How 'bout a beefy UPS? That allows the simple "continuous power" scenarios to be considered again, and is far cheaper than staffing a desk.
It's probably cheaper to pay an undergrad to staff a desk than to continually replace UPS batteries as they go through many repeated deep discharge cycles.
You can easily have the door "locked" from outside, But the room can be easily exited in the event of a power loss (crash bar on the inside door).
And if the safety issue is that people on the outside need to get in the room, just put in a big red "Press button to unlock door in case off emergency" button that sets off an alarm (or calls campus security and/or EMS services) while unlocking the door so if someone needs to get in the room in an emergency, they can.
If the equipment is hazardous enough that even trained users might need help, then having a lock on the door that only lets authorized personnel in the room is probably a good idea.
I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality.
That's not enough to make people embrace the lock-in, I don't think.
No body "embraces" lock-in -- they tolerate it.
To anyone who is already okay with these single-serving machines, that won't make a difference.
So, they have their choice: stop making the old machines to try to force everyone to upgrade, or have people not care about the upgrade.
P.S. Nespresso machines read a bar code on the pod, which customizes the brewing. So custom brewing isn't even a new idea in single-serving coffee makers.
That depends how good Keurig is at marketing it as a feature rather than as a limitation "Each Keurig K-Cup is individually tuned to match exactly with the coffee, we measure 17 different variables such as roasting time, acidity, moisture level, etc and our unique system automatically tunes your coffee maker to brew the best cup of coffee possible. Taste tests prove that K-DRM makes the best coffee". It doesn't matter whether consumers can actually tell the different, all the matters is that they think they can.
I could be completely wrong on this guess, but I don't know what other possible "game-changing functionality” they've come up with the justify the vendor-locked k-cups.
you must have a tiny-ass mug then. I Have a Cuisinart maker that grinds, and has a 4 cup setting, which perfectly fills my travel mug.
that is by biggest complaint about the Keurig - to fill a decent size mug, you need 2 cups on the large setting. at that point you get into the Buy at coffee shop kinda price per cup.
I think you meant to reply to the grandparent poster. I don't have a tiny-ass mug, I have a tiny ass-mug.
The Merlin was also the first touchscreen mobile device, it had a High Definition 3x3 pixel screen (plus 2 bonus pixels). But the screen was 1 bit monochrome (not even grayscale), so it never really caught on for watching movies, plus it had no Netflix support. Also, just like the iPhone, it had no MicroSD slot so you were stuck with the onboard memory.
So, fun fact. I've recently come to terms with an ugly fact : I have a legitimate physical addiction to caffeine. If I go a full day without, I get headaches by the end of the day.
Hardly the worst withdrawal symptoms ever, and defeated by some motrin and water... but still, a bit upsetting. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to indulge my habit
For this reason, I included caffeine tablets in my 72-hour earthquake survival kit. I don't want to be fighting caffeine withdrawl at the same time I'm searching for shelter. I don't trust Starbucks to have emergency power and water plus enough beans in-stock to feed my addition in case of disaster.
Insert pod, push button. How much interactivity does making coffee *need*?
I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality. Well, as "best" as you can get with pre-ground beans that have sat on the shelf in a pod for a few months.
Downside : a normal coffee brew process generates 6-12 cups of Joe.
I guess we could all switch to a press... but that's a bit messy and requires a stand alone heating method (I've not the space to keep a proper tea kettle on my office desk)
Keurig provides a clean single-cup solution
Just use an immersion heater in your coffee mug to heat the water before you dump it in the press.
You think SamTrans should run buses directly from places where Google (and Apple, etc) employees live to their workplace with no other stops?
I'm not sure anyone would be happier to see millions of dollars used to create publicly funded employer shuttles.
Well, there seems to be a demand for it and it seems there is already someone PAYING for such a service.
I wouldn't know why a public foundes bus company should be damned to only serve routes that lose money.
Running a bus one-way from a neighborhood to a single employer is not going to be a profitable public transit line. Even if Google paid SamTrans what they pay for their private bus, it wouldn't cover SamTrans' costs. Public transit is more expensive than private transit.
>Working with all sorts of people, even those in remote places in the world, is something I always will love. I for one will never move to California, even though I do fly in for a couple weeks now and again due to the idiotic gun/hunting laws. I prefer living in suburban/rural areas where I can enjoy life without the distraction of city idiots.
You must be the only person that actually travels to California for the gun/hunting laws. You're a good argument that California gun laws make it a better place for living.
I often find its much easier to get work done face to face
You're not a programmer.
Of course not, the programmers have been outsourced to India and other cheaper counties. It's the developers that are still coming to the office to collaborate with others in the company design and build software solutions (perhaps farming out some of the programming to offshore workers). If your job can best be done without face-to-face contact with others in the office, then it may as well be offshored someplace cheaper.
Even when given the choice to telecommute, I often choose not to. I often find its much easier to get work done face to face, that and when you're in an actual work environment (or at least, aren't at home) there are fewer distractions.
Most of Google's employees in the area can already get 50mbit or 100mbit internet from Comcast, I don't think gigabit is going to make them much more effective as home workers.
For years, widespread telecommuting has always been just around the corner, "if only we had (faster computers, high quality webcams, faster internet, younger managers, etc)" But if even Google and their limitless technology resources still find worthwhile to have a San Francisco satellite office and ship workers 40 miles from SF to Mountain View, then maybe the limitations of telecommuting are not technical.
It would be absolutely awesome of Samtrans or Muni provided a service similar to what the Google buses provide, but they don't, and they have actively worked to avoid doing so. So the activists really have no leg to stand on here. They should be trying to fix public transit in the bay area, not prevent people from working around its brokenness.
You think SamTrans should run buses directly from places where Google (and Apple, etc) employees live to their workplace with no other stops?
I'm not sure anyone would be happier to see millions of dollars used to create publicly funded employer shuttles.
Extending Caltrain to the new Transbay terminal would go a long way toward making Caltrain a commute option for more people, but even so, for the amount of time it takes to get from Noe Valley to the Transbay on transit, an employer shuttle bus can be half way to Mountain View.
just keep piling more fuel on it until it gets hot enough to melt rock, it melts down to, errr, China, creating a volcano, build geothermal plant to extract power from volcano.
If a USA runaway reactor will melt down to China, then I think a Japanese reactor will end up in the USA somewhere. So the USA is who can exploit it for geothermal energy, though we'll probably have to pay TEPCO for it.
"Keep it contained" is a little optimistic. There is radioactive tea draining from the site to the sea. They are trying to use robots to install an ice dam in the beach to stop that, but have yet to begin installing it. It is unknown if it will actually work. They estimate they are losing 300 tons of fluid per day, of unknown composition but most certainly very radioactive. That is not "contained".
That's why step one is "Keep it contained". Use resources now to keep it contained, but don't try to do any real cleanup until the good robots arrive. Maybe start a billion dollar x-prize robot campaign -- outline exactly the kind of outlandish tasks they need a robot to do, and let private industry do it for a piece of the billion dollar prize.
Tunnel 100 ft. below the reactor and build a huge leak-proof chamber. Use controlled detonation to collapse the reactor, building, and all into this chamber. Fill it with water and close/seal it off. Build something cool on top.
If it's easy to build a leak-proof, earthquake-proof chamber than can contain high grade nuclear waste indefinitely, maybe all reactors should have this huge chamber, then all they have to do after an accident is fill it with water and cap it off, and maybe build a playground on top.
Since they have a 40 year timeframe, they should just keep it contained for another decade or two and wait for superior robots to take over the task rather than relying on today's limited robots.
If this is true, then this is a really profound discovery that could help millions of people.
What I'm wondering, is why no other society, that we know of, has discovered this low-tech, yet seemingly incredibly useful thing previously?
For one thing, it doesn't filter viruses, so maybe it's already been evaluated and dicarded as a good solution. From TFA:
Karnik says sapwood likely can filter most types of bacteria, the smallest of which measure about 200 nanometers. However, the filter probably cannot trap most viruses, which are much smaller in size.
So it's of limited utility, since, as the summary says, common pathogens include viruses (e.g. adenoviruses, enteroviruses, hepatitis, rotavirus) -- for example, rotavirus is around 30nm in size, less than half the effective filtering size of the wood.
So the water will probably still need chemical or UV treatment after filtering.
Plus it's not clear how well it would work in the field, when the scientists built their filter:
They cut small sections of sapwood measuring about an inch long and half an inch wide, and mounted each in plastic tubing, sealed with epoxy and secured with clamps.
So while wood as a filter medium sounds attractive, if the user needs specialized equipment to get it to make a safe, water-tight seal, maybe it's not as useful in an area with limited resources.
I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking, cheaper food, less chance of crime happening to me or my properly while at or traveling to work and for most people closer to home. This is double so if locally aimed marketing and walk in customers are not very frequent.
I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking, cheaper food, less chance of crime happening to me or my properly while at or traveling to work and for most people closer to home. This is double so if locally aimed marketing and walk in customers are not very frequent.
Less traffic? You haven't driving down 101 to Mountain View lately, have you? And it's not like Mountain View is so much affordable than SF so you probably won't be living close to your Google job. A nice 1 bedroom in Mountain View can run $3 - $4,000, just like in SF.
Cheaper food? Sure, if your company provides it for you, otherwise that "cheap food" is a 15 - 20 minute drive off campus to a strip mall, so you end up spending half your lunch hour in your car. In Downtown SF there are dozens or hundreds of places within a 5 - 10 minute walk from the office, with prices ranging from a a $5 Chinese takeout place to a $150 restaurant.
Less chance of crime? Your car probably has a better chance of getting broken into in Mountainview since it'll be parked in a big, largely unpatrolled parking lor or parking garage. In SF, you're not going to be driving a car.
There are lots of benefits to living and working in a city, though it's not for everyone. If you like the "convenience" of being able to drive everywhere, you won't like a city. If you don't want to *have* to drive everywhere, a city is very attractive.
Solar insolation on the moon is not dramatically higher than on Earth - around 1400 W/m^2 versus around 1000 W/m^2 on Earth. Granted, a Lunar solar station wouldn't be affected by weather, but Earth based receivers will suffer from efficiency loss during bad weather.
Could they achieve the same result by building a bit larger system on earth, but without the hundreds (or thousands?) of rocket launches it would take to get the materials to the moon to get the thing started?
Besides, who wants to see a big black ribbon around the moon?
They plan to use lunar materials, so no hundresds of rocket launches to get started. I guess the point is kind of that real estate and raw materials are "free", if you get the proper manufacturing equipment up there. If that equipment is automated enough, you can build up slowly, but steadily.
That's why I started at the low end of "hundreds of launches" -- if raw materials were needed, launches would be in the many thousands or tens of thousands. Unless aliens left us a manufacturing plant on the moon when they buried the monolith, it's going to take a lot of equipment to get started.
Construction of the ISS required over 40 assembly launches.. And those launches were all to LEO which allows much bigger payloads than launching to the moon.
Perhaps the future will bring more efficient ways to get materials off the earth, but so far we're reliant on rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
How 'bout a beefy UPS? That allows the simple "continuous power" scenarios to be considered again, and is far cheaper than staffing a desk.
It's probably cheaper to pay an undergrad to staff a desk than to continually replace UPS batteries as they go through many repeated deep discharge cycles.
Or a badge-swipe operated inline power switch, shouldn't be difficult to lock something onto the end of a normal power cord.
That won't meet his requirements:
Most of these systems also require continuous power — so electrical interlocks are not a good option either.
You can easily have the door "locked" from outside, But the room can be easily exited in the event of a power loss (crash bar on the inside door).
And if the safety issue is that people on the outside need to get in the room, just put in a big red "Press button to unlock door in case off emergency" button that sets off an alarm (or calls campus security and/or EMS services) while unlocking the door so if someone needs to get in the room in an emergency, they can.
If the equipment is hazardous enough that even trained users might need help, then having a lock on the door that only lets authorized personnel in the room is probably a good idea.
I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality.
That's not enough to make people embrace the lock-in, I don't think.
No body "embraces" lock-in -- they tolerate it.
To anyone who is already okay with these single-serving machines, that won't make a difference.
So, they have their choice: stop making the old machines to try to force everyone to upgrade, or have people not care about the upgrade.
P.S. Nespresso machines read a bar code on the pod, which customizes the brewing. So custom brewing isn't even a new idea in single-serving coffee makers.
That depends how good Keurig is at marketing it as a feature rather than as a limitation "Each Keurig K-Cup is individually tuned to match exactly with the coffee, we measure 17 different variables such as roasting time, acidity, moisture level, etc and our unique system automatically tunes your coffee maker to brew the best cup of coffee possible. Taste tests prove that K-DRM makes the best coffee". It doesn't matter whether consumers can actually tell the different, all the matters is that they think they can.
I could be completely wrong on this guess, but I don't know what other possible "game-changing functionality” they've come up with the justify the vendor-locked k-cups.
you must have a tiny-ass mug then. I Have a Cuisinart maker that grinds, and has a 4 cup setting, which perfectly fills my travel mug.
that is by biggest complaint about the Keurig - to fill a decent size mug, you need 2 cups on the large setting. at that point you get into the Buy at coffee shop kinda price per cup.
I think you meant to reply to the grandparent poster. I don't have a tiny-ass mug, I have a tiny ass-mug.
The Merlin was also the first touchscreen mobile device, it had a High Definition 3x3 pixel screen (plus 2 bonus pixels). But the screen was 1 bit monochrome (not even grayscale), so it never really caught on for watching movies, plus it had no Netflix support. Also, just like the iPhone, it had no MicroSD slot so you were stuck with the onboard memory.
It's still available (in a new and improved model): http://www.amazon.com/Milton-B...
So, fun fact. I've recently come to terms with an ugly fact : I have a legitimate physical addiction to caffeine. If I go a full day without, I get headaches by the end of the day.
Hardly the worst withdrawal symptoms ever, and defeated by some motrin and water ... but still, a bit upsetting. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to indulge my habit
For this reason, I included caffeine tablets in my 72-hour earthquake survival kit. I don't want to be fighting caffeine withdrawl at the same time I'm searching for shelter. I don't trust Starbucks to have emergency power and water plus enough beans in-stock to feed my addition in case of disaster.
Insert pod, push button. How much interactivity does making coffee *need*?
I'm guessing that the chip in the pod tailors the brewing cycle for the coffee (or tea) in the pod for the best possible quality. Well, as "best" as you can get with pre-ground beans that have sat on the shelf in a pod for a few months.
Downside : a normal coffee brew process generates 6-12 cups of Joe.
I guess we could all switch to a press ... but that's a bit messy and requires a stand alone heating method (I've not the space to keep a proper tea kettle on my office desk)
Keurig provides a clean single-cup solution
Just use an immersion heater in your coffee mug to heat the water before you dump it in the press.
You think SamTrans should run buses directly from places where Google (and Apple, etc) employees live to their workplace with no other stops?
I'm not sure anyone would be happier to see millions of dollars used to create publicly funded employer shuttles.
Well, there seems to be a demand for it and it seems there is already someone PAYING for such a service.
I wouldn't know why a public foundes bus company should be damned to only serve routes that lose money.
Running a bus one-way from a neighborhood to a single employer is not going to be a profitable public transit line. Even if Google paid SamTrans what they pay for their private bus, it wouldn't cover SamTrans' costs. Public transit is more expensive than private transit.
>Working with all sorts of people, even those in remote places in the world, is something I always will love. I for one will never move to California, even though I do fly in for a couple weeks now and again due to the idiotic gun/hunting laws. I prefer living in suburban/rural areas where I can enjoy life without the distraction of city idiots.
You must be the only person that actually travels to California for the gun/hunting laws. You're a good argument that California gun laws make it a better place for living.
I often find its much easier to get work done face to face
You're not a programmer.
Of course not, the programmers have been outsourced to India and other cheaper counties. It's the developers that are still coming to the office to collaborate with others in the company design and build software solutions (perhaps farming out some of the programming to offshore workers). If your job can best be done without face-to-face contact with others in the office, then it may as well be offshored someplace cheaper.
Even when given the choice to telecommute, I often choose not to. I often find its much easier to get work done face to face, that and when you're in an actual work environment (or at least, aren't at home) there are fewer distractions.
Most of Google's employees in the area can already get 50mbit or 100mbit internet from Comcast, I don't think gigabit is going to make them much more effective as home workers.
For years, widespread telecommuting has always been just around the corner, "if only we had (faster computers, high quality webcams, faster internet, younger managers, etc)" But if even Google and their limitless technology resources still find worthwhile to have a San Francisco satellite office and ship workers 40 miles from SF to Mountain View, then maybe the limitations of telecommuting are not technical.
It would be absolutely awesome of Samtrans or Muni provided a service similar to what the Google buses provide, but they don't, and they have actively worked to avoid doing so. So the activists really have no leg to stand on here. They should be trying to fix public transit in the bay area, not prevent people from working around its brokenness.
You think SamTrans should run buses directly from places where Google (and Apple, etc) employees live to their workplace with no other stops?
I'm not sure anyone would be happier to see millions of dollars used to create publicly funded employer shuttles.
Extending Caltrain to the new Transbay terminal would go a long way toward making Caltrain a commute option for more people, but even so, for the amount of time it takes to get from Noe Valley to the Transbay on transit, an employer shuttle bus can be half way to Mountain View.
just keep piling more fuel on it until it gets hot enough to melt rock, it melts down to, errr, China, creating a volcano, build geothermal plant to extract power from volcano.
If a USA runaway reactor will melt down to China, then I think a Japanese reactor will end up in the USA somewhere. So the USA is who can exploit it for geothermal energy, though we'll probably have to pay TEPCO for it.
"Keep it contained" is a little optimistic. There is radioactive tea draining from the site to the sea. They are trying to use robots to install an ice dam in the beach to stop that, but have yet to begin installing it. It is unknown if it will actually work. They estimate they are losing 300 tons of fluid per day, of unknown composition but most certainly very radioactive. That is not "contained".
That's why step one is "Keep it contained". Use resources now to keep it contained, but don't try to do any real cleanup until the good robots arrive. Maybe start a billion dollar x-prize robot campaign -- outline exactly the kind of outlandish tasks they need a robot to do, and let private industry do it for a piece of the billion dollar prize.
Tunnel 100 ft. below the reactor and build a huge leak-proof chamber. Use controlled detonation to collapse the reactor, building, and all into this chamber. Fill it with water and close/seal it off. Build something cool on top.
If it's easy to build a leak-proof, earthquake-proof chamber than can contain high grade nuclear waste indefinitely, maybe all reactors should have this huge chamber, then all they have to do after an accident is fill it with water and cap it off, and maybe build a playground on top.
Since they have a 40 year timeframe, they should just keep it contained for another decade or two and wait for superior robots to take over the task rather than relying on today's limited robots.
If this is true, then this is a really profound discovery that could help millions of people.
What I'm wondering, is why no other society, that we know of, has discovered this low-tech, yet seemingly incredibly useful thing previously?
For one thing, it doesn't filter viruses, so maybe it's already been evaluated and dicarded as a good solution. From TFA:
Karnik says sapwood likely can filter most types of bacteria, the smallest of which measure about 200 nanometers. However, the filter probably cannot trap most viruses, which are much smaller in size.
So it's of limited utility, since, as the summary says, common pathogens include viruses (e.g. adenoviruses, enteroviruses, hepatitis, rotavirus) -- for example, rotavirus is around 30nm in size, less than half the effective filtering size of the wood.
So the water will probably still need chemical or UV treatment after filtering.
Plus it's not clear how well it would work in the field, when the scientists built their filter:
They cut small sections of sapwood measuring about an inch long and half an inch wide, and mounted each in plastic tubing, sealed with epoxy and secured with clamps.
So while wood as a filter medium sounds attractive, if the user needs specialized equipment to get it to make a safe, water-tight seal, maybe it's not as useful in an area with limited resources.
Really.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
What percent of Google employees live in San Francisco and work in Mountain View?
According to the article, apparently it's too many, regardless of the percentage.
You haven't driving down 101 to Mountain View lately
Driven. You haven't driven. What you wrote isn't English.
It's English, it's just not good English. It's an autocorrect typo, it's harder to proofread on a phone.
I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking, cheaper food, less chance of crime happening to me or my properly while at or traveling to work and for most people closer to home. This is double so if locally aimed marketing and walk in customers are not very frequent.
I would rather the campus be located away from urban area. Less traffic, less driving, cheap/free parking, cheaper food, less chance of crime happening to me or my properly while at or traveling to work and for most people closer to home. This is double so if locally aimed marketing and walk in customers are not very frequent.
Less traffic? You haven't driving down 101 to Mountain View lately, have you? And it's not like Mountain View is so much affordable than SF so you probably won't be living close to your Google job. A nice 1 bedroom in Mountain View can run $3 - $4,000, just like in SF.
Cheaper food? Sure, if your company provides it for you, otherwise that "cheap food" is a 15 - 20 minute drive off campus to a strip mall, so you end up spending half your lunch hour in your car. In Downtown SF there are dozens or hundreds of places within a 5 - 10 minute walk from the office, with prices ranging from a a $5 Chinese takeout place to a $150 restaurant.
Less chance of crime? Your car probably has a better chance of getting broken into in Mountainview since it'll be parked in a big, largely unpatrolled parking lor or parking garage. In SF, you're not going to be driving a car.
There are lots of benefits to living and working in a city, though it's not for everyone. If you like the "convenience" of being able to drive everywhere, you won't like a city. If you don't want to *have* to drive everywhere, a city is very attractive.
Really.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
Solar insolation on the moon is not dramatically higher than on Earth - around 1400 W/m^2 versus around 1000 W/m^2 on Earth. Granted, a Lunar solar station wouldn't be affected by weather, but Earth based receivers will suffer from efficiency loss during bad weather.
Could they achieve the same result by building a bit larger system on earth, but without the hundreds (or thousands?) of rocket launches it would take to get the materials to the moon to get the thing started?
Besides, who wants to see a big black ribbon around the moon?
They plan to use lunar materials, so no hundresds of rocket launches to get started. I guess the point is kind of that real estate and raw materials are "free", if you get the proper manufacturing equipment up there. If that equipment is automated enough, you can build up slowly, but steadily.
That's why I started at the low end of "hundreds of launches" -- if raw materials were needed, launches would be in the many thousands or tens of thousands. Unless aliens left us a manufacturing plant on the moon when they buried the monolith, it's going to take a lot of equipment to get started.
Construction of the ISS required over 40 assembly launches.. And those launches were all to LEO which allows much bigger payloads than launching to the moon.
Perhaps the future will bring more efficient ways to get materials off the earth, but so far we're reliant on rockets.
40% isn't dramatically higher?
Not when it's 240,000 miles away and you need to escape the Earth's large gravity well to get there.
How far would you be willing to drive to save 40% on something? Would you be willing to drive around the world 10 times to get a 40% better deal?