I don't care about the electrical costs of a hot CPU... I care about the noisy fans needed to move the extra heat away from the CPU and out of the box.
maybe both sides were so concerned about branding that they lost track of the bigger picture.
Right... Google wanted their branding on a mature mapping and navigation feature that worked, while Apple decided instead to have their branding all over a piece of crap that doesn't work...
Apple passed on the "bad" option, and instead chose the "terrible" option. Yay Apple! What's worse is that this has really taken the shine off Apple (pardon the pun), as even fanbois are asking what happened to Apple's SINGLE selling point, making products that are highly polished and "just work".
If Apple fixes their maps and navigation, and doesn't make any more stupid mistakes in the near future, it might just be forgotten, but if the situation gets worse, or if they make some other major mistake while people still have this one in the back of their minds, Apple's image could really be hurt, with sales taking a big hit.
What's worse about all this is simply the fact that there are numerous other providers of maps and navigation products for smartphones. Mapquest's version is already free for iOS, so Apple would have been able to preinstall theirs for free, or nearly so. Other providers would have charged a small fee to provide the entire service, and given Apple full control over whatever branding they wanted.
Also: Hydrogen seems unlikely to become a vehicle fuel. but it has long been useful for submarines, not to mention spacecraft. But perhaps the ultimate use will be aircraft carriers, using their abundant excess electricity and using the only raw material available... sea-water... to fuel-up jets.
That falls under something like "Betteridge's Law of Headlines". They are implying it because it's not true, but they want to stir up as much FUD as possible. If it was TRUE, they wouldn't HAVE TO just imply it.
Where are schools able to buy identically configured old used computer hardware that is still healthy enough for prolonged student use [...] for everyone to have one at $25 a pop,
There are a number of suppliers of off-lease computer equipment. I've deployed hundreds of them for large companies... A classroom worth is a small order. You'd have to tell me where you are located for me to come up with a list of specific distributors near you.
and small enough that it doesn't take up half the classroom [...] while consuming a fraction of the power usage from traditional machines?
That's a nice little logical-fallacy you've got there... Setting the goal-posts so nothing but a Pi equivalent will match. Sorry, but no. The monitors attached to a Pi aren't going to be any smaller than the monitors attached to a PC, nor will those same monitors use any more or less electricity... And while PCs will consume more power than a Pi, it's probably overshadowed by the power usage of those monitors, and if not, electricity is cheap enough in the first-world to make it a non-issue for running PCs a few hours a day.
Why would students need expandability for such a learning device? [...] What performance critical code are students going to be running
For EVERYTHING THEY DO. Computers are boring if they just light-up the screen and browse the internet. During my school years, we had PCs with EXPENSIVE analog-digital capture cards, allowing the PCs to be used for all kinds of lab work. Software-defined radio is also a great subject to learn about.
I'm also fond of wiring things like solenoids off serial ports to turn power outlets on and off, or interfacing with Arduinos and other embedded systems.
I think your statement is also irrelevant to be honest.
That there's something cheaper that can do everything the Pi can, and many things it can't, is irrelevant HOW? If a Pi isn't about the hardware being open, then it needs to be better than other computing devices in some objective ways. Lower power is all you've got, and that's not worth much.
You would have to produce hydrogen at insanely cheap prices, to be able to recover from the inefficiency of burning it in conventional engines, and still being a cheaper fuel than electricity in an EV.
You're correct that large trucks need another option than batteries, but in the mid-term, it sure won't be hydrogen. It may be that truck transport gets far less popular, as kerosene gets more expensive, and freight trains convert to all-electric with power lines over-head. Minimal steps, like conversion to natural gas, or much higher engine efficiencies (perhaps with turbines, fuel-cells burning gasoline, or other technologies) will make trucking viable, well into the future.
Long-term, I don't know what trucking will look like. It's possible hydrogen will be an option, but that's pretty unlikely, because any chemical conversion inherently introduces very significant losses, even in the very best-case. Could be we'll install over-head lines on interstates and trucks will look like trolleys... Could be that high-speed flywheels will become practical by then, and in the large space offered by trucks, could provide enough power/range, and with very fast recharge rate... Or trucking could all but die off. I don't have that level of fore-sight, but hydrogen sure isn't the horse I'd bet on...
Like I said to someone else, I'm not sure how this turned into an "either/or" discussion (perhaps because that's the nature of slashdot?) -
You have politicians and the U.S. automotive industry to blame for that. They promoted ethanol and hydrogen HEAVILY, as the future... to the extreme detriment of EVs, long after it was clear where the future really lie.
If you talk about hydrogen in a different context, you might avoid the controversy and bad feelings. But in the context of hydrogen-powered automobiles, you are always going to need a disclaimer that you aren't an industry shill (kicking that dead-horse once again, trying to stave-off EVs revolutionizing the industry) to avoid a fight.
"the inconvenience of waiting 30 minutes to recharge even 80% of your car is an issue. Take a trip of any length and you're spending hours waiting on your car to charge."
That's not true. If it takes 5 hours for you to burn through your 300-mile battery, you're going to WANT to stop pretty soon, anyhow. Most people don't eat full meals while driving, and the ones that do, we'd all like to stop... So every 5 hours you pull into a fast-food joint, plug-in your car, order a meal, eat while stationary, use the restroom, and then go back to your fully-charge vehicle.
Of course the reality isn't quite that tidy, but we're getting very, very close to that point now. The early adopters among us will be the ones to make that happen, and in just a few more years, everyone else will follow. If you don't want to be one of the early adopters, pushing the world forward, that's fine. You can always go for a Chevy Volt or plug-in Prius, and keep using gas for now, but benefiting from, and being a customer for, electric charging stations as they appear.
Hydrogen has zero chance. The problems aren't insurmountable, but they are many, and a LONG way off. Even once the problems are fixed, the price will remain astronomical... fuel cells aren't cheap, nor is hydrogen storage. And they will always be second to all-electric in terms of efficiency, so even if we had cheap hydrogen cars NOW, I'd expect them to be overtaken by EVs in another decade or so. The only folks who want hydrogen cars to work are the ones with a vested interest in the status quo, and want to keep their slice of the re-fueling infrastructure, rather than allowing people to fuel-up at home.
Meanwhile, EVs are just a stone's throw away from being practical. As soon as an EV comes out that gets 300 mile range on a charge, and about 15 minute recharge time, at a reasonable price, you'll see a sudden world-changing shift, as gas stations start disappearing overnight, and every investor starts throwing money at fast-food restaurants to install fast-charging stations. Once a car gets close to those specs, the jig will be up, and there will be no turning-back, because nothing else can out-compete EVs.
If electricity from the grid was much more expensive, then people would be installing PVs all over the place... as well as wind turbines... And those who couldn't afford to do so would be buying up gasoline-electric generators, and running them around the clock.
The electric grid would cease to exist, as it would be too exesnive to use, even as a minor supplement, so nobody would ever be connected.
Recomending Home Depot over Walmart is silly... they're completely equivalent. They both go nuts with low-quality products that IMHO shouldn't even be on their shelves.
Who really WANTS to save $5 when buying a faucet, by getting a flimsy plastic thing with guaranteed short life, which is only painted with chrome, and only noted as non-metallic in the fine print? I'm betting damn-near all their sales of those pieces of crap are confused / unexpecting consumers.
Home Depot will screw you over as surely as Walmart.
Is there yet a way to tell at time of purchase whether a CFL bulb is going to warm up in an acceptable time?
Both Amazon.com and Walmart.com have healthy online communities, who frequently post useful reviews of products. A quick look at the reviews for different brands and models of CFLs will tell you if a non-trivial number of people have problems with the ballasts, color temperature, or longevity.
Walmart.com review system is a bit better, displaying precentage of reviewers who would recomend the product, and allowing you to sort reviews by lowest-rating first to see all the complaints. You could even post a Q&A and someone is likely to respond. I wouldn't dream of shopping at physical Walmart stores, but reviews online make it practical to get some really good deals and not get sucked-in by low-quality crap they stock. You may occasionally find better deals on Amazon.com, particularly if you're a Prime member and want delivery rather than store pick-up.
France is roughly equivalent to the state of California in size and population density. Please explain why California doesn't have passenger rail and internet service equivalent to France (listed in TFA).
in 1000 years, do you really think we're going to power the world with windmills?
Wind can't do it, but solar most certainly can... And solar has innumerable advantages over nuclear, like smaller distributed generation, minimal security concerns, easy scale-up, nominal operating costs, etc. NASA doesn't seem to want to sell me an RTG to power my electric car, but companies are happy to sell me PV panels that'll fit, even if they can only really float-charge the battery pack.
Liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants appear to be the future, as they eliminate nearly all the problems, lowering initial and ongoing costs, evening-out power generation over days that have little or no sunlight, and being dead-simple technology, using mirrors, soldium, and a turbine.
Despite numerous cataclysms in the past, most languages remained intact. The Rosetta Stone is basically the way forward, a translation key with all languages represented, as at least ONE modern language is sure to be comprehensible in the very distant, post-apocalyptic future.
And it's an easier problem today than ever... We can print innumerable color pictures, labeled with the appropriate words. That wasn't so easy when craftsman were hand-carving stone tablets.
That's the way to go, BUT be sure you have more than one. On multiple occasions, we've lost the VPN connection with our China office.... Couldn't ping our VPN IP address from China, and vice vera... BUT all our other IPs were perfectly reachable. After a few days, everything was back to normal.
This is all with business IPs on both ends, I have no idea if the Firewall will be more strict with personal internet connections, or dynamic IPs, but I'd want at least a completely redundant backup connection (Landline and cellular maybe?) for when your usage gets flagged and you can't work.
"Ok. Try calculating the cost in joules instead of dollars."
How about YOU shut your idiocy-spewing mouth for a few seconds, and do it yourself? You seem to have some horrible form of tourettes, where you just can't shut up no matter how big of an idiot you make out of yourself. If you think there's some practical limit, then get off your ass and either do the math, or look up some sources who have already done it for you. The fact is, you're horribly, massively, terribly, insanely off-base, so just TRY to prove otherwise.
Only Google? You think only google does maps and navigation? Ever heard of Mapquest, which has free apps for iOS and Android? How about Verizon's VZNavigator and BB10 maps (Telecomsys) or AT&T Navigator (Telenav)? How about Nokia (Navteq) or TomTom (TeleAtlas)? And maybe Bing qualifies as well?
There are a ton of companies out there doing maps, navigation, POI, search, etc. Many of them are partially or entirely free. The fact that Apple didn't have the good sense to hire on a few people who knew WTF they were doing, and hold back the release until they had a solid and tested product, shows a complete disregard for their own customers, versus their animosity towards Google, and their unwillingness to simple license a working solution from any of the above.
As much money as Apple has, and yet they don't have the good sense to buy one of the companies listed above... At least google does that part right, buying the companies they need.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care about the electrical costs of a hot CPU... I care about the noisy fans needed to move the extra heat away from the CPU and out of the box.
Right... Google wanted their branding on a mature mapping and navigation feature that worked, while Apple decided instead to have their branding all over a piece of crap that doesn't work...
Apple passed on the "bad" option, and instead chose the "terrible" option. Yay Apple! What's worse is that this has really taken the shine off Apple (pardon the pun), as even fanbois are asking what happened to Apple's SINGLE selling point, making products that are highly polished and "just work".
If Apple fixes their maps and navigation, and doesn't make any more stupid mistakes in the near future, it might just be forgotten, but if the situation gets worse, or if they make some other major mistake while people still have this one in the back of their minds, Apple's image could really be hurt, with sales taking a big hit.
What's worse about all this is simply the fact that there are numerous other providers of maps and navigation products for smartphones. Mapquest's version is already free for iOS, so Apple would have been able to preinstall theirs for free, or nearly so. Other providers would have charged a small fee to provide the entire service, and given Apple full control over whatever branding they wanted.
Also: Hydrogen seems unlikely to become a vehicle fuel. but it has long been useful for submarines, not to mention spacecraft. But perhaps the ultimate use will be aircraft carriers, using their abundant excess electricity and using the only raw material available... sea-water... to fuel-up jets.
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2012/fueling-the-fleet-navy-looks-to-the-seas
Among the better alternatives to /. are Ars Technica, Popular Science, and Hacker News.
That falls under something like "Betteridge's Law of Headlines". They are implying it because it's not true, but they want to stir up as much FUD as possible. If it was TRUE, they wouldn't HAVE TO just imply it.
TFA only says his access was "suspended". In English, that's means temporary, and that's exactly what you'd expect to happen during an investigation.
Your mis-reading of it is simply NOT what the article actually says.
No, actually /. just keeps getting more like an insane asylum. The tin-foil hats are multiplying, and the sane ones have left for greener pastures.
TFA never said Assange can now be arrested, killed, or anything of the sort.
TFA also says that the one guy who was charged with doing so, got off scott-free, and has no explanation as to why.
There are a number of suppliers of off-lease computer equipment. I've deployed hundreds of them for large companies... A classroom worth is a small order. You'd have to tell me where you are located for me to come up with a list of specific distributors near you.
Just to prove the validity of the point (for an international audience) a reasonably close qualifier would be the P4 Samba from geeks.com: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId=SAMBA845V-24-4-R
That's a nice little logical-fallacy you've got there... Setting the goal-posts so nothing but a Pi equivalent will match. Sorry, but no. The monitors attached to a Pi aren't going to be any smaller than the monitors attached to a PC, nor will those same monitors use any more or less electricity... And while PCs will consume more power than a Pi, it's probably overshadowed by the power usage of those monitors, and if not, electricity is cheap enough in the first-world to make it a non-issue for running PCs a few hours a day.
For EVERYTHING THEY DO. Computers are boring if they just light-up the screen and browse the internet. During my school years, we had PCs with EXPENSIVE analog-digital capture cards, allowing the PCs to be used for all kinds of lab work. Software-defined radio is also a great subject to learn about.
I'm also fond of wiring things like solenoids off serial ports to turn power outlets on and off, or interfacing with Arduinos and other embedded systems.
That there's something cheaper that can do everything the Pi can, and many things it can't, is irrelevant HOW? If a Pi isn't about the hardware being open, then it needs to be better than other computing devices in some objective ways. Lower power is all you've got, and that's not worth much.
You would have to produce hydrogen at insanely cheap prices, to be able to recover from the inefficiency of burning it in conventional engines, and still being a cheaper fuel than electricity in an EV.
You're correct that large trucks need another option than batteries, but in the mid-term, it sure won't be hydrogen. It may be that truck transport gets far less popular, as kerosene gets more expensive, and freight trains convert to all-electric with power lines over-head. Minimal steps, like conversion to natural gas, or much higher engine efficiencies (perhaps with turbines, fuel-cells burning gasoline, or other technologies) will make trucking viable, well into the future.
Long-term, I don't know what trucking will look like. It's possible hydrogen will be an option, but that's pretty unlikely, because any chemical conversion inherently introduces very significant losses, even in the very best-case. Could be we'll install over-head lines on interstates and trucks will look like trolleys... Could be that high-speed flywheels will become practical by then, and in the large space offered by trucks, could provide enough power/range, and with very fast recharge rate... Or trucking could all but die off. I don't have that level of fore-sight, but hydrogen sure isn't the horse I'd bet on...
You have politicians and the U.S. automotive industry to blame for that. They promoted ethanol and hydrogen HEAVILY, as the future... to the extreme detriment of EVs, long after it was clear where the future really lie.
If you talk about hydrogen in a different context, you might avoid the controversy and bad feelings. But in the context of hydrogen-powered automobiles, you are always going to need a disclaimer that you aren't an industry shill (kicking that dead-horse once again, trying to stave-off EVs revolutionizing the industry) to avoid a fight.
"the inconvenience of waiting 30 minutes to recharge even 80% of your car is an issue. Take a trip of any length and you're spending hours waiting on your car to charge."
That's not true. If it takes 5 hours for you to burn through your 300-mile battery, you're going to WANT to stop pretty soon, anyhow. Most people don't eat full meals while driving, and the ones that do, we'd all like to stop... So every 5 hours you pull into a fast-food joint, plug-in your car, order a meal, eat while stationary, use the restroom, and then go back to your fully-charge vehicle.
Of course the reality isn't quite that tidy, but we're getting very, very close to that point now. The early adopters among us will be the ones to make that happen, and in just a few more years, everyone else will follow. If you don't want to be one of the early adopters, pushing the world forward, that's fine. You can always go for a Chevy Volt or plug-in Prius, and keep using gas for now, but benefiting from, and being a customer for, electric charging stations as they appear.
Hydrogen has zero chance. The problems aren't insurmountable, but they are many, and a LONG way off. Even once the problems are fixed, the price will remain astronomical... fuel cells aren't cheap, nor is hydrogen storage. And they will always be second to all-electric in terms of efficiency, so even if we had cheap hydrogen cars NOW, I'd expect them to be overtaken by EVs in another decade or so. The only folks who want hydrogen cars to work are the ones with a vested interest in the status quo, and want to keep their slice of the re-fueling infrastructure, rather than allowing people to fuel-up at home.
Meanwhile, EVs are just a stone's throw away from being practical. As soon as an EV comes out that gets 300 mile range on a charge, and about 15 minute recharge time, at a reasonable price, you'll see a sudden world-changing shift, as gas stations start disappearing overnight, and every investor starts throwing money at fast-food restaurants to install fast-charging stations. Once a car gets close to those specs, the jig will be up, and there will be no turning-back, because nothing else can out-compete EVs.
Agreed. Ditto for brake lights burning out, slow fluid leaks, and things like fuel pumps no longer performing to spec.
If electricity from the grid was much more expensive, then people would be installing PVs all over the place... as well as wind turbines... And those who couldn't afford to do so would be buying up gasoline-electric generators, and running them around the clock.
The electric grid would cease to exist, as it would be too exesnive to use, even as a minor supplement, so nobody would ever be connected.
Recomending Home Depot over Walmart is silly... they're completely equivalent. They both go nuts with low-quality products that IMHO shouldn't even be on their shelves.
Who really WANTS to save $5 when buying a faucet, by getting a flimsy plastic thing with guaranteed short life, which is only painted with chrome, and only noted as non-metallic in the fine print? I'm betting damn-near all their sales of those pieces of crap are confused / unexpecting consumers.
Home Depot will screw you over as surely as Walmart.
Both Amazon.com and Walmart.com have healthy online communities, who frequently post useful reviews of products. A quick look at the reviews for different brands and models of CFLs will tell you if a non-trivial number of people have problems with the ballasts, color temperature, or longevity.
Walmart.com review system is a bit better, displaying precentage of reviewers who would recomend the product, and allowing you to sort reviews by lowest-rating first to see all the complaints. You could even post a Q&A and someone is likely to respond. I wouldn't dream of shopping at physical Walmart stores, but reviews online make it practical to get some really good deals and not get sucked-in by low-quality crap they stock. You may occasionally find better deals on Amazon.com, particularly if you're a Prime member and want delivery rather than store pick-up.
A Raspberry Pi can't compete with older, used PCs for purchase price, performance, expandability, etc.
France is roughly equivalent to the state of California in size and population density. Please explain why California doesn't have passenger rail and internet service equivalent to France (listed in TFA).
Wind can't do it, but solar most certainly can... And solar has innumerable advantages over nuclear, like smaller distributed generation, minimal security concerns, easy scale-up, nominal operating costs, etc. NASA doesn't seem to want to sell me an RTG to power my electric car, but companies are happy to sell me PV panels that'll fit, even if they can only really float-charge the battery pack.
Liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants appear to be the future, as they eliminate nearly all the problems, lowering initial and ongoing costs, evening-out power generation over days that have little or no sunlight, and being dead-simple technology, using mirrors, soldium, and a turbine.
Actually, with InBev buying Budweiser, the biggest US beer producers make good stuff, namely: Sam Adams.
It's all the foreign companies flooding our market with cheap crap beer, so that it's hard to find the good stuff.
Despite numerous cataclysms in the past, most languages remained intact. The Rosetta Stone is basically the way forward, a translation key with all languages represented, as at least ONE modern language is sure to be comprehensible in the very distant, post-apocalyptic future.
And it's an easier problem today than ever... We can print innumerable color pictures, labeled with the appropriate words. That wasn't so easy when craftsman were hand-carving stone tablets.
That's the way to go, BUT be sure you have more than one. On multiple occasions, we've lost the VPN connection with our China office.... Couldn't ping our VPN IP address from China, and vice vera... BUT all our other IPs were perfectly reachable. After a few days, everything was back to normal.
This is all with business IPs on both ends, I have no idea if the Firewall will be more strict with personal internet connections, or dynamic IPs, but I'd want at least a completely redundant backup connection (Landline and cellular maybe?) for when your usage gets flagged and you can't work.
"Ok. Try calculating the cost in joules instead of dollars."
How about YOU shut your idiocy-spewing mouth for a few seconds, and do it yourself? You seem to have some horrible form of tourettes, where you just can't shut up no matter how big of an idiot you make out of yourself. If you think there's some practical limit, then get off your ass and either do the math, or look up some sources who have already done it for you. The fact is, you're horribly, massively, terribly, insanely off-base, so just TRY to prove otherwise.
Only Google? You think only google does maps and navigation? Ever heard of Mapquest, which has free apps for iOS and Android? How about Verizon's VZNavigator and BB10 maps (Telecomsys) or AT&T Navigator (Telenav)? How about Nokia (Navteq) or TomTom (TeleAtlas)? And maybe Bing qualifies as well?
There are a ton of companies out there doing maps, navigation, POI, search, etc. Many of them are partially or entirely free. The fact that Apple didn't have the good sense to hire on a few people who knew WTF they were doing, and hold back the release until they had a solid and tested product, shows a complete disregard for their own customers, versus their animosity towards Google, and their unwillingness to simple license a working solution from any of the above.
As much money as Apple has, and yet they don't have the good sense to buy one of the companies listed above... At least google does that part right, buying the companies they need.
Then why not helium in those tires? A little less weight would be a huge advantage.