I use PC power supplies for other stuff because they are VERY cheap when compared to general purpose power supplies from electronics places.
Absolutely true. I was looking at power supplies which could provide the 12V/25A needed for a large TEC (peltier). I could go with the purpose-built power supply unit for about $100, or I could get a 500W PC power supply for $10... Tough choice.
Same goes for ANY kind of car adapter... Would you like to spend $40 on a 5A cigarette lighter adapter, or spend $10 on a PC power supply that gives you more than 5Xs that much power on the 12V rails?
There's a growing sense of frustration with them, and I've found that many other search engines yield better results, so it is a matter of time before internet users at large start using something else?
I find just the opposite.
I don't really like gmail. I barely ever use froogle. I can't remember the last time I used Groups or the Directory. Maps is nice but it gives me completely wrong directions from time to time.
The only reason I like google is because it's a very good search engine. All the other search engines will give you a link to goatse before slashdot, and will return thousands of completely irrelevant results before the useful ones.
I've tried clusty, vivisimo, and I'm sure I'll use them some day in the distant future when a quick search on google doesn't turn up what I'm looking for. However, that hasn't happened in a long time.
Sure, sometimes you'll see a lot of spam results, but in my experience, that's only because you've search for some obscure terms, or misspellings, and google just doesn't have anything else to give you.
In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is like Playboy -- you're missing the point if you read it for the articles. You can get links to news stories anywhere; Slashdot is worth reading because of the comments.
Irrelevant, pointless articles lead to a dull conversation about nothing at all.
You just about always have to have a good and topical story posted before you'll find any good comments.
When was the last time you saw an insightful technical comment attached to a slashvertisement story?
Clearing a CMOS password is as simple as plugging-in a keyboard.
Yeah, you have to make the device before-hand, and you need to carry it around with your boot-CD, but it's really not very difficult.
Padlocks are good mainly to keep the casual thief from removing the case panel and going home with your high-end graphics card, RAM, HDD, CPU, etc. Add a cable to keep someone from walking away with the whole tower.
Now, he will lead the development of all future AMD computing products, including silicon roadmaps
Can someone tell me where I might find silicon roadmaps? My roadmaps are all made of paper, and get ruined when I spill coffee on them. Silicon roadmaps would surely solve this problem...
I absolutely hate web-based apps, and can't imagine why ANYONE would WANT more of them.
Imagine if DNS was a web-based app... No automating it. No tying it together with other programs ("the Unix way"). In fact, it would be so incredibly inconvenient as to be borderline useless.
If you have an application you want people to remotely use, make a protocol for it, and let people write NATIVE clients. Not some bloated web browser that is slow, inflexible, unstable, etc.
One can of soft drink can contain up to 14 tablespoons of sugar in it.
Yes, and something "natural" like Orange Juice has FAR more sugar than that. So what's the problem?
Next time you are at the grocery, pick up most prepared foods and look at the ingredients. You'll find that sugar or high fructose corn syrup is in nearly everything.
Guess what else is in everything... WATER! Spooky, isn't it? Are you scared now? All the WATER in your food is poisoning you.
It's a bit frightening especially since I had a personal health issue that no doctor could solve until I cut food with sugar out of my diet.
Anecdotal evidence like this proves nothing at all. There are plenty of people that will happily tell you how their magnetic bracelet cures cancer.
Without some real evidence, this whole post of yours is just insane paranoid ranting.
Now if thye could make a black concrete that doesn't fade, or is at least easy to dye.
Terrible idea. Being light grey (rather than black) is one of concrete's advantages. It would be far smarter to simply make lines on the road much darker.
Electric cars that I know of must keep the battery packs cool.
Cooling fans are necessary for fast charging, but I certainly haven't seen any systems that use anything like that during operation, nor can I think of any reason for them to do so. Batteries do not need to be kept cool while power is being drawn, if anything, you might want a heating system in very cold climates.
Plus, batteries discharge themselves when idle.
NiMH, LiIon, and Lead-Acid batteries all have a rather slow discharge rate. You shouldn't notice any difference at all after an electric car has been sitting around for a week.
I've never seen a production electric vehicle that didn't have a transmission.
You haven't seen many, have you?
Electric vehicles are not panacea of lower operating costs you present.
Not true. They do have some drawbacks in certain places ICEs do not, but they have far more advantages to their credit.
I know quite a few economics professors who would fail you for that statement.
If so, they should be fired. I think, however, that you are just mistakenly putting words in their mouths, because of your lack of understanding of economics.
Alas, Congress and the President have little to no interest in raising the CAFE standards to force such changes.
Not only are they not interested in doing that, they are suing the state of California to prevent them from doing exactly that. It's really quite blatant.
Yup, that's the ticket to cleaner air and reduced dependence on foreign oil: smaller biodiesel engines.
Only if the government was willing to step in and force a changeover date. Since they surely will not do that, it will be nearly impossible for an alternate liquid fuel like biodiesel to achieve critical mass. Meanwhile, we already have the infrastructure to support electric vehicles.
why does a "hybrid" get much less gas mileage than my old technology simple internal combustion engine with a CARBERATOR?
Because hybrids are much larger 5-passenger vehicles, with a trunk.
I'll be the first to say that buying a conventional fuel-effecient car is a much better option than an expensive and maintenance intensive hybrid that won't get the advertised fuel mileage, anyhow. However, the Geo Metro is NOT the car I would suggest to anyone.
Assuming I had one of these cars, where would I plug it in?
Well, I don't know your situation, but extension cords work nicely...
I'm sure as electric cars get more popluar, parking garages will install metered electric outlets. For now, either get real creative, or write the parking-lot owners and tell them you're buying an electric vehicle, and would be happy to pay to re-charge your car on whatever meter they would be willing to install.
Even obese America doesn't need an SUV to move that.:)
No, but unfortunately it seems large, fuel ineffecient vehicles are the only ones that have enough passenger room for large people. Why car-makers haven't adapted, I don't know. Perhaps they make so much on SUVs they don't want overweight customers to have a cheaper option.
Even city buses will have to pay more.
City buses around here all switched to natural gas a few years ago.
And even the cost of asphalt will go up (a byproduct of oil processing)
I hope so. Concrete has always been the better material. We can only hope asphalt prices increase enough to make concrete the material of choice for roads.
An RV posted for sale on the bulletin board at work gets 2.5 miles per gallon.
Please don't compare RVs with cars. It would be absolutely impossible to make an RV get 30MPG like a one ton Saturn. RVs have to haul a huge ammout of weight, fight very strong headwinds, and still be able to get up to highway speeds.
BUT, as the price of gasoline crosses $3.50 to 4.00/gal even my car will be too expensive to drive.
That's all subjective. A great many people don't have the option of NOT driving, so even if the price ballons, they will keep on paying for it.
In Europe, gas prices are much higher than in the US, much higher than $4/gal already, and that hasn't stopped everyone from driving.
Maybe if gas prices continue to rise, you'll see a large number of people buying all-electric GEMs, attaching wheels twice as large (perimeter), and driving them to/from work. That should give them a max speed of 50 MPH. It's unfortunate they weren't built better, or they might be much more popular.
The cars that re-charge from an electric wall outlet will cause electricity demand to increase, causing electrical prices to rise.
That would only be true if a huge number of people got all-electric cars at the same time.
Electrons are not a fossil fuel. Electricity is subject to the same laws of free market as products. As demand increases, prices will actually fall.
In addition, the majority of electric cars will be plugged-in and drawing power not during peak times, but at night when power draw is lowest, and in some place, rates are lower.
The cars that re-charge their own batteries aren't any cheaper in the long run when you have to replace the batteries
Not true at all. Consider how much money you save by not needing to regularly replace transmission fluid, filters, drive belts, spark plugs, air filters, fuel filters, etc. At very worst, all-electric cars won't cost any more to maintain than conventional cars.
or pay 3x the "normal" labor rate to have some certified tech work on the complex drivetrain.
No, that's only true with parallel hybrids, which are much more complex. All-electric vehicles are FAR less complex. The "drivetrain" of which you speak consists of an electric motor, and basically nothing else. You don't need a transmission or anything of the sort. That's all electronically controlled, and much less subject to failure than a mechnical transmission.
Fossil fuel is a zero sum game, you can't lower fuel costs by switching where you burn the fuel.
Completely and totally wrong. By using large power plants, which get vastly more power out of the same fuels than a small ICE ever could, you significantly reduce fuel costs.
But that doesn't matter, really. 30% of the electricity generated in CA is from hydro. With SCE's plans to build the largest solar-power plant ever on the horizon (/. story a couple days ago) even more of it will be from clean, non-fossil-fuel sources.
Nothing in the world would ever make your gasoline powered car get 30% of it's fuel from hydro. With electric, it's quite simple, and doesn't affect you in the least. Besides that, most people believe coal is a better option than oil, for obvious reasons. Very few power plants in the US burn oil.
wait at the gate (with engine running)
Another benefit of electric cars is that you don't waste any energy when idling. Key on or off, they wouldn't be wasting fuel that way. This helps greatly in traffic.
The Pentium M is good, but it's essentially a Pentium Pro.
No, Pentium Ms are nothing like Pentium Pros. The Pentium Pros became Xeons. The Pentium Ms use the same core as the PIIs & PIII, but not Pro.
That's 10 years old.
What a moronic sentiment.
You know, the silica they make them out of is REALLY old. Does that make them any less functional? Screw new designs. If the old one works well (and in this case, it does) use it.
Intle NEEDS to prove that they can still make a good x86 chip from "scratch".
What a troll. Intel doesn't need to prove anything. They sell products, they don't care about pissing contests. If improving an older core design for 500 years works well, it's idiotic not to do it.
Why do the high-tech companies always seem so far behind?
From the article: No one yet has found a way to overcome the considerable technological hurdles, such as finding a speedy way to pump two-hour movies through broadband,
That's interesting, because it seems like a whole lot of companies have spent a lot of money to make exactly that happen. What are VP7, VC-1, and H.264 but speedy ways to pump two-hour movies through broadband?
Tivo is basically stuck with MPEG-2, and though you can get significantly better quality with modern encoders than you see on DVDs, it still requires a bitrate that is several times higher than modern codecs, for decent quality.
Is there anybody that is really using the latest technology, to get video download services up to reasonable standards?
Since this plant produces 500 megawats, we would need at least 1000 of these plants to supply the nation's energy.
That's a bit insane. The US already has numerous hydro-electric dams (in CA, hydro already makes up 30% of grid power), and there is no reason to tear them down, and replace them with solar power.
Or I could point out that the U.S. is currently home to over 500,000 producing oil wells, 306,000 miles of natural gas pipelines (same link) and 160,000 miles of oil transmission pipelines.
Those pipelines aren't entirely above ground, however. You could talk about how much space sewers take up too, but since it's underground, nobody cares much.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely true. I was looking at power supplies which could provide the 12V/25A needed for a large TEC (peltier). I could go with the purpose-built power supply unit for about $100, or I could get a 500W PC power supply for $10... Tough choice.
Same goes for ANY kind of car adapter... Would you like to spend $40 on a 5A cigarette lighter adapter, or spend $10 on a PC power supply that gives you more than 5Xs that much power on the 12V rails?
I find just the opposite.
I don't really like gmail. I barely ever use froogle. I can't remember the last time I used Groups or the Directory. Maps is nice but it gives me completely wrong directions from time to time.
The only reason I like google is because it's a very good search engine. All the other search engines will give you a link to goatse before slashdot, and will return thousands of completely irrelevant results before the useful ones.
I've tried clusty, vivisimo, and I'm sure I'll use them some day in the distant future when a quick search on google doesn't turn up what I'm looking for. However, that hasn't happened in a long time.
Sure, sometimes you'll see a lot of spam results, but in my experience, that's only because you've search for some obscure terms, or misspellings, and google just doesn't have anything else to give you.
Irrelevant, pointless articles lead to a dull conversation about nothing at all.
You just about always have to have a good and topical story posted before you'll find any good comments.
When was the last time you saw an insightful technical comment attached to a slashvertisement story?
Clearing a CMOS password is as simple as plugging-in a keyboard.
Yeah, you have to make the device before-hand, and you need to carry it around with your boot-CD, but it's really not very difficult.
Padlocks are good mainly to keep the casual thief from removing the case panel and going home with your high-end graphics card, RAM, HDD, CPU, etc. Add a cable to keep someone from walking away with the whole tower.
Can someone tell me where I might find silicon roadmaps? My roadmaps are all made of paper, and get ruined when I spill coffee on them. Silicon roadmaps would surely solve this problem...
I absolutely hate web-based apps, and can't imagine why ANYONE would WANT more of them.
Imagine if DNS was a web-based app... No automating it. No tying it together with other programs ("the Unix way"). In fact, it would be so incredibly inconvenient as to be borderline useless.
If you have an application you want people to remotely use, make a protocol for it, and let people write NATIVE clients. Not some bloated web browser that is slow, inflexible, unstable, etc.
No, I'm very well informed, I just don't happen to agree with you, so you're not happy about what I have to say.
Correct. But would you like to provide some proof that the sugar produced in oranges is somehow more healthy for you than white processed sugar?
And "white processed sugar" isn't used in sodas at all, anyhow. It's actually high fructose corn syrup, and has been for a very long time.
Yes, and something "natural" like Orange Juice has FAR more sugar than that. So what's the problem?
Guess what else is in everything... WATER! Spooky, isn't it? Are you scared now? All the WATER in your food is poisoning you.
Anecdotal evidence like this proves nothing at all. There are plenty of people that will happily tell you how their magnetic bracelet cures cancer.
Without some real evidence, this whole post of yours is just insane paranoid ranting.
Umm, trademark law.
You can't just trademark any word you chose.
Sure, but files filled with zeros do that just as well, and they compress so well you can upload them in 1/10th as much time.
I've got a zipped 1GB file on a floppy around here somewhere...
Commercial trucks with trailers (Semi trucks).
To a lesser extent, buses.
Terrible idea. Being light grey (rather than black) is one of concrete's advantages. It would be far smarter to simply make lines on the road much darker.
Cooling fans are necessary for fast charging, but I certainly haven't seen any systems that use anything like that during operation, nor can I think of any reason for them to do so. Batteries do not need to be kept cool while power is being drawn, if anything, you might want a heating system in very cold climates.
NiMH, LiIon, and Lead-Acid batteries all have a rather slow discharge rate. You shouldn't notice any difference at all after an electric car has been sitting around for a week.
You haven't seen many, have you?
Not true. They do have some drawbacks in certain places ICEs do not, but they have far more advantages to their credit.
If so, they should be fired. I think, however, that you are just mistakenly putting words in their mouths, because of your lack of understanding of economics.
Not only are they not interested in doing that, they are suing the state of California to prevent them from doing exactly that. It's really quite blatant.
Only if the government was willing to step in and force a changeover date. Since they surely will not do that, it will be nearly impossible for an alternate liquid fuel like biodiesel to achieve critical mass. Meanwhile, we already have the infrastructure to support electric vehicles.
In CA, yes, that's a conservative number...
Because hybrids are much larger 5-passenger vehicles, with a trunk.
I'll be the first to say that buying a conventional fuel-effecient car is a much better option than an expensive and maintenance intensive hybrid that won't get the advertised fuel mileage, anyhow. However, the Geo Metro is NOT the car I would suggest to anyone.
Well, I don't know your situation, but extension cords work nicely...
I'm sure as electric cars get more popluar, parking garages will install metered electric outlets. For now, either get real creative, or write the parking-lot owners and tell them you're buying an electric vehicle, and would be happy to pay to re-charge your car on whatever meter they would be willing to install.
No, but unfortunately it seems large, fuel ineffecient vehicles are the only ones that have enough passenger room for large people. Why car-makers haven't adapted, I don't know. Perhaps they make so much on SUVs they don't want overweight customers to have a cheaper option.
City buses around here all switched to natural gas a few years ago.
I hope so. Concrete has always been the better material. We can only hope asphalt prices increase enough to make concrete the material of choice for roads.
Please don't compare RVs with cars. It would be absolutely impossible to make an RV get 30MPG like a one ton Saturn. RVs have to haul a huge ammout of weight, fight very strong headwinds, and still be able to get up to highway speeds.
That's all subjective. A great many people don't have the option of NOT driving, so even if the price ballons, they will keep on paying for it.
In Europe, gas prices are much higher than in the US, much higher than $4/gal already, and that hasn't stopped everyone from driving.
Maybe if gas prices continue to rise, you'll see a large number of people buying all-electric GEMs, attaching wheels twice as large (perimeter), and driving them to/from work. That should give them a max speed of 50 MPH. It's unfortunate they weren't built better, or they might be much more popular.
That would only be true if a huge number of people got all-electric cars at the same time.
Electrons are not a fossil fuel. Electricity is subject to the same laws of free market as products. As demand increases, prices will actually fall.
In addition, the majority of electric cars will be plugged-in and drawing power not during peak times, but at night when power draw is lowest, and in some place, rates are lower.
Not true at all. Consider how much money you save by not needing to regularly replace transmission fluid, filters, drive belts, spark plugs, air filters, fuel filters, etc. At very worst, all-electric cars won't cost any more to maintain than conventional cars.
No, that's only true with parallel hybrids, which are much more complex. All-electric vehicles are FAR less complex. The "drivetrain" of which you speak consists of an electric motor, and basically nothing else. You don't need a transmission or anything of the sort. That's all electronically controlled, and much less subject to failure than a mechnical transmission.
Completely and totally wrong. By using large power plants, which get vastly more power out of the same fuels than a small ICE ever could, you significantly reduce fuel costs.
But that doesn't matter, really. 30% of the electricity generated in CA is from hydro. With SCE's plans to build the largest solar-power plant ever on the horizon (/. story a couple days ago) even more of it will be from clean, non-fossil-fuel sources.
Nothing in the world would ever make your gasoline powered car get 30% of it's fuel from hydro. With electric, it's quite simple, and doesn't affect you in the least. Besides that, most people believe coal is a better option than oil, for obvious reasons. Very few power plants in the US burn oil.
Another benefit of electric cars is that you don't waste any energy when idling. Key on or off, they wouldn't be wasting fuel that way. This helps greatly in traffic.
No, Pentium Ms are nothing like Pentium Pros. The Pentium Pros became Xeons. The Pentium Ms use the same core as the PIIs & PIII, but not Pro.
What a moronic sentiment.
You know, the silica they make them out of is REALLY old. Does that make them any less functional? Screw new designs. If the old one works well (and in this case, it does) use it.
What a troll. Intel doesn't need to prove anything. They sell products, they don't care about pissing contests. If improving an older core design for 500 years works well, it's idiotic not to do it.
Why do the high-tech companies always seem so far behind?
From the article:
No one yet has found a way to overcome the considerable technological hurdles, such as finding a speedy way to pump two-hour movies through broadband,
That's interesting, because it seems like a whole lot of companies have spent a lot of money to make exactly that happen. What are VP7, VC-1, and H.264 but speedy ways to pump two-hour movies through broadband?
Tivo is basically stuck with MPEG-2, and though you can get significantly better quality with modern encoders than you see on DVDs, it still requires a bitrate that is several times higher than modern codecs, for decent quality.
Is there anybody that is really using the latest technology, to get video download services up to reasonable standards?
I live in the southwest, and have never heard of any such thing.
A search on Google finds nothing even remotely close (they're all pro-solar).
You really need to provide a source for your hard-to-believe claims.
Why is it that only banal tired old jokes get modded-up on /. while actually funny ones like this seem to get completely ignored.
That's a bit insane. The US already has numerous hydro-electric dams (in CA, hydro already makes up 30% of grid power), and there is no reason to tear them down, and replace them with solar power.
Those pipelines aren't entirely above ground, however. You could talk about how much space sewers take up too, but since it's underground, nobody cares much.
And the world trembles in fear at the very mention of the Swedish submarine fleet.