Ahh, but pre-cooling in the morning is going to be more efficient because you don't have the hot afternoon sun beating through the building's windows and warming the exterior.
The biggest "win" from TFA is that the research team was able to cobble together an algorithm that can provide up to 30% energy savings while conducting the pre-cooling. Even if everyone and their dog shifts electrical use to the morning, the smart cooling technique would still save power. It would still stagger demand, since homeowners wouldn't use similar techniques and will be sucking massive amounts of power in the afternoon.
That said, the long-term solution to this problem is to build more environmentally sensible buildings. Tall glass boxes don't let designers take advantage of strategic window placement, white roofs, clever ventilation, earth walls (or even huge stone interior walls that can act as thermal sinks to reduce temperature fluctuations). Air conditioning is actually a pretty ugly solution to the problem.
I was referring to the root post as sensational, not the article. "Much Colder..." and "degrees Kelvin" demonstrate a lack of grounding. TFA was actually pretty interesting (especially considering the source), but it describes a moderate effect akin to an "open system" air conditioner.
Of most importance: "The finding could apply to other planets in the solar system which have condensable atmospheres like Mars." IOW, it's another little piece in our understanding of the overall solar jigsaw puzzle.
The correct use is "43 kelvins." Unlike degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit (both adjectives), it is a noun, and the correct pluralization is kelvins.
I'm sure some newspaper will soon start running headlines about how Pluto is "23% colder than anticipated." In the real world, 10 K isn't that much, although it would be nice to know why our estimates are off. For reference, water freezes at 273.15 K, and the deepest darkest nook of outer space registers about 2.7 K, thanks to some background microwave radiation.
If it WAS true (and not a rumor) it would have also been the "first ever" software package ever to be put to market without ANY of the development staff OR beta testers leaking a copy.
Umm... if the Google box is a thin client, there's not going to be a "software package" to leak. It'd probably be running a small footprint version of a highly customized Firefox browser over a streamlined linux kernal. And I suspect that no one would find anything interesting about a leaked copy of Firefox.
Honestly, people are missing the boat here. In a web-centric world, the OS becomes relatively trivial, more like a display and interface driver system. If everything "in the machine" is stored on Google servers, and the "software" is little more than pages served from a host you don't need much on the client end -- a single set of display and video drivers (all of the Google cubes will be the same) and something to drive the interface ports. No more.
Kodak outsources the production (and possibly the design) of its cheapest cameras. My wife and I purchased one a few years ago because it was just about the only affordable digicam available. It (and all its breatheren) had defective battery management that made it impossible to use in the real world.
Anyone else notice that this thing's design harkens back to the wooden boxed Kodak Brownie cameras that were introduced (along with 120 roll film) in about 1901? I wish Kodak much success with their digital innovations -- it's been a bloodbath (technologically and from a dollar & cents/employment perspective) at their company for the last couple of years.
Personally, I'd like to see them create a hybrid analog/digital sensor that combines the best of the film and digital worlds. It would avoid the nasty blowouts that digicams are succeptible to, while adding the benefit of digital speed to the analog image capture process.
When they mention Mr. Potato Head's roll-out in 1952, there is some sensational math: grossed more than $4 million in its first year (that's $30 billion in 2005 dollars)
That's an increase of 7,500 times. IOW, the average salary in 1952 should have been around $5 per year! If you want a more tech-centric look at a few hundred classic gadgets, drop by my site -- http://www.retrothing.com/.
Some other excellent Slashdot post ideas:
1. The top ten iPod tea cozies
2. The top ten keyboard warmers
3. The top ten stickers that attach to the top of cheap laptops
4. The top ten girlie-themed skins for WinAmp
5. Top ten USB-powered mug warmers (and fans, and lamps, vibrators and anything else that shouldn't be attached to a computer)
Any idiot can stuff a USB drive into a farking prawn. That doesn't make it technologically interesting. Do people not have feed readers that enable them to read gadget blogs without having to submit links to the front page of Slash? This story was linked all over the blogsphere a couple of days ago.
Hang on. Microsoft doesn't take $399 for each xbox sold -- no-one's factored in dealer/distributor markups. I suspect that dealer margins will be quite low on this product, but they're certainly not going to shift inventory without earning something to cover overhead, credit card transaction fees, staffing, and so on.
Strange. Google is assuming that you'll be watching television alone (or at least with like-minded souls). Since my wife is a crystal-loving hemp-wearing nature lover and I'm a technodroid, it'll be interesting to see what sort of targeting goes on as we watch shows together on the Googletube.
Low-cost digital cinemas should theoretically slash distribution costs, but I suspect the cost savings will be a negligible percentage of the total cost to make, publicize and distribute the film. What the shift WILL do is slash the cost of distributing the 11 out of 12 films that are money losers in a manner that will transform the industry. Currently, movieplexes *have* to play stinker films for a short while, because the print is couriered to them and there aren't extra prints of the popular films to replace them. The distributor manufactures hundreds of prints of marginal films, and wants to see at least some return on their investment. So the film lingers for a few weeks in the cinema. With digital distribution, money losers can be quickly deleted from distribution at not cost -- it's not like there are hundreds of film prints that suddenly become worthless.
It's just a game.
Sometimes it scares me how immersed we've all become in the virtual world -- work, play, and entertainment all seem to intertwine into a tangled pile of bits.
My advice might seem strange: Go find a real-world hobby instead. Woodworking, go-kart racing, flying, skiing, filmmaking, scuba diving. They won't give you carpel tunnel syndrome, you'll get your butt out of a chair, and you won't find yourself writing lengthy online editorials about how a game won't let you name yourself after a food.
You'll live longer, trust me.
There's nothing really new here. Weblogs Inc. properties such as Engadget are modelled after WIRED magazine's Fetish page, which presents nifty gadgets every month. The key difference is that Engadget provides a steady stream of content throughout the day. The topics tend to be slightly random, so you never know quite what you're going to see next. In psychological terms, it's variable reinforcement applied to web content (with the chance to add your own comments to the hot stories) -- quite addictive stuff. It's also a lucrative market. These sites may run on blog software, but they're a world away from the "my boyfriend cheated with Kimberlee" sites that Blogger and Livejournal are famous for -- They're becoming mainstream electronic media properties, with significant daily reach. In some cases, they're more influential than traditional newsmedia sites.
Yahoo bought out oddpost in 2004. If you'll remember, they were the first to put together a really slick DHTML-based email application. What you see here is a result of merging the technology Ethan and Ian had developed with Yahoo's infrastructure (plus a great deal more - tabs and other features that aren't part of oddpost).
Glad to see a little dotrebound company like Oddpost make a mark!
Using electricity to convert water to hydrogen to create flame is a round-about way of making things more complicated than they have to be. There are better ways to make heat and light with electricity, after all. And there are better ways to make electricity with water. And if you need fire, burning a tree is simpler still.:)
I was sucked into their ADSL packages by a low introductory price. We soon discovered that the service was anything but reliable, going down several times a week for hours at a time. Eventually, things must have become so bad for the company that their call centers started proactively calling people to apologize for "recent problems with service." I can only imagine what an unbearable job that must have been.
My first question to the poor drone who called was, "So Telus admits there is a service problem?" When I got a "Yes," the next question was "When will you be processing my refund?"
That one just got a stunned "Uhhhhh."
I'm cheerfully waiting to see how long my connection lasts during the strike. I give it about anoth (*@&.. !)~ [ZZZT]
Hang on, guys. The idea of an OLED keyboard is really cool, but the truth of the matter is that the square and totally flat keys shown on their prototype would feel like typing on a supermarket cash register. Compare that to the concave and textured keys you're (probably) used to. Unless your primary computer is a Sinclair ZX-81. So, to make it useful, you'd need a sculpted and textured keycap, which will result in a fuzzy and clouded image. Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know touch-types. The keys could be printed in Lithuanian, for all I care.
Has anyone else noticed how marketers are becoming stunningly good at making people desperate for "the next new thing?" A handful of book copies accidentally sold before the release date gets significant press from the likes of CBC and CNN -- but ultimately, it's "false news." In a handful of days, there'll be millions of copies being read worldwide. Does that make the book any worse? Any less desirable? Not really. But, man, the marketing machine is definitely trying to make it feel like the sixth coming of Christ.
And then, the anxiety instantly dissapates, until the next must-have movie/book/cdmp3-ish thing. I suspect that this approach is the most effective way to profitably disseminate new media, or the distributors wouldn't use it. But it makes me wonder; how many fewer books would we need if people were patient and shared copies instead? My guess is that millions of the copies sold during the early frenzy will be read by one or two people, and then left on a shelf for 20 years collecting dust.
12 minutes after leaving the lot, 50% of new cars would be violently car-jacked, their owners left by the side of the road wondering why some zitty-faced kid just drove the shiny new car into a tree.
And so car dealerships would stop selling cars without armour, bullet-proof glass and tires, and so on.
I'm in Canada. The main reason I have cable (analog, btw) is because the signal quality from my local OTA analog stations is dismal. I live in the suburbs of a metropolitan area (approx 1 million people), yet several of the stations are snowy, ghosty messes. Several of my friends have confirmed similar results in other areas of the city. We're significantly behind the USA in the roll-out of digital OTA. I can't wait. I'm hopeful that digital error correction will give me decent off-air signals that allow me to ditch my basic cable and spend the extra $280/year on important things. Like RAM. Or single malt scotch.
The sad truth is that the billion$ earned by microserfs are ours. We're the ones who own the mutual funds that invest in Microsoft. We're the ones who buy MSFT because we believe their Xbox 360 hype. And, until recently, we haven't seen anything in return (in the form of dividends, that is). It's incredible how we buy into the stock market shell game.
This would be an absolute disaster in my house, given the gooey state my 3 year-old's fingers are usually in. He's perfected turning on the DVD player and TV, knows to hold discs by the edges, but no way would you ever get a decent finger scan from him.
And, come to think of it, what would give the lovely folks at the RIAA the right to require fingerprint ID from minors? Hmm. I'm going to be 17 for the rest of my life.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, but pre-cooling in the morning is going to be more efficient because you don't have the hot afternoon sun beating through the building's windows and warming the exterior. The biggest "win" from TFA is that the research team was able to cobble together an algorithm that can provide up to 30% energy savings while conducting the pre-cooling. Even if everyone and their dog shifts electrical use to the morning, the smart cooling technique would still save power. It would still stagger demand, since homeowners wouldn't use similar techniques and will be sucking massive amounts of power in the afternoon. That said, the long-term solution to this problem is to build more environmentally sensible buildings. Tall glass boxes don't let designers take advantage of strategic window placement, white roofs, clever ventilation, earth walls (or even huge stone interior walls that can act as thermal sinks to reduce temperature fluctuations). Air conditioning is actually a pretty ugly solution to the problem.
The Apple site repeatedly proclaims "2x faster. Twice as amazing." Of course, perhaps Steve defined X=0.6?
Of most importance: "The finding could apply to other planets in the solar system which have condensable atmospheres like Mars." IOW, it's another little piece in our understanding of the overall solar jigsaw puzzle.
It's a proper adjective, actually. ;)
I'm sure some newspaper will soon start running headlines about how Pluto is "23% colder than anticipated." In the real world, 10 K isn't that much, although it would be nice to know why our estimates are off. For reference, water freezes at 273.15 K, and the deepest darkest nook of outer space registers about 2.7 K, thanks to some background microwave radiation.
Umm... if the Google box is a thin client, there's not going to be a "software package" to leak. It'd probably be running a small footprint version of a highly customized Firefox browser over a streamlined linux kernal. And I suspect that no one would find anything interesting about a leaked copy of Firefox.
Honestly, people are missing the boat here. In a web-centric world, the OS becomes relatively trivial, more like a display and interface driver system. If everything "in the machine" is stored on Google servers, and the "software" is little more than pages served from a host you don't need much on the client end -- a single set of display and video drivers (all of the Google cubes will be the same) and something to drive the interface ports. No more.
Kodak outsources the production (and possibly the design) of its cheapest cameras. My wife and I purchased one a few years ago because it was just about the only affordable digicam available. It (and all its breatheren) had defective battery management that made it impossible to use in the real world.
The speed with which you can capture an image, manipulate it, and distribute it.
Personally, I'd like to see them create a hybrid analog/digital sensor that combines the best of the film and digital worlds. It would avoid the nasty blowouts that digicams are succeptible to, while adding the benefit of digital speed to the analog image capture process.
When they mention Mr. Potato Head's roll-out in 1952, there is some sensational math: grossed more than $4 million in its first year (that's $30 billion in 2005 dollars)
That's an increase of 7,500 times. IOW, the average salary in 1952 should have been around $5 per year! If you want a more tech-centric look at a few hundred classic gadgets, drop by my site -- http://www.retrothing.com/.
Some other excellent Slashdot post ideas: 1. The top ten iPod tea cozies 2. The top ten keyboard warmers 3. The top ten stickers that attach to the top of cheap laptops 4. The top ten girlie-themed skins for WinAmp 5. Top ten USB-powered mug warmers (and fans, and lamps, vibrators and anything else that shouldn't be attached to a computer) Any idiot can stuff a USB drive into a farking prawn. That doesn't make it technologically interesting. Do people not have feed readers that enable them to read gadget blogs without having to submit links to the front page of Slash? This story was linked all over the blogsphere a couple of days ago.
Hang on. Microsoft doesn't take $399 for each xbox sold -- no-one's factored in dealer/distributor markups. I suspect that dealer margins will be quite low on this product, but they're certainly not going to shift inventory without earning something to cover overhead, credit card transaction fees, staffing, and so on.
Strange. Google is assuming that you'll be watching television alone (or at least with like-minded souls). Since my wife is a crystal-loving hemp-wearing nature lover and I'm a technodroid, it'll be interesting to see what sort of targeting goes on as we watch shows together on the Googletube.
Low-cost digital cinemas should theoretically slash distribution costs, but I suspect the cost savings will be a negligible percentage of the total cost to make, publicize and distribute the film. What the shift WILL do is slash the cost of distributing the 11 out of 12 films that are money losers in a manner that will transform the industry. Currently, movieplexes *have* to play stinker films for a short while, because the print is couriered to them and there aren't extra prints of the popular films to replace them. The distributor manufactures hundreds of prints of marginal films, and wants to see at least some return on their investment. So the film lingers for a few weeks in the cinema. With digital distribution, money losers can be quickly deleted from distribution at not cost -- it's not like there are hundreds of film prints that suddenly become worthless.
It's just a game. Sometimes it scares me how immersed we've all become in the virtual world -- work, play, and entertainment all seem to intertwine into a tangled pile of bits. My advice might seem strange: Go find a real-world hobby instead. Woodworking, go-kart racing, flying, skiing, filmmaking, scuba diving. They won't give you carpel tunnel syndrome, you'll get your butt out of a chair, and you won't find yourself writing lengthy online editorials about how a game won't let you name yourself after a food. You'll live longer, trust me.
There's nothing really new here. Weblogs Inc. properties such as Engadget are modelled after WIRED magazine's Fetish page, which presents nifty gadgets every month. The key difference is that Engadget provides a steady stream of content throughout the day. The topics tend to be slightly random, so you never know quite what you're going to see next. In psychological terms, it's variable reinforcement applied to web content (with the chance to add your own comments to the hot stories) -- quite addictive stuff. It's also a lucrative market. These sites may run on blog software, but they're a world away from the "my boyfriend cheated with Kimberlee" sites that Blogger and Livejournal are famous for -- They're becoming mainstream electronic media properties, with significant daily reach. In some cases, they're more influential than traditional newsmedia sites.
Yahoo bought out oddpost in 2004. If you'll remember, they were the first to put together a really slick DHTML-based email application. What you see here is a result of merging the technology Ethan and Ian had developed with Yahoo's infrastructure (plus a great deal more - tabs and other features that aren't part of oddpost). Glad to see a little dotrebound company like Oddpost make a mark!
Using electricity to convert water to hydrogen to create flame is a round-about way of making things more complicated than they have to be. There are better ways to make heat and light with electricity, after all. And there are better ways to make electricity with water. And if you need fire, burning a tree is simpler still. :)
My first question to the poor drone who called was, "So Telus admits there is a service problem?" When I got a "Yes," the next question was "When will you be processing my refund?" That one just got a stunned "Uhhhhh." I'm cheerfully waiting to see how long my connection lasts during the strike. I give it about anoth (*@&.. !)~ [ZZZT]
Hang on, guys. The idea of an OLED keyboard is really cool, but the truth of the matter is that the square and totally flat keys shown on their prototype would feel like typing on a supermarket cash register. Compare that to the concave and textured keys you're (probably) used to. Unless your primary computer is a Sinclair ZX-81. So, to make it useful, you'd need a sculpted and textured keycap, which will result in a fuzzy and clouded image. Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know touch-types. The keys could be printed in Lithuanian, for all I care.
And then, the anxiety instantly dissapates, until the next must-have movie/book/cdmp3-ish thing. I suspect that this approach is the most effective way to profitably disseminate new media, or the distributors wouldn't use it. But it makes me wonder; how many fewer books would we need if people were patient and shared copies instead? My guess is that millions of the copies sold during the early frenzy will be read by one or two people, and then left on a shelf for 20 years collecting dust.
12 minutes after leaving the lot, 50% of new cars would be violently car-jacked, their owners left by the side of the road wondering why some zitty-faced kid just drove the shiny new car into a tree. And so car dealerships would stop selling cars without armour, bullet-proof glass and tires, and so on.
I'm in Canada. The main reason I have cable (analog, btw) is because the signal quality from my local OTA analog stations is dismal. I live in the suburbs of a metropolitan area (approx 1 million people), yet several of the stations are snowy, ghosty messes. Several of my friends have confirmed similar results in other areas of the city. We're significantly behind the USA in the roll-out of digital OTA. I can't wait. I'm hopeful that digital error correction will give me decent off-air signals that allow me to ditch my basic cable and spend the extra $280/year on important things. Like RAM. Or single malt scotch.
The sad truth is that the billion$ earned by microserfs are ours. We're the ones who own the mutual funds that invest in Microsoft. We're the ones who buy MSFT because we believe their Xbox 360 hype. And, until recently, we haven't seen anything in return (in the form of dividends, that is). It's incredible how we buy into the stock market shell game.
And, come to think of it, what would give the lovely folks at the RIAA the right to require fingerprint ID from minors? Hmm. I'm going to be 17 for the rest of my life.