>This is great, but what happens when it rains >and people want to go look at your website as >they can't be outside?
>
>"HTTP/1.1 Error 1000 - Sun is not shining"
And I suppose you'll say what about at night too?
But you know how when it's dark on one side of the Earth, then the Sun is shining on the other side of the earth?
I presume this company has two sets of solar panels, one in the USA and one in somewhere like west Australia, so as to get 24 hour/day of sunshine.
Furthermore, they probably send the sunlight from one place to another through the intercontential optic fibre systems. These fibres do actually carry their data in the form of light energy. After all, it does take energy to create these light signals, and at the other end, after the data has been extracted, the light is shone onto a mini array of solar panels to recover the light energy.
You wouldn't think an optic fibre carried much light energy, and that used to be true, but nowadays, due to new multiplexing and wave division channel technologies, they can stuff a phenomenal amount of sunlight down each fibre, something like 2300 kilojoules/cm^2 per second.
For more info on this, see:
www.solar-fibres.com
the website is a bit erratic, so if you can't get it, just try again later.
>I can handle a PDA running Linux. I can even >handle a calculator running Linux. But a watch? >What's next, a Linux powered hearing aid?
Umm yes that would actually be quite useful to me. I'm profoundly deaf and have to use state-of-the-art hearing aids that amplify by about 120 decibels, maintain high sound quality, and still fit into the space behind my ear. Quite a lot of processing power there. (the ones i currently have are analogue and come from a converted Israeli missile-tech factory - an actual example of the 'peace dividend!)
The next set I buy will be digital and needs to sample sound in thousands of channels, with different modifiable responses for each channel (like most deaf people, I hear better at some frequences than others - typically lower ones), and also be able to transpose higher pitched speech sounds (silibants - 's', 'f', etc) into lower channels, distinguish between different auditory environments, cancel noise, detect and auto-cancel feedback (a major problem for very high powered aids), and various other DSP wonders, all of which needs to be individually tuned for the wearer.
Programming and tuning these things require several months of frequent visits to the audiologists and their computers.
So yes, there's probably already enough power there to run linux. and I'd love to be able to hack my own aids without having to go to the audiologist. Not to mention running foreign lanuage speech reconition and Babelfish....
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>This is great, but what happens when it rains >and people want to go look at your website as >they can't be outside?
>
>"HTTP/1.1 Error 1000 - Sun is not shining"
And I suppose you'll say what about at night too?
But you know how when it's dark on one side of the Earth, then the Sun is shining on the other side of the earth?
I presume this company has two sets of solar panels, one in the USA and one in somewhere like west Australia, so as to get 24 hour/day of sunshine.
Furthermore, they probably send the sunlight from one place to another through the intercontential optic fibre systems. These fibres do actually carry their data in the form of light energy. After all, it does take energy to create these light signals, and at the other end, after the data has been extracted, the light is shone onto a mini array of solar panels to recover the light energy.
You wouldn't think an optic fibre carried much light energy, and that used to be true, but nowadays, due to new multiplexing and wave division channel technologies, they can stuff a phenomenal amount of sunlight down each fibre, something like 2300 kilojoules/cm^2 per second.
For more info on this, see:
www.solar-fibres.com
the website is a bit erratic, so if you can't get it, just try again later.
>I can handle a PDA running Linux. I can even >handle a calculator running Linux. But a watch? >What's next, a Linux powered hearing aid?
Umm yes that would actually be quite useful to me. I'm profoundly deaf and have to use state-of-the-art hearing aids that amplify by about 120 decibels, maintain high sound quality, and still fit into the space behind my ear. Quite a lot of processing power there. (the ones i currently have are analogue and come from a converted Israeli missile-tech factory - an actual example of the 'peace dividend!)
The next set I buy will be digital and needs to sample sound in thousands of channels, with different modifiable responses for each channel (like most deaf people, I hear better at some frequences than others - typically lower ones), and also be able to transpose higher pitched speech sounds (silibants - 's', 'f', etc) into lower channels, distinguish between different auditory environments, cancel noise, detect and auto-cancel feedback (a major problem for very high powered aids), and various other DSP wonders, all of which needs to be individually tuned for the wearer.
Programming and tuning these things require several months of frequent visits to the audiologists and their computers.
So yes, there's probably already enough power there to run linux. and I'd love to be able to hack my own aids without having to go to the audiologist. Not to mention running foreign lanuage speech reconition and Babelfish....