Always interesting to note when haters post drug war lies and get automatic top moderation.
Gee, did you read on Slashdot that the racist War on Drugs is actually all true and that marijuanas are killing the children because them dirty Mexicans can't stop puffing that nasty stuff. No really, it's true! I read it on Slashdot and it had a top moderation and was written by a real highly paid medical establishment person who gives people prescriptions for opiates every day so it's really really the truth.
Don't touch those marijuanas chillin's, it will kill you for certain.
I'm in the tropics as well and I don't use AC because I'm on the coast and it's not too warm but I had the same humidity issue that I had been living with for years. People had suggested getting a dehumidifier but I assumed they used almost as much current as an AC. But this year I had family coming to visit from the States and I looked more closely at dehumidifiers and found that they weren't as inefficient as I thought. I bought a Panasonic rated at 200watts and modified it with a hose that runs the water outside. It extracts a surprising amount of water from the interior air when it is warm and humid like say five gallons or twenty liters a day.
I run that water outside into a bucket and then pump it into a mist sprinkler head on a timer powered by an aquarium pump to cool the yard and it has a dramatic effect on the overall climate of the house while using fairly minimal amounts of electricity. If you're in a coastal tropical area it's a nice way to go.
I have a robot vacuum cleaner and it's more than a toy. I really cherish the thing. It's great. This is indeed a bit close to the specs of a robot vacuum cleaner. Now of course it's potentially much more than that. I certainly get that. That's nice but . . .
The other day I was looking around at Aliexpress. As a matter of fact, I was buying a ten pack of ATMega328s in the DIP 28 format since I'm an Arduino lover. As I was checking out I got one of those ads at that bottom saying: Other people who bought ten packs of ATMega328s also bought
And there was a totally bad ass looking robot hand. The thing looked like a piece of art. It was a human hand made of stainless steel wire basically. A pretty thing where every little finger moved independently. Sexy little thing. I hadn't thought to search for off-the-shelf robot hands.
But I was inspired to do so and I was quite impressed. There was a whole range of six degree of freedom hands for less than two hundred bucks. The down side was the controllers didn't look all that friendly. I'm just a hobbyist but I know from my investigations that industrial robots tend to use these things called teaching pendants which are basically like macro recorders that just take the input from the servos and record it so that you can rough-in a certain manipulation and then starting with that you can go to and editor and fine tune the functionality. So having an open and friendly user community for something like that would be amazing.
I'd hope to see Arduino putting something like that to work although I can imagine that perhaps a teaching pendant application might involve something a bit more beefy like the BeagleBone Black or RasPi.
An application like an open source robot hand massage would be the beginning of something interesting.
Now I realize retail and wholesale are two different worlds but here in Taiwan retail I just bought 36 meters of 1" diameter 18 guage steel square tubing for about US$72.00. I thought that was quite cheap actually. 36 meters, that's over a hundred feet so about seventy cents a linear foot.
I was just driving down south over the Chinese New Year and I saw nothing but truck after truck carrying steel rolls.
I suspect steel has gotten expensive in some countries and not so much in others. Copper is the same way. Chinese copper is a heck of a lot cheaper than copper in the US. I was going to make some copper fittings and then I priced them from China and I could get them pre-made and shipped for cheaper than I could buy the raw metal in the States.
Dessicant wheels can be a low cost method of controlling humidity. Certain specialized dessicant wheels for clean room applications can be expensive but you don't need to use those types. Dessicant wheels can actually be very cheap if you plan around them when you design the new facilities. Reducing humidity makes the environment more comfortable but is also way better for electronic and mechanical equipment. It also prevents the growth of mold and other microorganisms.
Part of making dessicant wheels cheap is having a cheap source of heat energy to recharge the dessicant wheels when they turn to the outside environment. Luckily, you can use the latest generation of extremely low cost solar thermal vacuum tubes coupled to copper heat pipes to capture and store solar thermal energy at low costs. An 1800mm x 58mm vacuum tube heat pipe combo can capture approximately 80 watts of solar thermal energy per tube under optimum conditions and yet they cost only around ten dollars a tube when purchased in lots of 100 from Chinese manufacturers that crank them out by the hundreds of thousands. Even compared to today's low-cost solar photovoltaic that's an order of magnitude lower costs on a per watt basis.
You can then apply the heat from those pipes that you store in say a 10,000 gallon tank of water to fire a Lithium Bromide chiller to chill the entire facility. Remember, the ongoing fuel costs for this system will be zero and it had integrated storage independent of external utilities.
The general idea is to think in terms of direct applications of thermal storage rather than conversion to electricity.
Retro video game fans know this CPU well but it's still being sold in brand new products with new software being targeted for it.
I use a Z-80 every day in my so-called car MP4 player. These are cheap car FM transmitter players that are easily found on eBay for a measly six bucks. They're so cheap I hand them out at Christmas to anyone who wants one.
The knock off second generation iPod Nanos are based on the same thing. Those are like twenty bucks because they have the battery and a bit more hassle than they're worth but what is cool in a geeky sort of way about these two products together is that since they both use the Z-80, they both use the same video compression format. It does work to play videos and the open source package works fine on Linux.
I'm so pleased to see this announcement and I would like to address those individuals here at Slashdot who are familiar with software development and ask you to consider something about electronic currencies that has long been in my mind and that I've posted about here and in other places before. I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the notion of granularity.
One of the cool things about being a software developer and one of the things that makes it so addictive to those who get into it is the fact that a software developer is like a god in relationship to the program under development. This is not unique to programming, writers of other sorts share this ability to simply create things out of thin air but in software development it is a fundamental skill. You declare a variable and it exists. That's all there is to it, you imagine it into existence.
So, sometimes when you're working on developing a program and you might find that the variables you've previously defined are insufficient for some task and you need to create new ones. This isn't a problem in software, you just make it happen. And you may find that there are places in your code that can be optimized with finer control so you make the finer degree of control by simply creating it. That's what I am referring to as granularity.
Being able to optimize granularity is a very cool thing. Now imagine applying the topic of granularity as it exists in software development to the economy.
There is no such thing as a free market in our world today. What we've got in the Anglo-American system is not a free market but a market with very coarse controls. It's not the case that it is or every will be or ever has been completely free. It has controls and those controls are what is called monetary policy. Basically, the government by being the largest borrower in the market can set interest rates. There's that and then there's spending and taxes and otherwise the government is pretty much out of the economic equation. The lack of granularity means that governments have very little control over the economy once the interest rates go down to zero.
An electronic currency opens up the possibility of creating a whole new level of control. Instead of all currency being exactly the same it would be possible to create individual units of currency with different depreciation or appreciation rates. The currency itself could become not unlike the bond market.
Now why on earth would anyone ever take payment in a currency that was pre-destined to depreciate? There would be no incentive to use it right? Well, there would if it was being offered as a form of social welfare. That is, in order to make a welfare state sustainable you would avoid the classic problem of creating inflation by making payment in a form of currency that had to be spent or else it would lose its value. The money would either be used quickly to stimulate the economy in times of economic hardship or it would disappear from the ledger completely.
I've mentioned this idea before and I realize it's a hard one for many people to get their heads around but I think it's important to remember one thing about electronic currency.
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Keynes no economic theorist could have imagined the role of electronics and digital communications today. It simply didn't exist. So when we apply the same old 19th century ideas to our current situation we're really selling ourselves short. We are in a new era. We've been here for a several decades now and yet the predominant attitude is one of denial. It's as if we collectively imagine that we're all going to go back to the way things used to be some day like Dorthy waking up back in Kansas but I think it's time to face the fact that the world can change for the better.
There's all this bickering in this thread along the usual lines of programming nuances and security blah blah blah which is fine and good but how about for the people who just want to see how this thing does with a few of their favorite ROMs?
Anybody actually have this installed (preferably on a GNU-Linux installation) and care to point out how they went about it?
That was what pissed me off. But yeah, this is old news.
Hell I think dynamic DNS should be a basic function of the net. That's how it was supposed to go. What is this Facebook shit. We're supposed to have our own servers. Indeed, back in the day it was actually originally set up where you directly applied for a class C IP range. That was a perfectly reasonable premise. It's interesting how far we've gotten away from that rather simple concept.
You can indeed die from heroin withdrawl. For a heavy user going cold turkey it's normal to experience extremely elevated blood pressure that can directly result in death especially when there are aggravating factors which is common in people living off a substance that can only be obtained in a black market economy of questionable purity injecting the drug with recycled syringes. You bet they can have complicating conditions before they go cold turkey under those circumstances. Circulatory problems are not a rare thing for junkies by any means. Totally collapsed veins are not unusual at all. When you couple those circumstances with an intense extended period of extremely elevated blood pressure it can result in death.
Having said that, the far more common cause of death for a heroin user going cold turkey is not a direct result of the withdrawl symptoms but an overdose in an effort to control the symptoms of withdrawl. That's pretty much the classic OD scenario. Saying that you can't die from quitting heroin seems to be a bit overly simplistic given that fact.
This is a bus that is growing rapidly in the automotive industry and is also popular in vending machines. There's an element of structure built into the network level to enhance safety as it's an automotive standard.
There has been an open source home automation system based on it for several years.
Moblin is limited to Intel video drivers and that means it is very limited in regards to 3D. This is an intentional move on Intel's part in order to enforce product category distinctions.
Tens of millions? It's more than that by far. The financial relationship between school districts and Microsoft is immense.
The very notion on free software is under constant attack day in and day out in the school precisely because the school administrations are already so bought out.
The only reason Microsoft even exists is because of their insistence that everybody owes them something.
How does Microsoft beat Linux in schools? The answers are vast. But what is partly missing in the analysis is the fact that the education "market" is not isolated to the United States. These are global issues in the here and now.
Yeah, I was impressed as well. I don't work in PLC, but I sure hope to design some low cost and open automated hardware at some point. I do hang out in some related forums.
For anybody interested in learning more about programmable logic controllers you might want to try
So while I've got no hands-on experience, I've lurked around those sites for a few years and I have to echo what EdBob is saying. PLCs are hurtin for some open solutions and this project looks awesome because it integrates CAN Bus as well and that's going in widespread in the automotive sector which means economies of scale.
Very interesting story indeed. Glad I got away from Reddit for a minute to check on ol' Slashdot.
The answer is Microsoft and Intel. Both have tried to define this new product category that neither particularly wanted after the fact by telling their OEMs that they would be punished if they didn't fall into line and put limits on them. Microsoft wanted to limit them by RAM and screen size while Intel tried to set a limit of using only their own on-board graphics that came with the Atom platform.
The OEMs initially complied and then Asus, which is both a brand name as well as an OEM, broke ranks and went with multi gig RAM and now apparently Atom platforms are going out with third party graphics solutions and larger screens. So the attempt to control this new product category and keep it clearly separate from the notebook looks bound to fail.
I, like many others from what I could gather from a quick google of "digital photo frame driver", was intrigued by the recent news that there is a huge glut of digital photo frame devices and that the average selling price is in the sub-thirty dollar range for the 7" part.
At that price point these things are getting close to the average retail price of a twenty character monochrome textmode LED display for hobbyist electronics projects. The question, of course, is the video driver and my first tentative googling didn't turn up much more than other people wondering the same thing.
With the advent of all these new SOC platforms like the Atom and Nvidia Tegra that include integrated video hardware within the SOC package it certainly seems like we're getting very close to ultra low cost homebrew SOC systems with repurposed digital photo frame video output. These could make for some great devices.
The trick will be in hitching the SOC chips which tend to come in fine pitched BGA packaging to spread-out boards using toaster oven SMT techniques to get to the pins and then identifying the input connections on some common digital photo frame devices. If anybody has one of these and does a teardown to see how they have wired the microcontroller/SOC to the digital photo frame please post links back to here.
So as a quick answer to your question, no TSMC does not manufacture anything in North America. They do most everything in XinZhu Science Park in the center of Taiwan.
As to the Godson. This was an intriguing story about eight years ago but at this point it's quite literally academic. The project is maintained as a pet research project to encourage students to learn processor design, but it is in no way a threat to Intel or AMD or Nvidia or Via or even any of the dozens if not hundreds of ARM 11 microprocessor vendors. The reason this is so is simple --money.
Processor intellectual property has been almost completely worthless for years now. Look at the netbook phenomena with Intel's Atom platform and the rise of the ARM 11 systems with Ghz clock speeds and insanely frugal power consumption that go into smart phones and media players as well as netbooks. These are devices that are going to be mass-market retailed in the low hundreds of dollars and quickly heading for sub one hundred dollar territory. It's a race to the bottom. There's not much room for processor technology to pay off at those price points after you pay for the LCD, the Li+ battery, the wireless radios, the chip fabrication and assembly. It doesn't matter if it's China, Russia, Venezuela, India, Canada or France. Developing a new CPU design at this point is first and foremost an exercise in bragging rights that will threaten none of the existing players who basically give up the circuit designs for a few pennies per unit.
I don't know about other locations, but in San Diego you can operate a neon sign shop in your garage. That entails pulling electric arcs off a 20Kv@1amp transformer that will easily kill a human being on contact during discharge along with operating ultra low pressure two-stage vacuum systems, running multiple oxygen torches with specialized heads and handling large quantities of mercury and hundreds of highly toxic and even mildly radiocative phosphor materials.
Better yet, the products such home businesses produce include xenon, argon, helium, hydrogen discharge tubes that can emit highly hazardous frequencies of radiation. In addition, lasers in the 30watt range are perfectly doable. But why stop there. In addition vacuum tube variations on the thyristor such as the thyratron or ignotron and other components that can be used as military/utility grade high voltage/high current switching ignition devices are perfectly simple to create with the same equipment. That's all perfectly doable and legit in San Diego. Well, I suppose you wouldn't want to be getting into the market for high power ignition devices without a pretty decent reason, but that other stuff is all legit as it should be.
It's just a simple fact that so much powerful high technology is already old news that has been in the public domain for many decades. People growing up in the fifties probably had better knowledge of basic chemistry than the general public does today. Harrassing hobbyists and garage business operators is certainly not going to make anybody safer. Quite the contrary: if you outlaw DIY scientists, then only outlaws will have mad tech skillz.
Via's whole weakness has been this bi-polar nature where their bread-and-butter was the chipsets that made them have to kiss ass to Intel to make sure they were privy to the proprietary data they needed to keep their chipsets compatible. That left their own CPUs and boards as the ugly step-daughter.
I remember when the Epias first came out here in Taiwan. You had to order them from England. There was no retail channel effort at all. I got really frustrated at this and went all over the island trying to get a local board and I slowly learned the story of Via's long-term mismanagement. For years it was owned by the daughter of a mega rich guy who had passed away and who really pissed away a lot of opportunities with clueless management. Their stock has been a local loser for years. The success of the MiniITX platform was nearly wasted due to this kind of problem so this is awesome news. Finally they're gonna go for it.
It's not just the boards. It's also about the PSUs and the other accessories that go along with these mini-PC platforms. This is a huge opportunity, but they've got to make it accessible. The prices certainly have to come down with the Atom platform and Nvidia's Tegra going coming in at well below a hudred bucks for boards that do 1080i and not so bad 3D, but Via can totally be a player in this new system-on-a-chip world order and unlike Nvidia they've got at least a record of trying to reach out to Linux users.
Oh and to Barry Lagina-- Competition is by no means an inherently good thing. In fact, that attitude that competition is a virtue embodies much of what is wrong with America today.
The author did mention amorphous silicon almost in passing, but seemed a bit dismissive so there was clearly a bit of bias in the report.
The place where the action is happening on all the solar isn't in the US, but in Asia. The vast majority of the thin-film players are in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan and this is no mystery because the turn-key factory provider (which happens to be a european defense conglomorate named Oerlikon that created a thin film division based off a version of Stanley Ovshinsky's technology that was put together through the purchase of a series of companies including Excimer Lasers) primarily pitches these factories at LCD module makers as a side businesss. Even DVD producers are seen as good matches so these are the kinds of businesses that were already traditionally in Asia.
That's why I think amorphous silicon is a much bigger story than what this article seemed to suggest.
But I would agree with the author that there is no real fundamental reason why conventional solar panels are expensive other than the lack of polysilicon supply. Until just the last few years there literally was no such thing as a dedicated polysilicon supply explicitly produced for solar modules. All the silicon that went into solar was sourced from the identical ingots used for semiconductors and solar applications were extremely pricey becaue solar was a second-rate player in an already very expensive sellers market. That has changed dramatically with much talk of a polysilicon bubble forming due to massive production outlays particularly in Mainland China.
We should see panel prices in the two dollar-a-watt range available on the web in the not-too-distant future. It's frustrating to think that we could have been at this point thirty years ago if we had used major government subsidies to seed a solar polysilicon supply. We were damn close in the seventies but then . . . well, I guess we all know what happened to the roof of the White House in 1986.
I applied for a job there a few years ago. I live in Taipei where it's headquartered. They told me I wanted too much money so it never happened. The staff is almost entirely Taiwanese with just a couple of native English speakers and they pay a basic local salary which is not that much while expecting long hours in the office. Because of the low wages and long hours, they have high turnover and most of the staff aren't really all that geeky, they're just doing a job. The guy who interviewed me was hoping I would sign on because he was like the lonely geek who actually loved computers and he thought it would be nice to someone who was genuinely enthusiastic about tech.
So the job they do there is not to actually do any original reporting. All they do is subscribe to the local Taiwanese print newspapers and go through the tech sections looking for stories to translate and summarize. This is why you get so many bogus stories coming out of there. Anything you can get published in any small-time local newspaper that has anything to do with tech is likely to get picked up there. Rather than trying to confirm anything, they just print retractions constantly.
The most interesting thing about this whole debacle has been seeing how many people have so little clue about solar thermal. When the story first broke you could see all these Republican apologists ranting about the horrors of photovoltaic production just as we see in this thread here on Slashdot on the other end of the story.
And then if it wasn't the atrocity of silane gas and photovoltaics then it was about how they were going to have to install all these new power lines. Again, we're seeing this same ignorant idiot trash spewed all over Slashdot.
The truth is, this is about solar thermal and this has been throughly vetted in public documents that are freely available to anyone with the slightest interest in the topic. Such far-left comunist hippies as Arnold Schwarzenegger drafted the document which explains in great detail that they have planned the solar thermal projects in question specifically to intersect with existing grid-interties.
No! Gasp, you mean somebody already thought of it?
Yes, read it yourself. Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
It's the Western Governorsâ(TM) Association. Clean and Diversified Energy Initiative. Solar Task Force Report. Get it while it's hot kids.
But what I really like about this whole story, yeah I have enjoyed this story from beginning to end, is that it raised the prominence of solar thermal in the mass media. All the long-haired dope smoking hippies bloggers in the world couldn't have achieved what the Bush BLM managed in a single month.
Slashdot Mirror
Always interesting to note when haters post drug war lies and get automatic top moderation.
Gee, did you read on Slashdot that the racist War on Drugs is actually all true and that marijuanas are killing the children because them dirty Mexicans can't stop puffing that nasty stuff. No really, it's true! I read it on Slashdot and it had a top moderation and was written by a real highly paid medical establishment person who gives people prescriptions for opiates every day so it's really really the truth.
Don't touch those marijuanas chillin's, it will kill you for certain.
I'm in the tropics as well and I don't use AC because I'm on the coast and it's not too warm but I had the same humidity issue that I had been living with for years. People had suggested getting a dehumidifier but I assumed they used almost as much current as an AC. But this year I had family coming to visit from the States and I looked more closely at dehumidifiers and found that they weren't as inefficient as I thought. I bought a Panasonic rated at 200watts and modified it with a hose that runs the water outside. It extracts a surprising amount of water from the interior air when it is warm and humid like say five gallons or twenty liters a day.
I run that water outside into a bucket and then pump it into a mist sprinkler head on a timer powered by an aquarium pump to cool the yard and it has a dramatic effect on the overall climate of the house while using fairly minimal amounts of electricity. If you're in a coastal tropical area it's a nice way to go.
I have a robot vacuum cleaner and it's more than a toy. I really cherish the thing. It's great. This is indeed a bit close to the specs of a robot vacuum cleaner. Now of course it's potentially much more than that. I certainly get that. That's nice but . . .
The other day I was looking around at Aliexpress. As a matter of fact, I was buying a ten pack of ATMega328s in the DIP 28 format since I'm an Arduino lover. As I was checking out I got one of those ads at that bottom saying: Other people who bought ten packs of ATMega328s also bought
And there was a totally bad ass looking robot hand. The thing looked like a piece of art. It was a human hand made of stainless steel wire basically. A pretty thing where every little finger moved independently. Sexy little thing. I hadn't thought to search for off-the-shelf robot hands.
But I was inspired to do so and I was quite impressed. There was a whole range of six degree of freedom hands for less than two hundred bucks. The down side was the controllers didn't look all that friendly. I'm just a hobbyist but I know from my investigations that industrial robots tend to use these things called teaching pendants which are basically like macro recorders that just take the input from the servos and record it so that you can rough-in a certain manipulation and then starting with that you can go to and editor and fine tune the functionality. So having an open and friendly user community for something like that would be amazing.
I'd hope to see Arduino putting something like that to work although I can imagine that perhaps a teaching pendant application might involve something a bit more beefy like the BeagleBone Black or RasPi.
An application like an open source robot hand massage would be the beginning of something interesting.
Now I realize retail and wholesale are two different worlds but here in Taiwan retail I just bought 36 meters of 1" diameter 18 guage steel square tubing for about US$72.00. I thought that was quite cheap actually. 36 meters, that's over a hundred feet so about seventy cents a linear foot.
I was just driving down south over the Chinese New Year and I saw nothing but truck after truck carrying steel rolls.
I suspect steel has gotten expensive in some countries and not so much in others. Copper is the same way. Chinese copper is a heck of a lot cheaper than copper in the US. I was going to make some copper fittings and then I priced them from China and I could get them pre-made and shipped for cheaper than I could buy the raw metal in the States.
When they taped out first silicon last year there was talk of its potential as a game emulator for the PS2 on cell phones.
Dessicant wheels can be a low cost method of controlling humidity. Certain specialized dessicant wheels for clean room applications can be expensive but you don't need to use those types. Dessicant wheels can actually be very cheap if you plan around them when you design the new facilities. Reducing humidity makes the environment more comfortable but is also way better for electronic and mechanical equipment. It also prevents the growth of mold and other microorganisms.
Part of making dessicant wheels cheap is having a cheap source of heat energy to recharge the dessicant wheels when they turn to the outside environment. Luckily, you can use the latest generation of extremely low cost solar thermal vacuum tubes coupled to copper heat pipes to capture and store solar thermal energy at low costs. An 1800mm x 58mm vacuum tube heat pipe combo can capture approximately 80 watts of solar thermal energy per tube under optimum conditions and yet they cost only around ten dollars a tube when purchased in lots of 100 from Chinese manufacturers that crank them out by the hundreds of thousands. Even compared to today's low-cost solar photovoltaic that's an order of magnitude lower costs on a per watt basis.
You can then apply the heat from those pipes that you store in say a 10,000 gallon tank of water to fire a Lithium Bromide chiller to chill the entire facility. Remember, the ongoing fuel costs for this system will be zero and it had integrated storage independent of external utilities.
The general idea is to think in terms of direct applications of thermal storage rather than conversion to electricity.
Damn, wasn't logged in. Please direct all scientifically accurate and rigidly quantitative hate mail to Ahfoo.
Retro video game fans know this CPU well but it's still being sold in brand new products with new software being targeted for it.
I use a Z-80 every day in my so-called car MP4 player. These are cheap car FM transmitter players that are easily found on eBay for a measly six bucks. They're so cheap I hand them out at Christmas to anyone who wants one.
The knock off second generation iPod Nanos are based on the same thing. Those are like twenty bucks because they have the battery and a bit more hassle than they're worth but what is cool in a geeky sort of way about these two products together is that since they both use the Z-80, they both use the same video compression format. It does work to play videos and the open source package works fine on Linux.
I'm so pleased to see this announcement and I would like to address those individuals here at Slashdot who are familiar with software development and ask you to consider something about electronic currencies that has long been in my mind and that I've posted about here and in other places before. I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the notion of granularity.
One of the cool things about being a software developer and one of the things that makes it so addictive to those who get into it is the fact that a software developer is like a god in relationship to the program under development. This is not unique to programming, writers of other sorts share this ability to simply create things out of thin air but in software development it is a fundamental skill. You declare a variable and it exists. That's all there is to it, you imagine it into existence.
So, sometimes when you're working on developing a program and you might find that the variables you've previously defined are insufficient for some task and you need to create new ones. This isn't a problem in software, you just make it happen. And you may find that there are places in your code that can be optimized with finer control so you make the finer degree of control by simply creating it. That's what I am referring to as granularity.
Being able to optimize granularity is a very cool thing. Now imagine applying the topic of granularity as it exists in software development to the economy.
There is no such thing as a free market in our world today. What we've got in the Anglo-American system is not a free market but a market with very coarse controls. It's not the case that it is or every will be or ever has been completely free. It has controls and those controls are what is called monetary policy. Basically, the government by being the largest borrower in the market can set interest rates. There's that and then there's spending and taxes and otherwise the government is pretty much out of the economic equation. The lack of granularity means that governments have very little control over the economy once the interest rates go down to zero.
An electronic currency opens up the possibility of creating a whole new level of control. Instead of all currency being exactly the same it would be possible to create individual units of currency with different depreciation or appreciation rates. The currency itself could become not unlike the bond market.
Now why on earth would anyone ever take payment in a currency that was pre-destined to depreciate? There would be no incentive to use it right? Well, there would if it was being offered as a form of social welfare. That is, in order to make a welfare state sustainable you would avoid the classic problem of creating inflation by making payment in a form of currency that had to be spent or else it would lose its value. The money would either be used quickly to stimulate the economy in times of economic hardship or it would disappear from the ledger completely.
I've mentioned this idea before and I realize it's a hard one for many people to get their heads around but I think it's important to remember one thing about electronic currency.
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Keynes no economic theorist could have imagined the role of electronics and digital communications today. It simply didn't exist. So when we apply the same old 19th century ideas to our current situation we're really selling ourselves short. We are in a new era. We've been here for a several decades now and yet the predominant attitude is one of denial. It's as if we collectively imagine that we're all going to go back to the way things used to be some day like Dorthy waking up back in Kansas but I think it's time to face the fact that the world can change for the better.
We simply need to make it so.
Hey, that's more like it. But I'm not a big Robby Roto fan. How about using local roms?
There's all this bickering in this thread along the usual lines of programming nuances and security blah blah blah which is fine and good but how about for the people who just want to see how this thing does with a few of their favorite ROMs?
Anybody actually have this installed (preferably on a GNU-Linux installation) and care to point out how they went about it?
That was what pissed me off. But yeah, this is old news.
Hell I think dynamic DNS should be a basic function of the net. That's how it was supposed to go. What is this Facebook shit. We're supposed to have our own servers. Indeed, back in the day it was actually originally set up where you directly applied for a class C IP range. That was a perfectly reasonable premise. It's interesting how far we've gotten away from that rather simple concept.
You can indeed die from heroin withdrawl. For a heavy user going cold turkey it's normal to experience extremely elevated blood pressure that can directly result in death especially when there are aggravating factors which is common in people living off a substance that can only be obtained in a black market economy of questionable purity injecting the drug with recycled syringes. You bet they can have complicating conditions before they go cold turkey under those circumstances. Circulatory problems are not a rare thing for junkies by any means. Totally collapsed veins are not unusual at all. When you couple those circumstances with an intense extended period of extremely elevated blood pressure it can result in death.
Having said that, the far more common cause of death for a heroin user going cold turkey is not a direct result of the withdrawl symptoms but an overdose in an effort to control the symptoms of withdrawl. That's pretty much the classic OD scenario. Saying that you can't die from quitting heroin seems to be a bit overly simplistic given that fact.
This is a bus that is growing rapidly in the automotive industry and is also popular in vending machines. There's an element of structure built into the network level to enhance safety as it's an automotive standard.
There has been an open source home automation system based on it for several years.
Yeah, here it is:
http://caraca.sourceforge.net/
Moblin is limited to Intel video drivers and that means it is very limited in regards to 3D. This is an intentional move on Intel's part in order to enforce product category distinctions.
Tens of millions? It's more than that by far. The financial relationship between school districts and Microsoft is immense.
The very notion on free software is under constant attack day in and day out in the school precisely because the school administrations are already so bought out.
The only reason Microsoft even exists is because of their insistence that everybody owes them something.
How does Microsoft beat Linux in schools? The answers are vast. But what is partly missing in the analysis is the fact that the education "market" is not isolated to the United States. These are global issues in the here and now.
Yeah, I was impressed as well. I don't work in PLC, but I sure hope to design some low cost and open automated hardware at some point. I do hang out in some related forums.
For anybody interested in learning more about programmable logic controllers you might want to try
http://www.control.com/
Which looks like it uses an older version of Slashcode.
or
http://www.plctalk.net/
There is also a nice intro tutorial on ladder logic and PLCs in general under the "PLC Basics" sidebar at
http://www.plcdev.com/
So while I've got no hands-on experience, I've lurked around those sites for a few years and I have to echo what EdBob is saying. PLCs are hurtin for some open solutions and this project looks awesome because it integrates CAN Bus as well and that's going in widespread in the automotive sector which means economies of scale.
Very interesting story indeed. Glad I got away from Reddit for a minute to check on ol' Slashdot.
The answer is Microsoft and Intel. Both have tried to define this new product category that neither particularly wanted after the fact by telling their OEMs that they would be punished if they didn't fall into line and put limits on them. Microsoft wanted to limit them by RAM and screen size while Intel tried to set a limit of using only their own on-board graphics that came with the Atom platform.
The OEMs initially complied and then Asus, which is both a brand name as well as an OEM, broke ranks and went with multi gig RAM and now apparently Atom platforms are going out with third party graphics solutions and larger screens. So the attempt to control this new product category and keep it clearly separate from the notebook looks bound to fail.
I, like many others from what I could gather from a quick google of "digital photo frame driver", was intrigued by the recent news that there is a huge glut of digital photo frame devices and that the average selling price is in the sub-thirty dollar range for the 7" part.
At that price point these things are getting close to the average retail price of a twenty character monochrome textmode LED display for hobbyist electronics projects. The question, of course, is the video driver and my first tentative googling didn't turn up much more than other people wondering the same thing.
With the advent of all these new SOC platforms like the Atom and Nvidia Tegra that include integrated video hardware within the SOC package it certainly seems like we're getting very close to ultra low cost homebrew SOC systems with repurposed digital photo frame video output. These could make for some great devices.
The trick will be in hitching the SOC chips which tend to come in fine pitched BGA packaging to spread-out boards using toaster oven SMT techniques to get to the pins and then identifying the input connections on some common digital photo frame devices. If anybody has one of these and does a teardown to see how they have wired the microcontroller/SOC to the digital photo frame please post links back to here.
So as a quick answer to your question, no TSMC does not manufacture anything in North America. They do most everything in XinZhu Science Park in the center of Taiwan.
As to the Godson. This was an intriguing story about eight years ago but at this point it's quite literally academic. The project is maintained as a pet research project to encourage students to learn processor design, but it is in no way a threat to Intel or AMD or Nvidia or Via or even any of the dozens if not hundreds of ARM 11 microprocessor vendors. The reason this is so is simple --money.
Processor intellectual property has been almost completely worthless for years now. Look at the netbook phenomena with Intel's Atom platform and the rise of the ARM 11 systems with Ghz clock speeds and insanely frugal power consumption that go into smart phones and media players as well as netbooks. These are devices that are going to be mass-market retailed in the low hundreds of dollars and quickly heading for sub one hundred dollar territory. It's a race to the bottom. There's not much room for processor technology to pay off at those price points after you pay for the LCD, the Li+ battery, the wireless radios, the chip fabrication and assembly. It doesn't matter if it's China, Russia, Venezuela, India, Canada or France. Developing a new CPU design at this point is first and foremost an exercise in bragging rights that will threaten none of the existing players who basically give up the circuit designs for a few pennies per unit.
I don't know about other locations, but in San Diego you can operate a neon sign shop in your garage. That entails pulling electric arcs off a 20Kv@1amp transformer that will easily kill a human being on contact during discharge along with operating ultra low pressure two-stage vacuum systems, running multiple oxygen torches with specialized heads and handling large quantities of mercury and hundreds of highly toxic and even mildly radiocative phosphor materials.
Better yet, the products such home businesses produce include xenon, argon, helium, hydrogen discharge tubes that can emit highly hazardous frequencies of radiation. In addition, lasers in the 30watt range are perfectly doable. But why stop there. In addition vacuum tube variations on the thyristor such as the thyratron or ignotron and other components that can be used as military/utility grade high voltage/high current switching ignition devices are perfectly simple to create with the same equipment. That's all perfectly doable and legit in San Diego. Well, I suppose you wouldn't want to be getting into the market for high power ignition devices without a pretty decent reason, but that other stuff is all legit as it should be.
It's just a simple fact that so much powerful high technology is already old news that has been in the public domain for many decades. People growing up in the fifties probably had better knowledge of basic chemistry than the general public does today. Harrassing hobbyists and garage business operators is certainly not going to make anybody safer. Quite the contrary: if you outlaw DIY scientists, then only outlaws will have mad tech skillz.
Via's whole weakness has been this bi-polar nature where their bread-and-butter was the chipsets that made them have to kiss ass to Intel to make sure they were privy to the proprietary data they needed to keep their chipsets compatible. That left their own CPUs and boards as the ugly step-daughter.
I remember when the Epias first came out here in Taiwan. You had to order them from England. There was no retail channel effort at all. I got really frustrated at this and went all over the island trying to get a local board and I slowly learned the story of Via's long-term mismanagement. For years it was owned by the daughter of a mega rich guy who had passed away and who really pissed away a lot of opportunities with clueless management. Their stock has been a local loser for years. The success of the MiniITX platform was nearly wasted due to this kind of problem so this is awesome news. Finally they're gonna go for it.
It's not just the boards. It's also about the PSUs and the other accessories that go along with these mini-PC platforms. This is a huge opportunity, but they've got to make it accessible. The prices certainly have to come down with the Atom platform and Nvidia's Tegra going coming in at well below a hudred bucks for boards that do 1080i and not so bad 3D, but Via can totally be a player in this new system-on-a-chip world order and unlike Nvidia they've got at least a record of trying to reach out to Linux users.
Oh and to Barry Lagina--
Competition is by no means an inherently good thing. In fact, that attitude that competition is a virtue embodies much of what is wrong with America today.
The author did mention amorphous silicon almost in passing, but seemed a bit dismissive so there was clearly a bit of bias in the report.
The place where the action is happening on all the solar isn't in the US, but in Asia. The vast majority of the thin-film players are in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan and this is no mystery because the turn-key factory provider (which happens to be a european defense conglomorate named Oerlikon that created a thin film division based off a version of Stanley Ovshinsky's technology that was put together through the purchase of a series of companies including Excimer Lasers) primarily pitches these factories at LCD module makers as a side businesss. Even DVD producers are seen as good matches so these are the kinds of businesses that were already traditionally in Asia.
That's why I think amorphous silicon is a much bigger story than what this article seemed to suggest.
But I would agree with the author that there is no real fundamental reason why conventional solar panels are expensive other than the lack of polysilicon supply. Until just the last few years there literally was no such thing as a dedicated polysilicon supply explicitly produced for solar modules. All the silicon that went into solar was sourced from the identical ingots used for semiconductors and solar applications were extremely pricey becaue solar was a second-rate player in an already very expensive sellers market. That has changed dramatically with much talk of a polysilicon bubble forming due to massive production outlays particularly in Mainland China.
We should see panel prices in the two dollar-a-watt range available on the web in the not-too-distant future. It's frustrating to think that we could have been at this point thirty years ago if we had used major government subsidies to seed a solar polysilicon supply. We were damn close in the seventies but then . . . well, I guess we all know what happened to the roof of the White House in 1986.
I applied for a job there a few years ago. I live in Taipei where it's headquartered. They told me I wanted too much money so it never happened. The staff is almost entirely Taiwanese with just a couple of native English speakers and they pay a basic local salary which is not that much while expecting long hours in the office. Because of the low wages and long hours, they have high turnover and most of the staff aren't really all that geeky, they're just doing a job. The guy who interviewed me was hoping I would sign on because he was like the lonely geek who actually loved computers and he thought it would be nice to someone who was genuinely enthusiastic about tech.
So the job they do there is not to actually do any original reporting. All they do is subscribe to the local Taiwanese print newspapers and go through the tech sections looking for stories to translate and summarize. This is why you get so many bogus stories coming out of there. Anything you can get published in any small-time local newspaper that has anything to do with tech is likely to get picked up there. Rather than trying to confirm anything, they just print retractions constantly.
The most interesting thing about this whole debacle has been seeing how many people have so little clue about solar thermal. When the story first broke you could see all these Republican apologists ranting about the horrors of photovoltaic production just as we see in this thread here on Slashdot on the other end of the story.
And then if it wasn't the atrocity of silane gas and photovoltaics then it was about how they were going to have to install all these new power lines. Again, we're seeing this same ignorant idiot trash spewed all over Slashdot.
The truth is, this is about solar thermal and this has been throughly vetted in public documents that are freely available to anyone with the slightest interest in the topic. Such far-left comunist hippies as Arnold Schwarzenegger drafted the document which explains in great detail that they have planned the solar thermal projects in question specifically to intersect with existing grid-interties.
No! Gasp, you mean somebody already thought of it?
Yes, read it yourself. Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
It's the Western Governorsâ(TM) Association. Clean and Diversified Energy Initiative. Solar Task Force Report. Get it while it's hot kids.
http://cleantechlawandbusiness.com/cleanbeta/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/solar-full.pdf.
But what I really like about this whole story, yeah I have enjoyed this story from beginning to end, is that it raised the prominence of solar thermal in the mass media. All the long-haired dope smoking hippies bloggers in the world couldn't have achieved what the Bush BLM managed in a single month.
Thanks BLM!