Everyone keeps claiming that nuclear waste is a huge long-term problem or that we'll run out of U235. This is a political problem and not a technological problem. Technologically, the problems have been solved, but due to a federal mandate from President Carter we are stuck with the current mess.
It is well known how to convert U238 into plutonium as a usable fuel, and the isotope of Pu is not suitable for bombs either. Thorium is also readily available as a fuel as well with a much larger supply than Uranium.
The other problem that always comes up is nuclear waste. When a fuel rod is removed from a reactor, it still contains a lot of usable fuel, which can be extracted and reused. If we use breeder reactors, the long term nuclear waste can be burned up so the only remainder is stuff that has a half life in the hundreds of years instead of thousands or tens of thousands of years, and it would be a fraction of the amount of waste. France already does this. It's expensive, but cost can probably be greatly reduced as the process is improved and the scale grows.
Granted, we do need to have very strong safety standards, but modern designs for nuclear reactors are a lot safer than the old designs. And the cost could also be drastically reduced if we stopped making each reactor a complete custom one-of and had a bunch with the same basic design.
The other form of energy I'd like to see tapped is geothermal, since that's almost free.
I consider myself green and am looking into installing Solar when the price drops a bit more.
Fat16 has been used by many digital cameras until fairly recently. My Canon elph SD100 from 3 years ago has problems with 1GB SD and only supports fat16. Most newer devices support both, but some cameras seem to run faster with fat16 vs fat32, perhaps due to the smaller directory entries (a lot of modern cameras get slower as more pictures are written). My Nikons don't seem to suffer this but I think they cache some filesystem information.
1. PDF files can be converted either for free or $0.10 to have them sent over the EVDO network. PDFs often don't work well on smaller displays without a lot of scrolling about (which is painful with e-Ink). PDFs are usually formatted for Letter or A4 paper and don't support reflowing the text for a different medium. 2. You can annotate. That's what the keyboard is for. 3. It does allow you to browse. The browser isn't perfect, since the e-Ink presents problems (no smooth scrolling available). I just read an article on how they were able to access calendar and email through Gmail using their mobile interface. 4. You don't really need Wi-fi hot spots when you have the EVDO network. Also, there are no monthly charges to use that network, so you can browse Wikipedia or whatever all you want through the built-in web browser. 5. For a screen that size it looks pretty decent. I don't have one myself but have played with it. It's pretty easy on the eyes. The text is quite clear and easy to read and it doesn't look too pixelated.
The problem is that PDFs are difficult or impossible to read when scaled to a small screen, and scrolling both horizontally and vertically to read it makes it very awkward.
As it is, I detest PDF files that are two columns since I have to scroll back to the top when reading a single page, and this is on a computer screen.
PDF is a poor format for eBooks because everything is pre-formatted, usually for a much larger screen. The MOBI format is much better for such devices, since it lets the device adjust the formatting to fit the screen rather than already defining a single format.
If it breaks or is stolen, you still have all of your books. Amazon keeps a backup of all of your books which they will download to a replacement unit. They already dealt with this issue.
Um, Kindel can read HTML and PDFs (and other document types, i.e. MS.DOC) can be converted ($0.10 with the file uploaded wirelessly to the Kindel. As for HTML, I guess the ability to access web sites and Wikipedia over the EVDO network free of charge don't count either.
PDFs are a difficult format to deal with, since a PDF is already layed out and designed typically for a 8.5x11 sheet of paper (or A4). They don't lend themselves very well to smaller displays since they come pre-formatted.
I am a Comcast subscriber and I use Bittorrent to download Linux DVD ISOs and other legal content. My experience is that the performance of Bittorrent is abysmal, presumably due to their "delaying" method. Comcast should not be spoofing any packets.
I would have no problem with Comcast using CoS instead and just classify Bittorrent traffic as low-priority bulk transfers. This way it would get whatever bandwidth is left over yet prioritize more important traffic like games and VOIP. (In fact, this is how I have my firewall configured).
I just ordered a Lexar 8GB compact flash with UDMA which will do 45MB/sec (300x), so there are other players out there besides SanDisk. I saw one from a no-name that claimed 350x speeds, but Lexar has a good name and offers recovery software. They also offer some high-speed readers supporting firewire (which, IMO, is much faster and more reliable than USB [at least on Linux]).
Of course I also have a camera on order which also supports UDMA which can take advantage of this card.
I looked at Sandisk, and I did not see UDMA support in their high-speed compact flash cards.
I'm sure Adobe knows this too and doesn't do much about it because they know that the more people who learn it and use it, the more people will buy it. When growing up I copied a fair amount of software, mostly because there's no way I could afford it, though I did buy some. Of course now it's different and I buy all the non-OSS software I use (yes, I pay for software to run on Linux).
As I understand it, the RFID is used for a pressure sensor to detect if a tire is very low and to give a warning to the driver. Each wheel has a unique ID, presumably in case you park really close to another Toyota.
Exchange does have IMAP available since I use Thunderbird on Linux at work to connect to it (via IMAP). It's slow, but it (usually) works, though it seems to hiccup and die periodically or require several tries to log in without timing out. The IMAP also seems to require periodic restarts on the Exchange side.
There is a feature in IMAP I think called IDLE where the client gets notified immediately if new email arrives. Recent versions of Thunderbird support this, so at work the instant an email arrives, Thunderbird will show it as available. KMail does not yet support this feature, at least in 3.5.7.
This doesn't work properly from my experience. It only notifies when it does it's next polling (usually every 5-10 minutes). Thunderbird will notify the instant the email arrives. It's a feature in IMAP which I think KMail does not yet implement.
Kmail shows a lot of promise, but I keep running into major stability issues with IMAP support with Kmail, plus it doesn't support the immediate notification of email like Thunderbird does. Hopefully this will be improved in KDE 4.0.
It can't handle more than 8 bits per color, which is a serious limitation for me. Most, if not all, D-SLRs can save in a RAW format which typically stores more than 8 bits per color, often 12 to 14 bits. This preserves more detail in the shadows which can be brought out with the proper software. Similarly, it is best if at least some of the image processing can be done in the raw data before converting it to RGB. On a digital camera, a pixel is not RGB*, but red, green, or blue (or sometimes even a different color) and must be processed to find out the actual color of a pixel location. Photoshop and other professional packages are able to handle this just fine. I think Krita can also deal with this, though I haven't played with it much. The last time I used it it was too slow to be usable.
In the past I found Gimp's user interface rather awkward to use. I have not used Photoshop, but I do use Bibble Pro on Linux, which has excellent raw photo processing support and is great for workflow processing.
* Foveon makes a sensor where each pixel is RGB, but its light sensitivity is not very good and hence is not widely used in cameras.
A lot of software contains proprietary libraries or other pieces of software provided by 3rd parties, which they are not allowed to distribute. It can be a huge job to strip or re-write those libraries, like what Sun had to do with Solaris, and if it's old software, it just isn't worth their time.
Many years ago I saw a SCSI drive that did just that. It was really cool looking inside, but it had reliability problems according to a friend of mine who bought one.
I concur. We have some newer PCs at work with integrated Intel graphics and the drivers don't work at all. The best I can get is frame buffer mode, which is useless with the LCD monitors, since the FB drivers cannot match the monitor's native resolution and are incredibly slow. I just gave up and installed an nVidia card with nVidia's driver, and everything just plain worked. I've rarely had problems with their proprietary driver. The only thing I need to remember is to reinstall after I boot into a new kernel (but even this is fairly painless).
I'd say Intel is worse shit than even ATI (which I detest). Out of the two Intel systems at work, neither will work outside of frame buffer mode, and worse than that, they cannot run at the native resolution of the LCD monitor.
The nVidia drivers just plain work. They detected the monitor correctly and have worked flawlessly ever since. Open or close source, they are by far the best drivers I've used. The ATI drivers I use on one of the machines support the monitors, but introduce periodic 2-D corruption when running Xemacs and corrupt the cursor when moving between Xinerama panes, but at least they can do 1680x1050 and Xinerama. I don't even mind that the 3-D is slow since this is a work machine and I don't really need 3-D.
The Intel drivers are far too slow at 2-D, and given I can only do 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 and both look like crap on the LCD monitors. One machine is a P-4 and the other a core 2 duo machine, and both are unusable with Intel.
I only want 2-D and the Intel drivers can't even do that right.
Also with nVidia, I don't really even need to care which chipset is used as long as it isn't too old, since the drivers just work. Even the open source nVidia drivers work well for 2-D.
From my understanding of the problem, Microsoft is no longer supporting the unicast response for DHCP like it did previously, even though that is the recommended way to do this. While Microsoft's implementation is valid (though not recommended), I can see why the ISP doesn't want to honor it. If a lot of Vista subscribers start doing this, there could potentially be a lot of broadcast packets. I.e. each time a Vista user connects, the DHCP server would send a broadcast response to everyone on the local subnet (which can be quite huge).
I remember scanning the broadcast network traffic years ago on my cable modem and it was tens to hundreds of DHCP requests packets per second. If most users start running Vista then this would double the broadcast traffic.
Broadcast should be avoided unless absolutely required.
33 MHz 32-bit PCI has a top transfer rate of about 133MB per second or just over 1Gbps. I have had no problem sending well over 127Mbps with my old Linux box with a cheap Realtec Gigabit nic.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone keeps claiming that nuclear waste is a huge long-term problem or that we'll run out of U235. This is a political problem and not a technological problem. Technologically, the problems have been solved, but due to a federal mandate from President Carter we are stuck with the current mess.
It is well known how to convert U238 into plutonium as a usable fuel, and the isotope of Pu is not suitable for bombs either. Thorium is also readily available as a fuel as well with a much larger supply than Uranium.
The other problem that always comes up is nuclear waste. When a fuel rod is removed from a reactor, it still contains a lot of usable fuel, which can be extracted and reused. If we use breeder reactors, the long term nuclear waste can be burned up so the only remainder is stuff that has a half life in the hundreds of years instead of thousands or tens of thousands of years, and it would be a fraction of the amount of waste. France already does this. It's expensive, but cost can probably be greatly reduced as the process is improved and the scale grows.
Granted, we do need to have very strong safety standards, but modern designs for nuclear reactors are a lot safer than the old designs. And the cost could also be drastically reduced if we stopped making each reactor a complete custom one-of and had a bunch with the same basic design.
The other form of energy I'd like to see tapped is geothermal, since that's almost free.
I consider myself green and am looking into installing Solar when the price drops a bit more.
Fat16 has been used by many digital cameras until fairly recently. My Canon elph SD100 from 3 years ago has problems with 1GB SD and only supports fat16. Most newer devices support both, but some cameras seem to run faster with fat16 vs fat32, perhaps due to the smaller directory entries (a lot of modern cameras get slower as more pictures are written). My Nikons don't seem to suffer this but I think they cache some filesystem information.
1. PDF files can be converted either for free or $0.10 to have them sent over the EVDO network. PDFs often don't work well on smaller displays without a lot of scrolling about (which is painful with e-Ink). PDFs are usually formatted for Letter or A4 paper and don't support reflowing the text for a different medium.
2. You can annotate. That's what the keyboard is for.
3. It does allow you to browse. The browser isn't perfect, since the e-Ink presents problems (no smooth scrolling available). I just read an article on how they were able to access calendar and email through Gmail using their mobile interface.
4. You don't really need Wi-fi hot spots when you have the EVDO network. Also, there are no monthly charges to use that network, so you can browse Wikipedia or whatever all you want through the built-in web browser.
5. For a screen that size it looks pretty decent. I don't have one myself but have played with it. It's pretty easy on the eyes. The text is quite clear and easy to read and it doesn't look too pixelated.
There is a nice switch on the back for turning the EVDO modem on or off. Just turn it off and nothing will be backed up.
The problem is that PDFs are difficult or impossible to read when scaled to a small screen, and scrolling both horizontally and vertically to read it makes it very awkward.
As it is, I detest PDF files that are two columns since I have to scroll back to the top when reading a single page, and this is on a computer screen.
PDF is a poor format for eBooks because everything is pre-formatted, usually for a much larger screen. The MOBI format is much better for such devices, since it lets the device adjust the formatting to fit the screen rather than already defining a single format.
If it breaks or is stolen, you still have all of your books. Amazon keeps a backup of all of your books which they will download to a replacement unit. They already dealt with this issue.
Um, Kindel can read HTML and PDFs (and other document types, i.e. MS .DOC) can be converted ($0.10 with the file uploaded wirelessly to the Kindel. As for HTML, I guess the ability to access web sites and Wikipedia over the EVDO network free of charge don't count either.
PDFs are a difficult format to deal with, since a PDF is already layed out and designed typically for a 8.5x11 sheet of paper (or A4). They don't lend themselves very well to smaller displays since they come pre-formatted.
I am a Comcast subscriber and I use Bittorrent to download Linux DVD ISOs and other legal content. My experience is that the performance of Bittorrent is abysmal, presumably due to their "delaying" method. Comcast should not be spoofing any packets.
I would have no problem with Comcast using CoS instead and just classify Bittorrent traffic as low-priority bulk transfers. This way it would get whatever bandwidth is left over yet prioritize more important traffic like games and VOIP. (In fact, this is how I have my firewall configured).
I just ordered a Lexar 8GB compact flash with UDMA which will do 45MB/sec (300x), so there are other players out there besides SanDisk. I saw one from a no-name that claimed 350x speeds, but Lexar has a good name and offers recovery software. They also offer some high-speed readers supporting firewire (which, IMO, is much faster and more reliable than USB [at least on Linux]).
Of course I also have a camera on order which also supports UDMA which can take advantage of this card.
I looked at Sandisk, and I did not see UDMA support in their high-speed compact flash cards.
I'm sure Adobe knows this too and doesn't do much about it because they know that the more people who learn it and use it, the more people will buy it. When growing up I copied a fair amount of software, mostly because there's no way I could afford it, though I did buy some. Of course now it's different and I buy all the non-OSS software I use (yes, I pay for software to run on Linux).
As I understand it, the RFID is used for a pressure sensor to detect if a tire is very low and to give a warning to the driver. Each wheel has a unique ID, presumably in case you park really close to another Toyota.
I run Cyrus and have no problem searching, but then again, Cyrus also builds up a single file database for searching purposes as well.
Exchange does have IMAP available since I use Thunderbird on Linux at work to connect to it (via IMAP). It's slow, but it (usually) works, though it seems to hiccup and die periodically or require several tries to log in without timing out. The IMAP also seems to require periodic restarts on the Exchange side.
-Aaron
There is a feature in IMAP I think called IDLE where the client gets notified immediately if new email arrives. Recent versions of Thunderbird support this, so at work the instant an email arrives, Thunderbird will show it as available. KMail does not yet support this feature, at least in 3.5.7.
This doesn't work properly from my experience. It only notifies when it does it's next polling (usually every 5-10 minutes). Thunderbird will notify the instant the email arrives. It's a feature in IMAP which I think KMail does not yet implement.
Kmail shows a lot of promise, but I keep running into major stability issues with IMAP support with Kmail, plus it doesn't support the immediate notification of email like Thunderbird does. Hopefully this will be improved in KDE 4.0.
It can't handle more than 8 bits per color, which is a serious limitation for me. Most, if not all, D-SLRs can save in a RAW format which typically stores more than 8 bits per color, often 12 to 14 bits. This preserves more detail in the shadows which can be brought out with the proper software. Similarly, it is best if at least some of the image processing can be done in the raw data before converting it to RGB. On a digital camera, a pixel is not RGB*, but red, green, or blue (or sometimes even a different color) and must be processed to find out the actual color of a pixel location. Photoshop and other professional packages are able to handle this just fine. I think Krita can also deal with this, though I haven't played with it much. The last time I used it it was too slow to be usable.
In the past I found Gimp's user interface rather awkward to use. I have not used Photoshop, but I do use Bibble Pro on Linux, which has excellent raw photo processing support and is great for workflow processing.
* Foveon makes a sensor where each pixel is RGB, but its light sensitivity is not very good and hence is not widely used in cameras.
A lot of software contains proprietary libraries or other pieces of software provided by 3rd parties, which they are not allowed to distribute. It can be a huge job to strip or re-write those libraries, like what Sun had to do with Solaris, and if it's old software, it just isn't worth their time.
I know of at least one 16-core commercial processor. Oh, it runs Linux too.
Many years ago I saw a SCSI drive that did just that. It was really cool looking inside, but it had reliability problems according to a friend of mine who bought one.
And from my quick reading on this it looks like it may have been addressed in the kernel and in fact may have been a bug introduced into the kernel.
/ 530
http://lists.openwall.net/linux-kernel/2007/04/30
-Aaron
I concur. We have some newer PCs at work with integrated Intel graphics and the drivers don't work at all. The best I can get is frame buffer mode, which is useless with the LCD monitors, since the FB drivers cannot match the monitor's native resolution and are incredibly slow. I just gave up and installed an nVidia card with nVidia's driver, and everything just plain worked. I've rarely had problems with their proprietary driver. The only thing I need to remember is to reinstall after I boot into a new kernel (but even this is fairly painless).
3-D works great on the nVidia driver as well.
I'd say Intel is worse shit than even ATI (which I detest). Out of the two Intel systems at work, neither will work outside of frame buffer mode, and worse than that, they cannot run at the native resolution of the LCD monitor.
The nVidia drivers just plain work. They detected the monitor correctly and have worked flawlessly ever since. Open or close source, they are by far the best drivers I've used. The ATI drivers I use on one of the machines support the monitors, but introduce periodic 2-D corruption when running Xemacs and corrupt the cursor when moving between Xinerama panes, but at least they can do 1680x1050 and Xinerama. I don't even mind that the 3-D is slow since this is a work machine and I don't really need 3-D.
The Intel drivers are far too slow at 2-D, and given I can only do 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 and both look like crap on the LCD monitors. One machine is a P-4 and the other a core 2 duo machine, and both are unusable with Intel.
I only want 2-D and the Intel drivers can't even do that right.
Also with nVidia, I don't really even need to care which chipset is used as long as it isn't too old, since the drivers just work. Even the open source nVidia drivers work well for 2-D.
From my understanding of the problem, Microsoft is no longer supporting the unicast response for DHCP like it did previously, even though that is the recommended way to do this. While Microsoft's implementation is valid (though not recommended), I can see why the ISP doesn't want to honor it. If a lot of Vista subscribers start doing this, there could potentially be a lot of broadcast packets. I.e. each time a Vista user connects, the DHCP server would send a broadcast response to everyone on the local subnet (which can be quite huge).
I remember scanning the broadcast network traffic years ago on my cable modem and it was tens to hundreds of DHCP requests packets per second. If most users start running Vista then this would double the broadcast traffic.
Broadcast should be avoided unless absolutely required.
33 MHz 32-bit PCI has a top transfer rate of about 133MB per second or just over 1Gbps. I have had no problem sending well over 127Mbps with my old Linux box with a cheap Realtec Gigabit nic.