Addendum: the same amount of oxygen would be liberated when charging. It could be a problem if you decided to charge it in an air-tight box, but under normal conditions it won't be a problem.
According to the article the lithium is oxidized to Li2O2, so 1 mole of lithium takes half a mole of molecular oxygen during discharge. If the battery contains 100g of lithium (a large laptop battery might contain this amount), a total discharge would need
100 g / 6.941 g/mol * 0.5 * 22.4 dm3/mol * (100%/20%) = 806.8 l
of air, or less that one cubic metre. The second figure is the atomic mass of lithium, the third is the ratio of the stoichiometric coefficients of oxygen and lithium in thhe reaction, the fourth is the molar volume of ideal gas, and the last is the factor from oxygen concentration.
Those are the potential problems I can see: 1. The batteries will degrade over time, because the porous carbon used as the catalyst will slowly oxidize away. 2. Moisture sensitivity might be a problem. Graphite-lithium intercalate used in the negative electrode is, as far as I know, not resistant to water. Li2O2 also doesn't look stable (Na2O2, a close analogue, decomposes when subjected to moisture) 3. Total life might be additionally shortened in cities with smog. Smog contains highly oxidative species like nitrogen oxides and free radicals, which would accelerate the degradation of the carbon catalyst. 4. Obviously it won't be suitable for waterproof equipment. 5. Maximum power output might decrease with altitude (lower oxygen partial pressure).
The main problem is that you can't control the quality of air around the device, so I predict that preventing the battery from degrading when the air is not 100% clean and moisture free is going to be a challenge.
Oxygen-carbon reaction is not used to generate power in this design. Read the second article and especially the picture, because the first one has no useful information. It might happen as an unwanted side reaction, but the actual reactions that produce energy are:
It's lithium that's oxidized (to lithium peroxide), NOT carbon. Carbon and MnO2 only make this reaction possible (my guess is that it's because porous carbon chemisorps oxygen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemisorption).
You seriously underestimate the amount of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Even massive forest fires do not change the global concentration of oxygen enough for anyone to notice.
There is no "output"; the carbon is only a catalyst/adsorbent. It's actually lithium that's oxidized, and lithium peroxide forms. Half reactions are as follows:
CnLi ---> Li+ + Cn (graphite) + e 2Li+ + 2e + O2 --C/MnO2 cat.-> Li2O2
The first is on the graphite-lithium intercalate electrode (not show in the article, but it's standard in Li-Ion cells).
The concept (taking one of the reagents from air) is not new. There were zinc-air batteries for decades, and they are widely used. They have one of the highest energy densities of all types of commercially available batteries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_battery
Seems like four years ago somebody even figured out how to make them electrically rechargeable (before that, the usual method of recharge was to replace the zinc plates and remove oxide waste, which was facilitated by cell design). http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903727
However, if those new batteries use carbon instead of zinc, they might have a higher theoretical upper bound on energy density. It looks like they're using graphite-lithium intercalate for the negative electrode (a standard thing), and the positive electrode is essentially a combined catalyst/adsorbent for Li2O2 which forms during electricity generation.
CnLi ---> Li+ + Cn + e 2Li+ + 2e + O2 --cat.-> Li2O2
Note that the first article is rather bogus: O2 does not "recharge" the battery, it is only a reagent.
I'm not familiar with the cost breakdown for the components of Li-ion batteries, but lithium seems like a major contributor, so this might not be much cheaper than the traditional Li-ion.
Maybe it was just the overenthusiastic marketing or the fanboys who swarmed to the system but Ubuntu really was supposed to change everything, where as the operating system landscape looks very much the same these days.
It did lower the price of XP for netbooks down to a few dollars though... In a way, desktop Linux made netbooks possible - otherwise Microsoft wouldn't lower the price of their system enough for this class of machines to become viable.
Works of the Federal government; State governments can still hold copyrights, and have assered copyright over the text of laws, preventing them from being disseminated on the Internet in PDF form (WTF!!!)
How would a GERMAN point of view in a war game be like. (...) How would a ww2 game that showed that be received?
There was one, it was called Codename Panzers. It contained authentic propaganda directed at German soldiers, and said things along the lines of "Poland attacked the Reich, we have to defend ourselves". Yet, some of my idiot brethren from Poland misinterpreted it as a statement of historical fact, and it was escalated into diplomatic ruckus, even though the game was made in Hungary (only the publisher was German).
So I'd say it was not received very well, because people are too stupid to distinguish between opinion and truth.
GLib has the functions g_sprintf, g_strdup, etc. which take care of allocating their own memory and are UTF-8 compliant. (You can replace the allocator if you wish.) The whole "size of buffer" problem does not exist when using GLib.
I once used a Libretto 100CT. It's very small even by today's netbook standards. The trackpoint is placed in a very weird spot. But the portability rocked.
Another interesting "proto-netbook" machines I have seen are Fujitsu B110 Lifebook, the Sharp Mebius line (I still have a Japanese version of it laying around - it was fantastic to use, but now I've moved to a HP TC1100 because the headphone jack broke) and more recently Sharp Muramasa. The latter one is more or less equivalent to a good quality modern netbook (1 GHz CPU, up to 512 MB RAM, long battery life, 1024x768 resolution), but it costed a fortune when it was new.
I also remember owning a very small subnotebook a long time ago (~6 years?) that fried my lap and could be used as an iron, but I can't remember the make or the model.
In a word, the only thing that changed with netbooks is that they made the once exclusive category of subnotebooks financially accessible to the general public.
You know that coffee is brewed with water that is on the verge of boiling, right? Ditto for hot tea, at least if you follow worldwide British/Indian custom.
Sorry bu it won't be anywhere near boiling. "Boiling" water from a teapot is about 90*C, when you pour it into a glass/porcelain cup (not a plastic one) the temperature drops by about 10*C more so it's about 80-85*C when the tea is brewing, and about 75*C when it's done brewing. To get 90*C tea or coffee you basically have to brew it inside a pre-tempered vacuum flask, and then it tastes awfully.
The author is making silly analogies with someone willfully going through hoops (investing time) to sabotage interoperability with an implementation in which the implementor has chosen not to invest time and effort reverse engineering and testing functionality which is clearly outside the specification.
So why did Microsoft actually write a plugin that contains a reverse-engineered implementation of that "outside of spec" format but did not include it?
Your argument is bogus because they implemented OO.o formulas in another program but decided not to include the code in SP2. I see no resaon for this except making life harder for everyone.
OpenDocument Foundation was a troll organization that only helped create the specs but was not the sole author. Their existence has no relation to the current discussion.
Besides, is there any reason a macrokernel couldn't be threaded? I thought they already were.
They are: things like kthreadd, migration/0, ksoftirqd, watchdog/0, events/0, khelper, kstop/0, kintegrityd/0, kblockd/0, kacpid, etc. you can see in the process list in Linux are all kernel threads.
Remember that on Linux the graphics drivers are also in userspace, in X11, on top of the shell that is on top of the Linux kernel.
Do you understnad that the shell is not a DOS prompt? X11 does not run "on top of" the shell!!! The shell is only a bit of code that decides which programs are run. It is only an user interface, it is not an operating system. You can run a system without a shell, though it would be hard - you'd have to do everything in the init process.
Linux graphic drivers are partially in the kernel and partially in userspace. Operations that make sense to be in userspace (e.g. things not implemented in hardware) are in userspace, while the low level code that manages device state is in kernel space.
Microkernels are going to be much slower, because to transfer data from a hard drive to an application you need 4 context switches instead of 2. In microkernel it is: request HD read, switch, message pass to hard disk driver, switch, read data, switch, map read data into app's virtual address space, switch, obtain data. In monolithic kernel it is: request HD read, switch, read data in kernel space, switch, obtain data.
I think you can see for yourself why microkernels are inherently slower. Context switch is one of the most expensive operation on modern CPUs.
Slashdot Mirror
Addendum: the same amount of oxygen would be liberated when charging. It could be a problem if you decided to charge it in an air-tight box, but under normal conditions it won't be a problem.
According to the article the lithium is oxidized to Li2O2, so 1 mole of lithium takes half a mole of molecular oxygen during discharge. If the battery contains 100g of lithium (a large laptop battery might contain this amount), a total discharge would need
100 g / 6.941 g/mol * 0.5 * 22.4 dm3/mol * (100%/20%) = 806.8 l
of air, or less that one cubic metre. The second figure is the atomic mass of lithium, the third is the ratio of the stoichiometric coefficients of oxygen and lithium in thhe reaction, the fourth is the molar volume of ideal gas, and the last is the factor from oxygen concentration.
So unless you are in a coffin this is not a risk.
Well, it's a lithium battery, that also includes an in-situ carbon fuel cell to replenish itself.
No, it is not. The carbon is only an adsorbent/catalyst matrix. Otherwise it would not be rechargeable. The first article contains misleading wording. Read the second one, or this one: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/lithium_oxygen_stair_battery/
Those are the potential problems I can see:
1. The batteries will degrade over time, because the porous carbon used as the catalyst will slowly oxidize away.
2. Moisture sensitivity might be a problem. Graphite-lithium intercalate used in the negative electrode is, as far as I know, not resistant to water. Li2O2 also doesn't look stable (Na2O2, a close analogue, decomposes when subjected to moisture)
3. Total life might be additionally shortened in cities with smog. Smog contains highly oxidative species like nitrogen oxides and free radicals, which would accelerate the degradation of the carbon catalyst.
4. Obviously it won't be suitable for waterproof equipment.
5. Maximum power output might decrease with altitude (lower oxygen partial pressure).
The main problem is that you can't control the quality of air around the device, so I predict that preventing the battery from degrading when the air is not 100% clean and moisture free is going to be a challenge.
Oxygen-carbon reaction is not used to generate power in this design. Read the second article and especially the picture, because the first one has no useful information. It might happen as an unwanted side reaction, but the actual reactions that produce energy are:
CnLi -> Li+ + Cn + e (Cn = graphite, CnLi = graphite-lithium intercalate)
2Li+ + 2e + O2 -> Li2O2
It's lithium that's oxidized (to lithium peroxide), NOT carbon. Carbon and MnO2 only make this reaction possible (my guess is that it's because porous carbon chemisorps oxygen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemisorption).
Rechargeable zinc-air battery, 4 years ago:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903727
I wonder whether they managed to take it anywhere. rechargeable zinc-air would be cool, because there's much more zinc than lithium on Earth.
The compact designs could not be recharged though.
You seriously underestimate the amount of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Even massive forest fires do not change the global concentration of oxygen enough for anyone to notice.
There is no "output"; the carbon is only a catalyst/adsorbent. It's actually lithium that's oxidized, and lithium peroxide forms. Half reactions are as follows:
CnLi ---> Li+ + Cn (graphite) + e
2Li+ + 2e + O2 --C/MnO2 cat.-> Li2O2
The first is on the graphite-lithium intercalate electrode (not show in the article, but it's standard in Li-Ion cells).
There is next to no information in the first article... this one is much more informative:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/lithium_oxygen_stair_battery/
The concept (taking one of the reagents from air) is not new. There were zinc-air batteries for decades, and they are widely used. They have one of the highest energy densities of all types of commercially available batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_battery
Seems like four years ago somebody even figured out how to make them electrically rechargeable (before that, the usual method of recharge was to replace the zinc plates and remove oxide waste, which was facilitated by cell design).
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164903727
However, if those new batteries use carbon instead of zinc, they might have a higher theoretical upper bound on energy density. It looks like they're using graphite-lithium intercalate for the negative electrode (a standard thing), and the positive electrode is essentially a combined catalyst/adsorbent for Li2O2 which forms during electricity generation.
CnLi ---> Li+ + Cn + e
2Li+ + 2e + O2 --cat.-> Li2O2
Note that the first article is rather bogus: O2 does not "recharge" the battery, it is only a reagent.
I'm not familiar with the cost breakdown for the components of Li-ion batteries, but lithium seems like a major contributor, so this might not be much cheaper than the traditional Li-ion.
They did not mention DRM? What the hell?
Also this quote about Ubuntu:
Maybe it was just the overenthusiastic marketing or the fanboys who swarmed to the system but Ubuntu really was supposed to change everything, where as the operating system landscape looks very much the same these days.
It did lower the price of XP for netbooks down to a few dollars though... In a way, desktop Linux made netbooks possible - otherwise Microsoft wouldn't lower the price of their system enough for this class of machines to become viable.
Works of the Federal government; State governments can still hold copyrights, and have assered copyright over the text of laws, preventing them from being disseminated on the Internet in PDF form (WTF!!!)
How would a GERMAN point of view in a war game be like. (...) How would a ww2 game that showed that be received?
There was one, it was called Codename Panzers. It contained authentic propaganda directed at German soldiers, and said things along the lines of "Poland attacked the Reich, we have to defend ourselves". Yet, some of my idiot brethren from Poland misinterpreted it as a statement of historical fact, and it was escalated into diplomatic ruckus, even though the game was made in Hungary (only the publisher was German).
So I'd say it was not received very well, because people are too stupid to distinguish between opinion and truth.
GLib has the functions g_sprintf, g_strdup, etc. which take care of allocating their own memory and are UTF-8 compliant. (You can replace the allocator if you wish.) The whole "size of buffer" problem does not exist when using GLib.
And them someone makes foo and bar dynamic
What? foo and bar are types. If their sizes do not match there is an ABI break and your program will not work anyway. Go learn some C.
Basic Input Output System Operating System...
that's like Personal Identification Number number.
Wikipedia, while cool and neat, is insufficient for many purposes (e.g. cannot replace detailed college textbooks).
Wikibooks FTW!
I once used a Libretto 100CT. It's very small even by today's netbook standards. The trackpoint is placed in a very weird spot. But the portability rocked.
Another interesting "proto-netbook" machines I have seen are Fujitsu B110 Lifebook, the Sharp Mebius line (I still have a Japanese version of it laying around - it was fantastic to use, but now I've moved to a HP TC1100 because the headphone jack broke) and more recently Sharp Muramasa. The latter one is more or less equivalent to a good quality modern netbook (1 GHz CPU, up to 512 MB RAM, long battery life, 1024x768 resolution), but it costed a fortune when it was new.
I also remember owning a very small subnotebook a long time ago (~6 years?) that fried my lap and could be used as an iron, but I can't remember the make or the model.
In a word, the only thing that changed with netbooks is that they made the once exclusive category of subnotebooks financially accessible to the general public.
You know that coffee is brewed with water that is on the verge of boiling, right? Ditto for hot tea, at least if you follow worldwide British/Indian custom.
Sorry bu it won't be anywhere near boiling. "Boiling" water from a teapot is about 90*C, when you pour it into a glass/porcelain cup (not a plastic one) the temperature drops by about 10*C more so it's about 80-85*C when the tea is brewing, and about 75*C when it's done brewing. To get 90*C tea or coffee you basically have to brew it inside a pre-tempered vacuum flask, and then it tastes awfully.
I thought everything shot into space had to be protected from radio activity.
The only things that need protection from radiation on a space probe are semiconductor-based devices (e.g. CPUs and other electronics).
I also thought everything that comes into contact with radio active material becomes radio active.
That is only true if the radioactive source emits neutron radiation or high energy alpha radiation.
HADOPI-like laws will be banned thanks to a different amendment:
http://www.blackouteurope.eu/blog/amendment-13846-adopted-again.-internet-is-a-fundamental-right-in-europe..html
(thanks for think_nix)
The author is making silly analogies with someone willfully going through hoops (investing time) to sabotage interoperability with an implementation in which the implementor has chosen not to invest time and effort reverse engineering and testing functionality which is clearly outside the specification.
So why did Microsoft actually write a plugin that contains a reverse-engineered implementation of that "outside of spec" format but did not include it?
Your argument is bogus because they implemented OO.o formulas in another program but decided not to include the code in SP2. I see no resaon for this except making life harder for everyone.
OpenDocument Foundation was a troll organization that only helped create the specs but was not the sole author. Their existence has no relation to the current discussion.
Besides, is there any reason a macrokernel couldn't be threaded? I thought they already were.
They are: things like kthreadd, migration/0, ksoftirqd, watchdog/0, events/0, khelper, kstop/0, kintegrityd/0, kblockd/0, kacpid, etc. you can see in the process list in Linux are all kernel threads.
Remember that on Linux the graphics drivers are also in userspace, in X11, on top of the shell that is on top of the Linux kernel.
Do you understnad that the shell is not a DOS prompt? X11 does not run "on top of" the shell!!! The shell is only a bit of code that decides which programs are run. It is only an user interface, it is not an operating system. You can run a system without a shell, though it would be hard - you'd have to do everything in the init process.
Linux graphic drivers are partially in the kernel and partially in userspace. Operations that make sense to be in userspace (e.g. things not implemented in hardware) are in userspace, while the low level code that manages device state is in kernel space.
Microkernels are going to be much slower, because to transfer data from a hard drive to an application you need 4 context switches instead of 2. In microkernel it is:
request HD read, switch, message pass to hard disk driver, switch, read data, switch, map read data into app's virtual address space, switch, obtain data.
In monolithic kernel it is:
request HD read, switch, read data in kernel space, switch, obtain data.
I think you can see for yourself why microkernels are inherently slower. Context switch is one of the most expensive operation on modern CPUs.