I dissagree. The biggest issue is cost. What is needed is a very cheap cell that has reasonable efficiency (10%) and is a suitable roofing material. Don't look to solar power as replacement for grid power, look to it as a supplement. Solar will not replace grid power for a very long time, and does not need to replace grid power to be useful. Look at installing a solar roofing material as an energy saving measure, not as an energy replacement measure. Don't worry about storage costs either (though I personally like the idea of a big fly wheel in my crawlspace), the best bet is to simply use all the power as it generated, or push excess back onto the grid. It does not have to be all or nothing. One very nice thing is that peak solar generation times coincide with peak AC demand. Providing for peak demand is the bane of electric utilities, and distributed solar power generation has a lot of potential to solve this.
Figure that an "average" house that uses 5kW would be about 2500 ft^2 or roughly 50 m^2. Covering just the roof (and roof has to be covered with something anyway) with 10% efficient cells would generate 5kW. Assume this is available 6 hours a day. Just by switching to an alternate roofing material, you can reduce your electric demand by 25%. I would call that nothing short of fantastic.
Finally, the 5kW estimate is a little on the high side, even for an older all-electric house today. Switching to high-efficiency CF lights, good insulation, geo-sourced (or solar) heat/AC and heat pump/heat recovery/solar water heating can greatly reduce this figure. These technologies are available today, and they are fairly inexpensive.
In 'Obsession' Kirk and a red shirt guy beamed down to a planet with a few Oz. of antimatter and a bunch of blood to blow up a gaseous cloud. I guess they forgot how to do that latter on.
You are assuming that the efficiency of a CPU stays the same over temperature. This is not the case. If you can get a CPU really cold, it's efficiency increases. It takes less power to do the same amount of work. So even with the added load of the the refridgeration unit, the overall system could in fact run cooler.
Let me get this straight... the resolution of the internal clock of the Patriot is 0.1 seconds, and yet an error of just 0.34 seconds caused the system to fail completely... Isn't that is cutting things a bit close right there?
And this error 0.34 second error occurred after nearly 4 days of uptime... The clock was off by less than 0.34/100hours*60*60 ~ 1ppm. That is a pretty dang good clock yet not good enough.
This does not sound like a software bug to me, this sounds like a poorly designed system.
Many cable companies offer digital servies (with a set top box) along with analog services. Is there not a standard for this? It would seem to me that the most obvious path to pushing digital TV would be to require cable companies to either charge for the digital set-top box or offer a discount if the set was already 'digital-ready'. (Assuming there is a standard, and it would be up to the FCC to set one--like they did for AM stereo) I would certainly pay $150 more for a set that saved a $10/month set-top box fee. Since the cable-company digital set-top boxes are everywhere, why should an OTA box still cost $700-$1000?
This is bascially the same path that lead to cable-ready TVs 20 years ago, and that was a fairly quick and painless transition. Is there a completely different standard for digital cable and digital OTA? Or is the real problem the encryption and the pay-per-view that seems to dominate digital cable channels?
More Typically, a 3MP camera would have 1.5M green pixels, 0.75M red and 0.75M blue pixels. This is called an GRGB Bayer pattern. It is not as bad as it sounds. Every Pixel contributes to resolution (luminance) but they must be processed in groups to produce color (chrominance) information. You eye is much more sensitive to luminance resolution anyway. Digital cameras require a pretty hefty DSP to do this processing.
Check out:
http://www.dpreview.com/learn/key=colour+filter+ ar ray
The pixel count is going to hurt them, Sigma will try to sell a 3.43MP Digital SLR for $3000 with an undersized (1.7X) sensor using this technology. I do not think this will compete well against a 6MP Canon D30 at a similar price.
This current claim is a heck of a lot like Joseph Newman's machine in 1984. Both worked on batteries... Both guys are paranoid...
A car battery is about 50Ah? at 12V with a stack of 4 is 2400Wh, so you could pull 4500W for ten minutes, and run the 300W of bulbs for nearly 2 hours without breaking any laws and still have a good bit of juice in the batteries. Since the batteries would be quite warm after a draw like that, the cell voltage might even be a little higher.
There is another possbile explaination. Notice the batteies are not fully charged to begin with? (A fully charged 12V battery will have nearly 16V across the terminals.) Every once in a while, a gizmo pops up that claims to rejuvinate dead batteries. These seemed to work best on old carbon batteries and you do not hear about them much anymore, but the effect was amazing. Hook a dead battery to the little gizmo and a few minute later the battery was cranking out juice again. And the gizmo was not transfering power to the battery. How did it do that?
Batteries often go dead with plenty of energy still trapped inside them. Some of this energy will come back if the battery is left alone for a while or a good hard smack will often bring a dead battery back to life for a bit. It also may be possible to bring a dead battery back to life by actually drawing power from it. It is not magic, but it has fooled a lot of people over the years.
The simpler solution is to make a cable modem must be physically reset every few hours...
I would think that if cable companies could sell a connection every 300 feet they would be pretty happy.
An even more obvious solution is to charge per megabyte uploaded/downloaded.
What is the policy on hijacking?
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I believe that passenger safety is the #1 concern of the flight crew. Passenger safety should no longer be the #1 concern of the flight crew. The #1 concern of the flight crew should be maintaining control of the airplane, even if it means sacrificing the plane, crew and passengers. Up until now, going along with a hijacker's demands seemed to be the best policy to minimize the loss of life. We no this is no longer the case.
Higher bigger flight attendants maybe? Drop the maximum weight limit. A 100 pound flight attendant is not going to stop anybody.
We also do not know what weapons were used in the hijacking. The reports of plastic knives and box cutters are not reliable.
So, what do they think people will pay for this service? I would pay a buck or two, not much more. It would be so much faster to drive to the video store, so unless this service is a whole lot cheaper than rental, I doubt many people will bother. Many internet services have gone under with the assumption that people will pay more because it is on the internet.
500MB for a full length movie? I kind of doubt it. Also, who can possible download 500MB in 20-40 minutes? I have never gotten download speeds in that range.
Typical stuff, the studios are more worried about security deleting the movie off of your hard drive after a day than they are about actually creating a service that people want.
Publishers are not stupid. Publishers want e-books to fail. They want the public to think that e-books suck. They want the makers of the e-book readers to take a bath. This is a staged flop! They want the public to think that paper is the only viable media for publishing. If e-books ever really took hold, the publishers would be out of business. Every writer would be there own publisher. The publishers know this! So publishers have conspired to do the only reasonable thing--staging the biggest flop since the PS/2 by keep the availability of e-books low, the cost high, and introduce as much hassle as they possibly can. By doing this, they are assured that e-books will be a fail brilliantly, and they will be guaranteed another ten years of business pushing paper.
You are wrong. If 60M people can use Napster, that many people can certainly figure out how to rip and copy CDs--if they want to.
Why are DvDs not widely copied? Is it because of copy protection (encryption), cost, lack of technical skill, or that the average user has no inclination what-so-ever to copy a DvD.
Is MacroVision effective in preventing VHS copying? Try this, ask a bunch of non-technical people if they can copy a rented VHS tape with a second tape deck. You will find that most people believe that you can. I doubt you will find anyone who has ever tried to copy a VHS tape and been stymied by Macrovision.
It is true that most people today have no inclination what so ever to rip a CD. That does not make the copy protection effective.
You underestimate the ability of the general public to become technical experts on a subject when they really, really want the end product. A good example right now is the wide-scale piracy of direct TV. It is not a trivial matter to pirate direct TV, yet very large number of people have figured it out.
A lock is not effective if it only keep honest people out.
In its twisted way, it is an anti-deterrent. Suppose they come up with a 100% fool-proof way to stop CD ripping. What would happen if someone wanted an MP3 from that album? They would turn to one of the many file sharing applications of course! Somewhere out there, there will be a digital copy. Eliminating 95% of the ripping does not mean that the MP3 would be 95% less avialable.
The logic of need for CD protection is flawed beyond comprehension. The record companies should be doing the oposite, putting good MP3s on the CD with the regular stuff, making CDs that are easier to read on computers. They are trying to protect themselves from the people who are actually buying the CDs. By locking up the CD, they are giving people even less insentive to buy them. Most manufacturers make an effort to make their products easier to use, but for some very odd reasons, the record companies have decided to the way to increased sales is by making their product more difficult to use.
Unfortunately, cracking the copy protection is the wrong solution to this non-sense. The correct solution would be for consumers to reject the CDs like Divx.
As a TiVo owner, I honestly have no idea what channel I am watching, ie, 2, 3, 32, etc. I could change cable companies and not even know it. However, I generally have a good idea what Network I am watching, FOX, UPN, Discovery, etc. There is a big difference between the two. In the days of TV and VCRs, you needed to know the channel, with a PVR, you do not.
Doesn't anyone think it is strange that there are 100,000's of these copy-proof CDs out there and no one has positively identified one of them yet?
Secondly, believe it or not, it is possible to digitize the analog output of a CD player with _no_ loss in fidelity. A similar trick is used to make a 56K modem work, but in the case of CDs you only have to deal with a few feet of cable rather than several miles of cable. The analog data simply has to be sampled faster than playback speed and at a higher resolution. The Signal-to-Noise Ratio would also need to be kept high. The resulting file would be huge, but with filtering the original resolution and sampling rate could be recovered.
What people tend to forget it that it is the digititization that causes a loss of fidelity, not the analog stages. In the early 80's most of the 'golden ear' crowd eschewed CDs because of this. Analog's weakness is in storage, not transmission.
Of course, this is only 1X, and connecting this to CD database is not nearly so easy as it is now. And it requires special (but cheap) hardware. Not a great solution, but it would do on the high end. On the low end, I doubt any one could tell the difference between an MP3 made directly from a digital source and one made by re-digitizing on a standard sound card.
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I dissagree. The biggest issue is cost. What is needed is a very cheap cell that has reasonable efficiency (10%) and is a suitable roofing material. Don't look to solar power as replacement for grid power, look to it as a supplement. Solar will not replace grid power for a very long time, and does not need to replace grid power to be useful. Look at installing a solar roofing material as an energy saving measure, not as an energy replacement measure. Don't worry about storage costs either (though I personally like the idea of a big fly wheel in my crawlspace), the best bet is to simply use all the power as it generated, or push excess back onto the grid. It does not have to be all or nothing. One very nice thing is that peak solar generation times coincide with peak AC demand. Providing for peak demand is the bane of electric utilities, and distributed solar power generation has a lot of potential to solve this.
Figure that an "average" house that uses 5kW would be about 2500 ft^2 or roughly 50 m^2. Covering just the roof (and roof has to be covered with something anyway) with 10% efficient cells would generate 5kW. Assume this is available 6 hours a day. Just by switching to an alternate roofing material, you can reduce your electric demand by 25%. I would call that nothing short of fantastic.
Finally, the 5kW estimate is a little on the high side, even for an older all-electric house today. Switching to high-efficiency CF lights, good insulation, geo-sourced (or solar) heat/AC and heat pump/heat recovery/solar water heating can greatly reduce this figure. These technologies are available today, and they are fairly inexpensive.
I have some old phone books where the numbers are all different lengths and are sequential. The grocery store's phone number was '2'.
In 'Obsession' Kirk and a red shirt guy beamed down to a planet with a few Oz. of antimatter and a bunch of blood to blow up a gaseous cloud. I guess they forgot how to do that latter on.
You are assuming that the efficiency of a CPU stays the same over temperature. This is not the case. If you can get a CPU really cold, it's efficiency increases. It takes less power to do the same amount of work. So even with the added load of the the refridgeration unit, the overall system could in fact run cooler.
But I have no idea if this is what they meant.
Let me get this straight... the resolution of the internal clock of the Patriot is 0.1 seconds, and yet an error of just 0.34 seconds caused the system to fail completely... Isn't that is cutting things a bit close right there?
And this error 0.34 second error occurred after nearly 4 days of uptime... The clock was off by less than 0.34/100hours*60*60 ~ 1ppm. That is a pretty dang good clock yet not good enough.
This does not sound like a software bug to me, this sounds like a poorly designed system.
Many cable companies offer digital servies (with a set top box) along with analog services. Is there not a standard for this? It would seem to me that the most obvious path to pushing digital TV would be to require cable companies to either charge for the digital set-top box or offer a discount if the set was already 'digital-ready'. (Assuming there is a standard, and it would be up to the FCC to set one--like they did for AM stereo) I would certainly pay $150 more for a set that saved a $10/month set-top box fee. Since the cable-company digital set-top boxes are everywhere, why should an OTA box still cost $700-$1000?
This is bascially the same path that lead to cable-ready TVs 20 years ago, and that was a fairly quick and painless transition. Is there a completely different standard for digital cable and digital OTA? Or is the real problem the encryption and the pay-per-view that seems to dominate digital cable channels?
More Typically, a 3MP camera would have 1.5M green pixels, 0.75M red and 0.75M blue pixels. This is called an GRGB Bayer pattern. It is not as bad as it sounds. Every Pixel contributes to resolution (luminance) but they must be processed in groups to produce color (chrominance) information. You eye is much more sensitive to luminance resolution anyway. Digital cameras require a pretty hefty DSP to do this processing.
+ ar ray
Check out:
http://www.dpreview.com/learn/key=colour+filter
The pixel count is going to hurt them, Sigma will try to sell a 3.43MP Digital SLR for $3000 with an undersized (1.7X) sensor using this technology. I do not think this will compete well against a 6MP Canon D30 at a similar price.
This current claim is a heck of a lot like Joseph Newman's machine in 1984. Both worked on batteries... Both guys are paranoid...
A car battery is about 50Ah? at 12V with a stack of 4 is 2400Wh, so you could pull 4500W for ten minutes, and run the 300W of bulbs for nearly 2 hours without breaking any laws and still have a good bit of juice in the batteries. Since the batteries would be quite warm after a draw like that, the cell voltage might even be a little higher.
There is another possbile explaination. Notice the batteies are not fully charged to begin with? (A fully charged 12V battery will have nearly 16V across the terminals.) Every once in a while, a gizmo pops up that claims to rejuvinate dead batteries. These seemed to work best on old carbon batteries and you do not hear about them much anymore, but the effect was amazing. Hook a dead battery to the little gizmo and a few minute later the battery was cranking out juice again. And the gizmo was not transfering power to the battery. How did it do that?
Batteries often go dead with plenty of energy still trapped inside them. Some of this energy will come back if the battery is left alone for a while or a good hard smack will often bring a dead battery back to life for a bit. It also may be possible to bring a dead battery back to life by actually drawing power from it. It is not magic, but it has fooled a lot of people over the years.
The simpler solution is to make a cable modem must be physically reset every few hours...
I would think that if cable companies could sell a connection every 300 feet they would be pretty happy.
An even more obvious solution is to charge per megabyte uploaded/downloaded.
I believe that passenger safety is the #1 concern of the flight crew. Passenger safety should no longer be the #1 concern of the flight crew. The #1 concern of the flight crew should be maintaining control of the airplane, even if it means sacrificing the plane, crew and passengers. Up until now, going along with a hijacker's demands seemed to be the best policy to minimize the loss of life. We no this is no longer the case.
Higher bigger flight attendants maybe? Drop the maximum weight limit. A 100 pound flight attendant is not going to stop anybody.
We also do not know what weapons were used in the hijacking. The reports of plastic knives and box cutters are not reliable.
So, what do they think people will pay for this service? I would pay a buck or two, not much more. It would be so much faster to drive to the video store, so unless this service is a whole lot cheaper than rental, I doubt many people will bother. Many internet services have gone under with the assumption that people will pay more because it is on the internet.
500MB for a full length movie? I kind of doubt it. Also, who can possible download 500MB in 20-40 minutes? I have never gotten download speeds in that range.
Typical stuff, the studios are more worried about security deleting the movie off of your hard drive after a day than they are about actually creating a service that people want.
Publishers are not stupid. Publishers want e-books to fail. They want the public to think that e-books suck. They want the makers of the e-book readers to take a bath. This is a staged flop! They want the public to think that paper is the only viable media for publishing. If e-books ever really took hold, the publishers would be out of business. Every writer would be there own publisher. The publishers know this! So publishers have conspired to do the only reasonable thing--staging the biggest flop since the PS/2 by keep the availability of e-books low, the cost high, and introduce as much hassle as they possibly can. By doing this, they are assured that e-books will be a fail brilliantly, and they will be guaranteed another ten years of business pushing paper.
You are wrong. If 60M people can use Napster, that many people can certainly figure out how to rip and copy CDs--if they want to. Why are DvDs not widely copied? Is it because of copy protection (encryption), cost, lack of technical skill, or that the average user has no inclination what-so-ever to copy a DvD. Is MacroVision effective in preventing VHS copying? Try this, ask a bunch of non-technical people if they can copy a rented VHS tape with a second tape deck. You will find that most people believe that you can. I doubt you will find anyone who has ever tried to copy a VHS tape and been stymied by Macrovision. It is true that most people today have no inclination what so ever to rip a CD. That does not make the copy protection effective. You underestimate the ability of the general public to become technical experts on a subject when they really, really want the end product. A good example right now is the wide-scale piracy of direct TV. It is not a trivial matter to pirate direct TV, yet very large number of people have figured it out. A lock is not effective if it only keep honest people out.
In its twisted way, it is an anti-deterrent. Suppose they come up with a 100% fool-proof way to stop CD ripping. What would happen if someone wanted an MP3 from that album? They would turn to one of the many file sharing applications of course! Somewhere out there, there will be a digital copy. Eliminating 95% of the ripping does not mean that the MP3 would be 95% less avialable. The logic of need for CD protection is flawed beyond comprehension. The record companies should be doing the oposite, putting good MP3s on the CD with the regular stuff, making CDs that are easier to read on computers. They are trying to protect themselves from the people who are actually buying the CDs. By locking up the CD, they are giving people even less insentive to buy them. Most manufacturers make an effort to make their products easier to use, but for some very odd reasons, the record companies have decided to the way to increased sales is by making their product more difficult to use. Unfortunately, cracking the copy protection is the wrong solution to this non-sense. The correct solution would be for consumers to reject the CDs like Divx.
As a TiVo owner, I honestly have no idea what channel I am watching, ie, 2, 3, 32, etc. I could change cable companies and not even know it. However, I generally have a good idea what Network I am watching, FOX, UPN, Discovery, etc. There is a big difference between the two. In the days of TV and VCRs, you needed to know the channel, with a PVR, you do not.
Doesn't anyone think it is strange that there are 100,000's of these copy-proof CDs out there and no one has positively identified one of them yet? Secondly, believe it or not, it is possible to digitize the analog output of a CD player with _no_ loss in fidelity. A similar trick is used to make a 56K modem work, but in the case of CDs you only have to deal with a few feet of cable rather than several miles of cable. The analog data simply has to be sampled faster than playback speed and at a higher resolution. The Signal-to-Noise Ratio would also need to be kept high. The resulting file would be huge, but with filtering the original resolution and sampling rate could be recovered. What people tend to forget it that it is the digititization that causes a loss of fidelity, not the analog stages. In the early 80's most of the 'golden ear' crowd eschewed CDs because of this. Analog's weakness is in storage, not transmission. Of course, this is only 1X, and connecting this to CD database is not nearly so easy as it is now. And it requires special (but cheap) hardware. Not a great solution, but it would do on the high end. On the low end, I doubt any one could tell the difference between an MP3 made directly from a digital source and one made by re-digitizing on a standard sound card.