I'm fairly sure most of the bandwidth is eaten by the pictures. Many, many articles have pictures, and clicking them often gets you hi-res versions. Each 200kb jpg is worth about a hundred pages of text.
16GB Hitachi Microdrive
Microdrives spurred greater innovation in handheld devices, such as Apple's iPod. When the iPod was first released in 2001, it had a 1.8-inch hard drive with 5GB of capacity. By 2006, the iPod was equipped with a microdrive that held 160GB.
First up, I'm not sure there ever was such a thing as a 16-gig microdrive. I think they topped out at 12 gigs or so (at least one product, the Trekstor Vibez, has a 12GB microdrive in it), after which flash memory ate up the market and it became counterproductive to invest in miniaturized mechanical storage.
I might be wrong here, but then every google hit I can get for "16gb microdrive" returns people asking how to replace the drives with 16GB compactflash cards, USB thumbdrives named "microdrive" with no relation to hard disks, and one product with a supposed 16GB microdrive in it that seems to never have materialized, so I'm probably right.
The iPod never had a 160 gig microdrive. Whoever wrote the article is getting confused between 1-inch compactflash-sized microdrives and 1.8-inch hard drives, originally meant for subnotebooks and later widely used in countless media players (including the iPod). The latter are very very small, but they're about twice the size of an actual microdrive.
I did some maths just for kicks: assuming no mistakes (I really suck at maths), with the technology we currently use for 2TB drives and assuming a single-platter microdrive, we could fit about 34 gigabytes on one. That's 34 gigs on a device requiring expensive, highly precise manufacturing - not to mention sensible to shock. Meanwhile 32gig USB thumbdrives are smaller, a lot tougher, and while they aren't (yet) cheap enough that we use them to prop up desks with short legs, they're surely cheap enough that if one with no vital data on it gets lost we just shrug and resign to buying another one.
There is a reason why battery technology hasn't developed as fast as the technologies that use them; packing more and more energy into a given volume is a dangerous thing to do.
That's not the reason. Keeping several dozen litres of easily flammable liquid in a tank and sending it to the engine by means of thin rubber tubing is dangerous too, but we do that all the time. If lithium batteries could be made with a much higher energy density than they have, they could always be placed inside armored containers - a bit like we do with LPG-powered vehicles.
The reason is simply that the technology isn't there yet.
When we pack a lot of energy in a stable state into a given volume, we tend to call those things "explosives".
Not necessarily. If we could put as much research in LiFePO4 cells as it's gone in LiIon during the years, it's a safe bet they'd have a much higher density than they have now (approximately half that of LiIon), while still being perfectly safe. The only way a LiFe cell can start a fire is if it's misused - say, to send a whole lot of energy through a thin wire, that overheats and sets fire to something nearby. The cell itself can be folded, spindled and mutilated with no consequences.
The danger is not in the amount of energy itself, it's in how it's stored. A log of wood has a lot of energy stored in it, but you're not scared by wood, are you?
There's a fine line to tread here, and the more-efficient thing to do is reduce wastage than try to push battery abilities.
Reducing wastage is certainly a noble goal, but physics has limits, and once you reach them the only possible solution is to pump more amps in your application.
We could always use a different form of energy storage, of course, but nuclear powered cellphones don't have customer appeal
It comes to mind that a miniaturized radioisotope generator could probably power a modern cell phone for years at an end. Of course, few people would want something containing a radioactive Strontium pellet near their 'nads, no matter how much protection it had...
I read (most of) the TFA, and it seems the only place the iPad is mentioned is in the last five or so lines at the end of the fourth page (of a total of four). The man says it's "very possible" they'll adopt a popular device like the iPad over another tablet or old PDA. Period.
Based on this ridiculously small amount of information about it, the iPad shouldn't even be mentioned in the summary. But it is, because that makes people read the article.
Y'know, I'm tired of all the blowjobs Steve Jobs is getting from the press the world over. I can't count the times I've seen ads for iPads thinly disguised as meaningful articles on magazines and newspapers that normally have nothing to do with the field of portable computing. The most shameless go with "how the iPad has changed our life" ("our" whose? Because last I checked, an iPad wasn't a requirement for every household like, say, a vacuum cleaner is). The ones that retain *some* level of self-respect have the decency to say "how tablet computers have changed our life", but then invariably have a picture of an iPad under that title.
And I'm no anti-fanboy, mind you. I dislike the iPad for a variety of reasons I won't discuss here, but I'd be making the same remarks if the press had gone all apeshit about the latest Android tablet, or something.
As for the topic of technology on space stations, I found this an interesting read, and rather more informative as well - though it's more about the computers running the stations than the ones used by the staff for their own enjoyment. It's surprising just how old the stuff going up in space really is.
I was in the TVTropes IRC channel when all this was going on, and what came out was: the contract for the ads that the tvtropes people signed with Google explicitly stated that no family-unsafe content was allowed. The wiki flew under the radar for a good while, probably because it has nothing explicit and so nobody thought of checking too hard, but ultimately someone did. Now, while the wiki has no porn or anything like it, it's undeniable that some of the arguments might be seen as not suitable for young children. Whether talk about lesbian erotica or massive amounts of profanity harm children or not can be discussed at length, but the matter remains that the contract conditions were clear.
I hate censorship as much as the next slashdotter and I hate self-righteous moralization even more, but in this particular case I find all this anti-googlism to be way out of proportion. Especially considering that TVTropes didn't really self-censore anything, they just put the relevant articles behind an "are you really sure" clickthrough barrier; all the content is still there.
The western world doesn't buy supercheap cars because it understandably has a problem with deathtraps. But a tablet can't kill you, no matter how badly it's made.
This seems strange to me. I've been to Helsinki a few months ago, and free hotspots were all over the place. It was faster to open the laptop, connect to a random hotspot and check google maps than it was to find a dead-tree map and read that. It seems hard to believe that all those hotspots, some of which looked pretty official (inside stations and such) were illegal.
Chinese electronic counterfeiters beg to differ.
Sometimes I wonder if more money is made by Apple, or collectively by the Chinese factories churning out cheap iPod clones at a rate of a bazillion per hour...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fairly sure most of the bandwidth is eaten by the pictures. Many, many articles have pictures, and clicking them often gets you hi-res versions. Each 200kb jpg is worth about a hundred pages of text.
16GB Hitachi Microdrive Microdrives spurred greater innovation in handheld devices, such as Apple's iPod. When the iPod was first released in 2001, it had a 1.8-inch hard drive with 5GB of capacity. By 2006, the iPod was equipped with a microdrive that held 160GB.
First up, I'm not sure there ever was such a thing as a 16-gig microdrive. I think they topped out at 12 gigs or so (at least one product, the Trekstor Vibez, has a 12GB microdrive in it), after which flash memory ate up the market and it became counterproductive to invest in miniaturized mechanical storage.
I might be wrong here, but then every google hit I can get for "16gb microdrive" returns people asking how to replace the drives with 16GB compactflash cards, USB thumbdrives named "microdrive" with no relation to hard disks, and one product with a supposed 16GB microdrive in it that seems to never have materialized, so I'm probably right.
The iPod never had a 160 gig microdrive. Whoever wrote the article is getting confused between 1-inch compactflash-sized microdrives and 1.8-inch hard drives, originally meant for subnotebooks and later widely used in countless media players (including the iPod). The latter are very very small, but they're about twice the size of an actual microdrive.
I did some maths just for kicks: assuming no mistakes (I really suck at maths), with the technology we currently use for 2TB drives and assuming a single-platter microdrive, we could fit about 34 gigabytes on one. That's 34 gigs on a device requiring expensive, highly precise manufacturing - not to mention sensible to shock. Meanwhile 32gig USB thumbdrives are smaller, a lot tougher, and while they aren't (yet) cheap enough that we use them to prop up desks with short legs, they're surely cheap enough that if one with no vital data on it gets lost we just shrug and resign to buying another one.
I read the pdf with the response. You forgot "we just made it even easier for people to find it, ha-ha".
There is a reason why battery technology hasn't developed as fast as the technologies that use them; packing more and more energy into a given volume is a dangerous thing to do.
That's not the reason. Keeping several dozen litres of easily flammable liquid in a tank and sending it to the engine by means of thin rubber tubing is dangerous too, but we do that all the time. If lithium batteries could be made with a much higher energy density than they have, they could always be placed inside armored containers - a bit like we do with LPG-powered vehicles. The reason is simply that the technology isn't there yet.
When we pack a lot of energy in a stable state into a given volume, we tend to call those things "explosives".
Not necessarily. If we could put as much research in LiFePO4 cells as it's gone in LiIon during the years, it's a safe bet they'd have a much higher density than they have now (approximately half that of LiIon), while still being perfectly safe. The only way a LiFe cell can start a fire is if it's misused - say, to send a whole lot of energy through a thin wire, that overheats and sets fire to something nearby. The cell itself can be folded, spindled and mutilated with no consequences. The danger is not in the amount of energy itself, it's in how it's stored. A log of wood has a lot of energy stored in it, but you're not scared by wood, are you?
There's a fine line to tread here, and the more-efficient thing to do is reduce wastage than try to push battery abilities.
Reducing wastage is certainly a noble goal, but physics has limits, and once you reach them the only possible solution is to pump more amps in your application.
We could always use a different form of energy storage, of course, but nuclear powered cellphones don't have customer appeal
It comes to mind that a miniaturized radioisotope generator could probably power a modern cell phone for years at an end. Of course, few people would want something containing a radioactive Strontium pellet near their 'nads, no matter how much protection it had...
I believe you mean "the mediocre, but still much less undesirable, control of a d-pad".
I read (most of) the TFA, and it seems the only place the iPad is mentioned is in the last five or so lines at the end of the fourth page (of a total of four). The man says it's "very possible" they'll adopt a popular device like the iPad over another tablet or old PDA. Period. Based on this ridiculously small amount of information about it, the iPad shouldn't even be mentioned in the summary. But it is, because that makes people read the article.
Y'know, I'm tired of all the blowjobs Steve Jobs is getting from the press the world over. I can't count the times I've seen ads for iPads thinly disguised as meaningful articles on magazines and newspapers that normally have nothing to do with the field of portable computing. The most shameless go with "how the iPad has changed our life" ("our" whose? Because last I checked, an iPad wasn't a requirement for every household like, say, a vacuum cleaner is). The ones that retain *some* level of self-respect have the decency to say "how tablet computers have changed our life", but then invariably have a picture of an iPad under that title.
And I'm no anti-fanboy, mind you. I dislike the iPad for a variety of reasons I won't discuss here, but I'd be making the same remarks if the press had gone all apeshit about the latest Android tablet, or something.
As for the topic of technology on space stations, I found this an interesting read, and rather more informative as well - though it's more about the computers running the stations than the ones used by the staff for their own enjoyment. It's surprising just how old the stuff going up in space really is.
I was in the TVTropes IRC channel when all this was going on, and what came out was: the contract for the ads that the tvtropes people signed with Google explicitly stated that no family-unsafe content was allowed. The wiki flew under the radar for a good while, probably because it has nothing explicit and so nobody thought of checking too hard, but ultimately someone did. Now, while the wiki has no porn or anything like it, it's undeniable that some of the arguments might be seen as not suitable for young children. Whether talk about lesbian erotica or massive amounts of profanity harm children or not can be discussed at length, but the matter remains that the contract conditions were clear. I hate censorship as much as the next slashdotter and I hate self-righteous moralization even more, but in this particular case I find all this anti-googlism to be way out of proportion. Especially considering that TVTropes didn't really self-censore anything, they just put the relevant articles behind an "are you really sure" clickthrough barrier; all the content is still there.
The western world doesn't buy supercheap cars because it understandably has a problem with deathtraps. But a tablet can't kill you, no matter how badly it's made.
This seems strange to me. I've been to Helsinki a few months ago, and free hotspots were all over the place. It was faster to open the laptop, connect to a random hotspot and check google maps than it was to find a dead-tree map and read that. It seems hard to believe that all those hotspots, some of which looked pretty official (inside stations and such) were illegal.
Chinese electronic counterfeiters beg to differ. Sometimes I wonder if more money is made by Apple, or collectively by the Chinese factories churning out cheap iPod clones at a rate of a bazillion per hour...