What he's proposing is a Savonius windmill. A fancy aenometer. Which we already do much, much better with the Darrius approach. The maximum possible energy that we can get out of the wind is 59%. Savonius windmills are far, far less efficient, as they rely on drag, and not lift.
Of course, he claims that it works off of lift, which-- if his mill even exists in reality-- it probably does, but the fact that it only gets "a little" boost from lift means that it is almost completely drag based.
One problem that people have when visualizing a windmill is the question, "Why not do it like a paddle-wheel? Like on an old steam-boat?" Well, do you still see those old steam-boats tooling up the river and across the ocean. No? Maybe you should wondered why. It's because... surprise, surprise, it's less efficient.
Not to mention the ridiculous claims about hurricane/tornado proof design. And the centripital forces it's have to undergo at these speeds. (Real VAWTs tend to be able to spin at such high speeds that they are explosively dangerous.) And the torque exerted on the bearing coupling of a several story high building when there's 150mph of wind pressing on the top.
opensourceenergy.com seems to be nothing more than a shrewd attempt to make fun of the/. crowd, by pulling us all in to wow at the latest, greatest power generation technique that's going to revolutionize our world.
You clearly have different feelings about this. I bought my first mac (this PB) in March. I'm disappointed with the hardware. There are what I feel are many poor design considerations, such as including a CD burner (I haven't used CDs since 2001); a non-remapable eject button right ontop of the delete key (whenever I type documents, I'm always hitting it); a case that is, in the 2005 model, *totally* impossible to take apart; speed is unbelieveably turn-of-the-century; etc.
But that doesn't mean it's not an improvement on Windows. My only regret in buying a mac is the physical mac I have in my grubby little hands. The OS is not "simply incredible", but Tiger is definitely a tremendous improvement over Windows.
In my experience, it's hardly all style. What's disappointing is that some of the more important style decisions have catastrophically bad impacts elsewhere, such as wireless.
I can't wait for OSX86 to get further along. I will happily buy my copy of OSX86 and then promptly slap it on a decent laptop that has all the features I want.
So, vis-a-vis wireless connections, is this as bad a decision as Apple's to make the PowerBook out of Al? Because, honestly, I've never seen worse wireless capabilities in my life. The Airport Extreme in my 2005 PowerBook sucks beyond all possible belief. My old Orinoco PCMCIA card gets much better reception. And my friend's new Acer gets around 15dB better reception than my Orinoco!
(Although I don't know if I believe NetStumbler. 15dB sounds like too good to be true. Perhaps it's a small bug with the NDIS driver interface. In any case, his Acer *does* get a million times better reception than my PowerBook.)
Never mind, figured it out. Quicksilver, the world's most useful application, hadn't had time to update its DB, and I'd forgotten I'd already installed Opera 6.x, so it loaded 6.x up and I thought it was 8.5.
Now using the new opera and not certain if I like it better or not than sfari.
There's a frickin' big banner ad gobbling up screen space. It's just a link to "Buy Opera NOW", but it's still a banner.
Is this version only free for Windows users? If this is the case, anyone know if they're planning on upgrading the OS X version to a bannerless model soon?
P.S. I registered for an Opera serial number back at their party, but I can't find it anymore. Can someone remind me if it's something you copy/paste or if it's in an email they send? What's the general format of the serial number? (so that I can do a spotlight search...)
Isn't this the moment when Yellow Dog Linux should declare that Linux has been leading a second, hidden life all this time, where everything has been compiled on both PPC and x86?
Yeah! And then we can all debate the wiseness of changing Linux from a PPC platform to x86!
Now, all we need is someone to crack Yellow Dog Linux so it'll run on an x86... I've got a developer's P4 with Linux already installed. I'll put the installation iso on bittorrent as soon as I make sure that there are no "unique identifiers".
Lens size is correlated with the amount of light captured by the lens, and not the size of the image.
In fact, for a long time hobbyists have played around with "pin-hole" cameras, cameras that, well, have a pin hole in the place of a lens. The light diffracts throught the small hole, spreading out and thus blowing up the image.
Really expensive lenses such as you'd see in telescopes are big so they can get the maximum amount of light.
For a neat demonstration of this principle, take some binoculars and cover half of one lens. You'll notice that-- surprise, surprise-- you still see the entire image!
So, in the end, the lens diameter will allow you to take pictures in lower light situations. Which might well equate to better picture quality if you're not in bright, shiny daylight since the picture will be acquired faster with less chance for motion blur.
"We've had the necessary technology for many years, the only problem will be finding someone prepared to pay that much."
You've got to be joking! I'm prepared to pay that much.
Of course I don't have it, but if I did, or even close to that amount, I would certainly accept the offer. And I bet everyone on slashdot feels the same!
Another bright side: it's never been so easy to turn money into history.
You're absolutely right. Forunately, as near as I can tell without trying it on a WRT54G, his scripts should work with little to no modification.
For instance, WRT54G uses iwconfig, so the grepped output in the scanap script is already perfect.
I've been doing this sort of WISP analysis for a long time with rrdtool, and can even look at pretty graphs for each client showing how long it's been connected, what sort of throughput it's had, and the quality of the connection over the course of the entire year.
Looking at the silver lining, this is actually a victory of sorts. If you look at what he's saying, he's coming out on the side of severe copyright reform. And anytime a widely distributed (although not in this case well-read) author comes out for a return to common sense copyright, it is absolutely a step in the right direction.
He simply disapproves of the tool we're using and raises some valid points, such as "Creative Commons: Public Domain". (Where he is incorrect, though, is in thinking that this is worthless. Au contraire, it improves awareness of what Creative Commons is and what it seeks to do.)
In the end, I approve of the message, even if I don't approve of his message.
We all know that this kind of guy and this kind of suit is getting way out of hand. Can we file a class action suit against him and his type of cretin? On behalf of all the consumers who have sufered with higher prices and less competition?
Seriously, what are the odds that someone can? The problem is that everyone knows that this is absurd, but none of the companies sued will go up to bat because they're far too woried about losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a judgement. If it were class action, WE, the halfway clued-in citizens of this world, could go on the attack, with NO fear that we'll be put out of business if we lose.
Maybe this kind of thing would teach all these intellectual property hounds to think twice before forming a business that does nothing else than "asset" patents and trademarks they've snatched up off others in a wave of speculation.
Which makes him worth 4.95 billion times more than Mother Teresa, right?
Because net worth is how to measure how important you are, and not how well you can game the system, right? Everyone who's rich deserves it, and everyone who's poor, too. Right?
It's not that they don't care, it's just impossible for them to do anything about it. There's just so much of it. Tons and tons and tons of it. And I bet that no one wants to sell it-- who knows, it could be worth millions!-- so it'll just sit and rot for another thousand years.
If I could, though, i'd love to buy a bit of it by the ton...
Oh, I wholehartedly agree. I was just using secrecy as an example of how these things get forgotten.
There're a million reasons, but the easiest one to imagine on such a large scale are people who for one reason or another refuse to disclose what they've got. I imagine that The Scream will be "lost" in much the same fashion. I guarantee that his/her children have NO idea that they're sitting on a multi-million dollar painting.
As an American, I never understood how Europeans could just lose this kind of thing. You're always hearing about some lost Michelangelo sculpture emerging, or a late Beethoven piece being discovered, or a Rembrandt revealed underneath a clown. My question was always, "How???"
Then I moved to France.
If you've never been to Europe, it's difficult to explain the shear amount of art here. It hangs of walls in homes, sits in the middle of city squares, and looms of staircases inside public buildings. They've got it everywhere, and over time, and especially because of a much higher level of secrecy in private, everyday life, these things just get forgotten.
It works like this: a grandmother knows that HER grandfather treasured a certain document and hid it away in a chest. She doesn't know what it was, as her grandfather never confided the secret to her, and when she passes away, her children find just another nameless ancient document in her affairs. They forget about it for generations, having no idea of its worth or origins.
In another example, the Naitonal Archeological Museum of Naples, Italy has so much art and sculpture that they simply haven't cataloged it all yet. In the middle of the building is a gigantic courtyard that is replete with statues that have no name and are just wearing away in the rain and shine. No one knows where they came from, or who made them.
Europe has just got so much of the stuff, hidden away as family heirlooms, in church vaults, or in plain sight in museums that they just can't analyze it all.
Anyway, just my meager attempt to help my fellow Americans what people mean when they talk about "Old" Europe.
I had the idea that we should found a small community and then declare copyrighted works public domain. Now of course you couldn't do that for everything, since major corps like Disney would shit lawyers on you, but you could declare eminent domain on all copyrighted works over 20 years-old. if anyone complains, you "reinstate" their copyright. For a fee.
The economic claim is not only simple, but real. Imagine now you can scan and digitally print those old photos of your grandparents, you can archive old books and movie, and you can adapt and derive with impunity. That's one magnificent cottage industry just waiting to be formed.
So maybe this USC decision will actually have a silver lining. Without doing anything quite so ridculous and doomed to failure as traing to seize a Supreme Court justice's house.
I've been involved in cryobiology since I did my Masters in it. back in 2001 Pretty cool stuff. Heh. (Thanks, I'll be here all night!)
Anyways...
I'm really fascinated by the metaphysical meanings of all this. Imagine that we froze a dog and brought it back to life (Hey, we just DID that, didn't we? Or pretty close, at least). Dog comes back, everything is hunky-dorey, he wags his tails, just like he used to, eats the same food as before, and still doesn't know not to pee on the carpet.
Understand that at LN2 temp, -197C, the only appreciable reaction is due to cosmic rays. We're talking EONS here. If it's that cold, it's dead. Dead, dead, dead. Not living anymore. This sets the stage for my philosophical question.
Imagine that we freeze a human. Human's just as dead as the dog. We reanimate him/her/it, and then... two possibilities. 1) Same thing as with the dog, human comes back, harty and hale. 2) Body comes back, but the brain refuses.
Isn't this a proof for the (non) existence of the soul? If the human comes back to life, that means the soul never left. Now, unless you're going to start some twisted, "Yeah, but god KNEW this one was coming back to life so he didn't take his soul... Hey, look 4800 year-old dinosaurs!" argument, you pretty much have to admit that the soul doesn't exist, or at least doesn't go away when you die. Because, let's admit it, frozen at -197C is just as dead as being blown to smythereens or having your heart stopped by the last (ultimate?) Big Mac you ate.
If the human DOESN'T come back, that pretty much proves that there is something special inside only humans that we lose the moment when we die, i.e. the soul.
So I'm really excited to see the first half of the data is in. Dogs live after death. They have no souls, at least not in the way we imagine them. Now, if only I'd work a little harder instead of reading/., I might help us get the second half of the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's all... horseshit.
/. crowd, by pulling us all in to wow at the latest, greatest power generation technique that's going to revolutionize our world.
5 58, or http://www.windstuffnow.com/main/vawt.htm.
What he's proposing is a Savonius windmill. A fancy aenometer. Which we already do much, much better with the Darrius approach. The maximum possible energy that we can get out of the wind is 59%. Savonius windmills are far, far less efficient, as they rely on drag, and not lift.
Of course, he claims that it works off of lift, which-- if his mill even exists in reality-- it probably does, but the fact that it only gets "a little" boost from lift means that it is almost completely drag based.
One problem that people have when visualizing a windmill is the question, "Why not do it like a paddle-wheel? Like on an old steam-boat?" Well, do you still see those old steam-boats tooling up the river and across the ocean. No? Maybe you should wondered why. It's because... surprise, surprise, it's less efficient.
Not to mention the ridiculous claims about hurricane/tornado proof design. And the centripital forces it's have to undergo at these speeds. (Real VAWTs tend to be able to spin at such high speeds that they are explosively dangerous.) And the torque exerted on the bearing coupling of a several story high building when there's 150mph of wind pressing on the top.
opensourceenergy.com seems to be nothing more than a shrewd attempt to make fun of the
For some real information on VAWTs, check out otherpower.com. For instance, http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/10/7/63930/5
You clearly have different feelings about this. I bought my first mac (this PB) in March. I'm disappointed with the hardware. There are what I feel are many poor design considerations, such as including a CD burner (I haven't used CDs since 2001); a non-remapable eject button right ontop of the delete key (whenever I type documents, I'm always hitting it); a case that is, in the 2005 model, *totally* impossible to take apart; speed is unbelieveably turn-of-the-century; etc.
But that doesn't mean it's not an improvement on Windows. My only regret in buying a mac is the physical mac I have in my grubby little hands. The OS is not "simply incredible", but Tiger is definitely a tremendous improvement over Windows.
In my experience, it's hardly all style. What's disappointing is that some of the more important style decisions have catastrophically bad impacts elsewhere, such as wireless.
I can't wait for OSX86 to get further along. I will happily buy my copy of OSX86 and then promptly slap it on a decent laptop that has all the features I want.
So, vis-a-vis wireless connections, is this as bad a decision as Apple's to make the PowerBook out of Al? Because, honestly, I've never seen worse wireless capabilities in my life. The Airport Extreme in my 2005 PowerBook sucks beyond all possible belief. My old Orinoco PCMCIA card gets much better reception. And my friend's new Acer gets around 15dB better reception than my Orinoco!
(Although I don't know if I believe NetStumbler. 15dB sounds like too good to be true. Perhaps it's a small bug with the NDIS driver interface. In any case, his Acer *does* get a million times better reception than my PowerBook.)
So, all style, no substance?
Never mind, figured it out. Quicksilver, the world's most useful application, hadn't had time to update its DB, and I'd forgotten I'd already installed Opera 6.x, so it loaded 6.x up and I thought it was 8.5.
Now using the new opera and not certain if I like it better or not than sfari.
Okay, I just downloaded Opera for OS X and...
There's a frickin' big banner ad gobbling up screen space. It's just a link to "Buy Opera NOW", but it's still a banner.
Is this version only free for Windows users? If this is the case, anyone know if they're planning on upgrading the OS X version to a bannerless model soon?
P.S. I registered for an Opera serial number back at their party, but I can't find it anymore. Can someone remind me if it's something you copy/paste or if it's in an email they send? What's the general format of the serial number? (so that I can do a spotlight search...)
...with a miniature version no larger than a milk carton.
Great!
Err...
Exactly just how big is a milk carton? Is this Canadian milk or American?
(This is actually a serious question. A milk carton in Europe is only one liter sized, which is pretty danged small for a satellite!)
Isn't this the moment when Yellow Dog Linux should declare that Linux has been leading a second, hidden life all this time, where everything has been compiled on both PPC and x86?
Yeah! And then we can all debate the wiseness of changing Linux from a PPC platform to x86!
Now, all we need is someone to crack Yellow Dog Linux so it'll run on an x86... I've got a developer's P4 with Linux already installed. I'll put the installation iso on bittorrent as soon as I make sure that there are no "unique identifiers".
Lens size is correlated with the amount of light captured by the lens, and not the size of the image.
In fact, for a long time hobbyists have played around with "pin-hole" cameras, cameras that, well, have a pin hole in the place of a lens. The light diffracts throught the small hole, spreading out and thus blowing up the image.
Really expensive lenses such as you'd see in telescopes are big so they can get the maximum amount of light.
For a neat demonstration of this principle, take some binoculars and cover half of one lens. You'll notice that-- surprise, surprise-- you still see the entire image!
So, in the end, the lens diameter will allow you to take pictures in lower light situations. Which might well equate to better picture quality if you're not in bright, shiny daylight since the picture will be acquired faster with less chance for motion blur.
"We've had the necessary technology for many years, the only problem will be finding someone prepared to pay that much."
You've got to be joking! I'm prepared to pay that much.
Of course I don't have it, but if I did, or even close to that amount, I would certainly accept the offer. And I bet everyone on slashdot feels the same!
Another bright side: it's never been so easy to turn money into history.
You're absolutely right. Forunately, as near as I can tell without trying it on a WRT54G, his scripts should work with little to no modification.
For instance, WRT54G uses iwconfig, so the grepped output in the scanap script is already perfect.
I've been doing this sort of WISP analysis for a long time with rrdtool, and can even look at pretty graphs for each client showing how long it's been connected, what sort of throughput it's had, and the quality of the connection over the course of the entire year.
Of course, if I'd read the article, I would have seen that it's only for AIM.
I tried it out. My score was 8. Of course, in France, everyone is on MSN. I only know two people on AIM, and they're in America.
So who's going to win this?
Why, the zombie hackers of course. I imagine that their ICQ buddy lists must be light-years long.
Looking at the silver lining, this is actually a victory of sorts. If you look at what he's saying, he's coming out on the side of severe copyright reform. And anytime a widely distributed (although not in this case well-read) author comes out for a return to common sense copyright, it is absolutely a step in the right direction.
He simply disapproves of the tool we're using and raises some valid points, such as "Creative Commons: Public Domain". (Where he is incorrect, though, is in thinking that this is worthless. Au contraire, it improves awareness of what Creative Commons is and what it seeks to do.)
In the end, I approve of the message, even if I don't approve of his message.
I wish I had mod points.
It lived and died like a mayfly. If only we could breed it like one, too.
One of those guys (the one in the dark shirt) was a slacker. He lets the other one do all the work.
We all know that this kind of guy and this kind of suit is getting way out of hand. Can we file a class action suit against him and his type of cretin? On behalf of all the consumers who have sufered with higher prices and less competition?
Seriously, what are the odds that someone can? The problem is that everyone knows that this is absurd, but none of the companies sued will go up to bat because they're far too woried about losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a judgement. If it were class action, WE, the halfway clued-in citizens of this world, could go on the attack, with NO fear that we'll be put out of business if we lose.
Maybe this kind of thing would teach all these intellectual property hounds to think twice before forming a business that does nothing else than "asset" patents and trademarks they've snatched up off others in a wave of speculation.
IANAL but I sure wih I were one right now.
Which makes him worth 4.95 billion times more than Mother Teresa, right?
Because net worth is how to measure how important you are, and not how well you can game the system, right? Everyone who's rich deserves it, and everyone who's poor, too. Right?
It's not that they don't care, it's just impossible for them to do anything about it. There's just so much of it. Tons and tons and tons of it. And I bet that no one wants to sell it-- who knows, it could be worth millions!-- so it'll just sit and rot for another thousand years.
If I could, though, i'd love to buy a bit of it by the ton...
Oh, I wholehartedly agree. I was just using secrecy as an example of how these things get forgotten.
There're a million reasons, but the easiest one to imagine on such a large scale are people who for one reason or another refuse to disclose what they've got. I imagine that The Scream will be "lost" in much the same fashion. I guarantee that his/her children have NO idea that they're sitting on a multi-million dollar painting.
I'm sorry, does Bezos actually have a clue about doing things, or is all he knows how to game the patent and legal system?
Officially, I'm now boycotting Amazon.com and will recommend to all my friends to do likewise.
As an American, I never understood how Europeans could just lose this kind of thing. You're always hearing about some lost Michelangelo sculpture emerging, or a late Beethoven piece being discovered, or a Rembrandt revealed underneath a clown. My question was always, "How???"
Then I moved to France.
If you've never been to Europe, it's difficult to explain the shear amount of art here. It hangs of walls in homes, sits in the middle of city squares, and looms of staircases inside public buildings. They've got it everywhere, and over time, and especially because of a much higher level of secrecy in private, everyday life, these things just get forgotten.
It works like this: a grandmother knows that HER grandfather treasured a certain document and hid it away in a chest. She doesn't know what it was, as her grandfather never confided the secret to her, and when she passes away, her children find just another nameless ancient document in her affairs. They forget about it for generations, having no idea of its worth or origins.
In another example, the Naitonal Archeological Museum of Naples, Italy has so much art and sculpture that they simply haven't cataloged it all yet. In the middle of the building is a gigantic courtyard that is replete with statues that have no name and are just wearing away in the rain and shine. No one knows where they came from, or who made them.
Europe has just got so much of the stuff, hidden away as family heirlooms, in church vaults, or in plain sight in museums that they just can't analyze it all.
Anyway, just my meager attempt to help my fellow Americans what people mean when they talk about "Old" Europe.
I had the idea that we should found a small community and then declare copyrighted works public domain. Now of course you couldn't do that for everything, since major corps like Disney would shit lawyers on you, but you could declare eminent domain on all copyrighted works over 20 years-old. if anyone complains, you "reinstate" their copyright. For a fee.
The economic claim is not only simple, but real. Imagine now you can scan and digitally print those old photos of your grandparents, you can archive old books and movie, and you can adapt and derive with impunity. That's one magnificent cottage industry just waiting to be formed.
So maybe this USC decision will actually have a silver lining. Without doing anything quite so ridculous and doomed to failure as traing to seize a Supreme Court justice's house.
I've been involved in cryobiology since I did my Masters in it. back in 2001 Pretty cool stuff. Heh. (Thanks, I'll be here all night!)
/., I might help us get the second half of the equation.
Anyways...
I'm really fascinated by the metaphysical meanings of all this. Imagine that we froze a dog and brought it back to life (Hey, we just DID that, didn't we? Or pretty close, at least). Dog comes back, everything is hunky-dorey, he wags his tails, just like he used to, eats the same food as before, and still doesn't know not to pee on the carpet.
Understand that at LN2 temp, -197C, the only appreciable reaction is due to cosmic rays. We're talking EONS here. If it's that cold, it's dead. Dead, dead, dead. Not living anymore. This sets the stage for my philosophical question.
Imagine that we freeze a human. Human's just as dead as the dog. We reanimate him/her/it, and then... two possibilities. 1) Same thing as with the dog, human comes back, harty and hale. 2) Body comes back, but the brain refuses.
Isn't this a proof for the (non) existence of the soul? If the human comes back to life, that means the soul never left. Now, unless you're going to start some twisted, "Yeah, but god KNEW this one was coming back to life so he didn't take his soul... Hey, look 4800 year-old dinosaurs!" argument, you pretty much have to admit that the soul doesn't exist, or at least doesn't go away when you die. Because, let's admit it, frozen at -197C is just as dead as being blown to smythereens or having your heart stopped by the last (ultimate?) Big Mac you ate.
If the human DOESN'T come back, that pretty much proves that there is something special inside only humans that we lose the moment when we die, i.e. the soul.
So I'm really excited to see the first half of the data is in. Dogs live after death. They have no souls, at least not in the way we imagine them. Now, if only I'd work a little harder instead of reading
Who finds it ironic that Nature charges for access to an article championing free access to information?