I'm a little confused on your point that regulation could work "just by charging"... Wouldn't that only work if all the EVs were already part of the baseline load? How would charging at 5kW be regulating load down when I was charging at 0kW (not 10kW) before with my trusty non-grid-connected gasoline engine?
All EVs would be incremental load from where we are today. One of the arguments that many EV enthusiasts make is that you can add a huge number of EVs to the road without adding any new baseline load because most charging would occur at off-peak times. My question is which benefit will we see - low up-front infrastructure costs because we won't have to build any new power plants? Or huge savings because we get to use V2G after we build the costly new power plants to bring up baseline load? I'm all for progress in EVs, and I'm glad people like you are pushing the envelope. I just find it frustrating when many proponents make the seemingly circular argument of claiming both of these benefits...
In mid-auction, Paul Allen or Bill Gates or some such divinely wealthy techie contacted him with an offer beyond his wildest expectations and certainly beyond the 250GBP highest bid (say $75K). Thus, he made an agreement with his new patron to withdraw the auction and avoid a silly and public price-raising war loaded with fake bids. Now, said techie is giddily planning his trip by private jet to pick up the toy of a lifetime, while simultaneously calling architect/contractors to add a room onto his estate worthy of this thing (maybe next to the DaVinci notebook? =) Meanwhile, some assistant of the rich guy is buying up old Tie Fighters and action figures left and right so that he and his kids can spend hours giddily re-enacting the movies.
Can't believe that a rich guy would do this? Re-watch The Toy.;-)
I, for one, just want to see those 100 progress pictures--I mean show me the Millenium Falcon on the landing ramp. If you're out there Mr. Rich Guy who bought this, please anonymously post the pictures for us to salivate over in envy!
(Note to owner: I would trade you a decent collection of c. 1970 ships just for the chance to see this thing).
as i stated in the comment, they do (or at least did), but only in higher end (mostly high volume) products. the cartridges were called something like the "Z" line (sorry if this name is way off, it's been a few months since I talked to the guy) and it makes sense that the more complex technology which would allow a separate ink supply to align appropriately with the head (and deal with the tricky near-head temperature problems) would cost more (and thus not be available in low range products).
wish i could go on, but i have a final tomorrow, so i have to sleep now.
I think it's more a matter of the need for the printer/printer-head interface to work correctly at that level. And proprietary interfaces are unfortunately a way of life. Some cars even require "proprietary" fuel (i.e. race cars because they are specifically designed to perform with a very high-octane fuel).
If the printing industry could establish a "standard" interface for printer/print-head generic cartridges could conceivably be implemented...but as all companies use different print-heads and inks even among their own products, that's unlikely to happen. i have trouble believing consumers would rather try to match the chemically correct ink to each head and to their printer than just buy it all in one package.
And I suppose the Lexmark cartridges are not identical. One is probably their "Pentium 4" model i.e. the one into which they dump R&D money and fit with higher quality longer-lasting print heads, while the prebate is probably more "Celeron"-like...older, cheaper, and shorter-lived print-head technology since they know that they don't have to worry about people illegally refilling it. (I know the analogy isn't great, but you get the idea)
I agree that you should be able to do what you want with it, but most people want to use their printer to print. And if you want it to continue to produce the same high-quality prints throughout it's lifetime as when you bought it, you'll use their stuff. It's kinda like game consoles...games are developed to work on _that_ platform, not all platforms. Similarly the HP print head is specifically designed to work with their electronics (which use the correct voltages, control signals, etc). Using someone else's print head (or even using an HP print head after it has deteriorated) means the printer doesn't function as specified, giving the appearance that the HP printer sucks. So they found a good way to justly protect their hardware's reputation.
HP is widely recognized as having a quality printing division just because this model allows them to "support" their product by ensuring parts are replaced as needed. Instead of making a disposable printer like most other brands, they took the part that breaks the most and made it disposable. When you replace the cartridge (and head), your printer is being "refurbished" in a way to keep producing quality.
I'm surprised that I can't find any posts explaining why printer manufacturers are against refills (other than the knee jerk "they want all my money" response).
I had the chance to meet one of the inventors of ink jet printing awhile back, and he explained why the HP "smart chip" would be (it wasn't rolled out yet then), a Good Thing(tm).
Most ink cartridges today have print heads on them already, which is a big part of their cost. Now obviously, the print head on an inkjet cartridge doesn't last forever. With today's really high printing resolutions, this head is a device which has to spit out pico-liters of ink with very precise timing. The ink must be at the correct temperature so as not to evaporate before hitting the paper or to stay wet on the paper for too long. All this requires a pretty sophistocated print head which wears down with use. After enough use, printing performance actually suffers.
The only way to guarantee printing quality under these conditions is to make sure the printing head is replaced periodically (i.e. with a new cartridge). By allowing cartridge refilling, there's no way to guarantee the print head gets replaced when it needs to be, and thus they wouldn't be able to guarantee that "an HP printer will always print quality." So there's actually a QA issue.
HP has developed a separate print head / ink assembly, but generally only very high volume printers use this type of solution (because it's not cost effective for Joe Q. Consumer to buy a gallon container of red ink), and even then they have to separately replace the print head occasionally.
Episode 2 probably won't beat this for the same reason Episode I didn't...they're mid-week releases. Weekend gross statistics are inherently heavily biased toward movies that are released on a Friday (and also biased toward newer movies due to inflation).
Maybe it's not as passive as disc golf, but lots of geeks still play Ultimate Frisbee. Most people have never played it until they get to college, and, as such, it's a very beginner-oriented sport. If you ever see people playing in a park, they're usually more than happy for you to join in, even if you've never played before.
It does involve some running, but it's non-contact and fun as hell. In fact the most important rule in the game is for it to be well-spirited (and fun). Also, many tournaments involve some wicked partying =)
the LEDs used in fiber most often do have some kind of amplification to produce lasing. since LEDs on their own have a really tough time producing enough power for optical transmission with just spontaneous emission, fiber devices that use LEDs often just use them in a step of producing Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER).
some designs are LED-driven in the sense that an LED "re-energizes" [excites the electrons back to a higher energy band] the particles after they emit photons (one such design is a diode injection laser). this kind of design, though using an LED as a "pump" still centrally operates through stimulated emission for amplification (it reflects the beam back and forth through the medium stimulating new photons of the same wavelength such that the beam eventually contains enough photons to have the power necessary to travel through an attenuating channel such as fiber).
was the LED doing the transmitting or being amplified into a lasing beam for transmission in that there 2km 3com action?
this just kinda randomly popped in my head, but AFAIK many states have some pretty strict laws regulating telemarketers (i.e. if you tell them "take my number off your list and never call me again" they have to do this or they get fined).
if legal precedent is set which makes email an analog of telephone communication, could this make legitimate companies sending explicitly unasked-for email (repeat SPAM) subject to fines under the same (or similar) laws?
contrary to the knee-jerk "big companies are out to get me" reflex, they are NOT trying to give you a fragile format to take your money.
in fact almost every aspect of how CD/DVD's work is designed to improve performance in the face of scratch/dust distortion.
the reason that the pitted layer is on the far side of the disc from the lense is specifically so that dust particles and scratches on the plastic surface are effectively ignored by the optics (outside of the laser's/lenses' depth of focus).
the CIRC (cross-interleaved reed-solomon coding) error control scheme is designed very specifically to correct for burst errors caused by continous physical damage to the disc (i.e. a scratch). the math these things use is pretty nuts (i was amazed to find out that my discman uses abstract algebra). they can completely correct something like a 3800 bit burst of errors and an audio CD can conceal a 13000 bit error burst easily (even using a cheap n' easy concealment technique like sample-and-hold).
the only reason CD's don't do better than this is because further error protection would take up even more data space. would you rather never hear a skip on your 35 minute CD or hear occasional distortion on your 74 minute CD...or would you rather shrink the feature size for bigger capacity and pay for it with hugely more complicated and expensive optics and feedback control?
everything is a trade-off in engineering design. the CD standard made their design choices to improve performance/price though, not to feed the industrial monster by reselling CD's.
if the source ever made into the linux community's hands (which i find highly unlikely), i think the first thing to happen would be to see exactly how proprietary windows formats work.
i.e. look at how windows implements NTFS, etc. and write linux drivers that are less of a guess.
first of all, this is not "Ask Slashdot," this is "Developers" (god the irony =)
secondly, instead of complaining about the semantics of the question, why not focus on answering the interesting part? what features are good and why?
i'd much rather read a (+5 Informative) "i'd have to go with built-in concurrency-related error-handling and here's why:" than an incorrectly modded (+5 Insightful) "I refuse to even attempt to answer your question because your boss is dumb and you should've asked it differently."
i mean, i appreciate an eye for detail and everything, but it's becoming a trend lately to scroll through huge amounts of highly-rated nit-picking comments to find some of value to read / mod up.
actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:
the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)
And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.
anakin: he was a kid...his character has nothing to do but develop (and it will be interesting to see where and when and why and how quickly the character change from "good" to "evil" happens).
amidala: the fact that she used a disguise to stay with the action allowed her character to be developed throughout the film. also, the principle of that action gives some insight into her character.
only kenobi and binks: first of all, i want to see kenobi developed further (there's got to be something more than recklessness to both creating and evading darth vader). second of all, there are plenty of characters for lucas to develop that we've already seen--in the sequels.
for example, i am _incredibly_ anxious to see boba fett develop into a real character. you get a short glimpse of him in episode 6, and if you've read the books, you know that he's an established badass, but i want to _see_ him be "coldly efficient" while "exploding into action."
i really don't see how there are big star wars fans who are pessimistic about this...i, for one, have been and will continue to eagerly await it. i trust lucas to entertain me (i wouldn't be a star wars fan if i didn't).
it doesn't seem like this would work so well...the PCI bus would get very hosed with I/O requests from the RAM on each chip. Instead of limiting the hosage of physical memory access to the IDE or SCSI bus, you take the PCI bus down with you too (making the bandwidth of the PCI bus limit scalability of how many procs you can use).
also, having multiple memories accessing the same data in a distributed program adds plenty of overhead to make sure all the memories maintain validity and access control of the data. thus the chips wouldn't be as simple as CPU, RAM, interface.
Scaling down does make shorter channel lengths (less distance to travel) and smaller capactive loads (quicker to charge) making faster logic. So that will help bring faster computers. And making smaller gates does inherently space them more closely (shrinking wires), so you get some speed gain there too (though scaling down wires can increase resistance and parasitic capacitance).
The real problem, though, is inter-module communication. The modules are still spaced about as far apart as they ever were...and there are always going to be more and more of them on die (thanks to increasingly complex architecture tricks). So it's that wire that runs essentially "all the way across the chip" which keeps a pretty constant delay. Communication tricks and/or smaller (less complicated) dies are really the only way to get around that one. ---------
i'm tired of all this crap about the brilliant "masterminds" behind amihotornot. they didn't mastermind anything. it's just two guys "between employment" who ripped off an idea from amihot.com (which is one reason they recently changed their name...ahh domain disputes...) ---------
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little confused on your point that regulation could work "just by charging"... Wouldn't that only work if all the EVs were already part of the baseline load? How would charging at 5kW be regulating load down when I was charging at 0kW (not 10kW) before with my trusty non-grid-connected gasoline engine?
All EVs would be incremental load from where we are today. One of the arguments that many EV enthusiasts make is that you can add a huge number of EVs to the road without adding any new baseline load because most charging would occur at off-peak times. My question is which benefit will we see - low up-front infrastructure costs because we won't have to build any new power plants? Or huge savings because we get to use V2G after we build the costly new power plants to bring up baseline load? I'm all for progress in EVs, and I'm glad people like you are pushing the envelope. I just find it frustrating when many proponents make the seemingly circular argument of claiming both of these benefits...
In mid-auction, Paul Allen or Bill Gates or some such divinely wealthy techie contacted him with an offer beyond his wildest expectations and certainly beyond the 250GBP highest bid (say $75K). Thus, he made an agreement with his new patron to withdraw the auction and avoid a silly and public price-raising war loaded with fake bids. Now, said techie is giddily planning his trip by private jet to pick up the toy of a lifetime, while simultaneously calling architect/contractors to add a room onto his estate worthy of this thing (maybe next to the DaVinci notebook? =) Meanwhile, some assistant of the rich guy is buying up old Tie Fighters and action figures left and right so that he and his kids can spend hours giddily re-enacting the movies.
Can't believe that a rich guy would do this? Re-watch The Toy. ;-)
I, for one, just want to see those 100 progress pictures--I mean show me the Millenium Falcon on the landing ramp. If you're out there Mr. Rich Guy who bought this, please anonymously post the pictures for us to salivate over in envy!
(Note to owner: I would trade you a decent collection of c. 1970 ships just for the chance to see this thing).
as i stated in the comment, they do (or at least did), but only in higher end (mostly high volume) products. the cartridges were called something like the "Z" line (sorry if this name is way off, it's been a few months since I talked to the guy) and it makes sense that the more complex technology which would allow a separate ink supply to align appropriately with the head (and deal with the tricky near-head temperature problems) would cost more (and thus not be available in low range products).
wish i could go on, but i have a final tomorrow, so i have to sleep now.
I think it's more a matter of the need for the printer/printer-head interface to work correctly at that level. And proprietary interfaces are unfortunately a way of life. Some cars even require "proprietary" fuel (i.e. race cars because they are specifically designed to perform with a very high-octane fuel).
If the printing industry could establish a "standard" interface for printer/print-head generic cartridges could conceivably be implemented...but as all companies use different print-heads and inks even among their own products, that's unlikely to happen. i have trouble believing consumers would rather try to match the chemically correct ink to each head and to their printer than just buy it all in one package.
And I suppose the Lexmark cartridges are not identical. One is probably their "Pentium 4" model i.e. the one into which they dump R&D money and fit with higher quality longer-lasting print heads, while the prebate is probably more "Celeron"-like...older, cheaper, and shorter-lived print-head technology since they know that they don't have to worry about people illegally refilling it. (I know the analogy isn't great, but you get the idea)
I agree that you should be able to do what you want with it, but most people want to use their printer to print. And if you want it to continue to produce the same high-quality prints throughout it's lifetime as when you bought it, you'll use their stuff. It's kinda like game consoles...games are developed to work on _that_ platform, not all platforms. Similarly the HP print head is specifically designed to work with their electronics (which use the correct voltages, control signals, etc). Using someone else's print head (or even using an HP print head after it has deteriorated) means the printer doesn't function as specified, giving the appearance that the HP printer sucks. So they found a good way to justly protect their hardware's reputation.
HP is widely recognized as having a quality printing division just because this model allows them to "support" their product by ensuring parts are replaced as needed. Instead of making a disposable printer like most other brands, they took the part that breaks the most and made it disposable. When you replace the cartridge (and head), your printer is being "refurbished" in a way to keep producing quality.
I'm surprised that I can't find any posts explaining why printer manufacturers are against refills (other than the knee jerk "they want all my money" response).
I had the chance to meet one of the inventors of ink jet printing awhile back, and he explained why the HP "smart chip" would be (it wasn't rolled out yet then), a Good Thing(tm).
Most ink cartridges today have print heads on them already, which is a big part of their cost. Now obviously, the print head on an inkjet cartridge doesn't last forever. With today's really high printing resolutions, this head is a device which has to spit out pico-liters of ink with very precise timing. The ink must be at the correct temperature so as not to evaporate before hitting the paper or to stay wet on the paper for too long. All this requires a pretty sophistocated print head which wears down with use. After enough use, printing performance actually suffers.
The only way to guarantee printing quality under these conditions is to make sure the printing head is replaced periodically (i.e. with a new cartridge). By allowing cartridge refilling, there's no way to guarantee the print head gets replaced when it needs to be, and thus they wouldn't be able to guarantee that "an HP printer will always print quality." So there's actually a QA issue.
HP has developed a separate print head / ink assembly, but generally only very high volume printers use this type of solution (because it's not cost effective for Joe Q. Consumer to buy a gallon container of red ink), and even then they have to separately replace the print head occasionally.
Episode 2 probably won't beat this for the same reason Episode I didn't...they're mid-week releases. Weekend gross statistics are inherently heavily biased toward movies that are released on a Friday (and also biased toward newer movies due to inflation).
There's a decent article on this linked from BBC News' front page.
Maybe it's not as passive as disc golf, but lots of geeks still play Ultimate Frisbee. Most people have never played it until they get to college, and, as such, it's a very beginner-oriented sport. If you ever see people playing in a park, they're usually more than happy for you to join in, even if you've never played before.
It does involve some running, but it's non-contact and fun as hell. In fact the most important rule in the game is for it to be well-spirited (and fun). Also, many tournaments involve some wicked partying =)
If you're interested in learning more, try:
What is Ultimate?
The Ultimate Handbook
or find a team near you.
obviously you've never seen MIT's attempts at sports...
as someone who's actually played sports at MIT, i'll take that bet any day.
the LEDs used in fiber most often do have some kind of amplification to produce lasing. since LEDs on their own have a really tough time producing enough power for optical transmission with just spontaneous emission, fiber devices that use LEDs often just use them in a step of producing Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER).
some designs are LED-driven in the sense that an LED "re-energizes" [excites the electrons back to a higher energy band] the particles after they emit photons (one such design is a diode injection laser). this kind of design, though using an LED as a "pump" still centrally operates through stimulated emission for amplification (it reflects the beam back and forth through the medium stimulating new photons of the same wavelength such that the beam eventually contains enough photons to have the power necessary to travel through an attenuating channel such as fiber).
was the LED doing the transmitting or being amplified into a lasing beam for transmission in that there 2km 3com action?
according to the letter (and nintendo.com which i checked just to satisfy my distraught, disbelieving eyes), nintendo is based out of Redmond, WA.
that's a weird freaking coincidence.
this just kinda randomly popped in my head, but AFAIK many states have some pretty strict laws regulating telemarketers (i.e. if you tell them "take my number off your list and never call me again" they have to do this or they get fined).
if legal precedent is set which makes email an analog of telephone communication, could this make legitimate companies sending explicitly unasked-for email (repeat SPAM) subject to fines under the same (or similar) laws?
i sure as hell hope so...
contrary to the knee-jerk "big companies are out to get me" reflex, they are NOT trying to give you a fragile format to take your money.
in fact almost every aspect of how CD/DVD's work is designed to improve performance in the face of scratch/dust distortion.
the reason that the pitted layer is on the far side of the disc from the lense is specifically so that dust particles and scratches on the plastic surface are effectively ignored by the optics (outside of the laser's/lenses' depth of focus).
the CIRC (cross-interleaved reed-solomon coding) error control scheme is designed very specifically to correct for burst errors caused by continous physical damage to the disc (i.e. a scratch). the math these things use is pretty nuts (i was amazed to find out that my discman uses abstract algebra). they can completely correct something like a 3800 bit burst of errors and an audio CD can conceal a 13000 bit error burst easily (even using a cheap n' easy concealment technique like sample-and-hold).
the only reason CD's don't do better than this is because further error protection would take up even more data space. would you rather never hear a skip on your 35 minute CD or hear occasional distortion on your 74 minute CD...or would you rather shrink the feature size for bigger capacity and pay for it with hugely more complicated and expensive optics and feedback control?
everything is a trade-off in engineering design. the CD standard made their design choices to improve performance/price though, not to feed the industrial monster by reselling CD's.
if the source ever made into the linux community's hands (which i find highly unlikely), i think the first thing to happen would be to see exactly how proprietary windows formats work.
i.e. look at how windows implements NTFS, etc. and write linux drivers that are less of a guess.
first of all, this is not "Ask Slashdot," this is "Developers" (god the irony =)
secondly, instead of complaining about the semantics of the question, why not focus on answering the interesting part? what features are good and why?
i'd much rather read a (+5 Informative) "i'd have to go with built-in concurrency-related error-handling and here's why:" than an incorrectly modded (+5 Insightful) "I refuse to even attempt to answer your question because your boss is dumb and you should've asked it differently."
i mean, i appreciate an eye for detail and everything, but it's becoming a trend lately to scroll through huge amounts of highly-rated nit-picking comments to find some of value to read / mod up.
actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:
the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)
and Fred Martin did his PhD dissertation at MIT on Circuits to Control: Learning Engineering by Designing LEGO Robots , developing MIT's annual 6.270 - "Autonomous LEGO Robot Design Competition" (which happened yesterday!!) in the process.
And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.
This isn't special...the FBI already logs all of my keystrokes for me...
:-)
i wonder if they'd be nice enough to hack together something to let me look at my stats
close... it's actually at http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/phot -02-02.html (no space in the uri).
it sure does make for a good background at those higher resolutions though...as do a large archive that page points to: an "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
anakin: he was a kid...his character has nothing to do but develop (and it will be interesting to see where and when and why and how quickly the character change from "good" to "evil" happens).
amidala: the fact that she used a disguise to stay with the action allowed her character to be developed throughout the film. also, the principle of that action gives some insight into her character.
only kenobi and binks: first of all, i want to see kenobi developed further (there's got to be something more than recklessness to both creating and evading darth vader). second of all, there are plenty of characters for lucas to develop that we've already seen--in the sequels.
for example, i am _incredibly_ anxious to see boba fett develop into a real character. you get a short glimpse of him in episode 6, and if you've read the books, you know that he's an established badass, but i want to _see_ him be "coldly efficient" while "exploding into action."
i really don't see how there are big star wars fans who are pessimistic about this...i, for one, have been and will continue to eagerly await it. i trust lucas to entertain me (i wouldn't be a star wars fan if i didn't).
it doesn't seem like this would work so well...the PCI bus would get very hosed with I/O requests from the RAM on each chip. Instead of limiting the hosage of physical memory access to the IDE or SCSI bus, you take the PCI bus down with you too (making the bandwidth of the PCI bus limit scalability of how many procs you can use).
also, having multiple memories accessing the same data in a distributed program adds plenty of overhead to make sure all the memories maintain validity and access control of the data. thus the chips wouldn't be as simple as CPU, RAM, interface.
Scaling down does make shorter channel lengths (less distance to travel) and smaller capactive loads (quicker to charge) making faster logic. So that will help bring faster computers. And making smaller gates does inherently space them more closely (shrinking wires), so you get some speed gain there too (though scaling down wires can increase resistance and parasitic capacitance).
The real problem, though, is inter-module communication. The modules are still spaced about as far apart as they ever were...and there are always going to be more and more of them on die (thanks to increasingly complex architecture tricks). So it's that wire that runs essentially "all the way across the chip" which keeps a pretty constant delay. Communication tricks and/or smaller (less complicated) dies are really the only way to get around that one.
---------
i'm tired of all this crap about the brilliant "masterminds" behind amihotornot. they didn't mastermind anything. it's just two guys "between employment" who ripped off an idea from amihot.com (which is one reason they recently changed their name...ahh domain disputes...)
---------
i'm assuming you don't mean real algebra...
---------
Also "Technology Review" had some articles about microphotonics in their July issue: http://www.techreview.com/articles/july00/fairley. htm (there are some worthwhile links at the bottom of the article too).