I've had LEDs lighting up my house for over two years now (my house is old with low ceilings, many of the lights are GU-10 downlighters -- they were halogen and/or compact fluorescent, they are now 7W LEDs and are superior to halogens or CF in every respect).
In other words, a very large charger (which is effectively a second battery) to go with your portable machine that's supposed to be small and portable.
Instead of having a charger which is effectively must be a second battery to work, why not just have...well, a second battery? Does away with high currents altogether and you can have a nice lightweight charger again that can even fit in a pocket. Or is that too "existing paradigm" for new technology?
You're still going to have to transfer all that power from the charger to the device, which is still going to require a lot of amps and a very thick cable. Even if you use 48VDC between the charger and the device, the cable between the charger and the device is going to have to be rated for something like 160 amps (in other words, your charging cable will be a pair of cables that are about the size of a typical cable from a car battery to the starter. Big, thick, heavy and stiff).
What a lot of these articles forget is the current requirements to charge something fast. Just because something can be charged fast doesn't mean you can do it.
Let's take a typical laptop battery of 70 watt hours. To charge it in one hour, you need a 70W power supply (more or less). Now let's charge that same battery - if we can - in 30 seconds, or 120th of the time. You'll need an 8.4kW charger to do that, which is going to be much larger and heavier than the laptop. In Britain where the mains electricity is 240 volts, you're going to need 35 amps to do that (typical household circuit is 13 amps, high power circuits for example ovens and tumble dryers are 30A). In the United States you'll need 70 amps.
OK, so you can charge slower (but still much faster than a conventional battery) but it's still going to require a large (heavy) power supply for your laptop if you want to make the charging speed significantly faster than current lithium ion batteries. You're either going to wind up lugging around a lot of extra weight with your portable machine, or you're going to need two chargers (more expense). The thing is, the times when you really wish you can charge a battery quickly are always times you're travelling and so won't have the large heavy charger with you!
Is there a link to some article not in the mainstream media? The article has no details at all. Did she use an off-the-shelf super capacitor? What circuits did she make (one characteristic of a capacitor is the voltage immediately goes down as soon as you take charge from it, unlike a Li-Ion battery which maintains a more or less constant voltage through most of its charge), and how efficient is the voltage regulation? What about the energy density of the device? All supercaps I know of have a very small fraction of the energy density of a lithium ion battery. To replace a Li-Ion you need similar energy density or you get a massive phone.
Well, better driver training probably has a bigger impact. The yellow phase in the UK is probably half what it is in Florida, yet the accident rate in the UK is well under half of what it is in the US despite the UK having a far greater population density and busier roads than Florida. What I've noticed in Florida is for traffic signals, green means go, yellow means go faster and red means the next six vehicles may pass through the intersection.
Drivers here are taught to observe well ahead, and also that if you see a signal ahead that's been green for a long time, anticipate that it may change very soon.
Where has this plague of saying "reach out to" come from when people mean "speak to" or "contact"? It gives the impression of some kind of emo touching session.
But one of the least safe amongst developed countries. The US has a worse rate than Italy, and Italian drivers have one hell of a reputation for being bad. It's also worse than Spain which has a similar reputation to Italy, and double the accident rate per 100k cars than the UK and Germany (which has autobahns without speed limits).
It's entirely probable. There are already way more radio controlled models than this number in the US. Many drones are really just standard radio controlled models with a few extra bits added (for instance on one "Police will be using this drone" article on TV, it was quite clearly just a 600 class electric RC helicopter - airframe cost of about $300, probably total build cost for RC use around $900 with top of the range gear - with some extra stuff on it). Given the low potential cost of many things that will count as a drone, 30000 might be a low estimate.
But it's unpleasant and wastes a lot of time. If we were in a world where the price stuck to the windscreen was the price you paid and that was that, you could google the fair price and compare prices at several car lots without having to talk to a salesweasel. The haggling model means if I want to compare prices at several dealers it is a slow and highly unpleasant process.
There is a sweet spot (with that argument, we could say why not use 2.4). The thing is Debian is fantastic for certain things, such as servers or development workstaitons - things where you want to have something very dependable that's going to be solid. And Debian is solid, and their conservative approach means we run it on all our Linux servers.
It would have resulted in a *proportional* punishment. As a teenager I improvised something far more spectacular and got caught (it was kind of obvious who did it - enormous bang followed by four teenagers running away from the sound source just as a teacher left the chemistry block). I was shouted at and IIRC got a detention for it. No suspension. No life-ruining felony prosecution.
What this girl is getting is grossly and obscenely disproportionate. Even if she's acquitted of felony charges, it is grossly unjust that she was ever dragged through the court system for this.
The problem isn't really the quantity of oil that's still to be mined. It's the rate of mining and ease of getting at it. The real problem is that what's running out fast is the cheap and easy oil. Our economy at the moment absolutely relies on oil being both cheap and easy.
To contrast unconventional sources and conventional (cheap, easy) oil: Canada's proven reserves are something like 1,000 times larger than Mexico's Cantarell field. However, despite the size of this oil reserve, and despite decades of development, the rate of production from Canadian tar sands is still only about the rate that Cantarell was producing at its peak.
Whether oil is available or not isn't the question. We're still going to have to make enormous (and hopefully not too painful) changes to the way we use energy (and thus to how the economy works) to be able to cope with the shift from cheap, easy to extract oil to very much more expensive oil and it may well just be cheaper to use something other than oil well before it runs out. The cited Bakken shale isn't something you stick a pipe into and oil comes gushing out, rather it's more like rock that has to be mined and then has to go through an expensive process to get usable oil out of it. It will always be vastly more expensive and vastly more energy consuming (much lower energy return on investment) than, say, British North Sea oil or the stuff that comes from Libya or Saudi Arabia.
My Sinclair ZX Spectrum (a personal computer from 1982) can do this (or rather could: now twitter insist on SSL it's a bit beyond an 8 bit Z80 CPU). I built an ethernet board for it. Displayed it at the 2010 Vintage Computing Festival at Bletchley Park, and many people tweeted from it.
I have to wonder why it's really necessary to even consider mandating filtering on public WiFi connections. The vast majority of them are in public places, and I have *never ever* seen anyone browsing porn in a public space. The amount of people who would browse porn when random strangers can see what you're doing has to be pretty damn small. It seems like a lot of political hot air to try and solve a problem that doesn't exist.
x64 has twice as many registers. That alone means less having to move stuff in and out of memory, so that will improve the speed when compared to 32 bit applications. 32 bit x86 has only 4 truly general purpose registers. x64 adds another 8 64 bit registers.
Notwithstanding all of that, amd64 also has more registers, so there''s less having to move stuff to and from memory and you can make most function calls by passing parameters in registers instead of on the stack. amd64 provides a worthwhile increase in performance just due to having twice as many general purpose registers (actually, more than twice as many because there's only really 4 proper general purpose registers on 32 bit x86 - amd64 adds 8 more registers).
But none of what you argue rules out a sharp decline in PCs. For example, a lot of the demand for PCs in the home is that each person wants their own. But 99% of the time what they can do is more comfortable and easier on a tablet - perhaps a typical household of 4 people will move from buying 4 laptops to only owning one laptop and everyone has a tablet for 99% of their internet use. That alone would represent a significant decline in the market for a home PC.
Business PCs will last a lot longer, but it's not likely to be a growth market because it's already saturated.
That's why they bombed a shopping mall in Manchester, and why they bombed pubs, and why they bombed a business district in London.
The Boston attack was more like an IRA attack than it was an Islam attack (I'm not saying it is or isn't either). The hallmarks of an Islamic attack are (1) suicide bombers (2) infatuation with aviation with other public transport as a distant second. This was neither a suicide bombing nor an attack on the transportation network.
It doesn't really match the Islamic modus operandi (at least in the west) for these reasons:
* Islamic terrorists are infatuated with aviation, with other transportation a distant second. This was nothing to do with transportation. * Islamic terrorists in the west are most normally suicide bombers.
This attack if it had hallmarks had the hallmarks of domestic nut jobs, similar to Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber rather than Islamic.
Slashdot Mirror
A long way to go?
I've had LEDs lighting up my house for over two years now (my house is old with low ceilings, many of the lights are GU-10 downlighters -- they were halogen and/or compact fluorescent, they are now 7W LEDs and are superior to halogens or CF in every respect).
In other words, a very large charger (which is effectively a second battery) to go with your portable machine that's supposed to be small and portable.
Instead of having a charger which is effectively must be a second battery to work, why not just have...well, a second battery? Does away with high currents altogether and you can have a nice lightweight charger again that can even fit in a pocket. Or is that too "existing paradigm" for new technology?
You're still going to have to transfer all that power from the charger to the device, which is still going to require a lot of amps and a very thick cable. Even if you use 48VDC between the charger and the device, the cable between the charger and the device is going to have to be rated for something like 160 amps (in other words, your charging cable will be a pair of cables that are about the size of a typical cable from a car battery to the starter. Big, thick, heavy and stiff).
What a lot of these articles forget is the current requirements to charge something fast. Just because something can be charged fast doesn't mean you can do it.
Let's take a typical laptop battery of 70 watt hours. To charge it in one hour, you need a 70W power supply (more or less). Now let's charge that same battery - if we can - in 30 seconds, or 120th of the time. You'll need an 8.4kW charger to do that, which is going to be much larger and heavier than the laptop. In Britain where the mains electricity is 240 volts, you're going to need 35 amps to do that (typical household circuit is 13 amps, high power circuits for example ovens and tumble dryers are 30A). In the United States you'll need 70 amps.
OK, so you can charge slower (but still much faster than a conventional battery) but it's still going to require a large (heavy) power supply for your laptop if you want to make the charging speed significantly faster than current lithium ion batteries. You're either going to wind up lugging around a lot of extra weight with your portable machine, or you're going to need two chargers (more expense). The thing is, the times when you really wish you can charge a battery quickly are always times you're travelling and so won't have the large heavy charger with you!
Is there a link to some article not in the mainstream media? The article has no details at all. Did she use an off-the-shelf super capacitor? What circuits did she make (one characteristic of a capacitor is the voltage immediately goes down as soon as you take charge from it, unlike a Li-Ion battery which maintains a more or less constant voltage through most of its charge), and how efficient is the voltage regulation? What about the energy density of the device? All supercaps I know of have a very small fraction of the energy density of a lithium ion battery. To replace a Li-Ion you need similar energy density or you get a massive phone.
Well, better driver training probably has a bigger impact. The yellow phase in the UK is probably half what it is in Florida, yet the accident rate in the UK is well under half of what it is in the US despite the UK having a far greater population density and busier roads than Florida. What I've noticed in Florida is for traffic signals, green means go, yellow means go faster and red means the next six vehicles may pass through the intersection.
Drivers here are taught to observe well ahead, and also that if you see a signal ahead that's been green for a long time, anticipate that it may change very soon.
If you don't live in the US, just don't pay the fine.
Since when was Blizzard a French company? It never has been. Blizzard started out as Silicon and Synapse and is based in Irvine, California.
If the code for this thing is written in C, you can now really shoot yourself in the foot (very accurately) :-) http://m5p.com/~pravn/foot.html
Where has this plague of saying "reach out to" come from when people mean "speak to" or "contact"? It gives the impression of some kind of emo touching session.
You obviously have never driven in Houston.
But one of the least safe amongst developed countries. The US has a worse rate than Italy, and Italian drivers have one hell of a reputation for being bad. It's also worse than Spain which has a similar reputation to Italy, and double the accident rate per 100k cars than the UK and Germany (which has autobahns without speed limits).
It's entirely probable. There are already way more radio controlled models than this number in the US. Many drones are really just standard radio controlled models with a few extra bits added (for instance on one "Police will be using this drone" article on TV, it was quite clearly just a 600 class electric RC helicopter - airframe cost of about $300, probably total build cost for RC use around $900 with top of the range gear - with some extra stuff on it). Given the low potential cost of many things that will count as a drone, 30000 might be a low estimate.
But it's unpleasant and wastes a lot of time. If we were in a world where the price stuck to the windscreen was the price you paid and that was that, you could google the fair price and compare prices at several car lots without having to talk to a salesweasel. The haggling model means if I want to compare prices at several dealers it is a slow and highly unpleasant process.
There is a sweet spot (with that argument, we could say why not use 2.4). The thing is Debian is fantastic for certain things, such as servers or development workstaitons - things where you want to have something very dependable that's going to be solid. And Debian is solid, and their conservative approach means we run it on all our Linux servers.
It would have resulted in a *proportional* punishment. As a teenager I improvised something far more spectacular and got caught (it was kind of obvious who did it - enormous bang followed by four teenagers running away from the sound source just as a teacher left the chemistry block). I was shouted at and IIRC got a detention for it. No suspension. No life-ruining felony prosecution.
What this girl is getting is grossly and obscenely disproportionate. Even if she's acquitted of felony charges, it is grossly unjust that she was ever dragged through the court system for this.
A bit OT, but how are you supposed to pronounce Coursera? Course Ra or Cours Era?
The problem isn't really the quantity of oil that's still to be mined. It's the rate of mining and ease of getting at it. The real problem is that what's running out fast is the cheap and easy oil. Our economy at the moment absolutely relies on oil being both cheap and easy.
To contrast unconventional sources and conventional (cheap, easy) oil: Canada's proven reserves are something like 1,000 times larger than Mexico's Cantarell field. However, despite the size of this oil reserve, and despite decades of development, the rate of production from Canadian tar sands is still only about the rate that Cantarell was producing at its peak.
Whether oil is available or not isn't the question. We're still going to have to make enormous (and hopefully not too painful) changes to the way we use energy (and thus to how the economy works) to be able to cope with the shift from cheap, easy to extract oil to very much more expensive oil and it may well just be cheaper to use something other than oil well before it runs out. The cited Bakken shale isn't something you stick a pipe into and oil comes gushing out, rather it's more like rock that has to be mined and then has to go through an expensive process to get usable oil out of it. It will always be vastly more expensive and vastly more energy consuming (much lower energy return on investment) than, say, British North Sea oil or the stuff that comes from Libya or Saudi Arabia.
My Sinclair ZX Spectrum (a personal computer from 1982) can do this (or rather could: now twitter insist on SSL it's a bit beyond an 8 bit Z80 CPU). I built an ethernet board for it. Displayed it at the 2010 Vintage Computing Festival at Bletchley Park, and many people tweeted from it.
I have to wonder why it's really necessary to even consider mandating filtering on public WiFi connections. The vast majority of them are in public places, and I have *never ever* seen anyone browsing porn in a public space. The amount of people who would browse porn when random strangers can see what you're doing has to be pretty damn small. It seems like a lot of political hot air to try and solve a problem that doesn't exist.
x64 has twice as many registers. That alone means less having to move stuff in and out of memory, so that will improve the speed when compared to 32 bit applications. 32 bit x86 has only 4 truly general purpose registers. x64 adds another 8 64 bit registers.
Notwithstanding all of that, amd64 also has more registers, so there''s less having to move stuff to and from memory and you can make most function calls by passing parameters in registers instead of on the stack. amd64 provides a worthwhile increase in performance just due to having twice as many general purpose registers (actually, more than twice as many because there's only really 4 proper general purpose registers on 32 bit x86 - amd64 adds 8 more registers).
But none of what you argue rules out a sharp decline in PCs. For example, a lot of the demand for PCs in the home is that each person wants their own. But 99% of the time what they can do is more comfortable and easier on a tablet - perhaps a typical household of 4 people will move from buying 4 laptops to only owning one laptop and everyone has a tablet for 99% of their internet use. That alone would represent a significant decline in the market for a home PC.
Business PCs will last a lot longer, but it's not likely to be a growth market because it's already saturated.
They didn't aim at civilians, oh really?
That's why they bombed a shopping mall in Manchester, and why they bombed pubs, and why they bombed a business district in London.
The Boston attack was more like an IRA attack than it was an Islam attack (I'm not saying it is or isn't either). The hallmarks of an Islamic attack are (1) suicide bombers (2) infatuation with aviation with other public transport as a distant second. This was neither a suicide bombing nor an attack on the transportation network.
It doesn't really match the Islamic modus operandi (at least in the west) for these reasons:
* Islamic terrorists are infatuated with aviation, with other transportation a distant second. This was nothing to do with transportation.
* Islamic terrorists in the west are most normally suicide bombers.
This attack if it had hallmarks had the hallmarks of domestic nut jobs, similar to Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber rather than Islamic.