Also remember, it costs $$$ to keep that computer running 24x7. Lessee: 150 Watts, 24 hours per day, 30 days a month: 150*24*30=108,000 watt-hours/month. How much are YOU paying for your electricity?
Yeah, I shut mine off every night. I have a little Netwinder (remember those?) running Debian Woody that I leave on 24/7 as a mini-webserver, but it only uses 10-15W. I suppose I should put some kind of text-based mud or something on it one of these days. Remember the old BBS game Operation Overkill II? Man what a cool door game...
But I digress. I agree totally, power hungry Linux gaming boxes should not be left on unless you are using them. Take the money you save every month from your electric bill and buy a Linux game or something.
Re:"DirectSound" equivalent is already on Linux
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 1
ALSA is so much better than OSS, its like comparing a Porsche to a set of roller skates, but I can see your point. Using OpenAL (or SDL, etc) with an ALSA backend is a better choice for end-user applications since its much more portable.
Honestly, I got kind of disgustapated with HL2 and I never even finshed the game yet (in Windows). Usually I play a game through and if I like it I'll mess around and eventually do a Wine install assuming it works. I've had regular old non-steam Half-Life working just great using Wine, and since HL seems to be the yardstick by which Wine's success is measured, it will probably eventually run quite well.
Some D3D games work great in Wine. I just recently amazed myself by getting Fallout: Tactics working with regular old CVS Wine with amazing performance, to me it seems snappier than it does in native Windows. BTW, it runs like crap in Cedega, but it smokes in CVS Wine.
Another one which I fooled around with is Privateer 2. I have both the DOS and Windows versions, so I compared DOSBox and Wine. The DOSBox one works, but the framerate drops to about zero if you point your ship at a planet, and the nav screen -- forget it. OTOH, the Windows version runs really fast under Wine, and it would be playable except the mouse is sort of restricted to an area smaller than the screen, I don't know how else to describe the effect. It is obvious that Wine runs things a whole lot faster than DOSBox though (when they work), so there might be something to that "not an emulator" business.
DOSBox is great though. If you have a 2GHz class machine you can easily run XCOM: Ufo Defense , Wing Commander Privateer, Ultima Underworld, and probably tons of other cool old DOS games in Linux. The above are personal favorites that I play all the time now (in Linux), so thats why I mention those particular ones.
Doom 3 runs pretty good on my system in Linux. I haven't done any real scientific comparison with Windows, but it seems about the same as far as I can tell.
I have a typical Gentoo / NVidia / Athlon-XP / SBLive Linux gamer box. Nothing real fancy except maybe the NVidia which is a FX5900.
Its a pretty good performer but wasn't super expensive when I got it about a year ago. You could probably slap a system like mine together cheap nowadays.
The problem is that energy efficiency of space drives (i.e. how much kinetic energy ends up in the vehicle, rather than the exhaust) is inversely proportional to the speed of the exhaust.
I'm not sure that I believe that. It goes against all that I have learned. The amount of force required to accelerate a particle to relativistic speeds becomes infinite the closer one comes to c. And for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. I'm not saying that its easy to build a linear accelerator or a massive power source into a spaceship, but I'm saying that if you want to get the most thrust from a given amount of matter(fuel) then this is the only way to go.
Well, for CAD, its a screwed up world. The best/most portable format is probably IGES, except its such a huge specification that nobody's IGES file is compatible with anybody else's. I'm an engineer and for myself I use Turbocad 10 professional at home. It reads/writes AutoCAD files and numerous other formats, and is somewhere in between AutoCAD and Pro/Engineer in terms of its capabilities. You'll have a tough time convincing any corporation to use TurboCAD though.
For text documents, HTML would be good, except MS products tend to produce the most screwed up HTML files I've ever seen. All I can recommend is to use PDF files for important and official documents because they are essentially immutable and tend to produce consistent hardcopies from any computer.
OpenOffice formats are nice, and if I were starting up a new business I would of course set up Linux workstations to use OO exclusively, and put a Windows machine down in the IT room so the IT staff could convert any troublesome documents that come through the email.
For Visio, there is no equivalent, other than exporting the visio file as a DXF or maybe a WMF. Windows MetaFiles never seem to load right in other apps though so thats something to think about. SVG files will probably be the future here if Dia starts using them.
I used to GM ShadowRun way back around 1991. It really wasn't all that complicated. No more than any of the other P&P games around at the time, and it was considerably simpler than the behemoth that D&D had grown into by that time.
We always had a good time playing it. I think I ran maybe a half-dozen adventures over as many months.
If you read the recent flame war on ZSNES vs Snes9x, you might be interested to know that there is a ShadowRun SNES Rom floating around thats pretty fun. I use ZSNES to run it personally. And yes, I bought the actual game for my now mothballed SNES.
Anybody tested this with Wine or Cedega? I see on the Transgaming site they have both GTA1 and GTA3 rated at 4 stars, but GTA2 isn't rated. I presume that it will probably work. I've never played any of these GTA games, but they seem to be popular.
Lets see, Firefox is made from Mozilla, which used to be Netscape. Netscape was pretty much crushed by the Microsoft IE juggernaut because Microsoft decided that they wanted to take control of the internet. So they used every means at their disposal to subvert and break Netscape, eventually ducking anti-trust lawsuits. They rolled over Netscape like Hitler's Blitzkrieg rolled over France.
Now that they have murdered wise old King Netscape and ursurped the throne, behold, here comes the son of Netscape, "Prince Firefox" on his shining horse promising to free the people from the yoke of IE spyware and security holes.
It really says a lot about Microsoft that all they can think to do is try and cast doubt about trusting this program. Last I knew, they were the company which has screwed over almost every other company that ever confided or collaborated with them, and which has personally squashed more innovation than probably anything in post-modern history. Yeah, trust... I haven't forgotten what they have done.
No that's definately not the idea behind LSB. I attended a Debian conference a couple years ago where they were talking about it, and to be LSB compliant, a system just has to meet certain baseline criteria and provide some utilities. Essentially, it has to be able to install and uninstall a LSB rpm format package. How this is accomplished is up to the distro to implement. I think Debian has an LSB package which installs some libs and stuff here and there and makes sure you have rpm installed. LSB packages will never supercede debs and Debian doesn't plan on leaving dpkg and apt for the main package management; however, if you install the LSB compatibility metapackage then you have the ability to also use these type of packages. If you ever want to see high end apps like CAD and drafting programs available for Linux, then something like LSB is needed to ensure that the vendor can provide one binary for all compliant Linux systems and it will just work. Thats all LSB is supposed to be.
Oops, sorry about that, I didn't mean to flame you. I admit, I posted this after more than a few beers and I think I got *ahem* a bit carried away. My bad. I think I turned off my computer and crawled up to bed shortly after pressing the submit button. I hate it when that happens.
educated shoppers would jump on the amd setup instead.
Maybe that's the plan. Nobody ever buys the absolute cheapest model. If they didn't have this then the AMD would be the cheapest and nobody would buy it. In six months they'll slash the prices down and dump these like ballast.
Exactly. You get something that already has a working X-Server, sound, drives, power management, etc. Laptops usually have some super crappy top secret sound and video chipsets, especially low-end ones. The fact that this thing comes with Linux already means that its fully supported by the kernel and X11.
Having personally installed Linux on 4 different laptops, I can attest that it is no picnic. You quickly become an expert on obscure chipsets and learn to write config files using the force.
That being said, I think I would go for something more like a used $100 IBM Z50 and slap NetBSD on it if I wanted a *Nix laptop. Tough to beat that 12 hour battery life and the keyboards are just outstanding (got one for my wife a couple years ago).
I'm pretty happy with my Zaurus though for my portable computing needs, in fact it fits my style better. A PDA with a James Bond keyboard running Linux, now thats cool.
What about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD? Isn't that the Debian distro of FreeBSD? Just because FreeBSD is still relatively obscure doesn't mean that its not going to end up in the same boat as Linux. Give it a couple more years.
My system is a dual-boot machine with Gentoo and Win2k. I leave my Win2k partition obviously for games that I will probably only play once and then uninstall them, and for other stuff that just isn't going to run under Wine, like Freelancer for instance. I spend most of my time in Linux, but sometimes I just want to play one of the Windows games so I'm not ashamed to say that I'll reboot into Win2k once in a while.
On the Linux side of things, I run Gentoo and just use the regular old Gnome desktop with Nautilus even. My system is fast enough to keep up with it, and Athlon-XP 2400, GeForce FX-5900, 1G of RAM, a fast 120G HD, 20" Monitor, SBLive! sound card, and some USB joysticks and game pads. I use the JFS filesystem in Gentoo because it has the lowest CPU usage and its speed is comparable with the other guys.
One of the greatest things for the Linux gamer is DOSBox. Using that program, I can play Wing Commander: Privateer, and X-COM UFO Defense in Linux. You can adjust the speed of DOSBox so the game feels about right. You know its getting pretty good if it can run Privateer (which is now abandonware and a free download from The Underdogs). In fact, you can probably run most of the great old DOS abandonware games in DOSBox with zero problems now. This one program increases your Linux gaming library to thousands of freely available commercial quality games.
Next are the nice commercial games which have a linux port. Neverwinter Nights and Doom3 stand at the forefront of the pack and run great on my system. Also there are great ports of Quake1/2/3, RtCW, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 1/2, and Doom.
After that, you enter the realm of Open Source games, with great titles like the Ur-Quan Masters, Vega Strike, Battle for Wesnoth, and any of the thousands of other games listed at The Linux Game Tome. Having Gentoo is an advantage here because the compiler toolchain is particularly strong, so its easy to compile and try out the latest cutting edge CVS versions of these in-development games.
Then you have the Wine and Cedega games. I use this for Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout1/2, and Diablo II. These (and other) well programmed games are totally playable in Wine, so there's no reason to have to special boot to windows just to play them, might as well just use Wine to play them. The windows versions of most of the old Loki games that are now broken typically work under Wine.
I won't even go into the other emulators, but suffice it to say that there are emulators for most consoles, such as ZSNES, and arcade games, like MAME. There are thousands of games which will work great using these things. I sometimes boot up ZSNES and play some ShadowRun.
Which leads me finally to the unfortunate state of the Loki titles. A lot of these are linked against older libs and may or not work on a new system without some serious fiddling around and building of compatibility libs. Some still work, some don't, but chances are that they will all eventually die of bit-rot. Poor Loki Games, you are missed.
I've been doing serious Linux gaming since 1998. There are tons of great games available, thousands that can be emulated, and the best part is if you want to take a hand at making your own games, you have every tool and library under the sun right there at your fingertips.
I can use Wine to play the following games good enough that there is no point in running them in windows:
Diablo II
Warcraft II BNE
Fallout 1/2
Jagged Alliance 2
In addition to this, plenty of other games work but I either (1) don't play them, or (2) haven't bothered to install them.
The ones which do work tend to work very well, usually at around about 80% of full speed. You can play OpenGL games also with little or no problems.
Wine has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, and TransGaming's Cedega version of Wine is a pretty high quality product also, it's worth looking into.
Thanks guys. I will have to think about the potential applications. Typical heat sources emit IR radiation as the (approximately) 4th root of temperature, but still this is some interesting stuff because not everything is typical. My thanks for answering my question!
The key to solar energy lies in our highways...
we need to research that as a viable source of electrical, and thermal energy.
IF we can build effecient nano- machines and embed them into the pavement we may achieve a new form of effecient enegry...
MIght require road side banks of capcitive storage cells...
Nice try but you get what you pay for. Sucking electromagnetic energy from moving vehicles would only result in vehicle drag, resulting in worse fuel economy, resulting in faster depletion of precious chemical energy.
Chemical energy storage really is the ultimate. Fossil fuels, and the synthetics, provide an unbeatable weight/energy ratio. Fuels don't decay, are easily able to be handled, and provide instantaneous energy transfer.
Biological energy, is in fact the most advanced form of energy capture available. I don't know if you believe in a GOD, but to me, GOD is Mr. Energy because he is one heck of a chemist. An enzyme is an incredibly complicated chemical molecule which is a catalyst that can make an ordinarily impossible chemical reaction thermodynamically favorible. Our bodies use thousands of these neato enzymes to enable us to eat more or less anything and walk, talk, think, and live. I don't really care if you believe in GOD or not, but you should probably realize that biochemistry is about the ultimate energy storage achievement and utilization possible. We humans run completely from fusion energy (our sun) via a tremendously complicated system of chain chemical reactions which we have only the barest understanding of. It's quite amazing if you think about it.
Highways, come on, give me a break. We should have bullet trains running in the center dividers of every major interstate highway. I personally would much rather have a luxurious 1/2 hour train ride to work, reading a book and drinking coffee, than a daily 1 hour hell ride up the highway worrying if some clowns will make me late and risk my job, meanwhile exposing my precious auto to no end of hazards and decay for such sensless activity.
Heck, just hook it up to a little exhaust fan so when you open the door of your auto in the heat of summer its not so hot but yet you don't need to leave your windows down.
As far as I know they decay, slowly losing output over time. Probably when it comes time to replace them, though, the replacements will be both cheaper and more efficient. They will last many years if properly installed; i.e. with a thin sheet of glass or some kind of transparent protective film to protect them from abrasion and help keep them free of dust and dirt.
Maintenence is an issue of course, nothing is perfect in this world.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I believe that it used to cost around $5000 for a 1kW PV array. This is a 5X price drop in capital equipment costs. If you set up shop like in New Mexico, you might make more like 90 cents per day's worth of power also because of the increased solar mean day index, and desert land in NM is probably super cheap.
Hooking up to the grid is both tricky and lossy. You must feed in a synchronous AC signal which is in phase with the grid. Typically you would use a DC->AC motor/generator set and you absolutely have to match the phase with the grid or else you have serious sparks flying. Fortunately, there are a lot of commercial solutions already out there which can do this.
Nice insight humbads, you set up some financing and I'll engineer it up. Deal?
Just use the solar cells to power up a linear accelerator and shoot nuclei out the back at near the speed of light. If you can get 0.999c from a nucleus you get a tremendous thrust for one little atom. Remember, F mA when you approach the speed of light. Relativity rockets (super ion engines) are probably the best means of propulsion where electric power is plentiful but mass is dear. I'm sorry, but that tiny momentum of a photon is so small it is pathetic. Granted you get 2x boost for reflection vs 1x boost for adsorbtion, but 2 x 0 still equals 0. The only way to practically get around in space is to shoot nuclei out the back of a rocket engine at the speed of light.
Oops, I missed the point, you proposed to apply a voltage to unroll the material. Personally I would think more along the lines of those pop out punching glove xxxxB type things with a small worm drive to extend and retract it.
Well a little piezoelectric tutorial can't hurt anyways:-)
Piezoelecticity is a force to voltage type thing and while pretty nifty, is unrelated to photovoltaic cells.
For the laymen out there, I'll explain this in technical terms. If you have a roughly cylindrical quartz crystal, and if you squeeze it, the crystal lattices "snap" into an alternative arrangement which free's up some electrons and essentially produces a static charge. When you remove the stress, the crystal lattice snaps back into its rest state and wants its electrons back.
Conversely, by applying an alternating current to a quartz crystal, you can make it physically stretch and shrink.
Because a quartz crystal is somewhat like a spring, a given shape/mass/volume of it will possess a resonant vibrational frequency. If you apply a signal to the crystal at or near the resonant frequency, the crystal's vibrational magnitude will increase, just like the famous Tacoma Narrows bridge "Galloping Girdy".
Piezoelectricity is a weird and wonderfull direct mechanical to electrical conversion phenomenon and it is typically used in electronics to convert a sloppy signal into a more precise one, or by utilizing higher harmonic modes, to multiply a lower frequency into a higher one.
Your post made me remember something that I was wondering about a while back but never found an answer.
Since Infra-Red radiation is part of the electromagnetic spectrum and very near the wavelengths of visible light, can it be focused using an optical lens just as one can focus light rays?
I had an idea about placing a fresnel lens in front of a large low-availability IR radiating source and focusing it to make a hotspot. A small area with an extremely high temperature is much more thermodynamically usefull than a large area with a relatively low temperature.
You might use this, for instance, to focus process heat onto a catalyst to improve chemical reaction rates.
Any reasonably useful photovoltaic system is going to need about 1kW output under typical conditions. So with this material, for around $1000 you can generate maybe 50 cents worth of electicity each day. Obviously you aren't going to get rich by selling power back to the grid with a scheme like this but 1kW of totally free power would be kind of nice to have.
I always thought that a cool thing to do would be to use the excess electricity from PV cells to crack water and make Hydrogen gas rather than goofing around with expensive batteries.
Probably one of the cheapest ways to store Hydrogen "on site" is the old upside down reservoir immersed under water. In this case you would just make some electrodes under the reservoir, maybe concentric stainless steel rings? And set up the cell array for 1.5 volts, which IIRC is close to the optimum voltage for water cracking. Hook it up and collect your "Brown's Gas" during the summer, and burn it during the winter.
I just love PV Cells, they really spark my imagination. I even have a little 5V/1A PV array to play with. Too bad where I live if it isn't raining then its probably snowing.
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But I digress. I agree totally, power hungry Linux gaming boxes should not be left on unless you are using them. Take the money you save every month from your electric bill and buy a Linux game or something.
ALSA is so much better than OSS, its like comparing a Porsche to a set of roller skates, but I can see your point. Using OpenAL (or SDL, etc) with an ALSA backend is a better choice for end-user applications since its much more portable.
Some D3D games work great in Wine. I just recently amazed myself by getting Fallout: Tactics working with regular old CVS Wine with amazing performance, to me it seems snappier than it does in native Windows. BTW, it runs like crap in Cedega, but it smokes in CVS Wine.
Another one which I fooled around with is Privateer 2. I have both the DOS and Windows versions, so I compared DOSBox and Wine. The DOSBox one works, but the framerate drops to about zero if you point your ship at a planet, and the nav screen -- forget it. OTOH, the Windows version runs really fast under Wine, and it would be playable except the mouse is sort of restricted to an area smaller than the screen, I don't know how else to describe the effect. It is obvious that Wine runs things a whole lot faster than DOSBox though (when they work), so there might be something to that "not an emulator" business.
DOSBox is great though. If you have a 2GHz class machine you can easily run XCOM: Ufo Defense , Wing Commander Privateer, Ultima Underworld, and probably tons of other cool old DOS games in Linux. The above are personal favorites that I play all the time now (in Linux), so thats why I mention those particular ones.
Doom 3 runs pretty good on my system in Linux. I haven't done any real scientific comparison with Windows, but it seems about the same as far as I can tell.
I have a typical Gentoo / NVidia / Athlon-XP / SBLive Linux gamer box. Nothing real fancy except maybe the NVidia which is a FX5900. Its a pretty good performer but wasn't super expensive when I got it about a year ago. You could probably slap a system like mine together cheap nowadays.
Well, for CAD, its a screwed up world. The best/most portable format is probably IGES, except its such a huge specification that nobody's IGES file is compatible with anybody else's. I'm an engineer and for myself I use Turbocad 10 professional at home. It reads/writes AutoCAD files and numerous other formats, and is somewhere in between AutoCAD and Pro/Engineer in terms of its capabilities. You'll have a tough time convincing any corporation to use TurboCAD though.
For text documents, HTML would be good, except MS products tend to produce the most screwed up HTML files I've ever seen. All I can recommend is to use PDF files for important and official documents because they are essentially immutable and tend to produce consistent hardcopies from any computer.
OpenOffice formats are nice, and if I were starting up a new business I would of course set up Linux workstations to use OO exclusively, and put a Windows machine down in the IT room so the IT staff could convert any troublesome documents that come through the email.
For Visio, there is no equivalent, other than exporting the visio file as a DXF or maybe a WMF. Windows MetaFiles never seem to load right in other apps though so thats something to think about. SVG files will probably be the future here if Dia starts using them.
We always had a good time playing it. I think I ran maybe a half-dozen adventures over as many months.
If you read the recent flame war on ZSNES vs Snes9x, you might be interested to know that there is a ShadowRun SNES Rom floating around thats pretty fun. I use ZSNES to run it personally. And yes, I bought the actual game for my now mothballed SNES.
Anybody tested this with Wine or Cedega? I see on the Transgaming site they have both GTA1 and GTA3 rated at 4 stars, but GTA2 isn't rated. I presume that it will probably work. I've never played any of these GTA games, but they seem to be popular.
Now that they have murdered wise old King Netscape and ursurped the throne, behold, here comes the son of Netscape, "Prince Firefox" on his shining horse promising to free the people from the yoke of IE spyware and security holes.
It really says a lot about Microsoft that all they can think to do is try and cast doubt about trusting this program. Last I knew, they were the company which has screwed over almost every other company that ever confided or collaborated with them, and which has personally squashed more innovation than probably anything in post-modern history. Yeah, trust... I haven't forgotten what they have done.
No that's definately not the idea behind LSB. I attended a Debian conference a couple years ago where they were talking about it, and to be LSB compliant, a system just has to meet certain baseline criteria and provide some utilities. Essentially, it has to be able to install and uninstall a LSB rpm format package. How this is accomplished is up to the distro to implement. I think Debian has an LSB package which installs some libs and stuff here and there and makes sure you have rpm installed. LSB packages will never supercede debs and Debian doesn't plan on leaving dpkg and apt for the main package management; however, if you install the LSB compatibility metapackage then you have the ability to also use these type of packages. If you ever want to see high end apps like CAD and drafting programs available for Linux, then something like LSB is needed to ensure that the vendor can provide one binary for all compliant Linux systems and it will just work. Thats all LSB is supposed to be.
Oops, sorry about that, I didn't mean to flame you. I admit, I posted this after more than a few beers and I think I got *ahem* a bit carried away. My bad. I think I turned off my computer and crawled up to bed shortly after pressing the submit button. I hate it when that happens.
Having personally installed Linux on 4 different laptops, I can attest that it is no picnic. You quickly become an expert on obscure chipsets and learn to write config files using the force.
That being said, I think I would go for something more like a used $100 IBM Z50 and slap NetBSD on it if I wanted a *Nix laptop. Tough to beat that 12 hour battery life and the keyboards are just outstanding (got one for my wife a couple years ago).
I'm pretty happy with my Zaurus though for my portable computing needs, in fact it fits my style better. A PDA with a James Bond keyboard running Linux, now thats cool.
What about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD? Isn't that the Debian distro of FreeBSD? Just because FreeBSD is still relatively obscure doesn't mean that its not going to end up in the same boat as Linux. Give it a couple more years.
On the Linux side of things, I run Gentoo and just use the regular old Gnome desktop with Nautilus even. My system is fast enough to keep up with it, and Athlon-XP 2400, GeForce FX-5900, 1G of RAM, a fast 120G HD, 20" Monitor, SBLive! sound card, and some USB joysticks and game pads. I use the JFS filesystem in Gentoo because it has the lowest CPU usage and its speed is comparable with the other guys.
One of the greatest things for the Linux gamer is DOSBox. Using that program, I can play Wing Commander: Privateer, and X-COM UFO Defense in Linux. You can adjust the speed of DOSBox so the game feels about right. You know its getting pretty good if it can run Privateer (which is now abandonware and a free download from The Underdogs). In fact, you can probably run most of the great old DOS abandonware games in DOSBox with zero problems now. This one program increases your Linux gaming library to thousands of freely available commercial quality games.
Next are the nice commercial games which have a linux port. Neverwinter Nights and Doom3 stand at the forefront of the pack and run great on my system. Also there are great ports of Quake1/2/3, RtCW, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 1/2, and Doom.
After that, you enter the realm of Open Source games, with great titles like the Ur-Quan Masters, Vega Strike, Battle for Wesnoth, and any of the thousands of other games listed at The Linux Game Tome. Having Gentoo is an advantage here because the compiler toolchain is particularly strong, so its easy to compile and try out the latest cutting edge CVS versions of these in-development games.
Then you have the Wine and Cedega games. I use this for Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout1/2, and Diablo II. These (and other) well programmed games are totally playable in Wine, so there's no reason to have to special boot to windows just to play them, might as well just use Wine to play them. The windows versions of most of the old Loki games that are now broken typically work under Wine.
I won't even go into the other emulators, but suffice it to say that there are emulators for most consoles, such as ZSNES, and arcade games, like MAME. There are thousands of games which will work great using these things. I sometimes boot up ZSNES and play some ShadowRun.
Which leads me finally to the unfortunate state of the Loki titles. A lot of these are linked against older libs and may or not work on a new system without some serious fiddling around and building of compatibility libs. Some still work, some don't, but chances are that they will all eventually die of bit-rot. Poor Loki Games, you are missed.
I've been doing serious Linux gaming since 1998. There are tons of great games available, thousands that can be emulated, and the best part is if you want to take a hand at making your own games, you have every tool and library under the sun right there at your fingertips.
- Diablo II
- Warcraft II BNE
- Fallout 1/2
- Jagged Alliance 2
In addition to this, plenty of other games work but I either (1) don't play them, or (2) haven't bothered to install them.The ones which do work tend to work very well, usually at around about 80% of full speed. You can play OpenGL games also with little or no problems.
Wine has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years, and TransGaming's Cedega version of Wine is a pretty high quality product also, it's worth looking into.
Thanks guys. I will have to think about the potential applications. Typical heat sources emit IR radiation as the (approximately) 4th root of temperature, but still this is some interesting stuff because not everything is typical. My thanks for answering my question!
Chemical energy storage really is the ultimate. Fossil fuels, and the synthetics, provide an unbeatable weight/energy ratio. Fuels don't decay, are easily able to be handled, and provide instantaneous energy transfer.
Biological energy, is in fact the most advanced form of energy capture available. I don't know if you believe in a GOD, but to me, GOD is Mr. Energy because he is one heck of a chemist. An enzyme is an incredibly complicated chemical molecule which is a catalyst that can make an ordinarily impossible chemical reaction thermodynamically favorible. Our bodies use thousands of these neato enzymes to enable us to eat more or less anything and walk, talk, think, and live. I don't really care if you believe in GOD or not, but you should probably realize that biochemistry is about the ultimate energy storage achievement and utilization possible. We humans run completely from fusion energy (our sun) via a tremendously complicated system of chain chemical reactions which we have only the barest understanding of. It's quite amazing if you think about it.
Highways, come on, give me a break. We should have bullet trains running in the center dividers of every major interstate highway. I personally would much rather have a luxurious 1/2 hour train ride to work, reading a book and drinking coffee, than a daily 1 hour hell ride up the highway worrying if some clowns will make me late and risk my job, meanwhile exposing my precious auto to no end of hazards and decay for such sensless activity.
See what I mean?
Heck, just hook it up to a little exhaust fan so when you open the door of your auto in the heat of summer its not so hot but yet you don't need to leave your windows down.
Maintenence is an issue of course, nothing is perfect in this world.
Hooking up to the grid is both tricky and lossy. You must feed in a synchronous AC signal which is in phase with the grid. Typically you would use a DC->AC motor/generator set and you absolutely have to match the phase with the grid or else you have serious sparks flying. Fortunately, there are a lot of commercial solutions already out there which can do this.
Nice insight humbads, you set up some financing and I'll engineer it up. Deal?
Just use the solar cells to power up a linear accelerator and shoot nuclei out the back at near the speed of light. If you can get 0.999c from a nucleus you get a tremendous thrust for one little atom. Remember, F mA when you approach the speed of light. Relativity rockets (super ion engines) are probably the best means of propulsion where electric power is plentiful but mass is dear. I'm sorry, but that tiny momentum of a photon is so small it is pathetic. Granted you get 2x boost for reflection vs 1x boost for adsorbtion, but 2 x 0 still equals 0. The only way to practically get around in space is to shoot nuclei out the back of a rocket engine at the speed of light.
Well a little piezoelectric tutorial can't hurt anyways :-)
For the laymen out there, I'll explain this in technical terms. If you have a roughly cylindrical quartz crystal, and if you squeeze it, the crystal lattices "snap" into an alternative arrangement which free's up some electrons and essentially produces a static charge. When you remove the stress, the crystal lattice snaps back into its rest state and wants its electrons back.
Conversely, by applying an alternating current to a quartz crystal, you can make it physically stretch and shrink.
Because a quartz crystal is somewhat like a spring, a given shape/mass/volume of it will possess a resonant vibrational frequency. If you apply a signal to the crystal at or near the resonant frequency, the crystal's vibrational magnitude will increase, just like the famous Tacoma Narrows bridge "Galloping Girdy".
Piezoelectricity is a weird and wonderfull direct mechanical to electrical conversion phenomenon and it is typically used in electronics to convert a sloppy signal into a more precise one, or by utilizing higher harmonic modes, to multiply a lower frequency into a higher one.
Since Infra-Red radiation is part of the electromagnetic spectrum and very near the wavelengths of visible light, can it be focused using an optical lens just as one can focus light rays?
I had an idea about placing a fresnel lens in front of a large low-availability IR radiating source and focusing it to make a hotspot. A small area with an extremely high temperature is much more thermodynamically usefull than a large area with a relatively low temperature.
You might use this, for instance, to focus process heat onto a catalyst to improve chemical reaction rates.
I always thought that a cool thing to do would be to use the excess electricity from PV cells to crack water and make Hydrogen gas rather than goofing around with expensive batteries.
Probably one of the cheapest ways to store Hydrogen "on site" is the old upside down reservoir immersed under water. In this case you would just make some electrodes under the reservoir, maybe concentric stainless steel rings? And set up the cell array for 1.5 volts, which IIRC is close to the optimum voltage for water cracking. Hook it up and collect your "Brown's Gas" during the summer, and burn it during the winter.
I just love PV Cells, they really spark my imagination. I even have a little 5V/1A PV array to play with. Too bad where I live if it isn't raining then its probably snowing.