As an aside, Mössbauer [sic] once told us how to get an effect named after you: call it something long and not acronym-friendly yourself first. He called his effect "Rückstossfreie Resonanzabsorption", or recoil-free resonance absorption. So quit shortly, people referred to it as Mössbauer effect instead...
I've seen the different BT headsets for phones, but I have yet to see a stereo headphone for music play. Are there any? And could this thingy be used as a wireless iPod? That would be quite nifty...
Sorry to inform you that people with an actual sense for both the metric system and the US-Imperial system are better off. Done a reality check lately? 2980kg is basically 3 metric tons, which is the weight of the 6 fastest F1 cars combined (give or take a few). As well, last time I checked, the horsepower was something like 1.36 kW.
Thanks for getting us into a measurement system debate again again!
Sure, sometimes the corner video store is out of the movie I want to rent, but that doesn't happen all that often,
Actually, this is what happened to me so often that I now don't really use video stores. The good thing about the internet is again that you can get the marvels streamed to your home from basically everywhere. If I want to see some old Italian movie I used to see in my youth in my home language dubbing (Don Camillo and Peppone comes to mind), there is the proverbial snowballs chance in hell that my blockbuster is gonna have it. OTOH, on some server somewhere out there, it should be available.
Point is, internet video servers also are hard to beat for breadth of offering.
I don't think so. Two reasons: this is what plenty of posters here are waiting for, and the other thing is: it's easy, and it's there for you.
What do I mean with the second thing? It's the convenience, stupid. If I can download it always whenever I want it, for not so much money (okay, 3.99 is a bit steep, but that's new films - for older ones, consider 0.99 realistic), in guaranteed quality, then I might just as well not bother with cracking the stream (we're talking mass audience here, not hackers) and loading up my hard disk with something I might only watch another couple of times, if that. Downloading from P2P (in my experience) typically is hard work, trying to get the right stream, figuring out that the file is rotten, having no guaranteed feed and so on.
Apart, this might just be the killer application that triggers the breakthrough of broadband. Who knows.
You're right, Denmark has roughly the same wind all over. Having said that, frontal systems tend to run over the country in a few hours, so even there you don't get the same situation for the whole country.
The problem here is aggravated by the lack of power transmission possibilities to the neighbours. There was one case on New Years morning, when the generation reached 100% of demand, and turbines had to be shut down, since the electricity could not be sold anywhere. This is partly due to the fact that northern Germany (actually the current world leader for installed wind power by a fair margin) has roughly the same wind speeds, and therefore the same problems at the same time. So the electricity has basically nowhere to go (and yes, in northern Germany they already were regulating down even the nuclear plants).
On the US situation I found a good quote in one IEEE proceedings paper from an electrical engineer in the US (it was roughly the time of the California problems): "The US is a country with a first rate power generation infrastructure, depending on a third world grid." (or similar). And it's not far off, since the grid in the US is splintered into many small units that have not that much capacity for transfer across the country.
It is in the area of a few months to a few years. The number depends on the site and the turbine. On a high-wind site (>9m/s), an energy payback of down to a few months is possible (these things are creating energy at a huge rate, the largest turbines (we call them turbines, not wind mills) are at 2.5MW peak).
Actually, no. Since the waters surrounding Denmark are not getting as warm, and since the land is not getting heated up that much by the sun (due to the lower angle of incidence, as one later poster pointed out), most of the wind is generated on the synoptic scale. This means that the distribution of highs and lows around the country are the main driver of winds, especially in the winter. In the summer, there is a slight daily effect visible, but in the winter the typical time constant is about 3 days between changes.
OTOH, Denmark (as well as the rest of Central and Norther Europe) does not need air condition, except for some special cases (and therefore it isn't even installed). This means that the main demand occurs in the winter months, when it is dark and cold. Luckily, the wind is highest (on average) there.
There is a concept called capacity credit - make a Google search for it, or look on the energy server of the IEA. They have a few articles about it, basically stating that for small penetrations, wind power has around 20-40% capacity credit (ie, can replace fossil fuelled capacity worth around 20-40% of its installed capacity). This number drops significantly to the minimum guaranteed power from wind for large (>40%) penetrations. This minimum guaranteed power is of course zero for a single wind farm, but since the wind always blows somewhere, is larger than that for a larger area (ca 2% of installed capacity for wind power distributed over Europe). Read my thesis, if you want to know much more about it.
Which might be a bit surprising, since Søren Krohn, the guy who got an award for the site, is a die-hard Mac user. But I guess IE exists for the Mac too...
While it is nifty and plays great music, is extremely light (at least without the phone) and lasts quite long, the gripe I have with it is the very fragile connection to the phone. Quite frequently, the telephone will slightly bend the connection just long enough to cut off the player. It's really hard to not have it bend - the only thing yet where I get it reliably to work is a shirt pocket, with the mp3 player sticking up. Of course, this also goes wrong if I carry a backpack...
What it is? It's that little clip-on player for phones like the T68, playing on MMC cards. I got it for £27 at a fire sale (though shipping cost me slightly more than that...), but they are usually around $99.
I see this from a different angle than basically all of the responses posted here so far: I'm a (what I would consider) mediocre coder, who comes from the domain side, like I suppose the people are you're working with. I know a lot about the domain I'm working on, but have not had enough exposure to Java and coding in general - it comprises about 20-30% of my job, not enough to get _really_ up to speed. However, I'm the first one to admit my need for tutelage.
So, your answer is in the above: Tutor them, implement some of the XP stuff mentioned above (Pair Programming, code reviews, frequent builds, unit tests), and feel free to take over some of their assignements.
Of course, if I misread this and they're just lazy buggers, threaten them with management... and look more often over their shoulders.
No, they mean just the tower of the wind turbine. Usually these days, they are tubular (actually, slightly conical) steel towers, hollow on the inside, so that you can step up the ladder, circular staircase or elevator. (Try climbing a 60m ladder three or four times in a day, as the maintenance guys do - keeps one fit!) These tubular steel towers reach heights of about 100 m (99m is the highest I've seen so far, on the DEWI test field). In the olden days, lattice towers were used quite frequently (see all the old machine forests eg on San Gorgognio or Altamont passes). Nowadays, the nicer aesthetics plus the possibility to put the electrical gear inside has nearly completely replaced them. However, for getting significantly higher than 100m, they might be much more cost-effective (I've seen one 114m lattice tower wedged in a forest - yes, it's a stupid idea).
Plug of the day: If you're really interested in wind energy, try windpower.dk. This will tell you everything you wanted to know, and then some.
It is still a train since it has all the convenience features of a train: stops in the middle of the city, no check-in time, and you can move around in it. Think restaurant/bistro! Combine that with a frequency of every ten minutes (not so much for interregional travel) and it behaves like a train in most senses.
Also, try to do the math on a four hour trip with it: half an hour drive to the airport, 45 min (at least) for check-in, wait 20 min for take-off, get up to cruising height, cruise 50 min, get down, wait for your baggage, drive half an hour to town. Sound much better?
Well, you always could try to use it in the classical laptop way, with one screen being used as a virtual keyboard / mouse pad combo. Shouldn't be too hard to implement this?
Could be used the other way round...
on
To The Pain
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· Score: 1
Sorry for being sensible here, but you also could rig that thing so that you can only use it a certain amount of time before it gets really uncomfortable... Keeping you from developing carpal tunnel and other symptoms. It also could be rigged to a clock, with a parental override, so that the kids have to stop playing, or suffer the consequences.
Yes, the thingy uses GPRS, but have you seen what it costs to get the service? At least here in DK, it's a subscription of 300 DKr/quarter (ca €40), plus a not-so-nominal fee per kb. It racks up quite fast.
I just got myself an Ericsson T68, but without getting the GPRS service - I'm just not out of reach of a real internet connection often enough for it to be viable. Keep in mind that you always can use the normal internet my phone company offers: you can get the odd email on the phone even with 9.6kbps!
Antimatter would be an energy storage medium, akin to hydrogen in the dreams of the hydrogen society. Remember, the antimatter has to be manufactured at (huge?) cost, just as the hydrogen that is burning so clean has to be produced somewhere, somehow.
Let me add to this.
I have seemingly the same machine, and the hinge covers went really fast (I carry it on my bike a lot, so that was nearly to be expected). However, somewhat later I sat on my parents porch in Germany (where I had bought the machine, since for some unknown reason the same computer was a couple hundreds euro cheaper there, even allowing for different sales tax), when a grass mite entered my display and died there. Yep, a small insect, size about 4x2 pixels. I could see it wiggle towards a large white patch on the screen, and then resting there, just left from the center.
So I call Dell Germany, where they tell me after some deliberation that this is not a warranty case. I'm pissed, but what can I do.
What I could do is to call Dell Denmark (where I live) just before the warranty went, also in connection with a couple of other small problems. They were much more helpful, sending a technician to the office and exchanging the display right away! I was happy to get that treatment, even though the repair technician had to come in three times due to different parts that were missing...
Now, the hinges are gone, and I'll have to get them repaired, along with the malfunctioning keyboard. Luckily, my company sponsored a ThinkPad (that 1400x1050 screen is flat gorgeous!), so I have a laptop while the other one is gone.
Would I get another Dell? Maybe. It clearly would depend on the specs of the machine, since their support is not better or worse than the support I saw from other companies.
I'm getting (all the time, full-screen capable) video from n24broadband.de. Now it's more analysis, but they have a synopsis every 15 minutes or so. This is amazing - they seem to be the only ones to hold up admirably. Of course, having only installed everything a few weeks ago helps... (get their stock while they're cheap!)
If not, let me throw in a couple of thoughts. Linux nowadays starts up much faster than Windows. If you use the graphical subsystem (X), it still is slightly faster in a typical environment (ie, my set-up;). Actually, starting up Konqueror from the KDE environment takes roughly as long as starting up IE5.5 from Windows98. This just means that a lot of the libraries is already preloaded - you pay for that with a longer start-up time until your system is useful at all. And have you ever waited for Outlook to load the MSHTML.dll? That also takes ages.
Point two: the software complexity. A group as loosely connected as the Linux kernel (sic!) hackers have to work on problems that are fairly well separated. Problems in one area shouldn't affect other areas, and GNU/Linux is doing a pretty good job at keeping different things different. There is nothing preventing people from using Linux without a nice point-and-click interface, if you don't need it. On the other hand, there is nothing preventing you from building a distro that preloads all necessary libraries and gives users the feeling of a fast browser start-up.
Complexity due to too large interdependencies between functionally unrelated areas might be (IANAWP (Windows Programmer)) one of the reasons why Windows has the instability it has. Ever thought of that?
Now, to finish this on a lighter note, having the xhtml.dll (or.so) in the widget subsystem used by every other application might actually be a good idea. Just hope that all programs are extremely stable, or the shared library will take everything down with one maladjusted application.
Slashdot Mirror
Whew, where is that moderation point when you need it for an 'Overrated' mod... ;)
As an aside, Mössbauer [sic] once told us how to get an effect named after you: call it something long and not acronym-friendly yourself first. He called his effect "Rückstossfreie Resonanzabsorption", or recoil-free resonance absorption. So quit shortly, people referred to it as Mössbauer effect instead...
I've seen the different BT headsets for phones, but I have yet to see a stereo headphone for music play. Are there any? And could this thingy be used as a wireless iPod? That would be quite nifty...
Sorry to inform you that people with an actual sense for both the metric system and the US-Imperial system are better off. Done a reality check lately? 2980kg is basically 3 metric tons, which is the weight of the 6 fastest F1 cars combined (give or take a few). As well, last time I checked, the horsepower was something like 1.36 kW.
Thanks for getting us into a measurement system debate again again!
Actually, this is what happened to me so often that I now don't really use video stores. The good thing about the internet is again that you can get the marvels streamed to your home from basically everywhere. If I want to see some old Italian movie I used to see in my youth in my home language dubbing (Don Camillo and Peppone comes to mind), there is the proverbial snowballs chance in hell that my blockbuster is gonna have it. OTOH, on some server somewhere out there, it should be available.
Point is, internet video servers also are hard to beat for breadth of offering.
I don't think so. Two reasons: this is what plenty of posters here are waiting for, and the other thing is: it's easy, and it's there for you.
What do I mean with the second thing? It's the convenience, stupid. If I can download it always whenever I want it, for not so much money (okay, 3.99 is a bit steep, but that's new films - for older ones, consider 0.99 realistic), in guaranteed quality, then I might just as well not bother with cracking the stream (we're talking mass audience here, not hackers) and loading up my hard disk with something I might only watch another couple of times, if that. Downloading from P2P (in my experience) typically is hard work, trying to get the right stream, figuring out that the file is rotten, having no guaranteed feed and so on.
Apart, this might just be the killer application that triggers the breakthrough of broadband. Who knows.
You're right, Denmark has roughly the same wind all over. Having said that, frontal systems tend to run over the country in a few hours, so even there you don't get the same situation for the whole country.
The problem here is aggravated by the lack of power transmission possibilities to the neighbours. There was one case on New Years morning, when the generation reached 100% of demand, and turbines had to be shut down, since the electricity could not be sold anywhere. This is partly due to the fact that northern Germany (actually the current world leader for installed wind power by a fair margin) has roughly the same wind speeds, and therefore the same problems at the same time. So the electricity has basically nowhere to go (and yes, in northern Germany they already were regulating down even the nuclear plants).
On the US situation I found a good quote in one IEEE proceedings paper from an electrical engineer in the US (it was roughly the time of the California problems): "The US is a country with a first rate power generation infrastructure, depending on a third world grid." (or similar). And it's not far off, since the grid in the US is splintered into many small units that have not that much capacity for transfer across the country.
It is in the area of a few months to a few years. The number depends on the site and the turbine. On a high-wind site (>9m/s), an energy payback of down to a few months is possible (these things are creating energy at a huge rate, the largest turbines (we call them turbines, not wind mills) are at 2.5MW peak).
Actually, no. Since the waters surrounding Denmark are not getting as warm, and since the land is not getting heated up that much by the sun (due to the lower angle of incidence, as one later poster pointed out), most of the wind is generated on the synoptic scale. This means that the distribution of highs and lows around the country are the main driver of winds, especially in the winter. In the summer, there is a slight daily effect visible, but in the winter the typical time constant is about 3 days between changes.
OTOH, Denmark (as well as the rest of Central and Norther Europe) does not need air condition, except for some special cases (and therefore it isn't even installed). This means that the main demand occurs in the winter months, when it is dark and cold. Luckily, the wind is highest (on average) there.
There is a concept called capacity credit - make a Google search for it, or look on the energy server of the IEA. They have a few articles about it, basically stating that for small penetrations, wind power has around 20-40% capacity credit (ie, can replace fossil fuelled capacity worth around 20-40% of its installed capacity). This number drops significantly to the minimum guaranteed power from wind for large (>40%) penetrations. This minimum guaranteed power is of course zero for a single wind farm, but since the wind always blows somewhere, is larger than that for a larger area (ca 2% of installed capacity for wind power distributed over Europe). Read my thesis, if you want to know much more about it.
Which might be a bit surprising, since Søren Krohn, the guy who got an award for the site, is a die-hard Mac user. But I guess IE exists for the Mac too...
While it is nifty and plays great music, is extremely light (at least without the phone) and lasts quite long, the gripe I have with it is the very fragile connection to the phone. Quite frequently, the telephone will slightly bend the connection just long enough to cut off the player. It's really hard to not have it bend - the only thing yet where I get it reliably to work is a shirt pocket, with the mp3 player sticking up. Of course, this also goes wrong if I carry a backpack...
What it is? It's that little clip-on player for phones like the T68, playing on MMC cards. I got it for £27 at a fire sale (though shipping cost me slightly more than that...), but they are usually around $99.
I see this from a different angle than basically all of the responses posted here so far: I'm a (what I would consider) mediocre coder, who comes from the domain side, like I suppose the people are you're working with. I know a lot about the domain I'm working on, but have not had enough exposure to Java and coding in general - it comprises about 20-30% of my job, not enough to get _really_ up to speed. However, I'm the first one to admit my need for tutelage.
So, your answer is in the above: Tutor them, implement some of the XP stuff mentioned above (Pair Programming, code reviews, frequent builds, unit tests), and feel free to take over some of their assignements.
Of course, if I misread this and they're just lazy buggers, threaten them with management... and look more often over their shoulders.
Good point - this combined with the OQO from earlier this day should really make the OQO much more versatile (no more VGA screen limit).
No, they mean just the tower of the wind turbine. Usually these days, they are tubular (actually, slightly conical) steel towers, hollow on the inside, so that you can step up the ladder, circular staircase or elevator. (Try climbing a 60m ladder three or four times in a day, as the maintenance guys do - keeps one fit!)
These tubular steel towers reach heights of about 100 m (99m is the highest I've seen so far, on the DEWI test field).
In the olden days, lattice towers were used quite frequently (see all the old machine forests eg on San Gorgognio or Altamont passes). Nowadays, the nicer aesthetics plus the possibility to put the electrical gear inside has nearly completely replaced them. However, for getting significantly higher than 100m, they might be much more cost-effective (I've seen one 114m lattice tower wedged in a forest - yes, it's a stupid idea).
Plug of the day: If you're really interested in wind energy, try windpower.dk. This will tell you everything you wanted to know, and then some.
Well, reading the headline I thought, wow, what a good idea, trying to break the dependence on foreign oil by using more wind power!
Would be a good slogan for that, too...
(However, reading that on Slashdot should have told me!)
It is still a train since it has all the convenience features of a train: stops in the middle of the city, no check-in time, and you can move around in it. Think restaurant/bistro! Combine that with a frequency of every ten minutes (not so much for interregional travel) and it behaves like a train in most senses.
Also, try to do the math on a four hour trip with it: half an hour drive to the airport, 45 min (at least) for check-in, wait 20 min for take-off, get up to cruising height, cruise 50 min, get down, wait for your baggage, drive half an hour to town. Sound much better?
Well, you always could try to use it in the classical laptop way, with one screen being used as a virtual keyboard / mouse pad combo. Shouldn't be too hard to implement this?
Sorry for being sensible here, but you also could rig that thing so that you can only use it a certain amount of time before it gets really uncomfortable... Keeping you from developing carpal tunnel and other symptoms.
It also could be rigged to a clock, with a parental override, so that the kids have to stop playing, or suffer the consequences.
Nifty.
I just got myself an Ericsson T68, but without getting the GPRS service - I'm just not out of reach of a real internet connection often enough for it to be viable. Keep in mind that you always can use the normal internet my phone company offers: you can get the odd email on the phone even with 9.6kbps!
Just my 0.02kB...
Antimatter would be an energy storage medium, akin to hydrogen in the dreams of the hydrogen society. Remember, the antimatter has to be manufactured at (huge?) cost, just as the hydrogen that is burning so clean has to be produced somewhere, somehow.
Just my 0.02 rants.
Yeah right, wasn't that what people used to think in the 80ies hacking away at Cobol and not thinking too much about the Year 2000 issue?
Let me add to this.
I have seemingly the same machine, and the hinge covers went really fast (I carry it on my bike a lot, so that was nearly to be expected). However, somewhat later I sat on my parents porch in Germany (where I had bought the machine, since for some unknown reason the same computer was a couple hundreds euro cheaper there, even allowing for different sales tax), when a grass mite entered my display and died there. Yep, a small insect, size about 4x2 pixels. I could see it wiggle towards a large white patch on the screen, and then resting there, just left from the center.
So I call Dell Germany, where they tell me after some deliberation that this is not a warranty case. I'm pissed, but what can I do.
What I could do is to call Dell Denmark (where I live) just before the warranty went, also in connection with a couple of other small problems. They were much more helpful, sending a technician to the office and exchanging the display right away! I was happy to get that treatment, even though the repair technician had to come in three times due to different parts that were missing...
Now, the hinges are gone, and I'll have to get them repaired, along with the malfunctioning keyboard. Luckily, my company sponsored a ThinkPad (that 1400x1050 screen is flat gorgeous!), so I have a laptop while the other one is gone.
Would I get another Dell? Maybe. It clearly would depend on the specs of the machine, since their support is not better or worse than the support I saw from other companies.
I'm getting (all the time, full-screen capable) video from n24broadband.de. Now it's more analysis, but they have a synopsis every 15 minutes or so. This is amazing - they seem to be the only ones to hold up admirably. Of course, having only installed everything a few weeks ago helps... (get their stock while they're cheap!)
Surely, this is satire, isn't it?
;). Actually, starting up Konqueror from the KDE environment takes roughly as long as starting up IE5.5 from Windows98. This just means that a lot of the libraries is already preloaded - you pay for that with a longer start-up time until your system is useful at all. And have you ever waited for Outlook to load the MSHTML.dll? That also takes ages.
.so) in the widget subsystem used by every other application might actually be a good idea. Just hope that all programs are extremely stable, or the shared library will take everything down with one maladjusted application.
If not, let me throw in a couple of thoughts. Linux nowadays starts up much faster than Windows. If you use the graphical subsystem (X), it still is slightly faster in a typical environment (ie, my set-up
Point two: the software complexity. A group as loosely connected as the Linux kernel (sic!) hackers have to work on problems that are fairly well separated. Problems in one area shouldn't affect other areas, and GNU/Linux is doing a pretty good job at keeping different things different. There is nothing preventing people from using Linux without a nice point-and-click interface, if you don't need it. On the other hand, there is nothing preventing you from building a distro that preloads all necessary libraries and gives users the feeling of a fast browser start-up.
Complexity due to too large interdependencies between functionally unrelated areas might be (IANAWP (Windows Programmer)) one of the reasons why Windows has the instability it has. Ever thought of that?
Now, to finish this on a lighter note, having the xhtml.dll (or
Sorry, thorium is the fissionable material, not the coolant - that was helium...