"Also, when renaming a file, Explorer only highlights the filename without selecting the extension."
So how do you change the f*ng extension?
"[...] in the Release Candidate releases and later, Microsoft blocked raw disc access from user mode applications."
WTF?! *And* you can't circumvent the restriction by installing a driver for it, because unsigned drivers are blocked unless you enable them at boot time, and because the presence of unsigned drivers disables the secure audio path, meaning you can't play your DRM'd content. So what about undeletion, truecrypt, colinux, ext2fs drivers, free space wiping applications, and all the other shit that does disk-related stuff that the OS doesn't support directly?
"Chunks of data over 64MB in size will not be defragmented [by the system disk defragmenter]; Microsoft has stated that this is because there is no discernible performance benefit in doing so."
And if I disagree with their conclusions, I can't do a f*cking thing about it, because they've disabled user-mode direct disk access.
"The ability to view and edit metadata stored in a file's secondary stream through the "Summary" tab of the file's "Property" dialog has been removed"
Huh. The one useful feature XP had, and they remove it in the next version.
"Button to go up one folder (or the folder containing the folder the user browsing) in Explorer has been removed."
5) It was not "add-on" development, it was essentially re-architecting the entire OS to be.NET based, something which nothing was really ready for, and was far too large of a job.
Do you have a source for that statement? It's not something I've ever heard before, and sounds quite unlikely to me: MS would almost certainly realise from the outset that that approach would be a mistake, at least until the technology of.NET and language-protected OSs was substantially better developed than now. Not to say they aren't working on it, but I don't think it was ever on the cards for Longhorn.
How long does it take to build up a colony capable of, and wishing to, launch a colony ship? It's on it's own, with a necessarily VERY small seed population. The colony is only going to WANT to keep colonizing when they become a mature, stable population -- when they're finished with the thorough colonization of their own planet. Maybe 10,000 years?
I think that's a substantial overestimate. It took a lot less than 500 years for European colonists to the Americas and Australia to reach a mature level of civilisation. Admittedly, they had larger numbers and assistance that interstellar colonists would lack, but still I doubt we're talking enough influence to make an order of magnitude difference.
Assuming that a population will take an active interest in colonization and will have the resources to pursue it when it reaches 1,000,000,000 and the population growth rate is e (just for convenience's sake... it seems a reasonable guess for an expanding colony) you only need 16 generations from a seed colony of 100 individuals. My guess is 500-1,000 years would be enough.
As I am fond of saying to various wingnuts, a god who can't set up evolution to achieve a desired end is not omnipotent.
An interesting argument a friend presented: the entire "Intelligent Design" movement is probably heretical, in some fashion. Because:
1. As you say, an omnipotent god could set up the universe so that evolution achieves his ends. 2. Intelligent Design argues that evolution does not work, that certain things have evolved that would not evolve without some kind of guiding assistance, because they are too unlikely to occur by chance, and selection does not assist in their production due to local maxima issues. These things are interpreted as evidence of the work of an intelligent designer (i.e., God). 3. This can be rephrased: "Evolution is broken, so God has to intervene to fix it now and then" 4. This implies that evolution, an aspect of God's design of the universe, is imperfect. An omnipotent god could have made it perfect, so God is not omnipotent. This contradicts the standard doctrines of most faiths.
The argument isn't perfect; it fails to address the issue that God could intentionally have created a broken form of evolution. Why He would have done that is a mystery, although as we know, "God Moves In Mysterious Ways", or so they keep telling me. But it means that IDers are relying in their arguments on God doing something that seems, under intelligent examination, to be irrational at best. That's not a good place to be arguing from.
As far as I can tell, *all* of them will require activation.
So it'll be a no-activation hack or nothing, I'm afraid. For me, I suspect it'll be nothing, at least for a while. None of my machines have enough RAM to run Vista.
That's not what I meant. I know of at least two retailers in my local area that have been selling them for a couple of years or more. One guy who sells executive cars supplies such a device professionally fitted with them, for just a couple of hundred quid, and has been doing so for over a year.
To suggest that just because using something would be illegal you can't actually buy it in the country is naive.
And only the most idiotic of those will use the Home EULA version. See, I use Home for testing downloaded from MSDN, and as such subject to the MSDN licensing agreement, NOT the EULA.
That's nice for you. Many of us can't afford the £567.49 per annum than an MSDN Operating Systems subscription costs.
Right. And now we see why these people have higher Linux costs than Windows costs.
More than 92 percent of Hostbasket's nearly 20,000 active shared hosting sites run on Microsoft Windows Server 2003
OK, so say they're running around 400 servers. They have 360 Windows servers and 40 Linux ones. Those 180 Windows servers probably need a team of about 10 people on site at a time to run them (i.e. approximately 36 servers per admin). The Linux ones, though, probably they have 2 people for managing them -- you need to have spare capacity in case of an emergency, and only having one person on site at a time who's qualified for a particular task is a recipe for disaster. That's 20 servers per admin, so each of those 20 servers costs 1/20th of an admin salary to maintain, not 1/36th like the Windows ones.
Economies of scale are everything in this business.
I work for a charity, and we run Windows 2003 on our web servers.
I'd have to agree with the findings, simply because any idiot (like me) can run a Windows 2003 server. All you need is Windows experience (which everyone has nowadays). Linux requires special knowledge and/or training.
I'm afraid your comparison is invalid. While I'm sure you're right for your own environment, the one we're talking about here is a company hosting 19,400 web sites of which the majority are based on dynamic content. I don't know how many machines they have, but at their scale, they'll be employing a reasonably large number of full-time admins. The fact that existing employees might have transferable Windows skills is of no relevance at all, because they'll have employees dedicated to the task.
Admittedly, the report was done by Microsoft itself
Doesn't this mean that the report is useless and should be totally disregarded?
No. It makes it marketing material, rather than an independent report, but a lot of people read marketing material, and often rely on information that it contains. Therefore we need to have good answers about why the conclusion it reaches is wrong, about why either (a) the business they are describing as being better off running Windows servers is atypical or (b) some assumption they make is invalid or even (c) some conclusion they draw isn't supported by the facts they cite or (d) some fact they cite is incorrect.
Also: if there are any points in here that are right, which makes it a good report (you can't tell without reading it whether it is or not), then those might highlight areas which we Linux programmers need to work on in order to make our system more appealing to this kind of business, which is after all our core area of competence.
For me it's 10 times easier for me to fix up an httpd.conf or some.htaccess files and set some permissions with chmod/chgrp, but for other people using the IIS dialogs or whatever might be easier.
I tell you, it's easier to configure IIS by editing config files as well. And given that's the way MS teaches their MSCEs to do it, too, I guess that's a fairly universal feeling, too. Web servers are complex applications that aren't usually well-served by GUI configuration.
You have to wonder about the quality of their Windows admins who are willing to work for half of what Linux admins are.
'Cause you can't be telling me that a Windows server needs less maintenance time in the hands of sombody who knows what they're doing. I like to think I do, and I manage web servers running on each platform (Windows Server 2003 and Debian Sarge), and I'll tell you now I spend much less time on the Debian one. Updates are easier to apply, and there are fewer of them.
you mean to tell me that the UK legalized something?!?
Yes, but it was the liberal democrats who made it happen. They also want to legalize:
Peaceful protests outside parliament
Not being sent to the US if a US court thinks maybe it might have some flimsy evidence that wouldn't stand up to getting a US citizen sent to face trial in the UK, because US congress hasn't ratified the treaty (and probably won't, it being *stupid*) while UK parliament has
The right to free assembly without police interference
Letting people who are suspected of terrorism-related offences out of their houses once in a while
Public interest whistleblowing
The right to silence
The right not to be convicted on hearsay evidence
I mean, is that kind of thinking insane or what?;)
If you're in a major metropolitan area where all the FM broadcast slots are in use, you may not have much success with one of these things.
There's no such place in the UK. Ofcom are fairly tight about licensing, and always ensure they leave some spectrum available. Generally, you won't get a license for broadcasting on a slot that's in use in a neighbouring area, even when that signal isn't detectable with standard equipment in your area, simply because they don't want the potential of malfunctioning equipment disrupting other broadcasts. Therefore, you'll never find anywhere where all the slots are in use.
That said, I'm not sure if there are any slots that are used nowhere, and most of these devices seem to have fixed frequency. Mine is fixed at 107.5, which does fail in the vicinity of Bristol.
Absolutely wrong. You insure a driver for a particular car, unless you have a company policy in which case you name drivers for the vehicles that the company owns. Even if I gave you permission, you could not legally drive my car if I had not insured it myself. If you care to check out your insurance documents you will see that the car you drive in such a manner MUST be insured already,
You are wrong.
My insurance cover note states:
The Policyholder may also drive with the owner's permission a motor car not owned by the Policyholder and not hired or leased to the Policyholder under a hire purchase or annual leasing agreement, provided that the poerson driving holds a licence to drive such motor car or has held and is not disqualified for holding or obtaining such a licence.
It doesn't mention anything about you needing to insure the vehicle.
and your insurance will only cover you for third party risk even then.
Only third-party cover is legally required.
Well I don't know what you've done to deserve that. But normal drivers find it works just fine. And whats the multiple policy crap about ? You are obviously not talking about everyday private car policies here.
What "I've done to deserve that" is use an insurance policy that doesn't directly name the vehicle. Yes, this is a little unusual, but it's not *that* unusual. Just because you've never done it yourself doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
The policy I quote from is a standard, consumer policy from Direct Line. The point is, I regularly drive a vehicle which belongs to a friend of mine. I don't want to have to pay for insurance for that vehicle as well, and he doesn't have insurance himself because he doesn't actually drive it at the moment. So I either have an "any other vehicle" policy like this (which are easy enough to get hold of, and fairly cheap too), or pay for multiple policies. Which do you think I'll do?
It strikes me that you either have a criminal record or have been convicted of a motoring offence before, because all the things you are saying are not usual at all.
No, neither of these things are true. I merely drive a vehicle that isn't covered by an insurance policy. I am covered by the insurance policy.
My driver's licence doesn't have a photo on it. How do you fix that one?
Send off to DVLA and get one ? If you change your address then it's free, if you PASS a test then it's free. What's the big deal ?
I don't see why I should. I'm perfectly entitled to continue using my existing license. I'm not likely to change my address in the near future, and I passed my driving test over ten years ago, thank you, so I'm not about to take another one. But the point I'm making is, that the police can't just rely on people have photo ID with them, because a large number of people don't carry photo ID with them, myself included.
This is fine if you buy a unit that also charges the battery but if you don't own an iPod you're pretty much screwed in that respect.
Most rechargeable devices seem to be capable of charging from USB power, so I don't see why you'd need an iPod to be able to recharge, as that's a standardised interface.
The police already have access to all the information they need regarding vehicles and ownership. They have computerised records that show whether a vehicle is insured and by whom.
No, they don't. As I said in the original post that this chain is a reply to, insurance is a property of the driver, not the car. Assuming you gave me permission to do so, and we're talking about the UK, I could get into your car and legally drive it, regardless of whether or not you had insurance.
If you doubt the insurance claims I just made, go here and follow the link to "How do we check Insurance,new style MOT Test Certificates and GVT Test Certificates?" (sorry no link - session id crap)- all you need is a number from the V5 and a number from the MOT certificate, nothing insurance related at all.
If I try to tax my car that way, it fails. Yet I have valid insurance. I therefore have to tax my car by taking an insurance cover note from my insurer to a post office or DVLA office; I can't use the web interface. That's something I live with in order to save the ~£400 per annum that having multiple policies would cost.
If you tax the car in a post office you need a valid insurance cert, so the DVLC must have a record of insurance relating to the vehicle.
No, they don't. I've been stopped by the police before; they have no idea whether or not my vehicle is insured. Therefore, they have to require me to produce documentation (which, fortunately, I can usually do by the roadside). There's no way around this, unforuntately.
The previous posters comments about matching the face to the licence should be all that's needed.
My driver's licence doesn't have a photo on it. How do you fix that one?
IANAL but I'm fairly certain the patents held by Borealis Technical Limited for their Power Chips line already covers this.
Looking at it, it seems both of them have taken a fairly old concept (a hot metal plater separated from a cold metal plate by a vacuum creating a potential, which has been known about since the 19th century) and have developed it in different directions:
PowerChips have switched from a metal plate to some kind of improved emitter that increases the electron transfer across the vacuum.
Eneco have substituted the vacuum for a layer of exotic semiconductor.
So, I'd (a) guess that there isn't likely to be a patent conflict between the two techniques and (b) suggest that Eneco's approach is more likely to be useful commercially because it doesn't rely on creating a small device that contains a vacuum (which is notoriously difficult).
Slow down cowboy... first of all, the purity of distilled yeast-produced ethanol is more than sufficient for the purposes of generating heat.
Yes, but probably not in the micro-scale catalytic burners that they'd need to use to get this down to laptop-battery size.
And besides, even if it wasn't carbon neutral, the real breakthrough would be harnessing the energy density of a fuel such as ethanol, which would be many tens or hundreds of times greater than even the best Li-polymer batteries
But probably fairly similar to a direct-methanol fuel cell. The only advantage of this over such a fuel cell as far as I see is that (a) ethanol's easier to produce than methanol and (b) it probably doesn't require large quantities of platinum catalyst.
Which has precisely what relevance to this article, which is about a process where "the energy of a hot metal [causes electrons to migrate] to a cold metal and in the process create an electronic charge"?
If you actually, you know, read the article, you wouldn't need to guess. They've placed a layer of semiconducter between the hot and cold plates that acts as a thermal barrier while allowing electrons to pass.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista has the first significant kernel modifications since NT4
I think that privelege goes to XP SP2, for the addition of NX support.
From the Wikipedia article:
"Also, when renaming a file, Explorer only highlights the filename without selecting the extension."
So how do you change the f*ng extension?
"[...] in the Release Candidate releases and later, Microsoft blocked raw disc access from user mode applications."
WTF?! *And* you can't circumvent the restriction by installing a driver for it, because unsigned drivers are blocked unless you enable them at boot time, and because the presence of unsigned drivers disables the secure audio path, meaning you can't play your DRM'd content. So what about undeletion, truecrypt, colinux, ext2fs drivers, free space wiping applications, and all the other shit that does disk-related stuff that the OS doesn't support directly?
"Chunks of data over 64MB in size will not be defragmented [by the system disk defragmenter]; Microsoft has stated that this is because there is no discernible performance benefit in doing so."
And if I disagree with their conclusions, I can't do a f*cking thing about it, because they've disabled user-mode direct disk access.
"The ability to view and edit metadata stored in a file's secondary stream through the "Summary" tab of the file's "Property" dialog has been removed"
Huh. The one useful feature XP had, and they remove it in the next version.
"Button to go up one folder (or the folder containing the folder the user browsing) in Explorer has been removed."
Along with key features of the user interface.
Yeah, I'll be upgrading.
5) It was not "add-on" development, it was essentially re-architecting the entire OS to be .NET based, something which nothing was really ready for, and was far too large of a job.
.NET and language-protected OSs was substantially better developed than now. Not to say they aren't working on it, but I don't think it was ever on the cards for Longhorn.
Do you have a source for that statement? It's not something I've ever heard before, and sounds quite unlikely to me: MS would almost certainly realise from the outset that that approach would be a mistake, at least until the technology of
How long does it take to build up a colony capable of, and wishing to, launch a colony ship? It's on it's own, with a necessarily VERY small seed population. The colony is only going to WANT to keep colonizing when they become a mature, stable population -- when they're finished with the thorough colonization of their own planet. Maybe 10,000 years?
I think that's a substantial overestimate. It took a lot less than 500 years for European colonists to the Americas and Australia to reach a mature level of civilisation. Admittedly, they had larger numbers and assistance that interstellar colonists would lack, but still I doubt we're talking enough influence to make an order of magnitude difference.
Assuming that a population will take an active interest in colonization and will have the resources to pursue it when it reaches 1,000,000,000 and the population growth rate is e (just for convenience's sake... it seems a reasonable guess for an expanding colony) you only need 16 generations from a seed colony of 100 individuals. My guess is 500-1,000 years would be enough.
As I am fond of saying to various wingnuts, a god who can't set up evolution to achieve a desired end is not omnipotent.
An interesting argument a friend presented: the entire "Intelligent Design" movement is probably heretical, in some fashion. Because:
1. As you say, an omnipotent god could set up the universe so that evolution achieves his ends.
2. Intelligent Design argues that evolution does not work, that certain things have evolved that would not evolve without some kind of guiding assistance, because they are too unlikely to occur by chance, and selection does not assist in their production due to local maxima issues. These things are interpreted as evidence of the work of an intelligent designer (i.e., God).
3. This can be rephrased: "Evolution is broken, so God has to intervene to fix it now and then"
4. This implies that evolution, an aspect of God's design of the universe, is imperfect. An omnipotent god could have made it perfect, so God is not omnipotent. This contradicts the standard doctrines of most faiths.
The argument isn't perfect; it fails to address the issue that God could intentionally have created a broken form of evolution. Why He would have done that is a mystery, although as we know, "God Moves In Mysterious Ways", or so they keep telling me. But it means that IDers are relying in their arguments on God doing something that seems, under intelligent examination, to be irrational at best. That's not a good place to be arguing from.
in fact the only fm transmitters that also charge your mp3 player only exist for the ipod
A RGER-PLAYERS/dp/B000IVILHK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGITAL-FM-TRANSMITTER-CH
As far as I can tell, *all* of them will require activation.
So it'll be a no-activation hack or nothing, I'm afraid. For me, I suspect it'll be nothing, at least for a while. None of my machines have enough RAM to run Vista.
That's not what I meant. I know of at least two retailers in my local area that have been selling them for a couple of years or more. One guy who sells executive cars supplies such a device professionally fitted with them, for just a couple of hundred quid, and has been doing so for over a year.
To suggest that just because using something would be illegal you can't actually buy it in the country is naive.
And only the most idiotic of those will use the Home EULA version. See, I use Home for testing downloaded from MSDN, and as such subject to the MSDN licensing agreement, NOT the EULA.
That's nice for you. Many of us can't afford the £567.49 per annum than an MSDN Operating Systems subscription costs.
OK, so say they're running around 400 servers. They have 360 Windows servers and 40 Linux ones. Those 180 Windows servers probably need a team of about 10 people on site at a time to run them (i.e. approximately 36 servers per admin). The Linux ones, though, probably they have 2 people for managing them -- you need to have spare capacity in case of an emergency, and only having one person on site at a time who's qualified for a particular task is a recipe for disaster. That's 20 servers per admin, so each of those 20 servers costs 1/20th of an admin salary to maintain, not 1/36th like the Windows ones.
Economies of scale are everything in this business.
I work for a charity, and we run Windows 2003 on our web servers.
I'd have to agree with the findings, simply because any idiot (like me) can run a Windows 2003 server. All you need is Windows experience (which everyone has nowadays). Linux requires special knowledge and/or training.
I'm afraid your comparison is invalid. While I'm sure you're right for your own environment, the one we're talking about here is a company hosting 19,400 web sites of which the majority are based on dynamic content. I don't know how many machines they have, but at their scale, they'll be employing a reasonably large number of full-time admins. The fact that existing employees might have transferable Windows skills is of no relevance at all, because they'll have employees dedicated to the task.
Admittedly, the report was done by Microsoft itself
Doesn't this mean that the report is useless and should be totally disregarded?
No. It makes it marketing material, rather than an independent report, but a lot of people read marketing material, and often rely on information that it contains. Therefore we need to have good answers about why the conclusion it reaches is wrong, about why either (a) the business they are describing as being better off running Windows servers is atypical or (b) some assumption they make is invalid or even (c) some conclusion they draw isn't supported by the facts they cite or (d) some fact they cite is incorrect.
Also: if there are any points in here that are right, which makes it a good report (you can't tell without reading it whether it is or not), then those might highlight areas which we Linux programmers need to work on in order to make our system more appealing to this kind of business, which is after all our core area of competence.
For me it's 10 times easier for me to fix up an httpd.conf or some .htaccess files and set some permissions with chmod/chgrp, but for other people using the IIS dialogs or whatever might be easier.
I tell you, it's easier to configure IIS by editing config files as well. And given that's the way MS teaches their MSCEs to do it, too, I guess that's a fairly universal feeling, too. Web servers are complex applications that aren't usually well-served by GUI configuration.
They quote almost a 100% over Windows labor.
You have to wonder about the quality of their Windows admins who are willing to work for half of what Linux admins are.
'Cause you can't be telling me that a Windows server needs less maintenance time in the hands of sombody who knows what they're doing. I like to think I do, and I manage web servers running on each platform (Windows Server 2003 and Debian Sarge), and I'll tell you now I spend much less time on the Debian one. Updates are easier to apply, and there are fewer of them.
In addition didn't you wonder why you couldn't buy them here?
There are plenty of places that will sell you one here. You know, for use while you're travelling out of the country.
Yes, but it was the liberal democrats who made it happen. They also want to legalize:
I mean, is that kind of thinking insane or what?
The main point in there being "1949". Yeah, it was over 50 years ago when that was done, time to GET WITH THE TIMES me thinks
Because, of course, the fundamental nature of radio interference changed in the 1980s.
If you're in a major metropolitan area where all the FM broadcast slots are in use, you may not have much success with one of these things.
There's no such place in the UK. Ofcom are fairly tight about licensing, and always ensure they leave some spectrum available. Generally, you won't get a license for broadcasting on a slot that's in use in a neighbouring area, even when that signal isn't detectable with standard equipment in your area, simply because they don't want the potential of malfunctioning equipment disrupting other broadcasts. Therefore, you'll never find anywhere where all the slots are in use.
That said, I'm not sure if there are any slots that are used nowhere, and most of these devices seem to have fixed frequency. Mine is fixed at 107.5, which does fail in the vicinity of Bristol.
Even if I gave you permission, you could not legally drive my car if I had not insured it myself. If you care to check out your insurance documents you will see that the car you drive in such a manner MUST be insured already,
You are wrong.
My insurance cover note states:
It doesn't mention anything about you needing to insure the vehicle.
and your insurance will only cover you for third party risk even then.
Only third-party cover is legally required.
Well I don't know what you've done to deserve that. But normal drivers find it works just fine. And whats the multiple policy crap about ? You are obviously not talking about everyday private car policies here.
What "I've done to deserve that" is use an insurance policy that doesn't directly name the vehicle. Yes, this is a little unusual, but it's not *that* unusual. Just because you've never done it yourself doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
The policy I quote from is a standard, consumer policy from Direct Line. The point is, I regularly drive a vehicle which belongs to a friend of mine. I don't want to have to pay for insurance for that vehicle as well, and he doesn't have insurance himself because he doesn't actually drive it at the moment. So I either have an "any other vehicle" policy like this (which are easy enough to get hold of, and fairly cheap too), or pay for multiple policies. Which do you think I'll do?
It strikes me that you either have a criminal record or have been convicted of a motoring offence before, because all the things you are saying are not usual at all.
No, neither of these things are true. I merely drive a vehicle that isn't covered by an insurance policy. I am covered by the insurance policy.
My driver's licence doesn't have a photo on it. How do you fix that one?
Send off to DVLA and get one ? If you change your address then it's free, if you PASS a test then it's free. What's the big deal ?
I don't see why I should. I'm perfectly entitled to continue using my existing license. I'm not likely to change my address in the near future, and I passed my driving test over ten years ago, thank you, so I'm not about to take another one. But the point I'm making is, that the police can't just rely on people have photo ID with them, because a large number of people don't carry photo ID with them, myself included.
This is fine if you buy a unit that also charges the battery but if you don't own an iPod you're pretty much screwed in that respect.
Most rechargeable devices seem to be capable of charging from USB power, so I don't see why you'd need an iPod to be able to recharge, as that's a standardised interface.
I don't see the need for any of this at all.
The police already have access to all the information they need regarding vehicles and ownership. They have computerised records that show whether a vehicle is insured and by whom.
No, they don't. As I said in the original post that this chain is a reply to, insurance is a property of the driver, not the car. Assuming you gave me permission to do so, and we're talking about the UK, I could get into your car and legally drive it, regardless of whether or not you had insurance.
If you doubt the insurance claims I just made, go here and follow the link to "How do we check Insurance,new style MOT Test Certificates and GVT Test Certificates?" (sorry no link - session id crap)- all you need is a number from the V5 and a number from the MOT certificate, nothing insurance related at all.
If I try to tax my car that way, it fails. Yet I have valid insurance. I therefore have to tax my car by taking an insurance cover note from my insurer to a post office or DVLA office; I can't use the web interface. That's something I live with in order to save the ~£400 per annum that having multiple policies would cost.
If you tax the car in a post office you need a valid insurance cert, so the DVLC must have a record of insurance relating to the vehicle.
No, they don't. I've been stopped by the police before; they have no idea whether or not my vehicle is insured. Therefore, they have to require me to produce documentation (which, fortunately, I can usually do by the roadside). There's no way around this, unforuntately.
The previous posters comments about matching the face to the licence should be all that's needed.
My driver's licence doesn't have a photo on it. How do you fix that one?
IANAL but I'm fairly certain the patents held by Borealis Technical Limited for their Power Chips line already covers this.
Looking at it, it seems both of them have taken a fairly old concept (a hot metal plater separated from a cold metal plate by a vacuum creating a potential, which has been known about since the 19th century) and have developed it in different directions:
PowerChips have switched from a metal plate to some kind of improved emitter that increases the electron transfer across the vacuum.
Eneco have substituted the vacuum for a layer of exotic semiconductor.
So, I'd (a) guess that there isn't likely to be a patent conflict between the two techniques and (b) suggest that Eneco's approach is more likely to be useful commercially because it doesn't rely on creating a small device that contains a vacuum (which is notoriously difficult).
Slow down cowboy... first of all, the purity of distilled yeast-produced ethanol is more than sufficient for the purposes of generating heat.
Yes, but probably not in the micro-scale catalytic burners that they'd need to use to get this down to laptop-battery size.
And besides, even if it wasn't carbon neutral, the real breakthrough would be harnessing the energy density of a fuel such as ethanol, which would be many tens or hundreds of times greater than even the best Li-polymer batteries
But probably fairly similar to a direct-methanol fuel cell. The only advantage of this over such a fuel cell as far as I see is that (a) ethanol's easier to produce than methanol and (b) it probably doesn't require large quantities of platinum catalyst.
Which has precisely what relevance to this article, which is about a process where "the energy of a hot metal [causes electrons to migrate] to a cold metal and in the process create an electronic charge"?
If you actually, you know, read the article, you wouldn't need to guess. They've placed a layer of semiconducter between the hot and cold plates that acts as a thermal barrier while allowing electrons to pass.