" implies "at all times within school hours".
The only thing they may reasonably track is 1) is this person a student/staff of our school (when entering the premises), and 2) which students did attend class today. No more tracking is needed; and RFID is not necessary for this - though it is mighty convenient.
I was thinking of a tinfoil pouch for it. No need to destroy it; just make it readable only when you allow for it to be read. Willingly destroying the chip may have other legal implications (the badge may be property of the institution) - and anyway they're likely to issue a new one when one is found faulty.
They do not modify customer data; only the software that runs the customer's sites. Which to me is totally cool as of the reasons to use a shared hosting site would be to not have to worry about the software that runs it.
You didn't have to hunt FF down. You know it's on the Firefox website. The download page is the top result on Google when searching for "Firefox". Your central respository is the internet.
That's not what I call a "central repository", sorry. Firefox I happen to know the web site right away; lots of other software not.
If you're into upgrading phones,.7z files aren't beyond you. It's a silly format on Windows. No one uses it. Don't expect out of the box support.
No support for standard formats like.zip, either. The WinXP that I use in VirtualBox doesn't even have support for standard stuff like pdf files. It has an "xps printer" installed to save prints as.xps files, it can't view those same files.
How do you know which application to pick from your respository when you're only after a text editor? Last time I looked, there were a gazillion (20?) text editors to pick from on a decent distro.
Bad example as a text editor comes installed by default. But indeed, the choice is often overwhelming. Though a Google search for "windows text editor" may be even worse as not only do you get thousands of results, you can't get a quick description of the software package (or even be sure it links to a software package); the single line in the search results (if relevant) is not enough. And it's not as easy to install: tick the package you want, and click "install selection".
I could moan all day about being unable to bluetooth files or even connect to the WiFi access point. Linux is no more my thing than Windows is yours.
Those two have been solved. Finally, I must add, those things often take too long to work reliably. A few years ago that was indeed a disaster; even the Xandros that came with the EEEPC 701 had issues with connecting to WiFi I remember. Installing a newer distro solved that. Bluetooth I tried a while back with my Ubuntu install and to my surprise it just worked. Linux has made great progress in general hardware support over the last years, and it is about bloody time they did.
Legacy support is important, agreed, and I don't see why a distro can't include GTK1.2 libraries for those that need them. Yet it's not good to support legacy at all cost.
Linux sound is a point in case: that finally seems to just work. A decade ago it was a mess, but the last few years I've not had issues any more. But to still support the old sound systems, no thanks, happy they're gone. Unless ALSA would add a driver that supports the old APIs.
It's not easy to find a balance between supporting a lot of legacy, and to be able to move forward and to make more radical improvements.
Windows has similar issues for newer versions. I still remember my father's complaints when one of his favourite games that he had since Win95 didn't work after moving from Win98 to WinXP.
Doom 3 is now some 9 years old. No wonder it doesn't work any more on 9 years newer OS, that has seen multiple major updates in the meantime. Try installing it on a Linux that was current when Doom 3 was current, and you won't have so many issues with the game.
It may still work on Windows but that's more because Windows has been mostly stagnant since the release of WinXP, and only a year or two ago finally started moving again.
With my recent experience using Win7, after a decade of Linux-only, I can attest that the installing of software is the one where Linux outshines Windows. For the simple reason that all modern distros come with very rich software repositories.
And drivers, recently I got a brand new Epson printer, and had to install the driver. It was newer than my distro, that's why. It was easier than installing the Windows driver even - I was surprised how easy it was. Maybe because the driver came as.deb package that installs with a few clicks, not a huge executable download that installs lots of crap with it.
For the rest I've had to install more drivers for Win7 than Linux on the same system... Linux just has almost all available drivers included already.
Installed base: yes Windows wins.
Familiar interface: well if you've always used Windows, that's true. Not any more for me, Linux is more familiar, and having used so many different UIs I just know how to search, and what to search for.
So I installed Win8 and she's happy again. My office comp still runs Linux, but I refuse to recommend it for less-than-knowledgeable users.
This assumes most users are quite knowledgeable about Windows already.
You may consider me a troll here, but I've just got exposed to Windows again, and not having used it for over a decade (Win 98 was the last one I really used) I can say I'm quite inexperienced and unknowledgeable about Windows, while being quite knowledgeable about Linux and it's quirks and shortcomings.
A week or two ago I bought a netbook, with Win7 starter on it. Oh my, what an experience. It was like my first steps in Linux, really, I don't have the feeling I'm really in control, know what I'm doing, or know what's going on. And it doesn't really appeal me, it feels like a big step back in time. I've used Windows before so I had some idea on how it works, but it's not easy.
In the shop they changed the language for me from Chinese to English. For some reason this required a complete re-installation of Windows from the rescue partition, which took about 3/4 hours to complete. Just to change the language of the UI? Why can't you just do that upon login, so that different users have a different UI language on the same system?
First of all in the shop they told me "HD is partitioned in two partitions, C and D". I think, cool, so user files go to D, and the system is on C. Well, no, the user files are on the C partition. In the shop I was about to ask something like "oh, so usr is mounted to D" when I realised that Windows doesn't do such things.
So D was empty. What's the use of that? I don't know. It was convenient for me to install Linux on it, three flavours, just to test what works best on that netbook. I'd like to keep Windows, can come in handy.
Back to Windows. It feels so incomplete, such a standard install. I wanted FF instead of IE, so had to hunt it down. I needed it to set up my WiFi printer, hunted down the drivers, and in the end got that working fine.
If I need some piece of software, I have to start hunting. There is no central repository where you can download anything you could possibly need. E.g. I wanted to upgrade my phone, got a new OS image, which was in.7z format. Now I had to find 7z decompressor, and download it from some third-party site. I just have to trust all of them that this software is safe... at least a third-party repository has a case for keeping their content safe, these direct downloads have a case for adding viruses instead.
The missus wants Chinese input. In a few clicks I had this enabled in Linux (Bodhi; a distro that I hadn't used before), in Windows I have no idea what to search for. I told her if she wants Windows with Chinese input she's on her own to install it, or just has to stick to Linux. She doesn't know how to install it either, so Linux it is.
Some software that I now have installed every time I get asked "this software wants to make changes to your hard disk, allow?". What changes? I don't know. Why does it need special permission? Why all the time? What is it going to change? Which directory? An application should simply have access to the user's own files, and read access to system files, no more no less.
Every time I connect my phone in USB mass storage mode, it starts to install drivers again. Why is that? I thought they were installed already? It is so irritating, and strange. I really wonder why it can't just retain the drivers it installed the previous time.
Windows also has the habit of installing updates in the background, slowing down the whole system in the process, without asking or notifying this happens (while it's very good at giving lots of superfluous notifications elsewhere). I don't know how to change this.
I miss simple tools like top, to see what's currently running. I have found a task list, the only way I know to get to this is via the ctrl-alt-del key combination, which also allows for reboot and so. Very str
The "didn't turn in DNA" part is not necessary part of the evidence.
It narrows down the list of suspects, if only one doesn't give DNA the investigation can focus on that individual. If that person is indeed the culprit, there is a very good chance that other evidence is found, directly incriminating the person, and with enough evidence search warrants may be received for more detailed searches. If he is not the culprit, there will be no such evidence.
On a purely economical basis, rural areas cost much more than they will ever return when it comes to putting out cable connections (fibre or otherwise). Otherwise they'd be wired by now, like urban areas.
On a social basis, it's a totally different matter. How much do we consider high-speed Internet a necessity, like telephone? Almost all rural areas have telephone at the same cost of urban, because governments legislate it like that. Urban dwellers subsidise rural dwellers.
That said there are definitely edge cases. Lodges deep in the mountains, in remote swamps, whatever. Cost of putting cables there is prohibitive. Wireless is the only way to go - be it some souped up WiFi, 3G/4G mobile, satellite, or something else.
Where to put the line? That's where the social inclusion debate comes.
And in the case of network cables, it's made more difficult as many companies have started building networks on their own, paid out of their own pockets, and sold to end users at cost plus profit. They did not have the requirement to wire everyone, nor to charge everyone the same. Urban doesn't subsidise rural, it was never intended to, and now rural also wants their lines and are shocked by the actual cost of it.
For these situations, as always, it should be a government task to build the infrastructure (i.e. the cables), and then allow everyone access at a fee. Just like the government builds roads, and then lets everyone use it - paid for by taxes on vehicles, petrol, tolls, etc. Government lays out the cables to everyone, then charges a fixed fee for access by providers, who in turn can serve anyone at the same cost - urban and rural included. As an additional bonus, you suddenly can get dozens if not hundreds of ISPs all competing with one another on the same cables.
That won't stop streaming. Rural areas don't have fibre because few people live there. Most people live in cities, close together, where wiring them all up is fairly cheap. And those alone should be more than enough to sustain a streaming market.
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To cool, you have to vaporise water. Not condense it: this system should generate heat.
Using water to cool is done a lot already, in big scale with cooling towers you see at power plants, and on smaller scale for air conditioning systems. The disadvantage is of course that you can not cool to low temperatures, as water doesn't evaporate any more. So it works best for cooling down higher temperatures, like those in a power plant.
Of course, there are also dehumidifiers around. They're being sold where I live big time - especially in summer where you have those 100% humidity weeks (one time we had laundry hanging out for three days, it was 28-30C during the day, but after three days it was still not dry and we took it to the laundry shop to have it tumble dried! That's how bad it can get!). One objection I have is that those things use quite some electricity, or chemicals to attract water and that have to be replaced all the time.
This sounds like a solution that does not need any external power input, nor does it need any additional chemicals. That's great, and if they can make it work would be a huge improvement. Both for creating drinking water where there is none available, and for getting the humidity down in your home when there is simply too much water in the air.
Probably the person who first put it on the map - which is exactly the next thing these researchers are going to try to figure out, according to TFA.
Interesting, such islands.
But I can hardly imagine them to form in 1600m deep water.
So there is a non-existing island on the map, happens.
What is stranger is that on Google maps' satellite view at that exact location there is a black area, which looks like as if someone has gone over it with an eraser, wiping out a part of the image. Roughly the size of the land mass indicated on the normal map.
Wonder why they did that.
That are normally dead-end streets in the middle of nowhere that are not likely to cause any issues other than raised eyebrows, and someone thinking "oh, a piece of road to no-where gone". Putting a complete island on a map where the sea is supposedly 1400m deep, that's a totally different thing. Such an island could be used as orientation point: a single island in the vast ocean is great for that. Not finding an island where it's expected, can give serious problems.
Whether it is closed or open source is totally irrelevant for probably >99% of the buyers. Most buyers don't even know whether it's open or closed source, and if they do, they don't care. They want a nice phone, one that works, and that has lots of apps available. That is far more important than whether the source to the OS is open or closed.
Interestingly in the second video I saw the Android logo (the green robot) flash by :-)
It's just a gui for Mer
You say it as if the GUI doesn't matter. In a consumer device. Where all the user gets to see, is the GUI.
It's the underlying OS that actually doesn't matter, it's all about the UI.
Rescue is a third, hidden partition. The D: was actually some 220 GB vs the 70 GB for the C: partition. Very convenient to install Linux alongside Windows :-)
She's going to have a hell of a time finding a job after finishing school... as nowadays most companies, at least those with 20+ employees, have their staff wear badges.
The school's authority (and responsibility) normally ends with school hours, possibly extended with the time spent on a school bus. After that a school has no business telling their students to wear ID badges or whatever. So "at all times" implies "at all times within school hours".
Tracking where a student is, goes to far.
The only thing they may reasonably track is 1) is this person a student/staff of our school (when entering the premises), and 2) which students did attend class today. No more tracking is needed; and RFID is not necessary for this - though it is mighty convenient.
I was thinking of a tinfoil pouch for it. No need to destroy it; just make it readable only when you allow for it to be read. Willingly destroying the chip may have other legal implications (the badge may be property of the institution) - and anyway they're likely to issue a new one when one is found faulty.
They do not modify customer data; only the software that runs the customer's sites. Which to me is totally cool as of the reasons to use a shared hosting site would be to not have to worry about the software that runs it.
With multi-player I didn't mean online. On the contrary. I meant two or more players in the room, playing on the same console.
You didn't have to hunt FF down. You know it's on the Firefox website. The download page is the top result on Google when searching for "Firefox". Your central respository is the internet.
That's not what I call a "central repository", sorry. Firefox I happen to know the web site right away; lots of other software not.
If you're into upgrading phones, .7z files aren't beyond you. It's a silly format on Windows. No one uses it. Don't expect out of the box support.
No support for standard formats like .zip, either. The WinXP that I use in VirtualBox doesn't even have support for standard stuff like pdf files. It has an "xps printer" installed to save prints as .xps files, it can't view those same files.
How do you know which application to pick from your respository when you're only after a text editor? Last time I looked, there were a gazillion (20?) text editors to pick from on a decent distro.
Bad example as a text editor comes installed by default. But indeed, the choice is often overwhelming. Though a Google search for "windows text editor" may be even worse as not only do you get thousands of results, you can't get a quick description of the software package (or even be sure it links to a software package); the single line in the search results (if relevant) is not enough. And it's not as easy to install: tick the package you want, and click "install selection".
I could moan all day about being unable to bluetooth files or even connect to the WiFi access point. Linux is no more my thing than Windows is yours.
Those two have been solved. Finally, I must add, those things often take too long to work reliably. A few years ago that was indeed a disaster; even the Xandros that came with the EEEPC 701 had issues with connecting to WiFi I remember. Installing a newer distro solved that. Bluetooth I tried a while back with my Ubuntu install and to my surprise it just worked. Linux has made great progress in general hardware support over the last years, and it is about bloody time they did.
Legacy support is important, agreed, and I don't see why a distro can't include GTK1.2 libraries for those that need them. Yet it's not good to support legacy at all cost.
Linux sound is a point in case: that finally seems to just work. A decade ago it was a mess, but the last few years I've not had issues any more. But to still support the old sound systems, no thanks, happy they're gone. Unless ALSA would add a driver that supports the old APIs.
It's not easy to find a balance between supporting a lot of legacy, and to be able to move forward and to make more radical improvements.
Windows has similar issues for newer versions. I still remember my father's complaints when one of his favourite games that he had since Win95 didn't work after moving from Win98 to WinXP.
Doom 3 is now some 9 years old. No wonder it doesn't work any more on 9 years newer OS, that has seen multiple major updates in the meantime. Try installing it on a Linux that was current when Doom 3 was current, and you won't have so many issues with the game.
It may still work on Windows but that's more because Windows has been mostly stagnant since the release of WinXP, and only a year or two ago finally started moving again.
With my recent experience using Win7, after a decade of Linux-only, I can attest that the installing of software is the one where Linux outshines Windows. For the simple reason that all modern distros come with very rich software repositories.
And drivers, recently I got a brand new Epson printer, and had to install the driver. It was newer than my distro, that's why. It was easier than installing the Windows driver even - I was surprised how easy it was. Maybe because the driver came as .deb package that installs with a few clicks, not a huge executable download that installs lots of crap with it.
For the rest I've had to install more drivers for Win7 than Linux on the same system... Linux just has almost all available drivers included already.
Installed base: yes Windows wins.
Familiar interface: well if you've always used Windows, that's true. Not any more for me, Linux is more familiar, and having used so many different UIs I just know how to search, and what to search for.
I can't speak for OP but for me the reasons to buy a game console (I don't have one; I'm not a gamer) would be:
- The games pretty much just work. No messing around with settings, making sure your system is beefy enough to play it with all effects enabled, etc.
- No worries about drivers, Windows breakdowns, etc. If you get a nice new controller, just plug it in, and it will work.
- More likely that you can do multi-player. The only times I've seen multi-player in action was using consoles.
- Play in the living room and connect to the TV, which is much bigger than my computer monitor. And the living room has space for multiple players.
Game consoles are rather specialised in that they do one thing and do that one thing well: playing games.
So I installed Win8 and she's happy again. My office comp still runs Linux, but I refuse to recommend it for less-than-knowledgeable users.
This assumes most users are quite knowledgeable about Windows already.
You may consider me a troll here, but I've just got exposed to Windows again, and not having used it for over a decade (Win 98 was the last one I really used) I can say I'm quite inexperienced and unknowledgeable about Windows, while being quite knowledgeable about Linux and it's quirks and shortcomings.
A week or two ago I bought a netbook, with Win7 starter on it. Oh my, what an experience. It was like my first steps in Linux, really, I don't have the feeling I'm really in control, know what I'm doing, or know what's going on. And it doesn't really appeal me, it feels like a big step back in time. I've used Windows before so I had some idea on how it works, but it's not easy.
In the shop they changed the language for me from Chinese to English. For some reason this required a complete re-installation of Windows from the rescue partition, which took about 3/4 hours to complete. Just to change the language of the UI? Why can't you just do that upon login, so that different users have a different UI language on the same system?
First of all in the shop they told me "HD is partitioned in two partitions, C and D". I think, cool, so user files go to D, and the system is on C. Well, no, the user files are on the C partition. In the shop I was about to ask something like "oh, so usr is mounted to D" when I realised that Windows doesn't do such things.
So D was empty. What's the use of that? I don't know. It was convenient for me to install Linux on it, three flavours, just to test what works best on that netbook. I'd like to keep Windows, can come in handy.
Back to Windows. It feels so incomplete, such a standard install. I wanted FF instead of IE, so had to hunt it down. I needed it to set up my WiFi printer, hunted down the drivers, and in the end got that working fine.
If I need some piece of software, I have to start hunting. There is no central repository where you can download anything you could possibly need. E.g. I wanted to upgrade my phone, got a new OS image, which was in .7z format. Now I had to find 7z decompressor, and download it from some third-party site. I just have to trust all of them that this software is safe... at least a third-party repository has a case for keeping their content safe, these direct downloads have a case for adding viruses instead.
The missus wants Chinese input. In a few clicks I had this enabled in Linux (Bodhi; a distro that I hadn't used before), in Windows I have no idea what to search for. I told her if she wants Windows with Chinese input she's on her own to install it, or just has to stick to Linux. She doesn't know how to install it either, so Linux it is.
Some software that I now have installed every time I get asked "this software wants to make changes to your hard disk, allow?". What changes? I don't know. Why does it need special permission? Why all the time? What is it going to change? Which directory? An application should simply have access to the user's own files, and read access to system files, no more no less.
Every time I connect my phone in USB mass storage mode, it starts to install drivers again. Why is that? I thought they were installed already? It is so irritating, and strange. I really wonder why it can't just retain the drivers it installed the previous time.
Windows also has the habit of installing updates in the background, slowing down the whole system in the process, without asking or notifying this happens (while it's very good at giving lots of superfluous notifications elsewhere). I don't know how to change this.
I miss simple tools like top, to see what's currently running. I have found a task list, the only way I know to get to this is via the ctrl-alt-del key combination, which also allows for reboot and so. Very str
The "didn't turn in DNA" part is not necessary part of the evidence.
It narrows down the list of suspects, if only one doesn't give DNA the investigation can focus on that individual. If that person is indeed the culprit, there is a very good chance that other evidence is found, directly incriminating the person, and with enough evidence search warrants may be received for more detailed searches. If he is not the culprit, there will be no such evidence.
On a purely economical basis, rural areas cost much more than they will ever return when it comes to putting out cable connections (fibre or otherwise). Otherwise they'd be wired by now, like urban areas.
On a social basis, it's a totally different matter. How much do we consider high-speed Internet a necessity, like telephone? Almost all rural areas have telephone at the same cost of urban, because governments legislate it like that. Urban dwellers subsidise rural dwellers.
That said there are definitely edge cases. Lodges deep in the mountains, in remote swamps, whatever. Cost of putting cables there is prohibitive. Wireless is the only way to go - be it some souped up WiFi, 3G/4G mobile, satellite, or something else.
Where to put the line? That's where the social inclusion debate comes.
And in the case of network cables, it's made more difficult as many companies have started building networks on their own, paid out of their own pockets, and sold to end users at cost plus profit. They did not have the requirement to wire everyone, nor to charge everyone the same. Urban doesn't subsidise rural, it was never intended to, and now rural also wants their lines and are shocked by the actual cost of it.
For these situations, as always, it should be a government task to build the infrastructure (i.e. the cables), and then allow everyone access at a fee. Just like the government builds roads, and then lets everyone use it - paid for by taxes on vehicles, petrol, tolls, etc. Government lays out the cables to everyone, then charges a fixed fee for access by providers, who in turn can serve anyone at the same cost - urban and rural included. As an additional bonus, you suddenly can get dozens if not hundreds of ISPs all competing with one another on the same cables.
That won't stop streaming. Rural areas don't have fibre because few people live there. Most people live in cities, close together, where wiring them all up is fairly cheap. And those alone should be more than enough to sustain a streaming market.