That would be improved batteries. Because electrolysis and subsequent burning of the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine sucks, efficiency wise. Fuel cells are still at an experimental stage and not closer to mass usage than improved Li-ion chemistries. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-ion#Improvements_to_Lithium_Ion_Battery_Technology. My favorite is the Lithium iron phosphate battery: Safer than traditional Li-ion batteries, lasts longer and is made from cheaper raw materials (no cobalt). While the energy density is a bit lower than traditional Li-ion, it beats NiMH. A123 and Valence have now published specs for a few of their products, and those look pretty nice.
You can trade somewhat lower capacity for longevity. Basically, if you are charging the battery, and take it to full charge, you are in fact damaging the battery slightly. So we don't fully charge the battery, so we can get many, many more cycles out of them (we use LiFE, batteries as well, which are much safer than LiIon.
Yes, LiFEPO4 looks very nice. While the capacity is still somewhat below that of traditional LiIon batteries, it seems to have much better longevity too.
Another advantage is that it does not need cobalt, which is relatively rare. Long term, I expect LiFEPO4 to be much cheaper than traditional LiIon.
Li-ion batteries with cobalt oxide cathode (the most popular type in laptops now) are known for losing their capacity over a few years, even when unused. But there are some other chemistries the laptop vendors could use, at the expense of somewhat less capacity.
That's what I noticed too: Slashdot is now pushing people into rating articles in a very annoying way. I guess GP is right about Slashdot becoming a "web 2.0 turd"
All the talk out there regarding the "viral" nature of GPL code has confused a lot of otherwise very smart people. What happens is that they miss the dividing line between "the development" and "the use" of the programs.
This seems to be, in my experience, more likely among lawyers than in other groups.
Lawyers, of all people, should be able to read the GPL and draw their own conclusions. I guess GP has no reason to be sorry about losing that particular customer, based on his anecdote they are likely to make more trouble than the contract is worth.
That reminds me of then automatic map generation of the early Elite versions. The C64 version did not only generate the map procedurally, but also the background info for the worlds on the map. This led to such things as "Planet XXX is known for its edible arts graduates";-)
I find this aspect particularly interesting, because it promises more variety in games where you can build things. Like many MMORPGs. You could experiment with various materials and get believable results, maybe at a level of realism where it actually has educational value.
This could be done today at a simplified level, where the materials you use affect the stats of the items. Plus maybe textures that are swapped in depending on the material. But with serious simulation (maybe finite element analysis of how breakable stuff is;-), things could become much more realistic and varied.
I've recently read a Groklaw article that mentioned a salary dispute between two lawyers. Both claimed to usually charge $400 per hour. AFAIK even highly sought after IT consultants rarely get away with that kind of fees.
Ok, I'm not the leftmost person on this planet, but maybe he just wasn't that important. Now, though, I do. And I know that he's probably not the nicest person to be around.
I also wonder how many have considered voting for his party and now, learning about this and what kind of people are inside it, won't touch it.
I can tell you more about his party: The "Linkspartei" (literally translates as "left party") consists partly of former members of the SPD (moderate socialists) and partly of former members of the SED (the ruling party of the old East Germany dictatorship). Plus probably some other people from the far left political spectrum.
Personally, I consider them unfit to govern a democratic country (and probably a non-democratic either, considering the collapse of East Germany). The only political camp I have a worse opinion of are the neo-Nazis.
Against at least one of those (cosmic rays), even quality RAM is not immune. This said, only the vendors of quality RAM seem to be in the business of making the ECC version anyway. Which makes it more expensive, because you're buying more of the good stuff (the parity bits for the SECDEC algorithm require an extra chip on the module). But considering the overall price of RAM, that should be not a problem.
It's only delusional when 'normal' people do not believe what you do, or there is "indisputable evidence to the contrary" which clearly makes you wrong. In the world of mankind, any religion with enough believers becomes that "indisputable evidence to the contrary" if you do not believe as they do.
This gets really interesting if you consider there are several large religions in the world, which frequently contradict each other's teachings. So whoever of them is right, it still leaves a large percentage of the world's population in error. Only the fact that it is unprovable which religion is right (if any) prevents all the other people from being classed as delusional;-)
Starting with some of GP's requirements (game-capable PC but at a reasonable price) and wanting to use ECC RAM for reliability I ended up buying an AMD last year. It is an AMD Athlon64 X2 EE 4600, a dual core with 2x2.4 GHz, not overclocked. In practice, this machine is fast enough, especially considering that I don't run the very latest games. The deciding factor in terms of Intel vs. AMD was that ECC capable mainboards for Intel are expensive. The cheapest C2D would have been not much more expensive than the Athlon (and a tad faster), but on the mainboard side the difference was 100 Euros or more.
Damage to eardrums can be expected when overpressures reach 720 pounds. Overpressures of 2160 pounds would have to be generated to produce lung damage.
So, at 1000 feet, pretty much sweet FA is going to happen (where FA = Fuck All)
1. Question: How much energy does the plasma-arc use? Answer: The plasma-arc facility uses approximately 40 megawatts of energy per hour. This is approximately one-quarter of the total output of hourly energy received from MSW.
2. Question: What will be the source of the plasma-arc energy? Answer: The facility will receive its energy from its total output. For St. Lucie, it is expected that the 3,000 tons of MSW processed per day will create 160 megawatts of energy per hour. As stated previously, 40 megawatts will be used to power the facility and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to an Electric Utility.
First, Mr Hilburn Hillestad got his units wrong. It is either "megawatts" (power) or "megawatt hours" (energy). "Megawatt hours per hour" would also make sense as average power delivered. That does not raise my confidence that he knows what he is talking about. But let's assume for a moment that he is talking about "megawatt hours per hour". Then 3,000 tons of MSW per day have to be vaporized with an input power of 40 MW. That makes 34.72 kg of material per second, with an input energy of 40 MJ per second. Or 1.15 kJ per g of material. Now let's look at some specific heat capacities (taken from Wikipedia) and how much you can heat the material with that. Water (in wet waste): 4.184 J/(gK), plus heat of vaporization of 2260 J/(gK) => you'd boil the water and vaporize some of it at 1 bar pressure. No plasma. Paraffin wax (to represent hydrocarbons): 2.5 J/(gK). => not counting heat of vaporization you'd heat that up by 460 degrees centigrade. Sufficient for the syngas creating Fischer-Tropsch process, but still no plasma.
Unfortunately I couldn't find numbers for cellulose (paper) on short notice, but I think the picture becomes clear: 40 MW is not nearly enough.
See, this is my problem with you people who put all your faith and belief behind "science", it just leads to pessimistic attitudes. I mean sure, I know it's unlikely that this system would be the exception to conservation of energy or any other principle of physics, but there's always a possibility that maybe, just maybe, plasma garbage vaporizing is where physics breaks down.
So the next question is: How does the plant vaporize the trash, and how much energy do they need to put into the process to get the plasma? Following the links, I get that the garbage is vaporized in an electric arc. The presentations on http://www.geoplasma.com/ do not tell us about the power consumption of that arc. I strongly suspect that it is WAY more than the burning of the syngas from the gasification process yields;-)
So did I as a kid, and we actually managed to break some of the Lego parts. Not the classic 4x2 bricks, but some of the more fragile ones. So there is an argument for cheap replacements;-)
He can hardly do worse than the Bush government in that regard. The increasing regulation discussed in this article is the work of a republican government. That said, I doubt the Democrats will be much different in that regard.
The kind of person that knows *just* enough to assemble a machine, but not enough to make sure all the parts your ordering/spec'ing for a machine will actually work together. This isn't the fault of the aftermarket parts producers -- it's yours.
My point is that some out-of-spec parts are marketed without explicit (enough) hints that they are out of spec and that the vendors bear some responsibility for the resulting mess.
But if we assume that you know what you're doing and take the time to read the reviews, then I agree that a self-assembled PC can be quite reliable. The same goes for pre-assembled PCs where the vendor knows what he is doing. Unfortunately, you rarely get to look at the parts list, so you don't know what mainboard, RAM and power supply are included (IMHO the three hardware parts most likely to cause trouble).
I'm serious about wanting the vendors to point out the pitfalls. After all, they market their stuff for a wide audience, not just through typical business-to-business channels. In that situation, I think they have a responsibility to try and warn people about side effects.
In my example, a half-educated person might be led to believe the increased voltage for the overclocker parts is normal. So you have Joe Sixpack who has some experience with overclocking but is not a real engineer. His reasoning goes as follows: -OK, these Corsair modules are specified for clock speeds over the standard. Should be fine. -The CPU is known to handle higher clock speeds well, let's go ahead. But what he does not know is the little detail that the voltage specified for the memory is outside the spec for DDR3 and the memory controller of the Intel CPU might be killed by it.
In case of BIOS and driver updates, I had one case where it was definitely necessary. Several years ago, I bought a cheap mainboard with VIA chipset to replace a broken one in an older PC. Unfortunately, that particular chipset tended to lose data on the PCI bus under high load (got some publicity back then). Fortunately, there was a software workaround in form of a new driver.
This and the previous/. article link to reports from people who have tested the pre-beta. The results seem pretty clear: 1) The GUI feels more responsive. 2) The memory consumption is pretty much the same. 3) Benchmark tests show little to no difference. So Windows 7 will probably be more fun to work with, but based on 2) and 3) you should not expect it to work on lower-ended machines compared to Vista. Overall, it looks like some GUI improvements and not much else.
It is not the "PC's" fault that you purchased bottom-barrel crap components. Know what Apple uses for motherboards? Slightly modified Intel parts (again, going from what I've seen in some newer machines that went to surplus at my place of work because of how expensive they'd have been to repair). I've never purchased motherboards (even some bottom-barrel priced boards), memory sticks from various companies (though I've settled on G.Skill lately), or other parts that were "buggy". Yes, I've had an occasional DOA part, but that's what warranties are for. Just going by your own words, I'd say you are one of those "Yea, I can be a PC-Tech here for (insert company), because I built my own machine at home!" people I see all over the place. The kind of person that knows *just* enough to assemble a machine, but not enough to make sure all the parts your ordering/spec'ing for a machine will actually work together. This isn't the fault of the aftermarket parts producers -- it's yours.
In my experience, the truth is halfway between your and GP's views:
If you pick somewhat reputable vendors, outright defects are rare. In particular, the Kingston modules GP complains about have always worked fine for me. But having to update BIOSes and drivers to work around bugs is not unusual. Finally, there are cases where components are out of spec by design and you need to know about it. Consider overclocker DDR3 memory (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=7) for instance. If you use these components as advertised, you may end up with a fried CPU. In that case, I do think it is fault of the aftermarket parts producers unless they include a big fat warning about known problems (in this case, Intel CPUs that may not survive the higher memory voltage).
They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista
Improving the front end is overdue and welcome.
Under Windows 2000/XP (have not touched Vista yet) I have often wondered why the Windows Explorer takes ages to show a directory, even if the actual content at the displayed directory level is only a few dozen elements. Maybe it scans all subdirectories for whatever arcane reason?
I strongly suspect there is a lot that can be optimized there, and if Windows 7 finally got around to it, this would be a good thing.
In the sense that the devices are "more intelligent" and handle a lot of the device-specific stuff themselves? That would make sense, at the expense of driving up hardware costs because you now need a general purpose CPU in every device (no drivers means the OS knows nothing about the innards of the device and thus cannot handle them from the computer's main CPU).
Slashdot Mirror
That would be improved batteries. Because electrolysis and subsequent burning of the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine sucks, efficiency wise. Fuel cells are still at an experimental stage and not closer to mass usage than improved Li-ion chemistries.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-ion#Improvements_to_Lithium_Ion_Battery_Technology.
My favorite is the Lithium iron phosphate battery:
Safer than traditional Li-ion batteries, lasts longer and is made from cheaper raw materials (no cobalt). While the energy density is a bit lower than traditional Li-ion, it beats NiMH. A123 and Valence have now published specs for a few of their products, and those look pretty nice.
And free publicity for GroundWork. With this Slashdot article I guess the number of people who are aware of that alternative to HP has multiplied ;-)
Yes, LiFEPO4 looks very nice. While the capacity is still somewhat below that of traditional LiIon batteries, it seems to have much better longevity too.
Another advantage is that it does not need cobalt, which is relatively rare. Long term, I expect LiFEPO4 to be much cheaper than traditional LiIon.
Li-ion batteries with cobalt oxide cathode (the most popular type in laptops now) are known for losing their capacity over a few years, even when unused.
But there are some other chemistries the laptop vendors could use, at the expense of somewhat less capacity.
That's what I noticed too:
Slashdot is now pushing people into rating articles in a very annoying way. I guess GP is right about Slashdot becoming a "web 2.0 turd"
Lawyers, of all people, should be able to read the GPL and draw their own conclusions.
I guess GP has no reason to be sorry about losing that particular customer, based on his anecdote they are likely to make more trouble than the contract is worth.
That reminds me of then automatic map generation of the early Elite versions. The C64 version did not only generate the map procedurally, but also the background info for the worlds on the map. This led to such things as "Planet XXX is known for its edible arts graduates" ;-)
I find this aspect particularly interesting, because it promises more variety in games where you can build things. Like many MMORPGs. You could experiment with various materials and get believable results, maybe at a level of realism where it actually has educational value.
This could be done today at a simplified level, where the materials you use affect the stats of the items. Plus maybe textures that are swapped in depending on the material. But with serious simulation (maybe finite element analysis of how breakable stuff is ;-), things could become much more realistic and varied.
Shouldn't that be "a few dollars less", because even OEM Windows costs some license fees (which HP would save)?
In terms of money, that seems to be true.
I've recently read a Groklaw article that mentioned a salary dispute between two lawyers. Both claimed to usually charge $400 per hour. AFAIK even highly sought after IT consultants rarely get away with that kind of fees.
I can tell you more about his party:
The "Linkspartei" (literally translates as "left party") consists partly of former members of the SPD (moderate socialists) and partly of former members of the SED (the ruling party of the old East Germany dictatorship). Plus probably some other people from the far left political spectrum.
Personally, I consider them unfit to govern a democratic country (and probably a non-democratic either, considering the collapse of East Germany). The only political camp I have a worse opinion of are the neo-Nazis.
Accorcing to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code#Hamming_codes_with_additional_parity_.28SECDED.29), a scheme that can correct 1 bit error and detect 2 is typically used. So it can correct single errors. The most common reason is some form of radiation (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Causes_of_soft_errors).
Against at least one of those (cosmic rays), even quality RAM is not immune. This said, only the vendors of quality RAM seem to be in the business of making the ECC version anyway. Which makes it more expensive, because you're buying more of the good stuff (the parity bits for the SECDEC algorithm require an extra chip on the module). But considering the overall price of RAM, that should be not a problem.
This gets really interesting if you consider there are several large religions in the world, which frequently contradict each other's teachings. So whoever of them is right, it still leaves a large percentage of the world's population in error. Only the fact that it is unprovable which religion is right (if any) prevents all the other people from being classed as delusional ;-)
Starting with some of GP's requirements (game-capable PC but at a reasonable price) and wanting to use ECC RAM for reliability I ended up buying an AMD last year. It is an AMD Athlon64 X2 EE 4600, a dual core with 2x2.4 GHz, not overclocked. In practice, this machine is fast enough, especially considering that I don't run the very latest games.
The deciding factor in terms of Intel vs. AMD was that ECC capable mainboards for Intel are expensive. The cheapest C2D would have been not much more expensive than the Athlon (and a tad faster), but on the mainboard side the difference was 100 Euros or more.
Actually, the inner ear gets damaged first, long before the eardrums actually rupture. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_damage#Long-term_exposure_to_environmental_noise
First, Mr Hilburn Hillestad got his units wrong. It is either "megawatts" (power) or "megawatt hours" (energy). "Megawatt hours per hour" would also make sense as average power delivered. That does not raise my confidence that he knows what he is talking about. But let's assume for a moment that he is talking about "megawatt hours per hour".
Then 3,000 tons of MSW per day have to be vaporized with an input power of 40 MW. That makes 34.72 kg of material per second, with an input energy of 40 MJ per second. Or 1.15 kJ per g of material. Now let's look at some specific heat capacities (taken from Wikipedia) and how much you can heat the material with that.
Water (in wet waste): 4.184 J/(gK), plus heat of vaporization of 2260 J/(gK) => you'd boil the water and vaporize some of it at 1 bar pressure. No plasma.
Paraffin wax (to represent hydrocarbons): 2.5 J/(gK). => not counting heat of vaporization you'd heat that up by 460 degrees centigrade. Sufficient for the syngas creating Fischer-Tropsch process, but still no plasma.
Unfortunately I couldn't find numbers for cellulose (paper) on short notice, but I think the picture becomes clear: 40 MW is not nearly enough.
So the next question is: ;-)
How does the plant vaporize the trash, and how much energy do they need to put into the process to get the plasma?
Following the links, I get that the garbage is vaporized in an electric arc. The presentations on http://www.geoplasma.com/ do not tell us about the power consumption of that arc. I strongly suspect that it is WAY more than the burning of the syngas from the gasification process yields
So did I as a kid, and we actually managed to break some of the Lego parts. Not the classic 4x2 bricks, but some of the more fragile ones. So there is an argument for cheap replacements ;-)
He can hardly do worse than the Bush government in that regard. The increasing regulation discussed in this article is the work of a republican government. That said, I doubt the Democrats will be much different in that regard.
Maybe you need to vote both of them out...
A quote from a few posts bach:
My point is that some out-of-spec parts are marketed without explicit (enough) hints that they are out of spec and that the vendors bear some responsibility for the resulting mess.
But if we assume that you know what you're doing and take the time to read the reviews, then I agree that a self-assembled PC can be quite reliable. The same goes for pre-assembled PCs where the vendor knows what he is doing. Unfortunately, you rarely get to look at the parts list, so you don't know what mainboard, RAM and power supply are included (IMHO the three hardware parts most likely to cause trouble).
I'm serious about wanting the vendors to point out the pitfalls. After all, they market their stuff for a wide audience, not just through typical business-to-business channels. In that situation, I think they have a responsibility to try and warn people about side effects.
In my example, a half-educated person might be led to believe the increased voltage for the overclocker parts is normal. So you have Joe Sixpack who has some experience with overclocking but is not a real engineer. His reasoning goes as follows:
-OK, these Corsair modules are specified for clock speeds over the standard. Should be fine.
-The CPU is known to handle higher clock speeds well, let's go ahead.
But what he does not know is the little detail that the voltage specified for the memory is outside the spec for DDR3 and the memory controller of the Intel CPU might be killed by it.
In case of BIOS and driver updates, I had one case where it was definitely necessary. Several years ago, I bought a cheap mainboard with VIA chipset to replace a broken one in an older PC. Unfortunately, that particular chipset tended to lose data on the PCI bus under high load (got some publicity back then). Fortunately, there was a software workaround in form of a new driver.
This and the previous /. article link to reports from people who have tested the pre-beta. The results seem pretty clear:
1) The GUI feels more responsive.
2) The memory consumption is pretty much the same.
3) Benchmark tests show little to no difference.
So Windows 7 will probably be more fun to work with, but based on 2) and 3) you should not expect it to work on lower-ended machines compared to Vista. Overall, it looks like some GUI improvements and not much else.
In my experience, the truth is halfway between your and GP's views:
If you pick somewhat reputable vendors, outright defects are rare. In particular, the Kingston modules GP complains about have always worked fine for me. But having to update BIOSes and drivers to work around bugs is not unusual.
Finally, there are cases where components are out of spec by design and you need to know about it. Consider overclocker DDR3 memory (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3448&p=7) for instance. If you use these components as advertised, you may end up with a fried CPU. In that case, I do think it is fault of the aftermarket parts producers unless they include a big fat warning about known problems (in this case, Intel CPUs that may not survive the higher memory voltage).
Improving the front end is overdue and welcome.
Under Windows 2000/XP (have not touched Vista yet) I have often wondered why the Windows Explorer takes ages to show a directory, even if the actual content at the displayed directory level is only a few dozen elements. Maybe it scans all subdirectories for whatever arcane reason?
I strongly suspect there is a lot that can be optimized there, and if Windows 7 finally got around to it, this would be a good thing.
In the sense that the devices are "more intelligent" and handle a lot of the device-specific stuff themselves? That would make sense, at the expense of driving up hardware costs because you now need a general purpose CPU in every device (no drivers means the OS knows nothing about the innards of the device and thus cannot handle them from the computer's main CPU).