A few miles per day? That sounds about right. Must be on the flat.
They say they have four solar panels. Suppose they're Shell
Solar SP150 units. Four of those would about cover a truck. You'd get about 600 watts in bright sunlight, about a tenth of what they need to move the truck at all. They might get 5KWH per day, or 18 MJ, if they're lucky.
One gallon of gasoline is about 100 MJ. So they're getting no more than 1/5 of a gallon of gas equivalent per day.
With batteries, you'd get about 80% of that energy out of storage. Electrolyzing hydrogen and then burning it is less efficient. Probably a lot less efficient.
They're pushing a pickup truck around, so they'd get maybe 15-20MPG. So
it looks like they can drive maybe two miles on the flat on a good day.
Of course, if you park it all week, you can go maybe ten miles on the weekend.
With super-light cars and ultra-expensive gallium arsenide photocells, things look better. But no way is putting some solar panels in a pickup truck ever going to accomplish much. The energy just isn't there.
This is getting really annoying. Either put the bozo in his own section or stop posting his stupid ads. Or at least edit them to reference the original story, not the Plogged version.
This is like being subscribed to PR Newswire.
Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.
The main reason NVidia still has closed source drivers is the GeForce/Quadro distinction. Quadro cards use the same chip as GeForce cards. There's a software switch that cripples the driver when running on a GeForce card. Some GeForce cards clock a bit faster. But the distinction lets NVidia charge 3x as much for the "pro" card.
The big difference seems to be that in GEForce mode, some extra bugs that mess up high-end animation applications are turned on.
That probably has more to do with the issue than any "proprietary technology".
Enabling 3D acceleration (DRI) still needs to be done manually by editing the/etc/X11/XF86Config file after running the SaX2 utility. Enabling FSAA must be done by editing the XF86Config file by hand as well (see our AA/AF section for details). After a little more than 8 hours of playing with configurations, we hit paydirt.
Any questions?
This binary driver thing has got to go. As Linux gains desktop market share, pressure will increase to open up the hardware interface to the driver. It's not like hooking OpenGL to the card involves
any technology that isn't well known in the industry.
Killing off dead clans needed on SourceForge
on
Halo 2 Ready to Ship
·
· Score: 1, Informative
"If you create a clan, do it because you intend to use it, and enjoy the camaraderie that Clan membership brings. We have systems in place to deal with "dead" or unused Clans. Unpleasant, pointy systems that reek of rust and blood and horror.
SourceForge needs that feature.
Most SourceForge projects are empty. Projects that have neither activity nor code should be archived, just to declutter the open source world.
7075-T6 aluminum tube is commonly used for bicycle seat posts. It's not an exotic material.
For a good discussion of centrifuge enrichment plants see this brochure for a German centrifuge plant. This gives the basic design formulae for sizing rotors and cascades, and has pictures of a large centrifuge cascade. There are more advanced designs, but they are experimental. That 1991 plant is proven. So that's probably what someone would try to copy.
Public reports are vague on what materials are actually used for centrifuge tubes in existing plants, but high-strength steels and carbon fibre are mentioned. Still, if you're willing to accept lower performance, aluminum could work. That German plant is commercial, and has to be cost-effective. A country that only wants a few bombs need not be as efficient.
Many years ago, the first "reality TV show", "Candid Camera", actually did get busted. They were operating in a store, and when a customer put his hat on the counter (this was a long time ago), they tried to sell the hat back to him. During the dispute with the customer, a cop walked in. Listened to the participants. Said, to the Candid Camera guy, "That's not a new hat. You're under arrest". The Candid Camera people came out from hiding, showed the camera, and said they were filming a TV show. The cop told them "It doesn't matter. You tried to steal the guy's hat. You're still under arrest", called for backup, and sent the whole crew to the lockup.
This was back when New York City's official policy on filming was "This city is too busy to make way for film crews". Now it's "Free permits, free locations, free police assistance". And tax credits.
Centralized planning at last!
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Soviets tried centralized planning, but they never had the computing power, communications, and data collection to support it. Their planning cycle was 1-5 years, and was based on total production counts. It was a dismal failure, out of touch with reality. (Although it worked better than what Russia has now. GDP is down 40% since communism tanked.)
But now, we see how centralized planning can work. With hourly updates, bar codes, online registers, and quick feedback to stores and suppliers, the American economy is now run from a central location. Bentonville, Arkansas.
Wal-Mart controls more production than Gosplan ever did. They definitely control production; ask any Wal-Mart supplier.
Wal-Mart is more standardized, more controlled, and more centrally managed than the USSR ever was.
In financial terms, bigger, too.
The San Francisco Metreon, which is basically a multiplex movie theater with some extra stuff, has struggled to figure out what the additional attractions should be.
They used to have "The Way Things Work", a big walk-through mechanical demo and a theater with a boring presentation. That didn't work. So they converted that theater to show anime, and that didn't work. Now it's mostly used for meetings.
Then they had Portal One, which is a video game arcade with really good interior decoration. It's modelled after Moebius' Airtight Garage series in Heavy Metal back in the 1970s. Nobody got this. Their giant custom multiplayer game became dated, their simulator ride didn't get much traffic, and now their big attractions are virtual bowling and retro games.
Between these two non-attractions is a little-used suspended walkway about 100m long. That's now the Walk of Game.
Optimal wind turbine size has been creeping up over the years. The first big wind turbine, at Grandpa's Knob in Vermont, was 1.3MW. It ran from 1941 to 1942, had a bearing failure, and was repaired in 1945, after which it had a loss of blade accident due to overspeed.
When wind power started to come back after the 1973 energy crisis, useful sizes were much smaller. There were a few big machines, but they were one of a kind prototypes.
Most of the turbines of the 1970s and 1980s were in the 100KW range. That's a convenient size, because all the components can be shipped easily. The entire hub/generator unit can be shipped assembled.
But all those little turbines are a maintenance headache. Farms of big mills generate more power per acre than little ones, because the blades are higher and catch more wind.
So size has been creeping up. As the 1970s units wear out, they're being replaced with fewer, but larger, machines. New wind farm machines are running around 1.5MW. That's a commercial technology. General Electric alone has
2300 units of its 1.5MW turbine installed.
Offshore, much bigger machines are the norm. Setting a pylon in the ocean is a big job, so the fewer the better. Big components can be moved in by ship, so the truck size limit goes away. So offshore machines are running around 5MW. But there aren't many of them. Most of the really big machines are still experimental.
Wind power is like hydroelectric power. There are a limited number of good sites. Most of the ones in California, the major passes through the coastal mountain range, are already taken. The East Coast doesn't have a long coastal mountain range, so installing wind farms in passes is out. So the East Coast systems tend to be offshore.
Total installed wind turbine capacity worldwide is about 40 gigawatts, although that's peak, not average, output. This is up by a factor of 10 in the last decade. Much of this is due to better power conversion technology. Early wind turbines synchronized the blade itself to the power grid. Newer ones have inverters and better controls, so they interface much better to each other and the power grid. Many of the early turbines were only tolerable on grid because they were such a minor portion of generation. They were a destabilizing influence, forced into synch by bigger generators elsewhere. With improved controls, wind generators can contribute to frequency stability, rather than stressing it. As wind power becomes a larger fraction of generation, that's essential.
Heavy-truck reporting is one of the easiest things to implement, and many heavy trucks already report their locations automatically to a dispatching center. But there's strong industry opposition for using that info to enforce truck safety rules.
The trouble with "storytelling" in games is that it locks the player into a canned plot. This is boring. In the game industry, such games are derisively referred to as "track rides", as in a theme park.
It's also the hell game designers used to find themselves in when involved in a Big Name Licensed Title project.
Now that players expect, and developers can deliver, a big, free-play world, plot-oriented games are in decline. Those stupid canned cinematics are disappearing.
Progress is now made by figuring out how to make free-play worlds more interesting, not by locking the user down to a plot track.
Well, after the Gossamer Condor won the Kremer Prize, and the Gossamer Albatross flew the English Channel on pedal power, everyone else pretty much gave up.
It was flying the English Channel that did it. Nobody else could even fly the Kremer course (a one-mile or so figure 8), and then the group did the English Channel.
It's wierd that the Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing has the web site moneyfactory.com.
The web site itself is even wierder. Uncut currency? Framed bills? Custom serial numbers?
5lb bags of shredded currency? It's like the Franklin Mint, only cheezier.
The constitutional trouble with the Patriot Act is because the Bush Administration hates judicial oversight, and drafted the Patriot Act to avoid it. Not because judicial oversight interferes with legitimate investigations, but because judicial oversight results in law enforcement being chewed out by judges when they do something dumb.
President Bush routinely tacks the following paragraph onto the end of almost every executive order, to attempt to evade judicial oversight of that order.
This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or
benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity
by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies,
entities, officers, employees or agents, or any other person.
That appears at the end of every executive order issued this year, except the ones raising pay for senior politically appointed officials.
Other presidents would do this occasionally for minor administrative matters, but Bush does it every time.
Slashdot Mirror
They say they have four solar panels. Suppose they're Shell Solar SP150 units. Four of those would about cover a truck. You'd get about 600 watts in bright sunlight, about a tenth of what they need to move the truck at all. They might get 5KWH per day, or 18 MJ, if they're lucky. One gallon of gasoline is about 100 MJ. So they're getting no more than 1/5 of a gallon of gas equivalent per day.
With batteries, you'd get about 80% of that energy out of storage. Electrolyzing hydrogen and then burning it is less efficient. Probably a lot less efficient.
They're pushing a pickup truck around, so they'd get maybe 15-20MPG. So it looks like they can drive maybe two miles on the flat on a good day.
Of course, if you park it all week, you can go maybe ten miles on the weekend.
With super-light cars and ultra-expensive gallium arsenide photocells, things look better. But no way is putting some solar panels in a pickup truck ever going to accomplish much. The energy just isn't there.
This is getting really annoying. Either put the bozo in his own section or stop posting his stupid ads. Or at least edit them to reference the original story, not the Plogged version. This is like being subscribed to PR Newswire.
Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.
That comment comes with an appropriate cartoon.
Yeah, right. Outside, there's crime, crack, and cold.
Now if you got the kid a pony...
(If you're going to RPG, go all the way. I used to own a one-ton Percheron warhorse for jousting. Online gaming is for wimps.)
In fact, Wired could probably cut deals to put their magazine in seats in business class.
The big difference seems to be that in GEForce mode, some extra bugs that mess up high-end animation applications are turned on.
That probably has more to do with the issue than any "proprietary technology".
Any questions?
This binary driver thing has got to go. As Linux gains desktop market share, pressure will increase to open up the hardware interface to the driver. It's not like hooking OpenGL to the card involves any technology that isn't well known in the industry.
SourceForge needs that feature. Most SourceForge projects are empty. Projects that have neither activity nor code should be archived, just to declutter the open source world.
For a good discussion of centrifuge enrichment plants see this brochure for a German centrifuge plant. This gives the basic design formulae for sizing rotors and cascades, and has pictures of a large centrifuge cascade. There are more advanced designs, but they are experimental. That 1991 plant is proven. So that's probably what someone would try to copy.
Public reports are vague on what materials are actually used for centrifuge tubes in existing plants, but high-strength steels and carbon fibre are mentioned. Still, if you're willing to accept lower performance, aluminum could work. That German plant is commercial, and has to be cost-effective. A country that only wants a few bombs need not be as efficient.
Many years ago, the first "reality TV show", "Candid Camera", actually did get busted. They were operating in a store, and when a customer put his hat on the counter (this was a long time ago), they tried to sell the hat back to him. During the dispute with the customer, a cop walked in. Listened to the participants. Said, to the Candid Camera guy, "That's not a new hat. You're under arrest". The Candid Camera people came out from hiding, showed the camera, and said they were filming a TV show. The cop told them "It doesn't matter. You tried to steal the guy's hat. You're still under arrest", called for backup, and sent the whole crew to the lockup.
This was back when New York City's official policy on filming was "This city is too busy to make way for film crews". Now it's "Free permits, free locations, free police assistance". And tax credits.
But now, we see how centralized planning can work. With hourly updates, bar codes, online registers, and quick feedback to stores and suppliers, the American economy is now run from a central location. Bentonville, Arkansas. Wal-Mart controls more production than Gosplan ever did. They definitely control production; ask any Wal-Mart supplier.
Wal-Mart is more standardized, more controlled, and more centrally managed than the USSR ever was. In financial terms, bigger, too.
They used to have "The Way Things Work", a big walk-through mechanical demo and a theater with a boring presentation. That didn't work. So they converted that theater to show anime, and that didn't work. Now it's mostly used for meetings.
Then they had Portal One, which is a video game arcade with really good interior decoration. It's modelled after Moebius' Airtight Garage series in Heavy Metal back in the 1970s. Nobody got this. Their giant custom multiplayer game became dated, their simulator ride didn't get much traffic, and now their big attractions are virtual bowling and retro games.
Between these two non-attractions is a little-used suspended walkway about 100m long. That's now the Walk of Game.
But he wasn't there to get anything done. The hard part is when you're there to do a real job, like making global roaming for cell phones work.
Monolithic kernel, lousy security architecture. Been there, done that, have pictures.
This story was already on Slashdot a few weeks back. Now we have it again, from Roland the Plogger.
That makes sense. The Great Plains/mountain transition works a lot like an ocean/coastal chain transition, funneling wind through passes.
When wind power started to come back after the 1973 energy crisis, useful sizes were much smaller. There were a few big machines, but they were one of a kind prototypes. Most of the turbines of the 1970s and 1980s were in the 100KW range. That's a convenient size, because all the components can be shipped easily. The entire hub/generator unit can be shipped assembled.
But all those little turbines are a maintenance headache. Farms of big mills generate more power per acre than little ones, because the blades are higher and catch more wind. So size has been creeping up. As the 1970s units wear out, they're being replaced with fewer, but larger, machines. New wind farm machines are running around 1.5MW. That's a commercial technology. General Electric alone has 2300 units of its 1.5MW turbine installed.
Offshore, much bigger machines are the norm. Setting a pylon in the ocean is a big job, so the fewer the better. Big components can be moved in by ship, so the truck size limit goes away. So offshore machines are running around 5MW. But there aren't many of them. Most of the really big machines are still experimental.
Wind power is like hydroelectric power. There are a limited number of good sites. Most of the ones in California, the major passes through the coastal mountain range, are already taken. The East Coast doesn't have a long coastal mountain range, so installing wind farms in passes is out. So the East Coast systems tend to be offshore.
Total installed wind turbine capacity worldwide is about 40 gigawatts, although that's peak, not average, output. This is up by a factor of 10 in the last decade. Much of this is due to better power conversion technology. Early wind turbines synchronized the blade itself to the power grid. Newer ones have inverters and better controls, so they interface much better to each other and the power grid. Many of the early turbines were only tolerable on grid because they were such a minor portion of generation. They were a destabilizing influence, forced into synch by bigger generators elsewhere. With improved controls, wind generators can contribute to frequency stability, rather than stressing it. As wind power becomes a larger fraction of generation, that's essential.
This is the latest big coaster in the Intaman product line. They have much more exotic ride products, like the Reverse Freefall Coaster and AquaTrax.
Heavy-truck reporting is one of the easiest things to implement, and many heavy trucks already report their locations automatically to a dispatching center. But there's strong industry opposition for using that info to enforce truck safety rules.
I had high hopes for There. But so far, such virtual worlds are a niche market.
Microsoft should be living in fear of multi-billion dollar judgements and public accusations of "accomodating terrorists", instead.
Now that players expect, and developers can deliver, a big, free-play world, plot-oriented games are in decline. Those stupid canned cinematics are disappearing.
Progress is now made by figuring out how to make free-play worlds more interesting, not by locking the user down to a plot track.
It was flying the English Channel that did it. Nobody else could even fly the Kremer course (a one-mile or so figure 8), and then the group did the English Channel.
It's wierd that the Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing has the web site moneyfactory.com. The web site itself is even wierder. Uncut currency? Framed bills? Custom serial numbers? 5lb bags of shredded currency? It's like the Franklin Mint, only cheezier.
President Bush routinely tacks the following paragraph onto the end of almost every executive order, to attempt to evade judicial oversight of that order.
- This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or
benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity
by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies,
entities, officers, employees or agents, or any other person.
That appears at the end of every executive order issued this year, except the ones raising pay for senior politically appointed officials. Other presidents would do this occasionally for minor administrative matters, but Bush does it every time.