Totally right, but to clarify what I think your point is, the problem is no in the case but in the internals.
In order to make a mini-pc they need to cram a lot of components into a small space. They do this by layering the components, thus creating a lot of narrow spaces through which air can flow. These narrow spaces offer a lot more resistance to flow than the wide-open spaces in a normal-size case. It also makes for very long and tortured air flow paths which constrict the flow.
The Macintosh Cube combats this by careful design of the space to maximize flow. All of the boards are aligned vertically so that the natural convection of the heated air adds to the flow. They also use components that naturally generate less heat, such as the PowerPC G4 processor.
I have been spending a small amount of time coding up a web page. It's not much so far, but it has the contact information and a bit of stuff about the clubs. As with most web pages it's not close to being finished but you can find it here
Robert L. Forward covers the topic of antimatter and some of its uses in his book Indistinguishable From Magic. You can find some information online about him and get some links to his ideas at his website.
I work for a Boys & Girls Club in one of the more depressed cities in the Unites States. We get tons of equipment and software donated to us from all sorts of companies, organizations, etc. The real problem is not the cost of the items, but rather the cost of the support and the lack of qualified people who want to work for a non-profit.
It's all well and fine to say that Linux costs next to nothing, but it is much harder to find people to support it. I know most places would rather use software which cost more up front but didn't need a software guru to set up and maintain. Sadly, we don't get the volunteer support we need to use most of the free software out there.
I know that there are some distributions of Linux out there that are pretty easy to use and set up, but they still don't compare to Windows or MacOS in overall ease. Sad, but true.
BTW - If anyone is in the Bridgeport, Connecticut area feel free to look up the Boys & Girls Clubs of Bridgeport. We have piles of old donated equipment and only limited time to fix and set up. Any help would be a godsend! Thanks.
Why do we need to *copy* anything anyway? Or at least, why isn't there a project to bring a new type of UI that is not WIMP, not Mac, not Win-like in any regards, that would be unique and well suited for maximum efficiency for power users?
Exploring other metaphors is a good idea, there is nothing that says that Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else has the penultimate user interface metaphor. The question really boils down to whether any new interface is going to be good enough to justify tossing all of the user's prior experience and forcing them to learn a new system. Right now most people have a good understanding of the desktop metaphor. Changing suddenly from that to something completely different would be a recipe for failure.
As most of us can agree upon, standards are a good thing. With good standards in place we can move on from reinventing the wheel every time we need a solution and instead get to work on deeper issues. Instead of seeking to toss out the Mac/Windows user interface metaphors, perhaps we would all be better served by forming up a user interface standards body and adopting an interface which builds upon and improves the existing metaphors, possibly evolving to better ones in such a way that users are not suddenly left out in the cold.
This method has been very successful on the Macintosh, where Apple has promoted their Human Interface Guidelines for years and have been gradually improving them as new innovations came up. For the most part a user can expect to be able to move from program to program and immediately have a basic understanding on how the program works. This makes the learning curve for any application as small as possible and greatly aids in the usability of the computer as a whole.
Personalization should be optional
on
Making It Personal
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have no problem with sites offering personalization options, but they are not for me. I think that most sites would be best served in offering the registration and benefits to those who want it, but also remaining fully open to those who do not.
Slashdot is a perfect example of this. If you don't want to register you can work the site perfectly fine and even post as anonymous (though you post as a lower caste). This is great for me, since I always toss my cookies I would have to re-register every single time I visited the site if I couldn't browse anonymously. Now the only time I log-in is when I want to post, since the benefits of posting when logged-in are worth it in my mind.
Honestly, I only know of one good reason for requiring a registration in order to use a site and that is when a site contains sensitive data which is only for certain people's use. Of course you have to lock it down and verify users then. Other than that I think sites are just trying to collect mailing lists on people. Personally I always give them totally false information, maybe if their mailing lists turn out to be full of crap they will get the point and stop the unsociable behavior.
Re:It's as fast as your network
on
Textmode Quake 2
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· Score: 2, Funny
You are in a dark room.
An imp has shot you.
darkness decends, you are dead.
No, no - it's more like this:
You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You have been eaten by a grue!
If you upped the priority of the process you might have gotten it to work a bit faster. The renice command sets the priority of a process so that it will take more processor time. Try using a value of -16 (lower values are higher priorities, go figure), but be warned that your computer might now be quite so responsive. It's a small price to pay if it cuts the time from 6 hours to 3, however.
Just do the following:
1) start the program going
2) run terminal
3) type top and hit return
4) look for the pid number for your process
(this is the pidnumber in step 6)
5) hit control-c
6) type sudo renice -16 pidnumber
7) enter the administration password
8) watch the time needed drop
Hey, didn't the Soviet Union, which was based on Communistic principals, fall? Why do you think that is?
Communism is great on paper but the problem becomes one of motivation. If everyone is given the same amount of goods without rewards for good performance then they will just do the minimum required to get their share. I'm not saying that pure capitalism is the best philosophy either, but at least it provides direct, material motivations for people to work harder and make their society better.
Like all philosophies out there, communism should be studied and some of its better ideas used to make our society a better place to live in. However, advocating communism as a sole philosophy to live by is to blind yourself to the realities of life.
The better world is truly built by getting people to act in their own self interest in such a way that it also helps others. Tax breaks for low emission cars, cash back for recycling, college money for volunteerism, etc. Ideas of this sort will do a lot more toward building up our quality of life than pure communism.
Motorola PowerPC G4 or the new G5 coming out soon!:)
Re:A classic case for a public-service website.
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
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· Score: 1
Of course they could go the Salon route, and introduce "AdCritic PREMIUM!" with larger vid feeds for a few bux.
They did this. Adcritic had a pay version which would let you view the ads in a much larger size. I never did it, but i saw it advertised on their site.
Adcritic, IMDB, and the Quicktime Movie Trailers sites were three of the sites I would use all the time to see what cool ads and movies were out and to get more information on them. I'm sad that Adcritic couldn't make it, I'm fairly certain the Quicktime page is safe, but I hope IMDB can stay up.
Personally I'd rather have a Firewire one instead. Transferring 1GB over USB would take quite a while.
Well, for under 1/2 the price ($400 compared to $900) you can get an Apple iPod that holds 5 gigs, has Firewire, and plays music. It acts as a generic Firewire drive, just like the JMTek device acts as a generic USB drive. The iPod is a bit larger, but since it's the size of a deck of cards it still fits very easily into your pocket.
Even easier math to code up would be to play the audio to an analog channel and feed that back into the sound-in plug on your computer. If you are hyper-concerned about fidelity you can copy it four or five times and blend the copies together using an averaging algorithm (the composite stream is more likely to be accurate to the original than any of the instance streams).
This is true if the noise is truly random, but if the noise has a non-random component in it then you will be reinforcing the noise. This is very possible, as you can get all sorts of noises due to ground-loop effects which will create a hum at certain frequencies. The equipment itself may also be more or less sensitive to certain frequencies and those frequencies will end up getting raised or lowered in volume compared to the rest of the recording, also causing a change in quality.
It's a wonder one of the middle eastern countries have not tried to build orbital rockets whose only purpose is to blow up when they get there. They have lots of money and their engineers are not incompetent. One properly armed missle could create a whole cascade effect. It's would totally devistate our economy and take out spy and targeting satelites all at once.
There's several problems with this. One is just how vast space is. Even in a low earth orbit you are talking about distances that are much larger than on the Earth. Suppose you did turn a whole rocket into debris. Most of the debris from the explosion would immediately deorbit to the Earth. The fraction of the original mass which stayed up would have to spread out enough to cover a good-sized area, or else it would present such a small target that the chance of it hitting anything would be extremely small. Even when the debris is out there, it would be very likely to miss any spacecraft, unless you sent up a few dozen of these things.
The second, major issue is cost. I did a little searching and found here that launches cost around $20,000 per pound for a 400 pound launch. That means that the entire 400 pound payload would cost around $8 million.
Now, with the World Trade Center disaster as an example you can see that far more damage could be done far more inexpensively. For an investment which was probably in the several hundred thousand dollar range (including food, housing, training, travel, of all the terrorists), they were able to kill 5,000 people, cause damage which is in the billions, and disturb an entire world. If they sent up 400 pounds worth of shrapnel they might eventually take out a satellite or spacecraft and cause damage in the few hundred million, along with 4 or 5 lives - all for the cost of $8 million a shot (assuming that one is enough). Which choice would you make?:)
Obligitory Dr. Evil quote...
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 1
"We'll turn the moon into what I like to call a 'Death Star'."
They may be making the assumption that you burn the hydrogen in the fuel cell and the gasoline in an internal combustion engine. The difference in efficiency should make up for the dfference in stored energy.
Good point! Although I thought current internal combustion engines were more efficient than fuel cells, I could certainly be wrong on that. I could easily see a difference in efficiency making up for the amount in my calculations, if it turns out fuel cells are more efficient.
Even still, it is kind of sneaky to include that - if that is what they are doing.
Well, according to them [millenniumcell.com] it contains about the same amount of energy per gram as gasoline.
Actually, they say there that their solution contains about as much energy per gallon as gasoline, but they also say that they are "weight-energy" equivalent. From the website:
The weight-energy storage is almost equivalent to gasoline. This means it generates about the same amount of energy per gallon of fuel as gasoline.
The molecular weight of sodium borohydrate is around 37.8 g/mole, the molecular weight of water is around 18 g/mole. So 37.8 g of sodium borohydrate would need 2 x 18 g of water, or 36 grams. Total them up and you get 73.8 grams, which produce 4 moles of H2, or 8 grams of hydrogen. Burning hydrogen produces approximately triple the energy of an equivalent mass of gasoline, so you would need approximately 24 g of gasoline to match the energy output of the solution.
So on one hand you have 73.8 grams of sodium borohydrate solution, on the other you have 24 grams of gasoline - and according to my calculations both are supposed to be roughly energy equivalent. With a specific gravity of around 1.0 for the solution and 0.72 for gasoline this translates to about 73.8 mL of solution and about 33.3 mL of gasoline. Something is not right here. You need around 3 times the weight and around 2 times the volume for equivalent energy according to my calculations.
Does anyone see anything wrong in my assumptions or calculations? It seems like their figures are very hyped-up and don't have basis in reality. Even assuming they are talking about dry sodium borohydrate (not including the water), you would need 37.8 g of it to be the equivalent of 24 g of gasoline. This is still about 1.6 times as much mass and 1.1 times as much volume.
Not that this makes the idea unworthy, it's just annoying to have the hype when their figures seem inflated.
The article states that the process of charging up the borax produces pollution, though so does this not (for now) just represent the "make the pollution elsewhere" paradox of electric cars
This is very true, you don't get something for nothing. In order to generate energy for use in a car, that energy has to come from somewhere. For hydrocarbon fuels the source is the sun which was used by plants and animals to create organic molecules. When they are burned they release the energy and pollution.
In order to make sodium borohydride you need to input energy. That will be done at the factory where the sodium borohydride is produced. One advantage of the chemical being produced in a factory is that the pollution is centralized. Filters can be used to concentrate the pollution and get rid of it, thus limiting the amount released to the environment. This can be done far more efficiently in a factory than in a car.
Another savings is that the power used to make the chemical can be produced in a much cleaner way than a petrochemical would be. Not only can you use "green" methods of power production such as wind or solar, even if you do use a coal power plant you gain the advantage of the more efficient scrubbers and catylization methods to reduce emissions from the plant. Again, this is much more efficient at removing pollution than similar methods on individual cars.
While it is nearly impossible to eliminate pollution stemming from the energy industry, we can consolidate the pollution in order to better control it. Through consolidation we can use much more efficient methods of dealing with the problems.
I love my iBook, but as a long time Windows feature, nothing irks me quite so much as how every program works differently, so you never know what to expect. Different keys for every application to switch between windows?
There are standard command key combinations for just about every common shortcut on the Mac. This doesn't mean that everyone uses all of the standards, a developer can do what he wants. Usually the programs which do not follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines are the ones which fail quickly, however.
I believe the standard window switching command key combo is "command-`" - that's the key above the tab key. Some programs don't use this shortcut but I've found quite a few that do. As far as opening a new window, that's pretty standard at command-n.
Some developers break the standards either unknowingly or on purpose. This happens on all types of systems. Usually these developers are the ones who are not around for long, and that's a good thing.
Well I know that Mac OS X, for one, has this awesome feature where you can close every single window of the foremost application (say, for example, the application called System Preferences) and it keeps running until you explicitly quit it with a Command-Q.
First of all, this is not new with MacOS X. This has been true of just about any application on a Mac, except the occasional few which buck the trend or have a need to quit when no windows are open.
Second, it really doesn't matter if you have none or a dozen applications sitting in the background on MacOS X. The operating system only assigns processor time to those applications actually performing work, and it pages out the memory used by idle programs if the memory is needed elsewhere. The net effect is that the idle processes have virtually no effect on taking up system resources, so who cares if they are still running?
Third, the paradigm of the MacOS is not document-centered, it is application-centered. This can be a very good thing when you are working with multiple documents, as only one instance of a program needs to be opened for multiple documents. This results in less memory being used, more efficient use of processor time, less chance of clashes over just which instance controls a particular file or service. Also, just because you close a window it does not mean that you are finished working with the program. There are many times when I'll close a window, then create another to work on a new document. If I had to re-run the program every time I wanted to do this I would waste a lot of time waiting for the program to start up.
Lastly, in the MacOS it is up to the programmer to determine if his program should quit when there are no more open windows. The developer should keep track of how many open windows there are and if none are open, either keep the application running or quit. There are some applications which do this, but it is decided on a case-by-case basis - as it should be.
Is it because he was an engineer and not a real scientist? Are you so jealous of real scientists and real scientific work that you have elevated someone like Tesla to near godhood.
Actually I'm a chemist, a "real scientist", and not a chemical engineer. So no, I'm not just enamored of Tesla as an engineer. I admire Tesla because he not only produced some of the first designs for wireless transmissions and AC motors, but he also produced just about every variation thereof. Many of the designs he produced have yet to be improved upon in any serious, fundamental way other than incremental improvements in materials or manufacturing methods. He was a truly amazing inventor who has not gotten nearly the amount of recognition he has deserved.
I would love this if they were broadcasting in digital radio. It would be cool to be able to have song titles listed, have the quality of digital, be able to search for a particular type of music or song being played, etc. If it is just analog then I'm not so sure if it will take off.
You are exactly right. Here is an article which explains the case in detail.
One of the links in the Slashdot article has this quote:
By trial and error, relying on his own intuition and audacity, Marconi conducted a series of experiments indicating that long-distance wireless communication was possible.
As you can see in the Tesla link I provided above, this statement is patently false. Marconi used the patents, research, and technical drawings of Tesla and faithfully duplicated Tesla's ideas. About the only thing Marconi stumbled into was the radio-reflecting layer in the atmosphere. This was not something he had planned, but instead discovered quite by accident. Marconi should not be credited at all in connection with radio, other than the fact that he managed to popularize it through his sensationalism.
This is similar to the case of the Wright Brothers. Their "first flight ever" was completed several years after another inventor, Gustav Whitehead, flew in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1901. There is a web page here with information on Whitehead and his flights. Basically, the Wright brothers managed to get better press and grabbed the title of first to fly from Gustav Whitehead, even though Whitehead was documented by several sources as having done it first.
For example, their most hyped game is Halo, right? Halo started as a game for Windows, but MS somehow convinced the developers to both develop for X-Box and delay work on a Windows release so that they could sell more X-Boxes. Again, leveraging their monopoly unfairly.
Halo was originally slated to come out for Macintosh, Windows, and the Playstation 2. Microsoft wanted to have the hot new games only available for the XBox in order to push the sales of the console so they bought Bungie out. They then delayed deveopment of Halo by around 6-12 months and released it at the XBox opening. A Macintosh/Windows version is still not completely certain and it definately won't appear for the Playstation 2.
This is exactly the reason Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly. One of the monopolistic practices Microsoft performs is that if another platform stands to benefit from a piece of software, Microsoft buys out the company and cancels the product for the opposing platform. It has happened several times before and it will continue to happen until Microsoft is finally crushed into a million separate parts too small to do much damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally right, but to clarify what I think your point is, the problem is no in the case but in the internals.
In order to make a mini-pc they need to cram a lot of components into a small space. They do this by layering the components, thus creating a lot of narrow spaces through which air can flow. These narrow spaces offer a lot more resistance to flow than the wide-open spaces in a normal-size case. It also makes for very long and tortured air flow paths which constrict the flow.
The Macintosh Cube combats this by careful design of the space to maximize flow. All of the boards are aligned vertically so that the natural convection of the heated air adds to the flow. They also use components that naturally generate less heat, such as the PowerPC G4 processor.
I have been spending a small amount of time coding up a web page. It's not much so far, but it has the contact information and a bit of stuff about the clubs. As with most web pages it's not close to being finished but you can find it here
I had a bit of time and found that there are a bunch of PDF files in the site, you can find them here: Antimatter Propulsion and Antiproton Annihilation Propulsion
Robert L. Forward covers the topic of antimatter and some of its uses in his book Indistinguishable From Magic. You can find some information online about him and get some links to his ideas at his website.
I work for a Boys & Girls Club in one of the more depressed cities in the Unites States. We get tons of equipment and software donated to us from all sorts of companies, organizations, etc. The real problem is not the cost of the items, but rather the cost of the support and the lack of qualified people who want to work for a non-profit.
It's all well and fine to say that Linux costs next to nothing, but it is much harder to find people to support it. I know most places would rather use software which cost more up front but didn't need a software guru to set up and maintain. Sadly, we don't get the volunteer support we need to use most of the free software out there.
I know that there are some distributions of Linux out there that are pretty easy to use and set up, but they still don't compare to Windows or MacOS in overall ease. Sad, but true.
BTW - If anyone is in the Bridgeport, Connecticut area feel free to look up the Boys & Girls Clubs of Bridgeport. We have piles of old donated equipment and only limited time to fix and set up. Any help would be a godsend! Thanks.
Exploring other metaphors is a good idea, there is nothing that says that Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else has the penultimate user interface metaphor. The question really boils down to whether any new interface is going to be good enough to justify tossing all of the user's prior experience and forcing them to learn a new system. Right now most people have a good understanding of the desktop metaphor. Changing suddenly from that to something completely different would be a recipe for failure.
As most of us can agree upon, standards are a good thing. With good standards in place we can move on from reinventing the wheel every time we need a solution and instead get to work on deeper issues. Instead of seeking to toss out the Mac/Windows user interface metaphors, perhaps we would all be better served by forming up a user interface standards body and adopting an interface which builds upon and improves the existing metaphors, possibly evolving to better ones in such a way that users are not suddenly left out in the cold.
This method has been very successful on the Macintosh, where Apple has promoted their Human Interface Guidelines for years and have been gradually improving them as new innovations came up. For the most part a user can expect to be able to move from program to program and immediately have a basic understanding on how the program works. This makes the learning curve for any application as small as possible and greatly aids in the usability of the computer as a whole.
For more information on the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, take a look here: Aqua Human Interface Guidelines
I have no problem with sites offering personalization options, but they are not for me. I think that most sites would be best served in offering the registration and benefits to those who want it, but also remaining fully open to those who do not.
Slashdot is a perfect example of this. If you don't want to register you can work the site perfectly fine and even post as anonymous (though you post as a lower caste). This is great for me, since I always toss my cookies I would have to re-register every single time I visited the site if I couldn't browse anonymously. Now the only time I log-in is when I want to post, since the benefits of posting when logged-in are worth it in my mind.
Honestly, I only know of one good reason for requiring a registration in order to use a site and that is when a site contains sensitive data which is only for certain people's use. Of course you have to lock it down and verify users then. Other than that I think sites are just trying to collect mailing lists on people. Personally I always give them totally false information, maybe if their mailing lists turn out to be full of crap they will get the point and stop the unsociable behavior.
No, no - it's more like this:
If you upped the priority of the process you might have gotten it to work a bit faster. The renice command sets the priority of a process so that it will take more processor time. Try using a value of -16 (lower values are higher priorities, go figure), but be warned that your computer might now be quite so responsive. It's a small price to pay if it cuts the time from 6 hours to 3, however.
Just do the following:
1) start the program going
2) run terminal
3) type top and hit return
4) look for the pid number for your process
(this is the pidnumber in step 6)
5) hit control-c
6) type sudo renice -16 pidnumber
7) enter the administration password
8) watch the time needed drop
Hey, didn't the Soviet Union, which was based on Communistic principals, fall? Why do you think that is?
Communism is great on paper but the problem becomes one of motivation. If everyone is given the same amount of goods without rewards for good performance then they will just do the minimum required to get their share. I'm not saying that pure capitalism is the best philosophy either, but at least it provides direct, material motivations for people to work harder and make their society better.
Like all philosophies out there, communism should be studied and some of its better ideas used to make our society a better place to live in. However, advocating communism as a sole philosophy to live by is to blind yourself to the realities of life.
The better world is truly built by getting people to act in their own self interest in such a way that it also helps others. Tax breaks for low emission cars, cash back for recycling, college money for volunteerism, etc. Ideas of this sort will do a lot more toward building up our quality of life than pure communism.
Motorola PowerPC G4 or the new G5 coming out soon! :)
They did this. Adcritic had a pay version which would let you view the ads in a much larger size. I never did it, but i saw it advertised on their site.
Adcritic, IMDB, and the Quicktime Movie Trailers sites were three of the sites I would use all the time to see what cool ads and movies were out and to get more information on them. I'm sad that Adcritic couldn't make it, I'm fairly certain the Quicktime page is safe, but I hope IMDB can stay up.
Well, for under 1/2 the price ($400 compared to $900) you can get an Apple iPod that holds 5 gigs, has Firewire, and plays music. It acts as a generic Firewire drive, just like the JMTek device acts as a generic USB drive. The iPod is a bit larger, but since it's the size of a deck of cards it still fits very easily into your pocket.
This is true if the noise is truly random, but if the noise has a non-random component in it then you will be reinforcing the noise. This is very possible, as you can get all sorts of noises due to ground-loop effects which will create a hum at certain frequencies. The equipment itself may also be more or less sensitive to certain frequencies and those frequencies will end up getting raised or lowered in volume compared to the rest of the recording, also causing a change in quality.
There's several problems with this. One is just how vast space is. Even in a low earth orbit you are talking about distances that are much larger than on the Earth. Suppose you did turn a whole rocket into debris. Most of the debris from the explosion would immediately deorbit to the Earth. The fraction of the original mass which stayed up would have to spread out enough to cover a good-sized area, or else it would present such a small target that the chance of it hitting anything would be extremely small. Even when the debris is out there, it would be very likely to miss any spacecraft, unless you sent up a few dozen of these things.
The second, major issue is cost. I did a little searching and found here that launches cost around $20,000 per pound for a 400 pound launch. That means that the entire 400 pound payload would cost around $8 million.
Now, with the World Trade Center disaster as an example you can see that far more damage could be done far more inexpensively. For an investment which was probably in the several hundred thousand dollar range (including food, housing, training, travel, of all the terrorists), they were able to kill 5,000 people, cause damage which is in the billions, and disturb an entire world. If they sent up 400 pounds worth of shrapnel they might eventually take out a satellite or spacecraft and cause damage in the few hundred million, along with 4 or 5 lives - all for the cost of $8 million a shot (assuming that one is enough). Which choice would you make? :)
"We'll turn the moon into what I like to call a 'Death Star'."
Good point! Although I thought current internal combustion engines were more efficient than fuel cells, I could certainly be wrong on that. I could easily see a difference in efficiency making up for the amount in my calculations, if it turns out fuel cells are more efficient.
Even still, it is kind of sneaky to include that - if that is what they are doing.
Well, according to them [millenniumcell.com] it contains about the same amount of energy per gram as gasoline.
Actually, they say there that their solution contains about as much energy per gallon as gasoline, but they also say that they are "weight-energy" equivalent. From the website:
The molecular weight of sodium borohydrate is around 37.8 g/mole, the molecular weight of water is around 18 g/mole. So 37.8 g of sodium borohydrate would need 2 x 18 g of water, or 36 grams. Total them up and you get 73.8 grams, which produce 4 moles of H2, or 8 grams of hydrogen. Burning hydrogen produces approximately triple the energy of an equivalent mass of gasoline, so you would need approximately 24 g of gasoline to match the energy output of the solution.
So on one hand you have 73.8 grams of sodium borohydrate solution, on the other you have 24 grams of gasoline - and according to my calculations both are supposed to be roughly energy equivalent. With a specific gravity of around 1.0 for the solution and 0.72 for gasoline this translates to about 73.8 mL of solution and about 33.3 mL of gasoline. Something is not right here. You need around 3 times the weight and around 2 times the volume for equivalent energy according to my calculations.
Does anyone see anything wrong in my assumptions or calculations? It seems like their figures are very hyped-up and don't have basis in reality. Even assuming they are talking about dry sodium borohydrate (not including the water), you would need 37.8 g of it to be the equivalent of 24 g of gasoline. This is still about 1.6 times as much mass and 1.1 times as much volume.
Not that this makes the idea unworthy, it's just annoying to have the hype when their figures seem inflated.
The article states that the process of charging up the borax produces pollution, though so does this not (for now) just represent the "make the pollution elsewhere" paradox of electric cars
This is very true, you don't get something for nothing. In order to generate energy for use in a car, that energy has to come from somewhere. For hydrocarbon fuels the source is the sun which was used by plants and animals to create organic molecules. When they are burned they release the energy and pollution.
In order to make sodium borohydride you need to input energy. That will be done at the factory where the sodium borohydride is produced. One advantage of the chemical being produced in a factory is that the pollution is centralized. Filters can be used to concentrate the pollution and get rid of it, thus limiting the amount released to the environment. This can be done far more efficiently in a factory than in a car.
Another savings is that the power used to make the chemical can be produced in a much cleaner way than a petrochemical would be. Not only can you use "green" methods of power production such as wind or solar, even if you do use a coal power plant you gain the advantage of the more efficient scrubbers and catylization methods to reduce emissions from the plant. Again, this is much more efficient at removing pollution than similar methods on individual cars.
While it is nearly impossible to eliminate pollution stemming from the energy industry, we can consolidate the pollution in order to better control it. Through consolidation we can use much more efficient methods of dealing with the problems.
I love my iBook, but as a long time Windows feature, nothing irks me quite so much as how every program works differently, so you never know what to expect. Different keys for every application to switch between windows?
There are standard command key combinations for just about every common shortcut on the Mac. This doesn't mean that everyone uses all of the standards, a developer can do what he wants. Usually the programs which do not follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines are the ones which fail quickly, however.
I believe the standard window switching command key combo is "command-`" - that's the key above the tab key. Some programs don't use this shortcut but I've found quite a few that do. As far as opening a new window, that's pretty standard at command-n.
Some developers break the standards either unknowingly or on purpose. This happens on all types of systems. Usually these developers are the ones who are not around for long, and that's a good thing.
Well I know that Mac OS X, for one, has this awesome feature where you can close every single window of the foremost application (say, for example, the application called System Preferences) and it keeps running until you explicitly quit it with a Command-Q.
First of all, this is not new with MacOS X. This has been true of just about any application on a Mac, except the occasional few which buck the trend or have a need to quit when no windows are open.
Second, it really doesn't matter if you have none or a dozen applications sitting in the background on MacOS X. The operating system only assigns processor time to those applications actually performing work, and it pages out the memory used by idle programs if the memory is needed elsewhere. The net effect is that the idle processes have virtually no effect on taking up system resources, so who cares if they are still running?
Third, the paradigm of the MacOS is not document-centered, it is application-centered. This can be a very good thing when you are working with multiple documents, as only one instance of a program needs to be opened for multiple documents. This results in less memory being used, more efficient use of processor time, less chance of clashes over just which instance controls a particular file or service. Also, just because you close a window it does not mean that you are finished working with the program. There are many times when I'll close a window, then create another to work on a new document. If I had to re-run the program every time I wanted to do this I would waste a lot of time waiting for the program to start up.
Lastly, in the MacOS it is up to the programmer to determine if his program should quit when there are no more open windows. The developer should keep track of how many open windows there are and if none are open, either keep the application running or quit. There are some applications which do this, but it is decided on a case-by-case basis - as it should be.
Is it because he was an engineer and not a real scientist? Are you so jealous of real scientists and real scientific work that you have elevated someone like Tesla to near godhood.
Actually I'm a chemist, a "real scientist", and not a chemical engineer. So no, I'm not just enamored of Tesla as an engineer. I admire Tesla because he not only produced some of the first designs for wireless transmissions and AC motors, but he also produced just about every variation thereof. Many of the designs he produced have yet to be improved upon in any serious, fundamental way other than incremental improvements in materials or manufacturing methods. He was a truly amazing inventor who has not gotten nearly the amount of recognition he has deserved.
I would love this if they were broadcasting in digital radio. It would be cool to be able to have song titles listed, have the quality of digital, be able to search for a particular type of music or song being played, etc. If it is just analog then I'm not so sure if it will take off.
You are exactly right. Here is an article which explains the case in detail.
One of the links in the Slashdot article has this quote:
As you can see in the Tesla link I provided above, this statement is patently false. Marconi used the patents, research, and technical drawings of Tesla and faithfully duplicated Tesla's ideas. About the only thing Marconi stumbled into was the radio-reflecting layer in the atmosphere. This was not something he had planned, but instead discovered quite by accident. Marconi should not be credited at all in connection with radio, other than the fact that he managed to popularize it through his sensationalism.
This is similar to the case of the Wright Brothers. Their "first flight ever" was completed several years after another inventor, Gustav Whitehead, flew in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1901. There is a web page here with information on Whitehead and his flights. Basically, the Wright brothers managed to get better press and grabbed the title of first to fly from Gustav Whitehead, even though Whitehead was documented by several sources as having done it first.
For example, their most hyped game is Halo, right? Halo started as a game for Windows, but MS somehow convinced the developers to both develop for X-Box and delay work on a Windows release so that they could sell more X-Boxes. Again, leveraging their monopoly unfairly.
Halo was originally slated to come out for Macintosh, Windows, and the Playstation 2. Microsoft wanted to have the hot new games only available for the XBox in order to push the sales of the console so they bought Bungie out. They then delayed deveopment of Halo by around 6-12 months and released it at the XBox opening. A Macintosh/Windows version is still not completely certain and it definately won't appear for the Playstation 2.
This is exactly the reason Microsoft has been found to be a monopoly. One of the monopolistic practices Microsoft performs is that if another platform stands to benefit from a piece of software, Microsoft buys out the company and cancels the product for the opposing platform. It has happened several times before and it will continue to happen until Microsoft is finally crushed into a million separate parts too small to do much damage.