I have a second battery for my PowerBook, but I never use it in the removable drive bay. Apple did a very good job making it so that you can change your battery while the computer is sleeping, so I just use it until it goes to sleep from lack of power, and then I swap bateries. You have a good 10-15 seconds to switch. I know that this isn't the case on my sister's iBook though, as you need a screwdriver to remove the battery...
Oops, I didn't notice you were talking about an iBook. I'm using a 333mhz lombard. I don't know what the battery life differences are between the lombard and an iBook.
In linux running 'noflushd', using the screen at the lowest brightness, and turning off auto save in xemacs, I can code for a good 4.5 hours without running out of battery. I have my 'pmud' scripts set to have the hard drive spin down after 5 minutes. Disabling ethernet increases the runtime some, and a USB mouse will take a good 20 minute bite out of the total runtime. There is new kernel support for low power usage on PPC that I'm not yet trying, and I'm hoping that will increase my battery life even more.
You're right though about the testing and debugging. gcc eats the battery (and toasts my lap).
Oh, my typical program set is 7 xterms, apache, mysqld, konqueror and xemacs.
The surface area of the roof of your garage doesn't collect enough sunshine (Even if you never had a cloudy day) enough to power your car if you drive more then a few miles a day.
It also says that their device can support sustained transfer rates of 100MB/sec and that it's "thousands of times faster" than disks. With 3 striped disks over a 2Gb Fibre Channel link I can get 180MB/sec sustained. There is a huge difference between twice as fast and thousands of times as fast. I doubt that even their seek times are more then 10s of times as fast. The seek times may even be slower if you restrict your hard disk to reads and writes on the outer 4 GB of the platters on a 15,000rpm drive. Considering that harddrives are a proven technology, and hot swapable, and expandable to the terrabyte range, I think I'll stick with the disks.
They were my least favorite part of that Black & White game.. If they work anything like that in Mozilla then why bother? With your other hand on the keyboard you can just use keyboard shortcuts which take one press instead of opposing movements. The only thing I ever use the mouse for is clicking on a link anyway. Everything else involoving the mouse is so unnatural to do with your hands. If it weren't for graphical web browsers and quake, I would never use my mouse at all. It may just be that I have really big hands, but I just find resting my hand on a mouse (they're all too small) makes my hand curl unnaturally. I don't even want to get in to the scroll wheel...
I agree about the motherboard specs. I never would have believed a conspiracy. If the chip has a lower core voltage then it is quite possible and even likely that the board manufacturers didn't build the board to provide the new lower voltage, even if the bridge chip supports it.
I don't think that Intel is evil, I just think that their marketing department has made some mistakes lately.
No, it's called a marketing mistake. They should have been truthful in advertising, and then they could have been raking in the dough on the new P3, but now they have to cripple it to save face. It's not capatilism, It's stupidity.
It's especially unfortunate, bucause it'll be a long time if ever before we see another processor that is both as fast as the new P3, and uses only.5 watts. The good thing is that they're playing it right in the corporate/embedded space where they know they can't pull the wool over people's eyes. Intel would have been in serious trouble if they had actually canned the P3 completely. They would have lost alot of business to IBM and Motorola and been left with only the rapidly declining consumer market.
Though it may seem dumb to people like us (geeks), the central vac is probably more apealing to the housewife that is going to be moving in then CAT5 would be. Especially when you consider how cheap 802.11b equipment is, you should leave the central vac. You'll more likely lower the value of the house if you change it into CAT5 conduit.
Unless it's broken. That's a whole different story.
You'd think that he'd charge less then $28 considering he's a complete idiot! Using liquid hydrogen to power jets is just one of his ideas, and it could be an OK idea. His grand plan, which is the subject of his book, is not to power just jets with hydrogen, but that he thinks we should replace all our power generating machines with hydrogen fueled devices. This includes nuclear power plants. Where does he propose we get all that hydrogen from? Solar and wind power. He says we'd only have to cover 0.1% of the surface of North america with windmills to generate the power. When he comes up with that number it seems like he fails to take into account that you are going to get far less energy out of the hydrogen then you put into refining and condensing it. There is 18.8 million square miles of area in North America, so he is proposing we build enough windmills to cover at least 18,800 square miles. The guy's a loon.
I have never once implied that we were 'helping' by maintaining the status quo. My only point was that wanting less for ourselves helps them about as much as eating that last bite of your apple helps starving people 10,000 miles away.
People today don't have the stomach for what it would take to set up a sustainable colony on Mars with today's technology. In the 1700's when europeans crossed the Atlantic they lost numerous colonists and expiditions before one took. And that was going to a place on the same planet where they know had to potential to sustain life. Without further information do you really think we could make a perminantly sustainable Mars colony with todays technology, and not loose a single person? Imagine how fast people of today would can the project after they saw the deaths of the colonists on TV a few hours later.
So progress should stop until all people can have the same technology?
I bet you're one of those people who thinks that we should shutdown "sweat shop" type places in these countries so that these people can't have jobs at all...
All communities have to start their moderization somewhere. Previous generations in the civilization you live in had poor living conditions and poor labor conditions at some point in their history. They worked toward the technology you have now. The communities/countries you speek of aren't unequal to the rest of us they're just behand the times. Our progress will pull them forward, but if we stand still we don't help them at all.
One last thing: if you "believe in it", why are you reading slashdot and not out digging a well, or convincing people to leave their cultural homeland to go somewhere where there is a hope of the land supporting them?
In my hometown there is a rail line that hasn't been used since the 50's or so. Recently, some construction workers showed up and started fixing the tracks so that they could be used again. There was an emergency town meeting and they quickly voted to not allow the railroad to run again. When they delivered the news to the railroad company they were basically told to fuck off because the rail line was under federal juristiction and they had no say in the matter. It was a great outcome, because probably only 2% of the town cared either way but the ones that cared had gotten themselves elected.
This whole cell tower situation reminded me of this little story, because it's the small portion of the community that cares wether there are cell towers around that actually expend the effort to get elected to some crappy local government position. Most of the time they run uncontested, or against someone with the same obnoxious opinions that are so unpopular that they only way that they can get what they want is by running for local office and winning. They are usually opposed to any change to their town because it wouldn't be that same as where they grew up anymore so they stand in the way of all proposals wether they are good or bad. Maybe if we had direct representation on the local level for issues like this things would be better (I know in my area that there are more people that want the new cell services then people who don't want the antennas), but if people don't care enough about these issues to speak up or go to town meetings, then they probably wouldn't go to vote either... Then again maybe town governments elsewhere aren't as screwed up as where I live.
Between the houses on Main street not getting painted because they can't figure out which color is 'historically appropriate', and the crappy cell coverage I'm starting to get a little pissed off. At this rate we'll either be stuck in whatever time period they deem historically apropriate and not make any progress, or the town will slowly decay due to process delays.
What if your drive detects it's an audio disc and then fails reading the TOC... all in firmware before the software gets a chance. You'll just get "drive not ready" or "please insert a disc" messages all day.
I would patent it myself if it were a patentable invention. I'm not saying that I couldn't get a patent.. I'm just saying that legally such a patent should be invalid.
It is obvious to anyone who is skilled in the art of network and security programming that you would have to set up a server that would authenticate with the browser to ensure that the browser supported a protection flag, and then send the document containing the flag. It is also obvious that the browser would have to disable any functionality that would allow digital copying of said content upon reciving a document with that flag (or tag or whatever). It is also obvious that the technology could be implemneted as a plugin to existing browsers.
Since I can pull all of that out of my ass, and it's here for everyone to see, it is unpatentable... unless such a technique for copy protecting web sites or similar network distributed documents is already patented. Even then I would argue that it's still obvious, but the case would be less clear cut...
The US government does not ban books. If a book is banned in the US it has do be done by the local governments in each town/county. A book will never get banned in every town, and it being banned just means that it's not freely available in the library or allowed in schools, so you can always buy it or go read it in the next town over's library.
In fact the only niches for patented 'standard extensions' all involve commerce.
And copy protection.
In 6-8 months when someone patents a meta tag that disables the "View Source" button and disables Copy/Paste, if the PTO doesn't think it's an obvious invention send them a link to this comment.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a second battery for my PowerBook, but I never use it in the removable drive bay. Apple did a very good job making it so that you can change your battery while the computer is sleeping, so I just use it until it goes to sleep from lack of power, and then I swap bateries. You have a good 10-15 seconds to switch. I know that this isn't the case on my sister's iBook though, as you need a screwdriver to remove the battery...
Oops, I didn't notice you were talking about an iBook. I'm using a 333mhz lombard. I don't know what the battery life differences are between the lombard and an iBook.
In linux running 'noflushd', using the screen at the lowest brightness, and turning off auto save in xemacs, I can code for a good 4.5 hours without running out of battery. I have my 'pmud' scripts set to have the hard drive spin down after 5 minutes. Disabling ethernet increases the runtime some, and a USB mouse will take a good 20 minute bite out of the total runtime. There is new kernel support for low power usage on PPC that I'm not yet trying, and I'm hoping that will increase my battery life even more.
You're right though about the testing and debugging. gcc eats the battery (and toasts my lap).
Oh, my typical program set is 7 xterms, apache, mysqld, konqueror and xemacs.
The surface area of the roof of your garage doesn't collect enough sunshine (Even if you never had a cloudy day) enough to power your car if you drive more then a few miles a day.
It also says that their device can support sustained transfer rates of 100MB/sec and that it's "thousands of times faster" than disks. With 3 striped disks over a 2Gb Fibre Channel link I can get 180MB/sec sustained. There is a huge difference between twice as fast and thousands of times as fast. I doubt that even their seek times are more then 10s of times as fast. The seek times may even be slower if you restrict your hard disk to reads and writes on the outer 4 GB of the platters on a 15,000rpm drive. Considering that harddrives are a proven technology, and hot swapable, and expandable to the terrabyte range, I think I'll stick with the disks.
Maybe they are comparing it to floppy disks?
Blech.
They were my least favorite part of that Black & White game.. If they work anything like that in Mozilla then why bother? With your other hand on the keyboard you can just use keyboard shortcuts which take one press instead of opposing movements. The only thing I ever use the mouse for is clicking on a link anyway. Everything else involoving the mouse is so unnatural to do with your hands. If it weren't for graphical web browsers and quake, I would never use my mouse at all. It may just be that I have really big hands, but I just find resting my hand on a mouse (they're all too small) makes my hand curl unnaturally. I don't even want to get in to the scroll wheel...
I agree about the motherboard specs. I never would have believed a conspiracy. If the chip has a lower core voltage then it is quite possible and even likely that the board manufacturers didn't build the board to provide the new lower voltage, even if the bridge chip supports it.
I don't think that Intel is evil, I just think that their marketing department has made some mistakes lately.
No, it's called a marketing mistake. They should have been truthful in advertising, and then they could have been raking in the dough on the new P3, but now they have to cripple it to save face. It's not capatilism, It's stupidity.
.5 watts. The good thing is that they're playing it right in the corporate/embedded space where they know they can't pull the wool over people's eyes. Intel would have been in serious trouble if they had actually canned the P3 completely. They would have lost alot of business to IBM and Motorola and been left with only the rapidly declining consumer market.
It's especially unfortunate, bucause it'll be a long time if ever before we see another processor that is both as fast as the new P3, and uses only
The problem is that these things only catch fire if you keep them under a blanket, or in your bag while they are plugged in.
Though it may seem dumb to people like us (geeks), the central vac is probably more apealing to the housewife that is going to be moving in then CAT5 would be. Especially when you consider how cheap 802.11b equipment is, you should leave the central vac. You'll more likely lower the value of the house if you change it into CAT5 conduit.
Unless it's broken. That's a whole different story.
Oops.. I just read it again. He actually said we'd need 0.5% of the area... That's 94,000 square miles... Even worse.
You'd think that he'd charge less then $28 considering he's a complete idiot! Using liquid hydrogen to power jets is just one of his ideas, and it could be an OK idea. His grand plan, which is the subject of his book, is not to power just jets with hydrogen, but that he thinks we should replace all our power generating machines with hydrogen fueled devices. This includes nuclear power plants. Where does he propose we get all that hydrogen from? Solar and wind power. He says we'd only have to cover 0.1% of the surface of North america with windmills to generate the power. When he comes up with that number it seems like he fails to take into account that you are going to get far less energy out of the hydrogen then you put into refining and condensing it. There is 18.8 million square miles of area in North America, so he is proposing we build enough windmills to cover at least 18,800 square miles. The guy's a loon.
#6 is missing an part... They give you a stack of books with the WRONG information in it!
That sucks.
I have never once implied that we were 'helping' by maintaining the status quo. My only point was that wanting less for ourselves helps them about as much as eating that last bite of your apple helps starving people 10,000 miles away.
People today don't have the stomach for what it would take to set up a sustainable colony on Mars with today's technology. In the 1700's when europeans crossed the Atlantic they lost numerous colonists and expiditions before one took. And that was going to a place on the same planet where they know had to potential to sustain life. Without further information do you really think we could make a perminantly sustainable Mars colony with todays technology, and not loose a single person? Imagine how fast people of today would can the project after they saw the deaths of the colonists on TV a few hours later.
Yeah, exactly, now wouldn't it be cool if it were cellphone sized and transmitted the images at 384k?
So progress should stop until all people can have the same technology?
I bet you're one of those people who thinks that we should shutdown "sweat shop" type places in these countries so that these people can't have jobs at all...
All communities have to start their moderization somewhere. Previous generations in the civilization you live in had poor living conditions and poor labor conditions at some point in their history. They worked toward the technology you have now. The communities/countries you speek of aren't unequal to the rest of us they're just behand the times. Our progress will pull them forward, but if we stand still we don't help them at all.
One last thing: if you "believe in it", why are you reading slashdot and not out digging a well, or convincing people to leave their cultural homeland to go somewhere where there is a hope of the land supporting them?
Wouldn't it be cool if you had a digital camera that stored it's pictures on your computer's hard drive at home...
In my hometown there is a rail line that hasn't been used since the 50's or so. Recently, some construction workers showed up and started fixing the tracks so that they could be used again. There was an emergency town meeting and they quickly voted to not allow the railroad to run again. When they delivered the news to the railroad company they were basically told to fuck off because the rail line was under federal juristiction and they had no say in the matter. It was a great outcome, because probably only 2% of the town cared either way but the ones that cared had gotten themselves elected.
This whole cell tower situation reminded me of this little story, because it's the small portion of the community that cares wether there are cell towers around that actually expend the effort to get elected to some crappy local government position. Most of the time they run uncontested, or against someone with the same obnoxious opinions that are so unpopular that they only way that they can get what they want is by running for local office and winning. They are usually opposed to any change to their town because it wouldn't be that same as where they grew up anymore so they stand in the way of all proposals wether they are good or bad. Maybe if we had direct representation on the local level for issues like this things would be better (I know in my area that there are more people that want the new cell services then people who don't want the antennas), but if people don't care enough about these issues to speak up or go to town meetings, then they probably wouldn't go to vote either... Then again maybe town governments elsewhere aren't as screwed up as where I live.
Between the houses on Main street not getting painted because they can't figure out which color is 'historically appropriate', and the crappy cell coverage I'm starting to get a little pissed off. At this rate we'll either be stuck in whatever time period they deem historically apropriate and not make any progress, or the town will slowly decay due to process delays.
So:
Other people in the world suffer, so therefore I should stop wanting better for myself?
I'm failing to grasp your logic.
What if your drive detects it's an audio disc and then fails reading the TOC... all in firmware before the software gets a chance. You'll just get "drive not ready" or "please insert a disc" messages all day.
I would patent it myself if it were a patentable invention. I'm not saying that I couldn't get a patent.. I'm just saying that legally such a patent should be invalid.
It is obvious to anyone who is skilled in the art of network and security programming that you would have to set up a server that would authenticate with the browser to ensure that the browser supported a protection flag, and then send the document containing the flag. It is also obvious that the browser would have to disable any functionality that would allow digital copying of said content upon reciving a document with that flag (or tag or whatever). It is also obvious that the technology could be implemneted as a plugin to existing browsers.
Since I can pull all of that out of my ass, and it's here for everyone to see, it is unpatentable... unless such a technique for copy protecting web sites or similar network distributed documents is already patented. Even then I would argue that it's still obvious, but the case would be less clear cut...
The US government does not ban books. If a book is banned in the US it has do be done by the local governments in each town/county. A book will never get banned in every town, and it being banned just means that it's not freely available in the library or allowed in schools, so you can always buy it or go read it in the next town over's library.
In fact the only niches for patented 'standard extensions' all involve commerce.
And copy protection.
In 6-8 months when someone patents a meta tag that disables the "View Source" button and disables Copy/Paste, if the PTO doesn't think it's an obvious invention send them a link to this comment.