There are zero technical details. It's difficult to even know what this standard includes. Zeroconf maybe? Maybe not?
All of the articles contain the same information from the press release. I've contacted several of the magazine authors, and none of them know anything either. Not that that stopped them from telling everyone about how great whatever-it-is is going to be.
> After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?
Does everyone already forget that the Pre was going to be the one to beat after the disappointment of the Storm? Clearly the Pre 2 will be the one to beat after the disappointment of the
There's nothing wrong with the Pre, and the "disappointment" has little to do with the phone. The disappointment is that it didn't stop the iPhone from clobbering them in the market in spite of the hue and cry from the haters and fanbois alike. If you define your disappointment by the lack of relative sales, then my guess is that this is going to be a disappointment too.
It's not about the phone, it's about what you can get onto the phone quickly and easily. Anyone that's Midomi'd a song while walking past a bar patio and then instantly downloaded it from iTunes knows what I mean. Consumers get this, and it seems only the self-declared "experts" who are missing this forest.
Did anyone else conclude that article was written by someone who had little idea what they were talking about? Note that "light" doesn't enter the description until after they talk about running power through it. And not one number.
To clarify that last statement: you talked about a 2 year window, and during the last 2.x years they sold 30 million, so in another 2 I think 15 to 20 million is fair.
So you're looking at a market of 50 million iPhones. That's a LOT of developer interest, both outside Apple and within. If inter-app programming actually adds value (debatable IMHO) then there's every reason to believe Apple can add it within that time frame, and every reason to believe the 3rd party developers would have put it to considerably wider use through sheer numbers alone.
> Give it 2 years or so for this tech to mature some more, get more apps out there and have > HTC and others build phones with a lot of storage like Apple does and i'll be junking my iphone > 3GS come 2011 when my contract expires.
Apple is adding features much more quickly than any of the other providers. Yes, it's true, some of those should have been in the first version. But that's besides the point, the issue is the velocity of change.
So the question is whether or not you think the Android platform's developers will create all this goodness before the iPhone developers do. Everything I can see suggests the iPhone market is going to win any sort of head-to-head "app off", especially if there's another 15 to 20 million handsets out there driving its development.
Is fixing the Hubble "space exploration"? It doesn't strike me as exploration, any more than changing the fanbelt in a car is exploration of my garage.
While it's certainly reasonable to suggest we consider high risks in exploration mode, like going to the Moon, it's another thing entirely to suggest we're being too risk adverse doing what was supposed to be routine maintenance. I'd wager a lot of money, and a donut, that if they put the risks at 100-to-1 they would have never proposed using manned missions for any of the stuff they do now.
BTW, there's a 1-in-185 chance that the Shuttle will be destroyed on any given mission by space debris. That was *definitely* not in the original calculations.
Seems like an interesting idea to me. There's no point attacking the iPhone head on, and this niche seems to be a good one to pick up. I know I wish my phone had better notification, and if it looked cool too, even better.
It sure is expandable! 40% of the easily usable hydro in Canada is untapped. The untapped portion is greater than the current electricity load of the entire country. Fully expanded, cheap sources only, there's enough hydro to power everything in Canada, and our cars.
I'm sorry that the same is not true in the U.S. On the other hand, you have the Nevada desert with 73% bright direct sunlight. I'll trade you some of our hydro during the peak production in the winter for some of your solar during peak production in the summer. Evens things out nicely.
> The solar panels will peak at 3.8 GW for about an hour at noon,
Pffft, you're calling me silly? Go look this up.
> To do as much work with solar power as with nuclear
You don't have to. Didn't you read the entire post? There are two problems in Ontario, peak and baseload. We can deal with the peak using PV and the baseload with hydro.
> The solar plant's price is 40% of the nuclear plant
I made that number up. You didn't notice that? Wholesale is a $1 a watt for PV and about 75 cents for nuclear. The delta isn't what you think it is.
> you'd see a fuel rod is considered "used" after just 5% of it was consumed. If we made this, say, 70%, we'd have enough uranium for 560 years
Ahhh yes, the "we'll just invent it" solution to the problem. Two can play that game: if we made the efficiency of solar cells jump from 5% to 70%, we wouldn't need any other form of power. There, problem solved.
> but newer reactors are just about as safe as any other source
And a price tag that matches their improved design. $26.5 billion for Darlington B? *flush*
Look, I'm not the one canceling the build-out. It's not even the "hysterical" greens. It's the investors. They look at the cash flow projections and say "no". They have better numbers than you do.
> you just need to choose the best one of the lot
Indeed, and the dollar voting has declared its loser. Ask George Smitherman.
So radioactive material escapes into the environment all the time. Good, we agree.
> They say the same thing about oil, and yet reserves keep turning up.
And the price keeps going up. Even with the current slump, it's still twice as expensive as it was a couple of years ago.
It doesn't make a difference how many new reserves we find, it's the ratio of those new reserves to the increase in demand that drives future prices. And we've been on the wrong side of that curve for a while now. The price is going to go back up, and keep going up. Do you really dispute this? If you do, you're going to have to explain why every single energy analyst disagrees with you.
> The main reason nuclear power is more expensive than coal is regulatory > and decommissioning costs -- not a fault of the technology but the political environment.
So? It doesn't make a difference what the cause is, if it's more expensive, it's more expensive. Look, we just went through this here in Ontario, after years of wrangling they just gave up. It was just too expensive. I'm not "arguing" this, this is a simple statement of fact that you can google up on your own.
> They tend to dispute a lot of things. That doesn't make them right.
No, but the fact that they got Chernobyl's down-wind makes their opinion more informed than yours.
> There's a price slump in the market right now
Yeah, *right now*. Back off the scale of your chart a little and you'll find that it's still four times as expensive as it was five years ago. The current slump follows the commodities market, and shows zero resilience that suggests it won't peak out in the 7 or 8 times range like it did at high oil. After all, it's an oil analog in the markets.
Is that a price trajectory you want to build your country's energy future on? One that's already barely economical and will be increasingly uneconomical over time?
> they're uneducated as you've just proven
Really? Insulting me, even though none of your points stand up to the slightest scrutiny? Do you really believe you know more about this than I do?
Look, forget me. You show me where all the new nuclear plants are being built in the US today. What, there are none? Oh, I guess that's because everyone in the power industry is uneducated too, right?
> electricity at current consumption rates we have enough uranium for 60,000 years
Uhhh, you really need to check your numbers. At current rates, with no processing, we have about 40 years worth (worldwide consumption). There's more thorium, but it's not entirely clear what the economic feasibility of the sources is. Either way, good news for me: Canada has 1/3rd of the known reserves of both. My pension is secure:-)
> Your back of the napkin solar plant doesn't pass the economic test either. [snip] > The cost estimate for your proposed array was 10B
After an unreasonable upward adjustment that you failed to back out.
> Your solar array would need to be at least 5 times larger than
Only if you ignore the rest of the post, which was to buy our baseload from Manitoba, Quebec and/or Labrador, all of whom are desperate to sell it to us. 5 GW of PV peak capacity and another 5 GW of hydro and you can turn off all the coal plants in Ontario. This is completely doable, for a price that is far less than Darlington B.
But don't take my work for it, take the Ontario government's. When the bill was presented to them, they dropped the entire idea as being economically infeasible.
That used to be true, but is no longer. pSi is coming from dedicated lines and is inexpensive both in feedstock and energy inputs.
> We've also got about 10 years of Indium left
Normal pSi is almost certainly the primary tech in any near-future buildout. If they get a suitable solid electrolyte then the DSSc's might make a play too. Neither is materials constrained.
We absolutely can do a whole lot of solar, and it absolutely will be beneficial by pretty much any measure. Update your numbers.
There's lots and lots of untapped hydro in Canada. Like 50 GW lots. Unfortunately there's nowhere to sell it, at least until the HVDC grid that Obama talks about actually gets built.
> How does the United States not reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel prevent nuclear proliferation anyway?
Uhhh, like this: "if the US is doing it and says it's for civilian purposes, then we're going to do it and say it's for civilian purposes".
> It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste
Zero, except? Wow, great argument there, sparky.
> doesn't escape into the environment
It escapes into the environment all the time.
> You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel
I'd say it's you that's failing to understand this. At current usage rates we have about 40 years worth. We can get more, a lot more, but only at dramatically increased prices. Nuclear power is already too expensive, driving up fuel costs will make it worse.
> The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line
Pffft. The rise in price over the last couple of years has already resulted in plants being scaled back and expansion plans ending all over the place.
> The complaints have no basis in fact
I'm sure the Ukrainians would dispute that "fact".
I'm a supporter of nuclear power, in general. You're whitewashing of its very real problems, and your willingness to demonize and simply write off its opponents, does nothing for your argument. "hysterical opponents"? Really now.
Give it up. Fusion will not be a practical energy source in your lifetime, if ever. No really. The generating industry association in the US has already stated this in no uncertain terms. They don't want it, won't buy it, and don't expect to ever see it.
Who cares about polls? The laws of physics don't care about public opinion. Neither do the laws of economics.
And the later is clearly a problem. We just went through this here in Ontario, with a new set of reactors planned to go in about 50 k east of Toronto at Darlington. Darlington A, the original set, was enormously over-budget, and if I'm doing the math right, will never pay itself back in inflation-adjusted dollars. All of us Ontarians have a little line item on our bills called the "debt retirement charge" as a result. In order to prevent this occuring again, Ontario Power Generation (via Infrastructure Ontario) demanded that the quotes include overrun insurance. That drove the price up over $26 billion.
I'm a failed physicist and I'm very much aware of the realities of nuclear power. It IS safe, and the waste is NOT that big a problem. But $26 billion is a REALLY BIG PROBLEM. I'm not the only one believing that; after the bill was presented, they cancelled the project.
Here's something to think about. Darlington A and B together would have produced about 7 GW peak. The site occupies 1200 acres, or just under 5 million square meters. 5 million square meters of 8% average solar panel will produce about 3.8 GW peak. Yeah, it's not baseload. Yeah, it's only during the day. Now here's the kicker... ready? Solar costs a dollar a watt wholesale, so the price of that plant is about, oh lets round up some, $10 billion.
It gets worse. We already get about 60% of our power from hydro. In fact, there's more _spare_capacity_ in the generator plants in northern Quebec than there would have been in Darlington. All we'd need is a cable to get it. How much? Mmmm, 500 million, tops. Newfoundland and Manitoba also have oodles of spare capacity that they would love to sell us. Arco say's there's another, ready for it? 25 GW continuous in northern Canada lying undeveloped. That's more than all the power the province uses. But they can't get a red cent to develop it, because OPG want's it all in house.
> JSTOR actually has a paper 'backup' of everything they scanned...
And then charge you outrageous amounts of money to see it.
I mean really. I'm more than capable of dealing with "bad metadata", especially considering that I never look at it. I use search, like anyone else in the 21st century. And when it comes to that, Google Books is an absolute godsend.
Imminent lawless action is already against the law. It has the nice feature that it does not discriminate on the basis of politics. Yelling "fire" in the theatre is not political hate speech, but it is dangerous.
> Is it possible to eliminate the listener on the second end of the scale? Not effectively.
History clearly demonstrates that statement is false. The KKK was brought down largely by a frown campaign, and remains marginalized today. Societal-level campaigns against hate have repeatedly demonstrated their powerful and rapid effects, effects that make laws look completely useless in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
There are zero technical details. It's difficult to even know what this standard includes. Zeroconf maybe? Maybe not?
All of the articles contain the same information from the press release. I've contacted several of the magazine authors, and none of them know anything either. Not that that stopped them from telling everyone about how great whatever-it-is is going to be.
> After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?
Does everyone already forget that the Pre was going to be the one to beat after the disappointment of the Storm? Clearly the Pre 2 will be the one to beat after the disappointment of the
There's nothing wrong with the Pre, and the "disappointment" has little to do with the phone. The disappointment is that it didn't stop the iPhone from clobbering them in the market in spite of the hue and cry from the haters and fanbois alike. If you define your disappointment by the lack of relative sales, then my guess is that this is going to be a disappointment too.
It's not about the phone, it's about what you can get onto the phone quickly and easily. Anyone that's Midomi'd a song while walking past a bar patio and then instantly downloaded it from iTunes knows what I mean. Consumers get this, and it seems only the self-declared "experts" who are missing this forest.
Maury
"I think we've reached a point where people are thinking I shouldn't quit my day job for this."
Umm, in commercial software?
STOP THE PRESSES!
Did anyone else conclude that article was written by someone who had little idea what they were talking about? Note that "light" doesn't enter the description until after they talk about running power through it. And not one number.
> You seem to think we should mitigate all the risks we can.
Hmmm, that's not how I read it. I saw an implicit "... afford to." in there.
Maury
To clarify that last statement: you talked about a 2 year window, and during the last 2.x years they sold 30 million, so in another 2 I think 15 to 20 million is fair.
So you're looking at a market of 50 million iPhones. That's a LOT of developer interest, both outside Apple and within. If inter-app programming actually adds value (debatable IMHO) then there's every reason to believe Apple can add it within that time frame, and every reason to believe the 3rd party developers would have put it to considerably wider use through sheer numbers alone.
Maury
> Give it 2 years or so for this tech to mature some more, get more apps out there and have
> HTC and others build phones with a lot of storage like Apple does and i'll be junking my iphone
> 3GS come 2011 when my contract expires.
Apple is adding features much more quickly than any of the other providers. Yes, it's true, some of those should have been in the first version. But that's besides the point, the issue is the velocity of change.
So the question is whether or not you think the Android platform's developers will create all this goodness before the iPhone developers do. Everything I can see suggests the iPhone market is going to win any sort of head-to-head "app off", especially if there's another 15 to 20 million handsets out there driving its development.
Maury
Is fixing the Hubble "space exploration"? It doesn't strike me as exploration, any more than changing the fanbelt in a car is exploration of my garage.
While it's certainly reasonable to suggest we consider high risks in exploration mode, like going to the Moon, it's another thing entirely to suggest we're being too risk adverse doing what was supposed to be routine maintenance. I'd wager a lot of money, and a donut, that if they put the risks at 100-to-1 they would have never proposed using manned missions for any of the stuff they do now.
BTW, there's a 1-in-185 chance that the Shuttle will be destroyed on any given mission by space debris. That was *definitely* not in the original calculations.
Maury
Seems like an interesting idea to me. There's no point attacking the iPhone head on, and this niche seems to be a good one to pick up. I know I wish my phone had better notification, and if it looked cool too, even better.
18 W for $38?! That's twice as expensive as existing technology from First Solar. How is this "cheap"?
> To be fair, hydro is not really expandable
It sure is expandable! 40% of the easily usable hydro in Canada is untapped. The untapped portion is greater than the current electricity load of the entire country. Fully expanded, cheap sources only, there's enough hydro to power everything in Canada, and our cars.
I'm sorry that the same is not true in the U.S. On the other hand, you have the Nevada desert with 73% bright direct sunlight. I'll trade you some of our hydro during the peak production in the winter for some of your solar during peak production in the summer. Evens things out nicely.
Maury
> This is silly.
Really?
> The reactors would produce 7 GW all the time.
Well, maybe 75% of the time.
> The solar panels will peak at 3.8 GW for about an hour at noon,
Pffft, you're calling me silly? Go look this up.
> To do as much work with solar power as with nuclear
You don't have to. Didn't you read the entire post? There are two problems in Ontario, peak and baseload. We can deal with the peak using PV and the baseload with hydro.
> The solar plant's price is 40% of the nuclear plant
I made that number up. You didn't notice that? Wholesale is a $1 a watt for PV and about 75 cents for nuclear. The delta isn't what you think it is.
Maury
Bull. Its a controller. Stop getting your "news" from lame-o sites like that.
Really? They can fit one into the Nano, but not the Touch?
> That's just pedantic
A pedantic argument on /.? Stop the presses!
> Reading up on the subject
You mean, as a physicist or something?
> you'd see a fuel rod is considered "used" after just 5% of it was consumed. If we made this, say, 70%, we'd have enough uranium for 560 years
Ahhh yes, the "we'll just invent it" solution to the problem. Two can play that game: if we made the efficiency of solar cells jump from 5% to 70%, we wouldn't need any other form of power. There, problem solved.
> but newer reactors are just about as safe as any other source
And a price tag that matches their improved design. $26.5 billion for Darlington B? *flush*
Look, I'm not the one canceling the build-out. It's not even the "hysterical" greens. It's the investors. They look at the cash flow projections and say "no". They have better numbers than you do.
> you just need to choose the best one of the lot
Indeed, and the dollar voting has declared its loser. Ask George Smitherman.
Maury
> Sure
So radioactive material escapes into the environment all the time. Good, we agree.
> They say the same thing about oil, and yet reserves keep turning up.
And the price keeps going up. Even with the current slump, it's still twice as expensive as it was a couple of years ago.
It doesn't make a difference how many new reserves we find, it's the ratio of those new reserves to the increase in demand that drives future prices. And we've been on the wrong side of that curve for a while now. The price is going to go back up, and keep going up. Do you really dispute this? If you do, you're going to have to explain why every single energy analyst disagrees with you.
> The main reason nuclear power is more expensive than coal is regulatory
> and decommissioning costs -- not a fault of the technology but the political environment.
So? It doesn't make a difference what the cause is, if it's more expensive, it's more expensive. Look, we just went through this here in Ontario, after years of wrangling they just gave up. It was just too expensive. I'm not "arguing" this, this is a simple statement of fact that you can google up on your own.
> They tend to dispute a lot of things. That doesn't make them right.
No, but the fact that they got Chernobyl's down-wind makes their opinion more informed than yours.
> There's a price slump in the market right now
Yeah, *right now*. Back off the scale of your chart a little and you'll find that it's still four times as expensive as it was five years ago. The current slump follows the commodities market, and shows zero resilience that suggests it won't peak out in the 7 or 8 times range like it did at high oil. After all, it's an oil analog in the markets.
Is that a price trajectory you want to build your country's energy future on? One that's already barely economical and will be increasingly uneconomical over time?
> they're uneducated as you've just proven
Really? Insulting me, even though none of your points stand up to the slightest scrutiny? Do you really believe you know more about this than I do?
Look, forget me. You show me where all the new nuclear plants are being built in the US today. What, there are none? Oh, I guess that's because everyone in the power industry is uneducated too, right?
Maury
> We can mine U from granite if we need to.
At enormous cost. It's already too expensive.
> electricity at current consumption rates we have enough uranium for 60,000 years
Uhhh, you really need to check your numbers. At current rates, with no processing, we have about 40 years worth (worldwide consumption). There's more thorium, but it's not entirely clear what the economic feasibility of the sources is. Either way, good news for me: Canada has 1/3rd of the known reserves of both. My pension is secure :-)
Maury
> Your back of the napkin solar plant doesn't pass the economic test either.
[snip]
> The cost estimate for your proposed array was 10B
After an unreasonable upward adjustment that you failed to back out.
> Your solar array would need to be at least 5 times larger than
Only if you ignore the rest of the post, which was to buy our baseload from Manitoba, Quebec and/or Labrador, all of whom are desperate to sell it to us. 5 GW of PV peak capacity and another 5 GW of hydro and you can turn off all the coal plants in Ontario. This is completely doable, for a price that is far less than Darlington B.
But don't take my work for it, take the Ontario government's. When the bill was presented to them, they dropped the entire idea as being economically infeasible.
Maury
> They're literally the waste chips that fail QC:
That used to be true, but is no longer. pSi is coming from dedicated lines and is inexpensive both in feedstock and energy inputs.
> We've also got about 10 years of Indium left
Normal pSi is almost certainly the primary tech in any near-future buildout. If they get a suitable solid electrolyte then the DSSc's might make a play too. Neither is materials constrained.
We absolutely can do a whole lot of solar, and it absolutely will be beneficial by pretty much any measure. Update your numbers.
Maury
> we can't build more hydro
There's lots and lots of untapped hydro in Canada. Like 50 GW lots. Unfortunately there's nowhere to sell it, at least until the HVDC grid that Obama talks about actually gets built.
> How does the United States not reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel prevent nuclear proliferation anyway?
Uhhh, like this: "if the US is doing it and says it's for civilian purposes, then we're going to do it and say it's for civilian purposes".
Maury
> It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste
Zero, except? Wow, great argument there, sparky.
> doesn't escape into the environment
It escapes into the environment all the time.
> You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel
I'd say it's you that's failing to understand this. At current usage rates we have about 40 years worth. We can get more, a lot more, but only at dramatically increased prices. Nuclear power is already too expensive, driving up fuel costs will make it worse.
> The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line
Pffft. The rise in price over the last couple of years has already resulted in plants being scaled back and expansion plans ending all over the place.
> The complaints have no basis in fact
I'm sure the Ukrainians would dispute that "fact".
I'm a supporter of nuclear power, in general. You're whitewashing of its very real problems, and your willingness to demonize and simply write off its opponents, does nothing for your argument. "hysterical opponents"? Really now.
Maury
Give it up. Fusion will not be a practical energy source in your lifetime, if ever. No really. The generating industry association in the US has already stated this in no uncertain terms. They don't want it, won't buy it, and don't expect to ever see it.
Maury
Who cares about polls? The laws of physics don't care about public opinion. Neither do the laws of economics.
And the later is clearly a problem. We just went through this here in Ontario, with a new set of reactors planned to go in about 50 k east of Toronto at Darlington. Darlington A, the original set, was enormously over-budget, and if I'm doing the math right, will never pay itself back in inflation-adjusted dollars. All of us Ontarians have a little line item on our bills called the "debt retirement charge" as a result. In order to prevent this occuring again, Ontario Power Generation (via Infrastructure Ontario) demanded that the quotes include overrun insurance. That drove the price up over $26 billion.
I'm a failed physicist and I'm very much aware of the realities of nuclear power. It IS safe, and the waste is NOT that big a problem. But $26 billion is a REALLY BIG PROBLEM. I'm not the only one believing that; after the bill was presented, they cancelled the project.
Here's something to think about. Darlington A and B together would have produced about 7 GW peak. The site occupies 1200 acres, or just under 5 million square meters. 5 million square meters of 8% average solar panel will produce about 3.8 GW peak. Yeah, it's not baseload. Yeah, it's only during the day. Now here's the kicker... ready? Solar costs a dollar a watt wholesale, so the price of that plant is about, oh lets round up some, $10 billion.
It gets worse. We already get about 60% of our power from hydro. In fact, there's more _spare_capacity_ in the generator plants in northern Quebec than there would have been in Darlington. All we'd need is a cable to get it. How much? Mmmm, 500 million, tops. Newfoundland and Manitoba also have oodles of spare capacity that they would love to sell us. Arco say's there's another, ready for it? 25 GW continuous in northern Canada lying undeveloped. That's more than all the power the province uses. But they can't get a red cent to develop it, because OPG want's it all in house.
*sigh*
> JSTOR actually has a paper 'backup' of everything they scanned...
And then charge you outrageous amounts of money to see it.
I mean really. I'm more than capable of dealing with "bad metadata", especially considering that I never look at it. I use search, like anyone else in the 21st century. And when it comes to that, Google Books is an absolute godsend.
Maury
> standard of imminent lawless action
Imminent lawless action is already against the law. It has the nice feature that it does not discriminate on the basis of politics. Yelling "fire" in the theatre is not political hate speech, but it is dangerous.
> Is it possible to eliminate the listener on the second end of the scale? Not effectively.
History clearly demonstrates that statement is false. The KKK was brought down largely by a frown campaign, and remains marginalized today. Societal-level campaigns against hate have repeatedly demonstrated their powerful and rapid effects, effects that make laws look completely useless in comparison.
Maury