Standard sized batteries are already on their way out. Manufacturer-specific rechargeables are the new standards.
Maybe... or maybe not. Progress is seldom linear, and tomorrow is not specially supposed to me just "more of today". It may on the contrary be very different, and even opposite to some respect (think of the automobile or computer products from 1950 to 1970 and try to extrapolate that to 2010, you get very strange results;-)
The key to many things is scale economy. If you can offer the same service at 30% less manufacturing and storing cost by having 10x longer series, you win. By the way, this is what ensured success of the Ford T and the VW Bug at a time. The Renault/Dacia Logan seems to be a success too in Europe with its "non-nonsense" approach, as well as Netbooks have been in 2008. Future is almost never "more of the same thing". That is incidentally why the Wii was such a sucess too. See aloso this :
... so I am not in a hurry for them to go to the finished product state, because perhaps it will stay free, and perhaps not; and in the latter case it will be a chore to get one's 7 GB of mail back to one's PC, especially if 10 million people are trying to do the same with theirs !
Or they might also say : it is free to stay on Gmail, but you will have to pay to get out !:-D
"will allow batteries (...) to 'take the shape of their container' rather than creating containers for the batteries"
Wonderful ! Now, instead of having some standard battery sizes (AA, AAA and so on), we are going tu have as many different shapes of batteries as there are products, not only between manufacturers but within the line of the same manufacturer (for the same reason that Gillette has 10 different shapes of blades, or than portables PCs have 200+ type of batteries, or that we hare 20 or so different AC/DC transformers at home), so you will have to buy every time a given manufacturer's battery and throw it away rather than reuse it on a later apparatus.
I am afraid that while technically we have a progress here, our production organization wil make it a regression; it something that happens from time to time.
If you start work at 9:00, put the time switch to boot your computer at 8:45. That should leave a lot of time.
Now, if a password must be entered for the boot to proceed, the question is : is it your job ? Then you should be paid as soon as you begin it. If it is somebody else's job, just wait for him/her to do it.
I don't know much about memory management in Linux. What happens if you hibernate the system while the swap file is in use?
I have never studied the kernel very closely, but I would expect normally what is on the disk not to be saved again since it's already there, and what is in RAM to be saved wherever possible in the remaining holes of the partition (hence the 2x rule ?), perhaps after some slight quick compression of every zone saved from RAM.
The "rule of two" is due to Knuth's demonstration : "When the memory is 50% full, there is necessarily one free block at least as big as the biggest already allocated block", or something similar.
Today, I would say the swap partition is mainly useful to store the state of the computer when you put it in hibernation mode, that is a little more that the size of your RAM if you want to be really cautious, just in case.
That being said, A GB of disk is so cheap compared to 1 GB of RAM - which is already cheap, now - that there is no problem in doubling that size for very special purposes (alternating 2 different "hot" graphic users sessions or operating systems without rebooting, for instance). Just my two cents.
Look at how different p2p statistics and box office are for some movies: this would be a better system, because at the very least the medium is not controlled by the guy who sells the stuff.
I am afraid it could perhaps not work : a major company like Sony released the infamous "Sony rootkit", so we might just as well conceive in a near future a "Universol botnet" or a "Virgen swarm" just intended to artificially boost a given artist's download counter. Remember nobody ever knew whether or not Brian Epstein "boosted" the Beatles or non when giving his record store figutes to the chart makers every week.
French provider Neuf Telecom does have such an offer : you are free to listen to (and download) music from one of their 9 categories for free if they are your ISP. For a monthly additional fee (is that 6 â ?), you can access all the 9 categories at will. Music can be listened on your PC or WMA reader.
You become unable to listen to your downloaded music 1 month after you end your subscription (if you ever do). Choosing classical music is a bargain, with thousands of references.
Neuf Telecom belongs to Universal, a reason why they could propose this offer rather quickly last year.
Re: Victor Hugo and copyright (was: Be careful and
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 1
Victor Hugo wrote some personal ideas about the copyright legitimity. For him, any work had two parents who alternated roles : the people felt someting they could no really express. The author perceived that feeling and translated it in his way. And then the people again said to some of there authors : "You translated our feelings so well that we make you a star !".
"At the death of one of these two authors", Hugo said, "it is only fair the other one, the people should inherit all the rights". This was a coureageous move, as Hugo's family lived essentially on his author's rights.
To be really fair, we should perhaps allow 20 years of copyright after the author's death so his family has a lot of time to find jobs. I do not see however any legitimate reason why it should be more. Struggle and dog fights do not have anything to do with reason, as fas as I know:-(
Re:Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic on
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 1
You don't have to suffer with a broken Dual turntable. I sent my Dual 1229 off for repair by a person that has a passion for these old Duals: http://www.fixmydual.com/
Thanks a lot ! It is nice that the know-how on old technologies continues to live through passionate amateurs. Hmmm... perhaps I could event try to have my old Revox A77 fixed or converted to 4-tracks:-)
Though the following is rather off-topic, there are here a lot of CitroÃn Traction avant fans, who keep their models running and in shape. Whenever a part breaks, they examine it and recreate a copy of it with small machine-tools they share. Much better than the original ones, in fact.
Re:Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic on
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 1
I cannot answer for sure to this question, but I guess that both the cell very small weight (compared to what those records were designed for) and artificial x-y channel separation by the cell of what is a mono recording, even if later merged in one signal, may introduce these strange effects. Of course we would need here some compared captures of the very same record in order to understand things further.
As people say : "I can give the time, but unfortunately that does not mean I know how to repair watches";-)
Re:Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic on
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It is not the cartridge itself that matters. The shape of the needle changed from the 78 size to a smaller one for the microgroove recordings. (33 + 1/3 and 45 )
Yes. These cells commonly used a commutable needle : one for 78 rpm and another for the microgroove, and a level allowed to switch from one to the other. Needless to say, I supposed the right needle was used.
That being said, piezo cartridges and magnetic ones accepted at a time these dual needles, so using the right needle is necessary, but here not sufficient:-)
Of course for best fidelity the single use steel needle is preferred....:)
That might be. When I was very young we used to have a "Peter Pan" portable mechanical 78rpm player and we had a box of needles, which had to be changed rather frequently. I had the surprise, when reading its user's manual to see that the manufacturer recommendend changing the needle after each record, which seems unbelievable. I always wondered if that really applied to steel needles, or just to former bamboo needles, which I never had a chance to see.
I still have a wind up gramophone of maybe twenties or thirties vintage that uses these. No amplification, no electricity.
What makes me sade evert time there is a technology change is the know-how that it lost with it forever - except perhaps a for a few passionates which allow it some survival. In french brocantes, it is common to find objects for sale, the function of which is ununderstandable, even for its preceding owners:-/
Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic ones
on
Digitizing Rare Vinyl
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I would like to warn all people wanting to digitize 78rpm records : the sound you get using a magnetic cell, especially stereo or mono ones posterior to the invention of "universal engraving" (around 1965 ?), you will get a hissing and unpleasant sound, and poor restitution.
Surprisingly, if you use a piezo, heavy cell (not suitable to read stereo records), you will get a much better sound, and almost no hiss.
I got very good results at a time from a Dual 1010 turnable, unfortunately out of order now:-(
I also have some Jack Hylton songs that do not seem to be present on his Internet tribute site (Bogey wail, Sarita...), for whoever is interested. I guess they are legally in the public domain now, as all of them date from before WW2.
The best way I can conceive is to use one of these fixed bikes providing electricity (Ragonots,they are called here) as a power supply for your PC. In that way the more tou are in front of your PC, the more exercise you get in order to use it. I strongly suggest you use it coupled to a good UPS. Things should now stay at complete equilibrium:-)
The installation DVD of the distros seemingly want to do everything in one step. Yes, I have an NVidia driver, a 7600GS on one machine, and something else (6600 LE ?) on another. Remember that there is not ONE, but THREE tools provided : YaST, sax2 and nvidia-settings. None of them seems to work for D15-plugged 16/10 screens, though they do work OK when DVI is used (unfortunately there is no DVI on the 940 NW).
I won't complain, though, because for a price of zero, I can say that I have much more than my no-money worth, obviously. The software available in the depots is so awesome that I recently changed my default / (root) size to 30 GB./root is on another, much bigger (300 GB) partition, of course.:-)
>>They have a single ethos of how each app is expected to work; linux does not.
I am afraid this is not a feature, but a flaw.
When you use somebody else's car (and every one of us has to do that once in a while, just as using somebody else's computer), you feel confident that the accelerator will be on the right and the brake on the left. When you unscrew something, you expect you can achieve it rotating your screwdriver counterclockwise. When you are in the rest rooms, you expect hot water to be on the left and cold water on the right, and counter-clockwise movements to open the water flow (though I did see different arrangement, which were hell !)
When one "buys" (in the figurated sense) a graphic interface, on expects a kind of normalization, a common rule, to be part of the package. If it is not there, is is as useless as X-Window used alone formerly was. Normalization, and clever normalization, is a part of the product, and it could be a terrible error to try avoiding it, because most orders, however imperfect, are still preferable to complete chaos.
I admit one can have mitigated feelings towards KDE4. I shall try to list both what is awful and what is awesome.
KDE4 is hell if your monitor is not recognized by Linux at installation time, which is at least the case for both mine with OpenSuSE 11.0 : a Samsung Syncmaster 940NW (1440x900, D15 plug) and an Asus MW221U (1650x1050) when on D15 plug. Try to customise KDE4 when your monitor is "recognized" as 800x600 (sometimes even 640x480!) and you are ine for w big nightmare and/or a big headache.
People are attached to little expected details, details as seeing for instance the three windows buttons (maximize, iconize, cancel) present on the window title bar when they need them, rather than disappearing randomly, with a slight preference to disappear exactly when needed. Or a detail like seeing a button yielding action when clicked, not 300 milliseconds afterthe click... or not reacting at all !
Resising and/or rotating icons ? OK. niw where is the laxian key ? That is : if tou did it my mistake, how do you put them back again exactly as they were without guessing ? Why not align on Picasa standards that keep unchanged the reference images, and allow to step back on every movement you did previously ? (a depth of 10 changes would be sufficient, of course).
But also there are great things : plasmoids, especially the ones with small diaporamas, are just lovable. Their border color following the (changing) screen background color is splendid. Windows with round corners, for a reason I cannot understand, really feel better - something strange after we all changed our rounder-corner TV screens for straigth-cornered screens some years ago. And the choice of background screens images (at least as I can see them on OpenSuSE)is gorgeous. Working on the computer is a splendid experience again. I am ready to change my graphic card and even my CPU if needed just for the sake of KDE4. On the other hand, is it reasonable to change a 32 W graphic card for a 120 W (or more) one when everybody is trying to save energy ? I have no answer to that question:-(
Does anybody remember the NEC Ultralite ? Because it has such a huge (2 MB !;-) ) RAM, it did not use a hard disk : DOS was quite happy with 640 KB, and the rest was used as a permanent RAMdisk, allowing tho load Turbo Pascal, Multiplan or Reflex quickly and silently:
The Toshiba Libretto did have a hard disk, as did the Fujitsu Lifebooks B112 and B142, the latter offering both USB-1 and a tactile screen very useful with Windows or KDE. If Fujitsu intends to offer a EEE-like PC, the B142 form factor would be a quite acceptable candidate. I wonder if they will do it.
If you look at history, there has been a long track record of religion disagreeing with science and science winning
True. But of the contrary too, in fact. We should not forget how the Big Bang theory was sneered at in the beginning (including by Fred Hoyle himself) as beeing too religiously connotated to be seriously considered. The same happened with Pasteur's theory of germs, that Clemenceau (then a journalist) attacked as "religiously motivated try to oppose the scientific [!] position of spontaneous generation"; incidentally, Clemenceau was doctor of medicine, while Pasteur was not. There is unfortunately no "silver bullet" telling us which side will automatically win in a given controversy.
The important point is not to know whether there are intelligent life forms elsewhere. The important point is to know, if they exist, if they already use the metric system or if we should prepare to intergalactic wars in order to convert them to it.
And the cost of the extra computer hardware, connectivity, and electricity to drive those things would probably cost more in both cash and resources than the way things are now.
Does it have to ? After all, we do not need any sophisticated power-hungry 3D graphic card here, nor a 300W power supply, nor even a simple 10W hard disk. As technology goes on, nothing prevents very small solid-state home servers connected to the Internet to consume as little as 10 W overall; indeed some basic Linux ARM-powered boxes do (some of them just sold as home routers).
To give an order of magnitude, 240 Wh used each day to power such a device amounts to 87 kWh per year, something around 5 euros. I wonder whether it would be possible not to rentabilize that.
It is clearly a good idea to modulate the price of commodities and associate some automatic actions with the time modulation of prices. That is already done in a crude fashion (just two or three levels) with peak-hour power or telephone rates, but making things happen "on demand" (after all, lowering prices means that a resource asks to be more consumed;-) ) could be even better.
However, in order to avoid congestion, it would probably be wise to introduce a random delay between the availability of a lower cost and the moment to use it, just like devices do with Ethernet, in ordre to avoid storms.
Also, a phone with a LED telling me : Â Hey, why not call now ? The prices are suddenly cheap ! Â would be an excellent way to introduce some sense of opportunity in a world having too many things decided just by clock considerations.
Stochastic computers represented any value between 0 and 1 (both included) by a probability. A set of random bits were sent according to that probability.
Multiplication, always a problem with analog computers at the time, was very simply, quickly and cheaply done by an AND chip (one of the inputs had to be decorrelated of the other by a delay line to avoid parasitic correlations). The addition was a little more tricky, but getting (p1+p2)/2 could be achived with just three basic circuits, if I remember well. Of course you had to remember that the value was scaled, well, exactly the same king of caution you had to observe with analog synthetizers at the very same time.
Details here for whoever is interested... and knows somebody reading French;-)
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculateur_stochastique
The complexity of keeping trace of scaling, decorrelations and the like could be taken away by monitoring them from an associated PC, now that I am thinking about it. Try it ! You will like it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe... or maybe not. Progress is seldom linear, and tomorrow is not specially supposed to me just "more of today". It may on the contrary be very different, and even opposite to some respect (think of the automobile or computer products from 1950 to 1970 and try to extrapolate that to 2010, you get very strange results ;-)
The key to many things is scale economy. If you can offer the same service at 30% less manufacturing and storing cost by having 10x longer series, you win. By the way, this is what ensured success of the Ford T and the VW Bug at a time. The Renault/Dacia Logan seems to be a success too in Europe with its "non-nonsense" approach, as well as Netbooks have been in 2008. Future is almost never "more of the same thing". That is incidentally why the Wii was such a sucess too. See aloso this :
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131098
http://www.arm.com/events/presentations/Robin's%20Semico06%20Keynote%20Speech_FINAL06Mar06.pdf
Or they might also say : it is free to stay on Gmail, but you will have to pay to get out ! :-D
Wonderful ! Now, instead of having some standard battery sizes (AA, AAA and so on), we are going tu have as many different shapes of batteries as there are products, not only between manufacturers but within the line of the same manufacturer (for the same reason that Gillette has 10 different shapes of blades, or than portables PCs have 200+ type of batteries, or that we hare 20 or so different AC/DC transformers at home), so you will have to buy every time a given manufacturer's battery and throw it away rather than reuse it on a later apparatus.
I am afraid that while technically we have a progress here, our production organization wil make it a regression; it something that happens from time to time.
... can give, from a skull, any hint about the size of the nose and the shape of the ear, both of which are made of just cartilage.
Any hint ?
If you start work at 9:00, put the time switch to boot your computer at 8:45. That should leave a lot of time. Now, if a password must be entered for the boot to proceed, the question is : is it your job ? Then you should be paid as soon as you begin it. If it is somebody else's job, just wait for him/her to do it.
I don't know much about memory management in Linux. What happens if you hibernate the system while the swap file is in use?
I have never studied the kernel very closely, but I would expect normally what is on the disk not to be saved again since it's already there, and what is in RAM to be saved wherever possible in the remaining holes of the partition (hence the 2x rule ?), perhaps after some slight quick compression of every zone saved from RAM.
Like they say in Perl, TIMTOWTDI ;-)
The "rule of two" is due to Knuth's demonstration : "When the memory is 50% full, there is necessarily one free block at least as big as the biggest already allocated block", or something similar.
Today, I would say the swap partition is mainly useful to store the state of the computer when you put it in hibernation mode, that is a little more that the size of your RAM if you want to be really cautious, just in case.
That being said, A GB of disk is so cheap compared to 1 GB of RAM - which is already cheap, now - that there is no problem in doubling that size for very special purposes (alternating 2 different "hot" graphic users sessions or operating systems without rebooting, for instance). Just my two cents.
Look at how different p2p statistics and box office are for some movies: this would be a better system, because at the very least the medium is not controlled by the guy who sells the stuff.
I am afraid it could perhaps not work : a major company like Sony released the infamous "Sony rootkit", so we might just as well conceive in a near future a "Universol botnet" or a "Virgen swarm" just intended to artificially boost a given artist's download counter. Remember nobody ever knew whether or not Brian Epstein "boosted" the Beatles or non when giving his record store figutes to the chart makers every week.
"Our generation's nuclear power?" Seriously? You're comparing finding a way to sell music with SPLITTING THE ATOM?!?
Well, would you accept a less provocative comparison ? Say, splitting hairs ? ;-)
You become unable to listen to your downloaded music 1 month after you end your subscription (if you ever do). Choosing classical music is a bargain, with thousands of references.
Neuf Telecom belongs to Universal, a reason why they could propose this offer rather quickly last year.
"At the death of one of these two authors", Hugo said, "it is only fair the other one, the people should inherit all the rights". This was a coureageous move, as Hugo's family lived essentially on his author's rights.
To be really fair, we should perhaps allow 20 years of copyright after the author's death so his family has a lot of time to find jobs. I do not see however any legitimate reason why it should be more. Struggle and dog fights do not have anything to do with reason, as fas as I know :-(
You don't have to suffer with a broken Dual turntable. I sent my Dual 1229 off for repair by a person that has a passion for these old Duals: http://www.fixmydual.com/
Thanks a lot ! It is nice that the know-how on old technologies continues to live through passionate amateurs. Hmmm... perhaps I could event try to have my old Revox A77 fixed or converted to 4-tracks :-)
Though the following is rather off-topic, there are here a lot of CitroÃn Traction avant fans, who keep their models running and in shape. Whenever a part breaks, they examine it and recreate a copy of it with small machine-tools they share. Much better than the original ones, in fact.
As people say : "I can give the time, but unfortunately that does not mean I know how to repair watches" ;-)
It is not the cartridge itself that matters. The shape of the needle changed from the 78 size to a smaller one for the microgroove recordings. (33 + 1/3 and 45 )
Yes. These cells commonly used a commutable needle : one for 78 rpm and another for the microgroove, and a level allowed to switch from one to the other. Needless to say, I supposed the right needle was used.
That being said, piezo cartridges and magnetic ones accepted at a time these dual needles, so using the right needle is necessary, but here not sufficient :-)
Of course for best fidelity the single use steel needle is preferred....:)
That might be. When I was very young we used to have a "Peter Pan" portable mechanical 78rpm player and we had a box of needles, which had to be changed rather frequently. I had the surprise, when reading its user's manual to see that the manufacturer recommendend changing the needle after each record, which seems unbelievable. I always wondered if that really applied to steel needles, or just to former bamboo needles, which I never had a chance to see.
I still have a wind up gramophone of maybe twenties or thirties vintage that uses these. No amplification, no electricity.
What makes me sade evert time there is a technology change is the know-how that it lost with it forever - except perhaps a for a few passionates which allow it some survival. In french brocantes, it is common to find objects for sale, the function of which is ununderstandable, even for its preceding owners :-/
Surprisingly, if you use a piezo, heavy cell (not suitable to read stereo records), you will get a much better sound, and almost no hiss. I got very good results at a time from a Dual 1010 turnable, unfortunately out of order now :-(
I also have some Jack Hylton songs that do not seem to be present on his Internet tribute site (Bogey wail, Sarita...), for whoever is interested. I guess they are legally in the public domain now, as all of them date from before WW2.
The best way I can conceive is to use one of these fixed bikes providing electricity (Ragonots,they are called here) as a power supply for your PC. In that way the more tou are in front of your PC, the more exercise you get in order to use it. I strongly suggest you use it coupled to a good UPS. Things should now stay at complete equilibrium :-)
I won't complain, though, because for a price of zero, I can say that I have much more than my no-money worth, obviously. The software available in the depots is so awesome that I recently changed my default / (root) size to 30 GB. /root is on another, much bigger (300 GB) partition, of course.:-)
I am afraid this is not a feature, but a flaw.
When you use somebody else's car (and every one of us has to do that once in a while, just as using somebody else's computer), you feel confident that the accelerator will be on the right and the brake on the left. When you unscrew something, you expect you can achieve it rotating your screwdriver counterclockwise. When you are in the rest rooms, you expect hot water to be on the left and cold water on the right, and counter-clockwise movements to open the water flow (though I did see different arrangement, which were hell !)
When one "buys" (in the figurated sense) a graphic interface, on expects a kind of normalization, a common rule, to be part of the package. If it is not there, is is as useless as X-Window used alone formerly was. Normalization, and clever normalization, is a part of the product, and it could be a terrible error to try avoiding it, because most orders, however imperfect, are still preferable to complete chaos.
KDE4 is hell if your monitor is not recognized by Linux at installation time, which is at least the case for both mine with OpenSuSE 11.0 : a Samsung Syncmaster 940NW (1440x900, D15 plug) and an Asus MW221U (1650x1050) when on D15 plug. Try to customise KDE4 when your monitor is "recognized" as 800x600 (sometimes even 640x480!) and you are ine for w big nightmare and/or a big headache.
People are attached to little expected details, details as seeing for instance the three windows buttons (maximize, iconize, cancel) present on the window title bar when they need them, rather than disappearing randomly, with a slight preference to disappear exactly when needed. Or a detail like seeing a button yielding action when clicked, not 300 milliseconds afterthe click... or not reacting at all !
Resising and/or rotating icons ? OK. niw where is the laxian key ? That is : if tou did it my mistake, how do you put them back again exactly as they were without guessing ? Why not align on Picasa standards that keep unchanged the reference images, and allow to step back on every movement you did previously ? (a depth of 10 changes would be sufficient, of course).
But also there are great things : plasmoids, especially the ones with small diaporamas, are just lovable. Their border color following the (changing) screen background color is splendid. Windows with round corners, for a reason I cannot understand, really feel better - something strange after we all changed our rounder-corner TV screens for straigth-cornered screens some years ago. And the choice of background screens images (at least as I can see them on OpenSuSE)is gorgeous. Working on the computer is a splendid experience again. I am ready to change my graphic card and even my CPU if needed just for the sake of KDE4. On the other hand, is it reasonable to change a 32 W graphic card for a 120 W (or more) one when everybody is trying to save energy ? I have no answer to that question :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_UltraLite.
The Toshiba Libretto did have a hard disk, as did the Fujitsu Lifebooks B112 and B142, the latter offering both USB-1 and a tactile screen very useful with Windows or KDE. If Fujitsu intends to offer a EEE-like PC, the B142 form factor would be a quite acceptable candidate. I wonder if they will do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto
http://sandbox.cz/~covex/hw/b112/
True. But of the contrary too, in fact. We should not forget how the Big Bang theory was sneered at in the beginning (including by Fred Hoyle himself) as beeing too religiously connotated to be seriously considered. The same happened with Pasteur's theory of germs, that Clemenceau (then a journalist) attacked as "religiously motivated try to oppose the scientific [!] position of spontaneous generation"; incidentally, Clemenceau was doctor of medicine, while Pasteur was not. There is unfortunately no "silver bullet" telling us which side will automatically win in a given controversy.
Future is not anymore what it once was :-(
However, if these life forms are really intelligent, they probably already use metric. Or, even better, Planck units :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
Does it have to ? After all, we do not need any sophisticated power-hungry 3D graphic card here, nor a 300W power supply, nor even a simple 10W hard disk. As technology goes on, nothing prevents very small solid-state home servers connected to the Internet to consume as little as 10 W overall; indeed some basic Linux ARM-powered boxes do (some of them just sold as home routers).
To give an order of magnitude, 240 Wh used each day to power such a device amounts to 87 kWh per year, something around 5 euros. I wonder whether it would be possible not to rentabilize that.
However, in order to avoid congestion, it would probably be wise to introduce a random delay between the availability of a lower cost and the moment to use it, just like devices do with Ethernet, in ordre to avoid storms.
Also, a phone with a LED telling me : Â Hey, why not call now ? The prices are suddenly cheap ! Â would be an excellent way to introduce some sense of opportunity in a world having too many things decided just by clock considerations.
Multiplication, always a problem with analog computers at the time, was very simply, quickly and cheaply done by an AND chip (one of the inputs had to be decorrelated of the other by a delay line to avoid parasitic correlations). The addition was a little more tricky, but getting (p1+p2)/2 could be achived with just three basic circuits, if I remember well. Of course you had to remember that the value was scaled, well, exactly the same king of caution you had to observe with analog synthetizers at the very same time.
Details here for whoever is interested... and knows somebody reading French ;-)
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculateur_stochastique The complexity of keeping trace of scaling, decorrelations and the like could be taken away by monitoring them from an associated PC, now that I am thinking about it. Try it ! You will like it ;-)