The capacity of a Saturn rocket is just shy of 118 times as massive as the largest nuclear device ever constructed.
Good... Then you don't need a warhead. Launch an ultra-massive chunk of steel into space, aim it where you want it, and give it a push. Gravity will do the rest.
I can't wait for the Taliban space program. They will spend all their funding building a Saturn V rocket to send Bin Laden to the moon with a lighter, so that he can be filmed burning the US flag put up there... Nobody remembering that there isn't any atmosphere on the moon.
TFA states that water is the "kryptonite" of the superstrong paper. Doesn't that kill its practicality in things like planes and automobiles?
Not in the slightest. It just won't be a drop-in replacement for aluminum.
All materials have their strengths and weaknesses. Think of something more like a house... Wood doesn't do too well with water, so the roof is coated with weak, non-structural materials like asphalt shingles or tile. In fact most structural building materials don't do too well with exposure to water and are shielded in some way.
It's not hard to imagine this carbon paper being used to construct structural beams of airplanes and automobiles, being coated with rubber or tar for last-line protection, and having the skin made of other materials that aren't at all susceptible to water (aluminum, fiberglass, or composites).
Of course, we don't know that is going to be an issue to begin with. They seem to be looking into materials other than water to bond the carbon, so this could all be a moot point.
Right now, Ext2 seems to be the best option. I use it myself on my large (backup) hard drives. There are a few big problems, though.
Ext2 support for Mac/OS X and Windows is... limited to say the least. It works, but if you're going to use Windows/Mac to copy files to your hard drive the majority of the time, you might prefer to stick with FAT32.
Ext2 is also not terribly robust. When mounted async, it has the old well known problem of data corruption should anything go wrong while writing data (power loss, crash, etc.). I've lost a couple of ext2 partitions to that. So if you care about your data, and can't use Ext3, I strongly suggest mounting your Ext2 partitions read-only, which really hobbles performance, but might not be too noticeable over (relatively slow) USB2.
Personally, I've got high hopes for UFS/FFS. Just about every operating system supports it in one form or another. Unfortunately, it seems nobody has bothered to get their implementations compatible with other implementations. So, while there is UFS/FFS support for Windows/OSX/Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX/etc. it's all in just a slightly different on-disk format, so it's not easy to get one to read another. It's a shame, because it's without question the most robust, flexible, high performance, and long-lived file system around.
I can only hope that with the transition to UFS2, maybe they'll avoid diverging as they upgrade. Of course, it's not a sure thing that the proprietary systems (eg. Solaris) will accept the upgrade path to UFS2 to begin with. (they seem more interested in going the Veritas route)
Pure straw man... changing the issue to something else entirely, and saying I was wrong about it.
Apparently not. Otherwise, it'd be kind of funny that one of the key uses for ultracaps is to deal with regenerative braking issues, eh?
Good one. Cars don't actually work. Proof: Bicycles are still being made.
120 VAC turns into 12 VAC, and 20 amps can be turned into 200 amps,
Electric cars don't need a 12V power supply. You're just changing the subject any time you want to ignore facts.
Now, go feed your car battery 200 amps at 17 volts continuously.
First, lead acid batteries are among the slowest charging types, so your comparison has nothing to do with the subject: ELECTRIC VEHICLES.
Second, it is indeed possible to fast charge car batteries, but not quite 30 minutes, and over-charging would go terribly wrong no matter what the energy storage method, including capacitors.
But again, don't let the facts slow you down.
You say that a lot, and yet don't bother to actually contract anything I've said. Seems you don't have any facts to offer. Just vague general concepts, and completely incorrect assertions based on oversimplification until you get the answers you want.
Electrolytics and oil caps; those are high pressure explosions. Ultracaps don't work like that. Sorry.
Try again. Check your laws of physics. You can't possibly have something storing significant amounts of energy, that won't explode with most/all of that energy turning directly into potential energy (heat and momentum). A 10KW explosion is a 10KW explosion, whether it's a battery, a capacitor, or anything else.
but you know what I have on my desk? I have a not-too-recent Maxwell ultracap. Yep. The real thing. 2700 farads.
Yeah, that'll make a great electric car. Call me when you get out of the driveway.
'cuz I know what's coming next.
In fact, the only reason you "know" this is because you're completely ignorant of the design of capacitors, and the extremely difficulty in scaling them up.
Got a tip that someone has hard vacuum containment technology that can wrap a massive flywheel in a zero-friction envelope so that the bearings (that I also hope you invested in) aren't a waste of tech? And something to compensate for all that torque? And materials that won't fly apart when great masses of it are spinning at really high speeds?
Wow. Your (lack of) knowledge of flywheels really is from the 1950s.
Containment is no problem. Magnetic bearings are making great progress. Torque issues are trivial, with multiple flywheels spinning in opposing directions (I'd think an intellectual giant like yourself could figure that one out in half a second, hmm). Carbon fiber has been used for flywheels for decades, and handles higher speeds than you could possibly want.
Pump water uphill and store it during off hours;
I can't wait to see your electric car design...
You're gonna put us all to shame with your magnificent hydro-electric car.
as near as I can tell, that's state of the art for flywheel ideas with regard to cars. Of course it can't store nearly enough energy to be useful to actually run the car for any length of time
You're horrible at even basic research. That flywheel is a completely different type for a completely different problem. It's specifically designed NOT to be able to store energy for any length, since it's NOT designed to be the sole energy storage method. It's not even electric for fucks sake. It is designed to handle short-term regenerative braking, and horrible at all else.
Drive 300 miles, wait 1/2 hour to charge, drive 300 miles, wait another 1/2 hour? That sounds annoying to me, frankly.
That's because you've never driven more than 300 miles and never given any thought to it. 300 miles is at least 4 hours, non-stop. The vast majority of humans need to stop at that often anyhow, and 30 minutes is about the right length of time.
Ultracaps, however, are different.
I'm getting very tired of hearing you bullshit your way through this...
A 2007 Corvette cranks 505 HP, or about 376.5 kilowatts.
Torque is the important measurement here, not HP. Not to mention that quoting engine HP very unfairly biases the comparison to begin with.
very important with things like regenerative braking;
Your blanket assertion that batteries can't charge fast enough to absorb the energy generated by regenerative braking is absurd.
Charge times being faster mean that at an hypothetical service station, a car based on ultracaps can be recharged and on its way in just a couple minutes.
The hypothetical service station can't reasonably exist, now or in the foreseeable future. At a minimum, there would need to be a nuclear power plant very nearby, with massive power lines feeding ultra-massive banks of super capacitors on-site.
Neither would it be reasonable or practical to build a car with wiring, insulation, and cooling that could accept that kind of massive and sustained power transfer.
Heat, in the confines of a battery, is a very, very bad thing. That is what limits charge rates.
Take your high school chemistry class lectures elsewhere. You just make yourself look foolish.
You're at least somewhat theoretically correct. Heat dissipation places an absolute lower limit on recharge times. That limit, though, is extremely low, and hasn't been approached by any electric vehicles yet. Why? Because they are designed not for your theoretical service station, but existing circuits. They take a very long time to charge in homes, because they are limited to 20-30amps. They charge much faster from commercial chargers, which are designed to be wired to much more powerful lines, but still, they limit them to what is reasonable for existing infrastructure, and as such, haven't yet put any effort into maximum theoretical charging speeds.
Do yourself a favor. Go out and buy some NiMH batteries with a 30 minute charger. While you're there, you might want to walk by the automotive department, and look at the high-end car battery chargers with 60 second rapid charge/engine start modes.
Nothing takes a full - or even reasonably partial - charge in 1/2 an hour. Nothing.
That is through no fault of the batteries. The designers decide that 30 minute charging wasn't needed, and so didn't make the trade-offs to get it. Saying you don't have it, so it can't be done, is idiotic.
Do we want kilowatts of heat gathering up in our power systems during charging? Maybe you're comfortable with that - I am not.
Heat doesn't "gather". Batteries don't get any hotter than you allow them to get. You can have a device drawing a kilowatt of power that barely seems warm, and you can have a device drawing 10Ws that gets red hot. Cooling systems aren't that complex, and can easily be designed to handle far more heat than we're talking about.
I've seen lithium fires; they are frightening. I've seen lead-acid burns, too, not a lot better.
I've seen giant capacitors arc, short, and explode. Low resistance makes them far more dangerous in the event of an accident. Even just being mounted in a car for any length of time is likely to cause internal shorts, and no casing will be big enough to hold back that kind of accidental weapon.
Batteries - frankly - haven't got a lot to recommend them. They are extreme polluters, hugely difficult to dispose of, expensive and complicated to recycle, charge slowly, can't deliver much power at once, and perform worse and worse as they get older (and not a lot older, for that matter.)
Batteries are infinitely cheaper than capacitors of similar capacities.
Battery recycling is a done deal... a net plus for a long time now.
Batteries can deliver enough immediate power to shred your wheels and turn your motor into molten metal if allowed to do so... Far, far more power than an internal combustion engine, and far more than anyone should ever need.
Vehicle charge times are limited by the circuit, rather than the batteries themselves. Even if you had capacitors, it would require a ridiculously expensive station with massive power storage to charge any faster than batteries. It's not a stretch to say that a electric vehicle with a bank of batteries should be able to be recharged in 30 minutes if designed to do so, and electrical supply isn't an issue.
I think your wattmeter is broken, seriously and not kidding.
That's only because you haven't the foggiest clue what you're talking about, and have never tested any of this stuff you're ranting about.
Compare this spec sheet picked at random from the Sony US website. Stated consumption of 160W in operation for a run-of-the-mill 36" CRT model.
Spec sheets always list the MAXIMUM, not the average, with normal brightness settings. Use a METER, not spec sheets!
If your 27" CRT-TV really uses less than 50W, make sure your space-time-continuum is in working condition, because it seems out of tune with the rest of the world's.
I tested it moments ago, and it's using 60W. Admitedly, that's higher than 50, but I've probably increased the brightness/contrast since I last tested it. It is a 27" Sharp Model 27U-S60 (rated at 105W) and it draws 60watts.
What's much more interesting than that is the fact that most Sony LCD TV sets actually use MORE power than their comparable sized CRT counterparts.
All the more evidence that listed power specs are vastly exaggerated and shouldn't be foolishly trusted.
I have a 500W power supply in my computer. Believe it or not, it doesn't draw anywhere near 500W when my computer is running.
It has a standard Enermax PSU and draws 35W with all LED blinkenlights except for ones from the NIC dark.
Err, what lights? Are you talking about your computer sitting idle or in standby now? You said completely off before.
And get some manners dude, don't try to be that rude to real people within striking distance of your nose.
You're an idiot with no idea what he's talking about. Being rude is the least of your problems, and you've fully earned it.
Please, Dell still gets computer parts at a much bigger discount than Bob and Jimbo's Super Tech Computers Inc does.
No they don't, manufacturers are selling to OEMs at very low margins already. They're going to sell at a loss to Dell.
Dell appears to pay about $60 for an OEM copy of Windows. No amount of hardware discounts is going to make up for $60 software on a $200 PC.
Tiny shops have the advantage of being able to switch suppliers on a whim, and smaller quantities is a big gain. You can just look around for companies trying to clear a few hundred of last year's model of PSU/motherboard/etc. and get it below cost. Dell absolutely can't do that.
The Power Factor of cheap switching power supplies, as found in CFLs, is commonly 0.6, or 40% off perfect (which you get with incandescents).
Now 0.6 power factor doesn't actually mean they take 40% more power to begin with. Large capacitors on the lines, and other loads with better power factors, help to reduce the effect of that greatly. It's only if a large percentage of the load has a low power factor that it would be an issue.
And even in the worst case, CFLs use 3-4X less power than incandescent lighting... Even if 40% of that savings was lost due to the lower PF (which it isn't), it would still be a huge savings.
the CRT is sucking 150W or more, while your LCD consumes less than 40W - or 60W if you've got a larger screen.
That's so stupid it's funny... or at least it would be if it hadn't been modded up.
First, my 19" CRT uses 60W. My 27" CRT-based TV uses 50W. So your figures are clearly bullshit, and you've never actually tested a CRT monitor.
Second, LCDs in general use about half the power, for a given size, so there's no situations where a giant 150W CRT can be replaced by an (equally large) 40W LCD...
it's dumb to pick [CRTs] up for even less than 10 dollars: larger CRTs may be cheap to buy, but they eat into your wallet through 2-3 years. For fellow geeks who use their computer for 10 hours a day, that's some serious cash burned per year.
That's the most ignorant thing I've heard in a long time.
Let's say you buy a new 30W LCD to replace your 60W CRT. Figure a price of $200 which is reasonably low. At 8 cents per KWH, it would take about 83,300 hours to make up the purchase price. If you're crazy and use your monitor 10 hours per day, 7 days a week, with no vacations or anything else interrupting that, it would take 8,330 days, or 22.8 years just to pay back the purchase price...
Companies buy LCDs because of the space savings. If you are FORCED to buy a new monitor, LCDs have only just recently come down to match the price of CRTs, so that the energy savings are worth anything money to you, and it still isn't much savings.
while older desktops routinely have PSUs that eat 30W in the *off*-state (computer powered down, but cable plugged in).
My god that's idiotic! Not only have I never seen anything like that, I can't believe that's even possible. At 30W of heat dissipation, without a fan spinning to cool it down, your PSU in your computer would reach several hundred degrees in a matter of minutes. All the PSUs I've tested, when off, use 2-3Ws, so your measurements are an order of magnitude off.
A wattmeter ($15) and a calculator ($5) can do so much more for your wallet (and those pooooooooor baby seals) than switching to CF lamps and changing the background of that damn CRT to black.
It sounds like you should have bought a $30 one, because your measurements are an order of magnitude off. Of course, even if you'd run the numbers with your insane figures, it still wouldn't pay off, so that's not to blame for your idiotic assertions.
Also, switching to CFLs would do more for energy savings than anything else an average person can do. Lighting uses more electricity than most anything else in the average home, including your PCs and CRTs combined.
Total cost: 3 switchable power strips for $3 each and an e-meter ($15). Savings in the first year almost $100 or more, convenience and standard of living lost: zero.
Yes, MythTV's dev team has stated they can go back to website scraping, but that will break every single time the website's format is slightly altered.
First, Zap2it.com regularly changed their format and broke XMLTV a number of times. Just my luck, they did that right as I was trying to set-up MythTV my first time... D'oh.
Second, you haven't been to XMLTV's website lately. They have plans to start their own listings website. http://schedulesdirect.org/ Two of the MythTV developers are involved.
Except you own the hardware, and can do anything you want with it.
Yet you don't own the software, which is highly integrated with the hardware, so any attempts to modify the Tivo to do what you want (scheduled recording... grabbing listings elsewhere, etc.), are likely to render it a useless hunk of hardware.
Is there any Series III hack yet to avoid the TiVo subscription in favor of an open source solution?
Even if there was a hack, there is no open source solution for TV listings anymore. zap2it is discontinuing their free service, so XMLTV doesn't have a read source of listings any longer.
People need to start figuring out how to grab the listings off of the satellite or cable companies' streams, like their own DVRs do. CableCard standardization is supposed to prevent this vendor lock-in, and should make this simple. Then Tivo could sell their boxes with no subscription, or rent them out for $10/mo like the low-end rip offs.
IEv2 was fast... and good if you wanted a browser for Gopher sites... If you wanted HTML, though, you were out of luck. It couldn't render anything correctly. It hung and crashed quite a bit, and downloading anything was quite a nightmare. Netscape's annoying download manager seems designed for IEv2, since downloading files more than 100k would never work.
People suffer from amazingly deficient long-term memory when it comes to this topic. Netscape was dead long before Microsoft shipped Windows 98, which was the first version of the OS to include IE.
Speaking of deficient memories...
Windows NT 4.0 came with IE2. Windows 95 OSR2 came with IE3.0.
Windows 98, with IE4, was just the first time IE wasn't complete and total crap. Mind you, it was still crap, but not significantly enough worse than Netscape 4 to make people buy a CD, or wait two hour for the damn thing to download. Bundling + Bandwidth limitations killed Netscape.
The company was heading down the wrong path, no question, but they were dead before any version of IE was even competitive. By the time IE v5 came out, Netscape was roadkill, swirling the drain.
It does amaze me what poor memories people have in general, and your "correction" is no exception.
It's obviously a scam. You don't need to do a whois look-up or anything else. Just look at the specs.
There's no way in hell they're going to offer a 1.6GHz CPU, 40GB HDD, 14" LCD, 256MB DDR, etc., for $150... Even at twice that price ($300) it would be a stretch, but just possible. At $150, it's laughable.
You could make a $150 laptop... If you went with a tiny screen, no backlight, no CD/DVD, tiny HDD, no battery, ancient CPU, etc., etc. But with fairly modern specs as this has, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that it's real.
Are you saying it wouldn't be so bad/unethical if the companies were harming non-Americans?
US Patents only apply in the US, in other words, to AMERICANS. These US Patents have nothing to do with non-Americans, except perhaps very few immigrants, if you want to get pedantic.
Pre-recorded MDs, like recordable MDs, still involve more parts than a CD.
More parts, but less material. Blank rewritable MDs were $2 each including a case, before you could even find a blank CD-R, and long before you could find them under $5 a piece... Never mind CD-RWs. The popularity of CDs vs MD no doubt reversed the situation somewhere along the line, but never the less, MDs are, at the worst, nominally more expensive than CDs to produce, including all moving parts.
MiniDisc was dramatically more expensive to produce than a CD.
Pre-recorded MDs were pressed exactly like CDs, so you're just deluded anyway...
And the quality, even at "full bitrate" was noticeably worse than a CD
Perhaps in the very earliest of units, back when computers were in the double digit MHz range, and expensive. But at least v2 of ATRAC was transparent to most everyone.
Unfortunately, Intel's more of a bunny; hop a few times then get tired and sit around, whereas AMD is more of the turtle (slow to market, but rather constant). Well all know who wins the race.
I think it's important to remember that Intel inadvertently delivered the high-end server market into AMD's lap.
Intel had done so much heavy marketing, pushing claims that the Itanium was going to blow away all the proprietary CPU architectures, that damn near EVERYONE EOL'd their Unix servers... Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, etc., etc. Intel and Itanium made them announce the end was coming, and then when Itanium turned out to be the biggest flop in history, companies around the world had nowhere to go, but perhaps POWER and SPARC.
Then, into this vacuum, appeared AMD's x86-64, which had great performance, and everything needed for the high-end server market. AMD ate everyone's lunch (and got a bit more comfortable than they should have).
And also interestingly... You can't run your old proprietary Unix OS on AMD64 hardware, so what do you do? You switch to Linux. So it got a boost out of Intel's stupid marketing blunder as well.
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Good... Then you don't need a warhead. Launch an ultra-massive chunk of steel into space, aim it where you want it, and give it a push. Gravity will do the rest.
I can't wait for the Taliban space program. They will spend all their funding building a Saturn V rocket to send Bin Laden to the moon with a lighter, so that he can be filmed burning the US flag put up there... Nobody remembering that there isn't any atmosphere on the moon.
Not in the slightest. It just won't be a drop-in replacement for aluminum.
All materials have their strengths and weaknesses. Think of something more like a house... Wood doesn't do too well with water, so the roof is coated with weak, non-structural materials like asphalt shingles or tile. In fact most structural building materials don't do too well with exposure to water and are shielded in some way.
It's not hard to imagine this carbon paper being used to construct structural beams of airplanes and automobiles, being coated with rubber or tar for last-line protection, and having the skin made of other materials that aren't at all susceptible to water (aluminum, fiberglass, or composites).
Of course, we don't know that is going to be an issue to begin with. They seem to be looking into materials other than water to bond the carbon, so this could all be a moot point.
Right now, Ext2 seems to be the best option. I use it myself on my large (backup) hard drives. There are a few big problems, though.
Ext2 support for Mac/OS X and Windows is... limited to say the least. It works, but if you're going to use Windows/Mac to copy files to your hard drive the majority of the time, you might prefer to stick with FAT32.
Ext2 is also not terribly robust. When mounted async, it has the old well known problem of data corruption should anything go wrong while writing data (power loss, crash, etc.). I've lost a couple of ext2 partitions to that. So if you care about your data, and can't use Ext3, I strongly suggest mounting your Ext2 partitions read-only, which really hobbles performance, but might not be too noticeable over (relatively slow) USB2.
Personally, I've got high hopes for UFS/FFS. Just about every operating system supports it in one form or another. Unfortunately, it seems nobody has bothered to get their implementations compatible with other implementations. So, while there is UFS/FFS support for Windows/OSX/Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX/etc. it's all in just a slightly different on-disk format, so it's not easy to get one to read another. It's a shame, because it's without question the most robust, flexible, high performance, and long-lived file system around.
I can only hope that with the transition to UFS2, maybe they'll avoid diverging as they upgrade. Of course, it's not a sure thing that the proprietary systems (eg. Solaris) will accept the upgrade path to UFS2 to begin with. (they seem more interested in going the Veritas route)
Pure straw man... changing the issue to something else entirely, and saying I was wrong about it.
Good one. Cars don't actually work. Proof: Bicycles are still being made.
Electric cars don't need a 12V power supply. You're just changing the subject any time you want to ignore facts.
First, lead acid batteries are among the slowest charging types, so your comparison has nothing to do with the subject: ELECTRIC VEHICLES.
Second, it is indeed possible to fast charge car batteries, but not quite 30 minutes, and over-charging would go terribly wrong no matter what the energy storage method, including capacitors.
You say that a lot, and yet don't bother to actually contract anything I've said. Seems you don't have any facts to offer. Just vague general concepts, and completely incorrect assertions based on oversimplification until you get the answers you want.
Try again. Check your laws of physics. You can't possibly have something storing significant amounts of energy, that won't explode with most/all of that energy turning directly into potential energy (heat and momentum). A 10KW explosion is a 10KW explosion, whether it's a battery, a capacitor, or anything else.
Yeah, that'll make a great electric car. Call me when you get out of the driveway.
In fact, the only reason you "know" this is because you're completely ignorant of the design of capacitors, and the extremely difficulty in scaling them up.
Wow. Your (lack of) knowledge of flywheels really is from the 1950s.
Containment is no problem. Magnetic bearings are making great progress. Torque issues are trivial, with multiple flywheels spinning in opposing directions (I'd think an intellectual giant like yourself could figure that one out in half a second, hmm). Carbon fiber has been used for flywheels for decades, and handles higher speeds than you could possibly want.
I can't wait to see your electric car design...
You're gonna put us all to shame with your magnificent hydro-electric car.
You're horrible at even basic research. That flywheel is a completely different type for a completely different problem. It's specifically designed NOT to be able to store energy for any length, since it's NOT designed to be the sole energy storage method. It's not even electric for fucks sake. It is designed to handle short-term regenerative braking, and horrible at all else.
Why don't you check out the flywheels curren
That's because you've never driven more than 300 miles and never given any thought to it. 300 miles is at least 4 hours, non-stop. The vast majority of humans need to stop at that often anyhow, and 30 minutes is about the right length of time.
I'm getting very tired of hearing you bullshit your way through this...
Torque is the important measurement here, not HP. Not to mention that quoting engine HP very unfairly biases the comparison to begin with.
Your blanket assertion that batteries can't charge fast enough to absorb the energy generated by regenerative braking is absurd.
The hypothetical service station can't reasonably exist, now or in the foreseeable future. At a minimum, there would need to be a nuclear power plant very nearby, with massive power lines feeding ultra-massive banks of super capacitors on-site.
Neither would it be reasonable or practical to build a car with wiring, insulation, and cooling that could accept that kind of massive and sustained power transfer.
Take your high school chemistry class lectures elsewhere. You just make yourself look foolish.
You're at least somewhat theoretically correct. Heat dissipation places an absolute lower limit on recharge times. That limit, though, is extremely low, and hasn't been approached by any electric vehicles yet. Why? Because they are designed not for your theoretical service station, but existing circuits. They take a very long time to charge in homes, because they are limited to 20-30amps. They charge much faster from commercial chargers, which are designed to be wired to much more powerful lines, but still, they limit them to what is reasonable for existing infrastructure, and as such, haven't yet put any effort into maximum theoretical charging speeds.
Do yourself a favor. Go out and buy some NiMH batteries with a 30 minute charger. While you're there, you might want to walk by the automotive department, and look at the high-end car battery chargers with 60 second rapid charge/engine start modes.
That is through no fault of the batteries. The designers decide that 30 minute charging wasn't needed, and so didn't make the trade-offs to get it. Saying you don't have it, so it can't be done, is idiotic.
Heat doesn't "gather". Batteries don't get any hotter than you allow them to get. You can have a device drawing a kilowatt of power that barely seems warm, and you can have a device drawing 10Ws that gets red hot. Cooling systems aren't that complex, and can easily be designed to handle far more heat than we're talking about.
I've seen giant capacitors arc, short, and explode. Low resistance makes them far more dangerous in the event of an accident. Even just being mounted in a car for any length of time is likely to cause internal shorts, and no casing will be big enough to hold back that kind of accidental weapon.
Batteries are infinitely cheaper than capacitors of similar capacities.
Battery recycling is a done deal... a net plus for a long time now.
Batteries can deliver enough immediate power to shred your wheels and turn your motor into molten metal if allowed to do so... Far, far more power than an internal combustion engine, and far more than anyone should ever need.
Vehicle charge times are limited by the circuit, rather than the batteries themselves. Even if you had capacitors, it would require a ridiculously expensive station with massive power storage to charge any faster than batteries. It's not a stretch to say that a electric vehicle with a bank of batteries should be able to be recharged in 30 minutes if designed to do so, and electrical supply isn't an issue.
Simple typo. Obviously they're NOT going to sell at a loss.
That's only because you haven't the foggiest clue what you're talking about, and have never tested any of this stuff you're ranting about.
Spec sheets always list the MAXIMUM, not the average, with normal brightness settings. Use a METER, not spec sheets!
I tested it moments ago, and it's using 60W. Admitedly, that's higher than 50, but I've probably increased the brightness/contrast since I last tested it. It is a 27" Sharp Model 27U-S60 (rated at 105W) and it draws 60watts.
All the more evidence that listed power specs are vastly exaggerated and shouldn't be foolishly trusted.
I have a 500W power supply in my computer. Believe it or not, it doesn't draw anywhere near 500W when my computer is running.
Err, what lights? Are you talking about your computer sitting idle or in standby now? You said completely off before.
You're an idiot with no idea what he's talking about. Being rude is the least of your problems, and you've fully earned it.
No they don't, manufacturers are selling to OEMs at very low margins already. They're going to sell at a loss to Dell.
Dell appears to pay about $60 for an OEM copy of Windows. No amount of hardware discounts is going to make up for $60 software on a $200 PC.
Tiny shops have the advantage of being able to switch suppliers on a whim, and smaller quantities is a big gain. You can just look around for companies trying to clear a few hundred of last year's model of PSU/motherboard/etc. and get it below cost. Dell absolutely can't do that.
I saw a little Asian guy in an orange robe just burst into flames... They're THAT HOT!
(Apologies to Robin Williams)
The Power Factor of cheap switching power supplies, as found in CFLs, is commonly 0.6, or 40% off perfect (which you get with incandescents).
Now 0.6 power factor doesn't actually mean they take 40% more power to begin with. Large capacitors on the lines, and other loads with better power factors, help to reduce the effect of that greatly. It's only if a large percentage of the load has a low power factor that it would be an issue.
And even in the worst case, CFLs use 3-4X less power than incandescent lighting... Even if 40% of that savings was lost due to the lower PF (which it isn't), it would still be a huge savings.
That's so stupid it's funny... or at least it would be if it hadn't been modded up.
First, my 19" CRT uses 60W. My 27" CRT-based TV uses 50W. So your figures are clearly bullshit, and you've never actually tested a CRT monitor.
Second, LCDs in general use about half the power, for a given size, so there's no situations where a giant 150W CRT can be replaced by an (equally large) 40W LCD...
That's the most ignorant thing I've heard in a long time.
Let's say you buy a new 30W LCD to replace your 60W CRT. Figure a price of $200 which is reasonably low. At 8 cents per KWH, it would take about 83,300 hours to make up the purchase price. If you're crazy and use your monitor 10 hours per day, 7 days a week, with no vacations or anything else interrupting that, it would take 8,330 days, or 22.8 years just to pay back the purchase price...
Companies buy LCDs because of the space savings. If you are FORCED to buy a new monitor, LCDs have only just recently come down to match the price of CRTs, so that the energy savings are worth anything money to you, and it still isn't much savings.
My god that's idiotic! Not only have I never seen anything like that, I can't believe that's even possible. At 30W of heat dissipation, without a fan spinning to cool it down, your PSU in your computer would reach several hundred degrees in a matter of minutes. All the PSUs I've tested, when off, use 2-3Ws, so your measurements are an order of magnitude off.
It sounds like you should have bought a $30 one, because your measurements are an order of magnitude off. Of course, even if you'd run the numbers with your insane figures, it still wouldn't pay off, so that's not to blame for your idiotic assertions.
Also, switching to CFLs would do more for energy savings than anything else an average person can do. Lighting uses more electricity than most anything else in the average home, including your PCs and CRTs combined.
Being completely and totally wrong: Priceless!
First, Zap2it.com regularly changed their format and broke XMLTV a number of times. Just my luck, they did that right as I was trying to set-up MythTV my first time... D'oh.
Second, you haven't been to XMLTV's website lately. They have plans to start their own listings website. http://schedulesdirect.org/ Two of the MythTV developers are involved.
Yet you don't own the software, which is highly integrated with the hardware, so any attempts to modify the Tivo to do what you want (scheduled recording... grabbing listings elsewhere, etc.), are likely to render it a useless hunk of hardware.
Even if there was a hack, there is no open source solution for TV listings anymore. zap2it is discontinuing their free service, so XMLTV doesn't have a read source of listings any longer.
People need to start figuring out how to grab the listings off of the satellite or cable companies' streams, like their own DVRs do. CableCard standardization is supposed to prevent this vendor lock-in, and should make this simple. Then Tivo could sell their boxes with no subscription, or rent them out for $10/mo like the low-end rip offs.
And asprin causes headaches, too... Really!
When was the last time you took Asprin, and you didn't have a headache 5 minutes afterwards? Proof!
IEv2 was fast... and good if you wanted a browser for Gopher sites... If you wanted HTML, though, you were out of luck. It couldn't render anything correctly. It hung and crashed quite a bit, and downloading anything was quite a nightmare. Netscape's annoying download manager seems designed for IEv2, since downloading files more than 100k would never work.
No they don't.
Netscape 4 was significantly more stable than IEv4. It had plenty of bugs and glitches, but IEv4 was worse, just not dramatically worse.
In fact you are. You're using your opinion (or perhaps what you incorrectly remember as your opinion) and asserting that it was everyone's opinion.
Ditto for HP (great workstations and servers back then, only DECs were better), yet DP don't exactly seem to be struggling as DEC has.
Speaking of deficient memories...
Windows NT 4.0 came with IE2. Windows 95 OSR2 came with IE3.0.
Windows 98, with IE4, was just the first time IE wasn't complete and total crap. Mind you, it was still crap, but not significantly enough worse than Netscape 4 to make people buy a CD, or wait two hour for the damn thing to download. Bundling + Bandwidth limitations killed Netscape.
The company was heading down the wrong path, no question, but they were dead before any version of IE was even competitive. By the time IE v5 came out, Netscape was roadkill, swirling the drain.
It does amaze me what poor memories people have in general, and your "correction" is no exception.
It's obviously a scam. You don't need to do a whois look-up or anything else. Just look at the specs.
There's no way in hell they're going to offer a 1.6GHz CPU, 40GB HDD, 14" LCD, 256MB DDR, etc., for $150... Even at twice that price ($300) it would be a stretch, but just possible. At $150, it's laughable.
You could make a $150 laptop... If you went with a tiny screen, no backlight, no CD/DVD, tiny HDD, no battery, ancient CPU, etc., etc. But with fairly modern specs as this has, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that it's real.
US Patents only apply in the US, in other words, to AMERICANS. These US Patents have nothing to do with non-Americans, except perhaps very few immigrants, if you want to get pedantic.
More parts, but less material. Blank rewritable MDs were $2 each including a case, before you could even find a blank CD-R, and long before you could find them under $5 a piece... Never mind CD-RWs. The popularity of CDs vs MD no doubt reversed the situation somewhere along the line, but never the less, MDs are, at the worst, nominally more expensive than CDs to produce, including all moving parts.
Pre-recorded MDs were pressed exactly like CDs, so you're just deluded anyway...
Perhaps in the very earliest of units, back when computers were in the double digit MHz range, and expensive. But at least v2 of ATRAC was transparent to most everyone.
I think it's important to remember that Intel inadvertently delivered the high-end server market into AMD's lap.
Intel had done so much heavy marketing, pushing claims that the Itanium was going to blow away all the proprietary CPU architectures, that damn near EVERYONE EOL'd their Unix servers... Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, etc., etc. Intel and Itanium made them announce the end was coming, and then when Itanium turned out to be the biggest flop in history, companies around the world had nowhere to go, but perhaps POWER and SPARC.
Then, into this vacuum, appeared AMD's x86-64, which had great performance, and everything needed for the high-end server market. AMD ate everyone's lunch (and got a bit more comfortable than they should have).
And also interestingly... You can't run your old proprietary Unix OS on AMD64 hardware, so what do you do? You switch to Linux. So it got a boost out of Intel's stupid marketing blunder as well.