$100,000 in batteries, and they couldn't use a microwave? Something's wrong there. When you can spend $1k on an inverter, and get a LARGE pure-sine unit that will handle a microwave without sweating, and another $1k will buy you enough batteries to run that for an hour straight, it's hard to believe that a $100,000 setup couldn't do it.
At the office, we have a bunch of Athlon64 3200+ machines that we built some time ago. They use Cool-N-Quiet, have a gig of memory, a 120-gig hard drive, a 6200 TurboCache video card, and have a 19" flat panel display. When we bought new UPSs, I took a kill-a-watt, plugged a machine AND the monitor in to it, and went through powering the machine up, logging in to a domain (and syncing roaming profile), web surfing, email, phone system login, the average stuff that our customer-service reps go through.
Remember, these figures include the flat panel. During two brief periods, I was able to get a 140-watt draw. During normal activity, power was around 100 watts, and when doing very little, total power was about 85 or 90 watts.
I have a P3/650 server with four hard drives, 512 megs, and no optical drive. With a Samba load, it draws about 65 watts from the wall. And yet, my Shuttle Via C3 system under a light load draws about 55 from the wall. My Asus C3 system draws about 60. I think that a large part of the reason is that the two C3 systems have REALLY cheap power supplies.
I also have a machine that peaks at just under a kilowatt, but that has 8 CPUs, 16 gigs of memory, and a big 15k RPM SCSI array...
Can you actually download 5 gigs in a month on Verizon's EVDO broadband????
Alright, that's pretty facetious. But the latency on the connection is high enough that surfind isn't what I would have expected it to be. Being spoiled by cable at home and a T3 at the office, the EVDO is a step down. Granted, it is a MASSIVE step UP in convenience!
... for more cars to remember individual preferences. Seat locations, temperature preferences, etc.. To a significant extent, it's a simple software approach, but one that car companies like to save for higher-end models to justify larger price tags. Instead of driving down the road adjusting mirrors and fiddling with radio stations, it could all be taken care of with one bit of input when you first get in the car.
I'll vote for a Linux firewall, like many of the other persons here - with one conditional. *If* your administrator is as comfortable administering a Linux firewall as he is the other products. If he's uncomfortable and unwilling to learn, it would be a poor choice.
You haven't mentioned how much traffic you handle, but even a very low-end server-class machine with Linux can handle some very impressive firewalling loads. On my core router, I used a dual-CPU machine simply because it's hard to find single-CPU machines with ECC memory. With stateful packet inspection and some fairly extensive rulesets, it's still rare to see it spend more than about 2% in system, or to see the load go above about 0.03. That's just for a "measly" 40 megabit line, which sees 10-20 megabits of HTTP and email serving, so even with relatively small packet sizes and high connection rates, it does a terrific job.
I don't know how much the other implementations might cost, but compared to what we were looking at, this was cheap enough that we bought another identical machine just to sit beneath it in case of catastrophic failure.
... doesn't have any education in it at all. He's just very good at graphics, and ended up doing the graphics on a number of medium- to big-name games. He's now the supervisor over his department.
He says about the same thing that everyone else in the game industry seems to say: You basically give up your life when you take the job. It doesn't matter how much work has to be done, marketing will determine the release date, and you WILL ship the game on that date - even if your entire team has to put in 16-hour days for half of a year straight.
I think I'd tell your cousin to pick another field...
Actually, I think that this would be far less abusive. Both in terms of working animals and animals raised for food, the amount of abuse imposed upon them is unbelievable. But once the animal is meant for transplantation (and hence, worth hundres of thousands, instead of hundreds), things will be entirely different. And when you look at the difference between getting sloppilly and ineffectively hit with a "stunner" by an uncaring migrant worker in a meat-packing plant then finishing the process still conscious.... and being anesthetized and dying in your sleep on an O.R. table, I think this would be the biggest step UP in the history of man's dealings with animals.
First, they'd have to figure out what was going on. That eliminates 99.9% of the people with unsecured wireless. Then, they'd have to actually call the police. That eliminates 90% of the.1% left. Then the police would actually have to care enough to do something about it, which drops the figure by another 99%. Those are the kinds of odds of winning a lottery, I think.
Seriously. Some time ago, my credit card number was used to call porn lines. On the statement, it had numbers to call to dispute the charges. I did, and my money was refunded. One of the companies gave me the phone number that the perp called from, which was easily traced back to an address.
I went to the police and said "Look, you've got someone using stolen credit card numbers. Here's his phone number, his address, and proof. The companies he called may even have recorded evidence." I was told that since my money was refunded, I wasn't a victim, and they didn't want to deal with it. If they won't get off of their butt when HANDED a credit-card scammer, I can't imagine they'd get very excited about someone using bandwidth, either.
Just get one of these. An external hard drive with built-in wireless networking and a built-in bittorrent client. No computer needed to download.
Set it up, let it leach off of an unsecured wireless network until the owner catches on, then switch to another one. No DMCA letters (at least not to YOUR door), and gaming performance on *your* network won't suffer at all!
Yes, that's bad in several ways. But it's still an interesting/funny thought!
If those go out, they are attributed to wear and tear in a harsh environment, but it's a lot harder to say that a software algorithm just got worn out...
I just want it so I can sit in the rear seat and watch a movie, play video games, work, whatever. Hey, put some "limo-black" tint on the rear windows, recline the seats, and get jiggy while your car cruises down the highway. You can't beat that.
Running out of air... interesting... I wonder how much of an effect it would have on the atmosphere if there were 10,000,000 compressed air tanks in the world at 4500 PSI, with enough volume to make these cars work...
If this actually comes into being, there are some really neat side-benefits of this sort of thing. Principally, as compressed air is not only easy to generate, it can be generated *AND* stored locally. That means that it can be done via "renewable" energy (solar and wind) *as they are available*.
As electricity is easy to generate locally - but not easy to store in sufficient quantity - you can't really have solar panels that will always be available to charge your electric car. However, you *can* have solar panels which fill your compressed-air tank, and then refill your can whenever you need.
Overall, that means a completely petroleum-free energy source for cars. Even if you don't believe that man is behind global warming, the thought of removing most of the automotive-produced pollution has got to be an appealing thought, with the idea of never paying a utility company (gas OR electric) to refuel your can again as a nice bonus.
Brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen. Brilliant ideas which are economically and realistically feasable are a completely different story. Then, you have to match the person with the brilliant, feasable idea with someone who can make the business actually work. If you don't have all of those in place, it's a guaranteed failure.
I currently have a Core 2 Duo 6600 with 4 gigs of RAM, a couple of Raptors and a few 400-gig drives for bulk storage. The video card is a 7900 GS. To make it a "dream" machine, I think all I'd have to do would be to add some more disk drives.
Sure, I could go for a Core 2 Extreme, or even for the 8-socket, dual-core Opteron with 16 gigs from my office, or SLI video cards, etc., But the speed benefits to me would be pretty minor.
If Adobe would get with the times (or at least with the times from 10 years ago), and release a 64-bit version of Photoshop, then I'd wish for more memory... but there's no reason to wish for something you can't use.
Use a higher-octane fuel, advance the timing, and use a block/head that sheds heat more quickly.
OK, now I've read TFA. It looks like they're injecting ethanol not just for the octane, but for cooling. Previous far-out turbocharging systems have injected water for cooling, ethanol is a step over that.
The ideas, though, aren't really new. Back in WW2, before the USA entered the war, the German planes significantly out-performed the British planes. Suddenly, baffled German pilots found that the British planes were pulling away, climbing and flying faster. They knew that they hadn't had new engines installed, it wasn't until they found a downed plane that they found the source: The USA, while not technically entered into the war, had been supplying fuel to Britain which had an octane rating about 40 points higher - allowing more compression and power without the knock.
Blending fuels isn't exactly new, either - top-fuel dragsters run about 97%-98% nitromethane, with a small amount of racing fuel added to keep things from getting too rough. In any event, now that I'm done shooting down their claims about being so revolutionary, I think that they should keep up the good work. Any improvements in this area are very good ones for all of us.
My suspicion is that you don't necessarily get the shorter line with the RFID, but that you will get a MUCH longer line if your RFID doesn't work...
That's based on a trip back east a few years ago where the travel agent booked the tickets with my wife's maiden, not married name. She was able to get the tickets by producing various documents, but each time through security, we would be told "No, the two of you step over here, please." Let's just say that it was a good thing that we arrived early.:-(
They don't all have to be like that. A LOT of people really liked the Libretto, which if I recall, got something like 5 or 7 hours on a battery. The unusable keyboard is your only really viable complaint, very few small machines get the keyboard right.
A fast CPU isn't necessary for a lot of everyday tasks. Isn't this Slashdot, where people boast about how nicely they can surf the web and do email on pitifully old hardware?
Portability is key for some people. When you *have* to carry something around all the time (especially for "just in case" situations), a very small slowdown in speed is well worth the benefits in having it with you all of the time.
Is there anyone out there that actually believed the published MTBF figures, even BEFORE these articles came out?
It's hard to take someone seriously when they claim that their drives have a 100+ year MTBF, especially since precious few are still functional after 1/10th of that much use. To make it better, many drives are NOT rated for continuous use, but only a certain number of hours per day. I didn't know that anyone EVER believed the MTBF B.S..
I thought about that as well - a friend of mine is a glider fanatic, and uses an iPaq hooked to a GPS to record in-flight data. When he gets back, he has some really nifty software to overlay the flight path on various maps, and do all sorts of calculations for him.
But, the article says that it will serve as a "digital data recorder, nicknamed 'black boxes' by the general media." That gives me the impression that they really do want this to be the plane's main black box.
Now that I think about it, though, there is one upside to this: If this brings the cost down by an order of magnitude (or more), then a lot of smaller, personal planes which don't have a "black box" right now may be able to afford one. Probably not of the same quality that you'd find on a 747, but still, some of them may survive a crash.:-)
You must be new here. That's the only possible reason to jump to silly conclusions.
Show me how to protect an iPod in the same way that a black box is protected. Since the internals of an iPod are not made to anywhere near the heat, shock, chemical, or other requirements of a "black box", then by the time you've provided "proper protection", you will have taken up so much of your cabin space (and perhaps used so much weight) that you could have just used a real "black box" to begin with.
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$100,000 in batteries, and they couldn't use a microwave? Something's wrong there. When you can spend $1k on an inverter, and get a LARGE pure-sine unit that will handle a microwave without sweating, and another $1k will buy you enough batteries to run that for an hour straight, it's hard to believe that a $100,000 setup couldn't do it.
At the office, we have a bunch of Athlon64 3200+ machines that we built some time ago. They use Cool-N-Quiet, have a gig of memory, a 120-gig hard drive, a 6200 TurboCache video card, and have a 19" flat panel display. When we bought new UPSs, I took a kill-a-watt, plugged a machine AND the monitor in to it, and went through powering the machine up, logging in to a domain (and syncing roaming profile), web surfing, email, phone system login, the average stuff that our customer-service reps go through.
Remember, these figures include the flat panel. During two brief periods, I was able to get a 140-watt draw. During normal activity, power was around 100 watts, and when doing very little, total power was about 85 or 90 watts.
I have a P3/650 server with four hard drives, 512 megs, and no optical drive. With a Samba load, it draws about 65 watts from the wall. And yet, my Shuttle Via C3 system under a light load draws about 55 from the wall. My Asus C3 system draws about 60. I think that a large part of the reason is that the two C3 systems have REALLY cheap power supplies.
I also have a machine that peaks at just under a kilowatt, but that has 8 CPUs, 16 gigs of memory, and a big 15k RPM SCSI array...
Can you actually download 5 gigs in a month on Verizon's EVDO broadband????
Alright, that's pretty facetious. But the latency on the connection is high enough that surfind isn't what I would have expected it to be. Being spoiled by cable at home and a T3 at the office, the EVDO is a step down. Granted, it is a MASSIVE step UP in convenience!
I'll vote for a Linux firewall, like many of the other persons here - with one conditional. *If* your administrator is as comfortable administering a Linux firewall as he is the other products. If he's uncomfortable and unwilling to learn, it would be a poor choice.
You haven't mentioned how much traffic you handle, but even a very low-end server-class machine with Linux can handle some very impressive firewalling loads. On my core router, I used a dual-CPU machine simply because it's hard to find single-CPU machines with ECC memory. With stateful packet inspection and some fairly extensive rulesets, it's still rare to see it spend more than about 2% in system, or to see the load go above about 0.03. That's just for a "measly" 40 megabit line, which sees 10-20 megabits of HTTP and email serving, so even with relatively small packet sizes and high connection rates, it does a terrific job.
I don't know how much the other implementations might cost, but compared to what we were looking at, this was cheap enough that we bought another identical machine just to sit beneath it in case of catastrophic failure.
steve
He says about the same thing that everyone else in the game industry seems to say: You basically give up your life when you take the job. It doesn't matter how much work has to be done, marketing will determine the release date, and you WILL ship the game on that date - even if your entire team has to put in 16-hour days for half of a year straight.
I think I'd tell your cousin to pick another field...
Actually, I think that this would be far less abusive. Both in terms of working animals and animals raised for food, the amount of abuse imposed upon them is unbelievable. But once the animal is meant for transplantation (and hence, worth hundres of thousands, instead of hundreds), things will be entirely different. And when you look at the difference between getting sloppilly and ineffectively hit with a "stunner" by an uncaring migrant worker in a meat-packing plant then finishing the process still conscious.... and being anesthetized and dying in your sleep on an O.R. table, I think this would be the biggest step UP in the history of man's dealings with animals.
steve
Better yet... I tracked down his wife and told HER. :-)
steve
First, they'd have to figure out what was going on. That eliminates 99.9% of the people with unsecured wireless. Then, they'd have to actually call the police. That eliminates 90% of the
Seriously. Some time ago, my credit card number was used to call porn lines. On the statement, it had numbers to call to dispute the charges. I did, and my money was refunded. One of the companies gave me the phone number that the perp called from, which was easily traced back to an address.
I went to the police and said "Look, you've got someone using stolen credit card numbers. Here's his phone number, his address, and proof. The companies he called may even have recorded evidence." I was told that since my money was refunded, I wasn't a victim, and they didn't want to deal with it. If they won't get off of their butt when HANDED a credit-card scammer, I can't imagine they'd get very excited about someone using bandwidth, either.
Just get one of these. An external hard drive with built-in wireless networking and a built-in bittorrent client. No computer needed to download.
Set it up, let it leach off of an unsecured wireless network until the owner catches on, then switch to another one. No DMCA letters (at least not to YOUR door), and gaming performance on *your* network won't suffer at all!
Yes, that's bad in several ways. But it's still an interesting/funny thought!
If those go out, they are attributed to wear and tear in a harsh environment, but it's a lot harder to say that a software algorithm just got worn out...
I just want it so I can sit in the rear seat and watch a movie, play video games, work, whatever. Hey, put some "limo-black" tint on the rear windows, recline the seats, and get jiggy while your car cruises down the highway. You can't beat that.
"Why doesn't anyone acknowledge that it takes more energy to produce a solar cell than it will EVER produce in it's lifetime?"
Maybe because it isn't true?
That was true at one point, but new cells have their "energy payback" in as much as 5 years to as low as a few months, depending on the type of cell.
Running out of air... interesting... I wonder how much of an effect it would have on the atmosphere if there were 10,000,000 compressed air tanks in the world at 4500 PSI, with enough volume to make these cars work...
Ah, well. It's too late for me to do any math.
If this actually comes into being, there are some really neat side-benefits of this sort of thing. Principally, as compressed air is not only easy to generate, it can be generated *AND* stored locally. That means that it can be done via "renewable" energy (solar and wind) *as they are available*.
As electricity is easy to generate locally - but not easy to store in sufficient quantity - you can't really have solar panels that will always be available to charge your electric car. However, you *can* have solar panels which fill your compressed-air tank, and then refill your can whenever you need.
Overall, that means a completely petroleum-free energy source for cars. Even if you don't believe that man is behind global warming, the thought of removing most of the automotive-produced pollution has got to be an appealing thought, with the idea of never paying a utility company (gas OR electric) to refuel your can again as a nice bonus.
Brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen. Brilliant ideas which are economically and realistically feasable are a completely different story. Then, you have to match the person with the brilliant, feasable idea with someone who can make the business actually work. If you don't have all of those in place, it's a guaranteed failure.
I currently have a Core 2 Duo 6600 with 4 gigs of RAM, a couple of Raptors and a few 400-gig drives for bulk storage. The video card is a 7900 GS. To make it a "dream" machine, I think all I'd have to do would be to add some more disk drives.
Sure, I could go for a Core 2 Extreme, or even for the 8-socket, dual-core Opteron with 16 gigs from my office, or SLI video cards, etc., But the speed benefits to me would be pretty minor.
If Adobe would get with the times (or at least with the times from 10 years ago), and release a 64-bit version of Photoshop, then I'd wish for more memory... but there's no reason to wish for something you can't use.
Use a higher-octane fuel, advance the timing, and use a block/head that sheds heat more quickly.
OK, now I've read TFA. It looks like they're injecting ethanol not just for the octane, but for cooling. Previous far-out turbocharging systems have injected water for cooling, ethanol is a step over that.
The ideas, though, aren't really new. Back in WW2, before the USA entered the war, the German planes significantly out-performed the British planes. Suddenly, baffled German pilots found that the British planes were pulling away, climbing and flying faster. They knew that they hadn't had new engines installed, it wasn't until they found a downed plane that they found the source: The USA, while not technically entered into the war, had been supplying fuel to Britain which had an octane rating about 40 points higher - allowing more compression and power without the knock.
Blending fuels isn't exactly new, either - top-fuel dragsters run about 97%-98% nitromethane, with a small amount of racing fuel added to keep things from getting too rough. In any event, now that I'm done shooting down their claims about being so revolutionary, I think that they should keep up the good work. Any improvements in this area are very good ones for all of us.
My suspicion is that you don't necessarily get the shorter line with the RFID, but that you will get a MUCH longer line if your RFID doesn't work...
:-(
That's based on a trip back east a few years ago where the travel agent booked the tickets with my wife's maiden, not married name. She was able to get the tickets by producing various documents, but each time through security, we would be told "No, the two of you step over here, please." Let's just say that it was a good thing that we arrived early.
They don't all have to be like that. A LOT of people really liked the Libretto, which if I recall, got something like 5 or 7 hours on a battery. The unusable keyboard is your only really viable complaint, very few small machines get the keyboard right.
A fast CPU isn't necessary for a lot of everyday tasks. Isn't this Slashdot, where people boast about how nicely they can surf the web and do email on pitifully old hardware?
Portability is key for some people. When you *have* to carry something around all the time (especially for "just in case" situations), a very small slowdown in speed is well worth the benefits in having it with you all of the time.
It's only hard to find if you're far away from Mexico, and/or don't want to visit the Mexican markets...
Is there anyone out there that actually believed the published MTBF figures, even BEFORE these articles came out?
It's hard to take someone seriously when they claim that their drives have a 100+ year MTBF, especially since precious few are still functional after 1/10th of that much use. To make it better, many drives are NOT rated for continuous use, but only a certain number of hours per day. I didn't know that anyone EVER believed the MTBF B.S..
I thought about that as well - a friend of mine is a glider fanatic, and uses an iPaq hooked to a GPS to record in-flight data. When he gets back, he has some really nifty software to overlay the flight path on various maps, and do all sorts of calculations for him.
:-)
But, the article says that it will serve as a "digital data recorder, nicknamed 'black boxes' by the general media." That gives me the impression that they really do want this to be the plane's main black box.
Now that I think about it, though, there is one upside to this: If this brings the cost down by an order of magnitude (or more), then a lot of smaller, personal planes which don't have a "black box" right now may be able to afford one. Probably not of the same quality that you'd find on a 747, but still, some of them may survive a crash.
You must be new here. That's the only possible reason to jump to silly conclusions.
Show me how to protect an iPod in the same way that a black box is protected. Since the internals of an iPod are not made to anywhere near the heat, shock, chemical, or other requirements of a "black box", then by the time you've provided "proper protection", you will have taken up so much of your cabin space (and perhaps used so much weight) that you could have just used a real "black box" to begin with.