Of course you can reform CO2 and water into methane and oxygen, but that still requires a lot of energy. Good thing is: the energy can be thermal. You'd still need a tankful of oxidizer and fuel. Nah, it's much simpler to have a scuba tank with you.
Sweetheart, you're commenting on a fictional device. A pool builder won't want to put anyone underwater with a fictional device as the only means of life support.
That may sound OK to a non-engineer, but if one is an engineer, then one knows that if you're developing multiple technologies from scratch, all at once, it will be a big project and it will take a long time. Just look at how long, and how many people it took to turn the groundbreaking Gravity Probe B into reality. That is some top-notch, unique engineering, it took dozens of people a half of a century to accomplish.
This mask would need a whole bunch of new technologies: new batteries, new motors, new turbines, water transport with very low friction losses, etc. It may be doable, but unless someone shows me a long string of graduate degrees obtained while this was being worked on, I call it a big fat bullshit.
Engineering - sometimes it's ultra-hard, and most of you have no clue.
The idea isn't even all that interesting. It's pure fiction, and it has been rehashed in sci-fi for way, way longer than I am alive. This is downright booooring.
I concur. That thing exists only as a digital model and renderings of the same. Maybe they did some rapid prototyping and have plastic mockups. It's a bunch of bullshit, in other words. And someone stupid at Slashdot picked it up and went with it. If those people take investments, I consider it an investment scam.
You're making up problems. The way it would be done in practice is:
1. Set up a current-measuring system that internally counts the elementary charges. This is sufficient to measure real-life amps in terms of real-life e.
2. Tweak the value of e in Coulombs to make things work out:)
It all only makes a difference if you do things by hand. When you do engineering drawings, the CAD system handles all that for you and it doesn't matter how evenly things divide out. When it's made in quantity, it's machined using various CNC systems, and those don't care about it either. Maybe a machinist would, if they use the old way of doing things and don't have numerical readouts.
That it varies as a whole is of no consequence. What matters is the differential variations in weight. Something as simple as lubricant outgassing will affect the results a whole lot - remember that they have the kilogram's uncertainty down to a couple dozen ppb IIRC. Basically, such a scale has to be zeroed before each weighing, and to do that you need to lift the weight off of it.
Agreed: Just look at any random american fast food chain. If you want to get the same amount of calories from a hamburger vs. a salad-based, much healthier meal, the price difference is anywhere between 2-4x. So eating well definitely costs more.
GPL doesn't limit the negative actions you can take if someone exercises their GPL rights. For example, IIRC if you're a RHEL customer with a subscription and you leak their RPMs or SRPMs, even if they are subject to GPL, your subscription is terminated and you're often banned for life from ever becoming their customer again. Seriously.
Myself, I'd absolutely love to run RHEL or CentOS on a desktop if I were using Linux on a desktop. You don't have to worry about things becoming fucked up with upgrades. For the few things I test on Linux, I always run CentOS in a VM, but my daily desktop runs on OS X.
At the most basic level, there are no barriers at all. RedHat's self-support subscription (~$300 annually per server) gives you access to their non-public knowledge base. It fully applies to CentOS, there's nothing either RedHat or CentOS or you would need to do to use it.
I don't think it's the problem with the language proper, just with the hopeless standard C library. Nobody is forced to use it naked, though. Either roll your own wrapper, or use something already made like Dave Hanson's code from C Interfaces and Implementations.
Minor nitpick: Photo CD contains a standard ISO filesystem with some proprietary digital image files stored on it. Quite early on, every CD contained PC-DOS-based image viewer software as well, so viewing wasn't an issue if you had a CD ROM reader. Most people simply didn't have CD-ROM drives in their machines, and even then the early drives were slow. I vividly remember a Philips reader that was an adaptation of their fairly bulky portable audio player, running at 1.5x speed (and about 1.5x the volume of a VHS cassette).
PhotoCD images contain multiple resolution variants of the picture, since image resampling on old computers was slower than simple reading of the appropriately sized bitmap image from the CD.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what happens when you get a designer running loose without an engineer to rein them in. Usually only stupid shit like this is the end result.
Of course you can reform CO2 and water into methane and oxygen, but that still requires a lot of energy. Good thing is: the energy can be thermal. You'd still need a tankful of oxidizer and fuel. Nah, it's much simpler to have a scuba tank with you.
Sweetheart, you're commenting on a fictional device. A pool builder won't want to put anyone underwater with a fictional device as the only means of life support.
Nope. Those complaints are in fact the very thing. You don't come up with multiple novel technologies out of the blue.
That may sound OK to a non-engineer, but if one is an engineer, then one knows that if you're developing multiple technologies from scratch, all at once, it will be a big project and it will take a long time. Just look at how long, and how many people it took to turn the groundbreaking Gravity Probe B into reality. That is some top-notch, unique engineering, it took dozens of people a half of a century to accomplish.
This mask would need a whole bunch of new technologies: new batteries, new motors, new turbines, water transport with very low friction losses, etc. It may be doable, but unless someone shows me a long string of graduate degrees obtained while this was being worked on, I call it a big fat bullshit.
Engineering - sometimes it's ultra-hard, and most of you have no clue.
The idea isn't even all that interesting. It's pure fiction, and it has been rehashed in sci-fi for way, way longer than I am alive. This is downright booooring.
I concur. That thing exists only as a digital model and renderings of the same. Maybe they did some rapid prototyping and have plastic mockups. It's a bunch of bullshit, in other words. And someone stupid at Slashdot picked it up and went with it. If those people take investments, I consider it an investment scam.
Everything is becoming "The land of take what you can, and fuck the other guy!"
And you will see most of them in church on Sundays!
Of course almost everything we download is copyrighted, by definition, even if those are all legal downloads and are all free!
You're making up problems. The way it would be done in practice is:
1. Set up a current-measuring system that internally counts the elementary charges. This is sufficient to measure real-life amps in terms of real-life e.
2. Tweak the value of e in Coulombs to make things work out :)
It all only makes a difference if you do things by hand. When you do engineering drawings, the CAD system handles all that for you and it doesn't matter how evenly things divide out. When it's made in quantity, it's machined using various CNC systems, and those don't care about it either. Maybe a machinist would, if they use the old way of doing things and don't have numerical readouts.
Not 0.005%, but rather 0.000'005%.
That it varies as a whole is of no consequence. What matters is the differential variations in weight. Something as simple as lubricant outgassing will affect the results a whole lot - remember that they have the kilogram's uncertainty down to a couple dozen ppb IIRC. Basically, such a scale has to be zeroed before each weighing, and to do that you need to lift the weight off of it.
Agreed: Just look at any random american fast food chain. If you want to get the same amount of calories from a hamburger vs. a salad-based, much healthier meal, the price difference is anywhere between 2-4x. So eating well definitely costs more.
And that is precisely what happens!
GPL doesn't limit the negative actions you can take if someone exercises their GPL rights. For example, IIRC if you're a RHEL customer with a subscription and you leak their RPMs or SRPMs, even if they are subject to GPL, your subscription is terminated and you're often banned for life from ever becoming their customer again. Seriously.
Oracle less expensive? They offer it for less than ~$300 per year per server? Seriously?
Myself, I'd absolutely love to run RHEL or CentOS on a desktop if I were using Linux on a desktop. You don't have to worry about things becoming fucked up with upgrades. For the few things I test on Linux, I always run CentOS in a VM, but my daily desktop runs on OS X.
Been there, done that, in both directions. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. Seriously.
At the most basic level, there are no barriers at all. RedHat's self-support subscription (~$300 annually per server) gives you access to their non-public knowledge base. It fully applies to CentOS, there's nothing either RedHat or CentOS or you would need to do to use it.
I don't think it's the problem with the language proper, just with the hopeless standard C library. Nobody is forced to use it naked, though. Either roll your own wrapper, or use something already made like Dave Hanson's code from C Interfaces and Implementations.
I'd hope that modern compilers should catch that. gcc would have, for quite a while now. Maybe a decade?
Not only that - some software just isn't all that racy to begin with. X11 is not really the kind of code I'd find exciting to muck with...
Minor nitpick: Photo CD contains a standard ISO filesystem with some proprietary digital image files stored on it. Quite early on, every CD contained PC-DOS-based image viewer software as well, so viewing wasn't an issue if you had a CD ROM reader. Most people simply didn't have CD-ROM drives in their machines, and even then the early drives were slow. I vividly remember a Philips reader that was an adaptation of their fairly bulky portable audio player, running at 1.5x speed (and about 1.5x the volume of a VHS cassette).
PhotoCD images contain multiple resolution variants of the picture, since image resampling on old computers was slower than simple reading of the appropriately sized bitmap image from the CD.
This is very insightful. It is the very pressure relief that is problematic!