if you're in a dry climate, they buy water fans. basically a big humidifier attached to a fan, as the water rapidly evaporates, it rapidly cools the air.
while this works great in Arizona, and the cost is nowhere near that of AC, the climate has to be dry enough for this to really work. for portable cooling, I've always found a canteen, and a colored cotton t-shirt to be quite refreshing even in humid climates (the water cools even if it can't evaporate, and this is generally how i tolerate bike riding once it gets hot)
only works if your house is well insulated, and frankly even with slats and insulation a house can become very warm during the day, without AC or some type of heat pump. the best type of heat pump for cooling is one with a reservoir that it can cool at night, but normal heat pumps don't do this... I've heard of a custom system they built for a museum in France, that cools and underground reservoir at night time and then uses that reservoir to cool the museum all day long, but even the heat pumps that require a reservoir for heating, don't also use that reservoir for cooling. seems a bit backwards to me, but maybe they're worried that the reservoir won't be warm enough to heat the house if they cool it... but then they could have a dual reservoir system, one for heating and one for cooling the cooling reservoir could be insulated lightly against the ground warmth, for optimal night time cooling...
maybe it's just as expensive to cool a reservoir, as it is to try to pump heat outside on a 110F day, but i doubt that somehow. oh well.
By geo-thermal i think you mean a 'heat pump' which is just a large underground tank of water. there is nothing geothermal about it, it exploits the fact that the temperature underground doesn't vary, that several feet of dirt is a very good insulator, and that at night time, it can use a radiator to cool the tank of water at night if needed.
I've yet to see an in home geothermal solution so I'm going to assume you meant a heat pump, which is a totally different concept.
personally i prefer using several kiddie pools as algae farms it's pretty cheap and easy, although to get bumper crops you may need to use low cost additives to promote the growth of algae, harvesting is pretty easy, a pool skim works fine, pressing is easy too, you have your choice or methods, a foot press is the lowest cost, but you might get tired of that quickly, so an automatic press might be preferred. you have to press algae to separate the vegetable oil from the the vegetable waste. the oil can either be used in s SVO(straight vegetable oil) converted diesel engine or converted to biodiesel with lye an any form of alcohol. the vegetable remains can be burned, or converted to ethanol, or used as feedstock for cows etc.
of course, the first real commercial production of algae started this month down in texas, by a long time oil and gas company... they're planning quite a bit of expansion in the growth and use of algae as a viable alternative to our shrinking oil reserves. Algae was first considered as an alternative in the 70s, but sadly there was no determination to switch to an unproven technology where all new farming and processing technology was needed, rather than export all our money over seas to foreign oil production...
if it is viable i think it wont take long for enough algae to be produced to make our dependence on foreign oil a part of history, if it isn't profitable enough, then we can still try to use algae to make coal electricity kyoto convention 'clean' in terms of CO emissions and legislate it at the cost of driving electricity prices higher.
but I feel that it will be viable, and at some point there will be a debate over if diesel engines should be replaced with SVO engines, because it does cost money to buy the lye and alcohol needed to convert plant oil to biodiesel, and SVO engines would save this cost... there are already kits available to convert a diesel engine to a SVO engine, as detailed at this website http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html
it seems that an engine kitted for SVO can still burn diesel, so the transition should be easy to legislate, eg: require SVO optimized engines for a decade before require SVO to replace BD/diesel. although in practice a SVO kitted engine might have lower fuel economy when running Biodiesel or regular diesel, still, if the idea is to switch from petrol diesel to bio-fuels, the Logical choice is SVO for it's cost savings over Biodiesel.
Re:Use a 'fan center' to isolate when grid power d
on
Hobbyist Renewable Energy?
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· Score: 2, Informative
tying into the grid is nice, if you're going to be producing enough power to light up 5 homes with an insanely large wind turbine, but this guy was talking about a hobbyist sized deal, where he's gone wrong is thinking he needs to tie in the grid at all. Batteries, cheap lead acid car batteries, they're really easy and cheap, and for a small project you might only need one $25 dollar battery and some cheap electronics that are quality but not certified for tying in the grid... then you can run a few lamps, maybe a refrigerator, maybe a tv, maybe even a computer... if you can predict the amount of energy produced all day, and the amount consumed, you can design the setup so the battery never dies, and always stays charged up...
why tie into the grid, when you're only producing enough wattage to power a single light bulb? eg: a home made windmill with a used car alternator.
why would you even consider tying into the grid instead of using a recyclable efficient lead acid battery?
as an example a nice DIY windmill might cost you $200 for a 16' pole, $30 for a used alternator, and $10-20 for wood and screws, and $40 for a new lead acid battery, plus $20-40 for wiring and electronics parts all told a DIY windmill for under $350 again it will probably only run a couple lamps, but the whole project is DIY
why tie into the grid when they sell lead acid batteries so cheap?
"3. Restrict your alternative power experiments to those that do not require an interconnect to the grid."
simple solution for #3, get a collection of lead acid batteries, connect them to the solar/wind generator, and off that connect to a circuit that say powers your fridge, or your tv, or your computer, and uses new non-grid wiring, you get continuous power from the battery system, and as long as your alternate energy device can charge the batteries up with whatever load you put on them you don't need to keep unplugging and plugging back in to grid power.
he's talking about doing a small solar or wind setup, so there is no sense trying to wire the whole house, and by not tying into the grid, you don't fry any linemen messing around with alternative energy.
First off, he's not a billionaire in the 'American' sense, since he's only worth $500 million US dollars, which happens to be about 3.5 billion of the dollars they use in South Africa, where he was born, and first became rich.
He now lives in england, and he only has put up 10 million dollars towards Ubuntu, but he's also invested in and donated to many open source groups, including KDE (he's the largest singe contributor to KDE ever)
He's a smart guy, who made his millions on tech and believes in Linux. Frankly, I believe at some point OEMs will wake up and realize 'I don't need microsoft' I mean if Dell pays $10 per copy of windows on all the 40.8 million PCs they shipped this year, that's still 408 million dollars. Can you imagine, if a few million here and a few million there from this Mark shuttleworth can make desktop linux closer to reality, imagine what even one tenth of what dell spends a year on windows would do for linux.
I've been waiting and waiting for OEMs to realize just what a money sinkhole microsoft is, and how they're the guys who make their part vendors support windows in the first place , and they're they guys who can break the publics bad habit of relying on windows, when better technology could easily be built. Sigh, someday, I can dream can't I?
if you have access to the physical hardware, and know which password encryption method was used, and can write to the shadow file, you can generate a new password, and overwrite into the shadow, his root password, all with a recovery/repair cd/ disk image.
I've forgotten a root password once (but it was on a bsd machine) so i just copied over my user account password in the shadow file, then set a new root password. it was easier for me because i knew a password on the system, the point is it's easy to generate a password with the correct crypto, if you have access to the shadow file, which most system recovery discs will easily give you access to.
"It would be far easier to supply your own counterfeit chip with the mods and sneak it into the supply chain."
Which is exactly what the Chinese ARE doing, and why the DOD is testing suppliers for their ability to detect modifications to chips. they decided that every chip used by the DOD now need to be checked for modifications, so they want whomever is best at finding those modifications to do it.
It's kinda hard to keep things secure if the Chinese have found a way to smuggle counterfeit chips into the DOD's firewall/routers that protect their organizations computers.
if the approach used is practical enough banks etc will start adopting similar approaches, after all cyber crime is running rampant and those with the money are looking for ways to protect it. Some credit card companies now text the user every time a credit card transaction goes through to catch credit card fraud faster.
"How will MADD know if I'm playing any of the other driving missions in the game...but I'm drunk in real life while doing it? Surely that must be worse than simulated drunkenness."
I was wondering if they'd have double vision or some kind of delay on when you press a button and when you get a response, after all without those features it's not really a drunk sim but just a 'slightly buzzed sim'
I don't play GTA games at all myself, but i would think a simulation that really really made the game harder to play (just as it would if you really got drunk) might make it easier to demonstrate to people how much harder it is to drive drunk. It's pretty sad when one of the major beer vendors slogan is 'drink responsibly' eg: don't drink and drive. I've seen people who only get drunk at home, vs those that only drink at bars, and often are too stupid to have a ride home, and the latter is far far more sad a state of denial to be in. Especially when you've gotten your third dui and you still aren't getting that you have a problem.
the whole point of concealed weapons are that some total stranger can't grab it out of your holster and shoot you with it.
cops run into that problem far more often than they'd like, and research has been done into putting biometrics into handguns for police so they can't be shot with their own firearm.
so open carry isn't as safe as concealed carry, plus with concealed carry, if you need to shoot someone they don't know what's coming until it's too late.
but shooting the idiots in the music industry, won't solve anything. What would solve things is an insane tax on analog music recordings, to shift the market to digital media. something like 500% should do it, and might help pay off that 9.4 trillion dollar national debt were faced with (its going up over a million dollars a minute, too)
it's not like music recordings need to sell at $10 to support artists and song writers, it's needed to make 5 or 6 multi billionaires in charge of analog music distribution.
just to be helpful, if OEMs pay $10 for windows, that's 2.5 billion a year to the Microsoft tax, if PC sales remain the same or increase and continue to sell in the current volumes, then by 2108 at least 255 billion dollars will have been saved by switching to Linux. realistically though growth has been rapidly accelerating, and the actual number goes much higher, if growth is 10% a year, every year, then in 6 years we make 2 billion new PCs, in another 4 years after that another 2 billion pcs, 3 years after that another 2 billion PCS, in 13 years, at $10 it's already 60 billion dollars saved. at that rate of snowballing growth, by 2108 the cost of the microsoft tax, at $10 per oem becomes a staggering 1.2 trillion dollars.
so 100 years of Microsoft would cost over 1.2 trillion dollars, still only 1/10th the national debt, but a staggering amount of money, they could never spend that much making Linux a viable replacement.
lawsuits about anti-competitive practices of microsoft may have changed things.
I realize that at one point microsoft was giving $15 licenses to OEMS who agreed to only ship microsoft, but now there is an oversight committee that reviews every change microsoft attempts to add to windows, as well as every contract they sign with oems etc.
I'm not sure what they pay now, but microsoft can no longer include exclusivity clauses.
but keep in mind OEMs are the bread and butter of microsofts core business windows, basically, 96% of PCs sold are sold by oems and there is a very small enthusiast market who roll their own, or upgrade an older machine to vista etc.
also keep in mind, more computers are built every year than have ever been built before, at the current rate of expansion there will be over 2 billion new PCs built by 2013.
and computers are getting more and more power hungry, and many people leave computers on all the time... but anyways, 255 million oem licenses even at $20 is 5.1 billion dollars i don't think you could possibly throw 5 billion dollars at Linux in a single year. so yes, Linux IS cheaper than windows unless Microsoft is willing to charge $.01 cent for windows major oems like Dell will be throwing 306 million dollars per 6% of the global computer market share they have at the 'Microsoft tax' at $20 It's still $15.3 million at $1 and $153,000 at 1 penny. (for 6% market share) or at one penny, 2.5 million a year for the global PC market.
so, don't dismiss the fact that if desktop linux was a clear alternative for windows that DELL would still save something like half a billion dollars A YEAR. imagine 125 years of savings. over 125 years, that's 62.5 billion dollars. if they charge $20 for windows.
I'd say Decades. element 112 first discovered in 1996 is still in debate about the name. it' creation and decay was confirmed in 2000, and as of 2008 it still is using it's greek name.
OTOH element 111 which was observed in 1994 and then confirmed in 2000, already had an official name by 2004.
the difference? 111 was detected as 3 particles each time 112 (and the element referenced in this article) are only found singly, also there is some debate over who discovered 112, but still, it can take decades, easily, after all 111 took exactly 1 decade to get away from it's greek name. so saying years when it really takes a decade or more, is a bit misleading.
"On February 2, 2004, synthesis of ununpentium was reported in Physical Review C by a team composed of Russian scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, and American scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.[1][2] The team reported that they bombarded americium-243 with calcium-48 ions to produce four atoms of ununpentium. These atoms, they report, decayed by emission of alpha-particles to ununtrium in approximately 100 milliseconds."
100 milliseconds of zero G wont get you far, even if it had that kind of special property.
i was most interested by the fact that they bombarded 'americum-243' with calcium-48 to make it, the naming of the elements used was pretty ironic to me.
SSDs are using NAND memory not NOR memory so you are wrong. NAND memory reads like traditional block devices. Compact Flash was the only device based on NOR memory, and is no longer used widely, and they eventually switched to NAND memory on CF, since the controller is in the chip this was easy to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory "Toshiba announced NAND flash at ISSCC in 1989. It has faster erase and write times, and requires a smaller chip area per cell, thus allowing greater storage densities and lower costs per bit than NOR flash; it also has up to ten times the endurance of NOR flash. However, the I/O interface of NAND flash does not provide a random-access external address bus. Rather, data must be read on a block-wise basis, with typical block sizes of hundreds to thousands of bits. This made NAND flash unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for program ROM since most microprocessors and microcontrollers required byte-level random access. In this regard NAND flash is similar to other secondary storage devices such as hard disks and optical media, and is thus very suitable for use in mass-storage devices such as memory cards. The first NAND-based removable media format was SmartMedia, and many others have followed, including MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital, Memory Stick and xD-Picture Card."
since NAND memory reads and writes like a block device, the only way for a SSD drive to increase its speed is by massively parallel read/write functionality, and since SSD drives are the only massively parallel source of data other than a very large super computer, or a network connection to millions of computers, there is little or no reason to design SSD memory to be massively parallel. i think normally ever 512 blocks has it's own shared read/write device, so sequential writes are horribly slow, since you have to write 512 blocks in a row, for each sequential write, now if you design a test bed where you can read 512 sections of 512 blocks in parallel (either from RAM, across a network, etc) you would essentially have a device that could read/write massively parallel blocks in a a much shorter time than any sequential block device, basically you'd have to RAID array a massive number of HDDs to get the same throughput, but normal SSDs aren't designed to be massively parallel, because most users need sequential throughput, and only server farms etc need massively parallel data streams..
and for server farms, the read/write limitations of SSD make it an unattractive alternative to conventional HDDs, however SSDs might be a good fit for supercomputers that have to do a lot of processing on a small amount of data, like weather prediction etc. at least, if they were designed to be massively parallel, and could thus be essentially a raid array of hundreds or thousands flash memory chips, instead of a single block device consisting of many many flash memory chips
if you go with stills, then you can get quite a lot of porn in 2 TB, so 2,097,152 still pictures if the stills are 1 megabyte a piece. if you look at each still for 5 seconds, you get 121 days of porn. compared to 41 days of watching dvd porn movies.
well obviously jpegs can be smaller, so you could have as low as 30 kb per still, or 34 times as many images, or 4,130 days of low res jpeg porn. a far cry from 23,725 days for a 65 year lifespan, even if you sleep/eat/shower half of the time.
so really it takes at least 6TB to fill 'one lifetime' of porn, if low res jpegs are used, or 204 TB for 4-8 megapixel jpegs, or 616 TB for standard DVD resolution for 1 lifetime of porn, or 3080 TB for a lifetime of high definition blu-ray porn. you can drop that to 1540 TB if you use mpeg-4 compressed HD, rather than 'standard' mpeg-2 compression.
I guess instead of 'libraries of congress' we should start measuring in 'lifetimes of porn' since i went to all the trouble of doing the math.
all the companies honestly developing 3-d data storage are struggling with the 'speed' issue. recording rates are slower than slow, and read back rates are much much faster. but it is new technology, and it will get better.
I remember when I though an 8X cd burner was a huge improvement over my previous 2X burner Now people think nothing of a 48X cd burner. once they can figure out how to make the hardware go faster and faster, it's going get a lot faster, and not stay a painfully slow process. They really wanted a reliable, easy to ship product, improved speed is just a way to create an upgrade market.
They are the first company to announce a ship date for 3-D storage, but they have another competitor in Israel that are aiming at a release by 2010.
the difference is that the competitor uses a 2-layer media with '100' virtual layers, rather than using holograms. quite different approaches, and both have announced very slow write rates and relatively good read back rates.
the telcom industry has been the most radically changed by new technology, in the 1970s people had telephone service, and unless they could afford long distance rates, they called relatives long distances away only for emergencies. Today, for $20 instead of getting 20 hours of long distance phone calls you get unlimited long distance through the US and sometimes Canada, often with only a small surcharge for calling Europe, or even a plan with unlimited calls over seas for a slightly larger monthly fee..
this is a drastic change, and it was only made possible by fiber optics, instead of laying expensive copper cables, cheap glass and cheap lasers are used instead.
and no the network wasn't laid for free, rather the googles of the world are paying for it, because the telcom industry discovered a much deeper pocket than consumers ever had, now that so much data can be sent over such a cheap infrastructure.
the market changed, and thanks to new technology they're rolling in money, even though more and more people are dropping land lines for wireless phones (which have also boosted telcom profits, $50 for the main plan plus $15 per phone... or more, for more minutes a month..)
Well, for one thing Only ATI's GPUs are capable of running directx 10.5, the fact of the matter is while ATI doesn't have the hottest card anymore, they've always been more concerned how good the image looks on the screen. Nvidia is as far as I'm concerned only worried about pixel pipe/vertex shader counts... they don't care what features of direct x game companies use to make 'prettier interfaces' for games, only about raw horsepower.
true this means for someone looking to pair a very nice 1080P 50" TV with a gaming system, they're either getting one nvidia card, or an SLI ATI configuration, but the picture looks so much better with games that support directx 10.5
As far as driver quality goes, Nvidia has the lions share of vista system crashes, with ati and then Microsoft as the sources of instability in vista... so it's not like nvidia has more stable drivers, you're just pretending like it's not a problem with nvidia even though everybody is having so much trouble with vista, that even Microsoft is rushing windows 7 to market.
Bandwidth will never be free, someone has to pay for all the giant undersea optical cables that make the 'internet' global, someone has to pay for all those buried fiber optic cables connecting cities, someone has to pay every time they're broken by a backhoe.
all the equipment takes a lot of energy, and the price of energy is going up, the cost of glass production may be going down due to the volumes we use to insulate homes, make windows (the kind in your home), make dishes etc, package food and goods in, the deoxygenated kind for printing silicon wafers, and making solar panels... and because of glass recycling becoming more prevalent.
but still, everything has a price, bandwidth is going down in price, because we went from shipping 'analog voices' over copper backbones to sending data over optic networks, and the technology for optics keeps getting better every year, eventually because the price of glass is so cheap, and they're now able to use other materials to make optic lines flexible, bandwidth will continue to drop in price, as the availability goes up, and we replace copper networks with all optic networks..
but still at the end of the day someone has to pay for all the overhead, so bandwidth will never be free. the dropping prices are related to improving technology, and there is still a lot more that can be done to improve, so prices can go even lower, and even more bandwidth can be sold. Even so, bandwidth will never be free.
the city of Alameda is an island though, and they only went with cable tv/internet.
this project sounds like they plan to offer triple play service (telephone/tv/internet) although more and more people are going cell phone only, in rural areas it may be less feasible since there are only so many towers and only in bigger cities and along major highways.
They plan on building a comparable Fiber network to the one Burlington Vermont did and got 40$ of the market there. They plan on having more people in the rural area subscribe too, but I think they are naive to expect that, with long term contracts to satellite internet service etc, and lower median incomes, I would expect a far lower adoption rate, perhaps half or less... since their pricing model is based on adoption rates... i think they'll be hemorrhaging money in no time.. all because of 2+ year commitments on satellite service... and because the people there might not have the $50 'minimum' monthly payment. paying $20 or $10 a month for dialup internet now plus $20 for phone service even if it's 14.4 speed is way different from paying a minimum of $50 for Fiber to the home with TV internet and phone service.. even if you add $35 for a single tv satellite basic package, you're only up to $55 a month, and if their assumption of a $50 starting price is based on getting half the residents to sign up and the real cost winds up being $70... that's a nightmare for the 12 communities involved..
remember some people use reception based TVs so they don't have the satellite TV bill to add in, and even if you offer just phone service, apparently there is a high cost for connecting each house (likely a fiber router that can do tv/internet/phone service, and connects to all the houses existing coaxial cable or telephone lines, as well as running new coaxial and Ethernet lines for PCs/TVs..) although if you just get phone they can just do the phone, but if you ever change your mind you have do the expensive in house cable running (usually through the basement or sometime outside the house, just drilling through the walls etc)
if they don't have the costs of running those legacy wires figured in they will find they drastically underestimated the cost of fiber to the home. even if they go with a fiber router that includes wireless a/g/n capabilities unless they can put additional boxes with every tv then they're still going to have to either adapt existing lines or run their own lines.
DSL may not be better, but it does have the advantage of not needing to run new lines, that's why I've seen many small towns go to DSL/TV over the phone line systems. they can offer triple play services in communities without running new wires, and even then their prices are considerably more than $50 although of course they are for profit companies...
and yes TV over regular copper phone lines. it does exist, I've seen and watched it, although not the AT&t version. the version i saw had the normal number of cable channels (more than 40) plus they had 20 audio only channels, and the box did internet and phone service too it was an all in one box, that hooked into the existing wiring wherever possible. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/27/2315239&from=rss
running that much fiber optics is going to be costly, if they don't get the adoption rates they wanted they're going to go belly up pretty quick.
on the plus side, rural people tend to do a lot less on the net than big city folks, word about p2p applications doesn't get around as fast.. and even you tube uses trivial amounts of bandwidth compared to p2p.
you didn't get my point, it's not that i was intentionally wrong, it's just that i often post about things AS I remember them happening, my memory is failable and i have almost 3000 non anonymous posts. sometimes i realize when reading other news articles, that i was dead wrong a day or so back... it's easy for me to realize i said stuff wrong in the past tense...
intentional? as if. i just don't have good memory retention skills... never have, may be related to my mental illness, but i remember people in my family being similar.
"If you are tactful, humble, erudite, and most of all, well informed on the subject you are posting about, you will be respected and modded up"
If i had a dime for every time i was modded up when I was WRONG I'd probably have $50.
If you post something that later turns out to be wrong, but was formatted correctly, and is a popular misconception you can get modded to +3 or +4 if you're lucky. to really get to +5 you generally have to be right, but getting to +3 is easy, about 1/5 of my posts get modded to +3 occasionally I come across something i can get modded to +5 with, but I already have karma bonus, it is a LOT harder to get modded from 1 to 2 than it is to get modded from 2 to 3... it has to do with the way slashcode rewards moderator points, and the way most people read articles.
for about a month i was trying to get a second account modded up i think i got 3 out of 60 articles modded up, it was pathetic. Plus the way slashcode works for people with lower karma is annoying.. It took me several months to get to the karma max on this account, in comparison on gamefaqs, just regular posting to message groups got my karma raised to a sufficient level, but gamefaqs has a radically different karma system for one thing the maximum karma is like 4096 or something.
the thing is gamefaqs used a more standard message board layout, and slashdot is primarily a news site, so older threads don't get moderated, and if you start moderating journals, they're apt to take away your mod points.. old threads could be bumped up by posting to them again on gamefaqs which is way different for keeping stuff that people want to read around rather than the way slashcode focuses highly on being quick to post about subjects to get karma.
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if you're in a dry climate, they buy water fans. basically a big humidifier attached to a fan, as the water rapidly evaporates, it rapidly cools the air.
while this works great in Arizona, and the cost is nowhere near that of AC, the climate has to be dry enough for this to really work. for portable cooling, I've always found a canteen, and a colored cotton t-shirt to be quite refreshing even in humid climates (the water cools even if it can't evaporate, and this is generally how i tolerate bike riding once it gets hot)
only works if your house is well insulated, and frankly even with slats and insulation a house can become very warm during the day, without AC or some type of heat pump. the best type of heat pump for cooling is one with a reservoir that it can cool at night, but normal heat pumps don't do this... I've heard of a custom system they built for a museum in France, that cools and underground reservoir at night time and then uses that reservoir to cool the museum all day long, but even the heat pumps that require a reservoir for heating, don't also use that reservoir for cooling. seems a bit backwards to me, but maybe they're worried that the reservoir won't be warm enough to heat the house if they cool it... but then they could have a dual reservoir system, one for heating and one for cooling the cooling reservoir could be insulated lightly against the ground warmth, for optimal night time cooling...
maybe it's just as expensive to cool a reservoir, as it is to try to pump heat outside on a 110F day, but i doubt that somehow. oh well.
By geo-thermal i think you mean a 'heat pump' which is just a large underground tank of water. there is nothing geothermal about it, it exploits the fact that the temperature underground doesn't vary, that several feet of dirt is a very good insulator, and that at night time, it can use a radiator to cool the tank of water at night if needed.
I've yet to see an in home geothermal solution so I'm going to assume you meant a heat pump, which is a totally different concept.
personally i prefer using several kiddie pools as algae farms it's pretty cheap and easy, although to get bumper crops you may need to use low cost additives to promote the growth of algae, harvesting is pretty easy, a pool skim works fine, pressing is easy too, you have your choice or methods, a foot press is the lowest cost, but you might get tired of that quickly, so an automatic press might be preferred. you have to press algae to separate the vegetable oil from the the vegetable waste. the oil can either be used in s SVO(straight vegetable oil) converted diesel engine or converted to biodiesel with lye an any form of alcohol. the vegetable remains can be burned, or converted to ethanol, or used as feedstock for cows etc.
of course, the first real commercial production of algae started this month down in texas, by a long time oil and gas company... they're planning quite a bit of expansion in the growth and use of algae as a viable alternative to our shrinking oil reserves. Algae was first considered as an alternative in the 70s, but sadly there was no determination to switch to an unproven technology where all new farming and processing technology was needed, rather than export all our money over seas to foreign oil production...
if it is viable i think it wont take long for enough algae to be produced to make our dependence on foreign oil a part of history, if it isn't profitable enough, then we can still try to use algae to make coal electricity kyoto convention 'clean' in terms of CO emissions and legislate it at the cost of driving electricity prices higher.
but I feel that it will be viable, and at some point there will be a debate over if diesel engines should be replaced with SVO engines, because it does cost money to buy the lye and alcohol needed to convert plant oil to biodiesel, and SVO engines would save this cost... there are already kits available to convert a diesel engine to a SVO engine, as detailed at this website http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html
it seems that an engine kitted for SVO can still burn diesel, so the transition should be easy to legislate, eg: require SVO optimized engines for a decade before require SVO to replace BD/diesel.
although in practice a SVO kitted engine might have lower fuel economy when running Biodiesel or regular diesel, still, if the idea is to switch from petrol diesel to bio-fuels, the Logical choice is SVO for it's cost savings over Biodiesel.
tying into the grid is nice, if you're going to be producing enough power to light up 5 homes with an insanely large wind turbine, but this guy was talking about a hobbyist sized deal, where he's gone wrong is thinking he needs to tie in the grid at all. Batteries, cheap lead acid car batteries, they're really easy and cheap, and for a small project you might only need one $25 dollar battery and some cheap electronics that are quality but not certified for tying in the grid... then you can run a few lamps, maybe a refrigerator, maybe a tv, maybe even a computer... if you can predict the amount of energy produced all day, and the amount consumed, you can design the setup so the battery never dies, and always stays charged up...
why tie into the grid, when you're only producing enough wattage to power a single light bulb? eg: a home made windmill with a used car alternator.
why would you even consider tying into the grid instead of using a recyclable efficient lead acid battery?
as an example a nice DIY windmill might cost you $200 for a 16' pole, $30 for a used alternator, and $10-20 for wood and screws, and $40 for a new lead acid battery, plus $20-40 for wiring and electronics parts all told a DIY windmill for under $350 again it will probably only run a couple lamps, but the whole project is DIY
why tie into the grid when they sell lead acid batteries so cheap?
"3. Restrict your alternative power experiments to those that do not require an interconnect to the grid."
simple solution for #3, get a collection of lead acid batteries, connect them to the solar/wind generator, and off that connect to a circuit that say powers your fridge, or your tv, or your computer, and uses new non-grid wiring, you get continuous power from the battery system, and as long as your alternate energy device can charge the batteries up with whatever load you put on them you don't need to keep unplugging and plugging back in to grid power.
he's talking about doing a small solar or wind setup, so there is no sense trying to wire the whole house, and by not tying into the grid, you don't fry any linemen messing around with alternative energy.
First off, he's not a billionaire in the 'American' sense, since he's only worth $500 million US dollars, which happens to be about 3.5 billion of the dollars they use in South Africa, where he was born, and first became rich.
He now lives in england, and he only has put up 10 million dollars towards Ubuntu, but he's also invested in and donated to many open source groups, including KDE (he's the largest singe contributor to KDE ever)
He's a smart guy, who made his millions on tech and believes in Linux. Frankly, I believe at some point OEMs will wake up and realize 'I don't need microsoft' I mean if Dell pays $10 per copy of windows on all the 40.8 million PCs they shipped this year, that's still 408 million dollars. Can you imagine, if a few million here and a few million there from this Mark shuttleworth can make desktop linux closer to reality, imagine what even one tenth of what dell spends a year on windows would do for linux.
I've been waiting and waiting for OEMs to realize just what a money sinkhole microsoft is, and how they're the guys who make their part vendors support windows in the first place , and they're they guys who can break the publics bad habit of relying on windows, when better technology could easily be built. Sigh, someday, I can dream can't I?
if you have access to the physical hardware, and know which password encryption method was used, and can write to the shadow file, you can generate a new password, and overwrite into the shadow, his root password, all with a recovery/repair cd/ disk image.
I've forgotten a root password once (but it was on a bsd machine) so i just copied over my user account password in the shadow file, then set a new root password. it was easier for me because i knew a password on the system, the point is it's easy to generate a password with the correct crypto, if you have access to the shadow file, which most system recovery discs will easily give you access to.
"It would be far easier to supply your own counterfeit chip with the mods and sneak it into the supply chain."
Which is exactly what the Chinese ARE doing, and why the DOD is testing suppliers for their ability to detect modifications to chips. they decided that every chip used by the DOD now need to be checked for modifications, so they want whomever is best at finding those modifications to do it.
It's kinda hard to keep things secure if the Chinese have found a way to smuggle counterfeit chips into the DOD's firewall/routers that protect their organizations computers.
if the approach used is practical enough banks etc will start adopting similar approaches, after all cyber crime is running rampant and those with the money are looking for ways to protect it. Some credit card companies now text the user every time a credit card transaction goes through to catch credit card fraud faster.
"How will MADD know if I'm playing any of the other driving missions in the game...but I'm drunk in real life while doing it? Surely that must be worse than simulated drunkenness."
I was wondering if they'd have double vision or some kind of delay on when you press a button and when you get a response, after all without those features it's not really a drunk sim but just a 'slightly buzzed sim'
I don't play GTA games at all myself, but i would think a simulation that really really made the game harder to play (just as it would if you really got drunk) might make it easier to demonstrate to people how much harder it is to drive drunk. It's pretty sad when one of the major beer vendors slogan is 'drink responsibly' eg: don't drink and drive. I've seen people who only get drunk at home, vs those that only drink at bars, and often are too stupid to have a ride home, and the latter is far far more sad a state of denial to be in. Especially when you've gotten your third dui and you still aren't getting that you have a problem.
the whole point of concealed weapons are that some total stranger can't grab it out of your holster and shoot you with it.
cops run into that problem far more often than they'd like, and research has been done into putting biometrics into handguns for police so they can't be shot with their own firearm.
so open carry isn't as safe as concealed carry, plus with concealed carry, if you need to shoot someone they don't know what's coming until it's too late.
but shooting the idiots in the music industry, won't solve anything. What would solve things is an insane tax on analog music recordings, to shift the market to digital media. something like 500% should do it, and might help pay off that 9.4 trillion dollar national debt were faced with (its going up over a million dollars a minute, too)
it's not like music recordings need to sell at $10 to support artists and song writers, it's needed to make 5 or 6 multi billionaires in charge of analog music distribution.
just to be helpful, if OEMs pay $10 for windows, that's 2.5 billion a year to the Microsoft tax, if PC sales remain the same or increase and continue to sell in the current volumes, then by 2108 at least 255 billion dollars will have been saved by switching to Linux. realistically though growth has been rapidly accelerating, and the actual number goes much higher, if growth is 10% a year, every year, then in 6 years we make 2 billion new PCs, in another 4 years after that another 2 billion pcs, 3 years after that another 2 billion PCS, in 13 years, at $10 it's already 60 billion dollars saved. at that rate of snowballing growth, by 2108 the cost of the microsoft tax, at $10 per oem becomes a staggering 1.2 trillion dollars.
so 100 years of Microsoft would cost over 1.2 trillion dollars, still only 1/10th the national debt, but a staggering amount of money, they could never spend that much making Linux a viable replacement.
lawsuits about anti-competitive practices of microsoft may have changed things.
I realize that at one point microsoft was giving $15 licenses to OEMS who agreed to only ship microsoft, but now there is an oversight committee that reviews every change microsoft attempts to add to windows, as well as every contract they sign with oems etc.
I'm not sure what they pay now, but microsoft can no longer include exclusivity clauses.
but keep in mind OEMs are the bread and butter of microsofts core business windows, basically, 96% of PCs sold are sold by oems and there is a very small enthusiast market who roll their own, or upgrade an older machine to vista etc.
also keep in mind, more computers are built every year than have ever been built before, at the current rate of expansion there will be over 2 billion new PCs built by 2013.
and computers are getting more and more power hungry, and many people leave computers on all the time... but anyways, 255 million oem licenses even at $20 is 5.1 billion dollars i don't think you could possibly throw 5 billion dollars at Linux in a single year. so yes, Linux IS cheaper than windows unless Microsoft is willing to charge $.01 cent for windows major oems like Dell will be throwing 306 million dollars per 6% of the global computer market share they have at the 'Microsoft tax' at $20 It's still $15.3 million at $1 and $153,000 at 1 penny. (for 6% market share) or at one penny, 2.5 million a year for the global PC market.
so, don't dismiss the fact that if desktop linux was a clear alternative for windows that DELL would still save something like half a billion dollars A YEAR. imagine 125 years of savings. over 125 years, that's 62.5 billion dollars. if they charge $20 for windows.
I'd say Decades. element 112 first discovered in 1996 is still in debate about the name. it' creation and decay was confirmed in 2000, and as of 2008 it still is using it's greek name.
OTOH element 111 which was observed in 1994 and then confirmed in 2000, already had an official name by 2004.
the difference? 111 was detected as 3 particles each time 112 (and the element referenced in this article) are only found singly, also there is some debate over who discovered 112, but still, it can take decades, easily, after all 111 took exactly 1 decade to get away from it's greek name. so saying years when it really takes a decade or more, is a bit misleading.
"On February 2, 2004, synthesis of ununpentium was reported in Physical Review C by a team composed of Russian scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, and American scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.[1][2] The team reported that they bombarded americium-243 with calcium-48 ions to produce four atoms of ununpentium. These atoms, they report, decayed by emission of alpha-particles to ununtrium in approximately 100 milliseconds."
100 milliseconds of zero G wont get you far, even if it had that kind of special property.
i was most interested by the fact that they bombarded 'americum-243' with calcium-48 to make it, the naming of the elements used was pretty ironic to me.
SSDs are using NAND memory not NOR memory so you are wrong. NAND memory reads like traditional block devices. Compact Flash was the only device based on NOR memory, and is no longer used widely, and they eventually switched to NAND memory on CF, since the controller is in the chip this was easy to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
"Toshiba announced NAND flash at ISSCC in 1989. It has faster erase and write times, and requires a smaller chip area per cell, thus allowing greater storage densities and lower costs per bit than NOR flash; it also has up to ten times the endurance of NOR flash. However, the I/O interface of NAND flash does not provide a random-access external address bus. Rather, data must be read on a block-wise basis, with typical block sizes of hundreds to thousands of bits. This made NAND flash unsuitable as a drop-in replacement for program ROM since most microprocessors and microcontrollers required byte-level random access. In this regard NAND flash is similar to other secondary storage devices such as hard disks and optical media, and is thus very suitable for use in mass-storage devices such as memory cards. The first NAND-based removable media format was SmartMedia, and many others have followed, including MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital, Memory Stick and xD-Picture Card."
since NAND memory reads and writes like a block device, the only way for a SSD drive to increase its speed is by massively parallel read/write functionality, and since SSD drives are the only massively parallel source of data other than a very large super computer, or a network connection to millions of computers, there is little or no reason to design SSD memory to be massively parallel. i think normally ever 512 blocks has it's own shared read/write device, so sequential writes are horribly slow, since you have to write 512 blocks in a row, for each sequential write, now if you design a test bed where you can read 512 sections of 512 blocks in parallel (either from RAM, across a network, etc) you would essentially have a device that could read/write massively parallel blocks in a a much shorter time than any sequential block device, basically you'd have to RAID array a massive number of HDDs to get the same throughput, but normal SSDs aren't designed to be massively parallel, because most users need sequential throughput, and only server farms etc need massively parallel data streams..
and for server farms, the read/write limitations of SSD make it an unattractive alternative to conventional HDDs, however SSDs might be a good fit for supercomputers that have to do a lot of processing on a small amount of data, like weather prediction etc. at least, if they were designed to be massively parallel, and could thus be essentially a raid array of hundreds or thousands flash memory chips, instead of a single block device consisting of many many flash memory chips
he was probably thinking 'still photographs'
if you go with stills, then you can get quite a lot of porn in 2 TB, so 2,097,152 still pictures if the stills are 1 megabyte a piece. if you look at each still for 5 seconds, you get 121 days of porn. compared to 41 days of watching dvd porn movies.
well obviously jpegs can be smaller, so you could have as low as 30 kb per still, or 34 times as many images, or 4,130 days of low res jpeg porn. a far cry from 23,725 days for a 65 year lifespan, even if you sleep/eat/shower half of the time.
so really it takes at least 6TB to fill 'one lifetime' of porn, if low res jpegs are used, or 204 TB for 4-8 megapixel jpegs, or 616 TB for standard DVD resolution for 1 lifetime of porn, or 3080 TB for a lifetime of high definition blu-ray porn. you can drop that to 1540 TB if you use mpeg-4 compressed HD, rather than 'standard' mpeg-2 compression.
I guess instead of 'libraries of congress' we should start measuring in 'lifetimes of porn' since i went to all the trouble of doing the math.
all the companies honestly developing 3-d data storage are struggling with the 'speed' issue. recording rates are slower than slow, and read back rates are much much faster. but it is new technology, and it will get better.
I remember when I though an 8X cd burner was a huge improvement over my previous 2X burner Now people think nothing of a 48X cd burner. once they can figure out how to make the hardware go faster and faster, it's going get a lot faster, and not stay a painfully slow process. They really wanted a reliable, easy to ship product, improved speed is just a way to create an upgrade market.
They are the first company to announce a ship date for 3-D storage, but they have another competitor in Israel that are aiming at a release by 2010.
the difference is that the competitor uses a 2-layer media with '100' virtual layers, rather than using holograms. quite different approaches, and both have announced very slow write rates and relatively good read back rates.
by official, i mean 'default on ubuntu 7.10 linux, having chosen 'chicago' timezone.'
the telcom industry has been the most radically changed by new technology, in the 1970s people had telephone service, and unless they could afford long distance rates, they called relatives long distances away only for emergencies. Today, for $20 instead of getting 20 hours of long distance phone calls you get unlimited long distance through the US and sometimes Canada, often with only a small surcharge for calling Europe, or even a plan with unlimited calls over seas for a slightly larger monthly fee..
this is a drastic change, and it was only made possible by fiber optics, instead of laying expensive copper cables, cheap glass and cheap lasers are used instead.
and no the network wasn't laid for free, rather the googles of the world are paying for it, because the telcom industry discovered a much deeper pocket than consumers ever had, now that so much data can be sent over such a cheap infrastructure.
the market changed, and thanks to new technology they're rolling in money, even though more and more people are dropping land lines for wireless phones (which have also boosted telcom profits, $50 for the main plan plus $15 per phone... or more, for more minutes a month..)
Well, for one thing Only ATI's GPUs are capable of running directx 10.5, the fact of the matter is while ATI doesn't have the hottest card anymore, they've always been more concerned how good the image looks on the screen. Nvidia is as far as I'm concerned only worried about pixel pipe/vertex shader counts... they don't care what features of direct x game companies use to make 'prettier interfaces' for games, only about raw horsepower.
true this means for someone looking to pair a very nice 1080P 50" TV with a gaming system, they're either getting one nvidia card, or an SLI ATI configuration, but the picture looks so much better with games that support directx 10.5
As far as driver quality goes, Nvidia has the lions share of vista system crashes, with ati and then Microsoft as the sources of instability in vista... so it's not like nvidia has more stable drivers, you're just pretending like it's not a problem with nvidia even though everybody is having so much trouble with vista, that even Microsoft is rushing windows 7 to market.
"When bandwidth becomes free"
Bandwidth will never be free, someone has to pay for all the giant undersea optical cables that make the 'internet' global, someone has to pay for all those buried fiber optic cables connecting cities, someone has to pay every time they're broken by a backhoe.
all the equipment takes a lot of energy, and the price of energy is going up, the cost of glass production may be going down due to the volumes we use to insulate homes, make windows (the kind in your home), make dishes etc, package food and goods in, the deoxygenated kind for printing silicon wafers, and making solar panels... and because of glass recycling becoming more prevalent.
but still, everything has a price, bandwidth is going down in price, because we went from shipping 'analog voices' over copper backbones to sending data over optic networks, and the technology for optics keeps getting better every year, eventually because the price of glass is so cheap, and they're now able to use other materials to make optic lines flexible, bandwidth will continue to drop in price, as the availability goes up, and we replace copper networks with all optic networks..
but still at the end of the day someone has to pay for all the overhead, so bandwidth will never be free. the dropping prices are related to improving technology, and there is still a lot more that can be done to improve, so prices can go even lower, and even more bandwidth can be sold. Even so, bandwidth will never be free.
the city of Alameda is an island though, and they only went with cable tv/internet.
this project sounds like they plan to offer triple play service (telephone/tv/internet) although more and more people are going cell phone only, in rural areas it may be less feasible since there are only so many towers and only in bigger cities and along major highways.
They plan on building a comparable Fiber network to the one Burlington Vermont did and got 40$ of the market there. They plan on having more people in the rural area subscribe too, but I think they are naive to expect that, with long term contracts to satellite internet service etc, and lower median incomes, I would expect a far lower adoption rate, perhaps half or less... since their pricing model is based on adoption rates... i think they'll be hemorrhaging money in no time.. all because of 2+ year commitments on satellite service... and because the people there might not have the $50 'minimum' monthly payment. paying $20 or $10 a month for dialup internet now plus $20 for phone service even if it's 14.4 speed is way different from paying a minimum of $50 for Fiber to the home with TV internet and phone service.. even if you add $35 for a single tv satellite basic package, you're only up to $55 a month, and if their assumption of a $50 starting price is based on getting half the residents to sign up and the real cost winds up being $70... that's a nightmare for the 12 communities involved..
remember some people use reception based TVs so they don't have the satellite TV bill to add in, and even if you offer just phone service, apparently there is a high cost for connecting each house (likely a fiber router that can do tv/internet/phone service, and connects to all the houses existing coaxial cable or telephone lines, as well as running new coaxial and Ethernet lines for PCs/TVs..) although if you just get phone they can just do the phone, but if you ever change your mind you have do the expensive in house cable running (usually through the basement or sometime outside the house, just drilling through the walls etc)
if they don't have the costs of running those legacy wires figured in they will find they drastically underestimated the cost of fiber to the home. even if they go with a fiber router that includes wireless a/g/n capabilities unless they can put additional boxes with every tv then they're still going to have to either adapt existing lines or run their own lines.
DSL may not be better, but it does have the advantage of not needing to run new lines, that's why I've seen many small towns go to DSL/TV over the phone line systems. they can offer triple play services in communities without running new wires, and even then their prices are considerably more than $50 although of course they are for profit companies...
and yes TV over regular copper phone lines. it does exist, I've seen and watched it, although not the AT&t version. the version i saw had the normal number of cable channels (more than 40) plus they had 20 audio only channels, and the box did internet and phone service too it was an all in one box, that hooked into the existing wiring wherever possible. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/27/2315239&from=rss
running that much fiber optics is going to be costly, if they don't get the adoption rates they wanted they're going to go belly up pretty quick.
on the plus side, rural people tend to do a lot less on the net than big city folks, word about p2p applications doesn't get around as fast.. and even you tube uses trivial amounts of bandwidth compared to p2p.
you didn't get my point, it's not that i was intentionally wrong, it's just that i often post about things AS I remember them happening, my memory is failable and i have almost 3000 non anonymous posts. sometimes i realize when reading other news articles, that i was dead wrong a day or so back... it's easy for me to realize i said stuff wrong in the past tense...
intentional? as if. i just don't have good memory retention skills... never have, may be related to my mental illness, but i remember people in my family being similar.
"If you are tactful, humble, erudite, and most of all, well informed on the subject you are posting about, you will be respected and modded up"
If i had a dime for every time i was modded up when I was WRONG I'd probably have $50.
If you post something that later turns out to be wrong, but was formatted correctly, and is a popular misconception you can get modded to +3 or +4 if you're lucky. to really get to +5 you generally have to be right, but getting to +3 is easy, about 1/5 of my posts get modded to +3 occasionally I come across something i can get modded to +5 with, but I already have karma bonus, it is a LOT harder to get modded from 1 to 2 than it is to get modded from 2 to 3... it has to do with the way slashcode rewards moderator points, and the way most people read articles.
for about a month i was trying to get a second account modded up i think i got 3 out of 60 articles modded up, it was pathetic. Plus the way slashcode works for people with lower karma is annoying.. It took me several months to get to the karma max on this account, in comparison on gamefaqs, just regular posting to message groups got my karma raised to a sufficient level, but gamefaqs has a radically different karma system for one thing the maximum karma is like 4096 or something.
the thing is gamefaqs used a more standard message board layout, and slashdot is primarily a news site, so older threads don't get moderated, and if you start moderating journals, they're apt to take away your mod points.. old threads could be bumped up by posting to them again on gamefaqs which is way different for keeping stuff that people want to read around rather than the way slashcode focuses highly on being quick to post about subjects to get karma.