What constitutes a PC? A motherboard? What if I upgrade my motherboard? This legislation would raise too many questions for the small Mom n' Pop operations. I just can't see where the money should come from.
It just seems as if the only way to calculate the cost for an actual PC to recycle is to get the cost when it comes time to recycle it!
Is it just like Tivo? Maybe you could give a little info on the recording time and stuff like that. Can you skip the commercials? I always wondered whether Time Warner would let you do that.
Yes... I have been trying to tell Slashdot that Time Warner cable has this very same service available for their Pay Per View movies here in the States. It is called Video On Demand. The movies are all the same price of ordering a regular PPV movie, but all of them start instantly. You can also fast forward, rewind, and pause them. The quality is as good as any of the movies you see on Digital Cable.
While I think that the Pay Per View aspect of this is kind of cool because you get to see the latest movies, Time Warner has also introduced HBO On Demand. For a little bit of extra money per month, you can pick from any of the movies that are currently showing on HBO. When you pick them, they start playing instantly. HBO has also put their original programming there too - which is very useful if you happen to miss an episode of the Sopranos or Six Feet Under.
Anyways, if you have Time Warner Cable here in the US, check it out! For the HBO On Demand feature they were offering the first month free.
Ohhh and one other thing. Here at home (Syracuse, NY), I just noticed a Time Warner commercial for Digital Video recording. It looks like the TiVo-like boxes from the cable companies will be here soon enough!
I've done some robotics work before. In my experience, embedded controls is usually the way to go. If you want to make some really simple robots, start off with a nice little PIC processor. There are tons of pages dealing with them on the internet, and they are pretty cheap (between 8 and 20 dollars). You don't need anything too extravagant like hard drives attached to your robot, and you can build a serial interface to let it talk to your PC. They also sell C compilers for them (there might be a free version as well).
Another good processor is the Motorola HC16 (or the HC12 or the HC11). This series has many output ports for controlling the different motors that you might decide to hook up to your robot. However, buying one with an Evaluation Board may be a little expensive though.
Also, read up on pulse width modulation and controls algorithms, you need to use them a lot to make your motors go. Unfortunately, the motors can be the most expensive parts of the robot. The ones with motion sensors on them can cost quite a bit (I think the ones that we used in the RPI Robotics Lab were something like $130 each). You might be able to just get a hobby motor for much less, but do some research into the interfaces between the motors and the processor before you make any decisions.
Finally, if you look in catalogs like Digikey, a lot of the vendors sell robot kits. Some of these are based on PIC processors and others are based on easier stuff like BasicStamps. They are not very expensive and can be quite fun to play with
Good luck, and have fun!
-Montag
Link to "All Things Considered" story about this
on
Carbon Releases in Asia
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Wow, I heard a clip about this the other day when I was listening to NPR. It's a really interesting audio segment that explains the problem and how it might happen again soon due to an El Nino condition this year. The link to the page that has the audio story is here. Note: This is in RealAudio format.
This is not a decade down the road. I have Digital Cable from Time Warner and they offer a service called HBO On Demand. Basically you get a menu of all of the shows that are on HBO this month, you select one and the show starts streaming to you. You can pause, rewind, and fast forward. The way it works is that they stream the mpeg directly to your digital cable box. There is absolutely no Tivo-like hardware on your cable box, yet you get some of the functionality of Tivo.
I can definitely see the cable company expanding this service to include other channels besides HBO, and I would think that it would happen before a decade is up!
Hmmm, I always get confused about this frames per second stuff. I have heard that the human eye can only detect things at ~30 frames per second - so why all this push to make things run at 150 fps? Can you really notice the difference above a certain amount? Or is this just the kind of thing that "videophiles" can see but nobody else has a clue?
That being said, this game looks like it will be amazing.
Back home in Syracuse, NY I saw a billboard for HBO "Video On Demand" service coming out soon on Time Warner Digital Cable. Apparently this would mean that you could watch HBO's library or original shows and the movies that they are showing right now. I couldn't tell if you had to pay per show or if you just got the service with your HBO subscription. Either way, HBO is the perfect company to try this out, since they are already subscription based and would not be losing anything.
I have an e-mail address that I have used to register for exactly one thing: AOL Instant messenger. I've never sent any other e-mail through this account, I've never published the address on the internet, or anywhere else for that matter. Yet apparently someone who has a crush on me has managed to get that e-mail address and report it to Crushlink! I don't even want to log on to the site to get onto their opt-out list because I don't trust them enough not to sell my address once they have verified that there is an actual person behind it.
I think he might be referring to the fact that "The Sims" for Windows does not work with WineX. There is a special version that was released with Mandrake Gaming Edition, which is a modified Windows version that has been made to work under WineX.
However, if you do a little research you can find this out - I don't know that TransGaming has been necessarily misleading, but I think that the "common knowledge" about WineX and The Sims is incorrect.
Not just for Silicon. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is building an $8 million biotechnology center, which they hope will form a biotech hub along with the University of Albany. The building will contain over 60 faculty members and 300 researchers, and is bound to attract a lot of attention from the private biotech industry.
There are also many hi-tech companies in the capital region. There is the Big One, but also there are several good small ones, including Plug Power, a company that is working on fuel cell power. Also, check out the Rensselaer Incubator Center (shoot, can't find a good link for that one). RPI helps startups by providing office space and other amenities - there have been some great companies to come out of this.
So, all of these together will hopefully kickstart the tech industry in the Capital Region!
Ah, you're right. It seems to me that in order to design an ansynchronous circuit that would take advantage of the second thing you mentioned (the idle portion part), it would be very tough. It seems like it would be hard to predict hazards in the same way you would predict them on a clocked machine.
The fact that there are different strategies for designing in asynchronous circuits is what I think the major issue will be. All of these designers who have been designing clocked stuff for years all of a sudden have to start thinking differently, and that can be hard to do. Here at RPI, the subject was just touched on by that one professor - when in reality it should probably a whole class!
Thanks for the reply - it was very informative.
-Montag
Heard about this stuff in class
on
Clockless Computing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have a professor here who swears by this asynchronous stuff. He told us that Intel actually developed an asynchronous version of the Pentium (I) processor. It worked just fine, and used less power than a normal clocked processor. Unfortunately, all of the processes and designs for everything else they were doing had to be redesigned for it, and it would have ended up costing a bundle in retraining and redesign in order to mass market the chip.
It seems to me that clockless chips like these would seem to work very well with MIPS style processors - where you have lots of little instructions. However, you can't take advantage of the extreme pipelining features that chips like the Pentium 4 use when you don't have a clocked design. It would take a lot of research and a lot of re-education to get the design engineers to start thinking asynchronously instead of clocked, but my professor seems to think that eventually there will be no other way to speed things up.
Its also like you'd be trading in one problem for a host of others. I remember doing tests on 1GHz clock chips, and those things had to be absolutely PERFECT in order work correctly on the motherboard. They ate up a lot of power too. However, an asynchronous design would have its own traps. You can design a state machine for it an then minimize the states, but glitches will do a lot more harm on a chip that is running asynchronously. Plus you have to take into account that chips run at different speeds at different temperatures. I think we have a long way to go in the quality of individual electronic components before we can actually implement a modern processor that is asynchronous.
By the way, that Professor's name is John McDonald, and he's here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Awww MAN, I got into that Blockbuster deal where you get 10 free rentals if you pay $24.95 for FoTR. But its the August release! Whats the big difference between the two?
Well, it sure seemed like a good deal at the time
-Montag
But if we could make boards out of the stuff that feathers are made out of, wouldn't it be easy to just "grow" the feather material the way we want it to come out?
If this has any basis in truth, then this sounds like a worthwhile little experiment to me.
We live in a capatilist society and the newspapers all have to make money. Granted - it should be a given that the stories should not be advertising-related, but the media has been controlled by money since the days of Hearst.
I have relegated myself to listening to NPR instead of reading these news sources. Public Radio (at least in the US) has strict rules about the funding of programming and conflicting interests.
One of the most interesting shows on my local NPR station is called The Media Project, which talks weekly about these kinds of conflicts. Check it out.
What about the fact that Philips (jointly with other companies) developed the CD-audio standard that we all know and love - for the entire industry instead of just for themselves. They have a pretty good track record of not being patent whores.
BTW, everyone keeps spelling it 'Phillips'. There is only one 'L'.
The Seiko Kinetic watch that I have has worked for up to 3 weeks after I wore it last. That being said, the energy required to make the little hands go around a watch is nothing compared to the energy required to make an artificial heart beat.
Re:Sources for unbiased articles?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I found this one after posting:
http://www.alternet.org
Sources for unbiased articles?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I have been reading a lot of comments from Slashdotters about how the American Mainstream Media doesn't report all of the facts, doesn't tell the whole truth, and doesn't let us know the real story about what is happening from all of this.
Are there any suggestions about where to look for accurate reporting about these incidents and the events surrounding the attack (i.e. the history of bin Laden and the CIA and reasons these fanatics would attack us)?
I know about the BBC but thats pretty much the only other place I can think of to look for news - besides other "mainstream" news agencies. I would like to hear about both foreign and domestic sources. Lets hear everybody's opinion on this.
I have all the respect in the world for you to be able to go out into the world and function as a schizophrenic. However, in the Abnormal Psychology class that I recently took we learned that while schizophrenia may be around for a person's entire life, it doesn't surface until a person is in his or her early 20's.
I agree with you about the talent part though. We were shown different pieces of art that were created by people with schizophrenia and they all looked amazingly complex and beautiful.
Slashdot Mirror
... with the smaller manufacturers?
What constitutes a PC? A motherboard? What if I upgrade my motherboard? This legislation would raise too many questions for the small Mom n' Pop operations. I just can't see where the money should come from.
It just seems as if the only way to calculate the cost for an actual PC to recycle is to get the cost when it comes time to recycle it!
-Montag
Is it just like Tivo? Maybe you could give a little info on the recording time and stuff like that. Can you skip the commercials? I always wondered whether Time Warner would let you do that.
Montag
Yes... I have been trying to tell Slashdot that Time Warner cable has this very same service available for their Pay Per View movies here in the States. It is called Video On Demand. The movies are all the same price of ordering a regular PPV movie, but all of them start instantly. You can also fast forward, rewind, and pause them. The quality is as good as any of the movies you see on Digital Cable.
While I think that the Pay Per View aspect of this is kind of cool because you get to see the latest movies, Time Warner has also introduced HBO On Demand. For a little bit of extra money per month, you can pick from any of the movies that are currently showing on HBO. When you pick them, they start playing instantly. HBO has also put their original programming there too - which is very useful if you happen to miss an episode of the Sopranos or Six Feet Under.
Anyways, if you have Time Warner Cable here in the US, check it out! For the HBO On Demand feature they were offering the first month free.
Ohhh and one other thing. Here at home (Syracuse, NY), I just noticed a Time Warner commercial for Digital Video recording. It looks like the TiVo-like boxes from the cable companies will be here soon enough!
-Montag
I've done some robotics work before. In my experience, embedded controls is usually the way to go. If you want to make some really simple robots, start off with a nice little PIC processor. There are tons of pages dealing with them on the internet, and they are pretty cheap (between 8 and 20 dollars). You don't need anything too extravagant like hard drives attached to your robot, and you can build a serial interface to let it talk to your PC. They also sell C compilers for them (there might be a free version as well).
Another good processor is the Motorola HC16 (or the HC12 or the HC11). This series has many output ports for controlling the different motors that you might decide to hook up to your robot. However, buying one with an Evaluation Board may be a little expensive though.
Also, read up on pulse width modulation and controls algorithms, you need to use them a lot to make your motors go. Unfortunately, the motors can be the most expensive parts of the robot. The ones with motion sensors on them can cost quite a bit (I think the ones that we used in the RPI Robotics Lab were something like $130 each). You might be able to just get a hobby motor for much less, but do some research into the interfaces between the motors and the processor before you make any decisions.
Finally, if you look in catalogs like Digikey, a lot of the vendors sell robot kits. Some of these are based on PIC processors and others are based on easier stuff like BasicStamps. They are not very expensive and can be quite fun to play with
Good luck, and have fun!
-Montag
Wow, I heard a clip about this the other day when I was listening to NPR. It's a really interesting audio segment that explains the problem and how it might happen again soon due to an El Nino condition this year. The link to the page that has the audio story is here. Note: This is in RealAudio format.
Regards, Montag
This is not a decade down the road. I have Digital Cable from Time Warner and they offer a service called HBO On Demand. Basically you get a menu of all of the shows that are on HBO this month, you select one and the show starts streaming to you. You can pause, rewind, and fast forward. The way it works is that they stream the mpeg directly to your digital cable box. There is absolutely no Tivo-like hardware on your cable box, yet you get some of the functionality of Tivo.
I can definitely see the cable company expanding this service to include other channels besides HBO, and I would think that it would happen before a decade is up!
-Montag
Hmmm, I always get confused about this frames per second stuff. I have heard that the human eye can only detect things at ~30 frames per second - so why all this push to make things run at 150 fps? Can you really notice the difference above a certain amount? Or is this just the kind of thing that "videophiles" can see but nobody else has a clue?
That being said, this game looks like it will be amazing.
-Montag
Back home in Syracuse, NY I saw a billboard for HBO "Video On Demand" service coming out soon on Time Warner Digital Cable. Apparently this would mean that you could watch HBO's library or original shows and the movies that they are showing right now. I couldn't tell if you had to pay per show or if you just got the service with your HBO subscription. Either way, HBO is the perfect company to try this out, since they are already subscription based and would not be losing anything.
-Montag
But for some reason, only 15 minutes of the DVD were ever viewed at a time! I wonder why???
I have an e-mail address that I have used to register for exactly one thing: AOL Instant messenger. I've never sent any other e-mail through this account, I've never published the address on the internet, or anywhere else for that matter. Yet apparently someone who has a crush on me has managed to get that e-mail address and report it to Crushlink! I don't even want to log on to the site to get onto their opt-out list because I don't trust them enough not to sell my address once they have verified that there is an actual person behind it.
Argh, I hate spam.
I think he might be referring to the fact that "The Sims" for Windows does not work with WineX. There is a special version that was released with Mandrake Gaming Edition, which is a modified Windows version that has been made to work under WineX.
However, if you do a little research you can find this out - I don't know that TransGaming has been necessarily misleading, but I think that the "common knowledge" about WineX and The Sims is incorrect.
-Montag
It's the British spelling baby... smashing!
Not just for Silicon. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is building an $8 million biotechnology center, which they hope will form a biotech hub along with the University of Albany. The building will contain over 60 faculty members and 300 researchers, and is bound to attract a lot of attention from the private biotech industry.
There are also many hi-tech companies in the capital region. There is the Big One, but also there are several good small ones, including Plug Power, a company that is working on fuel cell power. Also, check out the Rensselaer Incubator Center (shoot, can't find a good link for that one). RPI helps startups by providing office space and other amenities - there have been some great companies to come out of this.
So, all of these together will hopefully kickstart the tech industry in the Capital Region!
-Montag
Ah, you're right. It seems to me that in order to design an ansynchronous circuit that would take advantage of the second thing you mentioned (the idle portion part), it would be very tough. It seems like it would be hard to predict hazards in the same way you would predict them on a clocked machine.
The fact that there are different strategies for designing in asynchronous circuits is what I think the major issue will be. All of these designers who have been designing clocked stuff for years all of a sudden have to start thinking differently, and that can be hard to do. Here at RPI, the subject was just touched on by that one professor - when in reality it should probably a whole class!
Thanks for the reply - it was very informative.
-Montag
I have a professor here who swears by this asynchronous stuff. He told us that Intel actually developed an asynchronous version of the Pentium (I) processor. It worked just fine, and used less power than a normal clocked processor. Unfortunately, all of the processes and designs for everything else they were doing had to be redesigned for it, and it would have ended up costing a bundle in retraining and redesign in order to mass market the chip.
It seems to me that clockless chips like these would seem to work very well with MIPS style processors - where you have lots of little instructions. However, you can't take advantage of the extreme pipelining features that chips like the Pentium 4 use when you don't have a clocked design. It would take a lot of research and a lot of re-education to get the design engineers to start thinking asynchronously instead of clocked, but my professor seems to think that eventually there will be no other way to speed things up.
Its also like you'd be trading in one problem for a host of others. I remember doing tests on 1GHz clock chips, and those things had to be absolutely PERFECT in order work correctly on the motherboard. They ate up a lot of power too. However, an asynchronous design would have its own traps. You can design a state machine for it an then minimize the states, but glitches will do a lot more harm on a chip that is running asynchronously. Plus you have to take into account that chips run at different speeds at different temperatures. I think we have a long way to go in the quality of individual electronic components before we can actually implement a modern processor that is asynchronous.
By the way, that Professor's name is John McDonald, and he's here at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
-Montag
Awww MAN, I got into that Blockbuster deal where you get 10 free rentals if you pay $24.95 for FoTR. But its the August release! Whats the big difference between the two?
Well, it sure seemed like a good deal at the time
-Montag
But if we could make boards out of the stuff that feathers are made out of, wouldn't it be easy to just "grow" the feather material the way we want it to come out?
If this has any basis in truth, then this sounds like a worthwhile little experiment to me.
-Montag
We live in a capatilist society and the newspapers all have to make money. Granted - it should be a given that the stories should not be advertising-related, but the media has been controlled by money since the days of Hearst.
I have relegated myself to listening to NPR instead of reading these news sources. Public Radio (at least in the US) has strict rules about the funding of programming and conflicting interests.
One of the most interesting shows on my local NPR station is called The Media Project, which talks weekly about these kinds of conflicts. Check it out.
-Montag
Federally Funded Flea Dips for Fluffy
And there it is!
Usually they stick an April Fool's joke in their morning or afternoon news show, but I missed it. Did anyone catch it this year?
What about the fact that Philips (jointly with other companies) developed the CD-audio standard that we all know and love - for the entire industry instead of just for themselves. They have a pretty good track record of not being patent whores.
BTW, everyone keeps spelling it 'Phillips'. There is only one 'L'.
The Seiko Kinetic watch that I have has worked for up to 3 weeks after I wore it last. That being said, the energy required to make the little hands go around a watch is nothing compared to the energy required to make an artificial heart beat.
I found this one after posting:
http://www.alternet.org
I have been reading a lot of comments from Slashdotters about how the American Mainstream Media doesn't report all of the facts, doesn't tell the whole truth, and doesn't let us know the real story about what is happening from all of this.
Are there any suggestions about where to look for accurate reporting about these incidents and the events surrounding the attack (i.e. the history of bin Laden and the CIA and reasons these fanatics would attack us)?
I know about the BBC but thats pretty much the only other place I can think of to look for news - besides other "mainstream" news agencies. I would like to hear about both foreign and domestic sources. Lets hear everybody's opinion on this.
I have all the respect in the world for you to be able to go out into the world and function as a schizophrenic. However, in the Abnormal Psychology class that I recently took we learned that while schizophrenia may be around for a person's entire life, it doesn't surface until a person is in his or her early 20's.
I agree with you about the talent part though. We were shown different pieces of art that were created by people with schizophrenia and they all looked amazingly complex and beautiful.