You'll never get the best software from a company who's business model is to cater to the largest userbase possible. The options they include in a software package will never be the best, merely good enough for the masses and at a price the masses can afford.
It's kinda like expecting the very best food from somewhere like McDonalds. That'll never happen. Instead you have to go to the little corner bestro to get really good food.
While it's cool to have a woofer that can go down to 1 Hz and while it adds percusivness to the sound, I have to question why you'd want to use a subwoofer to deliever this.
Low frequency mechanical waves are carried much better through solid objects. If the goal is to produce a blast that you can feel in your chest, why not use transducers (shakers) mounted in chairs/walls/floors for the same effect using less power and more importantly, less money.
I'm finding this hard to believe. Lets see what math has to say about this.
10000 years between failures or a failure every 10000 years. Lets say there are 100 critical parts that make up this clock. That means each part needs to have an average operational lifespan of million years.
This assumes that there is no redundancy incorperated into the system, and there may be, but it's not obvious from the pictures.
I'm also wondering how this clock is powered. If it's purely mechanically powered, then 10,000 years may be possible. I doubt any electrical system can last that long without some serious over engineering (electrolytics dry out, motor bushes wear, wire insulation degrades, silicon dopants migrate).
Nintendo has made cartages for thier handheld systems that utilize tilt sensors. I'm sure other companies have them as well.
If you want to be really critical, we've had tilt games forever. You know, those cheapy plastic maze games where you roll the little steel ball thur. That is all I've ever seen these sensors lend themseves to, just digital versions of these games. The killer app for this tech is still waiting to be found. I guess hard drive protection is pretty close.
Like I said it's a neat toy if nothing else. I'm just waiting for my laptop with a power glove:-).
I'm a Computer Engineer myself. I know the pain of math used in EE.
The numbers should still be good. I could have just saved a couple steps if I left it in the form of energy and not taken it to power and then back to energy.
You just have to look at it as 3.22 trillion watts per year, which I probably should have stated it as such.
Now I'd like to do the same kind of calculations for the other power sources, but I'm having some trouble making sence of the units.
Wave power is cited as 25kW/m of wave crest length.
Did they mean wave crest hight or the energy density for a given meter of coast?
Tidal power is cited at 5kW/m^2 at a flow rate of 3m/s. I'm not sure what this 3m/s is refering to. It's not the change in the vericle column of water, otherwise we'd have some really killer tides, so what is it?
This means each person uses is responsible for 262 Kwh of power per day.
Now lets say that square meter of sunlight provides 1 kw of energy on average and the average area gets 5 good hours of sunlight per day. Looking at this chart, you can see that this assumption isn't too far off.
The typical solar panel is about 30% efficient. This means that for every square meter of solar panel would render 1.5 KwH every day.
This means that each man woman and child would need 174 square meters of panel to be responsible for all the energy made and used in their name!
Now these numbers account for all energy used both domestic, industrial, and exported. Also these numbers do not account for the added or lost efficiency of converting systems over to pure electrical power as opposed to other energy processes like those used in the internal combustion engine.
I left the links to my math in just incase I botched anything.
And I quote from Digipen's website: "DigiPen is the first educational institution in the world to offer a Bachelor of Science Degree program in game development."
I count around 400 different dvds on the eligible list, yet they are only offering 325 different titles in exchange.
No where does in the actual suit does it say you'll be getting a new copy of the same dvd back. Just that you get to pick them from a list. You're probably picking from MGM's list of 325 movies they couldn't sell. This reminds me of the CD price-fixing settlement where they sent libraries dud CDs.
So all you need to do is incorperate the technology of the fly-eating-robot, but adapt it to eat cockroaches.
Ugh.
On second thought, I find the idea of a critter that eats roaches to somehow be grosser than the roaches themselves. You'd have that unmistakable cruching sound of the roache's shell coming from the corners of your house as this thing feeds.
Lets not forget the single largest use of vacuum tubes today, the CRT (cathod ray tube). There in your old TVs and moniters.
Also every radio station and high power transmission you listen to is transmitted by large vacuum tubes. Silicon may never be able to replace these 10KW+ monsters.
Slashdot Mirror
You need bugs? Just look at any new OS release.
I won't touch Vista until the first service pack has been released.
And what of breaking?
Standard car:
Motion -> heat (waste)
Hybrid car:
Motion -> electricity
There's where all your city mpg savings come from.
You'll never get the best software from a company who's business model is to cater to the largest userbase possible. The options they include in a software package will never be the best, merely good enough for the masses and at a price the masses can afford.
It's kinda like expecting the very best food from somewhere like McDonalds. That'll never happen. Instead you have to go to the little corner bestro to get really good food.
While it's cool to have a woofer that can go down to 1 Hz and while it adds percusivness to the sound, I have to question why you'd want to use a subwoofer to deliever this.
Low frequency mechanical waves are carried much better through solid objects. If the goal is to produce a blast that you can feel in your chest, why not use transducers (shakers) mounted in chairs/walls/floors for the same effect using less power and more importantly, less money.
I'm finding this hard to believe.
Lets see what math has to say about this.
10000 years between failures or a failure every 10000 years.
Lets say there are 100 critical parts that make up this clock.
That means each part needs to have an average operational lifespan of million years.
This assumes that there is no redundancy incorperated into the system, and there may be, but it's not obvious from the pictures.
I'm also wondering how this clock is powered. If it's purely mechanically powered, then 10,000 years may be possible. I doubt any electrical system can last that long without some serious over engineering (electrolytics dry out, motor bushes wear, wire insulation degrades, silicon dopants migrate).
Yellow dots have just become the new white.
Plan ahead and incorperate random millimeter-sized yellow dots throughout your document...
If done correctly their tracking info is useless.
This is really cool, but I'll be really impressed when the whole thing updates in real-time à la Snowcrash. ;-)
earmarked to keep the voyager probes up and running.
That way you'd be funding real space stuff and it still has Star Trek relevance.
If you can sterilize your table, you can sterilize your keyboard.
Projection Keyboards
These would be great in areas with communial computers.
Tricky language.
Either pole of the battery can be seen as the anode, it all depends on how the cell is being used.
Borrowing from answers.com:
anode (n'd') pronunciation
n.
1. A positively charged electrode, as of an electrolytic cell, storage battery, or electron tube.
2. The negatively charged terminal of a primary cell or of a storage battery that is supplying current.
Taking light of this, it looks like they're both using the same idea exicuted in different manners.
A organic molecule to take up a lot of ions, or a substance with a high surface area to take up a lot of ions. Same difference.
Yes.
:-).
New innovation in the gaming market?
Not really.
Nintendo has made cartages for thier handheld systems that utilize tilt sensors. I'm sure other companies have them as well.
If you want to be really critical, we've had tilt games forever. You know, those cheapy plastic maze games where you roll the little steel ball thur. That is all I've ever seen these sensors lend themseves to, just digital versions of these games. The killer app for this tech is still waiting to be found. I guess hard drive protection is pretty close.
Like I said it's a neat toy if nothing else. I'm just waiting for my laptop with a power glove
Putting it in orbit will let you use a comparitivly smaller panel.
In space the power density is about 1.4kW/m^2 and you can get power 24h/day or 33.6kWh per day.
That's a factor of 6.72 times more power for a given square meter of sunshine.
Your 20000 square miles of solar panel shrinks to 2955 square miles. That's nearly a factor of 10.
I'm a Computer Engineer myself. I know the pain of math used in EE.
The numbers should still be good. I could have just saved a couple steps if I left it in the form of energy and not taken it to power and then back to energy.
You just have to look at it as 3.22 trillion watts per year, which I probably should have stated it as such.
Now I'd like to do the same kind of calculations for the other power sources, but I'm having some trouble making sence of the units.
Wave power is cited as 25kW/m of wave crest length.
Did they mean wave crest hight or the energy density for a given meter of coast?
Tidal power is cited at 5kW/m^2 at a flow rate of 3m/s. I'm not sure what this 3m/s is refering to. It's not the change in the vericle column of water, otherwise we'd have some really killer tides, so what is it?
How viable is solar power? I was asking myself this question and here's the numbers I came up with.
In 2001 the USA used 96275 trillion BTUs of energy that year. This comes to 3.22 trillion watts.
Now there are about 295 million people in the US, so this comes to about 11Kw per person at any given time.
This means each person uses is responsible for 262 Kwh of power per day.
Now lets say that square meter of sunlight provides 1 kw of energy on average and the average area gets 5 good hours of sunlight per day. Looking at this chart, you can see that this assumption isn't too far off.
The typical solar panel is about 30% efficient. This means that for every square meter of solar panel would render 1.5 KwH every day.
This means that each man woman and child would need 174 square meters of panel to be responsible for all the energy made and used in their name!
If every person in the united states of America put up solar panels. We would have over 51 billion square meters of panel, that's close to 20,000 square miles of panel or the equivalent of covering most of over in panels.
Now these numbers account for all energy used both domestic, industrial, and exported. Also these numbers do not account for the added or lost efficiency of converting systems over to pure electrical power as opposed to other energy processes like those used in the internal combustion engine.
I left the links to my math in just incase I botched anything.
I'm sure they've thought of this, but doesn't the RFID standard require that every tag can be rendered inoperative with a simple kill command?
All it would take is one script kiddy running through a casino with a chip-killer to ruin everyone's day.
"It is the first official game development education."
.
I think they forgot about Digipen
And I quote from Digipen's website: "DigiPen is the first educational institution in the world to offer a Bachelor of Science Degree program in game development."
No where does in the actual suit does it say you'll be getting a new copy of the same dvd back. Just that you get to pick them from a list. You're probably picking from MGM's list of 325 movies they couldn't sell. This reminds me of the CD price-fixing settlement where they sent libraries dud CDs.
http://www.wisinfo.com/journal/spjlocal/2924649334 86275.shtml
Funny reference to the orginal Star Trek. If I had any mod points, they'd be yours.
Not only will it crash your computer, but with this new controller, it'll break your toys too.
So all you need to do is incorperate the technology of the fly-eating-robot, but adapt it to eat cockroaches.
Ugh.
On second thought, I find the idea of a critter that eats roaches to somehow be grosser than the roaches themselves. You'd have that unmistakable cruching sound of the roache's shell coming from the corners of your house as this thing feeds.
Maybe not such a great idea.
Lets not forget the single largest use of vacuum tubes today, the CRT (cathod ray tube). There in your old TVs and moniters.
Also every radio station and high power transmission you listen to is transmitted by large vacuum tubes. Silicon may never be able to replace these 10KW+ monsters.
/For home-based audio, what's wrong with 802.11?
If you have a household with more than one person in it, you may wish your audio wasn't eatting up the wireless bandwidth.
Lets hope you don't run your P2P client and your wireless home entertainment center off the same hub.
Hmm.... I see our wireless theater coming one step closer.
;-)
3 times the bandwidth => 3+ stereo signals
I say 3+ because very few people need to broadcast thier music at a full 721kbs.
multicasting => music from seven points in your house or seven speaker systems throughout it.
The makings for a wireless rave
Yeah, you're gonna say bluetooth is dead, but maybe this is the nich it needs.