How are these things better than electric scooters like these: http://www.zapworld.com/
Yes, they have lots of, well, as far as I can see unnecessary technology in them, have their wheels side by side which means they require all that extra technology just to function and are therefore ridiculously expensive.
The scooters are lighter, faster, have longer range and only cost a couple of hundred quid rather than thousands.
It's possible now, but (in the UK) it costs twenty to thirty grand to put a system in. It'll recoup it's cost in maybe 25 years.
The cells you can buy in the stores are more likely to be 15-18% rather than 25% efficient. The 25% ones are fucking expensive and the 35% ones are like rocking horse shit.
Course, energy storage is still a problem for those cloudy days. Batteries are heavy, expensive, made of heavy metals or have to be replaced regularly which isn't exactly "green".
Compressed air energy storage may be feasable on a small scale with the use of a compressed air powered generator, some utilities already use compressed air to store energy on a huge scale. Use solar power to compress air to several hundred atmospheres during the day and run a generator from it during the night and during cloudy periods.
Sure, sounds dull but heat is looking like a viable way of storing energy generated from renewable sources.
CAES systems use air compressed using energy from off peak generation to provide generation capacity during peak hours:
http://www.pbworld.com/pbenergy/caes.htm
Already implemented in Germany and Alabama.
The Solar II power tower system in California stores concentrated heat from the sun in molten salt in order to generate power at night and during cloudy periods.
http://rhlx01.rz.fht-esslingen.de/projects/alt_e ne rgy/sol_thermal/powertower.html
If there is an unpatched Windows machine causing problems on the network, the ISPs should simply enforce their terms of service and disconnect the offending machine, whether the software is pirated or not.
And no, I can't think of a good reason for pirates being supplied with free upgrades.
Not entirely true that you can't throw hardware at a problem, but pretty close.
What gets me are all the people who want me to tune systems because an application is slow. Thing is, unless there's something specifically wrong with a hardware or software configuration, performance tuning at the hardware, OS, network and rdbms layers will only make a relatively marginal difference to the performance of the application.
Performance tuning or optimisation at the application code level on the other hand can make several orders of magnitude difference to the performance of an app.
10 hours spent optimizing code by the programmer vs 100,000 people spending an extra 30 seconds (if you're lucky) twenty times per day waiting for a computer to do something.
It all depends whether you want quantity or quality, doesn't it.
Believe it or not, not everyone is allowed to take their systems offline at a moment's notice and have you seen the amount of patching which has to be done on Windows systems?
We have a *team of 3 people* who do nothing but talk to the customers to arrange downtime for windows boxes and then apply patches.
Mc is just an abbreviation of Mac. It's gaelic and means "son of". In this case it's obviously a trademark rather than a name, making me incorrect so yes, I guess my education is showing.
Ah, how much do you think a machine room costs? How much for UPS provision? How much for cooling? How much for LAN/switching?
While individual machine costs may well be low these days, the infrastructure to support them is *not* cheap.
I reckon the estimates of the numbers (40k, 79k etc) of machines based on that 250 million dollar figure *seriously* overestimates the numbers of actual computers.
Almost all major companies use "Open Source" all over the place. They have for years, decades even.
The only difference might be that the muppets who think they are in charge now have to have an "open source stratagem", mainly because "Open Source" is now a brand all of it's own.
Slashdot Mirror
How are these things better than electric scooters like these: http://www.zapworld.com/
Yes, they have lots of, well, as far as I can see unnecessary technology in them, have their wheels side by side which means they require all that extra technology just to function and are therefore ridiculously expensive.
The scooters are lighter, faster, have longer range and only cost a couple of hundred quid rather than thousands.
It's possible now, but (in the UK) it costs twenty to thirty grand to put a system in. It'll recoup it's cost in maybe 25 years.
The cells you can buy in the stores are more likely to be 15-18% rather than 25% efficient. The 25% ones are fucking expensive and the 35% ones are like rocking horse shit.
Course, energy storage is still a problem for those cloudy days. Batteries are heavy, expensive, made of heavy metals or have to be replaced regularly which isn't exactly "green".
Compressed air energy storage may be feasable on a small scale with the use of a compressed air powered generator, some utilities already use compressed air to store energy on a huge scale. Use solar power to compress air to several hundred atmospheres during the day and run a generator from it during the night and during cloudy periods.
Sure, sounds dull but heat is looking like a viable way of storing energy generated from renewable sources.
e ne rgy/sol_thermal/powertower.html
CAES systems use air compressed using energy from off peak generation to provide generation capacity during peak hours:
http://www.pbworld.com/pbenergy/caes.htm
Already implemented in Germany and Alabama.
The Solar II power tower system in California stores concentrated heat from the sun in molten salt in order to generate power at night and during cloudy periods.
http://rhlx01.rz.fht-esslingen.de/projects/alt_
Damn, why didn't I think of that? All those usenet trolls would owe me a fortune...
Though couldn't hipcrime be considered prior art?
"Didn't someone say once that they have enough reserves to last 5 years without any sales at all?"
That assumes that they aren't spending billions settling lawsuits.
I guess you'll have to deal with the cost of not thinking ahead then and we won't.
Simple. Takes half an hour on a decent network.
Eh, you do store all your data on servers and build your client systems from standard images, don't you?
If there is an unpatched Windows machine causing problems on the network, the ISPs should simply enforce their terms of service and disconnect the offending machine, whether the software is pirated or not.
And no, I can't think of a good reason for pirates being supplied with free upgrades.
Not entirely true that you can't throw hardware at a problem, but pretty close.
What gets me are all the people who want me to tune systems because an application is slow. Thing is, unless there's something specifically wrong with a hardware or software configuration, performance tuning at the hardware, OS, network and rdbms layers will only make a relatively marginal difference to the performance of the application.
Performance tuning or optimisation at the application code level on the other hand can make several orders of magnitude difference to the performance of an app.
10 hours spent optimizing code by the programmer vs 100,000 people spending an extra 30 seconds (if you're lucky) twenty times per day waiting for a computer to do something.
It all depends whether you want quantity or quality, doesn't it.
Who would have thought that the Microsoft would be contributing to the state of the art of philosophy.
Believe it or not, not everyone is allowed to take their systems offline at a moment's notice and have you seen the amount of patching which has to be done on Windows systems?
We have a *team of 3 people* who do nothing but talk to the customers to arrange downtime for windows boxes and then apply patches.
Mc is just an abbreviation of Mac. It's gaelic and means "son of". In this case it's obviously a trademark rather than a name, making me incorrect so yes, I guess my education is showing.
Mr. Blair thinks the American education system is the best thing since sliced bread. We want one just like yours.
Anyway what do you want science for when you have MacDonalds?
Ah, how much do you think a machine room costs?
How much for UPS provision?
How much for cooling?
How much for LAN/switching?
While individual machine costs may well be low these days, the infrastructure to support them is *not* cheap.
I reckon the estimates of the numbers (40k, 79k etc) of machines based on that 250 million dollar figure *seriously* overestimates the numbers of actual computers.
Almost all major companies use "Open Source" all over the place. They have for years, decades even.
The only difference might be that the muppets who think they are in charge now have to have an "open source stratagem", mainly because "Open Source" is now a brand all of it's own.
WTF do they have to do with colonisation of space?
Space is there to be taken, the way America was taken; land, money, resources, power, independance, freedom.
We can't tell cos we can't see the source.
You could always just tune the cache down to bugger all. It's one of the kernel parameters.
Well, disk access speed, say 5ms. RAM access speed 10ns so RAM is approx half a million times faster than disk.
So, what... I want my apps paged out to disk so that I can wait for them to be loaded back in when I switch over from Mozilla to Open Office?
"I'd like to see a silent cooling mechanism for a Sun Enterprise 450 though"
All of mine are completely silenced by Machine Room 2000. Sure, it's a couple of years old now but it still keeps all of my machines cold and silent.
Because my PC boots off the LAN and does little more than start an X server. No hard disk, no PSU fan, no CPU fan. It's eerily silent.
HTH
" After coming back to WP at about v8-9, and moving through v11, I can safely say this program is stagnant."
You could say that about MS Word as well.
Maybe there just aren't all that many more features which can be added to a word processor.
There are other countries who manage manned space flight for a tiny fraction of the cost of NASA's efforts.
NASA has made an art of frittering billions.