Whoa! You were on the Glomar Explorer?
on
Flywheel UPS
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· Score: 1
I'm thinking of the Glomar Challenger. Is that a similar deal experimental drilling? Man, that's history books stuff there.
So what's up with the manganese nodule deal anyway? Was that ever a commercially feasible project? I understand there were numerous environmental issues involved.
I ask myself why nobody's mining the vents off of South America. I recall various explorations talking about toxic plumes full of exotic metals and bizarre life forms. But, I haven't heard of any commercial success.
I realize this is off topic, but this seems so intriguing in that here we have an environment that is naturally toxic and rich in highly reactive minerals in the guise of undersea vents that goes untapped while we create our own toxic wastes on land and don't know where to get rid of them.
Whoa, the Golmar Explorer had a flywheel too! Well, why not? Those ships had to stay as close to one spot as possible while they were drilling the pipe down into the floor. Was there any gyroscopic effect? Did you have to take that into account as a computer motor control person? You were a computer motor control person, weren't you? Oh, I'm impressed either way.
Damnit, just used my last mod point. I agree. Where's the clits? As I was riding home from work last night I was thinking about doing a short 3D animation with a clit heroine.
It's like my dear uncle told me when I brought home my high school sweetheart with the 38D knockers. He said, "When you grow up and become a man, you'll finally see the truth in what I'm about to tell you my son --tits are for kids."
Well, decades later, my highschool sweetheart is long gone and probably dependent upon a scaffolding --or a surgeon-- to keep things where they more or less ought to be and I live in Asia.
He may have just been jealous at the time, but my uncle's words struck me as very profound and almost sublime with the Trix cereal commercial tie-in. What he said has influenced my life very much for the better. I like to suck a tittie as much as any newborn, but if we're talking about exploring female sexuality, let's see some clits or any curvy section of the female pelvis in these video games.
If they could just do some custom heads with some bitchin chromed-out cooling fins, that would be very appealing. No complaints on the fat tires and a lot of the other hardware looks tough, but water cooled --no way. Air cooled with chrome for days and that would be a stylin' ride. And let's not have the pipes so straight. Put a little braid in them babies.
Dissipating the heat off a V-8 with air-cooled heads might take up a lot of surface area though. Hmm. Still, I'd take that over a diesel turbine for pulling to the curb in style. I bet it would sound sweet with some bent up pipes too. Hmm, I should go source some air-cooled Chevy heads. Somebody must have gone down this road before.
He's talking about terrabytes of data and multiple hosting but how hard are those resources to come by? I'm not saying they don't pay a lot for them, but are they using their equipment as efficiently as they can? I guess that's proprietary information.
The next value-added feature will be strong encryption and User ID verification for end users to ensure their ehm . . . safety. Implementing this feature could cost zillions in consulting fees.
Luckily, these guys are pros and they're gonna save us by making all the good choices. That's why they deserve the money!
If you were seriously deciding whether you're going to purchase dozens of PPC or X68 boxes for some networked processing, you'd think 250 pages of intro material might be worth reading.
Besides, the AppleSeed one page manual casually mentions that you'll naturally be running custom C and Fortran code on your machines. So, the --look ma --no hands-- effect kinda lose some of its punch.
If you're going to write custom apps for it, then you may eventually even want more documentation for when things don't turn out like you hope.
I think Mac has inspired some good ideas in software, but I imagine many small time users of parallel processing would probably be into 3D rendering and they'd probably be a price conscious lot. I guess some people were implying encryption key ehem. . . testing might be another application. But again, we're talking about a price sensitive crowd who would probably just go ahead and spend some time with a book before obtaining those PCs.
After all, what about if you can get yer finger on a source some of those ultra-dense server cases --the rack they used in the article blew-- that fit with some new dual AMD boards. Ooh ahh.
Besides, let me get lateral to the topic for a second. Have you heard that Via of Taiwan is doing CPUs already and they're shooting below radar in the price point penny arcade. they claim they're gonna take over the Mainland China market by trailing AMD and Intel in performance, but doing that price limbo dance like we haven't seen yet. I heard they were talking 1 GhZ for less than fifty bucks by the end of the year and Via claims in the local press that this is the price point they want to be at as they continue to plod along following the big guys and eating at the bottom edge.
Now, if these things have good chipsets and boards, then maybe it would be time for joe six-pack nerd to start stacking them up with a cool rack-mount configuration in every home. Perhaps we'll see generic rack mount systems with modular PC units and matching stackable stereo power amps. They should share some kind of heat soultion. Hell, if your amps and CPUs were hot enough --as they ought to be-- you could scavenge the process heat to run a heat pump to assist in cooling and heating your house. Wow, rad! I've got to talk to some of these Taiwan case moguls and see if we can get something going here.
It could be the fun new DIY consumer category --the power stack. It makes a house a home.
$1200 for a ten gig hard drive? Damn, that's quite expensive.
That Aiwa looks nice though for a few hundred. I say the retail channel with the best price point for car audio is car parts stores, but I haven't noticed much in my neighborhood yet. I hate to buy stuff that just gets ripped off, but if it gets around a hundred bucks and some change, I'd probably buy an MP3CDplayer. I've been waiting for that. Probably gettin' quite close at this point. With a removable faceplate would be very nice.
As far as saving old CDs, just take out the laser assembly and the little DC motors and all you've got left is some plastic sheet metal and a bit of circuit board, you don't need to be treasuring that stuff.
Sam's Laser FAQ has all kinds of interesting ideas including pumpin fiber with them and doing networking with dishes sorta like the O'Reilly microwave dish networking article a few days back on/.
Anybody else out there doing telecoms with second-hand CD laser assemblies? I've got some questions about antennae dimensions.
Today (sunday's) China Post (Taiwan print edition, no link) has an article about Taiwan having developed local DVD pickup heads for DVD-R drives.
The above post says DVD hardware is tightly controlled. Well, tightly is an adjective that is a bit vague to describe the real-world situation here. Japanese might be a better descriptive term, ie, the DVD hardware market is controlled by Matsushita and Sony and their karaoke buddies.
Now, Taiwan claims to have an independent source of DVD-R hardware IP. That means, the whole DVD hardware regulation playing field has been altered.
I've been ranting about this for almost two years now. The release of DVD writers into the market has been criminally slow and it's precisely because of these akward attempts to control the market like a pet in a cage which were facilitated by the Japanese ownership of all the DVD laser and associated hardware IP.
Once things start coming out of Taiwan, you've got a whole new ballgame. You say, the US will stop them from being imported? Hah! Here's is where it gets fun. How far will the US go to punish the Taiwan tech market? Taiwan is already kicked out of the UN. What next? No more military support, okay, so Taiwan goes back to Mainland China. Ha ha ha. Problem solved, guess not.
If this experiment is like this nasa link, then it's apparently not all about the hydrogen peroxide which could be a lot of fun, but aint exactly hi-tech
The nasa deal was all about using boron. Apparently peroxide produces a smoky plume, but this was a very clean green flame.
This struck me as pretty intriguing right away because I got my first A in college in glassblowing. And as you will recall from your glassblowing classes, it's the boron that makes the glass that you have to use the oxygen torch on.
There's something interesting about boron for sure and that's what this nasa deal was all about. If Carmack is going along those lines, this could be some interesting stuff.
Legally informed trickery is even less so. This reminds me of when people use the phrase "merely rhetorical."
Mere indeed!
Being technically informed and legally aware of the use of language is no small matter. Rather than being a simple trick, I'd say this is simply devastating for the RIAA and the MPAA. They have no answers suitable to their position and neither does the court.
The law itself is made of language. If you can't filter names, then you're getting a bit past where the law can help you.
I did my thesis on porn like most folks do thsese days and this same issue is exactly where porn came from. No particular judge ever said, okay, let's just have porn and get over it. It's the problem with the English language that's used to make the laws. You can't define obscenity, you can't filter songs by names. Language is a gas, it's a liquid, it's a plasma but it aint solid for long.
They shouldn't have antagonized her like that. Kozmo should have just ignored it.
Still, it's kinda silly to think much of a local small claims ruling when you're talking about something on the scale of spam. Yeah, it's California, but it's a frivilous dispute. You can't be expected to take days off to deal with spammers one at a time with those kinds of payments being extracted. And even if you did manage to get draconian and encourage spammers to hide thier identites completely with aggressive prosecution, would you really be in a big advantage? No way, you'd just get a different quality of spam.
Apparently, Python has a gazillion uses, but 3D packages have been especially warm to it and I've read that it's particularly well recieved by Hollywood film makers.
When I think of Perl, I think web pages. Of course Slashcode in particular comes to mind. So, does Parrot have any goals regarding interactions between the web and 3D.
Perhaps you've seen that news announcement for the new Macromedia 3D tool for Director. I went and checked some demos on that and it was impressive animation considering it was coming over the web. Are there any possibilities that some combination of Perl and Python will produce similar tools?
I hear the satellite service can cover that though. Otherwise, I'm tempted to say we're gonna pass the States in fiber penetration. They like to hype the possibility locally.
I can't complain about that. Access sucked for years, but the gov telecoms monopoly rolled with cheap DSL about six months ago after a few years of lousy cable service from a partly MS owned company. Hourly charges are a thing of the past now. Changes happen fast.
This place says that there is a company trying to make kits for cars to produce industrial diamonds in their exhaust with the addition of microwaves that would "zap" exhaust fumes. But how do you collect the diamonds? Let them run into the gutters. Hey, that would clean the shit out of the streets and the gutters. Interesting idea. No really, that has some appeal if you're working with cement. Well, if you wanted the streets to be polished like glass it would be cool. I"d be into it, but I can see some practical issues that could stand in the way of widespread adoption. Think of the lighting possibilities of glass smooth streets though!
And here's a whole different twist on it. Have your dearly departed loved ones turned into industrial diamonds?
an advertisement in 1988 in a Phoenix, Arizona, newspaper, the Sun City Daily News, exhorting customers to: turn the ashes of your beloved into a diamond'! It seemed we can reduce a dead husband or wife to an ornament in order to reproduce the sparkle in their eyes...
I'm not a licensed boilermaker -- yet-- but, I think that with steam you'd have a lot of issues going from, the micro to the macro scale in terms of your steam management.
But since it was you who brought it up, Mr. AC, I'd like to briefly step parallel to the topic and refresh our memories that there have been many solar boilers produced in the last century and it's far from determined that this is an impractical technology without even bringing in diamonds. It's just that concentrated solar is not competitive for straight electricity generation compared to a pertrochemicals or nuclear fuel coupled to a steam or gas turbine.
If you've got use for process heat though, it's a much more attractive proposition. There are several applications to be found in the deserts of California using simple parabolic reflectors or sheets of directed mirrors.
I have also read that several solar furnaces have been built using parablolic reflectors and a simple glass tube around the "boiler" where the light focuses on a black section of pipe. The glass provides an insulation layer while allowing the intensely focused IR to penetrate to the target. Apparently, in such a system, the temperatures are too high to efficiently make use of water directly, instead other fluids such as oils are used to hold the heat and subsequently a heat exchanger is used to pass the heat to a boiler.
So, although you may be able to use this diamond product to boil water, there are readily available materials which are much cheaper than a dollar per centimeter which can be used to produce steam from the sun. The reality is that steam turbines based on coal or oil or whatever are really hard to beat in terms of efficiency if you want to produce electricity rather than just collect raw heat.
This doesn't compare to conventional solar cells at all. The article says 10Watts per cemtimeter! Holy cow. Like the above post says, that's 100Kw a meter. Times a million for a kilometer. . . yikes. A hundred Gigawatts per kilometer? That's not your father's solar panel. That's the capacity of a couple or three big steam turbines --is it not?
And the article says they think they can manufacture this at a dollar a centimeter? Whoa! Ten thousand dollars a meter times a million . . . hmm. Ten billion dollars just for materials eh? Well, it's still far from competitive with terrestrial power at that price point. If they could get closer to ten cents a centimeter though. . . You've got to keep in mind, California is talking about doubling retail electricity rates. A dollar a centimeter aint gonna get it, but they're within a single magnitude range assuming they can keep the launch costs under control too. Big if.
Nonethless, that's about the price range for a 30 gigawatt coal plant right? Three hundred million US? Ci, no? I haven't bought one in such a long time.
Oh yeah, this is really going to have a major impact on education in the near future.
Let's see, schools at all levels can hardly afford the licensing fees for the NT servers they had installed with federal subsidies. Well that's just to get net access. But let's not even get into run-time agreements if the teachers actually had the gumption to use the multimedia tools pressed into their hands.
Schools --elementary through university-- are still battling with the costs of producing simple GUI assignments for students and integrating them into the curriculum. The fundamental issue is cost.
The senator is full of shit.
I'm talking out my ass here because I've never been to Japan, but I think the ideal model of a cyber-punk environment is Taiwan. I fell in love with Taipei about ten years ago when I found it almost perfectly resembled the image of LA portrayed in the movie Bladerunner. It's cleaned up a lot since then, but it's geographically like LA since it's surrounded by hills and subject to a powerful inversion layer that really amplifies the atmospheric effects of the air pollution. Add in the huge Japanese-style neon billboards and the bizarre architectural experiments and you've got what I call home. Love it.
And when Gibson talks about the British orientalism image, it really makes me wonder why he's not more obsessed with Hong Kong. I like the gritty experimental-under-construction feeling of Taipei more than the relative polish of Hong Kong, but if you get off reflecting on that cultural contrast, then I can't imagine Japan being a better place to ponder than Hong Kong.
I betcha Gibson speaks a little Japanese and that's the real reason he keeps going back. Language is an addiction.
It's late, allow me to be pedantic for a bit.
To the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, there was no category of imagery known as pornography. Erotic imagery was everywhere in ancient Rome. Walter Kendricks does a nice book covering this topic called The Secret Museum.
It wasn't until after the rise of the press in Europe around the 1500s that the notion of a special category for sexual imagery came into being.
The idea that certain classes of people have to be protected from sexually explicit imagery is relatively recent in western culture and didn't necessarily originate from the church.
Rather, the development of censorship against sexually explicit materia seems to have had more to do with the desire to conceal the details of sexual difference in the name of upholding the otherwise weak sexual norms of that period in european history.
This desire for concealment has been an extrememly powerful force into our modern times and we are still only beginning to expose ourselves to sexuality in the manner of a society of soveriegn human beings.
Let us look upon the success of pornography on the net with great pride. We are slowly awakening into a civilized people.
"Here's a solution, create a body to handle it, but make those in charge professors at the most prestigous universities around."
You're assuming that top professors are just sitting around waiting for a new assignment. That's a bit of a stretch. But even if these top notch profs were available, there's no reason to assume that they're going to be the disinterested god-like personas you'd like to believe. Indeed, you have to expect that those gifted with the political drive to make it to the top of academia inevitably have ferocious appetites for power among other things.
So, there's some problems with cloning technique at the early stages. So what? Let's not forget the claims that the clones were going to live forever because their telomeres weren't getting shorter. What happened to that? Statistically it became insignificant as further studies were undertaken and showed it wasn't really the case. It was just a statistical anomaly.
When Biology and Statistics get together to do a news piece, try and hold you nose and pretend you don't notice. People need to put out documents to get their certificates. We should be understanding of this fact, but let's not forget that people's academic degrees and hence research --even in the "hard" sciences-- tends to be a varying solution of hard research stirred in with a generous serving of zany drama that might even make it --gasp-- into the media.
As for those who want to get into the gory details as "evidence" of how bad this all is, well that's the same league as the goatse.cx crowd. You choose where you put your focus. If you just want to see the dark side of things, you don't have to go very far.
And as to the issue that should be important to those at/., it is the code itself. The telomeres are only working at the cellular reproduction level. But clearly a human being is more than a collection of cells. A jellyfish is a highly organized cellular system. Higher mammals go way beyond that and their fatality is usually associated with some systemic failure rather than general cellular decay.
There must be some meta encoding that programs us to die. That seems so obvious. This is a place where the statistics have been kept for hundreds of years in medical records and even headstones. For example, if you look into mouth cancer, you'll find that while there are myriad suspected causes, there is a startling spike in the occurance of the disease at a certain age seemingly regardless of a person's personal habits or prior health status.
Clearly, something within us induces systemic failures. Perhaps cloning will help us to eventually understand this, but getting so converned about telomeres and bad lab techniques seems to be focusing a bit short of the important question: How am I going to take control of my own destiny as a mortal?
but it's got to be more than just cells falling apart.
According to my favorite bedtime story collection, The Pictorial History of Steam Power, a steam turbine can produce one hoursepower of work per hour on about a half kilo (1lb) of coal. So, what's the conversion to kilowatt hours from horespower hours? I fergit, somebody help me out here.
Anyhow, seeing as how there isn't really a shortage of coal at this rate, it seems infinitely sensible to just go ahead and use the coal and work on the emissions a little more creatively.
What really impresses me about the history of steam is that although a turbine can pull this incredible amount of work out of a minimally processed resource, turbines aren't really all that much more efficient than the gigantic triple expansion steam cylinder engines that they replaced.
Even without a turbine, you could have gotten by with a pound and a half of coal to produce your hour of horespower well before the turn of the century.
Centralized power generation with grid distribution is omnipresent for a reason, it is efficient and makes real live economic sense.
If these guys have a drivetrain that can really spin off lead batteries, they're onto something. Now let's see the price drop. That's the part they're gonna hate.
That double post was a fuck up, but it fits the theme here.
Yeah, excess is exactly the right place to be looking. I'm talking to you about a man named George Bataille who wrote a lot about the internet and monorails and whatnot in the thirties.
The above poster had it right. This monorail plan doesn't offer excess value, so it's never going to work and particularly not in the States. But let me clarify how that works.
When it comes to excess, it's hard to beat sex. Sex is expendature in so many ways. Sex, is the best motivator of all. Even drugs like Coke can only mimic the ecstacy of sex. And a product that's going to be successfull has got to be sexy. That's the unspoken value. The part you didn't actually get a receipt for, but the only part you really wanted.
And if it can't sell as a product because it isn't sexy, it's not going anywhere in the US. That's what keeps America beautiful --some would say brutal. And this thing isn't sexy at sixty miles an hour. That's like when your wife says she wants you to pay for her breast reduction. It's gonna be hard to find that money.
Now, on the other hand. Let's see something like Honda and Toyota and GM are already working on with these hybrids. The existing car companies accept that a car has to have some balls even if they're marketing them to hello kitty lovin' downtown commuters.
There's no reason the two might not go together though. This particular guy's cars may not be the answer, but the cheap guide rail idea is way overdo in some form or another.
I got yer thin edge right here --a Linux run time for Macromedia Authorware.
It seems I saw games listed as an example of where Linux falls behind in the apps department. Well, perhaps, but let's talk about another kind of game.
I realize commando command line die hards don't ever want to see a multimedia authoring package for Linux because it will do the same thing it does to Windows, ie pollute it with zillions of trashy pseudo-commercial educational apps. But there is at least one market that is so juicy ripe for Open Source multimedia and that is education.
The tools marketed to educators are more of a barrier to the creation of on-line curricula than the technological skills necessary to develop interesting lessons. If an instructor plans to profit from their work, they've got to pay $2500 bucks for a licensing agreement for stuff that might even have come pre-loaded on their machines under special academic licenses. Oh yeah, it makes pretty pictues and sounds and all that and the students might actually dig it, but this is serious cash you have to put up if you want to get any kind of compensation as a small time developer. I think it acts as a barrier to people who might otherwise at least attempt to produce content they feel some pride in which is often all it takes to hold the student's respect for another semester.
But let's not sweat the run time agreement. Hey, what's a few grand for a big living prof. If this imaginary prof was really into it this deep then she'd be flopping down the cash and smiling all the way to the bank.
Now what about student scores and stuff --"is this where I put a database?" our hapless faculty member inquires. Oh yeah, this is where IBM breaks out the lube. Suddenly you've got a reason to contact Lotus. Hmm. What do they do again? Oh yeah, now it's getting hot and heavy. The education market is in deep bondage.
I don't know all that many teachers, but I'm in the education market myself and I've seen copies of Macromedia Authorware in teacher's offices from California to Taiwan that simply don't get used. Perhaps if the chump change side of it looked more appetizing these suckers would bite. Plenty of teachers will write a little app to try and make even a few hundred bucks. But when the overhead gets like it is, there's just no motivation to try. An open source run time might change that.
Even if you just look at the university side of things in the next year or so, building an Authorware run time for Linux could be a real wedge because it would probably reduce a lot of the insistance on windows PCs in computer labs coming from faculty doing their own multimedia materials.
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I'm thinking of the Glomar Challenger. Is that a similar deal experimental drilling? Man, that's history books stuff there.
So what's up with the manganese nodule deal anyway? Was that ever a commercially feasible project? I understand there were numerous environmental issues involved.
I ask myself why nobody's mining the vents off of South America. I recall various explorations talking about toxic plumes full of exotic metals and bizarre life forms. But, I haven't heard of any commercial success.
I realize this is off topic, but this seems so intriguing in that here we have an environment that is naturally toxic and rich in highly reactive minerals in the guise of undersea vents that goes untapped while we create our own toxic wastes on land and don't know where to get rid of them.
Whoa, the Golmar Explorer had a flywheel too! Well, why not? Those ships had to stay as close to one spot as possible while they were drilling the pipe down into the floor. Was there any gyroscopic effect? Did you have to take that into account as a computer motor control person? You were a computer motor control person, weren't you? Oh, I'm impressed either way.
Can you read that? That's the answer to the question.
Damnit, just used my last mod point. I agree. Where's the clits? As I was riding home from work last night I was thinking about doing a short 3D animation with a clit heroine.
It's like my dear uncle told me when I brought home my high school sweetheart with the 38D knockers. He said, "When you grow up and become a man, you'll finally see the truth in what I'm about to tell you my son --tits are for kids."
Well, decades later, my highschool sweetheart is long gone and probably dependent upon a scaffolding --or a surgeon-- to keep things where they more or less ought to be and I live in Asia.
He may have just been jealous at the time, but my uncle's words struck me as very profound and almost sublime with the Trix cereal commercial tie-in. What he said has influenced my life very much for the better. I like to suck a tittie as much as any newborn, but if we're talking about exploring female sexuality, let's see some clits or any curvy section of the female pelvis in these video games.
If they could just do some custom heads with some bitchin chromed-out cooling fins, that would be very appealing. No complaints on the fat tires and a lot of the other hardware looks tough, but water cooled --no way. Air cooled with chrome for days and that would be a stylin' ride. And let's not have the pipes so straight. Put a little braid in them babies.
Dissipating the heat off a V-8 with air-cooled heads might take up a lot of surface area though. Hmm. Still, I'd take that over a diesel turbine for pulling to the curb in style. I bet it would sound sweet with some bent up pipes too. Hmm, I should go source some air-cooled Chevy heads. Somebody must have gone down this road before.
He's talking about terrabytes of data and multiple hosting but how hard are those resources to come by? I'm not saying they don't pay a lot for them, but are they using their equipment as efficiently as they can? I guess that's proprietary information.
The next value-added feature will be strong encryption and User ID verification for end users to ensure their ehm . . . safety. Implementing this feature could cost zillions in consulting fees.
Luckily, these guys are pros and they're gonna save us by making all the good choices. That's why they deserve the money!
If you were seriously deciding whether you're going to purchase dozens of PPC or X68 boxes for some networked processing, you'd think 250 pages of intro material might be worth reading.
Besides, the AppleSeed one page manual casually mentions that you'll naturally be running custom C and Fortran code on your machines. So, the --look ma --no hands-- effect kinda lose some of its punch.
If you're going to write custom apps for it, then you may eventually even want more documentation for when things don't turn out like you hope.
I think Mac has inspired some good ideas in software, but I imagine many small time users of parallel processing would probably be into 3D rendering and they'd probably be a price conscious lot. I guess some people were implying encryption key ehem. . . testing might be another application. But again, we're talking about a price sensitive crowd who would probably just go ahead and spend some time with a book before obtaining those PCs.
After all, what about if you can get yer finger on a source some of those ultra-dense server cases --the rack they used in the article blew-- that fit with some new dual AMD boards. Ooh ahh.
Besides, let me get lateral to the topic for a second. Have you heard that Via of Taiwan is doing CPUs already and they're shooting below radar in the price point penny arcade. they claim they're gonna take over the Mainland China market by trailing AMD and Intel in performance, but doing that price limbo dance like we haven't seen yet. I heard they were talking 1 GhZ for less than fifty bucks by the end of the year and Via claims in the local press that this is the price point they want to be at as they continue to plod along following the big guys and eating at the bottom edge.
Now, if these things have good chipsets and boards, then maybe it would be time for joe six-pack nerd to start stacking them up with a cool rack-mount configuration in every home. Perhaps we'll see generic rack mount systems with modular PC units and matching stackable stereo power amps. They should share some kind of heat soultion. Hell, if your amps and CPUs were hot enough --as they ought to be-- you could scavenge the process heat to run a heat pump to assist in cooling and heating your house. Wow, rad! I've got to talk to some of these Taiwan case moguls and see if we can get something going here.
It could be the fun new DIY consumer category --the power stack. It makes a house a home.
$1200 for a ten gig hard drive? Damn, that's quite expensive. /.
That Aiwa looks nice though for a few hundred. I say the retail channel with the best price point for car audio is car parts stores, but I haven't noticed much in my neighborhood yet. I hate to buy stuff that just gets ripped off, but if it gets around a hundred bucks and some change, I'd probably buy an MP3CDplayer. I've been waiting for that. Probably gettin' quite close at this point. With a removable faceplate would be very nice.
As far as saving old CDs, just take out the laser assembly and the little DC motors and all you've got left is some plastic sheet metal and a bit of circuit board, you don't need to be treasuring that stuff.
Sam's Laser FAQ has all kinds of interesting ideas including pumpin fiber with them and doing networking with dishes sorta like the O'Reilly microwave dish networking article a few days back on
Anybody else out there doing telecoms with second-hand CD laser assemblies? I've got some questions about antennae dimensions.
Today (sunday's) China Post (Taiwan print edition, no link) has an article about Taiwan having developed local DVD pickup heads for DVD-R drives.
The above post says DVD hardware is tightly controlled. Well, tightly is an adjective that is a bit vague to describe the real-world situation here. Japanese might be a better descriptive term, ie, the DVD hardware market is controlled by Matsushita and Sony and their karaoke buddies.
Now, Taiwan claims to have an independent source of DVD-R hardware IP. That means, the whole DVD hardware regulation playing field has been altered.
I've been ranting about this for almost two years now. The release of DVD writers into the market has been criminally slow and it's precisely because of these akward attempts to control the market like a pet in a cage which were facilitated by the Japanese ownership of all the DVD laser and associated hardware IP.
Once things start coming out of Taiwan, you've got a whole new ballgame. You say, the US will stop them from being imported? Hah! Here's is where it gets fun. How far will the US go to punish the Taiwan tech market? Taiwan is already kicked out of the UN. What next? No more military support, okay, so Taiwan goes back to Mainland China. Ha ha ha. Problem solved, guess not.
If this experiment is like this nasa link, then it's apparently not all about the hydrogen peroxide which could be a lot of fun, but aint exactly hi-tech
The nasa deal was all about using boron. Apparently peroxide produces a smoky plume, but this was a very clean green flame.
This struck me as pretty intriguing right away because I got my first A in college in glassblowing. And as you will recall from your glassblowing classes, it's the boron that makes the glass that you have to use the oxygen torch on.
There's something interesting about boron for sure and that's what this nasa deal was all about. If Carmack is going along those lines, this could be some interesting stuff.
Legally informed trickery is even less so. This reminds me of when people use the phrase "merely rhetorical."
Mere indeed!
Being technically informed and legally aware of the use of language is no small matter. Rather than being a simple trick, I'd say this is simply devastating for the RIAA and the MPAA. They have no answers suitable to their position and neither does the court.
The law itself is made of language. If you can't filter names, then you're getting a bit past where the law can help you.
I did my thesis on porn like most folks do thsese days and this same issue is exactly where porn came from. No particular judge ever said, okay, let's just have porn and get over it. It's the problem with the English language that's used to make the laws. You can't define obscenity, you can't filter songs by names. Language is a gas, it's a liquid, it's a plasma but it aint solid for long.
Not what you hate.
There's often a huge difference between the two.
They shouldn't have antagonized her like that. Kozmo should have just ignored it.
Still, it's kinda silly to think much of a local small claims ruling when you're talking about something on the scale of spam. Yeah, it's California, but it's a frivilous dispute. You can't be expected to take days off to deal with spammers one at a time with those kinds of payments being extracted. And even if you did manage to get draconian and encourage spammers to hide thier identites completely with aggressive prosecution, would you really be in a big advantage? No way, you'd just get a different quality of spam.
Apparently, Python has a gazillion uses, but 3D packages have been especially warm to it and I've read that it's particularly well recieved by Hollywood film makers.
When I think of Perl, I think web pages. Of course Slashcode in particular comes to mind. So, does Parrot have any goals regarding interactions between the web and 3D.
Perhaps you've seen that news announcement for the new Macromedia 3D tool for Director. I went and checked some demos on that and it was impressive animation considering it was coming over the web. Are there any possibilities that some combination of Perl and Python will produce similar tools?
I hear the satellite service can cover that though. Otherwise, I'm tempted to say we're gonna pass the States in fiber penetration. They like to hype the possibility locally.
I can't complain about that. Access sucked for years, but the gov telecoms monopoly rolled with cheap DSL about six months ago after a few years of lousy cable service from a partly MS owned company. Hourly charges are a thing of the past now. Changes happen fast.
This place says that there is a company trying to make kits for cars to produce industrial diamonds in their exhaust with the addition of microwaves that would "zap" exhaust fumes. But how do you collect the diamonds? Let them run into the gutters. Hey, that would clean the shit out of the streets and the gutters. Interesting idea. No really, that has some appeal if you're working with cement. Well, if you wanted the streets to be polished like glass it would be cool. I"d be into it, but I can see some practical issues that could stand in the way of widespread adoption. Think of the lighting possibilities of glass smooth streets though!
..
And here's a whole different twist on it. Have your dearly departed loved ones turned into industrial diamonds?
an advertisement in 1988 in a Phoenix, Arizona, newspaper, the Sun City Daily News, exhorting customers to: turn the ashes of your beloved into a diamond'! It seemed we can reduce a dead husband or wife to an ornament in order to reproduce the sparkle in their eyes.
I'm not a licensed boilermaker -- yet-- but, I think that with steam you'd have a lot of issues going from, the micro to the macro scale in terms of your steam management.
But since it was you who brought it up, Mr. AC, I'd like to briefly step parallel to the topic and refresh our memories that there have been many solar boilers produced in the last century and it's far from determined that this is an impractical technology without even bringing in diamonds. It's just that concentrated solar is not competitive for straight electricity generation compared to a pertrochemicals or nuclear fuel coupled to a steam or gas turbine.
If you've got use for process heat though, it's a much more attractive proposition. There are several applications to be found in the deserts of California using simple parabolic reflectors or sheets of directed mirrors.
I have also read that several solar furnaces have been built using parablolic reflectors and a simple glass tube around the "boiler" where the light focuses on a black section of pipe. The glass provides an insulation layer while allowing the intensely focused IR to penetrate to the target. Apparently, in such a system, the temperatures are too high to efficiently make use of water directly, instead other fluids such as oils are used to hold the heat and subsequently a heat exchanger is used to pass the heat to a boiler.
So, although you may be able to use this diamond product to boil water, there are readily available materials which are much cheaper than a dollar per centimeter which can be used to produce steam from the sun. The reality is that steam turbines based on coal or oil or whatever are really hard to beat in terms of efficiency if you want to produce electricity rather than just collect raw heat.
This doesn't compare to conventional solar cells at all. The article says 10Watts per cemtimeter! Holy cow. Like the above post says, that's 100Kw a meter. Times a million for a kilometer. . . yikes. A hundred Gigawatts per kilometer? That's not your father's solar panel. That's the capacity of a couple or three big steam turbines --is it not?
And the article says they think they can manufacture this at a dollar a centimeter? Whoa! Ten thousand dollars a meter times a million . . . hmm. Ten billion dollars just for materials eh? Well, it's still far from competitive with terrestrial power at that price point. If they could get closer to ten cents a centimeter though. . . You've got to keep in mind, California is talking about doubling retail electricity rates. A dollar a centimeter aint gonna get it, but they're within a single magnitude range assuming they can keep the launch costs under control too. Big if.
Nonethless, that's about the price range for a 30 gigawatt coal plant right? Three hundred million US? Ci, no? I haven't bought one in such a long time.
Oh yeah, this is really going to have a major impact on education in the near future.
Let's see, schools at all levels can hardly afford the licensing fees for the NT servers they had installed with federal subsidies. Well that's just to get net access. But let's not even get into run-time agreements if the teachers actually had the gumption to use the multimedia tools pressed into their hands.
Schools --elementary through university-- are still battling with the costs of producing simple GUI assignments for students and integrating them into the curriculum. The fundamental issue is cost.
The senator is full of shit.
I'm talking out my ass here because I've never been to Japan, but I think the ideal model of a cyber-punk environment is Taiwan. I fell in love with Taipei about ten years ago when I found it almost perfectly resembled the image of LA portrayed in the movie Bladerunner. It's cleaned up a lot since then, but it's geographically like LA since it's surrounded by hills and subject to a powerful inversion layer that really amplifies the atmospheric effects of the air pollution. Add in the huge Japanese-style neon billboards and the bizarre architectural experiments and you've got what I call home. Love it.
And when Gibson talks about the British orientalism image, it really makes me wonder why he's not more obsessed with Hong Kong. I like the gritty experimental-under-construction feeling of Taipei more than the relative polish of Hong Kong, but if you get off reflecting on that cultural contrast, then I can't imagine Japan being a better place to ponder than Hong Kong.
I betcha Gibson speaks a little Japanese and that's the real reason he keeps going back. Language is an addiction.
It's late, allow me to be pedantic for a bit.
To the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, there was no category of imagery known as pornography. Erotic imagery was everywhere in ancient Rome. Walter Kendricks does a nice book covering this topic called The Secret Museum.
It wasn't until after the rise of the press in Europe around the 1500s that the notion of a special category for sexual imagery came into being.
The idea that certain classes of people have to be protected from sexually explicit imagery is relatively recent in western culture and didn't necessarily originate from the church.
Rather, the development of censorship against sexually explicit materia seems to have had more to do with the desire to conceal the details of sexual difference in the name of upholding the otherwise weak sexual norms of that period in european history.
This desire for concealment has been an extrememly powerful force into our modern times and we are still only beginning to expose ourselves to sexuality in the manner of a society of soveriegn human beings.
Let us look upon the success of pornography on the net with great pride. We are slowly awakening into a civilized people.
"Here's a solution, create a body to handle it, but make those in charge professors at the most prestigous universities around."
You're assuming that top professors are just sitting around waiting for a new assignment. That's a bit of a stretch. But even if these top notch profs were available, there's no reason to assume that they're going to be the disinterested god-like personas you'd like to believe. Indeed, you have to expect that those gifted with the political drive to make it to the top of academia inevitably have ferocious appetites for power among other things.
So, there's some problems with cloning technique at the early stages. So what? Let's not forget the claims that the clones were going to live forever because their telomeres weren't getting shorter. What happened to that? Statistically it became insignificant as further studies were undertaken and showed it wasn't really the case. It was just a statistical anomaly. /., it is the code itself. The telomeres are only working at the cellular reproduction level. But clearly a human being is more than a collection of cells. A jellyfish is a highly organized cellular system. Higher mammals go way beyond that and their fatality is usually associated with some systemic failure rather than general cellular decay.
When Biology and Statistics get together to do a news piece, try and hold you nose and pretend you don't notice. People need to put out documents to get their certificates. We should be understanding of this fact, but let's not forget that people's academic degrees and hence research --even in the "hard" sciences-- tends to be a varying solution of hard research stirred in with a generous serving of zany drama that might even make it --gasp-- into the media.
As for those who want to get into the gory details as "evidence" of how bad this all is, well that's the same league as the goatse.cx crowd. You choose where you put your focus. If you just want to see the dark side of things, you don't have to go very far.
And as to the issue that should be important to those at
There must be some meta encoding that programs us to die. That seems so obvious. This is a place where the statistics have been kept for hundreds of years in medical records and even headstones. For example, if you look into mouth cancer, you'll find that while there are myriad suspected causes, there is a startling spike in the occurance of the disease at a certain age seemingly regardless of a person's personal habits or prior health status.
Clearly, something within us induces systemic failures. Perhaps cloning will help us to eventually understand this, but getting so converned about telomeres and bad lab techniques seems to be focusing a bit short of the important question: How am I going to take control of my own destiny as a mortal?
but it's got to be more than just cells falling apart.
According to my favorite bedtime story collection, The Pictorial History of Steam Power, a steam turbine can produce one hoursepower of work per hour on about a half kilo (1lb) of coal. So, what's the conversion to kilowatt hours from horespower hours? I fergit, somebody help me out here.
Anyhow, seeing as how there isn't really a shortage of coal at this rate, it seems infinitely sensible to just go ahead and use the coal and work on the emissions a little more creatively.
What really impresses me about the history of steam is that although a turbine can pull this incredible amount of work out of a minimally processed resource, turbines aren't really all that much more efficient than the gigantic triple expansion steam cylinder engines that they replaced.
Even without a turbine, you could have gotten by with a pound and a half of coal to produce your hour of horespower well before the turn of the century.
Centralized power generation with grid distribution is omnipresent for a reason, it is efficient and makes real live economic sense.
If these guys have a drivetrain that can really spin off lead batteries, they're onto something. Now let's see the price drop. That's the part they're gonna hate.
That double post was a fuck up, but it fits the theme here.
Yeah, excess is exactly the right place to be looking. I'm talking to you about a man named George Bataille who wrote a lot about the internet and monorails and whatnot in the thirties.
The above poster had it right. This monorail plan doesn't offer excess value, so it's never going to work and particularly not in the States. But let me clarify how that works.
When it comes to excess, it's hard to beat sex. Sex is expendature in so many ways. Sex, is the best motivator of all. Even drugs like Coke can only mimic the ecstacy of sex. And a product that's going to be successfull has got to be sexy. That's the unspoken value. The part you didn't actually get a receipt for, but the only part you really wanted.
And if it can't sell as a product because it isn't sexy, it's not going anywhere in the US. That's what keeps America beautiful --some would say brutal. And this thing isn't sexy at sixty miles an hour. That's like when your wife says she wants you to pay for her breast reduction. It's gonna be hard to find that money.
Now, on the other hand. Let's see something like Honda and Toyota and GM are already working on with these hybrids. The existing car companies accept that a car has to have some balls even if they're marketing them to hello kitty lovin' downtown commuters.
There's no reason the two might not go together though. This particular guy's cars may not be the answer, but the cheap guide rail idea is way overdo in some form or another.
I got yer thin edge right here --a Linux run time for Macromedia Authorware.
It seems I saw games listed as an example of where Linux falls behind in the apps department. Well, perhaps, but let's talk about another kind of game.
I realize commando command line die hards don't ever want to see a multimedia authoring package for Linux because it will do the same thing it does to Windows, ie pollute it with zillions of trashy pseudo-commercial educational apps. But there is at least one market that is so juicy ripe for Open Source multimedia and that is education.
The tools marketed to educators are more of a barrier to the creation of on-line curricula than the technological skills necessary to develop interesting lessons. If an instructor plans to profit from their work, they've got to pay $2500 bucks for a licensing agreement for stuff that might even have come pre-loaded on their machines under special academic licenses. Oh yeah, it makes pretty pictues and sounds and all that and the students might actually dig it, but this is serious cash you have to put up if you want to get any kind of compensation as a small time developer. I think it acts as a barrier to people who might otherwise at least attempt to produce content they feel some pride in which is often all it takes to hold the student's respect for another semester.
But let's not sweat the run time agreement. Hey, what's a few grand for a big living prof. If this imaginary prof was really into it this deep then she'd be flopping down the cash and smiling all the way to the bank.
Now what about student scores and stuff --"is this where I put a database?" our hapless faculty member inquires. Oh yeah, this is where IBM breaks out the lube. Suddenly you've got a reason to contact Lotus. Hmm. What do they do again? Oh yeah, now it's getting hot and heavy. The education market is in deep bondage.
I don't know all that many teachers, but I'm in the education market myself and I've seen copies of Macromedia Authorware in teacher's offices from California to Taiwan that simply don't get used. Perhaps if the chump change side of it looked more appetizing these suckers would bite. Plenty of teachers will write a little app to try and make even a few hundred bucks. But when the overhead gets like it is, there's just no motivation to try. An open source run time might change that.
Even if you just look at the university side of things in the next year or so, building an Authorware run time for Linux could be a real wedge because it would probably reduce a lot of the insistance on windows PCs in computer labs coming from faculty doing their own multimedia materials.