What you want is a cell that produces the maximum life-cycle watt-hours per dollar, adjusted to NPV for life time.
Why? Well, if it costs more to make a cell than it will produce in its lifetime, then the cell is only good as an energy storage machanism, like hydrogen. You put energy in one and, and you take it out at the other, but the "out" side has less energy than the "in" side took.
A cell that costs more than 1-2c/kwh to produce is not economical. We can already generate power for 2c or less with nuclear, 3-5c for fossil fuels.
The cells based on this metric alone may not be practical due to size and other factors, but any cell which fails this metric can never be used for net power generation.
Interesting, and very likely correct. I was under the naieve assumption that the manufacturers would be generating player keys themselves. That, of course, would be foolish from the AACSLA perspective.
Sorry for not modding you up, but I'm somewhat curious:
If the players each have a unique key, what is the probability that the keys which are used to identify the player are (mathematically) sequential? I don't know squat about cryptography, or the way AACS works, except for what I read here (that's very sad, indeed). Nonetheless, it has been proven that most manufacturers are unbelievably lazy when it comes to this sort of thing. If there is a chance that the player keys are sequentially assigned (within the cryptographic "series" if there is such a thing), it would be theoretically possible to expose a large number of keys from a few data points. That _would_ have the effect of screwing up a large base of installed players.
I expect the details would make such a process very difficult, and once performed the manufacturers would likely resort to a pseudo-random asignment, but it sure would be fun to watch. As long as my (future) player wasn't one of the ones revoked.;-)
While possible, that's just doing way too much work. By getting the video feed, you're getting the raw stream of bits. While technically useful, it would then have to be captured and stored at extremely high data rates and then recompressed to create the original. It might take 10-15x the running time of the film to get it back into usable form, and then you'd have to deal with transcoding artifacts which effectively degrade the copy. If I want to copy my HD-DVDs onto my HTPC to use it as a jukebox*, I want the original quality I paid for.
It's much more efficient, and higher quality, to intercept the data before it gets decoded, and it's even more time-efficient to have the keys to decode the stream directly and write it back to disc at the speed limit of the player. Luckily, we have people in the hacker community with nothing better to do than play cat-and-mouse with the DRM houses.
*for the record I own neither an HD-DVD player nor a HTPC, though I am building the latter to store my 200+ DVDs I currently have in a hardware jukebox for more convenient viewing)
Oddly enough, it's true - though I was in a trollish mood.
I live in the south. I have friends who are rednecks. They really do exist. As do trailer parks.
The danger of any quick-growth area is that infrastructre can't keep up. What's just as bad is that every builder around will fight any assessemnt tootha dn nail, which means bonds and higher property taxes to cover the new growth. And, yes, it will mean trailers for classrooms until the building catches up.
Remember my post and go to your town council meetings. I doubt you can talk sense into them, but you can at least try.
A zune, even with it's questionable attributes, is going to be quite attractive at a $49 or $99 pricepoint - even if you get stuck with a year or two of $16.95/mo service. Americans will delay any capital investment - especially for entertainment - even if they pay through the nose on a regular basis. Cell phones, cableTV, satTV have far and away proven this to be true.
I hate to admit it, but MS might - I say might - be on to something here. Something bad, imho, but I'm pretty far outside of the mainstream when it comes to this stuff.
Now, they could end up being the first mouse instead of the early bird - I'm thinking prodigy and pop-up ads at the moment - but this could herald the beginning of a new paradigm in portable music. (Man, that's a lot of marketingspeak - I feel slimy just typing it).
Anyway, with the massive influx of people and the NAHB lobby making sure that there are no per-residence capital improvement fees the schools will look just like the existing "home sites" - full of trailers.
(yes, I'm being crass, but it's true - unless your local people get some backbones you're going to get to watch your tax _rates_ triple or quadruple to cover the infrastrucutre costs that these newcomers are going to drive)
That'd be great if nothing every got updated. I actually tried this once and by the time I was ready to start over from scratch I realized it was almost easier to do an actual clean install with current-version apps than try and upgrade everything from 0.4-2.0 versions ago. Now I just keep a directory around with all the commonly installed apps, and when I get an update, I try to remember to put the new install version in the appropriate folder. I've almost given up that for a simple list of apps, and a directory with critical drivers. Things change too fast to have a "stable" image that's good for more than 6 months or so, and with XP running stably for longer than that (my current install is 2.5 years old), the image is just useless.
Don't worry! Competition in the cable market allows you to choose any provider you like!
Of course, most places aren't served by more than one cable company, so if you want new service you have to move to a new territory. I still haven't quite figured out that part (no monopolies, only exclusive territories).
It's a shame that they can't figure out how to make local telephone, cable and local DSL act the same way long distance calling does in the US. Heck, even the power compainies (well, some of them) manage to do it.
Unfortunatly, until the local service gets unshackled from the physical plant we're going to be stuck with whatever they incumbents offer us.
Yes, but the people in charge are still pulling mighty tidy salaries (afaik), so for a business school, this would be a lesson of the opposite type. "How to milk a company with a nonexistant product and no chance of survival for several years while pulling down a 99.9% percentile income."
No, not really. After being invoved with the "game" long enough, they can really see whats happening by watching the raw data scroll across the screen.
(oh, come on - you know somebody would give you a smart-ass answer like that)
How much storage do you need? Spindle running, no read/write values are in the 2-5W range, with peak write at about 12W. A small laptop will happily chug at less than 40 watts, and 750GB drives are available with 1TB in oem hands right now. I daresay under 50W at idle (prob 40W w/ the screen off) is going to kick the butt of most desktops without a monitor.
While it would be nice to save those three idle watts, I think the cost of a full system would probably outweigh that loss.
There are a lot of non-foodstock crops which are more energy positive than corn. Al LOT more positive. Many people still believe corn to be net negative (see: Hydrogen)
Why does the substitute have to be a current market product? Why does it have to be grown in soils which are suited to somehting else. Is it impossible to believe that the sandy/silty soils of the mid-atlantic tobacco region are unsuitable for any of the various bio-fuel crops?
Anyway, the economics you propose won't work. It takes a lot of captial to convert most production, so the changeover is very slow (see Tobacco, above). AS some farms convert to the new fuel to "chase the market", the price of the fuel will come down, and the price of (say) corn will go up - but not excessively. As long as the government isn't substantially subsidizing one of the players, the net effect will be a balanced market. By adding a crop, the likelihood of new players in the market makes the existing markets less unstable, and ideally would fill the gap for those whos crops are not economically viable (se Tobacco, above). If the govenment research went towards fuel crops which are hardy in non-traditional food-crop areas, we would see a net increase in total farm production.
There will still be give and take, but corn is the "obvious answer" with too many bad results. And ADM is laughing all the way to the bank.
So do the work you're supposed to do and provide a written set of notes for the people to take home. PP is a lousy archive medium - it's too sparse and, if have several gigs of textual information and resolution appropriate materia, way to inefficient for storage. You can summarize clearly in 4 typewritten pages (8 if you include figures, 12 if you've put a lot of work into it) what takes 30-40 slides for most people to present. Don't half ass it and hit archive.
Because biofuel is actually energy positive - you get more energy out the tank than it took to put the fuel into the tank.
Hydrogen is a storage medium, not an energy source.
BTW - the "energy source" for biofuel is solar. In fact, if you discount nuclear, everything is solar. Well, actually, nuclear is solar, too, since that's where the elements were formed (though perhaps not _our_ sun - perhaps stellar energy is more accurate). But I digress...
Biofuel uses solar energy which is being collected now, instead of solar which was collected in the past and for which there is a finite amount. It's a bit circuitous, but the energy it takes to raise biofuel crops and convert those crops to a fuel product is less than the energy the end-fuel produces. Which is the key. Corn, for many years, took more energy to produce ethanol than you could get by burning the end-product ethanol. It's now (help me out/.ers) 10-20% energy positive. Other fules are more positive, and have the advantage of not using a feedstock as the crop source.
It will always take more energy to make a fuel out of hydrogen compounds than that hydrogen can release. TANSTAAFL.
Interesting. I'm not up on all the details of better ripping technique, and my HT server just got commandeered for the new office server (going to get a new one, eventually, on the company's dime, of course). I'm finishing up the playroom now, and though my wife doesn't know it, I've got my eye on building a bargain FP system with the hitachi 720p dlp and a unity gain 135" 1.78 screen. I've had a 119" system with an old 768p Sony and a hipower, but that got rolled into the construction loan...gotta buy this time with real cash;-)
Anyway, I've been so disappointed with the Xvid results I was about to just give up. I still may, and just rip to mpeg2 - I've got about 300 DVDs to convert at some point, and HD space is cheap. I just picked up another TB of space for $218. 2x compression for lossy->lossy doesn't sound like a huge bargain (though I'm basing this on audio, which is a dangerous comparison).
If I might ask - what kind of horsepower is necessary to playback the HD? Will a single core P3.4 hack it (XP MCE for the OS), provided there are no other critical bottlenecks?
Nothing occurs in a vacuum any more. Efficiency and economic viability of any product is tied to the current supply chain, and any change in the balance of this order of magnitude will be felt everywhere. I always thought it interesting when there were stories on biodeisel being made from recycled cooking oil nobody ever mentioned that there is a fairly limited supply of said oil when compared with the demand for automotive fuel. Sure, there's lots going to waste, but making the waste product a viable commodity in a quickly growing market is bound to create scarcity. All of a sudden, stuff that's free because it is waste now has an actual market value.
Are we really so myopic that the lure of "free fuel" has completely distracted us from the fact that nothing on this planet is being produced in such quantity that changing the market for that product radically will not affect the marketplace?
Actually, my local donation center has the option of giving two units of plasma. I haven't gone since they introduced it (6 maybe 8 months ago). Back in the day they didn't have lists available for perusal. I hadn't realized - never really gave it the thought - that the blood could be used for clinical testing should it prove not suitable for transfustion; that's a reasonable use in its own right. The chunk out of my day is pretty valuable (probabaly close to $250 in lost income when all is said and done). I don't worry about giving it away for a good purpose, I just don't want to waste it (and the time and materials of the RC) because someone is afraid of "offending" me by not letting me donate. (They used to have a station where you could "anonymously" indicate your blood was dangerous, but still save face by "donating")
Good call on the technician for your wife's donation. Don't know if that's actually true (I'm am fully ignornant of the process once the blood leaves my arm), but that should be enough to get just about any parent of a small child back to the center in 2 months. For those without children, you can be as sympathetic as you like but you'll never really feel that kind of comment until you have one.
Slashdot Mirror
What you want is a cell that produces the maximum life-cycle watt-hours per dollar, adjusted to NPV for life time.
Why? Well, if it costs more to make a cell than it will produce in its lifetime, then the cell is only good as an energy storage machanism, like hydrogen. You put energy in one and, and you take it out at the other, but the "out" side has less energy than the "in" side took.
A cell that costs more than 1-2c/kwh to produce is not economical. We can already generate power for 2c or less with nuclear, 3-5c for fossil fuels.
The cells based on this metric alone may not be practical due to size and other factors, but any cell which fails this metric can never be used for net power generation.
No, H is next - I vote for half-wit hippo. Whoops, that would be Vista. Better skip it and go straight to Intellectual Ibid.
Interesting, and very likely correct. I was under the naieve assumption that the manufacturers would be generating player keys themselves. That, of course, would be foolish from the AACSLA perspective.
Sorry for not modding you up, but I'm somewhat curious:
;-)
If the players each have a unique key, what is the probability that the keys which are used to identify the player are (mathematically) sequential? I don't know squat about cryptography, or the way AACS works, except for what I read here (that's very sad, indeed). Nonetheless, it has been proven that most manufacturers are unbelievably lazy when it comes to this sort of thing. If there is a chance that the player keys are sequentially assigned (within the cryptographic "series" if there is such a thing), it would be theoretically possible to expose a large number of keys from a few data points. That _would_ have the effect of screwing up a large base of installed players.
I expect the details would make such a process very difficult, and once performed the manufacturers would likely resort to a pseudo-random asignment, but it sure would be fun to watch. As long as my (future) player wasn't one of the ones revoked.
While possible, that's just doing way too much work. By getting the video feed, you're getting the raw stream of bits. While technically useful, it would then have to be captured and stored at extremely high data rates and then recompressed to create the original. It might take 10-15x the running time of the film to get it back into usable form, and then you'd have to deal with transcoding artifacts which effectively degrade the copy. If I want to copy my HD-DVDs onto my HTPC to use it as a jukebox*, I want the original quality I paid for.
It's much more efficient, and higher quality, to intercept the data before it gets decoded, and it's even more time-efficient to have the keys to decode the stream directly and write it back to disc at the speed limit of the player. Luckily, we have people in the hacker community with nothing better to do than play cat-and-mouse with the DRM houses.
*for the record I own neither an HD-DVD player nor a HTPC, though I am building the latter to store my 200+ DVDs I currently have in a hardware jukebox for more convenient viewing)
Oddly enough, it's true - though I was in a trollish mood.
I live in the south. I have friends who are rednecks. They really do exist. As do trailer parks.
The danger of any quick-growth area is that infrastructre can't keep up. What's just as bad is that every builder around will fight any assessemnt tootha dn nail, which means bonds and higher property taxes to cover the new growth. And, yes, it will mean trailers for classrooms until the building catches up.
Remember my post and go to your town council meetings. I doubt you can talk sense into them, but you can at least try.
Best of luck.
I'm going to agree with your detractors.
A zune, even with it's questionable attributes, is going to be quite attractive at a $49 or $99 pricepoint - even if you get stuck with a year or two of $16.95/mo service. Americans will delay any capital investment - especially for entertainment - even if they pay through the nose on a regular basis. Cell phones, cableTV, satTV have far and away proven this to be true.
I hate to admit it, but MS might - I say might - be on to something here. Something bad, imho, but I'm pretty far outside of the mainstream when it comes to this stuff.
Now, they could end up being the first mouse instead of the early bird - I'm thinking prodigy and pop-up ads at the moment - but this could herald the beginning of a new paradigm in portable music. (Man, that's a lot of marketingspeak - I feel slimy just typing it).
Yeah, but most of you are.
Anyway, with the massive influx of people and the NAHB lobby making sure that there are no per-residence capital improvement fees the schools will look just like the existing "home sites" - full of trailers.
(yes, I'm being crass, but it's true - unless your local people get some backbones you're going to get to watch your tax _rates_ triple or quadruple to cover the infrastrucutre costs that these newcomers are going to drive)
I believe that would be the "breasts" option.
...this is slashdot, after all.
Oh, this just opens up a whole new world of "photocopy your butt" bad ideas.
That'd be great if nothing every got updated. I actually tried this once and by the time I was ready to start over from scratch I realized it was almost easier to do an actual clean install with current-version apps than try and upgrade everything from 0.4-2.0 versions ago. Now I just keep a directory around with all the commonly installed apps, and when I get an update, I try to remember to put the new install version in the appropriate folder. I've almost given up that for a simple list of apps, and a directory with critical drivers. Things change too fast to have a "stable" image that's good for more than 6 months or so, and with XP running stably for longer than that (my current install is 2.5 years old), the image is just useless.
Don't worry! Competition in the cable market allows you to choose any provider you like!
Of course, most places aren't served by more than one cable company, so if you want new service you have to move to a new territory. I still haven't quite figured out that part (no monopolies, only exclusive territories).
It's a shame that they can't figure out how to make local telephone, cable and local DSL act the same way long distance calling does in the US. Heck, even the power compainies (well, some of them) manage to do it.
Unfortunatly, until the local service gets unshackled from the physical plant we're going to be stuck with whatever they incumbents offer us.
Witchcraft incest porn?
All I can say is that I'm bailing if "hot grits" appears anywhere in book 7!
Yes, but the people in charge are still pulling mighty tidy salaries (afaik), so for a business school, this would be a lesson of the opposite type. "How to milk a company with a nonexistant product and no chance of survival for several years while pulling down a 99.9% percentile income."
No, not really. After being invoved with the "game" long enough, they can really see whats happening by watching the raw data scroll across the screen.
(oh, come on - you know somebody would give you a smart-ass answer like that)
Don't confound a mac thread with facts. It only makes the mac mods angry.
And that's not "specially molded plastic," it's a fashion statement for your living room.
(Go ahead fanboi, mod me down, too. I've got karma to burn.)
How much storage do you need? Spindle running, no read/write values are in the 2-5W range, with peak write at about 12W. A small laptop will happily chug at less than 40 watts, and 750GB drives are available with 1TB in oem hands right now. I daresay under 50W at idle (prob 40W w/ the screen off) is going to kick the butt of most desktops without a monitor.
While it would be nice to save those three idle watts, I think the cost of a full system would probably outweigh that loss.
That's pretty impressive. Around me, that would mean an electric bill of about $18/mo, $10 of which would be taxes and billing fees.
There are a lot of non-foodstock crops which are more energy positive than corn. Al LOT more positive. Many people still believe corn to be net negative (see: Hydrogen)
Why does the substitute have to be a current market product? Why does it have to be grown in soils which are suited to somehting else. Is it impossible to believe that the sandy/silty soils of the mid-atlantic tobacco region are unsuitable for any of the various bio-fuel crops?
Anyway, the economics you propose won't work. It takes a lot of captial to convert most production, so the changeover is very slow (see Tobacco, above). AS some farms convert to the new fuel to "chase the market", the price of the fuel will come down, and the price of (say) corn will go up - but not excessively. As long as the government isn't substantially subsidizing one of the players, the net effect will be a balanced market. By adding a crop, the likelihood of new players in the market makes the existing markets less unstable, and ideally would fill the gap for those whos crops are not economically viable (se Tobacco, above). If the govenment research went towards fuel crops which are hardy in non-traditional food-crop areas, we would see a net increase in total farm production.
There will still be give and take, but corn is the "obvious answer" with too many bad results. And ADM is laughing all the way to the bank.
So do the work you're supposed to do and provide a written set of notes for the people to take home. PP is a lousy archive medium - it's too sparse and, if have several gigs of textual information and resolution appropriate materia, way to inefficient for storage. You can summarize clearly in 4 typewritten pages (8 if you include figures, 12 if you've put a lot of work into it) what takes 30-40 slides for most people to present. Don't half ass it and hit archive.
here endeth the lecture.
Because biofuel is actually energy positive - you get more energy out the tank than it took to put the fuel into the tank.
/.ers) 10-20% energy positive. Other fules are more positive, and have the advantage of not using a feedstock as the crop source.
Hydrogen is a storage medium, not an energy source.
BTW - the "energy source" for biofuel is solar. In fact, if you discount nuclear, everything is solar. Well, actually, nuclear is solar, too, since that's where the elements were formed (though perhaps not _our_ sun - perhaps stellar energy is more accurate). But I digress...
Biofuel uses solar energy which is being collected now, instead of solar which was collected in the past and for which there is a finite amount. It's a bit circuitous, but the energy it takes to raise biofuel crops and convert those crops to a fuel product is less than the energy the end-fuel produces. Which is the key. Corn, for many years, took more energy to produce ethanol than you could get by burning the end-product ethanol. It's now (help me out
It will always take more energy to make a fuel out of hydrogen compounds than that hydrogen can release. TANSTAAFL.
Interesting. I'm not up on all the details of better ripping technique, and my HT server just got commandeered for the new office server (going to get a new one, eventually, on the company's dime, of course). I'm finishing up the playroom now, and though my wife doesn't know it, I've got my eye on building a bargain FP system with the hitachi 720p dlp and a unity gain 135" 1.78 screen. I've had a 119" system with an old 768p Sony and a hipower, but that got rolled into the construction loan...gotta buy this time with real cash ;-)
Anyway, I've been so disappointed with the Xvid results I was about to just give up. I still may, and just rip to mpeg2 - I've got about 300 DVDs to convert at some point, and HD space is cheap. I just picked up another TB of space for $218. 2x compression for lossy->lossy doesn't sound like a huge bargain (though I'm basing this on audio, which is a dangerous comparison).
If I might ask - what kind of horsepower is necessary to playback the HD? Will a single core P3.4 hack it (XP MCE for the OS), provided there are no other critical bottlenecks?
Nothing occurs in a vacuum any more. Efficiency and economic viability of any product is tied to the current supply chain, and any change in the balance of this order of magnitude will be felt everywhere. I always thought it interesting when there were stories on biodeisel being made from recycled cooking oil nobody ever mentioned that there is a fairly limited supply of said oil when compared with the demand for automotive fuel. Sure, there's lots going to waste, but making the waste product a viable commodity in a quickly growing market is bound to create scarcity. All of a sudden, stuff that's free because it is waste now has an actual market value.
Are we really so myopic that the lure of "free fuel" has completely distracted us from the fact that nothing on this planet is being produced in such quantity that changing the market for that product radically will not affect the marketplace?
I guess the answer is, "yes."
Actually, my local donation center has the option of giving two units of plasma. I haven't gone since they introduced it (6 maybe 8 months ago). Back in the day they didn't have lists available for perusal. I hadn't realized - never really gave it the thought - that the blood could be used for clinical testing should it prove not suitable for transfustion; that's a reasonable use in its own right. The chunk out of my day is pretty valuable (probabaly close to $250 in lost income when all is said and done). I don't worry about giving it away for a good purpose, I just don't want to waste it (and the time and materials of the RC) because someone is afraid of "offending" me by not letting me donate. (They used to have a station where you could "anonymously" indicate your blood was dangerous, but still save face by "donating")
Good call on the technician for your wife's donation. Don't know if that's actually true (I'm am fully ignornant of the process once the blood leaves my arm), but that should be enough to get just about any parent of a small child back to the center in 2 months. For those without children, you can be as sympathetic as you like but you'll never really feel that kind of comment until you have one.