Mostly true, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's entirely true.
Firstly, through their own criminal corruption and stupidity, they except the travesty of democracy that was the election, and end up with the candidate that lost.
Yep, we got the candidate that lost and he is also proving very obtuse about his lack of a mandate. But a lot of us are very pissed off and I'm pretty sure Dubya is gonna be a one-term prez, just like his dad.
Then, their new president, a man who is renowned for being insanely stupid decides to throw bombs at Iraq to deflect growing concerns about his mental capabilities and lack of foreign policy.
Noticed that, did you? I was wondering if anyone else did.
And the American people do nothing.
Ummmmm... it's obvious you don't live here because a lot of people are up in arms. But it doesn't get reported because, bzzzt, the global media (including those based outside of the US) are mostly owned by the very people who benefit from our stolen election. Why don't you see what these folks have to say about it?
The economy takes a huge nosedive because faith and trust in the country is plummeting.
It didn't help that Greenspan cringed when dubya patted him on the back.
Star Wars is reinstated to "protect" this foolish president and his foolish people.
bzzzt, wrong. Star wars is reinstated to "protect" the pocketbooks of some of the folks who benefitted from our stolen election, in this case the aerospace industry. Nobody seriously thinks Star Wars can protect us from anything military because quite a few of us have enough brains to realize you could just ship the bombs over here via parcel post.
Then a spy plane (a plane used to SPY on possible targets and threats in foreign countries) crashes into a Chinese plane while SPYING on Cina, a country that is know to be hostile toward Americans and who's huge growing strength and might is not something you want to fuck with.
bzzzzt, wrong. You must have missed that part about how our plane was flying straight and level on autopilot when the hot-dogging Chinese pilot crashed into it.
The Americans then proceed to handle the situation as badly as possible, insisting on NOT apologising, and rattling sabres at the Chinese because they feel that their national honour is at stake.
Actually, one of Dubya's rare moments of actual backbone. They should have apologized to us. And they should give us the goddamn plane back right now.
(News: You have no national honour left. We laugh at you while feeling pity.)
Fine, we will take back all the things we have given to the world and build a wall around the country so we won't bother you. We can start with this computer network you're using to bash us -- you do have two tin cans and some string so you'll have a fallback when it's gone?
And you still pay this man, and his criminally corrupt aids and coworkers, and you defend him and his xenophobic policies.
Not sure where you're going with this chumly. He's in office, so he gets paid, and a lot of us are very vocal about not liking it.
Have fun with your recession Americans - this is one financial crisis that you have engineered yourselves, and this time you truly deserve it.
It's been in the works for at least a decade. Hell, I'm looking forward to it. I got my house in the last recession and I'm sure I'll be able to get a good deal on a beemer once a few more twentysomething snotnoses get their reality check.
Your "onion" shells are the first part of the cosmology of his Culture universe. But in the 6th dimension the universe is a torus; and as the onion shells expand and then contract they circle this torus, arriving back at their point of creation without ever colliding with the universes behind them. So each universe is closed, but an infinite number of them are created and destroyed at the center of the torus.
Let's see, there is also an "energy grid" separating the universe-onion-shells which the Culture has not yet learned how to penetrate, though it comes in handy for powering faster-than-light spaceships.
For more info on this I suggest reading one of these books by Iain Banks:
The Player of Games Consider Phlebas Use of Weapons Excession
There is also an online Banks fanzine called the Culture, and an online interview somewhere (do a search) where he explains this cosmology in great detail, and other items about the Culture which aren't explained fully in the books -- like how the characters get their names.
The paper is not anonymous. Follow the link to the FAQ and you will see several of the participants listed. Additionally, not only did they not take the paper down, they simply posted the RIAA's letter ahead of it. Kinda makes a statement, posting the threat letter at the beginning of the very webpage they want you to suppress, eh?
If you read the paper, you'll see that one of the algorithms actually is patentend, and therefore can't be a trade secret -- this is even noted in the paper.
Nobody issues a challenge like that if they expect their precious standard to be broken. Oops. Now they're pissed. I didn't realize two year olds were allowed to run corporations.
The SF zoom is especially impressive because you can see the "coastline fractal" at four discernably different scales. It's much more impressive than the usual demos that rely on still photos at different magnifications.
I've been using it for about 2 weeks now and it is wonderful. You can actually change what your browser reports for program and version, have it squelch or lie about your personal information, and just plain reinvent the whole Web experience for you.
Proxomitron is also the cleanest Windoze program I have ever used. It does not use the registry, does not use or place any files outside of its install directory, and can be bypassed with a single click. Since it functions as a HTTP proxy it works with any browser.
The only problem is that, once you configure your browser to use the proxy, you can't surf the Web unless Proxomitron is running. You need to set it to autostart or to start along with your browser. Since I have always-on broadband I just put a shortcut in Startup. (And I was wondering if it would work under Wine; I thought it would and am glad to find I was right.)
...except that the telcos really are phasing pay phones out because they don't make enough revenue. (Of course, this may be in relation to newer technologies; which would you rather sell, two calls for a total of US$0.50 or one cell phone contract for US$40.00 per month?)
As I suggested in another post above, it is obvious that pay phones are a good thing to have. And we're not going to have them soon. There has been plenty of info on this lately, planting the seeds of acceptability when it gets really hard to find one.
I think the consensus is that pay phones are a Good Thing -- handy in an emergency, and available for people who can't afford a cellphone, don't want one, or whose cellphone just died at an inopportune time.
That said, it's a shame they are going the way of the dodo. Yep, they are.
The problem is that, because of cellphones, pay phone use is decreasing. That means pay phones make less money. That means the for-profit corporations now running them will pull them. Simple economics -- if you're the only one in town who needs a left-handed three-pitch anchor screw, don't expect Home Depot to carry it.
So without making anything like a general comment (heh) on the topic, let me just point out that this is one small area where capitalism is clearly failing. For all the evils of the ATT/Bell monopoly, it did subsidize necessary but unprofitable services like pay phones and hard to service local lines with the profits from more lucrative and voluntary things like long distance. Not a good thing if you're a big long distance customer, but a very good thing if your car just got jacked and you need to call the police.
Considering the libertarian/capitalistic streak that runs through the/. community, it is kind of amusing to see this outpouring of enthusiasm over a service which is clearly going to die because the evil corporate pigs don't make enough money off of it. Pay phones are just one detail in the broad category of infrastructure which IMO really should be maintained by taxes and subsidies, because without some social engineering they just won't exist even though they are beneficial.
Of course, the other possibility is that the cost of a pay call will go up. Some phones already meter local calls by the minute. But that's a spiral to doom; make the call too expensive and more people will spring for a cell phone, usage will go down more, you will have to jack the price again, etc.
If someone has a solution to this that will not get called "communism" or "socialism" by the usual elements, I'd be very interested in hearing about it. Meanwhile, this is just one of those things that, to me, argue against the purely liberarian/capitalistic worldview -- whatever its other beneficial contrasts might be to the current overall situation.
The deuterium is mostly like hydrogen but only mostly. It's ok to burn with oxygen but I think it doesn't quite work right in biological systems. Kinda toxic. I've forgotten exactly what happens but it's not Good.
Deuterium operates exactly the same way as hydrogen in chemical systems, biological or otherwise. It is not toxic. Tritium, which can (if it is present) also be concentrated by the process that isolates deuterium, is highly radioactive, and does represent a health threat. There was no tritium in the environment to be concentrated when the first experiments were done, but there is now thanks to the nuclear industry. This is about the only potential health threat I can think of from drinking heavy water.
Except, of course, for the threat to your pocketbook -- heavy water is brutally expensive. That would be one hell of an expensive pause for refreshment if you were to drink a glass of the stuff.
You can generate power production on this scale with a toy steam engine. IIRC Edmund's Scientific even sells a kit that does just this trick, even including the light bulb.
Slightly more practical, it should be no big trick to take the small 2-stroke gasoline engine off a gas-powered string trimmer and use it to power a small DC generator. Getting a generator of the right scale would be a problem, but you could probably find a permanent magnet DC motor the right size to run in reverse.
Yet more practical, Mother Earth News once ran an article about converting a lawnmower into a portable DC arc welder using a car battery and alternator. This was a very cool project which I wish I had the time to try. You could, of course, use the same technique to power any 12V project. I could see this being used, for example, for a fairly high-power ham rig if you couldn't get a car to the site.
The problem is that the efficiency of IC/SGS-generator production goes down with the scale. The smaller you make it, the less well it works -- which is why, of the examples I give here, only the welder is practical for anything. They're also noisy, require a lot of maintenance, and tend not to run reliably for long periods of time. At the scale of hand-carried portable, they just aren't practical.
You (and the website you reference) have confused two wholly different technologies:
1. Fuel cells generate electricity by the action of a replaceable chemical fuel, without the usual intermediate step of burning the fuel to generate heat to spin generators. They are a proven technology and most of the R&D is going into finding ways to use new fuels or make them smaller or work at lower temperatures (say, below the BP of water -- most fuel cells only work at very high temperatures).
A fuel cell is not going to care whether its fuel is H or Deuterium because H and deuterium behave exactly the same in chemical reactions.
2. Cold fusion, which is a scam and doesn't exist and doesn't work. Nobody has ever demonstrated cold fusion. If they had done so they would have gotten a crapload of neutrons, and in all likelihood they would be dead.
This is not to say that cold fusion will remain forever impossible, only that nobody has ever demonstrated it. The current spin on the lack of neutrons seems to be that not only are they claiming a magic new way to fuse deuterium at low temperatures, they are magically fusing them in some new way that doesn't produce neutrons. Sorry, but I only swallow one magic trick per potential scam.
From the website:
As stated on Good Morning America, "It's either, you know, an ordinary chemical reaction that's not behaving the way we expect it to, or some kind of a nuclear reaction...It's neither one nor the other, so it really is just a genuine mystery right now."
A great mystery, all right, except to those of us who know some nuclear physics; but not so much of a mystery as to prevent them from soliciting funds for further "research." At least they are honest enough to admit that what they have might not be cold fusion, but I bet most of their investors didn't catch that disclaimer.
...the Air Force is the only service where the enlisted men, technicians, and grunts get to stay safely behind the lines while the officers go out and risk their necks getting shot at.
The picture link worked. (kewl!) But the link from the picture to further text revealed:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] The Microsoft Jet database engine stopped the process because you and another user are attempting to change the same data at the same time.
/en/ssi/ssi_ad1.asp, line 28
Now that's one I haven't seen in before -- at least as a result of clicking on a "read more" link.
Linde Chemical did make a particularly nice star sapphire, though.
And you can't get them any more. Linde stars are no longer available, except as old stock. And connoisseurs can spot them a mile away. Because they are no longer made Linde stars are now as valuable as similar quality natural stones.
The settlement is probably negotiated on the premise that some folks actually get use out of their drives, before they die (or maybe they never die at all -- all of the 5 or so ZIP drives my company uses are still going strong). So, for some users the rebate is free money and for others it's less than their lost investment. That's how class actions work. They average everything across the board. The idea is that, while this isn't completely fair, the paperwork and court time necessary to do it right would suck up so much resources that even less would be available for the plaintiffs (and their lawyers).
And rather cleverly, too. The original AC is lampooning the style of those pro-capitalism fanatics who have made such a religion out of the Law of Supply and Demand that they find anything outside of Capitalism unthinkably horrible and evil, no matter how reasonable or mild it might be.
He is also lampooning the current paranoia of the right wing which thinks the current mild criticisms launched (generally on op-ed pages and at protests) at their ideas are somehow comparable to the centuries-long armed suppression of Left thought, and that if these alien ideas triumph it will somehow mean the End of the World As We Know It (tm).
Actually, if you go to a gem show you will find Linde Star Sapphires selling for quite high prices. Seems Linde (now a division of Union Carbide, oops, a division of a division of Dow) had one chemist who actually knew the secret of making the blasted things. When he died, the secret of the Linde star died with him. Linde Division no longer makes star sapphires, and the distinctive artificial Linde Stars are as valuable in their own right as high-quality natural stones.
I would love to have a toaster with a display and some kind of input. Let it know what's in the slots and exactly how I want them done. This does imply some kind of embedded OS.
No it doesn't. As I said, you could do it with a PIC. Have you ever done any embedded programming?
Is there any other kind of watch worth wearing?
Actually I have been given to understand by non-geek but well-connected friends that, if you ever intend to do anything in the world, the Geek Watch is exactly what you don't want to be wearing. I have progressed through the years (under tutelage from the boss and female unit) from the Digital Wonder to the Citizen Pseudo-Digial Wonder to, finally, the Classic Seiko (the new ones aren't as good, the cognescenti know) which doesn't have a second hand. Yeah, it's a pain when I have to time a wait loop, I keep a stopwatch in the desk for that. You deal with it. Fashion costs.
Nah, it's not ad hominem. Every Ayn Rand footkisser I've ever met has been a lunatic of some kind, usually with an undeservered superiority complex.
Your problem with the type then. You were still wrong.
" The guy is right -- when you make things more complicated than they need to be you make them fail more."
Sorry, that's just not true any more. Unless you're Microsoft, of course. (ObMS Bash)
OBMS or not, you're wrong. I work with embedded stuff day in and out. It's still true that the more complicated you make the plumbing, the easier it is to muck up the works. Modern automobiles fail in much more frustrating and interesting ways than Model T's did -- I should know, since I have some relatives who run an auto shop. They are slowly being driven out of business by the equivalent of MCSE's -- equivalent in every way, including paper over experience and inability to deal with real failures.
If you pay attention to the details, you can indeed have a complex and highly reliable system.
But nobody is paying attention to those details. Microsoft? HAHAHAHAHA They have never met a detail they liked since 1974. Anybody else? The Linux folx, yes, they like details, but their system isn't realtime and is very, very bloated re: embedded systems. Look, I'd love it as much as anybody if this fairy tale could be made real, but it can't and it isn't and it's really stupid to hope for it. In embedded systems, it's you and the metal. If you think otherwise, you will fail.
I can't belive they get away with this stuff like it's the norm.
Maybe you weren't around back in 1981 when IBM was advertising its 8088-based PC with the 8-bit data bus as a "16-bit" machine. Of course, this was in the days when CPU clock x RAM width = speed. Sure, it had a "16-bit core" which they advertised as making it "faster," except, waitaminute, in benchmarks with real software the PC was slower than, say, a Z-80. Oh, the distance that slippery slope can lead...
WARNING: 'I love this' is not reply, is goatsex
on
Pentium IV study
·
· Score: 1
Doesn't this guy have anything to do besides tricking people into clicking on his silly links?
I called customer service the other day for an appliance I have that's broken, and they practically laughed at me when I said I wanted to buy some parts. When you can get them they cost more than a new unit.
Yeah, it's sad. The flipside of this is that with a little planning ahead you can often get spare parts for free -- just wait for someone else to toss their exact duplicate of your gizmo in the trash, and fish it out for a "parts spare." It's surprising how often I've been able to do this.
a cpu, a few simple sensors, and my toast never burns and my frozen waffles come out just right. Try doing that with a simple thermocouple.
You don't need any OS for that. You can do it with a PIC.
Unless your watch is full of gears and springs, it has an OS.
No it doesn't. Unless it is a very fancy nerd watch it likely doesn't even have a CPU, just an oscillator and a bunch of counters.
Someone calling themself "Ayn Rand" from aynrand.org is scarcely in a position to pontificate upon what is sane and rational.
C'mon, you can do better than this ad hominem response. The guy is right -- when you make things more complicated than they need to be you make them fail more. When you make them more capable you depend on them more. Thus, you end up depending more on stuff that is less dependable. What happens when the only user interface is through your kitchen master console (after all, everything intercommunicates so why spend a few bucks on buttons? Just ask printer manufacturers), and one day that interoperability fails? Then your toaster not only doesn't brown your toast right, it doesn't toast them at all; your fridge inexplicably shuts down and ruins all your food, none of the lights will come on, and the phone won't even work so you can call the service guy. Yeah, I really want a house that works like that.
Well, except for a few rare exceptions, such as the cellphones and PDA's mentioned -- and these really aren't "embedded" apps once they reach this level of complexity; rather, they have become extensions of the multifunctional "desktop." So yeah, they'll need an OS.
But the car, fridge, and toaster do not need an OS and aren't getting one soon. Embedded is most of what I do, and it is mostly done to the bare metal in minimal hardware. Even when it is bloated (as when a 6-level interrupt system has been coded in C++ on a 80186) it's a charming kind of backward bloat, harkening to the 1980's. It takes 256 whole K, isn't that cu-ute.
Most embedded apps are realtime, mission critical, single-tasking (or pseudo-multitaskable), and lack user interfaces. Until recently the dominant chip in car applications was the 8048. When you are building in the quantities, with the price structure, and with the requirements of embedded, it usually makes sense to code the whole thing from the bare metal up in C and assembler.
We are beginning to see a few devices that don't really need OS's showing up with OS-like kernels, and they are notoriously slow and unreliable. They don't compete well against more traditionally created firmware, which runs circles around them even on inferior hardware. At least this is the case in the scale industry; I don't see why it would be different anywhere else. Even PC104 hasn't really taken off, despite a few companies that have invested in it. When you are building mission-critical stuff or in quantities of millions, it makes sense to do it from the ground up. In the first hand you have the chance to make sure it's right, and in the second you save money. Yes, Virginia, it does make a difference whether you need 512K RAMS instead of 256's. And the ability to live with that extra wait state can make the difference between a product that ships now and one that never does.
There simply is no room for a general-purpose OS in such an environment. We've seen them (QNX, etc.) already where they are appropriate, and that niche isn't going to change. Meanwhile, neither Linux nor anything ever created by Microsoft since 1974 is really suitable for an embedded platform.
Slashdot Mirror
So if one fails the other can still fly the plane home instead of crash-landing it in China.
Mostly true, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's entirely true.
Firstly, through their own criminal corruption and stupidity, they except the travesty of democracy that was the election, and end up with the candidate that lost.
Yep, we got the candidate that lost and he is also proving very obtuse about his lack of a mandate. But a lot of us are very pissed off and I'm pretty sure Dubya is gonna be a one-term prez, just like his dad.
Then, their new president, a man who is renowned for being insanely stupid decides to throw bombs at Iraq to deflect growing concerns about his mental capabilities and lack of foreign policy.
Noticed that, did you? I was wondering if anyone else did.
And the American people do nothing.
Ummmmm... it's obvious you don't live here because a lot of people are up in arms. But it doesn't get reported because, bzzzt, the global media (including those based outside of the US) are mostly owned by the very people who benefit from our stolen election. Why don't you see what these folks have to say about it?
The economy takes a huge nosedive because faith and trust in the country is plummeting.
It didn't help that Greenspan cringed when dubya patted him on the back.
Star Wars is reinstated to "protect" this foolish president and his foolish people.
bzzzt, wrong. Star wars is reinstated to "protect" the pocketbooks of some of the folks who benefitted from our stolen election, in this case the aerospace industry. Nobody seriously thinks Star Wars can protect us from anything military because quite a few of us have enough brains to realize you could just ship the bombs over here via parcel post.
Then a spy plane (a plane used to SPY on possible targets and threats in foreign countries) crashes into a Chinese plane while SPYING on Cina, a country that is know to be hostile toward Americans and who's huge growing strength and might is not something you want to fuck with.
bzzzzt, wrong. You must have missed that part about how our plane was flying straight and level on autopilot when the hot-dogging Chinese pilot crashed into it.
The Americans then proceed to handle the situation as badly as possible, insisting on NOT apologising, and rattling sabres at the Chinese because they feel that their national honour is at stake.
Actually, one of Dubya's rare moments of actual backbone. They should have apologized to us. And they should give us the goddamn plane back right now.
(News: You have no national honour left. We laugh at you while feeling pity.)
Fine, we will take back all the things we have given to the world and build a wall around the country so we won't bother you. We can start with this computer network you're using to bash us -- you do have two tin cans and some string so you'll have a fallback when it's gone?
And you still pay this man, and his criminally corrupt aids and coworkers, and you defend him and his xenophobic policies.
Not sure where you're going with this chumly. He's in office, so he gets paid, and a lot of us are very vocal about not liking it.
Have fun with your recession Americans - this is one financial crisis that you have engineered yourselves, and this time you truly deserve it.
It's been in the works for at least a decade. Hell, I'm looking forward to it. I got my house in the last recession and I'm sure I'll be able to get a good deal on a beemer once a few more twentysomething snotnoses get their reality check.
Your "onion" shells are the first part of the cosmology of his Culture universe. But in the 6th dimension the universe is a torus; and as the onion shells expand and then contract they circle this torus, arriving back at their point of creation without ever colliding with the universes behind them. So each universe is closed, but an infinite number of them are created and destroyed at the center of the torus.
Let's see, there is also an "energy grid" separating the universe-onion-shells which the Culture has not yet learned how to penetrate, though it comes in handy for powering faster-than-light spaceships.
For more info on this I suggest reading one of these books by Iain Banks:
The Player of Games
Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Excession
There is also an online Banks fanzine called the Culture, and an online interview somewhere (do a search) where he explains this cosmology in great detail, and other items about the Culture which aren't explained fully in the books -- like how the characters get their names.
The paper is not anonymous. Follow the link to the FAQ and you will see several of the participants listed. Additionally, not only did they not take the paper down, they simply posted the RIAA's letter ahead of it. Kinda makes a statement, posting the threat letter at the beginning of the very webpage they want you to suppress, eh?
If you read the paper, you'll see that one of the algorithms actually is patentend, and therefore can't be a trade secret -- this is even noted in the paper.
Nobody issues a challenge like that if they expect their precious standard to be broken. Oops. Now they're pissed. I didn't realize two year olds were allowed to run corporations.
The SF zoom is especially impressive because you can see the "coastline fractal" at four discernably different scales. It's much more impressive than the usual demos that rely on still photos at different magnifications.
Proxomitron is also the cleanest Windoze program I have ever used. It does not use the registry, does not use or place any files outside of its install directory, and can be bypassed with a single click. Since it functions as a HTTP proxy it works with any browser.
The only problem is that, once you configure your browser to use the proxy, you can't surf the Web unless Proxomitron is running. You need to set it to autostart or to start along with your browser. Since I have always-on broadband I just put a shortcut in Startup. (And I was wondering if it would work under Wine; I thought it would and am glad to find I was right.)
As I suggested in another post above, it is obvious that pay phones are a good thing to have. And we're not going to have them soon. There has been plenty of info on this lately, planting the seeds of acceptability when it gets really hard to find one.
That said, it's a shame they are going the way of the dodo. Yep, they are.
The problem is that, because of cellphones, pay phone use is decreasing. That means pay phones make less money. That means the for-profit corporations now running them will pull them. Simple economics -- if you're the only one in town who needs a left-handed three-pitch anchor screw, don't expect Home Depot to carry it.
So without making anything like a general comment (heh) on the topic, let me just point out that this is one small area where capitalism is clearly failing. For all the evils of the ATT/Bell monopoly, it did subsidize necessary but unprofitable services like pay phones and hard to service local lines with the profits from more lucrative and voluntary things like long distance. Not a good thing if you're a big long distance customer, but a very good thing if your car just got jacked and you need to call the police.
Considering the libertarian/capitalistic streak that runs through the /. community, it is kind of amusing to see this outpouring of enthusiasm over a service which is clearly going to die because the evil corporate pigs don't make enough money off of it. Pay phones are just one detail in the broad category of infrastructure which IMO really should be maintained by taxes and subsidies, because without some social engineering they just won't exist even though they are beneficial.
Of course, the other possibility is that the cost of a pay call will go up. Some phones already meter local calls by the minute. But that's a spiral to doom; make the call too expensive and more people will spring for a cell phone, usage will go down more, you will have to jack the price again, etc.
If someone has a solution to this that will not get called "communism" or "socialism" by the usual elements, I'd be very interested in hearing about it. Meanwhile, this is just one of those things that, to me, argue against the purely liberarian/capitalistic worldview -- whatever its other beneficial contrasts might be to the current overall situation.
Deuterium operates exactly the same way as hydrogen in chemical systems, biological or otherwise. It is not toxic. Tritium, which can (if it is present) also be concentrated by the process that isolates deuterium, is highly radioactive, and does represent a health threat. There was no tritium in the environment to be concentrated when the first experiments were done, but there is now thanks to the nuclear industry. This is about the only potential health threat I can think of from drinking heavy water.
Except, of course, for the threat to your pocketbook -- heavy water is brutally expensive. That would be one hell of an expensive pause for refreshment if you were to drink a glass of the stuff.
Slightly more practical, it should be no big trick to take the small 2-stroke gasoline engine off a gas-powered string trimmer and use it to power a small DC generator. Getting a generator of the right scale would be a problem, but you could probably find a permanent magnet DC motor the right size to run in reverse.
Yet more practical, Mother Earth News once ran an article about converting a lawnmower into a portable DC arc welder using a car battery and alternator. This was a very cool project which I wish I had the time to try. You could, of course, use the same technique to power any 12V project. I could see this being used, for example, for a fairly high-power ham rig if you couldn't get a car to the site.
The problem is that the efficiency of IC/SGS-generator production goes down with the scale. The smaller you make it, the less well it works -- which is why, of the examples I give here, only the welder is practical for anything. They're also noisy, require a lot of maintenance, and tend not to run reliably for long periods of time. At the scale of hand-carried portable, they just aren't practical.
1. Fuel cells generate electricity by the action of a replaceable chemical fuel, without the usual intermediate step of burning the fuel to generate heat to spin generators. They are a proven technology and most of the R&D is going into finding ways to use new fuels or make them smaller or work at lower temperatures (say, below the BP of water -- most fuel cells only work at very high temperatures).
A fuel cell is not going to care whether its fuel is H or Deuterium because H and deuterium behave exactly the same in chemical reactions.
2. Cold fusion, which is a scam and doesn't exist and doesn't work. Nobody has ever demonstrated cold fusion. If they had done so they would have gotten a crapload of neutrons, and in all likelihood they would be dead.
This is not to say that cold fusion will remain forever impossible, only that nobody has ever demonstrated it. The current spin on the lack of neutrons seems to be that not only are they claiming a magic new way to fuse deuterium at low temperatures, they are magically fusing them in some new way that doesn't produce neutrons. Sorry, but I only swallow one magic trick per potential scam.
From the website:
As stated on Good Morning America, "It's either, you know, an ordinary chemical reaction that's not behaving the way we expect it to, or some kind of a nuclear reaction...It's neither one nor the other, so it really is just a genuine mystery right now."
A great mystery, all right, except to those of us who know some nuclear physics; but not so much of a mystery as to prevent them from soliciting funds for further "research." At least they are honest enough to admit that what they have might not be cold fusion, but I bet most of their investors didn't catch that disclaimer.
Sounds fair to me.
The picture link worked. (kewl!) But the link from the picture to further text revealed:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] The Microsoft Jet database engine stopped the process because you and another user are attempting to change the same data at the same time.
Now that's one I haven't seen in before -- at least as a result of clicking on a "read more" link.
Of course, I didn't say you couldn't.
Linde Chemical did make a particularly nice star sapphire, though.
And you can't get them any more. Linde stars are no longer available, except as old stock. And connoisseurs can spot them a mile away. Because they are no longer made Linde stars are now as valuable as similar quality natural stones.
The settlement is probably negotiated on the premise that some folks actually get use out of their drives, before they die (or maybe they never die at all -- all of the 5 or so ZIP drives my company uses are still going strong). So, for some users the rebate is free money and for others it's less than their lost investment. That's how class actions work. They average everything across the board. The idea is that, while this isn't completely fair, the paperwork and court time necessary to do it right would suck up so much resources that even less would be available for the plaintiffs (and their lawyers).
He is also lampooning the current paranoia of the right wing which thinks the current mild criticisms launched (generally on op-ed pages and at protests) at their ideas are somehow comparable to the centuries-long armed suppression of Left thought, and that if these alien ideas triumph it will somehow mean the End of the World As We Know It (tm).
Actually, if you go to a gem show you will find Linde Star Sapphires selling for quite high prices. Seems Linde (now a division of Union Carbide, oops, a division of a division of Dow) had one chemist who actually knew the secret of making the blasted things. When he died, the secret of the Linde star died with him. Linde Division no longer makes star sapphires, and the distinctive artificial Linde Stars are as valuable in their own right as high-quality natural stones.
No it doesn't. As I said, you could do it with a PIC. Have you ever done any embedded programming?
Is there any other kind of watch worth wearing?
Actually I have been given to understand by non-geek but well-connected friends that, if you ever intend to do anything in the world, the Geek Watch is exactly what you don't want to be wearing. I have progressed through the years (under tutelage from the boss and female unit) from the Digital Wonder to the Citizen Pseudo-Digial Wonder to, finally, the Classic Seiko (the new ones aren't as good, the cognescenti know) which doesn't have a second hand. Yeah, it's a pain when I have to time a wait loop, I keep a stopwatch in the desk for that. You deal with it. Fashion costs.
Nah, it's not ad hominem. Every Ayn Rand footkisser I've ever met has been a lunatic of some kind, usually with an undeservered superiority complex.
Your problem with the type then. You were still wrong.
" The guy is right -- when you make things more complicated than they need to be you make them fail more." Sorry, that's just not true any more. Unless you're Microsoft, of course. (ObMS Bash)
OBMS or not, you're wrong. I work with embedded stuff day in and out. It's still true that the more complicated you make the plumbing, the easier it is to muck up the works. Modern automobiles fail in much more frustrating and interesting ways than Model T's did -- I should know, since I have some relatives who run an auto shop. They are slowly being driven out of business by the equivalent of MCSE's -- equivalent in every way, including paper over experience and inability to deal with real failures.
If you pay attention to the details, you can indeed have a complex and highly reliable system. But nobody is paying attention to those details. Microsoft? HAHAHAHAHA They have never met a detail they liked since 1974. Anybody else? The Linux folx, yes, they like details, but their system isn't realtime and is very, very bloated re: embedded systems. Look, I'd love it as much as anybody if this fairy tale could be made real, but it can't and it isn't and it's really stupid to hope for it. In embedded systems, it's you and the metal. If you think otherwise, you will fail.
Maybe you weren't around back in 1981 when IBM was advertising its 8088-based PC with the 8-bit data bus as a "16-bit" machine. Of course, this was in the days when CPU clock x RAM width = speed. Sure, it had a "16-bit core" which they advertised as making it "faster," except, waitaminute, in benchmarks with real software the PC was slower than, say, a Z-80. Oh, the distance that slippery slope can lead...
Doesn't this guy have anything to do besides tricking people into clicking on his silly links?
Yeah, it's sad. The flipside of this is that with a little planning ahead you can often get spare parts for free -- just wait for someone else to toss their exact duplicate of your gizmo in the trash, and fish it out for a "parts spare." It's surprising how often I've been able to do this.
You don't need any OS for that. You can do it with a PIC.
Unless your watch is full of gears and springs, it has an OS.
No it doesn't. Unless it is a very fancy nerd watch it likely doesn't even have a CPU, just an oscillator and a bunch of counters.
Someone calling themself "Ayn Rand" from aynrand.org is scarcely in a position to pontificate upon what is sane and rational.
C'mon, you can do better than this ad hominem response. The guy is right -- when you make things more complicated than they need to be you make them fail more. When you make them more capable you depend on them more. Thus, you end up depending more on stuff that is less dependable. What happens when the only user interface is through your kitchen master console (after all, everything intercommunicates so why spend a few bucks on buttons? Just ask printer manufacturers), and one day that interoperability fails? Then your toaster not only doesn't brown your toast right, it doesn't toast them at all; your fridge inexplicably shuts down and ruins all your food, none of the lights will come on, and the phone won't even work so you can call the service guy. Yeah, I really want a house that works like that.
But the car, fridge, and toaster do not need an OS and aren't getting one soon. Embedded is most of what I do, and it is mostly done to the bare metal in minimal hardware. Even when it is bloated (as when a 6-level interrupt system has been coded in C++ on a 80186) it's a charming kind of backward bloat, harkening to the 1980's. It takes 256 whole K, isn't that cu-ute.
Most embedded apps are realtime, mission critical, single-tasking (or pseudo-multitaskable), and lack user interfaces. Until recently the dominant chip in car applications was the 8048. When you are building in the quantities, with the price structure, and with the requirements of embedded, it usually makes sense to code the whole thing from the bare metal up in C and assembler.
We are beginning to see a few devices that don't really need OS's showing up with OS-like kernels, and they are notoriously slow and unreliable. They don't compete well against more traditionally created firmware, which runs circles around them even on inferior hardware. At least this is the case in the scale industry; I don't see why it would be different anywhere else. Even PC104 hasn't really taken off, despite a few companies that have invested in it. When you are building mission-critical stuff or in quantities of millions, it makes sense to do it from the ground up. In the first hand you have the chance to make sure it's right, and in the second you save money. Yes, Virginia, it does make a difference whether you need 512K RAMS instead of 256's. And the ability to live with that extra wait state can make the difference between a product that ships now and one that never does.
There simply is no room for a general-purpose OS in such an environment. We've seen them (QNX, etc.) already where they are appropriate, and that niche isn't going to change. Meanwhile, neither Linux nor anything ever created by Microsoft since 1974 is really suitable for an embedded platform.