Electricity is, by far, more valuable than hydrogen (or any common chemical fuel for that matter). I'd take a 40% efficient solar cell that produces electricity over a 15% efficient solar cell that produces hydrogen any day.
Also note that that the article states that they could *theoretically* get this hydrogen cell up to 15% efficient. Hard to get excited when the theoretical max of a new idea can't even match the practical (if uneconomical) maximum of existing technology.
I fear nothing. Well, I am a bit paranoid when the next unwelcome and random Tampax commercial will splash across my TV while eating supper. And I do fear, quite frankly, that you will continue your vacuous posting here on/.
So, you think the Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountains have all that haze from the massive car pollution there, vice the ozone-producing isoprene that plants, trees in particular, emit, with plant hydrocarbon emission being at a rate ten times that of all the world's cars?
Ooo "hydrocarbons." Way to word in a way that sounds bad without actually qualifying it such that it has any relevance. Bravo.
I'll tell you what, I'll take the haze of the Smoky Mountains over the smog of a city any day.
I suppose listening only to that great bastion of unbiased scientific study, the 4:1 liberal:conservative press, is one option...
Can I ask you something? When you ignorant hicks go on about the librul media, what exactly are you referring to? Do you really mean just the press? If so, I just can't see it. Or do you include entertainment, music, games, advertising, etc? Is CNN liberal? I want to know exactly what we're talking about.
And what do you consider liberal, anyway? It is "liberal" to have nudity on TV? Do you blame all the violence in entertainment on liberals? I've never been clear on this. I want to know just how deep your paranoia and fear goes.
The Amiga CDTV was the first (or at least one of the earlier ones) to drop the floppy drive. I don't think that's any major step in any case, but let's not pretend Apple were doing any innovating to do the same thing years later. It was just part of a natural gradual trend as floppy drives became less common.
I'm sorry, did I EVER say that Apple was the "first" to not include a floppy drive or even imply it? No. You're just being a pedantic idiot. Besides, who gives a crap what th CDTV did? It was an utter failure anyway. I didn't even know it existed until you mentioned it. I had to look it up on WIkipedia.
Have you ever run through a 'make config' on a Linux kernel before? That should give you some idea of what any PC OS vendor has to deal with. Granted, a good portion of the drivers available the Linux kernel are for hardware you probably won't be finding in a Vista box, but still... even a fraction of of that list is pretty significant. It is a lot more than Apple has to deal with, at least. I can could on my fingers the number of hardware configurations Apple supports with Leopard.
Sounds like somebody has never left the suburbs in his entire life.
Sounds like somebody has no idea what they're talking about. I happen to live in Portland. And in case you don't know, we don't get a lot of clear skies at night most of the year. So even if we lived in a perfect world where cities gave off no light polution, I wouldn't be able to rely on the night sky to illuminate the environment.
Also, you do understand that ANY bright local light will ruin ones night vision and make the feeble light of the heavens totally useless, right? So unless you're willing to mandate that ALL lights be off at night in a city, there's just no way to rely on the night sky to illumunate things... even if you could guarantee that there'd never be cloud cover.
The rest of the world can be quite nice. It'll be OK if you're more than 5 miles away from your mommy for a little while.
Share?? Why would I want to share an office WiFi with others? News flash: WiFi is used for more than just internet access. Even at home I transfer files between computers.
Bet they're all locked down... if linux firmware for routers started having sane sharing rules (5 k up 25 down shared) and people banded together to buy big bandwidth the telecos would be happy and everything would be nice...
Why would people band together and limit themselves to 256/56 internet access? Users "band together" through ISPs which then buy big pipe from the telcos.
Sharing works when people share, sharing doesn't work when people don't.
Well duh.
You could mustard gas a city and sell clean air... but it'd be nice if people didn't. Limits on the free market and all that.
The ones I was thinking of were floppies from the variable speed drives, though I had forgotten that Apple had already dropped that format a while before the iMac entered the scene. AFAIK no one has ever made a USB variable speed floppy drive.
Yes, quite a while before. Variable speed drives were used for 800k disks. Like, before 1990.
I never remembered seeing anything other than 1.44MB "PC" USB floppy disk drives, which meant that there was no way to read Mac floppies on your iMac without using another Mac as a go-between.
You should have tried plugging one into a Mac. I have a USB floppy drive from around 1998 sitting in my closet that my wife used on her G3 tower w/ OS 9. I think she needed it for Quark or something like that.
Then I hope you admire the Amiga CDTV even more. It dropped the floppy years before Apple even thought of it. I dunno why people give the Imac the credit.
Except that the CDTV wasn't meant to be a general purpose computer and lacked a lot more than just a floppy drive.
This makes no sense. The Imac was great at forcing people off the floppy, but at the same time, people could still pay out extra and get a floppy? Which is it?
Not if it continues to utilize the 2.4Ghz range. In most urban areas the 2.4Ghz band is already saturated. I went to install Wifi in one of our satelite offices here in Portland I was able to see 50... that's right 50! other APs in the area. That sucks when there are 3 (4 if you push it) non-overlapping channels available.
I might understand wanting blue ray but DVDs are no longer worth the weight. Software installs are rare and Thinkpads can boot off firewire.
The THinkpads have firewire? Man, isn't that ironic. The MacBook Air doesn't have Firewire... which makes it that much less appealing. With the kind of storage you get on these little thing you really want firewire for decent external drive performance.
Seriously, I think Apple went just a little too far just to be able to claim they hve the thinnest notebook. Usually I like Apple stuff, but this time they've pretty much skipped function completely and went all "form."
Gave you a good position to throw the thing from when you realized there was no floppy drive...
I admire Apple for pushing such horrible technologies as teh floppy drive into extinction (at least on Mac. You can still find them on PCs even today). Besides, if you really needed a floppy drive you could always get a USB version.
So... we now are in a world where people can see you clearly enough to tell that you're being attacked but can't hear you, and the criminals can't force you out of the light?
Being seen AND heard is better than just being heard. And it would be kind of difficult to force a person out of the light if the whole parking lot, for example, is illuminated.
Look, I'm not saying that lighting a parking lot magically makes the world a crime free, but it is definitely nice to have in urban and suburban areas.
And what about more innocent things like being seen by a car in a parking lot?
Now that wouldn't be about crime, now would it? If so, that would make it unrelated to my original post which specified "at least when it comes to crime", now wouldn't it?
And my post was about public safety in general. So you can find one or two specific situations (ninja attacks, for example) where lighting might not help. Big deal? My broader point still stands.
Because people like having the outdoors illuminated...
Speak for yourself.
...and everyone else who is weary of walking through a dark parking lot or driving down a poorly lit city street.
particularly public areas
This wouldn't have anything to do with that "false sense of security", now would it?
You haven't shown it to be false.
That's because they aren't very bright.
But in a Bortle limit of one, they *are*, which is part of what makes it so amazing. You've never been to anywhere that dark and looked up at a moonless sky before, have you? It's really incredible.
Bright enough to see it in the sky and being bright enough to illuminate your surroundings are two different things. I've spent plenty of time outdoors at night away from the city and it is incredible, but I sure wouldn't rely on it for outdoor lighting in an urban area. Any significant artificial light would ruin your night vision. It is an "all or nothing" sort of thing. SInce you can't extinguish all lights in the city, you kind of have to use artificial illumination.
In most cases, negative cost. Low scattering lights, like sodium, tend to be relatively cheap for how much light they provide, and proper fixtures direct more of the light where you want it.
Don't street lights use sodium lamps? And what is wrong with the fixtures?
It's more often more about the perception of safety than actual safety, at least when it comes to crime. Lights leave shadows where objects block them. When your night vision adjusts to the light, the shadows, and anything in them, get proportionally dimmer to you, making it harder to see someone "lurking in the shadows".
Yeah, maybe if we were talking about ninjas, but I seriously doubt that your average thug is really going to lurk in the shadow cast by garbage can. Does this happen where you live? Besides, it isn't just about seeing a potential attacker it is about being seen by others in case you are attacked. And what about more innocent things like being seen by a car in a parking lot? I MUCH prefer to drive in the city with lit streets. It makes a huge difference. Ever seen a city block during a blackout?
There's a lot more we could do about night lighting. A hundred years ago, almost everyone lived in a Bortle scale 1 area. Now, almost nobody in the first world does,
You know why? Because people like having the outdoors illuminated... particularly public areas. It is a luxury that we in the so called "first world" can afford.
and even much of the third world has elevated Bortle limits. What percentage of Americans do you think have ever seen zodiacal light, gegenschein, shadows cast from Scorpius and Sagittarius, or had Jupiter and Venus affect their dark adaptation?
That's because they aren't very bright.
It doesn't have to be this way. Some types of lights are subject to far less atmospheric scattering. Properly designed fixtures can eliminate most of the overhead glow and even give you more light for the areas you're trying to illuminate. And so on.
Seriously, we need to think about our light placement and usage.
Lit streets and parking lots are a matter of public safety. There's nothing wrong with it.
Re:XDMCP: Help please!
on
X Power Tools
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· Score: 2, Informative
Really? I don't recall having much problem with XDMCP. Granted, I never had to do it large scale, but it was more or less just a matter of having one machine run XDM/GDM and then on "client" machines start X with an option that points it to the IP of the XDMCP "server." IIRC, there is even an XDMCP browser. The only thing is that some distributions (maybe most these days?) don't enable listening for TCP connections by default for security reasons. So you have to know where to enable that.
-matthew
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
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· Score: 1
Put the drivers in kernel modules, where drivers belong, and let X do what it does best: security and networking. This isn't even a full-on Tannenbaum microkernel. This is just common sense. Not even monolithic kernel advocates seem to promote this kind of architecture-gumbo anywhere else.
Didn't Windows at some point suffer from having all the graphics stuff running in kernel mode? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like loading a multi-megabyte module into your kernel. The size of the NVIDIA closed source kernel module alone is scary enough. Now, take a lot of functionality out of X and put it in there and you have a real monstrosity.
-matthew
Re:It's fine that the source is closed, for them..
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Spore Hands-On Preview
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Game Devs don't have/need to give us their work for free, IMO, but if they'd make it to where *anyone* could use the games they write, they'd sell more, and I for one would sure appreciate it.
When I used Linux I used to wish more games were released for LInux but then I realized that it isn't that big of a deal to boot into Windows to pay the types of games that I tend to enjoy. Really, what's a 3 minute reboot (or whatever it is) to play a fullscreen game for a few hours? Once you're in, the OS it happens to be running on is pretty much irrelevant.
That said, I sure am glad EVE Online came out with a client for Linux and Mac because it means I don't have to reboot just to login and update my skill training. Though I suppose just providing that functionality through the web site would be enough.
Next time I hit "Reply" before noon ask me if I've had my coffee. Now that I think about it, unless you are airheaded (see my OP) there wouldn't be any exploding, right? Someone call Adam Savage!
Slashdot Mirror
Electricity is, by far, more valuable than hydrogen (or any common chemical fuel for that matter). I'd take a 40% efficient solar cell that produces electricity over a 15% efficient solar cell that produces hydrogen any day.
Also note that that the article states that they could *theoretically* get this hydrogen cell up to 15% efficient. Hard to get excited when the theoretical max of a new idea can't even match the practical (if uneconomical) maximum of existing technology.
-matthew
These product magic hydrogen. Hydrogen from plain ol' electrolysis is not magic. It is well understood.
You can Google it. My full name is not hard to get from my nickname here.
But yes, I am like Sting.
I was hoping it would be a Chad Vader skit.
Ah, but at least *I* don't do it anonymously.
Wow. It is amazing how many FRPM (Futurama References Per Minute) you get when an environmental article is posted.
If there is no malicious intent, how can you call the person an ecoterrorist?
Ooo "hydrocarbons." Way to word in a way that sounds bad without actually qualifying it such that it has any relevance. Bravo.
I'll tell you what, I'll take the haze of the Smoky Mountains over the smog of a city any day.
Can I ask you something? When you ignorant hicks go on about the librul media, what exactly are you referring to? Do you really mean just the press? If so, I just can't see it. Or do you include entertainment, music, games, advertising, etc? Is CNN liberal? I want to know exactly what we're talking about.
And what do you consider liberal, anyway? It is "liberal" to have nudity on TV? Do you blame all the violence in entertainment on liberals? I've never been clear on this. I want to know just how deep your paranoia and fear goes.
-matthew
I'm sorry, did I EVER say that Apple was the "first" to not include a floppy drive or even imply it? No. You're just being a pedantic idiot. Besides, who gives a crap what th CDTV did? It was an utter failure anyway. I didn't even know it existed until you mentioned it. I had to look it up on WIkipedia.
Moron.
Have you ever run through a 'make config' on a Linux kernel before? That should give you some idea of what any PC OS vendor has to deal with. Granted, a good portion of the drivers available the Linux kernel are for hardware you probably won't be finding in a Vista box, but still... even a fraction of of that list is pretty significant. It is a lot more than Apple has to deal with, at least. I can could on my fingers the number of hardware configurations Apple supports with Leopard.
Sounds like somebody has no idea what they're talking about. I happen to live in Portland. And in case you don't know, we don't get a lot of clear skies at night most of the year. So even if we lived in a perfect world where cities gave off no light polution, I wouldn't be able to rely on the night sky to illuminate the environment.
Also, you do understand that ANY bright local light will ruin ones night vision and make the feeble light of the heavens totally useless, right? So unless you're willing to mandate that ALL lights be off at night in a city, there's just no way to rely on the night sky to illumunate things... even if you could guarantee that there'd never be cloud cover.
WTF is your problem?
Share?? Why would I want to share an office WiFi with others? News flash: WiFi is used for more than just internet access. Even at home I transfer files between computers.
Why would people band together and limit themselves to 256/56 internet access? Users "band together" through ISPs which then buy big pipe from the telcos.
Well duh.
WTF are you smoking? Not mustard gas, I hope.
Yes, quite a while before. Variable speed drives were used for 800k disks. Like, before 1990.
You should have tried plugging one into a Mac. I have a USB floppy drive from around 1998 sitting in my closet that my wife used on her G3 tower w/ OS 9. I think she needed it for Quark or something like that.
-matthew
Except that the CDTV wasn't meant to be a general purpose computer and lacked a lot more than just a floppy drive.
Both.
Not if it continues to utilize the 2.4Ghz range. In most urban areas the 2.4Ghz band is already saturated. I went to install Wifi in one of our satelite offices here in Portland I was able to see 50... that's right 50! other APs in the area. That sucks when there are 3 (4 if you push it) non-overlapping channels available.
The THinkpads have firewire? Man, isn't that ironic. The MacBook Air doesn't have Firewire... which makes it that much less appealing. With the kind of storage you get on these little thing you really want firewire for decent external drive performance.
Seriously, I think Apple went just a little too far just to be able to claim they hve the thinnest notebook. Usually I like Apple stuff, but this time they've pretty much skipped function completely and went all "form."
-matthew
I admire Apple for pushing such horrible technologies as teh floppy drive into extinction (at least on Mac. You can still find them on PCs even today). Besides, if you really needed a floppy drive you could always get a USB version.
-matthew
Being seen AND heard is better than just being heard. And it would be kind of difficult to force a person out of the light if the whole parking lot, for example, is illuminated.
Look, I'm not saying that lighting a parking lot magically makes the world a crime free, but it is definitely nice to have in urban and suburban areas.
And my post was about public safety in general. So you can find one or two specific situations (ninja attacks, for example) where lighting might not help. Big deal? My broader point still stands.
You haven't shown it to be false.
Bright enough to see it in the sky and being bright enough to illuminate your surroundings are two different things. I've spent plenty of time outdoors at night away from the city and it is incredible, but I sure wouldn't rely on it for outdoor lighting in an urban area. Any significant artificial light would ruin your night vision. It is an "all or nothing" sort of thing. SInce you can't extinguish all lights in the city, you kind of have to use artificial illumination.
Don't street lights use sodium lamps? And what is wrong with the fixtures?
Yeah, maybe if we were talking about ninjas, but I seriously doubt that your average thug is really going to lurk in the shadow cast by garbage can. Does this happen where you live? Besides, it isn't just about seeing a potential attacker it is about being seen by others in case you are attacked. And what about more innocent things like being seen by a car in a parking lot? I MUCH prefer to drive in the city with lit streets. It makes a huge difference. Ever seen a city block during a blackout?
You know why? Because people like having the outdoors illuminated... particularly public areas. It is a luxury that we in the so called "first world" can afford.
That's because they aren't very bright.
At what cost? And what does it really accomplish?
-matthew
Lit streets and parking lots are a matter of public safety. There's nothing wrong with it.
Really? I don't recall having much problem with XDMCP. Granted, I never had to do it large scale, but it was more or less just a matter of having one machine run XDM/GDM and then on "client" machines start X with an option that points it to the IP of the XDMCP "server." IIRC, there is even an XDMCP browser. The only thing is that some distributions (maybe most these days?) don't enable listening for TCP connections by default for security reasons. So you have to know where to enable that.
-matthew
Didn't Windows at some point suffer from having all the graphics stuff running in kernel mode? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like loading a multi-megabyte module into your kernel. The size of the NVIDIA closed source kernel module alone is scary enough. Now, take a lot of functionality out of X and put it in there and you have a real monstrosity.
-matthew
When I used Linux I used to wish more games were released for LInux but then I realized that it isn't that big of a deal to boot into Windows to pay the types of games that I tend to enjoy. Really, what's a 3 minute reboot (or whatever it is) to play a fullscreen game for a few hours? Once you're in, the OS it happens to be running on is pretty much irrelevant.
That said, I sure am glad EVE Online came out with a client for Linux and Mac because it means I don't have to reboot just to login and update my skill training. Though I suppose just providing that functionality through the web site would be enough.
-matthew
Or in case of asploding, Dan Savage.