Lithium-ferro phosphate is the chemistry used in the cells for the XO OLPC laptop. Here an excerpt from ACM Queue's recent inteview with OLPC CTO Mary-Lou Jepsen:
We started to look into other battery chemistries,
such as lithium-ferro phosphate, which people haven't
really used yet in consumer electronics. This chemistry
charges in heat up to 60 degrees C. It's also about as safe
as NiMH. We can put nickel-metal hydride or lithium-
ferro phosphate or, eventually, other battery chemistries
into our laptops, which was another accomplishment. It
was a real pain. We did that in the embedded controller.
We also have a little fuel gauge in each battery that so we
can keep track of its life cycle.
Our battery has a five-year life. You can go to 2,000
charge/recharge cycles. The lithium-ion battery in my
ThinkPad is supposed to last for 500 charges, but in
practice it's more like 200. So, moving to lithium-ferro
phosphate is really cool because you don't have to spend
additional money on periodic battery replacement costs,
regardless of the environment.
Also, lithium-ferro phosphate is pretty environmen-
tally friendly. Some early studies we did suggested that it
possibly can decompose into fertilizer (with processing).
Typically we think of batteries as environmentally bad,
but there's some indication that lithium-ferro phosphate
isn't that harmful. We haven't quite gone through all
of the rigor on this, however, and it does require some
processing to decompose it into fertilizer. Full article is here.
I sort of regard my LaserJet like a Belgian brewer regards a lambic brewery: don't touch it. Who knows? You might actually need those spiderwebs for the thing to work. Anyway, I just adjusted the scope of my DHCP server to exclude that IP and just gave it a static one. I'm not going to do anything that might alter its functionality, but thanks for the suggestion.
My CS professors seem to prefer hard copy over email, which is odd, because we're talking about code here. But then my Data Structures prof's Exchange server crashed, and he was unaware that I had sent my homework in. It wasn't until he sent us our midterm grades that I realized something was wrong-- my average was much too low. He ended up allowing me to resubmit my homework, but now, when professors give me the option to give them something electronically, or on paper, I opt for paper. I place it directly in in their hands, if at all possible.
Shit, dude, LaserJet 4M Plus. My company got rid of it a couple years ago, so I got to take it home. It's been complaining about low toner since Day 1 at home, but as far as I can tell, that warning is completely spurious. I've never changed the toner cartridge.
I can set it up to work over my LAN (one downside, no DHCP, only BOOTP), via ethernet. Plus, there's a big bonus for having a printer that allows me to legitmately say "PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?" on a regular basis.
There are probably oodles of these machines on eBay. They really are built like tanks, and they're about as heavy, too.
That is the best rebuttal to the parent's argument I've seen in a long time. I don't know if you've seen this, but last month's issue of Communications of the ACM was on developing a culture of experimentation in CS. Interesting read.
A ping pong ball can be a pretty big target compared to a target miles away. While a targeting system that stays focused on a ping pong ball is indeed admirable, when you factor in:
motion of the aircraft
distance
atmosphere
the fact that our lasers aren't really collimated
the problem gets a lot harder. Not saying it can't be done, but I'm skeptical as to the degree of accuracy. Engineers are always optimists.
The mammoth and bison remains all display small (about 2-3mm in size) perforations.
Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction.
The ratios of different types of atoms in the fragments meant it was most unlikely they had originated on Earth, the team told the AGU meeting. A meteorite would not be my first thought. That would be alien hunters.
I'm not exactly sure when Chris' tour is up, but I'm sure I'll hear about it, since he and I live in the same town. He and my brother both served on the student volunteer force in Amherst, MA, and that's what he's doing up there now-- fighting fires. Well, he would be anyway, if there were any. Chris seemed hell-bent on doing something crazy after college, and I remember him asking me a million questions about hiking the AT, but I guess he opted for something way crazier!
If what you're predicting comes true, then we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg for web-application attacks. For your typical designer to be able to do this stuff, we need some other kind of technology, because input validation done in Javascript ain't gonna cut it.
Write it, then. The point I was making is that most of us don't care about solving your little status quo problem. Other people can use whatever POS software they want to use. If you need OOXML support, contribute it, or pay someone to implement it, but don't complain when the rest of us don't give a rat's ass.
But that's the beauty of Open Source. The community wrote this software. Us. We don't have to compromise for shit, because this is software that everyone can use, and hack, for free.
Microsoft has proven time and again that if you give them slack, they'll hang you with it. So, fuck them. They've held up the state of computing for long enough. We now have free and open software that would have been the envy of many proprietary vendors only a few years ago. And this software isn't going to go away. Adobe can't make GIMP's version bumps produce incompatible formats. Apple can't make CentOS look for license keys and refuse to run. Microsoft can't make us embrace, extend, and extinguish an RFC. It's time we've left them behind. If they want to play in the new ball game, fine. But they'll have to play by our rules.
It's a kind of existential absurdity that I might soon be able to find out everything there is to know about my neighbors via the internet, and yet nothing at all about my government.
I personally learned this one from my photo tech class in high school (do they still have that class anymore?). There was a chemical that we dipped our developed and fixed film in to prevent water spots from forming on them as they dried. Water just ran right off onto the floor. My teacher casually brought up soap when explaining how this works. Ah, soap! I knew it had a use;^)
The problem with it is this: coming from C, all of C++'s weirdnesses stood out. A vector? Turns out, that's a template class (and a damn useful one), but I didn't know that at the time. Why do I need the algorithm header? What about cin.eof()? cin/cout objects and their flags are damn weird when you're used to just pulling in data from a keyboard buffer and dealing with errors yourself.
When I first saw this, I think I was literally on the level of "how do I get input from a keyboard in C++?" Answering that question with all the bells and whistles of C++ was not what I was looking for. More cognitive load than I needed. And wrt the data structure in question, anything with the word "stack" in it would have made sense to me. Not an array which then gets reversed. Weird.
#include<iostream> #include<vector> #include<algorithm> using namespace std;
int main() { vector<double> v;
double d; while(cin>>d) v.push_back(d);// read elements if (!cin.eof()) {// check if input failed cerr << "format error\n"; return 1;// error return }
cout << "read " << v.size() << " elements\n";
reverse(v.begin(),v.end()); cout << "elements in reverse order:\n"; for (int i = 0; i<v.size(); ++i) cout << v[i] << '\n';
return 0;// success return }
The first time I saw that, coming from a C background, made me think, "This is simple?!" Of course, now that I've been programming in C++ for a couple years (per requirement of my CS department), I have to say it's not so bad. Maybe not the way I'd approach the problem myself, but it does have a certain conceptual elegance, even if the code itself looks like puke. Bjarne Stroustrup wrote this, BTW.
I didn't mean to imply that DRM was part of the collective reasoning that lead to MP3 becoming a de facto standard. What I meant was that the absence of copy-controls worked in its favor. There were indeed copy-protected formats back then, although this was copy-protection in hardware, not software. SCMS is essentially what killed DAT early on.
But you're right-- it was good enough at the time. I remember a friend of mine who had discovered how to encode MP3s (this must have been around 1997), and this was mind-blowing to me, because I had previously "copied" CDs onto my computer by ripping them to AIFF and storing them on ZIP disk (burners were only just starting to become affordable then). The loss in quality was totally worth the space savings, in my opinion.
I disagree about the W3C, though. The W3C is all about interoperable formats. Open formats make the "network effect" work faster, because there can be competition in implementing those services. It's true-- we may get "video on our cellphones" faster with a proprietary solution. But the implementors will always take a walled-garden approach with their solutions, because it will be imperative for their proprietary solution that you not see the value in their competitor's products. This works counter to the network effect. The W3C makes the network effect happen much faster by devising a standard that everyone can use, for free. You may not make as much money in the short term, but after your solution reaches critical mass, the benefits will outweigh the pitfalls. HTTP/HTML is a perfect example. I clearly remember, in the early 90's, thinking that "the web" was a waste of time. Gopher was so much better! But, as you can see, even technical merit was not enough. HTML was "good enough": free and easy to implement. HTML's one pitfall, searching, went away when good (and free) search engines like Google came around.
I agree with you, but the parent poster's comments reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend. What if, by helping people, e.g., providing food for starving people in an impoverished country, you are actually just prolonging the suffering? I had never thought of this before, but now, when I walk down the street on the way to work, I question whether giving money to a homeless person is misguided. Homelessness is sometimes somebody who is down on their luck-- but, at least in major metro areas, these people are often in this position because they cannot take care of themselves. They may be mentally ill, or they may have a substance-abuse problem. What will they do with the money? Will they hurt themselves even more?
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be compassionate. On the contrary, I believe that caring for those who cannot care for themselves is one real measure of the "progress" of society. I simply find myself wondering whether our charity makes the problem worse.
Nokia and Apple obviously have stakes in determining the codec that people use for video over the web. Apple is pushing H.264, which they point out is a standard, but fail to mention is also proprietary. Nokia mentions this in their position paper, but goes on to recommend H.264 anyway. Ironically, they list their #1 criteria for codec adoption to be "The specifications, and supporting documentation and code (i.e. conformance test suites, example/reference code,...) are obtainable by everyone, for free or against a reasonable fee (ISO/IEC fees are reasonable in this sense)." You can't get a more reasonable fee than free, which is the case with Ogg. Anyhow, it's clear that Apple wants AppleTV to be a new content-delivery platform. Nokia probably has similar plans.
What I really suspect Nokia is saying in this paper are in criteria #2 and #5: "There is only a manageable risk in implementing the specification. In practice, we prefer specifications that have been developed in a collaborative manner under an IPR policy with disclsore requirements. Examples include specifications developed by the ITU-T, ISO/IEC, or the IETF." and "Compatibility with DRM. We understand that this could be a sore point in W3C, but from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."
Basically, "we think Ogg will get us sued" and "Hollywood won't use Ogg". It's a shame that Stephan Wenger (the author of this paper) has now damaged his own credibility by writing a four-page exercise in being disingenuous.
I'd like to point out that the one really successful proprietary codec, MP3, is a success because of the huge numbers of people who intially implemented the codec without a license and because it didn't support DRM, thus leading to widespread piracy, and establishing the format as the de facto standard for unencumbered audio. I would personally consider the W3C negligent if they did not choose an open (free as in beer and speech) codec.
I suspect that pervasive monitoring, not disease treatment, will end up being the big gain with nano-devices. The starting point for diagnosis at the moment is a patient's description of the symptoms. A person with bio-sensors "installed" will allow a doctor to examine a patient's vital signs directly-- I think this will help to greatly improve a doctor's initial diagnosis, because symptoms are often not a good indicator of what is happening. And the best thing about this kind of device is that it will allow testing to happen over a period of time. Were you to give these to healthy people, you could also establish a "baseline" to compare against when they are in ill health in the future.
There are some obvious privacy concerns here, but were bio-sensors to be inserted in a large number of people, this would greatly benefit epidemiology. That's an application of nano-technology that I would like to see happen, and I think it would revolutionize medical knowledge.
That is indeed regrettable, but why should the public provide for the family/estate of an author for 70 years? I don't know how publishing contracts work off of the top of my head (although if I walk about ten feet down the hall, I could ask someone who writes them), but I suspect that a smart author would make sure that royalties continue to be paid to his/her family. That was indeed the case with one book that we publish-- the author died, and royalties continued to flow to her husband per her contract, as the book continues to be a big money-maker.
There are already mechanisms in place to provide for families in need, and even if there weren't, I don't see that as being a valid reason to support an abused legal construct. Your argument is "think of the children" stuff. Rhetoric 101.
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Our battery has a five-year life. You can go to 2,000 charge/recharge cycles. The lithium-ion battery in my ThinkPad is supposed to last for 500 charges, but in practice it's more like 200. So, moving to lithium-ferro phosphate is really cool because you don't have to spend additional money on periodic battery replacement costs, regardless of the environment.
Also, lithium-ferro phosphate is pretty environmen- tally friendly. Some early studies we did suggested that it possibly can decompose into fertilizer (with processing). Typically we think of batteries as environmentally bad, but there's some indication that lithium-ferro phosphate isn't that harmful. We haven't quite gone through all of the rigor on this, however, and it does require some processing to decompose it into fertilizer. Full article is here.
The only way this would work is if we take human pilots completely out of the picture. Even very smart people make mistakes.
I sort of regard my LaserJet like a Belgian brewer regards a lambic brewery: don't touch it. Who knows? You might actually need those spiderwebs for the thing to work. Anyway, I just adjusted the scope of my DHCP server to exclude that IP and just gave it a static one. I'm not going to do anything that might alter its functionality, but thanks for the suggestion.
My CS professors seem to prefer hard copy over email, which is odd, because we're talking about code here. But then my Data Structures prof's Exchange server crashed, and he was unaware that I had sent my homework in. It wasn't until he sent us our midterm grades that I realized something was wrong-- my average was much too low. He ended up allowing me to resubmit my homework, but now, when professors give me the option to give them something electronically, or on paper, I opt for paper. I place it directly in in their hands, if at all possible.
Shit, dude, LaserJet 4M Plus. My company got rid of it a couple years ago, so I got to take it home. It's been complaining about low toner since Day 1 at home, but as far as I can tell, that warning is completely spurious. I've never changed the toner cartridge.
I can set it up to work over my LAN (one downside, no DHCP, only BOOTP), via ethernet. Plus, there's a big bonus for having a printer that allows me to legitmately say "PC LOAD LETTER? What the fuck does that mean?" on a regular basis.
There are probably oodles of these machines on eBay. They really are built like tanks, and they're about as heavy, too.
That is the best rebuttal to the parent's argument I've seen in a long time. I don't know if you've seen this, but last month's issue of Communications of the ACM was on developing a culture of experimentation in CS. Interesting read.
- motion of the aircraft
- distance
- atmosphere
- the fact that our lasers aren't really collimated
the problem gets a lot harder. Not saying it can't be done, but I'm skeptical as to the degree of accuracy. Engineers are always optimists.Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction.
The ratios of different types of atoms in the fragments meant it was most unlikely they had originated on Earth, the team told the AGU meeting. A meteorite would not be my first thought. That would be alien hunters.
I'm not exactly sure when Chris' tour is up, but I'm sure I'll hear about it, since he and I live in the same town. He and my brother both served on the student volunteer force in Amherst, MA, and that's what he's doing up there now-- fighting fires. Well, he would be anyway, if there were any. Chris seemed hell-bent on doing something crazy after college, and I remember him asking me a million questions about hiking the AT, but I guess he opted for something way crazier!
If what you're predicting comes true, then we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg for web-application attacks. For your typical designer to be able to do this stuff, we need some other kind of technology, because input validation done in Javascript ain't gonna cut it.
Write it, then. The point I was making is that most of us don't care about solving your little status quo problem. Other people can use whatever POS software they want to use. If you need OOXML support, contribute it, or pay someone to implement it, but don't complain when the rest of us don't give a rat's ass.
... what Miguel de Icaza's obsession with shoving Microsoft technologies in to Gnome? 4. Profit.But that's the beauty of Open Source. The community wrote this software. Us. We don't have to compromise for shit, because this is software that everyone can use, and hack, for free.
Microsoft has proven time and again that if you give them slack, they'll hang you with it. So, fuck them. They've held up the state of computing for long enough. We now have free and open software that would have been the envy of many proprietary vendors only a few years ago. And this software isn't going to go away. Adobe can't make GIMP's version bumps produce incompatible formats. Apple can't make CentOS look for license keys and refuse to run. Microsoft can't make us embrace, extend, and extinguish an RFC. It's time we've left them behind. If they want to play in the new ball game, fine. But they'll have to play by our rules.
Calling names doesn't help, either.
It's a kind of existential absurdity that I might soon be able to find out everything there is to know about my neighbors via the internet, and yet nothing at all about my government.
I personally learned this one from my photo tech class in high school (do they still have that class anymore?). There was a chemical that we dipped our developed and fixed film in to prevent water spots from forming on them as they dried. Water just ran right off onto the floor. My teacher casually brought up soap when explaining how this works. Ah, soap! I knew it had a use ;^)
So true.
The problem with it is this: coming from C, all of C++'s weirdnesses stood out. A vector? Turns out, that's a template class (and a damn useful one), but I didn't know that at the time. Why do I need the algorithm header? What about cin.eof()? cin/cout objects and their flags are damn weird when you're used to just pulling in data from a keyboard buffer and dealing with errors yourself.
When I first saw this, I think I was literally on the level of "how do I get input from a keyboard in C++?" Answering that question with all the bells and whistles of C++ was not what I was looking for. More cognitive load than I needed. And wrt the data structure in question, anything with the word "stack" in it would have made sense to me. Not an array which then gets reversed. Weird.
I didn't mean to imply that DRM was part of the collective reasoning that lead to MP3 becoming a de facto standard. What I meant was that the absence of copy-controls worked in its favor. There were indeed copy-protected formats back then, although this was copy-protection in hardware, not software. SCMS is essentially what killed DAT early on.
But you're right-- it was good enough at the time. I remember a friend of mine who had discovered how to encode MP3s (this must have been around 1997), and this was mind-blowing to me, because I had previously "copied" CDs onto my computer by ripping them to AIFF and storing them on ZIP disk (burners were only just starting to become affordable then). The loss in quality was totally worth the space savings, in my opinion.
I disagree about the W3C, though. The W3C is all about interoperable formats. Open formats make the "network effect" work faster, because there can be competition in implementing those services. It's true-- we may get "video on our cellphones" faster with a proprietary solution. But the implementors will always take a walled-garden approach with their solutions, because it will be imperative for their proprietary solution that you not see the value in their competitor's products. This works counter to the network effect. The W3C makes the network effect happen much faster by devising a standard that everyone can use, for free. You may not make as much money in the short term, but after your solution reaches critical mass, the benefits will outweigh the pitfalls. HTTP/HTML is a perfect example. I clearly remember, in the early 90's, thinking that "the web" was a waste of time. Gopher was so much better! But, as you can see, even technical merit was not enough. HTML was "good enough": free and easy to implement. HTML's one pitfall, searching, went away when good (and free) search engines like Google came around.
I agree with you, but the parent poster's comments reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend. What if, by helping people, e.g., providing food for starving people in an impoverished country, you are actually just prolonging the suffering? I had never thought of this before, but now, when I walk down the street on the way to work, I question whether giving money to a homeless person is misguided. Homelessness is sometimes somebody who is down on their luck-- but, at least in major metro areas, these people are often in this position because they cannot take care of themselves. They may be mentally ill, or they may have a substance-abuse problem. What will they do with the money? Will they hurt themselves even more?
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be compassionate. On the contrary, I believe that caring for those who cannot care for themselves is one real measure of the "progress" of society. I simply find myself wondering whether our charity makes the problem worse.
Nokia and Apple obviously have stakes in determining the codec that people use for video over the web. Apple is pushing H.264, which they point out is a standard, but fail to mention is also proprietary. Nokia mentions this in their position paper, but goes on to recommend H.264 anyway. Ironically, they list their #1 criteria for codec adoption to be "The specifications, and supporting documentation and code (i.e. conformance test suites, example/reference code, ...) are obtainable by everyone, for free or against a reasonable fee (ISO/IEC fees are reasonable in this sense)." You can't get a more reasonable fee than free, which is the case with Ogg. Anyhow, it's clear that Apple wants AppleTV to be a new content-delivery platform. Nokia probably has similar plans.
What I really suspect Nokia is saying in this paper are in criteria #2 and #5: "There is only a manageable risk in implementing the specification. In practice, we prefer specifications that have been developed in a collaborative manner under an IPR policy with disclsore requirements. Examples include specifications developed by the ITU-T, ISO/IEC, or the IETF." and "Compatibility with DRM. We understand that this could be a sore point in W3C, but from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."
Basically, "we think Ogg will get us sued" and "Hollywood won't use Ogg". It's a shame that Stephan Wenger (the author of this paper) has now damaged his own credibility by writing a four-page exercise in being disingenuous.
I'd like to point out that the one really successful proprietary codec, MP3, is a success because of the huge numbers of people who intially implemented the codec without a license and because it didn't support DRM, thus leading to widespread piracy, and establishing the format as the de facto standard for unencumbered audio. I would personally consider the W3C negligent if they did not choose an open (free as in beer and speech) codec.
I suspect that pervasive monitoring, not disease treatment, will end up being the big gain with nano-devices. The starting point for diagnosis at the moment is a patient's description of the symptoms. A person with bio-sensors "installed" will allow a doctor to examine a patient's vital signs directly-- I think this will help to greatly improve a doctor's initial diagnosis, because symptoms are often not a good indicator of what is happening. And the best thing about this kind of device is that it will allow testing to happen over a period of time. Were you to give these to healthy people, you could also establish a "baseline" to compare against when they are in ill health in the future.
There are some obvious privacy concerns here, but were bio-sensors to be inserted in a large number of people, this would greatly benefit epidemiology. That's an application of nano-technology that I would like to see happen, and I think it would revolutionize medical knowledge.
This sounds like an actual legitimate use for RFID tags. It would be a fairly simple matter then to find out if an instrument was left in a patient.
These are Seagate disks in USB enclosures. The problem here is with the behavior of the USB bridge chipset, NOT THE DISK.
That is indeed regrettable, but why should the public provide for the family/estate of an author for 70 years? I don't know how publishing contracts work off of the top of my head (although if I walk about ten feet down the hall, I could ask someone who writes them), but I suspect that a smart author would make sure that royalties continue to be paid to his/her family. That was indeed the case with one book that we publish-- the author died, and royalties continued to flow to her husband per her contract, as the book continues to be a big money-maker.
There are already mechanisms in place to provide for families in need, and even if there weren't, I don't see that as being a valid reason to support an abused legal construct. Your argument is "think of the children" stuff. Rhetoric 101.