Meh. That this device is "as fast as a modern PC" for the single task it was designed for is nothing particularly interesting. It is, as another reader pointed out, essentially just a large DSP. Just because a 400MHz GPU is many, many times faster than your 3GHz CPU at drawing pretty pictures, doesn't mean it's a better general purpose CPU. If you took all the millions of transistors in a P4 and made them all do NAND in parallel, you would have the world's fastest NAND gate, capable of doing a million near-instantaneous NANDs simultaneously.
This is not to belittle the achievement of the folks who built Collosus. It is, however, more correctly compared to things like the EFF DES key cracker, which like the Colossus was massively parallel. It was also a gajillion times faster than a PC *at the one thing it did*.
This is more or less what the "hybrid" silverado will be doing. Rather than taking the full-on hybrid approach right away, they are getting things set up so the engine can shut off when the vehicle is stopped. The full hybrid version is expected later, in 2007.
I would agree that this is the right approach to take. There are a couple of things automakers can do that would approve fuel economy across the board without a total conversion to hybrid:
1. Integrated Starter-Alternator and electric accessories to allow engine shutoff at stops.
2. CVT transmissions for all automatics. Much lower power loss than "slushbox" torque converters. (The Civic HX has had this since 1996, along with a few others. Significantly better fuel economy in city driving vs. traditional automatic.)
3. Variable displacement engines. Like the old Cadillac or the upcoming Accord hybrid, these shut down cylinders when full acceleration isn't needed.
Just switching to CVT alone would save us a crapload of fuel. Traditional automatics are terrible for fuel economy.
Early Buggles fans will have known that since 1979, when the song was released, and spent some time on the charts, before becoming synonymous with MTV.
For the record, I was not an early Buggles fan (a little young to be in the record-buying demographic in '79). I just happened to notice the copyright date on my LP.
Wow, that's a flashback. I used to run that from floppy on my Amiga 500. It took all day to render a mountain that would be far below-average by today's gaming standards, but it was SO DAMN COOL. Especially since they included bitmap data for Olympus Mons on mars along with the nifty fractal landscape generator.
I might be interested if I could get an N-gage for $50 with no contract. Otherwise, my plain-old-phone and GBA SP are doing just fine. I'd love to have an all-in-one, but it better be ALL-in-one, not "crappy substitutes for everything in one."
There's too many big phone + crappy camera + lousy PIM + poorly-designed controls + bad screen orientation devices already.
I was shopping for a ton of new camping gear (new pack for me, a whole set of equipment for my girlfriend) for a trip we were taking, and the guy who ran the store was complaining that his computers were all rebooting over and over.
Being a giant dork and avid slashdot reader, I recognized the symptoms as one of the viruses making the rounds, helped him remove it and patch things up to be secure. In exchange, I got 25% off anything, which he has been offering to me on every trip I've made to the store. Not a bad deal for 20 minutes' work.
I'll admit, it does have a certain mad-scientist appeal to it... natural selection should harden up the animals to tolerate it over time, and eventually they will become super-animals, capable of defending their territory from encroaching human development by means of their laser eyebeams, psychic attacks, and tree-generated forcefields. Perhaps a few will even develop organs that allow them to use the spent nuclear fuel to power their own internal nuclear reactions.
Or possibly they'll just have too many heads and legs, and flop around horribly, inspiring tug-the-heartstrings documentaries.
Don't get me wrong on this-- I'm a conservationist-type who likes the idea of nuclear power, too. But this guy is a nutcase. He advocates dropping the nuclear waste into pristine wilderness "to keep developers out."
Whistles and points to the same article, where if you look past the sensationalist headline, you will discover that the EPA ratings for ALL cars are waaaay too high. They test fuel economy by measuring *emissions*. That's like measuring how tall someone is by weighing them-- of COURSE it's always wrong.
There is a company putting them into shingles. I was just bemoaning the inability to buy them at my local Home Depot-- since as we all know, home improvement projects always require more than one trip back to the store.
Check out sunslates for one example-- I seem to remember there being another, but the name escapes me. They go on like slate roofing tiles.
Your numbers are old. The point for energy break-even (when the amount of power produced is more than the power used to make them) is roughly 2-4 years, and their cost break-even is well within their 20-30 year lifetime. How long this takes depends on the electric rates in your area, of course.
A batteryless grid-tied system will break even on cost in roughly 6-12 years. Most people just can't stomach the large up-front cost for such a long payoff time. I can't, although I intend to as soon as I have an extra $10K sitting around.
Nasty chemicals are indeed used in their production, but your number there is so exaggerated it's ridiculous. Grid-power production produces a LOT of waste material each year per user. We generate roughly 1.5lbs. of CO2 per kWH-- roughly 2700lbs per person per year from the electricity used in their homes. This isn't to say that carbon is all we're dumping, it's just the only one I found a quick number for. Also in the mix of waste products from the power system are sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. And if we're talking nuclear power (which I support, so don't get too excited) there's the radioactive waste instead. To claim that solar panel production produces ten times the waste of grid-power production is disingenuous. Sure, the stuff used to make solar panels is nasty, but the amount involved compared to 30 years * 2700lbs. waste per person, I think there's a clear winner.
To quote our government, PV production produces small amounts of waste materials, but it is minimal relative to emissions from conventional energy sources."
Man, I have to stop there on the way home tonight to pick up more bits and pieces for the renovations we're making to our new house-- I *wish* I could just take a carload of solar shingles home with me, and plug them straight into some pre-existing standardized rooftop wiring grid.
It's currently a long-term win to buy panels, but it's too steep an up-front investment for most people. $20K with payback over decades is more than most people are willing to do. Perhaps the power companies could invest in people's rooftops, and charge the same rate for the power until they are paid off (plus a tidy profit).
I didn't say I didn't like it, I just said it's silly. Monty Python is also silly, but I get a kick out of them as well. The game is comically complicated while simultaneously maintaining that old-timey feel. It's like a sport satire, without trying to be.
You're right, I oversimplified. You get three chances to succeed, except that there are ways to forfeit some of your chances, like having your ball caught, or if you turn around and beat the catcher to death with your bat.
I was about to correct you, but it seems both I and the last poster were taught wrong. I checked your link, and verified by digging up several others. You do indeed add 's to non-plural possesive nouns like James's.
Nothing makes me madder than discovering that along the way, one of my teachers drilled the wrong thing into me. We all depend on what we were taught in things like grammar. Unlike math, there's no "going back to first principles" or "proving it for yourself." If we were taught wrong, we end up making fools of ourselves later,. Of course, it might help if we paid teachers more than a pittance, or if more than a tiny fraction of students cared, but that's another gripe for another time.
And then, of course, there's the possibility that all three sites I checked on the 'net are wrong-- lord knows the internet isn't exactly edited for accuracy. For now, I'll just have to take your word for it.
Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
It's why I did it. Vegetarian engineers for thermodynamics!
I've always wanted to see a multilevel MMO game that was playable as RTS (decides where units are sent), FPS (play as an individual in the unit), vehicle sim (pilot or drive something), or engineer/artist (create more buildings/items/stuff).
At the simplest level, you'd have RTS'ers engaged in some massive war at a high level, ordering troops around and sending out objectives, while the FPS'ers charged in with the vehicle players to try to take their objectives. The depth and randomness created by making all the footsoldiers real people would be almost like reality, although you'd probably have more "i'm stuck running in a corner" than in real life.
I figured you were joking, so I tacked my joke onto it. I'm 27, but haven't managed to get around to getting licensed-- I keep finding something else to tinker with. I just moved, though, and there's a "crazy antenna junkie" up the street from me with a house that looks like a metal porcupine who I should probably go meet. He's either a ham, or an evil scientist-- and either way I want to hear about his cat mind-control project.
It just struck me as particularly funny to hear slang like "hater" applied to a hobby that is largely the domain of the generation of Nerds before us. The ones who wore puffy trucker hats non-ironically, and who didn't have an internet to make global communication easy and cheap.
I did not think I would live to be old enough to see this. Someone young enough to use the word "hater" defending ham radio? This is just two steps away from the supreme court issuing a ruling containing "w00t, d00d."
In the meantime, I suspect we will soon be seeing X-TREME denture ads, and all da playas in da hizouse will be talking about how their retirement investment portfolios are off da heazy fo' sheazy.
The device you're looking for is the tapwave zodiac. If you haven't already heard of it, it's a PalmOS device designed for gaming-- layout similar to the PSP, available now, 480x320 screen. I'd give it a little longer if you want it for movies-- SD cards will only get cheaper. I'm oh-so-tempted, but I think I'll wait for SD prices to come down a bit more.
In my state, bicycles have the right of way on roads, and are supposed to be ridden *in* the road, obeying the same rules as cars. It is against the law to ride a bike on the sidewalk, but this is rarely enforced.
There are plenty of idiots on both sides, from cyclists who won't stop for lights/signs to avoid losing their speed, to drivers who don't pay attention or pass where it's illegal.
Personally, I fear for my life when bike-commuting here (nobody expects cyclists because they're so rare on the roads)-- so I tend to stay on the illegal sidewalks near large roads, where there aren't many pedestrians and the side-road traffic is minimal.
Add one more datapoint for me. Computer Engineer, lucasarts adventure gaming dork, halloween tron-costume wearer, serious runner, cyclist, triathlete and occasional rock-climber and backpacker.
I'd climb more if it wasn't so freaking expensive at the gyms around here, or if Indiana had much of anywhere to actually climb. My last apartment was near a "bootleg" wall built on the underside of a bridge, which was nice, but I'm a good half-hour drive from there now and don't make it out that way much.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. That this device is "as fast as a modern PC" for the single task it was designed for is nothing particularly interesting. It is, as another reader pointed out, essentially just a large DSP. Just because a 400MHz GPU is many, many times faster than your 3GHz CPU at drawing pretty pictures, doesn't mean it's a better general purpose CPU. If you took all the millions of transistors in a P4 and made them all do NAND in parallel, you would have the world's fastest NAND gate, capable of doing a million near-instantaneous NANDs simultaneously.
This is not to belittle the achievement of the folks who built Collosus. It is, however, more correctly compared to things like the EFF DES key cracker, which like the Colossus was massively parallel. It was also a gajillion times faster than a PC *at the one thing it did*.
I think he's more likely to be beaten to death by his english teachers.
We're all picking nits. It's the slashdot equivalent of eating lice off your fellow monkeys-- we don't have anything better to do, and we're hungry.
I forgot where that analogy was going.
This is more or less what the "hybrid" silverado will be doing. Rather than taking the full-on hybrid approach right away, they are getting things set up so the engine can shut off when the vehicle is stopped. The full hybrid version is expected later, in 2007.
I would agree that this is the right approach to take. There are a couple of things automakers can do that would approve fuel economy across the board without a total conversion to hybrid:
1. Integrated Starter-Alternator and electric accessories to allow engine shutoff at stops.
2. CVT transmissions for all automatics. Much lower power loss than "slushbox" torque converters. (The Civic HX has had this since 1996, along with a few others. Significantly better fuel economy in city driving vs. traditional automatic.)
3. Variable displacement engines. Like the old Cadillac or the upcoming Accord hybrid, these shut down cylinders when full acceleration isn't needed.
Just switching to CVT alone would save us a crapload of fuel. Traditional automatics are terrible for fuel economy.
Early Buggles fans will have known that since 1979, when the song was released, and spent some time on the charts, before becoming synonymous with MTV.
For the record, I was not an early Buggles fan (a little young to be in the record-buying demographic in '79). I just happened to notice the copyright date on my LP.
Wow, that's a flashback. I used to run that from floppy on my Amiga 500. It took all day to render a mountain that would be far below-average by today's gaming standards, but it was SO DAMN COOL. Especially since they included bitmap data for Olympus Mons on mars along with the nifty fractal landscape generator.
I might be interested if I could get an N-gage for $50 with no contract. Otherwise, my plain-old-phone and GBA SP are doing just fine. I'd love to have an all-in-one, but it better be ALL-in-one, not "crappy substitutes for everything in one."
There's too many big phone + crappy camera + lousy PIM + poorly-designed controls + bad screen orientation devices already.
I was shopping for a ton of new camping gear (new pack for me, a whole set of equipment for my girlfriend) for a trip we were taking, and the guy who ran the store was complaining that his computers were all rebooting over and over.
Being a giant dork and avid slashdot reader, I recognized the symptoms as one of the viruses making the rounds, helped him remove it and patch things up to be secure. In exchange, I got 25% off anything, which he has been offering to me on every trip I've made to the store. Not a bad deal for 20 minutes' work.
I'll admit, it does have a certain mad-scientist appeal to it... natural selection should harden up the animals to tolerate it over time, and eventually they will become super-animals, capable of defending their territory from encroaching human development by means of their laser eyebeams, psychic attacks, and tree-generated forcefields. Perhaps a few will even develop organs that allow them to use the spent nuclear fuel to power their own internal nuclear reactions.
Or possibly they'll just have too many heads and legs, and flop around horribly, inspiring tug-the-heartstrings documentaries.
Don't get me wrong on this-- I'm a conservationist-type who likes the idea of nuclear power, too. But this guy is a nutcase. He advocates dropping the nuclear waste into pristine wilderness "to keep developers out."
Whistles and points to the same article, where if you look past the sensationalist headline, you will discover that the EPA ratings for ALL cars are waaaay too high. They test fuel economy by measuring *emissions*. That's like measuring how tall someone is by weighing them-- of COURSE it's always wrong.
There is a company putting them into shingles. I was just bemoaning the inability to buy them at my local Home Depot-- since as we all know, home improvement projects always require more than one trip back to the store.
Check out sunslates for one example-- I seem to remember there being another, but the name escapes me. They go on like slate roofing tiles.
Your numbers are old. The point for energy break-even (when the amount of power produced is more than the power used to make them) is roughly 2-4 years, and their cost break-even is well within their 20-30 year lifetime. How long this takes depends on the electric rates in your area, of course.
A batteryless grid-tied system will break even on cost in roughly 6-12 years. Most people just can't stomach the large up-front cost for such a long payoff time. I can't, although I intend to as soon as I have an extra $10K sitting around.
Nasty chemicals are indeed used in their production, but your number there is so exaggerated it's ridiculous. Grid-power production produces a LOT of waste material each year per user. We generate roughly 1.5lbs. of CO2 per kWH-- roughly 2700lbs per person per year from the electricity used in their homes. This isn't to say that carbon is all we're dumping, it's just the only one I found a quick number for. Also in the mix of waste products from the power system are sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. And if we're talking nuclear power (which I support, so don't get too excited) there's the radioactive waste instead. To claim that solar panel production produces ten times the waste of grid-power production is disingenuous. Sure, the stuff used to make solar panels is nasty, but the amount involved compared to 30 years * 2700lbs. waste per person, I think there's a clear winner.
To quote our government, PV production produces small amounts of waste materials, but it is minimal relative to emissions from conventional energy sources."
Man, I have to stop there on the way home tonight to pick up more bits and pieces for the renovations we're making to our new house-- I *wish* I could just take a carload of solar shingles home with me, and plug them straight into some pre-existing standardized rooftop wiring grid.
It's currently a long-term win to buy panels, but it's too steep an up-front investment for most people. $20K with payback over decades is more than most people are willing to do. Perhaps the power companies could invest in people's rooftops, and charge the same rate for the power until they are paid off (plus a tidy profit).
"lucky Han Solo and the Skywalker Twins"
Don't give the Olsen franchise any more ideas.
I didn't say I didn't like it, I just said it's silly. Monty Python is also silly, but I get a kick out of them as well. The game is comically complicated while simultaneously maintaining that old-timey feel. It's like a sport satire, without trying to be.
You're right, I oversimplified. You get three chances to succeed, except that there are ways to forfeit some of your chances, like having your ball caught, or if you turn around and beat the catcher to death with your bat.
I dunno... getting 1 out of 2 when you get three tries to succeed once is good no matter what you're doing.
Of course, I still think baseball is silly.
I was about to correct you, but it seems both I and the last poster were taught wrong. I checked your link, and verified by digging up several others. You do indeed add 's to non-plural possesive nouns like James's.
Nothing makes me madder than discovering that along the way, one of my teachers drilled the wrong thing into me. We all depend on what we were taught in things like grammar. Unlike math, there's no "going back to first principles" or "proving it for yourself." If we were taught wrong, we end up making fools of ourselves later,. Of course, it might help if we paid teachers more than a pittance, or if more than a tiny fraction of students cared, but that's another gripe for another time.
And then, of course, there's the possibility that all three sites I checked on the 'net are wrong-- lord knows the internet isn't exactly edited for accuracy. For now, I'll just have to take your word for it.
It's why I did it. Vegetarian engineers for thermodynamics!
I've always wanted to see a multilevel MMO game that was playable as RTS (decides where units are sent), FPS (play as an individual in the unit), vehicle sim (pilot or drive something), or engineer/artist (create more buildings/items/stuff).
At the simplest level, you'd have RTS'ers engaged in some massive war at a high level, ordering troops around and sending out objectives, while the FPS'ers charged in with the vehicle players to try to take their objectives. The depth and randomness created by making all the footsoldiers real people would be almost like reality, although you'd probably have more "i'm stuck running in a corner" than in real life.
I figured you were joking, so I tacked my joke onto it. I'm 27, but haven't managed to get around to getting licensed-- I keep finding something else to tinker with. I just moved, though, and there's a "crazy antenna junkie" up the street from me with a house that looks like a metal porcupine who I should probably go meet. He's either a ham, or an evil scientist-- and either way I want to hear about his cat mind-control project.
It just struck me as particularly funny to hear slang like "hater" applied to a hobby that is largely the domain of the generation of Nerds before us. The ones who wore puffy trucker hats non-ironically, and who didn't have an internet to make global communication easy and cheap.
I did not think I would live to be old enough to see this. Someone young enough to use the word "hater" defending ham radio? This is just two steps away from the supreme court issuing a ruling containing "w00t, d00d."
In the meantime, I suspect we will soon be seeing X-TREME denture ads, and all da playas in da hizouse will be talking about how their retirement investment portfolios are off da heazy fo' sheazy.
The device you're looking for is the tapwave zodiac. If you haven't already heard of it, it's a PalmOS device designed for gaming-- layout similar to the PSP, available now, 480x320 screen. I'd give it a little longer if you want it for movies-- SD cards will only get cheaper. I'm oh-so-tempted, but I think I'll wait for SD prices to come down a bit more.
In my state, bicycles have the right of way on roads, and are supposed to be ridden *in* the road, obeying the same rules as cars. It is against the law to ride a bike on the sidewalk, but this is rarely enforced.
There are plenty of idiots on both sides, from cyclists who won't stop for lights/signs to avoid losing their speed, to drivers who don't pay attention or pass where it's illegal.
Personally, I fear for my life when bike-commuting here (nobody expects cyclists because they're so rare on the roads)-- so I tend to stay on the illegal sidewalks near large roads, where there aren't many pedestrians and the side-road traffic is minimal.
Add one more datapoint for me. Computer Engineer, lucasarts adventure gaming dork, halloween tron-costume wearer, serious runner, cyclist, triathlete and occasional rock-climber and backpacker.
I'd climb more if it wasn't so freaking expensive at the gyms around here, or if Indiana had much of anywhere to actually climb. My last apartment was near a "bootleg" wall built on the underside of a bridge, which was nice, but I'm a good half-hour drive from there now and don't make it out that way much.