Cut out the middle man (NASA) and you've got basically what they can do in Battlefield 2 from the Commander's view. Another five years and it'll stream straight to the google maps server for this specific function. We've already given google a nasa air strip, it's not long before we'll be giving them our tax dollars to leverage google maps/earth for more purposes beyond recovering crashed aircraft and scouting wildfires.
Feces also contain competing bacteria that inefficently produce methane!. Unless your majic H2 plant is powering a UV sterilizer, that bacteria is more than likely going to compete with whatever's in the waste you send it, decreasing efficency, and leading to you having to clean it out 2-3 times a week.
They've engineered yeast that with proper coaxing, will output 25% alcohol. But you have to oxygenate the wort (unfermented beer/wine) before hand, and then nurse it along under very specific temperature conditions (unknown to me).... oh yeah, and use a specially bred strain of yeast not avalible to the public.
I'm sure that you use less energy to distill alcohol when your solution is 25% ethanol, vs. 3-8% (maybe even 15%?), but ultimately you're using (roughly) the same amount of food, but expending far more energy to coax the yeast to do the work for you.
In a similar vein, my friend moved to Beijing for two years, and before leaving, set up his old desktop with Ubuntu for his 50 year old (technophobe) mother. He came back just recently and exclaimed, "I'd forgotten about this old thing! Now that I think about it, not once did I have to do support for this machine - not in two years".
Granted, 99% of what she does is surf the web, and check her hotmail account, but 2 years is a pretty good record... definitely making some headway in usability by the general public.
I'm running Tiger on 512mb ram on a 550mhz powerbook... I'd say that there was an immediate, solid, 15% drop in speed/"snappiness" over 10.3 (10.3.9 was blazing fast on old hardware btw). I'm sure with a 166mhz bus and another 400mhz to deal with the overhead of Tiger, it's (10.4) a pretty speedy OS, but if you don't have room for that overhead, it's sloooow. Fortunately it hasn't slowed down much since 10.4.0. 10.4.1 was a good bump from 10.4.0, but 10.4.10 still isn't as fast as the last version of 10.3 on my machine.
Shopping with my mother for a new display to replace the broken one on Sunday, my mom pointed to a "Works with Vista!" sign attached to a LCD monitor and said "I heard that's (Vista) not very good". I was quite proud, and a little shocked, that quite possibly the most technophobe and technologically backwards person I know (my mother) was even aware of how bad Vista was, even if only through the grapevine.
That said, even with that kind of bad PR, Vista will no doubt make headay in to the market in 1-2 years time. It took at least that long for XP to really have good market penetration.... and by that time, computers should be able to run Vista reasonably.
I'm renting a room currently. House is 1600 sq ft, and judging from it's construction (cheap!!) the AC is probably R10 or whatever the rating's called (you can buy R20s now but they're not cheap... R12 or 13 is more standard)... also the ventilation system isn't sealed and as a result keeps the attic 5-10 degrees cooler than outside. Fortunately my rent includes a flat utility rate, so that's my landlord's problem (I identified why, but he never bothered to fix it... he also never bothered to fix the running toilet which exploded 2 weeks later and flooded the entire house... but that's another story)...
New AC units, installed, run $3500 on the low end in states that don't need AC like WA and MT, to $5500 on the low end in TX, to $10,000+ on the high end for residental installs.
Living in a 700sq ft apartment in Arlington TX, with two computers running 24/7 and the AC set to 75 we paid about $160 a month year round, even though we never used the heater in the winter (two computers with dual CRTs puts out plenty of heat)... later I lived in Plano and paid $140(winter)-260(summer) for electricity for a brand new 1200sq ft apartment and kept the apartment around 80 degrees except at night... it was on the corner with a SW exposure and hot as fuck comming home at 5pm.
So it varies, expecailly with how lazy you are with maintanence, and how willing you are to open the windows between 70-88 degrees. For some reason a house with it's windows open @ 88 degrees seems much cooler than a house cooled with the AC at 80 degrees.
I grew up just outside of Tacoma, Wa, so I hear you on that. You do get used to it after the first two years, but you get strange looks from the locals around here (TX) when wearing Tshirts in 65 degree weather.
Lightbulbs in the US use Watts as their brightness ratings (to the average consumer, at least; lumens are typically listed on the package as well, but not in as large of print), so consumers/non engineers can associate with watts more easily because they have an easy comparison (lightbulbs). I.E. 400w computer power supply = 4 x 100w light bulbs, 1 laptop =.85x100 w lightbulb, air conditioner = 10 or 50x 100w lightbulbs. It's our electric "library of congress" or "football field".
I would mod you up for that if I could. I try to not think about places that require AC at night:-)
FWIW, this area has around 30 days over 100 per year. Nights are usually comfortable and the daytime humidity is low.
Shit, durring the summer in TX we're lucky if it gets below 90 at any point durring the night. Last night around 3am it got down to 87, and the AC was off for more than 15 min. AC units pretty much run 24/7 may-october here and a $350 july or august electric bill isn't at all uncommon ($.11-.13 per kw/hr here in Dallas). Temps typically only fluctuate 8-10 degrees between highs and lows here. I think solar would be a great argument here durring the summer...
I wanted to mod you down as "misinformed" but I've already commented in this thread. There are things called "deep cycle" lead acid batteries which are designed for long charge/discharge cycles. See also: Toyota Prius. Finally, lead acid batteries are recycleable.
You need to work on your information density skills. Your post takes up my whole screen and only the last line is of any use. The rest could be condensed into a pseudo algorthm and only take up 2-3 lines. Is english your first language? Your grammar looks good...
Probably better than the average broadband subscriber. You could comfortably host two bit torrent files off that connection and still have plenty of bandwidth left over for gradma to check her email or sally to buy the new britney spears song off itunes.
Pacific Northeast??? Is that what they call the place the third star to the left? "Heavy Rain" doesn't really exist there... just a slow, monotonous precipitation. In Dallas you may actually experience some packet drop, although only for about 5 min (as the famous saying goes, "if you don't like the weather in TX, just wait five minutes".
Rumble is invaluable for racing/driving games. Lets you know if you're on the rumble strip, on the track, or have a wheel in the grass. Also makes it easy to distinguish which gun you're currently holding (many games just have the crosshair) by rate of fire/kick. Secondly you know when you're getting fired upon/hit due to rumble, which can be hard to tell from the screen flashing red in one direction while your gun is illuminating the whole screen yellow from gunfire. Since I pretty much only play those two genres, I find it a pretty important feature.
Oh, and it comes in handy in football games, a contact sport. But I only play football games 2 weekends a month in the fall/winter with friends...
Shit, in 2002 (120gb drives were just reaching the $150 range), you were lucky if you could buy a drive that would do 40mb/s (real world). Drive makers were claiming 44-48mb/s, but real world was 36-39. I'm not sure what it is today, but I can't imagine it's improved much since then. Even today, it's tough to max out a FW400 line connected to a single drive... it's just not the weakest link in the system... still.
We had a lan party summer after our senior year (23 also - represent) and only 15 people, but also 15 computers. More people (girlfriends, friends without computers - about 20 in all) would drift in and out for about three days, go see a movie/get food and come back. People slept on the floor when they were tired (typically 3am-10am), and gamed/socialized set shit on fire (hey, they were in high school)... but they still obeyed their bodily functions. You're an idiot to stay seated and play video games continiously for three days while you feel ill and eventually collapse and die.
a) $2400/year is pretty damn cheap for a primary buisness expense b) either 1) you can write off most or all of the expense or 2) your company should be able to absorb most of that cost
Slashdot Mirror
Cut out the middle man (NASA) and you've got basically what they can do in Battlefield 2 from the Commander's view. Another five years and it'll stream straight to the google maps server for this specific function. We've already given google a nasa air strip, it's not long before we'll be giving them our tax dollars to leverage google maps/earth for more purposes beyond recovering crashed aircraft and scouting wildfires.
What blows me away is that this a) never made the national news and b) you can't find ANY photos of it online, anywhere. Total radio silence on it.
Walmart sells them, for starters. You can find walmarts in many more cities than you can find apple stores.
Feces also contain competing bacteria that inefficently produce methane!. Unless your majic H2 plant is powering a UV sterilizer, that bacteria is more than likely going to compete with whatever's in the waste you send it, decreasing efficency, and leading to you having to clean it out 2-3 times a week.
They've engineered yeast that with proper coaxing, will output 25% alcohol. But you have to oxygenate the wort (unfermented beer/wine) before hand, and then nurse it along under very specific temperature conditions (unknown to me).... oh yeah, and use a specially bred strain of yeast not avalible to the public.
I'm sure that you use less energy to distill alcohol when your solution is 25% ethanol, vs. 3-8% (maybe even 15%?), but ultimately you're using (roughly) the same amount of food, but expending far more energy to coax the yeast to do the work for you.
Vista was a big complicated disaster that started 5 years ago and shows no sign of ending.
...Vista is Microsoft's Iraq?
//been listening to too much NPR
In a similar vein, my friend moved to Beijing for two years, and before leaving, set up his old desktop with Ubuntu for his 50 year old (technophobe) mother. He came back just recently and exclaimed, "I'd forgotten about this old thing! Now that I think about it, not once did I have to do support for this machine - not in two years".
Granted, 99% of what she does is surf the web, and check her hotmail account, but 2 years is a pretty good record... definitely making some headway in usability by the general public.
I'm running Tiger on 512mb ram on a 550mhz powerbook... I'd say that there was an immediate, solid, 15% drop in speed/"snappiness" over 10.3 (10.3.9 was blazing fast on old hardware btw). I'm sure with a 166mhz bus and another 400mhz to deal with the overhead of Tiger, it's (10.4) a pretty speedy OS, but if you don't have room for that overhead, it's sloooow. Fortunately it hasn't slowed down much since 10.4.0. 10.4.1 was a good bump from 10.4.0, but 10.4.10 still isn't as fast as the last version of 10.3 on my machine.
Shopping with my mother for a new display to replace the broken one on Sunday, my mom pointed to a "Works with Vista!" sign attached to a LCD monitor and said "I heard that's (Vista) not very good". I was quite proud, and a little shocked, that quite possibly the most technophobe and technologically backwards person I know (my mother) was even aware of how bad Vista was, even if only through the grapevine.
That said, even with that kind of bad PR, Vista will no doubt make headay in to the market in 1-2 years time. It took at least that long for XP to really have good market penetration.... and by that time, computers should be able to run Vista reasonably.
I'm renting a room currently. House is 1600 sq ft, and judging from it's construction (cheap!!) the AC is probably R10 or whatever the rating's called (you can buy R20s now but they're not cheap... R12 or 13 is more standard)... also the ventilation system isn't sealed and as a result keeps the attic 5-10 degrees cooler than outside. Fortunately my rent includes a flat utility rate, so that's my landlord's problem (I identified why, but he never bothered to fix it... he also never bothered to fix the running toilet which exploded 2 weeks later and flooded the entire house... but that's another story)...
New AC units, installed, run $3500 on the low end in states that don't need AC like WA and MT, to $5500 on the low end in TX, to $10,000+ on the high end for residental installs.
Living in a 700sq ft apartment in Arlington TX, with two computers running 24/7 and the AC set to 75 we paid about $160 a month year round, even though we never used the heater in the winter (two computers with dual CRTs puts out plenty of heat)... later I lived in Plano and paid $140(winter)-260(summer) for electricity for a brand new 1200sq ft apartment and kept the apartment around 80 degrees except at night... it was on the corner with a SW exposure and hot as fuck comming home at 5pm.
So it varies, expecailly with how lazy you are with maintanence, and how willing you are to open the windows between 70-88 degrees. For some reason a house with it's windows open @ 88 degrees seems much cooler than a house cooled with the AC at 80 degrees.
I grew up just outside of Tacoma, Wa, so I hear you on that. You do get used to it after the first two years, but you get strange looks from the locals around here (TX) when wearing Tshirts in 65 degree weather.
Double Beta
Lightbulbs in the US use Watts as their brightness ratings (to the average consumer, at least; lumens are typically listed on the package as well, but not in as large of print), so consumers/non engineers can associate with watts more easily because they have an easy comparison (lightbulbs). I.E. 400w computer power supply = 4 x 100w light bulbs, 1 laptop = .85x100 w lightbulb, air conditioner = 10 or 50x 100w lightbulbs. It's our electric "library of congress" or "football field".
I would mod you up for that if I could. I try to not think about places that require AC at night
FWIW, this area has around 30 days over 100 per year. Nights are usually comfortable and the daytime humidity is low.
Shit, durring the summer in TX we're lucky if it gets below 90 at any point durring the night. Last night around 3am it got down to 87, and the AC was off for more than 15 min. AC units pretty much run 24/7 may-october here and a $350 july or august electric bill isn't at all uncommon ($.11-.13 per kw/hr here in Dallas). Temps typically only fluctuate 8-10 degrees between highs and lows here. I think solar would be a great argument here durring the summer...
I wanted to mod you down as "misinformed" but I've already commented in this thread. There are things called "deep cycle" lead acid batteries which are designed for long charge/discharge cycles. See also: Toyota Prius. Finally, lead acid batteries are recycleable.
You need to work on your information density skills. Your post takes up my whole screen and only the last line is of any use. The rest could be condensed into a pseudo algorthm and only take up 2-3 lines. Is english your first language? Your grammar looks good...
Probably better than the average broadband subscriber. You could comfortably host two bit torrent files off that connection and still have plenty of bandwidth left over for gradma to check her email or sally to buy the new britney spears song off itunes.
Pacific Northeast??? Is that what they call the place the third star to the left? "Heavy Rain" doesn't really exist there... just a slow, monotonous precipitation. In Dallas you may actually experience some packet drop, although only for about 5 min (as the famous saying goes, "if you don't like the weather in TX, just wait five minutes".
Works over POTS lines, avalible since 1984 (before the @ in email addresses)!
"Saunders' presentation warned of the potential for the new cables to create a new trans-Pacific capacity bubble"
...What?
Rumble is invaluable for racing/driving games. Lets you know if you're on the rumble strip, on the track, or have a wheel in the grass. Also makes it easy to distinguish which gun you're currently holding (many games just have the crosshair) by rate of fire/kick. Secondly you know when you're getting fired upon/hit due to rumble, which can be hard to tell from the screen flashing red in one direction while your gun is illuminating the whole screen yellow from gunfire. Since I pretty much only play those two genres, I find it a pretty important feature.
Oh, and it comes in handy in football games, a contact sport. But I only play football games 2 weekends a month in the fall/winter with friends...
Shit, in 2002 (120gb drives were just reaching the $150 range), you were lucky if you could buy a drive that would do 40mb/s (real world). Drive makers were claiming 44-48mb/s, but real world was 36-39. I'm not sure what it is today, but I can't imagine it's improved much since then. Even today, it's tough to max out a FW400 line connected to a single drive... it's just not the weakest link in the system... still.
We had a lan party summer after our senior year (23 also - represent) and only 15 people, but also 15 computers. More people (girlfriends, friends without computers - about 20 in all) would drift in and out for about three days, go see a movie/get food and come back. People slept on the floor when they were tired (typically 3am-10am), and gamed/socialized set shit on fire (hey, they were in high school)... but they still obeyed their bodily functions. You're an idiot to stay seated and play video games continiously for three days while you feel ill and eventually collapse and die.
Where do you work that you can afford not only a new 160gb ipod, but $30,000 worth of music, in addition to your living expenses? Are they hiring?
a) $2400/year is pretty damn cheap for a primary buisness expense
b) either 1) you can write off most or all of the expense or 2) your company should be able to absorb most of that cost