I've had good luck with the 505 series from Sony, however, to say their customer service sucks is the understatement of the decade. I bought my and pretended I didn't have ANY support; it's easier that way. That said, they run well, get decent battery life, and don't weigh too much.
Others had had good luck with the IBM Thinkpads. I also hear good things about the G3 Apple notebooks, but I don't know about the new titanium G4, it's a little bit, ugh, large for my tastes anyhow.
Someone, pretty please, release linux on a HP Jornada 720..:)
Yeah, ditto! My pro is a little trooper. The screen needs recalibrating a lot now though, dispite reseating the connector many times. I suspect the capacitance or whatever effect generates the touch detection is going. I can't think of anything else I bought in 1997 I'm still using today, though:).
Palm IIIxe's are going for $250 cdn here. It's tempting up upgrade, but I really want one of those m505s..
So when they say "Join the Linux revolution" and "free software movement", does this mean that all of the software on the machine is GPL or something similar, so that unlike Palm OS, when I want to change a built-in app I can (provided I have skillz)? I'm not finding a lot on their site that indicates one way or the other.
IIRC, Palm has the source to all of the on-board applications (and a lot of the games) included as part of the development kit, so you can indeed change the application to do whatever you want. Some of them have, as I believe there are several very nice calendar replacements available based on the 'stock' code. You can even get the source code to the OS as a liscenced developer - is it free? No, but the code is available.
Palm has actively supported the free tools; They could be nicer about the USB specs, but I don't know enough to comment on that.
You might want to check out Palm Open Source for more goodies. There a nice little market doing custom development for palms, now, too.
NOBODY has come out and offered what I really want - linux on a PDA with a nice keyboard, a la the Jornada! GCC to go, with a real keyboard. I could toss the vaio then.
The wonderful intergration of custom chips and a well designed OS (Guru errors aside, but that was class - nice, evil-looking flashing red error box!) and a dedication to the hacker community at large is what made the Amiga succeed in spite of everything Commodore did do kill it (although they eventually succeeded). How many computers and video cards do you know that actually ship with hardware schematics, now?
What's needed is someone to take hardware - be it G4 hardware, GF3 chips, whatever, standardize on it and then say "WE WILL SUPPORT THIS TILL DEATH DO US PART". This lets software developers push that metal to the limit, just like they did on the Amiga.
Hey Redhat: You want to get onto the desktop in a big way? Use some of that IPO cash to cut a deal with some hardware vendors. Make a sleek box, it doesn't even have to be X86. Just put state of the art 3D hardware in there; Fund the development of the API's to make it happen, e.g. OpenGL, SDL, whatever - and then make sure that the hardware runs out of the box. Need to get NDA's from NVidia? Fine - just make sure that it works with your product. Give people the platform, and good things will happen. The platform isn't just linux, and it's not just hardware, either.
That's why all these Amiga resurrections fail. They miss the point of what made the Amiga grand. Does anyone else remember Digi-Paint? The product that bragged about the engineers spending months hacking a pure assembly paint package? That thing was FAST. And it had a spirit to it, too. (*Grin* all those ads with Kiki.. I wonder what Newtek is doing these days..)
One of the funny things about the USA is that the drug war has given people easy access to organized crime - even those in high school. If you want a gun, you just ask someone who sells drugs. If they don't know where to get a gun, the person they buy their supply from will - and so on. Finding someone to sell you drugs in high school is NOT a very hard thing to do.
Funny how the harder you crack down on drugs, the more risky it gets to traffic, hence the more lucerative, and the organized movements become even more entrenched. More of the population needs to understand basic economic principles - supply side economics don't work for anything, including the drug war. Heh.
Ok, for starters: I really recommend that anyone interested in this stuff pick up a (modern) book on biology and genetics, there's a lot of stuff been discovered in the past 10 years, and we're only just scratching the surface. (Someone will make a lot of money selling computers to process all that info:).
This gene has been predicted (if not known about) for some time. It's needed, because your cells die all the time, they're supposed to. Over time, you get problems - errors - in DNA, and this is one of the problems with making cells that duplicate forever, eventually, they won't do the same things anymore (IIRC, brewing companies need to change the yeast they use periodically, because mutations that occur over time change the taste of the beer). The cells in yeast aren't all that different from the cells in your own body! (Actually, anyone who has problems with evoloution would be shocked at how much your cellular processes are (identical) to any other furry mammal).
The biggest application of this kind of technology is the real limit on human lifespan - brain cells. We can eventually replace almost everything else, somehow, but your brain is what and who you are. Once it deteriorates, you're not the same person anymore. Figuring out how to prevent brain cells from dying - brain cells are unique, in that they do not reproduce, ever - just the supporting (gidal?) cells do.
Nobody will be living forever until nanotech becomes rampant - no other mechanism to repair nerve and cellular damage is possible (and even then, it might not be enough). I wouldn't mind retaining my mental facilities until I reach the end of my lifespan, though. If you figure you'll probably live to 80, but will be signifigantly handicapped after 60 or 65, that's a 15 year productive increase.
There is NOTHING wrong with me taking a copy of Redhat Linux, or any other code - calling it XtalLinuX, putting up the XtalLinuX.com web site, and charging you $40/CD for it. I don't even have to make the source code available to the general public. That would be the nice thing to do, of course, but the GPL has one, and only one requirement:
Anyone who gets the binary gets the source, to do so as they please, under the GPL.
This of course means that you can buy a copy of XtalLinuX, and then give it away free to anyone who asks, if that's your perogative. If I charged you $5000 instead of $50, you might be less inclined to do so - but both are perfectly legal under the terms of the GPL.
What's wrong with this? I try to buy every major revision of Redhat because I think it saves me a lot of time, and it's a good product compared to the alternatives. The money IMHO is well spent, and like it or not, everybody has to eat - charging for support is one model, but there's nothing wrong with selling GPL code. I've done it in the past, and I'll likely do it in the future. The key point, is that once the binaries and source leave your hands, that person can do with them whatever they want - that's what FREE as in SPEECH means. IE is free as in beer - read the EULA - once you drink the beer, you don't get much else. Except maybe a nasty belch or two!
Hope that clears things up.
Seen that Honda walking robot?
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Hacking Biology
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You know the one that automatically learns itself how to walk, and looks wrong? Put a automatic rifle in it's hands, and you don't need any genetically modified soldiers:)
If every one of them replaced a single 100W lightbulb with a 15W compact flourescent, that is 976,650,000W of savings.
You assume that the lightbulb is on all the time, which is incorrect. I hardly have any lights on ever at my place, and most people I know at most use bulbs for a few hours per day - and they're not going to spend a hundred bucks swapping bulbs - those 15W ones are expensive as hell. Telling people to buy them at an added cost to them - less beer, for example - without raising the price accordingly flies in the face of the economics upon which your country was built.
Not to say conversion isn't a good thing, but the reason people waste power IS BECAUSE THE PRICE IS ARTIFICIALLY LOW. If you want people to use less power, for god's sake, just RAISE THE PRICE. That's capitialism, aren't you guys the united states of america? The supply falls, the price rises, more people will want to build power stations - but oh, wait, you've gone and fucked yourselves with environmental legislation that flies in the face of reality. You SHOULD have several more nuclear power plants, or hydro, or coal, or whatever, if you want to sustain the current price to consumers.
You can buy all the power you want from us in Canada - it just isn't going to be cheap. Raise the price, and watch all those 15W bulbs fly off the shelves. Lower the enviromental regulations, and build some power plants. Just wait until people start using their A/C in summer - you have lots of people, well, you get lots of pollution to match.
Search dejanews and you'll see plenty of people who have batteries that won't hold a charge. Might be bad luck, though, who knows? I'd like to be able to replace it at whim, though. My cell phone - Startac w/slim liion - wouldn't hold a charge for more than a single phone call after a year. New battery solved that problem.
Arrgh, none of the new models have user-replaceable batteries.. I have a Palm Pro which is on it's last legs, and I'm really apprehensive about getting a new unit that doesn't take external batteries. Maybe I'll get a IIIxe while they're on sale (really cheap now). See, I bought my Pro in 1995, and I've used it daily since then. (It's a USRobotics one, too:). I can't count the batteries I've gone through. Palm recently discontinuted almost ALL of the accessories for the pro, and you can't get the upgrade cards anymore. What would happen if it had an internal battery? I can tell you what would happen, I'd be paying $100 for a device that's not worth giving a way, and I'd be forced to buy a new one.
Does anyone know if you can buy the internal batteries seperately for a stockpile? Yes, I know they're not user-replaceable, but neither are the capacitors in a TV - doesn't mean you can't do it:). Or have any third-party manufacturers taken up the case yet for the Palm V/Vx owners - I quick search of deja/googlenews indicates that there are a LOT of people waiting a long time to get batteries replaced, something inacceptable IMHO.
The ring is a great way to spot canuck engineers when they're over the border - most americans don't wear them, IIRC it's not as big a deal as it is here.
"Engineer" is protected by law here, like a legal or medical designation, and you can get in big doo-doo if you use the word anywhere w/o being a P.Eng. MCSE's aren't allowed to spell out what those letters mean, even, on business cards / course offerings here in New Brunswick.
Um, not to burst anyone's bubble here, but most of my graduating EE/CompE class of 2000 is employed directly or indirectly as a programmer. What they program typically isn't windows, but more often than not embedded systems, control systems, etc. There _are_ software systems where instability is not an option, period - are you being fatalistic when you say that bugs are par for the course?
Engineering was a great choice for a basis of a primary software-based career; Getting to build a computer from being tossed some ram, a CPU, a latch and some miscellaneous components was great experience and helps when you actually write software for a machine you didn't build (which in 99/100 cases is what actually goes on). It also leaves open the pure hardware side of the world too, in case the software industry blows up (which might happen, who knows).
Engineer and Programmer are not mutually exclusive. This is also being posted from Canada, where a MCSE isn't enough to call yourself an engineer, either.:)
Even if you estimated the distribution grid losses at only 50% ( conservative ! ), add in the multiple conversions and you can't be far from the efficiency of an ICE ( in the area of 40% overall I think ?)
I already quoted in another post that distribution system losses are 8%, not 50% or 90%. This is straight from my electrical engineering handbook, which is in it's 13th edition. I don't have the mechanical engineering equivilant handy, but your typical engine in a car is at BEST only 20% efficient in converting the chemical power in gasoline to mechanical power at the wheels. I think the actual numbers are even lower.
As for your SUV comment, from a study I did three years ago, your chances of survival in many types of automobile collision are related in a linear fashion to the ratio of the weight of your vehicle to the weight of the other vehicle. So, in a general sense, if you are in an accident, it IS safer to be in the larger vehicle, ala SUV / truck / 18 wheeler.
Except that following this philosophy results in everyone driving behemoths that are wasteful and inefficient, and when they get in an accident with each other, the energies involved are much, much higher. Your safety comes at the expense of those who choose (or have no choice but to) drive smaller economy cars. SUV's are signifigantly more dangerous when evasive / sudden maneuvers are required for.
A good background on the electric car stuff is the book ' Natural Capitalism', which I believe was reviewed on slashdot before. It describes the electric car fallacies in great detail!
Much of those 'fallicies' had to do with the primitive battery technology we use currently. Electric motors are over 90% efficient at converting electrical energy to mechanical motion. 90%. The problem is in getting the power to the car at a useful rate without causing more problems than you're solving (lead pollution, weight, etc).
Umm...you don't "overclock" motors, although you can supe up an electric motor in almost as many ways as you can with an internal combustion engine. That is one of the most lame uses of the term overclock I have heard in awhile. The motor doesn't have an internal clock that we are increasing for more power in some way. It's got magnets and wires, and a pile of control circuitry.
Is it reallly that lame? You can get more power out of an electric motor - easily 50%, or more, of rated capacity - by increasing the voltage and/or current (subject to the breakdown voltages and heat that the insulation can take). This is much like what you do when you overclock a processor - yes, there is no clock on a motor (although, there is phase in AC motors:), but you up the current supply just like you do a chip, and then you need to do something with the extra heat - and that extra heat effects the life of the motor, just like a chip.
The other thing...why do you mention an ICE GM product? GM has a hybrid that gets like 80 MPG they have been demoing. Look it up actually...it's a really slick and innovative machine.
Historically, GM makes crap. An engine/car that doesn't run is a lot of wasted energy. This is my opinion, and I'm sure yours is quite different. I drive hondas.:)
And as an afterthought...look up how much pollution a MODERN coal power plant puts out. It's no where near what people think they are, because they used to be so sloppy about pollution years ago. It's the lack of that knowledge and NIMBY that keep the things from being built anywhere that we could use one.
Yes, that's right.. coal is pretty cheap and a decent way to make power.. there's lots of places left to generate hydro power though, which is some of the easiest to do (red tape aside, of course). Then again, I'm Canadian, lots of places to generate power here, and lots of oil, too. Maybe someday I won't have to live with all these taxes... heh
Where I heard that, I don't know.. I have no problem with monitoring of public spaces - there's some trial work being done here in Canada, IIRC - the only thing is that I want to be able to watch the same thing that the police are watching. After all, it is public money and my taxes that are paying for it - so I should be able to watch, too. This can easily be done via broadband internet or even cable.. and would be most interesting:). I like the reality channel.. heh heh.
The only negative consequence I can think of is that it's going to increase the price of dope...:(
Forgive me then, my standard reference texts and EE degree are worthless and I obviously bow down to the l33t knowledge of the "Natual Library" books. How stupid am I to go to my reference shelf!
You're being incredibly dense and ignorant. Power losses have been low ever since people figured out Ohm's law and that heating is a function of current, and that's why transmission lines run at 100's of kilovolts at low amperages - so you don't heat the lines up an lose power through thermal inefficiency. I have no idea about the turbine losses, but I can look those up, too. The actual transmission line losses factor in about 8%, which is more than acceptable, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation - electricity would cost too much.
100's of miles isn't actually that much loss, please read some basic physics and electric theory and you can figure out why.
I'm in no way arguing that electric cars with current battery technology make any sense whatsoever - you're right, you probably could make a good case for them being net polluters, not the other way around. If you look at electric motors alone, which near 90% efficient, and in most cases, don't HAVE a transmission to cause losses. The problem is the energy storage, and the solution to that is a fuel cell - which we can't produce cost-effectively, yet.
I can dig some numbers out from my machines reference on high-output electric motors themselves, but they're extremely effificent. The losses are in the energy storage mechanism.
This is especially true for older remote hydro-electric stations (dams), where over 95% of the energy is lost in transit. Meaning that 95% of the energy goes to heating 100s of miles of hydro cables and towers.
Transmission line losses are NOT 95%. What are you smoking? The figures I've heard bantered about are more like 5-10%. You are incorrect, and I don't want to see this modded up.
Not to commit the same crime, my Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers (13th edition) quotes the figure at about 8% of the total output of a large power system. (18-107). PLEASE think before you post such a completely ignorant figure in the future, and I really hope the moderators don't mod that up, because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Centralized power distribution is the most efficient way to generate power. Period. Yes, it makes a mess in the location you do it in (coal, dam, whatever). Welcome to the price of a modern society.
Don't get too excited. All an electric car does is moves the power generation from the inside of your car to a powerplant outside your city, which probably produces more pollution by burning coal. Better car performance is cool, but this doesn't have any environmental benefits.
Please don't spread completely incorrect assumptions like this around here. You're wrong. Let's say you have a 100MW coal-fired generating station. The average output of a good-sized car engine is about 200kW or so (that might be a little bit on the high side). If you think that 500 large car engines running flat out are a better bet than a properly running plant with a turbine, I have a bridge to sell you. Not only from an emissions standpoint - but there's lubricants, replacement parts, lifetimes - that plant is probably good for 50 years - how many 1950's engines you going to run flat out for 50 years? This translates into bigtime savings in emissions and environmental pollution elsewhere. And that's coal - some of the messiest. There's lots of surplus hydro power in Canada - but you gotta get it from us Canucks. Keep suckin back the juice so my taxes will go down!:)
ELECTRIC CARS HAVE LOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS. The problem is getting a battery technology that lasts long enough to be cost effective, or getting fuel cells to have the outputs required to make them cost effective. A properly designed electric motor will run as long as it's OWNER if it's kept within it's temperature specs - and you can overclock motors, too:) - compare that with your average ICE GM product.
I suppose you drive a SUV and think it's safer, too. (Sorry, couldn't resist. That was uncalled for:).
Until somebody has a network sniffer on there, has cracked their encryption - or modified the hardware itself - and/or is selling a little black box to verify your games, or even better yet, has released linux software to do it for them. Time to save those old machines:). I'm waiting for a resurgance of "dongles" and the like for consoles.. heh
Alternatively to that, I guess you could always copy the playstation CD/DVD, and then use a software hack like the "nocd" fixes that are becoming common for games in the PC world.
Discs get broken and scratched! This isn't a made up problem.. if I drop $50 on a game, I better have the ability to store the original someplace safe.
If the problem with users using crypto is that most don't know how or aren't technically savvy enough, why not abstract this from the user completely to make mail traffic (more) secure to snooping? People are under the assumption that there's nothing that can be done from the time that they hit send, and I'm not sure that's completely accurate.
What about encrypting at the SMTP level? e.g. the information is transmitted plaintext to your local outgoing mail server, but then that server relays the mail traffic in an encrypted form - to other servers to which it knows how to get the proper public key from. This isn't ideal, but it would be at least a little better. Along the same lines - when CPU power is cheap, why not encrypt at the router level, too? Why do people assume that the government has some god-given right to have the ability to snoop on my private converstations?
Along the same lines, why not integrate the encryption/identity stuff into the OS - this is harder in windows, but could more easily become a part of gnome, or whatever.
Just some thoughts.. and I encrypt work and project related stuff when I travel in case my notebook gets swiped - and I'd like to retain that right. Crypto filesystems are the ideal here, though - again, as transparent as possible.
I just wanted to point out that handheld doesn't necessarily imply that the device has no keyboard and CERTAINLY doesn't imply that it follows the palm form factor. There's no denying that palm hit it right on the nose with what you need in a handheld computer - I've had one since the Pro was introduced (Mmmm, backlight), and I'm still using my Pro today - and actively programming.
The current versions of the PalmOS API are limited though in terms of the multimedia features they can handle, but this will be changing in versions 4 and 5 of the OS to reflect improvements in the hardware side of the equation (e.g. 200Mhz chips that can run on AAA's..)
What they're aiming for, I hope, and I bet, is a handheld along the size of the HP Jornadas that are the traditional clamshell design. The first company that makes an ultra-subnote running linux, as light as possible with a nice screen - they're going to get my money, because I want something that can run for a day, edit and compile C++ code - prefreably GCC, but that's secondary. I'd like a real machine to store email on, and I'd like there to be the option of NO HD to break. Maybe run a browser. I don't need much else, but I need bigger size. I'd like it in the 1-1.5lb range.
That's the market that I think they're going after; Palm and WinCE are both way to limited (although for completely different reasons) to ever really succeed here. I used to have a Hewlett Packard 100LX that did this role nicely.. I want something smaller than my vaio, damnit, that doesn't suck up a battery in 45 minutes!
Someone, please port linux to the Jornada.. or I'll wait for one of these.. arrgh.
If any marketdroids are reading this.. PLEASE make a device with the following, and I and likely hordes of other geeks will run to you:
Decent screen. Jornada OK, square better. 10" or maybe 8.4".
Run for a LONG time on a battery. 6 hours+. Maybe 12. Ability to run standard cells nice, but not necessary.
Flashed based, and support the IBM microdrive.
Compactflash support
Can run a REAL operating system; Linux is the obvious choice, but make it run GCC and I'm happy.
Light - 1-1.5lb MAX, and the thinner, the better.
Strong case - Don't care what, but titanium would be nice!
Can run a web brower. Doesn't have to be huge. Lots of little embedded solutions are out there. Or maybe optimize Galeon or Konqueror. I don't care.
Actively support it. Yes, I know about the liberetto. Try getting it fixed when it (inevitably) gets smooshed. Palm and Handspring have the lead here.
And be able to run MAME;). Ok, maybe I can live without that.
I'd give HP kudos if they released the information to get Linux and XWindows running on the Jornada, but IIRC, the projects to get it running haven't met with much success. An officially endorsed version would be just as good as them going out and switching it themselves, which is what I'd rather see. Getting all the functionality working smoothly is a bigger task than I think it would be at first glance. (Sound & Video, especially).
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Ever wonder what they do with all those communications? Maybe they can put them in escrow for 200 years :)
I've had good luck with the 505 series from Sony, however, to say their customer service sucks is the understatement of the decade. I bought my and pretended I didn't have ANY support; it's easier that way. That said, they run well, get decent battery life, and don't weigh too much.
Others had had good luck with the IBM Thinkpads. I also hear good things about the G3 Apple notebooks, but I don't know about the new titanium G4, it's a little bit, ugh, large for my tastes anyhow.
Someone, pretty please, release linux on a HP Jornada 720.. :)
Yeah, ditto! My pro is a little trooper. The screen needs recalibrating a lot now though, dispite reseating the connector many times. I suspect the capacitance or whatever effect generates the touch detection is going. I can't think of anything else I bought in 1997 I'm still using today, though :).
Palm IIIxe's are going for $250 cdn here. It's tempting up upgrade, but I really want one of those m505s..
So when they say "Join the Linux revolution" and "free software movement", does this mean that all of the software on the machine is GPL or something similar, so that unlike Palm OS, when I want to change a built-in app I can (provided I have skillz)? I'm not finding a lot on their site that indicates one way or the other.
IIRC, Palm has the source to all of the on-board applications (and a lot of the games) included as part of the development kit, so you can indeed change the application to do whatever you want. Some of them have, as I believe there are several very nice calendar replacements available based on the 'stock' code. You can even get the source code to the OS as a liscenced developer - is it free? No, but the code is available.
Palm has actively supported the free tools; They could be nicer about the USB specs, but I don't know enough to comment on that.
You might want to check out Palm Open Source for more goodies. There a nice little market doing custom development for palms, now, too.
NOBODY has come out and offered what I really want - linux on a PDA with a nice keyboard, a la the Jornada! GCC to go, with a real keyboard. I could toss the vaio then.
The wonderful intergration of custom chips and a well designed OS (Guru errors aside, but that was class - nice, evil-looking flashing red error box!) and a dedication to the hacker community at large is what made the Amiga succeed in spite of everything Commodore did do kill it (although they eventually succeeded). How many computers and video cards do you know that actually ship with hardware schematics, now?
What's needed is someone to take hardware - be it G4 hardware, GF3 chips, whatever, standardize on it and then say "WE WILL SUPPORT THIS TILL DEATH DO US PART". This lets software developers push that metal to the limit, just like they did on the Amiga.
Hey Redhat: You want to get onto the desktop in a big way? Use some of that IPO cash to cut a deal with some hardware vendors. Make a sleek box, it doesn't even have to be X86. Just put state of the art 3D hardware in there; Fund the development of the API's to make it happen, e.g. OpenGL, SDL, whatever - and then make sure that the hardware runs out of the box. Need to get NDA's from NVidia? Fine - just make sure that it works with your product. Give people the platform, and good things will happen. The platform isn't just linux, and it's not just hardware, either.
That's why all these Amiga resurrections fail. They miss the point of what made the Amiga grand. Does anyone else remember Digi-Paint? The product that bragged about the engineers spending months hacking a pure assembly paint package? That thing was FAST. And it had a spirit to it, too. (*Grin* all those ads with Kiki.. I wonder what Newtek is doing these days..)
My $0.02cdn.
One of the funny things about the USA is that the drug war has given people easy access to organized crime - even those in high school. If you want a gun, you just ask someone who sells drugs. If they don't know where to get a gun, the person they buy their supply from will - and so on. Finding someone to sell you drugs in high school is NOT a very hard thing to do.
Funny how the harder you crack down on drugs, the more risky it gets to traffic, hence the more lucerative, and the organized movements become even more entrenched. More of the population needs to understand basic economic principles - supply side economics don't work for anything, including the drug war. Heh.
Ok, for starters: I really recommend that anyone interested in this stuff pick up a (modern) book on biology and genetics, there's a lot of stuff been discovered in the past 10 years, and we're only just scratching the surface. (Someone will make a lot of money selling computers to process all that info :).
This gene has been predicted (if not known about) for some time. It's needed, because your cells die all the time, they're supposed to. Over time, you get problems - errors - in DNA, and this is one of the problems with making cells that duplicate forever, eventually, they won't do the same things anymore (IIRC, brewing companies need to change the yeast they use periodically, because mutations that occur over time change the taste of the beer). The cells in yeast aren't all that different from the cells in your own body! (Actually, anyone who has problems with evoloution would be shocked at how much your cellular processes are (identical) to any other furry mammal).
The biggest application of this kind of technology is the real limit on human lifespan - brain cells. We can eventually replace almost everything else, somehow, but your brain is what and who you are. Once it deteriorates, you're not the same person anymore. Figuring out how to prevent brain cells from dying - brain cells are unique, in that they do not reproduce, ever - just the supporting (gidal?) cells do.
Nobody will be living forever until nanotech becomes rampant - no other mechanism to repair nerve and cellular damage is possible (and even then, it might not be enough). I wouldn't mind retaining my mental facilities until I reach the end of my lifespan, though. If you figure you'll probably live to 80, but will be signifigantly handicapped after 60 or 65, that's a 15 year productive increase.
There is NOTHING wrong with me taking a copy of Redhat Linux, or any other code - calling it XtalLinuX, putting up the XtalLinuX.com web site, and charging you $40/CD for it. I don't even have to make the source code available to the general public. That would be the nice thing to do, of course, but the GPL has one, and only one requirement:
Anyone who gets the binary gets the source, to do so as they please, under the GPL.
This of course means that you can buy a copy of XtalLinuX, and then give it away free to anyone who asks, if that's your perogative. If I charged you $5000 instead of $50, you might be less inclined to do so - but both are perfectly legal under the terms of the GPL.
What's wrong with this? I try to buy every major revision of Redhat because I think it saves me a lot of time, and it's a good product compared to the alternatives. The money IMHO is well spent, and like it or not, everybody has to eat - charging for support is one model, but there's nothing wrong with selling GPL code. I've done it in the past, and I'll likely do it in the future. The key point, is that once the binaries and source leave your hands, that person can do with them whatever they want - that's what FREE as in SPEECH means. IE is free as in beer - read the EULA - once you drink the beer, you don't get much else. Except maybe a nasty belch or two!
Hope that clears things up.
You know the one that automatically learns itself how to walk, and looks wrong? Put a automatic rifle in it's hands, and you don't need any genetically modified soldiers :)
If every one of them replaced a single 100W lightbulb with a 15W compact flourescent, that is 976,650,000W of savings.
You assume that the lightbulb is on all the time, which is incorrect. I hardly have any lights on ever at my place, and most people I know at most use bulbs for a few hours per day - and they're not going to spend a hundred bucks swapping bulbs - those 15W ones are expensive as hell. Telling people to buy them at an added cost to them - less beer, for example - without raising the price accordingly flies in the face of the economics upon which your country was built.
Not to say conversion isn't a good thing, but the reason people waste power IS BECAUSE THE PRICE IS ARTIFICIALLY LOW. If you want people to use less power, for god's sake, just RAISE THE PRICE. That's capitialism, aren't you guys the united states of america? The supply falls, the price rises, more people will want to build power stations - but oh, wait, you've gone and fucked yourselves with environmental legislation that flies in the face of reality. You SHOULD have several more nuclear power plants, or hydro, or coal, or whatever, if you want to sustain the current price to consumers.
You can buy all the power you want from us in Canada - it just isn't going to be cheap. Raise the price, and watch all those 15W bulbs fly off the shelves. Lower the enviromental regulations, and build some power plants. Just wait until people start using their A/C in summer - you have lots of people, well, you get lots of pollution to match.
Search dejanews and you'll see plenty of people who have batteries that won't hold a charge. Might be bad luck, though, who knows? I'd like to be able to replace it at whim, though. My cell phone - Startac w/slim liion - wouldn't hold a charge for more than a single phone call after a year. New battery solved that problem.
Arrgh, none of the new models have user-replaceable batteries.. I have a Palm Pro which is on it's last legs, and I'm really apprehensive about getting a new unit that doesn't take external batteries. Maybe I'll get a IIIxe while they're on sale (really cheap now). See, I bought my Pro in 1995, and I've used it daily since then. (It's a USRobotics one, too :). I can't count the batteries I've gone through. Palm recently discontinuted almost ALL of the accessories for the pro, and you can't get the upgrade cards anymore. What would happen if it had an internal battery? I can tell you what would happen, I'd be paying $100 for a device that's not worth giving a way, and I'd be forced to buy a new one.
Does anyone know if you can buy the internal batteries seperately for a stockpile? Yes, I know they're not user-replaceable, but neither are the capacitors in a TV - doesn't mean you can't do it :). Or have any third-party manufacturers taken up the case yet for the Palm V/Vx owners - I quick search of deja/googlenews indicates that there are a LOT of people waiting a long time to get batteries replaced, something inacceptable IMHO.
Other than that.. *drool*.
The ring is a great way to spot canuck engineers when they're over the border - most americans don't wear them, IIRC it's not as big a deal as it is here.
"Engineer" is protected by law here, like a legal or medical designation, and you can get in big doo-doo if you use the word anywhere w/o being a P.Eng. MCSE's aren't allowed to spell out what those letters mean, even, on business cards / course offerings here in New Brunswick.
Um, not to burst anyone's bubble here, but most of my graduating EE/CompE class of 2000 is employed directly or indirectly as a programmer. What they program typically isn't windows, but more often than not embedded systems, control systems, etc. There _are_ software systems where instability is not an option, period - are you being fatalistic when you say that bugs are par for the course?
Engineering was a great choice for a basis of a primary software-based career; Getting to build a computer from being tossed some ram, a CPU, a latch and some miscellaneous components was great experience and helps when you actually write software for a machine you didn't build (which in 99/100 cases is what actually goes on). It also leaves open the pure hardware side of the world too, in case the software industry blows up (which might happen, who knows).
Engineer and Programmer are not mutually exclusive. This is also being posted from Canada, where a MCSE isn't enough to call yourself an engineer, either. :)
Even if you estimated the distribution grid losses at only 50% ( conservative ! ), add in the multiple conversions and you can't be far from the efficiency of an ICE ( in the area of 40% overall I think ?)
I already quoted in another post that distribution system losses are 8%, not 50% or 90%. This is straight from my electrical engineering handbook, which is in it's 13th edition. I don't have the mechanical engineering equivilant handy, but your typical engine in a car is at BEST only 20% efficient in converting the chemical power in gasoline to mechanical power at the wheels. I think the actual numbers are even lower.
As for your SUV comment, from a study I did three years ago, your chances of survival in many types of automobile collision are related in a linear fashion to the ratio of the weight of your vehicle to the weight of the other vehicle. So, in a general sense, if you are in an accident, it IS safer to be in the larger vehicle, ala SUV / truck / 18 wheeler.
Except that following this philosophy results in everyone driving behemoths that are wasteful and inefficient, and when they get in an accident with each other, the energies involved are much, much higher. Your safety comes at the expense of those who choose (or have no choice but to) drive smaller economy cars. SUV's are signifigantly more dangerous when evasive / sudden maneuvers are required for.
A good background on the electric car stuff is the book ' Natural Capitalism', which I believe was reviewed on slashdot before. It describes the electric car fallacies in great detail!
Much of those 'fallicies' had to do with the primitive battery technology we use currently. Electric motors are over 90% efficient at converting electrical energy to mechanical motion. 90%. The problem is in getting the power to the car at a useful rate without causing more problems than you're solving (lead pollution, weight, etc).
Umm...you don't "overclock" motors, although you can supe up an electric motor in almost as many ways as you can with an internal combustion engine. That is one of the most lame uses of the term overclock I have heard in awhile. The motor doesn't have an internal clock that we are increasing for more power in some way. It's got magnets and wires, and a pile of control circuitry.
Is it reallly that lame? You can get more power out of an electric motor - easily 50%, or more, of rated capacity - by increasing the voltage and/or current (subject to the breakdown voltages and heat that the insulation can take). This is much like what you do when you overclock a processor - yes, there is no clock on a motor (although, there is phase in AC motors :), but you up the current supply just like you do a chip, and then you need to do something with the extra heat - and that extra heat effects the life of the motor, just like a chip.
The other thing...why do you mention an ICE GM product? GM has a hybrid that gets like 80 MPG they have been demoing. Look it up actually...it's a really slick and innovative machine.
Historically, GM makes crap. An engine/car that doesn't run is a lot of wasted energy. This is my opinion, and I'm sure yours is quite different. I drive hondas. :)
And as an afterthought...look up how much pollution a MODERN coal power plant puts out. It's no where near what people think they are, because they used to be so sloppy about pollution years ago. It's the lack of that knowledge and NIMBY that keep the things from being built anywhere that we could use one.
Yes, that's right.. coal is pretty cheap and a decent way to make power.. there's lots of places left to generate hydro power though, which is some of the easiest to do (red tape aside, of course). Then again, I'm Canadian, lots of places to generate power here, and lots of oil, too. Maybe someday I won't have to live with all these taxes... heh
Where I heard that, I don't know.. I have no problem with monitoring of public spaces - there's some trial work being done here in Canada, IIRC - the only thing is that I want to be able to watch the same thing that the police are watching. After all, it is public money and my taxes that are paying for it - so I should be able to watch, too. This can easily be done via broadband internet or even cable.. and would be most interesting :). I like the reality channel.. heh heh.
The only negative consequence I can think of is that it's going to increase the price of dope... :(
People still buy drugs on the street? :)
Forgive me then, my standard reference texts and EE degree are worthless and I obviously bow down to the l33t knowledge of the "Natual Library" books. How stupid am I to go to my reference shelf!
You're being incredibly dense and ignorant. Power losses have been low ever since people figured out Ohm's law and that heating is a function of current, and that's why transmission lines run at 100's of kilovolts at low amperages - so you don't heat the lines up an lose power through thermal inefficiency. I have no idea about the turbine losses, but I can look those up, too. The actual transmission line losses factor in about 8%, which is more than acceptable, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation - electricity would cost too much.
100's of miles isn't actually that much loss, please read some basic physics and electric theory and you can figure out why.
I'm in no way arguing that electric cars with current battery technology make any sense whatsoever - you're right, you probably could make a good case for them being net polluters, not the other way around. If you look at electric motors alone, which near 90% efficient, and in most cases, don't HAVE a transmission to cause losses. The problem is the energy storage, and the solution to that is a fuel cell - which we can't produce cost-effectively, yet.
I can dig some numbers out from my machines reference on high-output electric motors themselves, but they're extremely effificent. The losses are in the energy storage mechanism.
This is especially true for older remote hydro-electric stations (dams), where over 95% of the energy is lost in transit. Meaning that 95% of the energy goes to heating 100s of miles of hydro cables and towers.
Transmission line losses are NOT 95%. What are you smoking? The figures I've heard bantered about are more like 5-10%. You are incorrect, and I don't want to see this modded up.
Not to commit the same crime, my Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers (13th edition) quotes the figure at about 8% of the total output of a large power system. (18-107). PLEASE think before you post such a completely ignorant figure in the future, and I really hope the moderators don't mod that up, because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Centralized power distribution is the most efficient way to generate power. Period. Yes, it makes a mess in the location you do it in (coal, dam, whatever). Welcome to the price of a modern society.
Don't get too excited. All an electric car does is moves the power generation from the inside of your car to a powerplant outside your city, which probably produces more pollution by burning coal. Better car performance is cool, but this doesn't have any environmental benefits.
Please don't spread completely incorrect assumptions like this around here. You're wrong. Let's say you have a 100MW coal-fired generating station. The average output of a good-sized car engine is about 200kW or so (that might be a little bit on the high side). If you think that 500 large car engines running flat out are a better bet than a properly running plant with a turbine, I have a bridge to sell you. Not only from an emissions standpoint - but there's lubricants, replacement parts, lifetimes - that plant is probably good for 50 years - how many 1950's engines you going to run flat out for 50 years? This translates into bigtime savings in emissions and environmental pollution elsewhere. And that's coal - some of the messiest. There's lots of surplus hydro power in Canada - but you gotta get it from us Canucks. Keep suckin back the juice so my taxes will go down! :)
ELECTRIC CARS HAVE LOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS. The problem is getting a battery technology that lasts long enough to be cost effective, or getting fuel cells to have the outputs required to make them cost effective. A properly designed electric motor will run as long as it's OWNER if it's kept within it's temperature specs - and you can overclock motors, too :) - compare that with your average ICE GM product.
I suppose you drive a SUV and think it's safer, too. (Sorry, couldn't resist. That was uncalled for :).
Until somebody has a network sniffer on there, has cracked their encryption - or modified the hardware itself - and/or is selling a little black box to verify your games, or even better yet, has released linux software to do it for them. Time to save those old machines :). I'm waiting for a resurgance of "dongles" and the like for consoles.. heh
Alternatively to that, I guess you could always copy the playstation CD/DVD, and then use a software hack like the "nocd" fixes that are becoming common for games in the PC world.
Discs get broken and scratched! This isn't a made up problem .. if I drop $50 on a game, I better have the ability to store the original someplace safe.
If the problem with users using crypto is that most don't know how or aren't technically savvy enough, why not abstract this from the user completely to make mail traffic (more) secure to snooping? People are under the assumption that there's nothing that can be done from the time that they hit send, and I'm not sure that's completely accurate.
What about encrypting at the SMTP level? e.g. the information is transmitted plaintext to your local outgoing mail server, but then that server relays the mail traffic in an encrypted form - to other servers to which it knows how to get the proper public key from. This isn't ideal, but it would be at least a little better. Along the same lines - when CPU power is cheap, why not encrypt at the router level, too? Why do people assume that the government has some god-given right to have the ability to snoop on my private converstations?
Along the same lines, why not integrate the encryption/identity stuff into the OS - this is harder in windows, but could more easily become a part of gnome, or whatever.
Just some thoughts.. and I encrypt work and project related stuff when I travel in case my notebook gets swiped - and I'd like to retain that right. Crypto filesystems are the ideal here, though - again, as transparent as possible.
I just wanted to point out that handheld doesn't necessarily imply that the device has no keyboard and CERTAINLY doesn't imply that it follows the palm form factor. There's no denying that palm hit it right on the nose with what you need in a handheld computer - I've had one since the Pro was introduced (Mmmm, backlight), and I'm still using my Pro today - and actively programming.
The current versions of the PalmOS API are limited though in terms of the multimedia features they can handle, but this will be changing in versions 4 and 5 of the OS to reflect improvements in the hardware side of the equation (e.g. 200Mhz chips that can run on AAA's..)
What they're aiming for, I hope, and I bet, is a handheld along the size of the HP Jornadas that are the traditional clamshell design. The first company that makes an ultra-subnote running linux, as light as possible with a nice screen - they're going to get my money, because I want something that can run for a day, edit and compile C++ code - prefreably GCC, but that's secondary. I'd like a real machine to store email on, and I'd like there to be the option of NO HD to break. Maybe run a browser. I don't need much else, but I need bigger size. I'd like it in the 1-1.5lb range.
That's the market that I think they're going after; Palm and WinCE are both way to limited (although for completely different reasons) to ever really succeed here. I used to have a Hewlett Packard 100LX that did this role nicely.. I want something smaller than my vaio, damnit, that doesn't suck up a battery in 45 minutes!
Someone, please port linux to the Jornada.. or I'll wait for one of these.. arrgh.
If any marketdroids are reading this .. PLEASE make a device with the following, and I and likely hordes of other geeks will run to you:
Please?
I'd give HP kudos if they released the information to get Linux and XWindows running on the Jornada, but IIRC, the projects to get it running haven't met with much success. An officially endorsed version would be just as good as them going out and switching it themselves, which is what I'd rather see. Getting all the functionality working smoothly is a bigger task than I think it would be at first glance. (Sound & Video, especially).