FYI: The 5.5V capacitors are actually made up of 2 individual cells in series each of which rated for ~ 2.5V nominal each. That is dictated by the dielectric material properties.
>The EESU is composed of 31,353 of these components arranged in parallel.
I think it is more than likely to have capacitors in series and parallel combination to get to these high voltages.
What I mean is that "octopodes" would be correct if you wanted to borrow (from latin) the plural form as well as the singular form. "Octopi" is what people think the borrowed plural should be but it's incorrect. But yes, "octopuses" is how the plural would be formed in English and that seems to be gaining ground over octopi. According to this page written in 2004 octopi had a slight advantage in terms of number of results returned by Google. It's now very much in favour of octopuses, 490,000 to 344,000.
Ok, I have not read tfa (in this case tfp), but I do know a bit about capacitors. Follow along with me here:
You can calculate the energy stored in a capacitor (in Joules) by E =.5*CV^2 where C = capacitance (in Farads) and V = voltage, or
--> V = sqrt((2E)/C)
--> 3500 = sqrt((2*187992000)/30.7)
3500v is a lot. Up until now most comercially available supercapacitors do 5.5v or less and tend to leak energy over time. It's possilbe these guys have really made a stunning break through (the fact they filed for a patent is sure something), but the numbers set off my bullshit detector.
TFA (or TFP if you prefer) does indeed state 3500v. The patent also claims leakage of only 0.1% per 30 days. So, big claims. Hopefully they're for real. We'll just have to wait and see.
Gasoline contains 39MJ/litre, so the capacitor contains the same energy density as 1 gallon of fuel (or 1.2 US gallons for leftpondians).
If we new the efficiency of converting energy in the capacitor into kinetic energy, we could compare the usefulness of this technology.
According to Wikipedia the Tesla has battery-to-wheel efficiency of about 90%. Internal combustion engines are about 20% (the thermodynamic limit is 37%).
A single car battery is about 200 watt hours. The batteries in the Tesla Roadster holds 53 kWÂh according to Wikipedia.
Now thats an interesting coincidence. I wonder if they just worked out how much capacitor would be needed for the power plant of the Tesla.
If they can bring it to market at the stated weight (130kg) it'll makes things very interesting. The Tesla's current battery pack weighs 450kg so you could triple its range. Or cut the vehicles weight by 25% (current weight is about 1200kg).
Octopus is latinized Greek not Greek. Hence, octopi is in play. And glancing around at a few dictionaries, it doesn't appear that octopi is wrong much less "universally" wrong.
According to the OED (via Wikipedia), octopi would be correct if octopus were a second declension noun, which it isn't. Therefore the correct pural should be octopodes. If it were a native latin noun the plural would be octopedes (cf. centipedes, millipedes). Dictionaries seem to largely agree that octopuses is the most common English plural, octopi next (though misconceived), and octopodes rarely.
That article claims that consoles are seeing higher sales primarily because of lower piracy. That should mean that the difference is reduced or eliminated for games that can't effectively be pirated - the ones with peripherals like Guitar Hero. So did the PC release of any of the Guitar Hero games do better that expected relative to other games? If not (and I'm pretty sure it did not) then it indicates that other factors are at least as important.
So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product if it isn't free, because it can't be done.
Your premise is flawed. Pirates obviously do value the product even if it's not free, which they show by taking the time and effort to get it.
I don't think it's quite that black and white. The time and effort to pirate is extremely low - usually a matter of a couple of minutes to start a download. It's lower than the time and effort of just getting to a brick and mortar store. So you can't ascribe very much value that way. It's so low that people sometimes don't even use the stuff they download. Also consider that time and effort taken to pirate does not represent the downloader's estimation of the value of the product, it represents the downloader's estimate of the potential value of the product.
Can you "run" a document you've opened recently on XP? Not that I know of. You can open it on Vista easily (like Quicksilver allows).
The "run" dialog will open documents. In fact it works better than applications: applications only get auto-completed if you've run them before using the dialog. Documents get auto-completed if you've opened them before in any application.
But the onus is on the bank to ensure the signature is legitimate. If the owner of the account contests the withdrawal and the bank can't show an accurate signature then the bank will have to refund the withdrawal. So the account owner is protected.
... which has nothing to do with me being 5000 Euro richer:)
Right, but since the banks screwed up in the first place I'm not too bothered if they foot the bill.
Um. Yes it is. I can go to any branch of my local bank any time, tell them my name and account number and withdraw up to EUR 5000,-- with just a signature.
But the onus is on the bank to ensure the signature is legitimate. If the owner of the account contests the withdrawal and the bank can't show an accurate signature then the bank will have to refund the withdrawal. So the account owner is protected. For the banks protection they tend to have security cameras so the criminal is taking a significant risk in trying to physically withdraw money.
You have to keep in mind the differences between countries.
In Germany, the most popular way to order stuff online is to give your bank account number to the merchant who will then charge your account.
It works just like a credit card number and stores rarely check if the number (account) really belongs to the person that's making the order.
So what protection do you have if a merchant charges incorrectly? If bank account numbers can be used like credit card numbers then bank accounts should have the same sort of fraud protection as credit cards.
Sorry, I missed the "equivalent of". But an account number is not the equivalent of a direct debit card. It's not that easy to withdraw money from an account when all you have is the account number.
Who wants a mass list anyway, you can't target spam at people just because they're German and they have a bank account, and stealing that many identities begs the question, "why?"
Yeah, who could have use for the equivalent of 21 million valid direct debit cards.
How do you propose to obtain the 21 million valid direct debit cards? Ring up the banks and get them to change the address of every account to your address?
A company that makes Spore wants to earn a living. And to do that they put on DRM.
And it just can't work.
The premise of DRM is to make more difficult for people to casually copy the game.
That means managing to put restriction for every last game player out there. Everyone has to be subjected to that shit in the hopes that the copying will be limited.
But then, all it takes is 1 single unique copy. 1 single unique time when the DRM has been circumvented, for that copy to be made available to millions via the internet.
Exactly right. People are not copying the retail release with its DRM they're copying a hacked version which has no DRM. So how can DRM possibly be effective? If I was a shareholder of one of these companies I'd be asking why they're spending money on DRM systems which clearly can't work.
Well, except that it's not Warnsdorff's algorithm. In fact, this seems to just give a list of all possible paths a knight can take from (1,1), including those that do not cover the entire board (or at least I don't see the spot where it filters out the latter).
Well, except that it's not Warnsdorff's algorithm.
No, but neither is the 60 line Python version, right? The link I mentioned has a version using the Warnsdorff algorthim and it's similar in length to the Prolog version (which also doesn't implement Warnsdorff's algorithm, though I may be mistaken - I haven't used Prolog in about 15 years).
In fact, this seems to just give a list of all possible paths a knight can take from (1,1), including those that do not cover the entire board (or at least I don't see the spot where it filters out the latter).
It's the loop: it counts down from n^2 (where n is the number of squares per side). So the loop only ends successfully if the tour covers the entire board.
No. You seem to be suffering from the widely held delusion (at least among "content creators") that a pirated copy is a lost sale.
I assume from the way you phrase that you aren't yourself a quote content creator unquote.
I used the quotes because I'm talking about publishers as well as developers and publishers don't actually create anything.
What evidence do you have that DRM can be made secure enough to make a difference? I've yet to see anything convincing from the industry on either of those points.
Now that article is pretty balanced - breaking the keygens only closed one way to pirate the game (cracked copies with the protection code removed were still available), and a 70% increase in sales certainly doesn't equate to eliminating piracy. But it didn't have to.
They did get a 70% increase in sales after the first fix (though they make no mention of how long that increase lasted). They also said that the 2nd and 3rd fixes had no impact on downloads and left sales either flat or slightly down (i.e. strengthening DRM hurt in one case). The fourth fix had a slight impact: 13% increase in sales. The link says:
As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.
I did say that some people will buy the game if the DRM is strengthened. But I said that generally pirates can't be forced to buy the game using DRM and your link supports me on that: 99.9% of the pirates did not buy the game when the DRM was strengthened. And that statistic also makes it clear that a download can't be equated to a lost sale: it's more like 1/1000 of a lost sale.
The question is whether strengthening DRM is an effective way to increase sales (well everyone says "increase sales", but what they really mean is "increase profit"). Let's look at the numbers from the article: 92% piracy rate means 11.5 downloads for every sold copy. They figured that their DRM fixes resulted in 1 extra sale per 1000 copies prevented. So, 87 sales results in 1000 downloads, and fixing the DRM results in one extra sale. How much money should be spend on strengthening DRM for a 1.15% increase in sales?
Of course this is only one data point. But it's not convincing me that strengthening DRM is the way to go.
Your position is one that only makes sense if you assume you are, somehow, much smarter than all the major PC game publishers out there, despite having worse or non-existant access to the statistics you'd need to make a decision. I find that a pretty arrogant position.
I don't think I'm smarter than all the major PC game publishers at all - your reasoning to arrive at that conclusion is faulty. However, I do think that if the industry had real statistics to back up the use of DRM they would publicise them and put this debate to rest. The lack of hard data from the industry and the ease with which people can find pirated material make it is clear that DRM is pretty ineffective. It's an arms race the industry obviously can't win (not on the PC platform at least) and yet they continue to pour millions of dollars into the fight while the pirates spend nothing.
"I want this game, and I took it for free. If you can find a more secure drm, you will make more money from me"
No. You seem to be suffering from the widely held delusion (at least among "content creators") that a pirated copy is a lost sale. The statement that is actually being made is this:
"I want this game, and I took it for free. I'm not prepared to pay the price you ask with the restrictions you've imposed".
Making the DRM more secure might get some people to pay. Removing the DRM might get some people to pay. What evidence do you have that adding DRM is more effective than removing DRM? What evidence do you have that DRM can be made secure enough to make a difference? I've yet to see anything convincing from the industry on either of those points. Most likely the price is simply too high. Content creators need to stop looking at pirates as people that can be forced to buy. Most of them can't be, though some them could be induced to buy (with better quality games, fewer DRM annoyances, lower prices). Trying to force them (via DRM) appears ineffective so far and is certainly turning away people who otherwise would buy.
While his lying is NOTHING near to what Nixon, reagan, or W did, he still lied. I believe that we had no excuse to ask him what we did, but he did lie under oath. There is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT ABOUT IT.
You're equating his lying with his being corrupt. I don't think they are the same thing. Clinton's lying does not necessarily indicate corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that you?
No.
FYI: The 5.5V capacitors are actually made up of 2 individual cells in series each of which rated for ~ 2.5V nominal each. That is dictated by the dielectric material properties.
>The EESU is composed of 31,353 of these components arranged in parallel.
I think it is more than likely to have capacitors in series and parallel combination to get to these high voltages.
The patent says they are all in parallel.
What I mean is that "octopodes" would be correct if you wanted to borrow (from latin) the plural form as well as the singular form. "Octopi" is what people think the borrowed plural should be but it's incorrect. But yes, "octopuses" is how the plural would be formed in English and that seems to be gaining ground over octopi. According to this page written in 2004 octopi had a slight advantage in terms of number of results returned by Google. It's now very much in favour of octopuses, 490,000 to 344,000.
Ok, I have not read tfa (in this case tfp), but I do know a bit about capacitors. Follow along with me here: You can calculate the energy stored in a capacitor (in Joules) by E = .5*CV^2 where C = capacitance (in Farads) and V = voltage, or
--> V = sqrt((2E)/C)
--> 3500 = sqrt((2*187992000)/30.7)
3500v is a lot. Up until now most comercially available supercapacitors do 5.5v or less and tend to leak energy over time. It's possilbe these guys have really made a stunning break through (the fact they filed for a patent is sure something), but the numbers set off my bullshit detector.
TFA (or TFP if you prefer) does indeed state 3500v. The patent also claims leakage of only 0.1% per 30 days. So, big claims. Hopefully they're for real. We'll just have to wait and see.
The capacitor described apparently stores ~180MJ.
Gasoline contains 39MJ/litre, so the capacitor contains the same energy density as 1 gallon of fuel (or 1.2 US gallons for leftpondians).
If we new the efficiency of converting energy in the capacitor into kinetic energy, we could compare the usefulness of this technology.
According to Wikipedia the Tesla has battery-to-wheel efficiency of about 90%. Internal combustion engines are about 20% (the thermodynamic limit is 37%).
TFA:
52.220 kWh of energy
A single car battery is about 200 watt hours. The batteries in the Tesla Roadster holds 53 kWÂh according to Wikipedia.
Now thats an interesting coincidence. I wonder if they just worked out how much capacitor would be needed for the power plant of the Tesla.
If they can bring it to market at the stated weight (130kg) it'll makes things very interesting. The Tesla's current battery pack weighs 450kg so you could triple its range. Or cut the vehicles weight by 25% (current weight is about 1200kg).
Octopus is latinized Greek not Greek. Hence, octopi is in play. And glancing around at a few dictionaries, it doesn't appear that octopi is wrong much less "universally" wrong.
According to the OED (via Wikipedia), octopi would be correct if octopus were a second declension noun, which it isn't. Therefore the correct pural should be octopodes. If it were a native latin noun the plural would be octopedes (cf. centipedes, millipedes). Dictionaries seem to largely agree that octopuses is the most common English plural, octopi next (though misconceived), and octopodes rarely.
That article claims that consoles are seeing higher sales primarily because of lower piracy. That should mean that the difference is reduced or eliminated for games that can't effectively be pirated - the ones with peripherals like Guitar Hero. So did the PC release of any of the Guitar Hero games do better that expected relative to other games? If not (and I'm pretty sure it did not) then it indicates that other factors are at least as important.
So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product if it isn't free, because it can't be done.
Your premise is flawed. Pirates obviously do value the product even if it's not free, which they show by taking the time and effort to get it.
I don't think it's quite that black and white. The time and effort to pirate is extremely low - usually a matter of a couple of minutes to start a download. It's lower than the time and effort of just getting to a brick and mortar store. So you can't ascribe very much value that way. It's so low that people sometimes don't even use the stuff they download. Also consider that time and effort taken to pirate does not represent the downloader's estimation of the value of the product, it represents the downloader's estimate of the potential value of the product.
Can you "run" a document you've opened recently on XP? Not that I know of. You can open it on Vista easily (like Quicksilver allows).
The "run" dialog will open documents. In fact it works better than applications: applications only get auto-completed if you've run them before using the dialog. Documents get auto-completed if you've opened them before in any application.
But the onus is on the bank to ensure the signature is legitimate. If the owner of the account contests the withdrawal and the bank can't show an accurate signature then the bank will have to refund the withdrawal. So the account owner is protected.
... which has nothing to do with me being 5000 Euro richer :)
Right, but since the banks screwed up in the first place I'm not too bothered if they foot the bill.
Um. Yes it is. I can go to any branch of my local bank any time, tell them my name and account number and withdraw up to EUR 5000,-- with just a signature.
But the onus is on the bank to ensure the signature is legitimate. If the owner of the account contests the withdrawal and the bank can't show an accurate signature then the bank will have to refund the withdrawal. So the account owner is protected. For the banks protection they tend to have security cameras so the criminal is taking a significant risk in trying to physically withdraw money.
You have to keep in mind the differences between countries. In Germany, the most popular way to order stuff online is to give your bank account number to the merchant who will then charge your account. It works just like a credit card number and stores rarely check if the number (account) really belongs to the person that's making the order.
So what protection do you have if a merchant charges incorrectly? If bank account numbers can be used like credit card numbers then bank accounts should have the same sort of fraud protection as credit cards.
Sorry, I missed the "equivalent of". But an account number is not the equivalent of a direct debit card. It's not that easy to withdraw money from an account when all you have is the account number.
Who wants a mass list anyway, you can't target spam at people just because they're German and they have a bank account, and stealing that many identities begs the question, "why?"
Yeah, who could have use for the equivalent of 21 million valid direct debit cards.
How do you propose to obtain the 21 million valid direct debit cards? Ring up the banks and get them to change the address of every account to your address?
I'm really sceptical that even 1% of this 1 million+ figure is people downloading it "because they had to" after buying it.
I agree - surely most people who actually bought the game would just download a no-cd crack rather than downloading the entire game.
A company that makes Spore wants to earn a living. And to do that they put on DRM.
And it just can't work.
The premise of DRM is to make more difficult for people to casually copy the game. That means managing to put restriction for every last game player out there. Everyone has to be subjected to that shit in the hopes that the copying will be limited.
But then, all it takes is 1 single unique copy. 1 single unique time when the DRM has been circumvented, for that copy to be made available to millions via the internet.
Exactly right. People are not copying the retail release with its DRM they're copying a hacked version which has no DRM. So how can DRM possibly be effective? If I was a shareholder of one of these companies I'd be asking why they're spending money on DRM systems which clearly can't work.
Well, except that it's not Warnsdorff's algorithm. In fact, this seems to just give a list of all possible paths a knight can take from (1,1), including those that do not cover the entire board (or at least I don't see the spot where it filters out the latter).
Well, except that it's not Warnsdorff's algorithm.
No, but neither is the 60 line Python version, right? The link I mentioned has a version using the Warnsdorff algorthim and it's similar in length to the Prolog version (which also doesn't implement Warnsdorff's algorithm, though I may be mistaken - I haven't used Prolog in about 15 years).
In fact, this seems to just give a list of all possible paths a knight can take from (1,1), including those that do not cover the entire board (or at least I don't see the spot where it filters out the latter).
It's the loop: it counts down from n^2 (where n is the number of squares per side). So the loop only ends successfully if the tour covers the entire board.
It can be done concisely in functional languages, e.g. Haskell:
:: Int -> [[(Int,Int)]]
knights
knights n = loop (n*n) [[(1,1)]]
where loop 1 = map reverse . id
loop i = loop (i-1) . concatMap nextMoves
nextMoves already@(x:xs) = [next:already | next <- possible]
where possible = filter (\x -> on_board x && not (x `elem` already)) $ jumps x
jumps (x,y) = [(x+a, y+b) | (a,b) <- [(1,2), (2,1), (2,-1), (1,-2), (-1,-2), (-2,-1), (-2,1), (-1,2)]]
on_board (x,y) = (x >= 1) && (x <= n) && (y >= 1) && (y <= n)
(from http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/99_questions/90_to_94).
I assume from the way you phrase that you aren't yourself a quote content creator unquote.
I used the quotes because I'm talking about publishers as well as developers and publishers don't actually create anything.
Alright. Here's an interview with a game developer who used an extremely weak form of DRM (serial numbers only). Obsoleting the first generation of keygens increased sales by 70% overnight.
Now that article is pretty balanced - breaking the keygens only closed one way to pirate the game (cracked copies with the protection code removed were still available), and a 70% increase in sales certainly doesn't equate to eliminating piracy. But it didn't have to.
They did get a 70% increase in sales after the first fix (though they make no mention of how long that increase lasted). They also said that the 2nd and 3rd fixes had no impact on downloads and left sales either flat or slightly down (i.e. strengthening DRM hurt in one case). The fourth fix had a slight impact: 13% increase in sales. The link says:
As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.
I did say that some people will buy the game if the DRM is strengthened. But I said that generally pirates can't be forced to buy the game using DRM and your link supports me on that: 99.9% of the pirates did not buy the game when the DRM was strengthened. And that statistic also makes it clear that a download can't be equated to a lost sale: it's more like 1/1000 of a lost sale.
The question is whether strengthening DRM is an effective way to increase sales (well everyone says "increase sales", but what they really mean is "increase profit"). Let's look at the numbers from the article: 92% piracy rate means 11.5 downloads for every sold copy. They figured that their DRM fixes resulted in 1 extra sale per 1000 copies prevented. So, 87 sales results in 1000 downloads, and fixing the DRM results in one extra sale. How much money should be spend on strengthening DRM for a 1.15% increase in sales?
Of course this is only one data point. But it's not convincing me that strengthening DRM is the way to go.
Your position is one that only makes sense if you assume you are, somehow, much smarter than all the major PC game publishers out there, despite having worse or non-existant access to the statistics you'd need to make a decision. I find that a pretty arrogant position.
I don't think I'm smarter than all the major PC game publishers at all - your reasoning to arrive at that conclusion is faulty. However, I do think that if the industry had real statistics to back up the use of DRM they would publicise them and put this debate to rest. The lack of hard data from the industry and the ease with which people can find pirated material make it is clear that DRM is pretty ineffective. It's an arms race the industry obviously can't win (not on the PC platform at least) and yet they continue to pour millions of dollars into the fight while the pirates spend nothing.
pirating the game just makes one statement:
"I want this game, and I took it for free. If you can find a more secure drm, you will make more money from me"
No. You seem to be suffering from the widely held delusion (at least among "content creators") that a pirated copy is a lost sale. The statement that is actually being made is this:
"I want this game, and I took it for free. I'm not prepared to pay the price you ask with the restrictions you've imposed".
Making the DRM more secure might get some people to pay. Removing the DRM might get some people to pay. What evidence do you have that adding DRM is more effective than removing DRM? What evidence do you have that DRM can be made secure enough to make a difference? I've yet to see anything convincing from the industry on either of those points. Most likely the price is simply too high. Content creators need to stop looking at pirates as people that can be forced to buy. Most of them can't be, though some them could be induced to buy (with better quality games, fewer DRM annoyances, lower prices). Trying to force them (via DRM) appears ineffective so far and is certainly turning away people who otherwise would buy.
We're gonna throw dinner rolls at one another?
Amazingly enough, the term bunfight has nothing to do with fighting or buns (or indeed food of any sort).
Oh well, it's not exactly like it's the first time a Briticism has been used incorrectly on /.
Well that's one theory. Here's another.
While his lying is NOTHING near to what Nixon, reagan, or W did, he still lied. I believe that we had no excuse to ask him what we did, but he did lie under oath. There is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT ABOUT IT.
You're equating his lying with his being corrupt. I don't think they are the same thing. Clinton's lying does not necessarily indicate corruption.
nVidia have released patches for libavcodec, libavutil, and ffmpeg. So most Linux software should pick up support in pretty quick time.
Again, not strictly a doomsday device, but nevertheless, the Lazy Gun is the most ingenious weapon ever inventerised!
Another example from Iain Banks is Grdifire, the weaponry at the end of the universe.