All of the posts so far about the application in electric cars have been about the recharge time, which is indeed interesting. However, the overlooked potential of these batteries is the variable discharge time.
Electric motors are better than internal combustion engines at producing low-RPM torque. All of the torque of an electric motor is available at 0 RPMs. IC engines have to rev up before most of their torque is available, which is why we have clutches. One limitation of how much torque an electric engine can apply is how much current you can supply it with.
A fast-discharge battery could be really useful in an electric car.
Point being, yesterday's idea of "real" storage is avilable in solid state. By the time today's idea of "real" storage is avilable, today will be yesterday. Lather, rinse, repeat.
True. However, we're getting pretty close.
When we talk about solid state storage, we're talking specifically about Flash RAM. I know of no other solid state technology that is even near the price point where it can compete with disk storage (feel free to educate me:-).
Flash capacities are getting to the point where you could use them to replace hard disks on modern systems. They are expanding faster than the storage requirements of most software. Linux, with X, KDE, and a bunch of applications, can be installed in under a couple of gigs. With a solid state 4GB compact flash, this leaves 2GB for/home... quite reasonable. No, you're not going to store AVIs of SouthPark episodes, and probably not your entire CD collection, but I could certainly fit my entire current hard drive on an 8GB drive, and that's 2 4GB flash cards.
The biggest problem is that modern Flash memory is only guaranteed for 10,000 erase/write cycles, which could be a problem for systems not specifically tuned for living on Flash memory (filesystems with logs, heavy/tmp use, any application that frequently compiles software, etc).
Nevertheless, I fully expect solid state memory to get to the point, eventually, where it'll be practical to use them instead of hard drives. The first application will probably be in laptops, where there will be an 8GB solid state memory system working basically as an L3 cache between the HD and the memory; the HD stays spun down most of the time, saving power. Heck, why don't we do that now with Microdrives?
for x in `find . -name \*.jpg` ; convert -size 120x120 $x ${x/.jpg/_thumb.jpg}
Creates thumbnails of all of the JPEGs in a directory hierarchy. You can probably find a GUI app to accomplish this specific task, since it is so common, but the point is that you can replace the convert command with just about any processing command (such as strip '\r' characters from text files, or sort images into subdirectories based on size), and this enables doing things that are simply impossible to batch with a GUI (without writing an app).
Let me put it this way: any sufficiently flexible and generic GUI app that enables doing what you can do in a shell, is a shell.
But the Libertarians also support eliminating Government oversight of businesses. I trust the Government ->this<- much more than big business, because at least I have a tiny say in what Government does.
Big business is perpetual -- there are no limitations on terms of service, so if you get a Darl McBride in a corporation, he's embedded like a tick and just as hard to remove. Governement, at least, switches administrations occasionally.
Big business, as a group, has a very poor record of being conscious of anything but profit -- there are very few publically traded businesses who, I believe, would take any measures to protect the environment were it not for EPA laws.
Government isn't benevolent, but I give a pseudo-democratic one like ours better odds of attempting to serve the people. In fact, you can trace the cause of most of the cases where goverment fails to serve the people directly to involvement by big business. How would reducing government oversight of big business help this? If anything, it would exacerbate the problem.
My main disagreement with Libertarianism is that it supposes that class-action lawsuits can replace things like the EPA -- as if we don't have enough litigation in this country already. Case in point: Remember the Firestone fiasco a couple of years back? It was revealed that Firestone had determined that it was less expensive to pay off potential lawsuits due to manufacturing flaws than it was to fix the flaws and recall the tires. Litigation is not the answer.
I suspect that much of the timing had to do with the fact that IBM wanted to get as much information as they could from SCO so that they could present a reasonable case.
Anybody can walk in on day one and say, "Their case is groundless" -- this is, in effect, what you do when you decide to fight it in the first case. It is another thing entirely to walk in and say, "Their case is groundless, and here is why, and here are their documents which support the argument."
IBM is probably saying (or implying) something like: "SCO has claimed to have met the court's requirements for discovery, so they've claimed to have provided all of the relevant documents in the case. In light of this information, we believe that the case is meritless, and here is why, and here are the documents to support it. Our argument is either correct, or SCO is in contempt of court for having failed to provide all of the information requested."
Remember, Democrats were involved in the censorship wars in the 80's. The leader of the PMRC,
the major force in media censorship, was Tipper Gore, the wife of the future vice president, Al Gore. These were the folks trying to censor recording artists in the 80's. Joe Lieberman started the "games cause violence" hysteria, and who late last decade tried to re-introduce Mcarthyism by dragging the heads of media studios to DC to justify the movies, music, and games they are producing.
The media has forgotten, or has chosen not to comment on the fact, that this is exactly how Joseph McCarthy started the witch-hunts in the 50's.
The Democrats don't have a sterling record, but it isn't as uniformly black as the Republican's, lately. If you value freedom of people (as opposed to freedom of corporations), the Democratic party is still your best bet.
I know people who are happy being contractors, so I know that my opinion isn't shared by everybody in IT, but I blame by own unhappiness with my career on the fact that it is difficult to get a permanent placement as a computer programmer.
I've got contract opportunities left and right, but I really miss being able to form long-term relationships with the people I work with, to get to know the organization and the details of the business I'm working in, and to not have that termination date always looming ahead.
I can't believe that it doesn't affect a person on at least a subconscious level to know that there's a definite date after which they are unemployed and their future is uncertain. It makes it difficult to buy a house and plan long term, when you don't know where you'll have to move for your next job, or how long you'll be unemployed if you choose to stay in the same location.
Add to this the fact that most contract positions are for very short periods -- less than two years -- to avoid lawsuits (contractors suing for benefits as employees since they've been in a position for years -- the MS case set a precedent) and you have a high-stress situation.
It isn't as if, in IT, you can plan ahead and line up future work a year in advance; most contract positions are immediate or near-future opportunities.
Yes, in today's economy, there's no guarantee of long-term employment, but with a permanent position, there's at least the illusion of long term employment, and there are darned few of those positions available for software developers.
Your computer would be powerful enough to not only do flat speech recognition, but would be able to have its own natural language engine... all processed in real-time.
This isn't so much an issue of memory, as processing power. Some good DSPs would be more helpful here than terabytes of memory.
All programs evolve until they can send email. -- Richard Letts
Jamie Zawinski, author of the original Netscape email program, is also quoted as rephrasing this as "All programs grow to encompass the functionality of email reading"
They weren't kidding, were they? The corollary is, then, that all devices evolve until they can read email.
Size matters, but in the spy business...
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 2, Informative
... smaller is better.
This'll be great if it takes up less space in my wallet than a half dozen cards. Otherwise, I'll wait for a future, slimmer, version.
Seriously, though, this could be a great idea. Three credit cards, a driver's license, three insurance cards (dental, medical, and auto)... plus a bunch of other cards I don't carry because I rarely use them (voter's registration card, etc) and are therefore at perpetual risk of being lost; this thing has a lot of potential.
The owner is in control of the information on the device, and it appears actually safer than carrying regular credit cards since it can't be used by thieves (assuming it also proves to be secure). My only questions center around the RFID tag, but they could be easily satisfied.
The problem I've had with most of the RSS browsers is that they don't distinguish between what you've read, and what you haven't. They either create a web page (which is sort of tedious to browse), or they ticker-tape the N most recent events. If you're off-line for a while, and N+1 events come through, you miss that first one, and in any case, you have to constantly scan the ticker for new events.
eventwatcher queues messages, and alerts you when any of your feeds has a new event. When you read events, you can trash them, or save them. If you save them, they go into a different queue which you can browse later; if you trash them, they're marked as "read", and don't show up in your queue.
eventwatcher is a KDE app, and it sits in the system tray, alerting you via a tooltip when a new event comes in (and telling you how many events you have in the queue). For an early release of the app, it is amazingly useful; I only have a couple of feature requests, and I highly recommend it.
I'm not affiliated with the project and have had no contact with the author yet.
I'm more worried about the Bush administration's ideas for using this technology than I am about Wal-Mart's.
What, you think they're two different issues? Hey, I know that when I head down to Wal-Mart to pick up an assault rifle and a couple of kilograms of cocaine, my biggest worry is whether George is going to be sitting in the Oval Office checking over my shopping list.
I know you have alternative parties, but they're not really viable choices.
How do you define "viable choices"? Is it that they have a decent chance of winning? In that case, then we indeed only have two parties, and the reason for this is because of our voting system. There is no way of determining what percentage of the population would vote Libertarian if they could without jeopardizing their interests, because voting results don't accurately reflect the opinion of the voters.
Voters were clearly still happy with Bush in 2002 or else they would have moved to limit his power.
Much of this has to do with the effectiveness of modern gerrymandering techniques, which tends to be more a tool of Republicans than Democrats.
On top of this, Al Qaeda unfortunately chose that time to instigate their terrorist attacks; that is a situation which only worked in the administration's favor. It was a unifying event, bringing Americans together, and giving the president an opportunity to launch a war which America supported, bolstering Bush's popularity. After taking Afghanistan, Bush used the momentum to pursue his personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein. Whether or not this will have worked in his favor has yet to be seen. He may have miscalculated; if Iraq would have resisted more, he might have been able to draw out the war through the elections. In the past 100 years, presidents who were running during a period of war that hadn't yet "turned sour" were reelected.
If he can keep the spin on the war in Iraq up, he might have a chance. On the other hand, no president who ever lost the popular vote has won a reelected. In any case, it should be an interesting election.
yes, a tiny percentage of voters could have changed the outcome, but when 40% of the people don't vote, clearly it doesn't really matter to the majority who wins.
The only majority that matters (in the USA) is the majority that votes. With the exception of some disenfranchised voters in Florida, every legal national of the USA has the opportunity to vote. It isn't difficult or costly to do, its the "official" way to have your opinion counted, and there is no good excuse not to. Those who do not exercise this right for that election, reject the opportunity to have their opinions matter.
So, the majority of voters (the only "majority" who counts) were disenfranchised in 2000. It wasn't even the first time that it had happened, just the most obvious.
We may be in a situation where the flawed electoral system in the USA is beginning to collapse. It may be at the point where what the majority of voters wants doesn't matter, because the elections are being fixed, as they were in Florida. I'm not sure we're there yet, but I do know that the system is flawed and needs to be changed.
We have a third party (Greens), and a fourth party (Libertarians), and a fifth party (Socialists), and a sixth party (Communists)... not necessarily in that order, but we have them.
The problem is that the American voting system discourages people from voting for what they believe in, and forces them to vote for the lesser of two evils.
The accounting error that placed George W. Bush in office would not have been an issue had a large segment of the liberal population not decided to vote -- for once -- by their consciences. Ralph Nader won about 2.7% of the popular vote in 2000 (Buchanan, the next most popular conservative to Bush, took less than 0.5 percent of the popular vote from Bush). It isn't unreasonable to assume that almost 100% of those people who voted for Nader would have preferred Gore to Bush. If even one percent had voted strategically (for the lesser of two evils), the Florida fiasco would not have been an issue.
I'm a firm proponent of electoral reform, so that people can vote their consciences without jeopardizing their position and letting the greater of two evils seize the power. However, until that time, I hope that the American public votes insincerely so that we don't end up with a repeat of the 2000 election.
"The Associated Press reports today that a leaked inside memo indicates that Microsoft may not be bribing officials to choose Microsoft products. One official, who asked to not be named, is quoted as saying, 'Frankly, we're flabbergasted at this entirely uncharacteristic behavior on Microsoft's part.'"
Another nifty thing good revision control systems can do (well, some of them -- Subversion, for instance, lacks this) is distributed operation. For instance, this means you can make a branch of someone else's code stored on your own server,
Distributed repositories is a really nice feature for some development models, like open source, but it is a nightmare for corporate environments, where having a central repository is critical.
You'll find a lot of corporate developers out there who reject the very idea of concurrent version control; they want a system where you have to lock a file to be able to edit it (like RCS). They want to be able to see, easily, who's working on what at any given time. They don't want to resolve conflicts -- they want to avoid them in the first place. Concurrent version control is a "bad idea" to them, and the idea of distributed repositories makes them shudder.
Now, I disagree with the lock-to-use philosophy; I know, from experience, that it causes more problems and frustration than it solves. However, the central repository architecture does have a number of benefits, not least of which is cheap copies, which leads to intuitive and elegant tags and branches.
I use darcs for my open source projects, but Subversion at work. They both have strengths arising from their unique architectures that are conducive to different development models.
I scribble all sorts of notes and drawings on my TT, and my only complaint is that the screen is too small. If the screen were the size of a notepad, and the machine were still instant-on, and it had similar battery life of the TT, it would be the ideal tablet.
It wouldn't replace palmtops, because of the form factor, but it would satisfy the need-to-scribble itch.
No, they won't. They use it because it is the company standard, and they're forced to use it. "Most" corporate users, anyway.
Seriously, though; I'm contracting at a company that forces the use of IE, firstly by locking down the machines so that it is difficult to install software, and secondly by having the entire intranet website so dependant on IE-specific Javascript that you have to use IE to, for instance, access the company directory.
I'm half joking. Most companies probably aren't this bad about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Electric motors are better than internal combustion engines at producing low-RPM torque. All of the torque of an electric motor is available at 0 RPMs. IC engines have to rev up before most of their torque is available, which is why we have clutches. One limitation of how much torque an electric engine can apply is how much current you can supply it with.
A fast-discharge battery could be really useful in an electric car.
When we talk about solid state storage, we're talking specifically about Flash RAM. I know of no other solid state technology that is even near the price point where it can compete with disk storage (feel free to educate me :-).
Flash capacities are getting to the point where you could use them to replace hard disks on modern systems. They are expanding faster than the storage requirements of most software. Linux, with X, KDE, and a bunch of applications, can be installed in under a couple of gigs. With a solid state 4GB compact flash, this leaves 2GB forThe biggest problem is that modern Flash memory is only guaranteed for 10,000 erase/write cycles, which could be a problem for systems not specifically tuned for living on Flash memory (filesystems with logs, heavy /tmp use, any application that frequently compiles software, etc).
Nevertheless, I fully expect solid state memory to get to the point, eventually, where it'll be practical to use them instead of hard drives. The first application will probably be in laptops, where there will be an 8GB solid state memory system working basically as an L3 cache between the HD and the memory; the HD stays spun down most of the time, saving power. Heck, why don't we do that now with Microdrives?
Creates thumbnails of all of the JPEGs in a directory hierarchy. You can probably find a GUI app to accomplish this specific task, since it is so common, but the point is that you can replace the convert command with just about any processing command (such as strip '\r' characters from text files, or sort images into subdirectories based on size), and this enables doing things that are simply impossible to batch with a GUI (without writing an app).
Let me put it this way: any sufficiently flexible and generic GUI app that enables doing what you can do in a shell, is a shell.
IMTAFBIAP (I'd mod that as "Funny", but I've already posted).
Big business is perpetual -- there are no limitations on terms of service, so if you get a Darl McBride in a corporation, he's embedded like a tick and just as hard to remove. Governement, at least, switches administrations occasionally.
Big business, as a group, has a very poor record of being conscious of anything but profit -- there are very few publically traded businesses who, I believe, would take any measures to protect the environment were it not for EPA laws.
Government isn't benevolent, but I give a pseudo-democratic one like ours better odds of attempting to serve the people. In fact, you can trace the cause of most of the cases where goverment fails to serve the people directly to involvement by big business. How would reducing government oversight of big business help this? If anything, it would exacerbate the problem.
My main disagreement with Libertarianism is that it supposes that class-action lawsuits can replace things like the EPA -- as if we don't have enough litigation in this country already. Case in point: Remember the Firestone fiasco a couple of years back? It was revealed that Firestone had determined that it was less expensive to pay off potential lawsuits due to manufacturing flaws than it was to fix the flaws and recall the tires. Litigation is not the answer.
Anybody can walk in on day one and say, "Their case is groundless" -- this is, in effect, what you do when you decide to fight it in the first case. It is another thing entirely to walk in and say, "Their case is groundless, and here is why, and here are their documents which support the argument."
IBM is probably saying (or implying) something like: "SCO has claimed to have met the court's requirements for discovery, so they've claimed to have provided all of the relevant documents in the case. In light of this information, we believe that the case is meritless, and here is why, and here are the documents to support it. Our argument is either correct, or SCO is in contempt of court for having failed to provide all of the information requested."
IANALOAP (...Or A Paralegal)
The media has forgotten, or has chosen not to comment on the fact, that this is exactly how Joseph McCarthy started the witch-hunts in the 50's.
The Democrats don't have a sterling record, but it isn't as uniformly black as the Republican's, lately. If you value freedom of people (as opposed to freedom of corporations), the Democratic party is still your best bet.
... and to follow RMS's lead, I insist that it be called GNU/Linux/XFree86/KDE/Mandrake, not just "Linux".
I've got contract opportunities left and right, but I really miss being able to form long-term relationships with the people I work with, to get to know the organization and the details of the business I'm working in, and to not have that termination date always looming ahead.
I can't believe that it doesn't affect a person on at least a subconscious level to know that there's a definite date after which they are unemployed and their future is uncertain. It makes it difficult to buy a house and plan long term, when you don't know where you'll have to move for your next job, or how long you'll be unemployed if you choose to stay in the same location.
Add to this the fact that most contract positions are for very short periods -- less than two years -- to avoid lawsuits (contractors suing for benefits as employees since they've been in a position for years -- the MS case set a precedent) and you have a high-stress situation.
It isn't as if, in IT, you can plan ahead and line up future work a year in advance; most contract positions are immediate or near-future opportunities.
Yes, in today's economy, there's no guarantee of long-term employment, but with a permanent position, there's at least the illusion of long term employment, and there are darned few of those positions available for software developers.
This isn't so much an issue of memory, as processing power. Some good DSPs would be more helpful here than terabytes of memory.
Hey, if that screw's holding the space shuttle that I'm on together, I consider it money well spent.
They weren't kidding, were they? The corollary is, then, that all devices evolve until they can read email.
Yow. I'd buy that extended version.
This'll be great if it takes up less space in my wallet than a half dozen cards. Otherwise, I'll wait for a future, slimmer, version.
Seriously, though, this could be a great idea. Three credit cards, a driver's license, three insurance cards (dental, medical, and auto)... plus a bunch of other cards I don't carry because I rarely use them (voter's registration card, etc) and are therefore at perpetual risk of being lost; this thing has a lot of potential.
The owner is in control of the information on the device, and it appears actually safer than carrying regular credit cards since it can't be used by thieves (assuming it also proves to be secure). My only questions center around the RFID tag, but they could be easily satisfied.
The problem I've had with most of the RSS browsers is that they don't distinguish between what you've read, and what you haven't. They either create a web page (which is sort of tedious to browse), or they ticker-tape the N most recent events. If you're off-line for a while, and N+1 events come through, you miss that first one, and in any case, you have to constantly scan the ticker for new events.
eventwatcher queues messages, and alerts you when any of your feeds has a new event. When you read events, you can trash them, or save them. If you save them, they go into a different queue which you can browse later; if you trash them, they're marked as "read", and don't show up in your queue.
eventwatcher is a KDE app, and it sits in the system tray, alerting you via a tooltip when a new event comes in (and telling you how many events you have in the queue). For an early release of the app, it is amazingly useful; I only have a couple of feature requests, and I highly recommend it.
I'm not affiliated with the project and have had no contact with the author yet.
On top of this, Al Qaeda unfortunately chose that time to instigate their terrorist attacks; that is a situation which only worked in the administration's favor. It was a unifying event, bringing Americans together, and giving the president an opportunity to launch a war which America supported, bolstering Bush's popularity. After taking Afghanistan, Bush used the momentum to pursue his personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein. Whether or not this will have worked in his favor has yet to be seen. He may have miscalculated; if Iraq would have resisted more, he might have been able to draw out the war through the elections. In the past 100 years, presidents who were running during a period of war that hadn't yet "turned sour" were reelected. If he can keep the spin on the war in Iraq up, he might have a chance. On the other hand, no president who ever lost the popular vote has won a reelected. In any case, it should be an interesting election.
The only majority that matters (in the USA) is the majority that votes. With the exception of some disenfranchised voters in Florida, every legal national of the USA has the opportunity to vote. It isn't difficult or costly to do, its the "official" way to have your opinion counted, and there is no good excuse not to. Those who do not exercise this right for that election, reject the opportunity to have their opinions matter.So, the majority of voters (the only "majority" who counts) were disenfranchised in 2000. It wasn't even the first time that it had happened, just the most obvious.
We may be in a situation where the flawed electoral system in the USA is beginning to collapse. It may be at the point where what the majority of voters wants doesn't matter, because the elections are being fixed, as they were in Florida. I'm not sure we're there yet, but I do know that the system is flawed and needs to be changed.
The problem is that the American voting system discourages people from voting for what they believe in, and forces them to vote for the lesser of two evils.
The accounting error that placed George W. Bush in office would not have been an issue had a large segment of the liberal population not decided to vote -- for once -- by their consciences. Ralph Nader won about 2.7% of the popular vote in 2000 (Buchanan, the next most popular conservative to Bush, took less than 0.5 percent of the popular vote from Bush). It isn't unreasonable to assume that almost 100% of those people who voted for Nader would have preferred Gore to Bush. If even one percent had voted strategically (for the lesser of two evils), the Florida fiasco would not have been an issue.
I'm a firm proponent of electoral reform, so that people can vote their consciences without jeopardizing their position and letting the greater of two evils seize the power. However, until that time, I hope that the American public votes insincerely so that we don't end up with a repeat of the 2000 election.
Now, that would be news.
You'll find a lot of corporate developers out there who reject the very idea of concurrent version control; they want a system where you have to lock a file to be able to edit it (like RCS). They want to be able to see, easily, who's working on what at any given time. They don't want to resolve conflicts -- they want to avoid them in the first place. Concurrent version control is a "bad idea" to them, and the idea of distributed repositories makes them shudder.
Now, I disagree with the lock-to-use philosophy; I know, from experience, that it causes more problems and frustration than it solves. However, the central repository architecture does have a number of benefits, not least of which is cheap copies, which leads to intuitive and elegant tags and branches.
I use darcs for my open source projects, but Subversion at work. They both have strengths arising from their unique architectures that are conducive to different development models.
I scribble all sorts of notes and drawings on my TT, and my only complaint is that the screen is too small. If the screen were the size of a notepad, and the machine were still instant-on, and it had similar battery life of the TT, it would be the ideal tablet.
It wouldn't replace palmtops, because of the form factor, but it would satisfy the need-to-scribble itch.
Pah. There are some crackpots who think plants are intelligent, too.
Heck, I'll sell Linux to the government for 4 billion dollars. That should guarantee them a good value.
Seriously, though; I'm contracting at a company that forces the use of IE, firstly by locking down the machines so that it is difficult to install software, and secondly by having the entire intranet website so dependant on IE-specific Javascript that you have to use IE to, for instance, access the company directory.
I'm half joking. Most companies probably aren't this bad about it.
I hope.