It sounds cool and looks cool, but I want to get my hands on it before I decide. I hope it's not like Wil's other games where it's fun in the beginning but then just gets tedious as you get farther along. The Sims was fun for me at first, but I ended up hating it because all I ended up doing was chasing the stats instead of doing cool stuff like putting them in unique predicaments. Those damned Sims have to hit the can more than my girlfriend.
With that said, even if Spore isn't as great as everyone makes it out to be, I'm hoping it will spawn a new class of games that use procedurally generated content for some incredibly unique gaming experiences.
Man, there's a lot of hate in here for Dell. Just curious, why? My GF and boss both have a Dell 700m and I've got to say those things are solid. Small, light, battery life of 3+ hours. Light years better than Vaios, IMHO. I've experienced few problems with their desktop systems as well.
As far as the exploding laptop, is it really the manufacturer's fault? This question would apply regardless of who it is. It would seem to me that if it were a manufacturing defect in the laptop, say in the charging circuitry, those models would be exploding left and right. It was very likely that the battery pack on that thing was made by a third party and sold for half the price of an OEM pack.
That's not to say that OEM battery packs can't blow up. The battery cells are procured from outside manufacturers. Of course, laptop manufacturers will (hopefully) only buy batteries made by reputable firms, but right now there's big business in counterfeit batteries over in China. I remember awhile back Kyocera had phones coming with counterfeit batteries that were exploding in peoples' pockets and hands, inflicting some serious injuries. The thing is, don't just eye Dells with suspicison - I imagine it's possible for any manufacturer to get a bad batch of batteries if they're not careful, but I imagine that's rare and they are, indeed, careful. Big laptop manufacturers probably have direct accounts, anyway.
First, you have the most expensive console on the market by $200. Then, the head of SCE rolls out and says the PS3 is too cheap, as if Sony is doing us some kind of favor by making the game console so "reasonably" priced. The games, pressed to the higher priced and rare Blue-Ray format, will likely be more expensive than the competition as well.
Now, Sony is going to try to limit resales on top of that? This is corporate suicide 3DFX style. Sony thinks they can use their market momentum to shoo in the PS3, but I think they will find otherwise. There is no _way_ I would lay down 6 bills for a stinking game console. I could get a pretty loaded Dell with a 19" LCD for that.
IMHO, it's the Wii that's going to dominate - $200, a back to basics fun game approach instead of PC shovelware, and a really innovative control system? Hell, I'm thinking about signing up for one of those...
But the game is so much more fun when your sims are miserable. Nothing is better than when I set it up so the career mom comes home and finds Dad in bed with the maid. It's poetry in motion. I know my work is done with Freud comes down to have a little chat with Mom. Then I lock her out of the bathroom and make the kids clean up the resulting mess. For Dad and the maid I arrange a little "cooking accident" in the kitchen with no fire extingisher, no phone, and no exit. Hauntings rule.
I must be a sociopath - But then again, I *AM* a sysadmin.
I just don't see a bubble in tech. Yeah, there's some crazy money being thrown around, but it's not from investors as in the 90's, it's coming through aquisitions. By the late 90's everyone and their mother was a stock speculator. People saw these crazy returns and jumped in to get themselves a piece of the pie. Naturally, this phenomenon fed on itself and everything became overvalued incredibly quickly. When the big stock holders and VCs started selling off their stakes, all that money evaporated and so we have a crash. Right now I don't see anybody blindly investing in whatever tech stock they can to exploit returns that are way higher than they should be.
Where I DO see it is in commodities and certain housing markets. Metals - Particularly gold and silver - are going crazy right now. ETF stocks have opened up so you can buy "shares" in metals, and when you do, the ETF buys physical metal to store in a vault (it's just gold and silver now, AFAIK. Cheaper metals would cost too much to store) The rise of these ETFs allow any joe to buy gold and silver on a whim, thus creating a large potential of making them overvalued. Compounding the problem is that a lot of countries are getting scared by the inflating dollar and hedging their investments with gold, further driving up the price. The rise of the price due to this activity is a lot of the reason the gold & silver ETFs were created in the first place - The price activity has the attention of the public.
Don't get me started on housing in the US. I have seen this coming for three years. In the US, places in the midwest and south are going for what they should be, maybe even below - You can pick up a nice 3 bedroom 2 bath house with 1700 sq ft of living space and a good sized lot for the low $100's. These markets are safe from the bubble. But the same place out here in the SoCal city where I live will cost you at least $550,000, and that's with practically no lot. Even in the High Desert, which is on the other side of the mountains and 80 miles from LA, it will cost you $300,000 to get in the same house. Two years ago the same house was $160,000. It's ridiculous. The rise in prices is mostly due to the same mentality that caused the stock crash of the late 90's - People saw their homeowner friends building massive equity (and cashing it out to buy nice toys) and wanted to get in the game before it was too late. So they all started jumping out of the rental market and buying houses, which reduced inventory and thus drove prices up. The banks noticed the meteoric rise in equity, and they started loosening their credit criteria - They'll still make a ton of money even if the place forecloses. Pretty soon anyone who could breathe was qualifying for a home loan. Many of them could not afford a standard 30 year fixed rate loan, and so took out an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage, for those of you with no home buying experience) loan instead. So they were given a really low initial interest rate that would stay fixed for the first 5 years and then the banks would be allowed to increase it with the market.
Then came the "creative" loans. When people could no longer afford 30 year fixed or standard ARMs, banks started pushing "interest only" loans. This is basically an ARM loan except you don't have to pay principal on the loan during the fixed period (again, usually 5 years). What's in the fine print is that after the 5 year period is up, you must start paying the principal you weren't paying during the fixed period. Coupled with increasing interest rates, a homeowner could be looking at significatly higher payments.
But it gets better. Then came the "partial interest" loans. So now, not only are you in an ARM and not paying any principal, but you are also only paying a fraction of the interest every month. This is how a lot of people making $40,000 a year are buying houses that they would ordinarily need to be making $130,000 a year to afford. These are also called "negative am
1. Consistency, a working out-of-the-box configuration? Check out asterisk@home
I'm looking at it...Still have yet to play with it. Not sure yet if I could get away with running a company on it though.
2. No GUI by default? Are you saying that traditional PBX systems DO?
No, but that's apples and oranges. The traditional PBX is based on a legacy paradigm whose time is drawing to a close. We're talking about VoIP, which by definition has got an Ethernet run to a switch at one point or another. Is it too much to ask that such a system has some sort of graphical management interface? My BCM as a GUI, as does Cisco Call Manager.
3. Ease of use: It's easier to parse a couple of.conf files (or install AMP and use that) than to memorize and navigate voice or beep menu prompts
4. Who can maintain it? Anyone who can RTFM, read English, and navigate vi, pico, or nano -- or a web browser if AMP is installed
I can do the above two, and so can a lot of guys familiar with *nix. But there is still a learning curve. I know the Nortel BCM pretty well, and it'd be pretty easy for me to walk into just about any company and fix a problem they're having because one install doesn't change much from the next. This may not be the case with Asterisk. Maybe I could install some frontend management tools I'm used to, but when you start screwing with a system like that you take the chance of breaking something.
With that said, my point was that if an Asterisk box breaks or needs maintenance and I'm not around for whatever reason, will my boss be able to open a phone book and find someone who can fix the problem? If a Nortel/Panasonic/etc system breaks, you look up "Telephone Repair" and find a shop who specializes in your system. Calling guys up at random and saying "hey we have an Asterisk system..Got anyone down there who can fix our problem" would be problematic and would earn me the ire of my superiors for the trouble.
5. re: The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike,
This is NOT a weakness. I don't have an Avaya, Nortel, Panasonic, or (other proprietary PBX) 8-line or 4-line or 24-line system that needs to be thrown away and replaced by a new system when the need for more lines arises. Just add another FXO card or two, or at worst, another asterisk box and link them together.
The weakness I described was is not because of expandability problems - It's because of the situtation outlined above regarding system maintenance. The only one who is truly specialized in a custom asterisk build is you. Now I take it you've got a pretty decent setup going since you seem to know a lot about it - If you stepped away from your box and it broke, how easily would the people left using the system be able to find someone to repair it...fast?
Please understand that I am not calling Asterisk useless. Actually, I think it's a nice piece of software that I might personally find useful - It might not be bad to run at my house. What I'm saying is that I can't deploy it at my company because it'd be too hard for my superiors to find someone to muck through it if I'm not available.
Open source? Check Open standards? Check ( note: skype is not open in this regard ) Quality product? Check check check Huge business impact? Check
Market penetration? Ease of use?
Skype is VOIP that any Joe can install for free, and has widespread useage.
Asterisk, on the other hand, is a royal headache to install, configure and maintain. The VoIP phones I've seen that are supposed to work with it are generally pretty clunky and not very resilient. And unless something has changed since I last looked at it, there is no graphical management tool that comes with it, and instead requires you to download a separate one that is either free or commerical. The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike, greatly complicating maintenance and overall adaptation. Having said that, if I rolled it out for my company and left, who would my company be able to call to make changes or otherwise maintain it?
Simply put, something like Asterisk just can't get traction unless there's some type of standard applied to it. If Digium started selling plug-n-play boxes that could be mounted to a plywood backing and had a standardized GUI interface along with phones that can take a beating, I'd definitely take a serious look at it.
A power adapter? You've got to be kidding - Most external 2.5" HD enclosures can be powered by the USB bus itself. Plus, you are paying some company to take a drive, put it in a case, and slap their name on it. Why does this unit have Firewire 800 anyway? FW400 is faster than any laptop drive can go...And, besides, is Firewire REALLY necessary when just about every computer under the sun has USB 2.0 now? Besides, USB2.0 can also sustain transfer rates greater than most single hard drives can dish out. So why not roll your own enclosure?
I was having a discussion with a friend last week about muni wi-fi and its practicality. I said that I thought it was a pink elephant, and outlined the following reasons. The assumption based on these points, of course, is that you are trying to blanket the entire municipality with WiFi service, which comes with the potential for a lot of people jumping on.
Shared fabric - Like hubs in the days of old, a WiFi AP can only move as much combined data per second as the number on it.
Half duplex - Bandwidth is further limited as WiFi radios typically can only either listen or broadcast at any given time. I _have_heard whispers about prototype chips out there that can do full duplex, but I'm not aware of what products, if any, use them.
Limited range - The ISM band is very limited as far as how much power you are allowed to output. Most laptops and WiFi PCMCIA cards only have a broadcast power of about 30-100mW. At the top end you'd be lucky to get service past 500 feet with a standard dipole. Yes, you can use an external antenna, but that's impractical for laptop users and requires professional installation for desktop users.
Now add up all of these three factors - Because you have limited bandwidth, you must install a lot of APs to make sure your service doesn't grind to a halt. This is doubly so becuase the idea is to have a blanket of coverage. But there is another problem - If you have that many APs, you will need a wired connection for each one of them. You can uplink them to a main site, yes - But line of sight is a factor there, as is radio spectrum - If you have dozens of installations trying to talk to a main site, there is a big problem because WiFi only has 3 channels (1, 6, and 11) to pick from that don't interfere with each other in any way, which means your bandwidth will tank because of transmission collisions.
To get around this, you could uplink your APs serially, but then the problem is that the users at the last AP in the line will be contesting for bandwidth with the users of every AP after it, all the way up to the network access point.
In conclusion - While WiFi has a lot of great applications, city-wide Internet access isn't one of them. IMHO, the future of wireless Internet access likely lies with cell providers, who have paid for their (large) piece of the spectrum and are allowed to broadcast with a lot more radio power than ISM ever will. I'm already seeing this going on in EVDO.
Like many here, I read the article and got the idea that they were talking about a perpetual motion machine (could be the "The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier." at the beginning of the article that gave everyone that impression...), but the only place that I can find such a claim is from the author of the article...From the way it's written, it just doesn't appear that he knows what he is talking about.
I glanced through the patent at USPTO and it appears to me that what this is is a more efficient electric motor, not something that outputs more energy than is put into it.
Lockheed tried this about 10 years ago, with a drone called DarkStar. My friend was working at Lockheed as a contractor at the time. After it crashed on takeoff, he said the project was doomed - Everyone at the airbase started calling it Project DarkSpot.
You never know...Maybe Google's long term plan is to shut down the filters when it becomes too deeply entrenched in the Chinese networks to simply kick out:)
It doesn't sound too different from the old lemon battery experiment. Sure, he might be able to generate voltage, but the question is...Where are the AMPS? If he has 12V at.005 milliamps, this tree electricity won't be useful to anyone. I hope not too many investors are buying this guy's line...
Additionally, a singularity is defined as a point in space that has such intense gravitation that spacetime is curved infinitely around it (a theory about gravity states that it does not "pull" things towards it, but rather warps space, and objects caught in gravitation are just following the curvature of said space) It seems to me that when this happens, nothing can enter or leave. That sounds like a spacetime bubble to me.
The use of the words "folded into this dimension" sounds a little cliche, I agree. But we can also agree that this universe has 3 dimensions, but has no detectable edge.
Consider what we thought about the earth a relatively short time ago...It was thought the earth was flat (2-D), because that's the way it looked from our perspective. Obviously we know better now and the earth is actually spherical (3-D). In this sense, does it defy logic that our universe exists in a 4-D or greater system?
Black holes emit x-ray radiation and get smaller and smaller until they disappear, or "evaporate".
Does all the matter of a black hole bleed off as X-Ray radiation? Or is all of it just folded up into the singularity, which should be theoretically impossible to get to since spacetime is infinitely warped around it?
Could the "big bang" have occurred when a singularity in another universe isolated itself and folded into this dimension? Could the whole universe be a spacetime bubble? Stuff to think about...
*sigh* ignore above post it's late and I'm not thinking clearly. I was thinking strictly in terms of USB drives, not devices like digital cameras that need to READ the filesystem.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds cool and looks cool, but I want to get my hands on it before I decide. I hope it's not like Wil's other games where it's fun in the beginning but then just gets tedious as you get farther along. The Sims was fun for me at first, but I ended up hating it because all I ended up doing was chasing the stats instead of doing cool stuff like putting them in unique predicaments. Those damned Sims have to hit the can more than my girlfriend.
With that said, even if Spore isn't as great as everyone makes it out to be, I'm hoping it will spawn a new class of games that use procedurally generated content for some incredibly unique gaming experiences.
Considering you can get a 48 acre farm complete with structures and a home for $140,000 out there, I guess a ratty old farm house isn't too much to part with. Although, I doubt they will sign over the land underneath it, and will essentially let him live there rent free, at least until the novelty wears out.
Money is more important than life. Welcome to America.
Man, there's a lot of hate in here for Dell. Just curious, why? My GF and boss both have a Dell 700m and I've got to say those things are solid. Small, light, battery life of 3+ hours. Light years better than Vaios, IMHO. I've experienced few problems with their desktop systems as well.
As far as the exploding laptop, is it really the manufacturer's fault? This question would apply regardless of who it is. It would seem to me that if it were a manufacturing defect in the laptop, say in the charging circuitry, those models would be exploding left and right. It was very likely that the battery pack on that thing was made by a third party and sold for half the price of an OEM pack.
That's not to say that OEM battery packs can't blow up. The battery cells are procured from outside manufacturers. Of course, laptop manufacturers will (hopefully) only buy batteries made by reputable firms, but right now there's big business in counterfeit batteries over in China. I remember awhile back Kyocera had phones coming with counterfeit batteries that were exploding in peoples' pockets and hands, inflicting some serious injuries. The thing is, don't just eye Dells with suspicison - I imagine it's possible for any manufacturer to get a bad batch of batteries if they're not careful, but I imagine that's rare and they are, indeed, careful. Big laptop manufacturers probably have direct accounts, anyway.
They'd probably lock me up.
First, you have the most expensive console on the market by $200. Then, the head of SCE rolls out and says the PS3 is too cheap, as if Sony is doing us some kind of favor by making the game console so "reasonably" priced. The games, pressed to the higher priced and rare Blue-Ray format, will likely be more expensive than the competition as well.
Now, Sony is going to try to limit resales on top of that? This is corporate suicide 3DFX style. Sony thinks they can use their market momentum to shoo in the PS3, but I think they will find otherwise. There is no _way_ I would lay down 6 bills for a stinking game console. I could get a pretty loaded Dell with a 19" LCD for that.
IMHO, it's the Wii that's going to dominate - $200, a back to basics fun game approach instead of PC shovelware, and a really innovative control system? Hell, I'm thinking about signing up for one of those...
But the game is so much more fun when your sims are miserable. Nothing is better than when I set it up so the career mom comes home and finds Dad in bed with the maid. It's poetry in motion. I know my work is done with Freud comes down to have a little chat with Mom. Then I lock her out of the bathroom and make the kids clean up the resulting mess. For Dad and the maid I arrange a little "cooking accident" in the kitchen with no fire extingisher, no phone, and no exit. Hauntings rule.
I must be a sociopath - But then again, I *AM* a sysadmin.
I just don't see a bubble in tech. Yeah, there's some crazy money being thrown around, but it's not from investors as in the 90's, it's coming through aquisitions. By the late 90's everyone and their mother was a stock speculator. People saw these crazy returns and jumped in to get themselves a piece of the pie. Naturally, this phenomenon fed on itself and everything became overvalued incredibly quickly. When the big stock holders and VCs started selling off their stakes, all that money evaporated and so we have a crash. Right now I don't see anybody blindly investing in whatever tech stock they can to exploit returns that are way higher than they should be.
Where I DO see it is in commodities and certain housing markets. Metals - Particularly gold and silver - are going crazy right now. ETF stocks have opened up so you can buy "shares" in metals, and when you do, the ETF buys physical metal to store in a vault (it's just gold and silver now, AFAIK. Cheaper metals would cost too much to store) The rise of these ETFs allow any joe to buy gold and silver on a whim, thus creating a large potential of making them overvalued. Compounding the problem is that a lot of countries are getting scared by the inflating dollar and hedging their investments with gold, further driving up the price. The rise of the price due to this activity is a lot of the reason the gold & silver ETFs were created in the first place - The price activity has the attention of the public.
Don't get me started on housing in the US. I have seen this coming for three years. In the US, places in the midwest and south are going for what they should be, maybe even below - You can pick up a nice 3 bedroom 2 bath house with 1700 sq ft of living space and a good sized lot for the low $100's. These markets are safe from the bubble. But the same place out here in the SoCal city where I live will cost you at least $550,000, and that's with practically no lot. Even in the High Desert, which is on the other side of the mountains and 80 miles from LA, it will cost you $300,000 to get in the same house. Two years ago the same house was $160,000. It's ridiculous. The rise in prices is mostly due to the same mentality that caused the stock crash of the late 90's - People saw their homeowner friends building massive equity (and cashing it out to buy nice toys) and wanted to get in the game before it was too late. So they all started jumping out of the rental market and buying houses, which reduced inventory and thus drove prices up. The banks noticed the meteoric rise in equity, and they started loosening their credit criteria - They'll still make a ton of money even if the place forecloses. Pretty soon anyone who could breathe was qualifying for a home loan. Many of them could not afford a standard 30 year fixed rate loan, and so took out an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage, for those of you with no home buying experience) loan instead. So they were given a really low initial interest rate that would stay fixed for the first 5 years and then the banks would be allowed to increase it with the market.
Then came the "creative" loans. When people could no longer afford 30 year fixed or standard ARMs, banks started pushing "interest only" loans. This is basically an ARM loan except you don't have to pay principal on the loan during the fixed period (again, usually 5 years). What's in the fine print is that after the 5 year period is up, you must start paying the principal you weren't paying during the fixed period. Coupled with increasing interest rates, a homeowner could be looking at significatly higher payments.
But it gets better. Then came the "partial interest" loans. So now, not only are you in an ARM and not paying any principal, but you are also only paying a fraction of the interest every month. This is how a lot of people making $40,000 a year are buying houses that they would ordinarily need to be making $130,000 a year to afford. These are also called "negative am
Ok, but first I need to leverage my botnet to extort the money I need for the price of admission.
1. Consistency, a working out-of-the-box configuration? Check out asterisk@home
.conf files (or install AMP and use that) than to memorize and navigate voice or beep menu prompts
I'm looking at it...Still have yet to play with it. Not sure yet if I could get away with running a company on it though.
2. No GUI by default? Are you saying that traditional PBX systems DO?
No, but that's apples and oranges. The traditional PBX is based on a legacy paradigm whose time is drawing to a close. We're talking about VoIP, which by definition has got an Ethernet run to a switch at one point or another. Is it too much to ask that such a system has some sort of graphical management interface? My BCM as a GUI, as does Cisco Call Manager.
3. Ease of use: It's easier to parse a couple of
4. Who can maintain it? Anyone who can RTFM, read English, and navigate vi, pico, or nano -- or a web browser if AMP is installed
I can do the above two, and so can a lot of guys familiar with *nix. But there is still a learning curve. I know the Nortel BCM pretty well, and it'd be pretty easy for me to walk into just about any company and fix a problem they're having because one install doesn't change much from the next. This may not be the case with Asterisk. Maybe I could install some frontend management tools I'm used to, but when you start screwing with a system like that you take the chance of breaking something.
With that said, my point was that if an Asterisk box breaks or needs maintenance and I'm not around for whatever reason, will my boss be able to open a phone book and find someone who can fix the problem? If a Nortel/Panasonic/etc system breaks, you look up "Telephone Repair" and find a shop who specializes in your system. Calling guys up at random and saying "hey we have an Asterisk system..Got anyone down there who can fix our problem" would be problematic and would earn me the ire of my superiors for the trouble.
5. re: The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike,
This is NOT a weakness. I don't have an Avaya, Nortel, Panasonic, or (other proprietary PBX) 8-line or 4-line or 24-line system that needs to be thrown away and replaced by a new system when the need for more lines arises. Just add another FXO card or two, or at worst, another asterisk box and link them together.
The weakness I described was is not because of expandability problems - It's because of the situtation outlined above regarding system maintenance. The only one who is truly specialized in a custom asterisk build is you. Now I take it you've got a pretty decent setup going since you seem to know a lot about it - If you stepped away from your box and it broke, how easily would the people left using the system be able to find someone to repair it...fast?
Please understand that I am not calling Asterisk useless. Actually, I think it's a nice piece of software that I might personally find useful - It might not be bad to run at my house. What I'm saying is that I can't deploy it at my company because it'd be too hard for my superiors to find someone to muck through it if I'm not available.
Open source? Check
Open standards? Check ( note: skype is not open in this regard )
Quality product? Check check check
Huge business impact? Check
Market penetration? Ease of use?
Skype is VOIP that any Joe can install for free, and has widespread useage.
Asterisk, on the other hand, is a royal headache to install, configure and maintain. The VoIP phones I've seen that are supposed to work with it are generally pretty clunky and not very resilient. And unless something has changed since I last looked at it, there is no graphical management tool that comes with it, and instead requires you to download a separate one that is either free or commerical. The consequences of this are that that no two Asterisk installations will likely be anything alike, greatly complicating maintenance and overall adaptation. Having said that, if I rolled it out for my company and left, who would my company be able to call to make changes or otherwise maintain it?
Simply put, something like Asterisk just can't get traction unless there's some type of standard applied to it. If Digium started selling plug-n-play boxes that could be mounted to a plywood backing and had a standardized GUI interface along with phones that can take a beating, I'd definitely take a serious look at it.
A power adapter? You've got to be kidding - Most external 2.5" HD enclosures can be powered by the USB bus itself. Plus, you are paying some company to take a drive, put it in a case, and slap their name on it. Why does this unit have Firewire 800 anyway? FW400 is faster than any laptop drive can go...And, besides, is Firewire REALLY necessary when just about every computer under the sun has USB 2.0 now? Besides, USB2.0 can also sustain transfer rates greater than most single hard drives can dish out. So why not roll your own enclosure?
2 E16817145329
2 E16817146035
2 E16822148073
2 E16822146047
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
$18.99
Or if you really, really want firewire:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
How about a 160GB for $329
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
Or a 7200RPM 80GB for $145?
So ask yourself - Is a clear case and a Firewire 800 interface really worth the extra $100?
I tend to say "fuck" too much in company ;).
That's OK. When you work with computers, profanity is a second language.
I was having a discussion with a friend last week about muni wi-fi and its practicality. I said that I thought it was a pink elephant, and outlined the following reasons. The assumption based on these points, of course, is that you are trying to blanket the entire municipality with WiFi service, which comes with the potential for a lot of people jumping on.
Shared fabric - Like hubs in the days of old, a WiFi AP can only move as much combined data per second as the number on it.
Half duplex - Bandwidth is further limited as WiFi radios typically can only either listen or broadcast at any given time. I _have_heard whispers about prototype chips out there that can do full duplex, but I'm not aware of what products, if any, use them.
Limited range - The ISM band is very limited as far as how much power you are allowed to output. Most laptops and WiFi PCMCIA cards only have a broadcast power of about 30-100mW. At the top end you'd be lucky to get service past 500 feet with a standard dipole. Yes, you can use an external antenna, but that's impractical for laptop users and requires professional installation for desktop users.
Now add up all of these three factors - Because you have limited bandwidth, you must install a lot of APs to make sure your service doesn't grind to a halt. This is doubly so becuase the idea is to have a blanket of coverage. But there is another problem - If you have that many APs, you will need a wired connection for each one of them. You can uplink them to a main site, yes - But line of sight is a factor there, as is radio spectrum - If you have dozens of installations trying to talk to a main site, there is a big problem because WiFi only has 3 channels (1, 6, and 11) to pick from that don't interfere with each other in any way, which means your bandwidth will tank because of transmission collisions.
To get around this, you could uplink your APs serially, but then the problem is that the users at the last AP in the line will be contesting for bandwidth with the users of every AP after it, all the way up to the network access point.
In conclusion - While WiFi has a lot of great applications, city-wide Internet access isn't one of them. IMHO, the future of wireless Internet access likely lies with cell providers, who have paid for their (large) piece of the spectrum and are allowed to broadcast with a lot more radio power than ISM ever will. I'm already seeing this going on in EVDO.
Like many here, I read the article and got the idea that they were talking about a perpetual motion machine (could be the "The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier." at the beginning of the article that gave everyone that impression...), but the only place that I can find such a claim is from the author of the article...From the way it's written, it just doesn't appear that he knows what he is talking about.
I glanced through the patent at USPTO and it appears to me that what this is is a more efficient electric motor, not something that outputs more energy than is put into it.
Disclaimer: Link was down, so I didn't RTFA.
Ok, so the Apple gets Intel chips, and according to the article will switch to Windows?
Why, then, would anyone shell out the extra money for an Apple when they can buy a beige box PC for a fraction of the price?
If this is true, Apple has signed their own death warrant.
Lockheed tried this about 10 years ago, with a drone called DarkStar. My friend was working at Lockheed as a contractor at the time. After it crashed on takeoff, he said the project was doomed - Everyone at the airbase started calling it Project DarkSpot.
You never know...Maybe Google's long term plan is to shut down the filters when it becomes too deeply entrenched in the Chinese networks to simply kick out :)
Indeed it is.
The song for those wondering, is from Avenue Q
It doesn't sound too different from the old lemon battery experiment. Sure, he might be able to generate voltage, but the question is...Where are the AMPS? If he has 12V at .005 milliamps, this tree electricity won't be useful to anyone. I hope not too many investors are buying this guy's line...
I'll share, all you had to do was ask.
It means something to someone.
0 30917.htmls mo/Sean's%20mutliverse.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/white_hole_
http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/Projects/modernco
Additionally, a singularity is defined as a point in space that has such intense gravitation that spacetime is curved infinitely around it (a theory about gravity states that it does not "pull" things towards it, but rather warps space, and objects caught in gravitation are just following the curvature of said space) It seems to me that when this happens, nothing can enter or leave. That sounds like a spacetime bubble to me.
The use of the words "folded into this dimension" sounds a little cliche, I agree. But we can also agree that this universe has 3 dimensions, but has no detectable edge.
Consider what we thought about the earth a relatively short time ago...It was thought the earth was flat (2-D), because that's the way it looked from our perspective. Obviously we know better now and the earth is actually spherical (3-D). In this sense, does it defy logic that our universe exists in a 4-D or greater system?
That is my understanding of it as well...But where did all that matter come from to begin with?
Black holes emit x-ray radiation and get smaller and smaller until they disappear, or "evaporate".
Does all the matter of a black hole bleed off as X-Ray radiation? Or is all of it just folded up into the singularity, which should be theoretically impossible to get to since spacetime is infinitely warped around it?
Could the "big bang" have occurred when a singularity in another universe isolated itself and folded into this dimension? Could the whole universe be a spacetime bubble? Stuff to think about...
*sigh* ignore above post it's late and I'm not thinking clearly. I was thinking strictly in terms of USB drives, not devices like digital cameras that need to READ the filesystem.