I've actually been involved in the preliminary designs of a small very powerful wearable computer, and we looked really hard at a fuel-cell solution - from Antig, no less. The real turn-off was not risk of fire or anything (this can be handled), but the fact that for every 10W of electrical power they generate 12-15W of heat. It's already difficult to get rid of ~25W from the electronics in a lunchbox sized device to be worn on the body. Now imagine adding ~35W of heat to generate the 25W - no thanks. I hope they've improved that ratio since we last checked, but I'm not expecting a miracle here...
Hydrogen fuel-cells are better in this respect, but still nowhere near the ratio for rechargable batteries, where the ratio is something like 1W of heat for 10W of electrical power. But hydrogen is more difficult to handle than the watered-down methanol most fuel-cells use (the limit was something like 28% for airplane approval last I checked, but that was admittedly about a year ago).
Maybe the grandparent poster lives in a country where electrical energy is more expensive than in the US. It sure is in my country - about $0.25 per kWh these days, and likely to increase. Most of that is energy tax, designed to make us consume less energy (and milk some money out of us). Still has to be payed, though. This will lead to at least tripling (sp?) the energy cost, and then the savings becomes substantial.
Even if the savings is just $10 per month, this will let you amortize a couple of hundred bucks over just two years, and with energy prices going nowhere but up, this looks like an OK project. Plus, you get to play with new and cool technology, which by itself could easily be worth a couple of hundred bucks to most geeks/nerds.
it's simply not worth the effort. Keyboards are dirt cheap (pun intended), and spending 15 minutes cleaning them wastes more time than buying a new one costs. The one at home - that's another story. Mine is a good ergonomic model at about 10x the cost, and I'm not going to throw that away.
I suspect you live where snow never comes, because in/after a snowstorm you'll really appreciate ABS and TC (Traction Control). I've got both on my '99 Mazda 626 and it works wonderfully to get me through drifts and change lane on the highway with 15 cm of snow between lanes. Especially the latter can really make your car seriously unstable - with TC I just notice the TC indicator lighting up and the engine revving up and down like crazy (that's how my TC works - not by selective braking). I've got about 300 metres of gravel road to my house, and during winter it regularly builds big drifts. With TC to keep the car going I can go through much bigger drifts than with TC disabled, because it allows me to use the maximum amount of grip available. As long as you move forward, you can pass through just about ANY snowdrift. If you stop, you've got just about NO chance of getting going again.
On dry roads I agree though - using the ABS is a clear indication that you're pushing your luck a bit too far.
But even then TC can be really helpful if the road is narrow, and a big truck passes you. Sometimes you need to move slightly off the road to avoid being hit, and if you're really unlucky this will put one of your driven wheels into a mudhole (or something similarly slippery). Without TC, there's a measurable risk of your car spinning out of control. With TC, you'll just notice some activity in the dashboard and the engine revs up and down. I know this because I've tried it several times, including the spinning part.
Fun with a 1541 drive...
on
Scanjet Music
·
· Score: 1
Back when I was in high school a C64 with a 1541 drive was the latest and greatest (yeah, I'm THAT old). Most of us couldn't afford getting one, and the first guy to get one was a *TOTAL* ass. So we made a small program, disguised it as a fun game and gave it to him. All it did was to bang the drive head against the barriers as fast as possible, which destroyed alignment after about 300 iterations or so. Since he could not figure out how to align it himself, he had to go to the store and pay for it. The REALLY fun part was that he did it repeatedly, and never wised up to the fact that the program was bogus - he thought it was defective instead:-)
Somewhat evil I guess - but that's just how it works in highschool...
While I entirely agree about the puppy part (have had two so far), I disagree about the human baby (have had three so far) taking years to learn to comprehend. They show amazing skills at figuring out what is going on, but are very bad at motor skills and control. The end result is that babies know a LOT about what happens around them, but are generally unable to let this affect their actions enough for us to understand before they get sufficient motor and/or voice control. At around the age of one, most babies can easily understand basic words like their own name, words for a select set of foods, words for other family members (parents and siblings, usually), words for cat, dog, rabbit or other house pets in the baby's house and a quasi-random set of other sounds/words they were exposed to on a regular basis. They can easily decode actions and can imitate the simplest of them (clapping, for instance), and can easily understand being called for. Most of them are not able to focus on the task of actually moving to the caller for long enough to complete the task, unless the distance is very short, but that is not related to comprehension.
I suspect you simply haven't had children yet, and it's therefore easy to understand why you think that babies are unable to comprehend anything for a couple of years. I pretty much thought like you do, and I was very pleased to learn that I was dead wrong...
I haven't read TFA (hey, this is Slashdot - I'm not supposed to), and remain very sceptical about any wild claims, and I'm quite willing to accept that it is utter crap. But just because something conflicts with the CURRENT laws of physics, doesn't mean that it's wrong. In fact, history has proven conclusively that the various previous laws of physics WERE wrong. Sure, they were applicable in some areas, but useless in others. It's been like that... forever. Current laws of physics are very good and all, but they are not COMPLETE and likely to be only an approximation of the "real" laws of physics. So how is this different from how it always was, except in degree of applicability?
This easily leads to the conclusion that the current laws of physics are, in fact, WRONG. Only not very much so, and much less than ever before. But it is arrogance to assume that the theories of physics can NOT be wrong. </rant>
I've played ALL versions of Civilization, and spent FAR more time doing so than I should. Right now, the most enjoyable part of CivIII is the Conquests expansion pack - playing "Rise Of Rome" is just GREAT. My question is this: Will there be a similar expansion to CivIV, and how important are such expansions for the game in general? Also, have you played any of the free mods available for CivIII, of which some are of great quality?
Yes, but will it run on ~25 Watts of power, and not need a Boeing-sized fan? That's what the (by comparison ridiculously slow) Via CPU boards are meant to do. We run one as an industrial controller (with a 667 MHz E6000 chip from E-Value [no affiliation]), and the damn thing consumes less than 15 Watts with harddisk and all. In fact, it will happily run for more than an hour on 5 standard AA rechargables (2200 mAh).
5 us latency is good and all, but that is VERY fast hardware. A better measure would be using a system somewhat comparable to an advanced industrial controller, which is where RTLinux is meant to be used, IMHO. Something like a 667 MHz VIA processor board(no affiliation) is rather high-end in that respect - rate it on such a system, and your numbers will actually mean something.
To those who compare this to XP - you've completely missed the mark. XP is not, will never be, and has never been claimed to be realtime. There really is no comparable offering from Microsoft at the moment, with Windows CE coming closest in terms of realtime capability. I doubt that 5 us is within reach on ANY hardware with WinCE, though.
OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest, and that this does not open up whole new frontiers of exciting materials - or am I completely wrong here? Is there some magical "limit" that was exceeded by this? If there *IS* a magical limit somewhere, what is it?
While they're at it, they should make an Amsterdam-style coffeeshop instead - then the socializing will become much... funnier. At least that's the association that *I* made immediately upon reading the post.
We've been doing something like this for years in Denmark. Most people (my guess is at least 2 out of 3, including myself) don't need to add anything except a few deductions that the tax agency can not possibly know about (we can deduct parts of the cost of transportation to work, for instance). Most people still use the snailmail version, but we've been able to do this electronically for several years now.
To make a proper USB port on a cell phone, it must be able to supply 500 mA at 5V through the USB port. This actually exceeds the power usage of the phone itself, and therefore drastically reduces battery life when a power-needing unit is attached. Even though the power usage could not reasonably be attributed to the phone, most people will definately blame the *phone* for "running out of power way too soon".
I would like one though - imagine putting a printer on the camera phone, or putting a real keyboard on it to type SMS'es at the office.
I know that English is not what you meant, but realistically that's what almost everybody uses as the lowest common denominator. To non-native english speakers/users (such as myself) the use of english is mandatory for most worldwide net-related experiences. So while the geek inside would like to see your technological solution to the problem, solving it in "humanware" is still far more practical, and is likely to remain so for *MANY* years. Besides, learning a few extra of the major languages is NEVER a wasted effort, IMHO. The first one you learn can be tough, but once you get a grasp of the process of learning languages, you'll find it quite straightforward to learn more. Of course, YMMV.
I know that other major languages have sizeable sub-portions of the Net too, but they'r still totally dwarfed by the amount of english out there.
Like the man said about tsunami alerts in the United States: "There's still a large segment of the population that would go get their kids out of school so they could drive to the beach and watch the big waves..."
Those who still do not believe in natural selection raise their hands. No-one? Didn't think so.
It is a fairly safe bet that at some point in the future either GRT or QT or both will be replaced with something more accurate.
I've been thinking about this, and your post just triggered me. We've had physics for millenia (the four elements? Ancient Greek theories about atoms?), and all the previous attempts have proven to be wrong. Not altogether wrong, mind you - there were just classes of problems they could not answer satisfactorily (or at all). Every new iteration of physics theory has come about to correct some area of "wrongness", and we still see this today (superstring theory or Grand Unified Theory, for instance).
Today the areas of wrongness usually either involve the very tiny stuff (atoms and subparticles thereof) or the very big stuff (cosmic theories like Big Bang - where's the dark matter?), but I'm firmly convinced that our "laws" of physics are wrong - at least in the sense that they are still not accurate enough in the extreme situations. So far, all other attempts have been proven wrong sooner or later - why should we be at the end of that particular road now? I'm pretty sure lots of people have concluded that throughout history, but they were - in hindsight - wrong.
Of course the current laws of physics are immensely useful, but they are bound to be wrong in one way or another.
There's an interesting psychology experiment (read here on slashdot) where they put you in a room with two strings dangling from the ceiling. You're asked to tie the strings together. Holding one sting, you can't reach the other one. With out cutting or taking down the strings, how do you do it? All you have to work with is a pair of pliars. (BTW, even with extended reach of the pliars, you still can't reach the other string.)
[spoiler alert]
I've heard that one before, although it involved a PDA instead. Tie the pair of pliars to the end of one string, and set it swinging so that - when holding the other string - you can reach the swinging string. Now catch the swinging string and voila!
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually been involved in the preliminary designs of a small very powerful wearable computer, and we looked really hard at a fuel-cell solution - from Antig, no less. The real turn-off was not risk of fire or anything (this can be handled), but the fact that for every 10W of electrical power they generate 12-15W of heat. It's already difficult to get rid of ~25W from the electronics in a lunchbox sized device to be worn on the body. Now imagine adding ~35W of heat to generate the 25W - no thanks. I hope they've improved that ratio since we last checked, but I'm not expecting a miracle here...
Hydrogen fuel-cells are better in this respect, but still nowhere near the ratio for rechargable batteries, where the ratio is something like 1W of heat for 10W of electrical power. But hydrogen is more difficult to handle than the watered-down methanol most fuel-cells use (the limit was something like 28% for airplane approval last I checked, but that was admittedly about a year ago).
Maybe the grandparent poster lives in a country where electrical energy is more expensive than in the US. It sure is in my country - about $0.25 per kWh these days, and likely to increase. Most of that is energy tax, designed to make us consume less energy (and milk some money out of us). Still has to be payed, though.
This will lead to at least tripling (sp?) the energy cost, and then the savings becomes substantial.
Even if the savings is just $10 per month, this will let you amortize a couple of hundred bucks over just two years, and with energy prices going nowhere but up, this looks like an OK project. Plus, you get to play with new and cool technology, which by itself could easily be worth a couple of hundred bucks to most geeks/nerds.
it's simply not worth the effort. Keyboards are dirt cheap (pun intended), and spending 15 minutes cleaning them wastes more time than buying a new one costs. The one at home - that's another story. Mine is a good ergonomic model at about 10x the cost, and I'm not going to throw that away.
I suspect you live where snow never comes, because in/after a snowstorm you'll really appreciate ABS and TC (Traction Control). I've got both on my '99 Mazda 626 and it works wonderfully to get me through drifts and change lane on the highway with 15 cm of snow between lanes. Especially the latter can really make your car seriously unstable - with TC I just notice the TC indicator lighting up and the engine revving up and down like crazy (that's how my TC works - not by selective braking).
I've got about 300 metres of gravel road to my house, and during winter it regularly builds big drifts. With TC to keep the car going I can go through much bigger drifts than with TC disabled, because it allows me to use the maximum amount of grip available. As long as you move forward, you can pass through just about ANY snowdrift. If you stop, you've got just about NO chance of getting going again.
On dry roads I agree though - using the ABS is a clear indication that you're pushing your luck a bit too far.
But even then TC can be really helpful if the road is narrow, and a big truck passes you. Sometimes you need to move slightly off the road to avoid being hit, and if you're really unlucky this will put one of your driven wheels into a mudhole (or something similarly slippery). Without TC, there's a measurable risk of your car spinning out of control. With TC, you'll just notice some activity in the dashboard and the engine revs up and down. I know this because I've tried it several times, including the spinning part.
Back when I was in high school a C64 with a 1541 drive was the latest and greatest (yeah, I'm THAT old). Most of us couldn't afford getting one, and the first guy to get one was a *TOTAL* ass. So we made a small program, disguised it as a fun game and gave it to him. All it did was to bang the drive head against the barriers as fast as possible, which destroyed alignment after about 300 iterations or so. Since he could not figure out how to align it himself, he had to go to the store and pay for it. The REALLY fun part was that he did it repeatedly, and never wised up to the fact that the program was bogus - he thought it was defective instead :-)
Somewhat evil I guess - but that's just how it works in highschool...
While I entirely agree about the puppy part (have had two so far), I disagree about the human baby (have had three so far) taking years to learn to comprehend. They show amazing skills at figuring out what is going on, but are very bad at motor skills and control. The end result is that babies know a LOT about what happens around them, but are generally unable to let this affect their actions enough for us to understand before they get sufficient motor and/or voice control. At around the age of one, most babies can easily understand basic words like their own name, words for a select set of foods, words for other family members (parents and siblings, usually), words for cat, dog, rabbit or other house pets in the baby's house and a quasi-random set of other sounds/words they were exposed to on a regular basis. They can easily decode actions and can imitate the simplest of them (clapping, for instance), and can easily understand being called for. Most of them are not able to focus on the task of actually moving to the caller for long enough to complete the task, unless the distance is very short, but that is not related to comprehension.
I suspect you simply haven't had children yet, and it's therefore easy to understand why you think that babies are unable to comprehend anything for a couple of years. I pretty much thought like you do, and I was very pleased to learn that I was dead wrong...
I haven't read TFA (hey, this is Slashdot - I'm not supposed to), and remain very sceptical about any wild claims, and I'm quite willing to accept that it is utter crap. But just because something conflicts with the CURRENT laws of physics, doesn't mean that it's wrong. In fact, history has proven conclusively that the various previous laws of physics WERE wrong. Sure, they were applicable in some areas, but useless in others. It's been like that
This easily leads to the conclusion that the current laws of physics are, in fact, WRONG. Only not very much so, and much less than ever before. But it is arrogance to assume that the theories of physics can NOT be wrong.
</rant>
I've played ALL versions of Civilization, and spent FAR more time doing so than I should. Right now, the most enjoyable part of CivIII is the Conquests expansion pack - playing "Rise Of Rome" is just GREAT.
My question is this: Will there be a similar expansion to CivIV, and how important are such expansions for the game in general? Also, have you played any of the free mods available for CivIII, of which some are of great quality?
Yes, but will it run on ~25 Watts of power, and not need a Boeing-sized fan? That's what the (by comparison ridiculously slow) Via CPU boards are meant to do. We run one as an industrial controller (with a 667 MHz E6000 chip from E-Value [no affiliation]), and the damn thing consumes less than 15 Watts with harddisk and all. In fact, it will happily run for more than an hour on 5 standard AA rechargables (2200 mAh).
5 us latency is good and all, but that is VERY fast hardware. A better measure would be using a system somewhat comparable to an advanced industrial controller, which is where RTLinux is meant to be used, IMHO. Something like a 667 MHz VIA processor board(no affiliation) is rather high-end in that respect - rate it on such a system, and your numbers will actually mean something.
To those who compare this to XP - you've completely missed the mark. XP is not, will never be, and has never been claimed to be realtime. There really is no comparable offering from Microsoft at the moment, with Windows CE coming closest in terms of realtime capability. I doubt that 5 us is within reach on ANY hardware with WinCE, though.
OK, so obviously this could be used as "better-than-diamonds" for industrial purposes - grinding and such. But it seems to me that the improvement is only modest, and that this does not open up whole new frontiers of exciting materials - or am I completely wrong here? Is there some magical "limit" that was exceeded by this? If there *IS* a magical limit somewhere, what is it?
While they're at it, they should make an Amsterdam-style coffeeshop instead - then the socializing will become much ... funnier. At least that's the association that *I* made immediately upon reading the post.
does it run Debian Woody?
*ducks*
"two 1.5 ton AC"
I know that lots of geeks tend to gain weight, but those are big Anonymous Cowards!
Out of mod-points when there's something truly insightful...
We've been doing something like this for years in Denmark. Most people (my guess is at least 2 out of 3, including myself) don't need to add anything except a few deductions that the tax agency can not possibly know about (we can deduct parts of the cost of transportation to work, for instance). Most people still use the snailmail version, but we've been able to do this electronically for several years now.
To make a proper USB port on a cell phone, it must be able to supply 500 mA at 5V through the USB port. This actually exceeds the power usage of the phone itself, and therefore drastically reduces battery life when a power-needing unit is attached. Even though the power usage could not reasonably be attributed to the phone, most people will definately blame the *phone* for "running out of power way too soon".
I would like one though - imagine putting a printer on the camera phone, or putting a real keyboard on it to type SMS'es at the office.
It isn't as if NASA finishes a shutttle, and then immediately starts building a new, improved shuttle.
And there we have the reason why the Shuttle never got out of beta, I suppose...
For some reason the Rail watchdog's office isn't called OfRail though
How about adopting a more american naming convention, and call it the "Department of Rail" - easily abbreviated to "DeRail".
I know that English is not what you meant, but realistically that's what almost everybody uses as the lowest common denominator. To non-native english speakers/users (such as myself) the use of english is mandatory for most worldwide net-related experiences. So while the geek inside would like to see your technological solution to the problem, solving it in "humanware" is still far more practical, and is likely to remain so for *MANY* years. Besides, learning a few extra of the major languages is NEVER a wasted effort, IMHO. The first one you learn can be tough, but once you get a grasp of the process of learning languages, you'll find it quite straightforward to learn more. Of course, YMMV.
I know that other major languages have sizeable sub-portions of the Net too, but they'r still totally dwarfed by the amount of english out there.
bandwagon. Somehow, my belief in Intel's profound desire for a "few extra bucks" has never let me down.
Like the man said about tsunami alerts in the United States: "There's still a large segment of the population that would go get their kids out of school so they could drive to the beach and watch the big waves..."
Those who still do not believe in natural selection raise their hands. No-one? Didn't think so.
Are nerds oblivious to simple economics?
Yes
It is a fairly safe bet that at some point in the future either GRT or QT or both will be replaced with something more accurate.
I've been thinking about this, and your post just triggered me. We've had physics for millenia (the four elements? Ancient Greek theories about atoms?), and all the previous attempts have proven to be wrong. Not altogether wrong, mind you - there were just classes of problems they could not answer satisfactorily (or at all). Every new iteration of physics theory has come about to correct some area of "wrongness", and we still see this today (superstring theory or Grand Unified Theory, for instance).
Today the areas of wrongness usually either involve the very tiny stuff (atoms and subparticles thereof) or the very big stuff (cosmic theories like Big Bang - where's the dark matter?), but I'm firmly convinced that our "laws" of physics are wrong - at least in the sense that they are still not accurate enough in the extreme situations. So far, all other attempts have been proven wrong sooner or later - why should we be at the end of that particular road now? I'm pretty sure lots of people have concluded that throughout history, but they were - in hindsight - wrong.
Of course the current laws of physics are immensely useful, but they are bound to be wrong in one way or another.
There's an interesting psychology experiment (read here on slashdot) where they put you in a room with two strings dangling from the ceiling. You're asked to tie the strings together. Holding one sting, you can't reach the other one. With out cutting or taking down the strings, how do you do it? All you have to work with is a pair of pliars. (BTW, even with extended reach of the pliars, you still can't reach the other string.)
[spoiler alert]
I've heard that one before, although it involved a PDA instead. Tie the pair of pliars to the end of one string, and set it swinging so that - when holding the other string - you can reach the swinging string. Now catch the swinging string and voila!