I almost forgot, Picasa 2 runs GREAT under CrossOver Mac. It's truly amazing how well it works. I wasn't willing to shell out the $60 just so I could use Picasa, but picasa and a few other apps ran great under the trial version. I might have to check it out again to see how well it works with Picasa 3.
The tagging, searching and organizing of photos under Picasa might be worth the bucks Crossover costs. Iphoto does a terrible job of organizing and tagging. Bibble is great for editing, but sucks entirely for organizing or searching. Actually, those features are non existent.
Switching from Picasa to iPhoto was PAINFUL. So painful in fact, that I ditched it all together. I started using Bibble on the mac. It's much more powerful and way less limited. It's mostly designed for processing RAW photos, but works well with jpegs too. It does crash every six or seven seconds though.
I really miss the watch feature and the time-line feature. That was by far one of the coolest photo organization tools I've ever seen. I wish google would get on it and release Picasa for the mac too.
Instead of playing whack-a-mole-legislation with reporters and privacy advocates that point out problems, wouldn't our lawmakers efforts be better directed to fixing the privacy holes?
Someone has blown the whistle and turned on the flashing yellow klaxons to alert Virginia citizens and lawmakers to shoddy privacy practices. She's not trying to profit, she's probably not even trying to benefit from this work (except, perhaps in a very professional way). This woman is doing her civic and professional duty to solve what she sees as a problem.
Because she has no direct method for solving this problem, her only recourse is to alert her lawmakers and hope they fix the gigantic hole. Instead of whacking her with legislation, they should be carefully crafting legislation that provides guidelines and most importantly REAL FUNDING to help secure personal informaiton.
What about the quality of the rectified wave that is dumped into the gizmo? I don't know much about design, but it seems possible that some devices would run well dirty power, and others wouldn't deal with it at all.
There's probably a warranty-security issue here too. Manufactures of higher end devices spec out a third party plug, or have one designed specifically for their product to reduce any problems further down the line. They know exactly what voltage range, quality of full wave rectification, and total amperage their gizmo needs. Since you just paid $400 for your new toy, it sure would suck for both you and the company if your El Cheapomatic Universal Dongleizer provided one of those resources just outside of spec and fried your brand new Thingiee. It's a warranty headache for you and for the company.
I think companies would be thrilled to stop shipping wall-warts. The cost that is passed on to the consumer could be pocketed and they could also save on packaging, shipping and materials overall. I think it's just too much of a wild-card, in their eyes, to hope that every Universal Wall-Wart is made within spec.
Any aliens that encounter our civilization may experience life in a completely incomprehensible way. For instance, they might not speak, but rather use some form of sign language or color language like squid. But, if they are a space faring race, and presumably interested in learning about other races, they'll have the necessary intelligence to make a go at learning what the disk means.
You'd be amazed what you can tease out of a text, especially poetry. Because so much poetry depends on end rhyme, it's possible to not only figure out pronunciation, but also accent. We can be so precise as to narrow down the accent that Shakespeare wrote in by examining the songs in his plays. It's pretty freaking cool.
But again, this all hinges on the premise that aliens can comprehend a spoken language, or even a written, symbolic language. If they can't, then of course this device won't work. Fortunately, future humans (if there are any) should be able to make some sense of this thing. It will be invaluable to future researchers. Lord knows, our land fills will be a wealth of information to any future archeologist.
Sign blindness is more of a real problem than the tiny amount of Gallium in LEDs. If you want to protect people, you can't deluge them with constant warnings. They eventually become sign blind and begin ignoring, or worse mocking warning labels. According to the labels, every can of paint in the hardware store causes cancer in California. But what I don't know is if paint A is going to make me infertile the moment I look at it, or if paint B is just a problem if I drink 5 gallons of it. The labels don't have any kind of granularity.
A color coded system might do consumers well. No color==mostly OK. Green==Don't eat a bunch of this, it's not good for you. Yellow==Take care when using this, ventilation is a good idea and long term exposure is probably going to hurt you. Red==For the love of all that is holly, wear a respirator or leave it for the pros. Black==if you are reading this, you're already dead.
California needs to remember that poison is in the portion. EVERYTHING is poisons in the right quantity. A warning label can be useful, when not slapped on every surface that it can physically bond to.
Warning! This cliff is known to the state of California to cause plummeting, falling and smassing of bones. Gravity in effect at edge of cliff face! Short term exposure to gravity can cause serious injury.
It takes a lot to get kids to overcome their ennui and fear of teasing and to allow themselves to become curious. Careful, manageable steps that have a pretty good GEE-WHIZ factor are needed before moving on to really abstract things like Pi. I've seen it done in a 5th grade classroom and it was amazing.
The teacher started off with having kids measure all sorts of body parts, tables, chairs, windows books, whatever. They had a measurement scavenger hunt and had to find stuff longer than 100 cm, less than 15 cm, but more than 8 cm. Stuff like that. That lasted for a couple of days, then they started talking about perimeter. He challenged kids to figure out how much string it would take to surround their desk, their book, eventually the classroom. They loved climbing over desks, and under tables to pull the string around the perimeter of the room. It was awesome.
Eventually, they started talking about the perimeter of round things. He had the kids bring in all sorts of cans, balls, anything round. The kids were already comfortable with measuring and the idea of perimeter, so they didn't have to stretch their minds too much. At this point, he had them measure the diameter of the circles. Then he asked them to find some patterns among all the diameter/circumdference pairs. He hinted and prodded and suggested a lot, but the kids eventually "discovered" that the circumference was always about 3 times bigger than the diameter.
Wow. These kids "discovered" Pi all on their own. Or at least they felt like they did.
That's masterful teaching. It takes some amazing skill to manage 25 kids running around the room measuring things, and some amazing tact to give just the right amount of help while they investigate, but it can be done.
Obviously, self signing is meaningless for anonymous strangers. It works just fine for you and your friends/colleagues, but not for anyone outside your immediately trusted group.
What are the free alternatives to VeriSign's hefty fees? Some kind of community effort to create trust, much like PGP key signing seems like it would be a good solution.
Besides being expensive, it looks like any shmo can register with verisign and then conduct all sorts of questionable practices behind their cert. It doesn't look like there's any sort of vetting in the process. I didn't complete the signup process, but it looked like once they had my money, they'd send me a certificate. While the connection is secure, that doesn't tell me a darn thing about what they are going to do with my data, or weather or not they're going to try something malicious.
By around age 5 I learned most (if not all) of these facts from watching TLC or Discovery.
That we teach and test facts is part of the problem with science education in the US. I'm a science teacher at a public charter school and I struggle with this problem constantly. The comprehensive curriculum and Grade Level Expectations (standards) emphasize science as an inquiry skill. If I follow the GLEs, the most important skills I can teach are inquiry. That is to say, I should be teaching kids to ask questions, design experiments, do research, be curious and skeptical. This is a perfect science education. It doesn't matter if kids know exactly what the carbon cycle is, or if the sun is the center of our solar system. Instead, I'm giving them the skills to learn about these content knowledge areas.
Unfortunately, when it comes time to take a standardized test, 20% of the test asks kids to call upon their ability to do science by making predictions, designing experiments or comparing data. The other 80% of the test actually tests content knowledge (facts).
If you're familiar with blooms taxonomy, you know that regurgitating facts is the least mentally strenuous and intellectually challenging task. It's great if a kid knows that the earth orbits the sun and that sun orbits the center of the milky way and the milky way is part of a super cluster of galaxies, but isn't it more important that a kid knows how to do a good scientific experiment? That she knows what a control is, what a variable is and can shout, "BOGUS!" when an infomercial tells her that something--that clearly has not been--is scientifically proven.
What we need to do, is push for teaching and assessment (standardized tests) that challenge kids to think. We want science fairs that don't just show what the solar system is, but rather show off quality experiments that kids did regarding the solar system. Every citizen would benefit from the ability to not just know what a neurotransmitter is (that's what teh intertubes and books are for), but rather how to use scientific reasoning in solving problems and learning.
If you have kids, try encouraging your kid's teachers to try experiments in class. If you know what good science looks like, volunteer to help conduct a quality, rigorous experiment in your kid's school. Most of my colleagues at the elementary level are liberal arts majors that have NEVER been taught good science. They don't know what it looks like because their teachers failed them. If you sincerely care about your kid's education, help out the teacher. It has to start somewhere!
Encourage your kids to ask questions and then help them find the answer. Don't just look the damn thing up, teach them how to create a test that will either answer the question or lead them to more questions. Science is beautiful and doesn't have to subtract from the natural beauty of the world, rather it adds to it and reveals the subtle beauty and elegance of everything.
S3 is a pretty good option. I've been using the jungledisk client along with rsync to manage offsite home backups. S3 Is pretty cheap and the clients are fairly flexible.
I haven't played with any remote clients, but your hosting provider can probably hook up one of the many clients mentioned in the parrent. The price of S3 is hard to beat. I spend about $6 per month on ~20 gigs worth of backups.
And those that purchase iPhones to "jailbreak" them are just as dumb. If you hate Apple's stifling environment so much, don't buy an iPhone.
Why go thru the hassle of hacking something that you know is against their rules and agreements?
Why buy some great piece of hardware that has awesomeness written all over it just because the manufacturer is a little silly? Why wouldn't you? There's so much potential for hacking in that little box it's insane. The iPhone isn't the only platform that screams, "awesome hacking here", there are many others including FIC's smart phone, nokia, palm and all the others.
Sure, Apple is restrictive, but who cares. If there's a way to hack around the restrictions for the joy of hacking, why wouldn't you? Of course this assumes you're not just Joe Consumer who expects a fully open mobile computing platform. If you are, forget the iphone. If you want to hack on a fun little mobile computing device, the iphone is great.
Let's not get carried away and use absolutes on the inter-tubes. Not everyone who buys an iphone and jail-breaks it is an idiot. Those who expect a jail-broken iphone to have the same functionality as a nokia, or those who complain because they didn't read their contract are probably lacking in the common sense department, however.
I couldn't find any eight digit numbers that scored zero hits.
That's really interesting. Perhaps 8 digit numbers are common for serial numbers and dates. Today's date is 20080723. I can't even begin to think of all the logs and file names that I've generated that contain a similar string.
Anyone else have any ideas why 8 digit numbers are so common?
How do you cool using a V8? You'd still need a fan attached to it do move any heat away.
We don't need no steenking fan! You just strap the bare motherboard to the roof of your V8 1970 Pontiac Firebird and drive between 90 and 100 mph. No fan, but adequate cooling as long as you're not stuck in traffic.
Of course the cooling system will use power and generate heat, but that heat won't necessarily be as much as a fan. A fan uses power to dissipate heat and in the process generates heat. I don't know the proper thermodynamic way to state this, but it's possible to make a more or less efficient cooling system. For example, it would be exceedingly inefficient to use a V8 engine to cool a laptop. It would do a hell-of a job of cooling the thing, but it would generate a whole lot more heat and suck down a whole lot more energy than a small electric fan.
This thing might use less power and do a better job of moving power than a fan. I have no idea if this thing works better. If this device is more efficient than a fan (uses less energy and releases less heat), then it would be superior and would not make a lappy hotter. Otherwise, it's really only good for server applications where the heat can be pumped outside the box that holds the server.
It still drains the battery, but not necessarily the same way that a fan drains a battery. Think of the difference between a compact fluorescent versus an incandescent bulb. They can both be tuned to release a certain amount of light, but the CF will release a whole lot less heat and use less energy to do the same job as the incandescent light. In this case, the CF bulb is vastly more efficient in doing the work of emitting light.
The article doesn't say anything about the amount of energy the new pump uses, or the efficiency. It's possible that the device can use less power and dissipate more heat than a fan. It's also possible that the thing is wildly inefficient too. Typically, liquid based cooling is more efficient at moving heat than gas based systems. This is why we cool nuclear power plants with liquid instead of air.
I wonder what kind of power these little diaphragms suck down. I imagine that a liquid based cooling system is more efficient than one based on circulating air. It's great that this technology can move heat away faster, but I wonder if it can do it at a lower power cost.
This is a perfect example of how hacking can benefit the greater good. While it would be great to ride Dutch trains for free, it's obviously not sustainable and therefore I don't mind paying for services I receive. It is rather frustrating however to see companies attack the hackers that have found this weakness. Fixing the weakness will obviously cost money and time, but that is far superior to months of unscrupulous individuals taking free train rides all over the country. The students could have easily distributed this to their friends and community members quietly and cost the rail system thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) in free trips before it was discovered.
The rail company may have been duly diligent in their security assessment of the system, but obviously missed this problem. In this case, the students have provided a very valuable service for FREE. This can potentially improve the overall quality of the rail system. Obviously the rail company needs to spend capital to repair the flaw in the system, but that is superior to discovering and repairing the flaw after thousands of free trips have already been lost. In this case, the money lost in free trips can be reinvested into the service to improve it, rather than just flushed down the drain.
If companies can change their opinion of hackers that voluntarily point out security flaws to be more positive and less adversarial, everyone can potentially benefit.
Actually many of the theories are testable, but not in a direct fashion. For instance, continental drift is tough to measure. It happens really, really slow. We can, however pull out samples of the mid-atlantic sea floor and observe that it is spreading via magnetic evidence that is consistent with magnetic data gathered from around the globe at independent sites.
We obviously can't go back in time and check out the big bang, but we do have data gathered from the COBE mission that analyzed cosmic background radiation. The gathered data matches up almost perfectly with many big-bang related predictions. While we can't make a universe in a tea cup and observe what happens, we can make hypothesis and then see if the data we gather matches up. If it the data doesn't match, then either our hypothesis needs some work (or maybe is junk), or there was an error in our data collection. Either way, the scientific method, when followed rigorously, provides us with a way to eliminate error and bad theories. It's all pretty amazing.
We can't test everything directly--nobody's going to visit a black hole anytime soon--but we can make models and then compare them with real observations. It's called Science.
Slashdot Mirror
I almost forgot, Picasa 2 runs GREAT under CrossOver Mac. It's truly amazing how well it works. I wasn't willing to shell out the $60 just so I could use Picasa, but picasa and a few other apps ran great under the trial version. I might have to check it out again to see how well it works with Picasa 3.
The tagging, searching and organizing of photos under Picasa might be worth the bucks Crossover costs. Iphoto does a terrible job of organizing and tagging. Bibble is great for editing, but sucks entirely for organizing or searching. Actually, those features are non existent.
Switching from Picasa to iPhoto was PAINFUL. So painful in fact, that I ditched it all together. I started using Bibble on the mac. It's much more powerful and way less limited. It's mostly designed for processing RAW photos, but works well with jpegs too. It does crash every six or seven seconds though.
I really miss the watch feature and the time-line feature. That was by far one of the coolest photo organization tools I've ever seen. I wish google would get on it and release Picasa for the mac too.
Instead of playing whack-a-mole-legislation with reporters and privacy advocates that point out problems, wouldn't our lawmakers efforts be better directed to fixing the privacy holes?
Someone has blown the whistle and turned on the flashing yellow klaxons to alert Virginia citizens and lawmakers to shoddy privacy practices. She's not trying to profit, she's probably not even trying to benefit from this work (except, perhaps in a very professional way). This woman is doing her civic and professional duty to solve what she sees as a problem.
Because she has no direct method for solving this problem, her only recourse is to alert her lawmakers and hope they fix the gigantic hole. Instead of whacking her with legislation, they should be carefully crafting legislation that provides guidelines and most importantly REAL FUNDING to help secure personal informaiton.
What about the quality of the rectified wave that is dumped into the gizmo? I don't know much about design, but it seems possible that some devices would run well dirty power, and others wouldn't deal with it at all.
There's probably a warranty-security issue here too. Manufactures of higher end devices spec out a third party plug, or have one designed specifically for their product to reduce any problems further down the line. They know exactly what voltage range, quality of full wave rectification, and total amperage their gizmo needs. Since you just paid $400 for your new toy, it sure would suck for both you and the company if your El Cheapomatic Universal Dongleizer provided one of those resources just outside of spec and fried your brand new Thingiee. It's a warranty headache for you and for the company.
I think companies would be thrilled to stop shipping wall-warts. The cost that is passed on to the consumer could be pocketed and they could also save on packaging, shipping and materials overall. I think it's just too much of a wild-card, in their eyes, to hope that every Universal Wall-Wart is made within spec.
Travel to interesting hot deserts, meet interesting people and kill them from a great distance.
Be all you can be with technology!
I know the military has provided us with all kinds of great tech, but it's a shame that we have to kill people.
Any aliens that encounter our civilization may experience life in a completely incomprehensible way. For instance, they might not speak, but rather use some form of sign language or color language like squid. But, if they are a space faring race, and presumably interested in learning about other races, they'll have the necessary intelligence to make a go at learning what the disk means.
You'd be amazed what you can tease out of a text, especially poetry. Because so much poetry depends on end rhyme, it's possible to not only figure out pronunciation, but also accent. We can be so precise as to narrow down the accent that Shakespeare wrote in by examining the songs in his plays. It's pretty freaking cool.
But again, this all hinges on the premise that aliens can comprehend a spoken language, or even a written, symbolic language. If they can't, then of course this device won't work. Fortunately, future humans (if there are any) should be able to make some sense of this thing. It will be invaluable to future researchers. Lord knows, our land fills will be a wealth of information to any future archeologist.
Sign blindness is more of a real problem than the tiny amount of Gallium in LEDs. If you want to protect people, you can't deluge them with constant warnings. They eventually become sign blind and begin ignoring, or worse mocking warning labels. According to the labels, every can of paint in the hardware store causes cancer in California. But what I don't know is if paint A is going to make me infertile the moment I look at it, or if paint B is just a problem if I drink 5 gallons of it. The labels don't have any kind of granularity.
A color coded system might do consumers well. No color==mostly OK. Green==Don't eat a bunch of this, it's not good for you. Yellow==Take care when using this, ventilation is a good idea and long term exposure is probably going to hurt you. Red==For the love of all that is holly, wear a respirator or leave it for the pros. Black==if you are reading this, you're already dead.
California needs to remember that poison is in the portion. EVERYTHING is poisons in the right quantity. A warning label can be useful, when not slapped on every surface that it can physically bond to.
Warning! This cliff is known to the state of California to cause plummeting, falling and smassing of bones. Gravity in effect at edge of cliff face! Short term exposure to gravity can cause serious injury.
It takes a lot to get kids to overcome their ennui and fear of teasing and to allow themselves to become curious. Careful, manageable steps that have a pretty good GEE-WHIZ factor are needed before moving on to really abstract things like Pi. I've seen it done in a 5th grade classroom and it was amazing.
The teacher started off with having kids measure all sorts of body parts, tables, chairs, windows books, whatever. They had a measurement scavenger hunt and had to find stuff longer than 100 cm, less than 15 cm, but more than 8 cm. Stuff like that. That lasted for a couple of days, then they started talking about perimeter. He challenged kids to figure out how much string it would take to surround their desk, their book, eventually the classroom. They loved climbing over desks, and under tables to pull the string around the perimeter of the room. It was awesome.
Eventually, they started talking about the perimeter of round things. He had the kids bring in all sorts of cans, balls, anything round. The kids were already comfortable with measuring and the idea of perimeter, so they didn't have to stretch their minds too much. At this point, he had them measure the diameter of the circles. Then he asked them to find some patterns among all the diameter/circumdference pairs. He hinted and prodded and suggested a lot, but the kids eventually "discovered" that the circumference was always about 3 times bigger than the diameter.
Wow. These kids "discovered" Pi all on their own. Or at least they felt like they did.
That's masterful teaching. It takes some amazing skill to manage 25 kids running around the room measuring things, and some amazing tact to give just the right amount of help while they investigate, but it can be done.
Obviously, self signing is meaningless for anonymous strangers. It works just fine for you and your friends/colleagues, but not for anyone outside your immediately trusted group.
What are the free alternatives to VeriSign's hefty fees? Some kind of community effort to create trust, much like PGP key signing seems like it would be a good solution.
Besides being expensive, it looks like any shmo can register with verisign and then conduct all sorts of questionable practices behind their cert. It doesn't look like there's any sort of vetting in the process. I didn't complete the signup process, but it looked like once they had my money, they'd send me a certificate. While the connection is secure, that doesn't tell me a darn thing about what they are going to do with my data, or weather or not they're going to try something malicious.
By around age 5 I learned most (if not all) of these facts from watching TLC or Discovery.
That we teach and test facts is part of the problem with science education in the US. I'm a science teacher at a public charter school and I struggle with this problem constantly. The comprehensive curriculum and Grade Level Expectations (standards) emphasize science as an inquiry skill. If I follow the GLEs, the most important skills I can teach are inquiry. That is to say, I should be teaching kids to ask questions, design experiments, do research, be curious and skeptical. This is a perfect science education. It doesn't matter if kids know exactly what the carbon cycle is, or if the sun is the center of our solar system. Instead, I'm giving them the skills to learn about these content knowledge areas.
Unfortunately, when it comes time to take a standardized test, 20% of the test asks kids to call upon their ability to do science by making predictions, designing experiments or comparing data. The other 80% of the test actually tests content knowledge (facts).
If you're familiar with blooms taxonomy, you know that regurgitating facts is the least mentally strenuous and intellectually challenging task. It's great if a kid knows that the earth orbits the sun and that sun orbits the center of the milky way and the milky way is part of a super cluster of galaxies, but isn't it more important that a kid knows how to do a good scientific experiment? That she knows what a control is, what a variable is and can shout, "BOGUS!" when an infomercial tells her that something--that clearly has not been--is scientifically proven.
What we need to do, is push for teaching and assessment (standardized tests) that challenge kids to think. We want science fairs that don't just show what the solar system is, but rather show off quality experiments that kids did regarding the solar system. Every citizen would benefit from the ability to not just know what a neurotransmitter is (that's what teh intertubes and books are for), but rather how to use scientific reasoning in solving problems and learning.
If you have kids, try encouraging your kid's teachers to try experiments in class. If you know what good science looks like, volunteer to help conduct a quality, rigorous experiment in your kid's school. Most of my colleagues at the elementary level are liberal arts majors that have NEVER been taught good science. They don't know what it looks like because their teachers failed them. If you sincerely care about your kid's education, help out the teacher. It has to start somewhere!
Encourage your kids to ask questions and then help them find the answer. Don't just look the damn thing up, teach them how to create a test that will either answer the question or lead them to more questions. Science is beautiful and doesn't have to subtract from the natural beauty of the world, rather it adds to it and reveals the subtle beauty and elegance of everything.
[Rant concluded.]
S3 is a pretty good option. I've been using the jungledisk client along with rsync to manage offsite home backups. S3 Is pretty cheap and the clients are fairly flexible.
I haven't played with any remote clients, but your hosting provider can probably hook up one of the many clients mentioned in the parrent. The price of S3 is hard to beat. I spend about $6 per month on ~20 gigs worth of backups.
And those that purchase iPhones to "jailbreak" them are just as dumb. If you hate Apple's stifling environment so much, don't buy an iPhone.
Why go thru the hassle of hacking something that you know is against their rules and agreements?
Why buy some great piece of hardware that has awesomeness written all over it just because the manufacturer is a little silly? Why wouldn't you? There's so much potential for hacking in that little box it's insane. The iPhone isn't the only platform that screams, "awesome hacking here", there are many others including FIC's smart phone, nokia, palm and all the others.
Sure, Apple is restrictive, but who cares. If there's a way to hack around the restrictions for the joy of hacking, why wouldn't you? Of course this assumes you're not just Joe Consumer who expects a fully open mobile computing platform. If you are, forget the iphone. If you want to hack on a fun little mobile computing device, the iphone is great.
Let's not get carried away and use absolutes on the inter-tubes. Not everyone who buys an iphone and jail-breaks it is an idiot. Those who expect a jail-broken iphone to have the same functionality as a nokia, or those who complain because they didn't read their contract are probably lacking in the common sense department, however.
I couldn't find any eight digit numbers that scored zero hits.
That's really interesting. Perhaps 8 digit numbers are common for serial numbers and dates. Today's date is 20080723. I can't even begin to think of all the logs and file names that I've generated that contain a similar string.
Anyone else have any ideas why 8 digit numbers are so common?
Is that the modern equivalent of the Mayan calendar running out of days?
And about 600,000,000 of those are, "FrIST P0ST!"
How do you cool using a V8? You'd still need a fan attached to it do move any heat away.
We don't need no steenking fan! You just strap the bare motherboard to the roof of your V8 1970 Pontiac Firebird and drive between 90 and 100 mph. No fan, but adequate cooling as long as you're not stuck in traffic.
Of course the cooling system will use power and generate heat, but that heat won't necessarily be as much as a fan. A fan uses power to dissipate heat and in the process generates heat. I don't know the proper thermodynamic way to state this, but it's possible to make a more or less efficient cooling system. For example, it would be exceedingly inefficient to use a V8 engine to cool a laptop. It would do a hell-of a job of cooling the thing, but it would generate a whole lot more heat and suck down a whole lot more energy than a small electric fan.
This thing might use less power and do a better job of moving power than a fan. I have no idea if this thing works better. If this device is more efficient than a fan (uses less energy and releases less heat), then it would be superior and would not make a lappy hotter. Otherwise, it's really only good for server applications where the heat can be pumped outside the box that holds the server.
The Tardis' outside dimensions and volume remain the same (it's stuck as a Police Call Box), it's interior volume, however, is limitless.
I would trade my lappy for a Tardis any day of the week though.
It still drains the battery, but not necessarily the same way that a fan drains a battery. Think of the difference between a compact fluorescent versus an incandescent bulb. They can both be tuned to release a certain amount of light, but the CF will release a whole lot less heat and use less energy to do the same job as the incandescent light. In this case, the CF bulb is vastly more efficient in doing the work of emitting light.
The article doesn't say anything about the amount of energy the new pump uses, or the efficiency. It's possible that the device can use less power and dissipate more heat than a fan. It's also possible that the thing is wildly inefficient too. Typically, liquid based cooling is more efficient at moving heat than gas based systems. This is why we cool nuclear power plants with liquid instead of air.
I wonder what kind of power these little diaphragms suck down. I imagine that a liquid based cooling system is more efficient than one based on circulating air. It's great that this technology can move heat away faster, but I wonder if it can do it at a lower power cost.
Whoops! I guess I didn't RTFA carefuly enough. Thanks for pointing that out.
This is a perfect example of how hacking can benefit the greater good. While it would be great to ride Dutch trains for free, it's obviously not sustainable and therefore I don't mind paying for services I receive. It is rather frustrating however to see companies attack the hackers that have found this weakness. Fixing the weakness will obviously cost money and time, but that is far superior to months of unscrupulous individuals taking free train rides all over the country. The students could have easily distributed this to their friends and community members quietly and cost the rail system thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) in free trips before it was discovered.
The rail company may have been duly diligent in their security assessment of the system, but obviously missed this problem. In this case, the students have provided a very valuable service for FREE. This can potentially improve the overall quality of the rail system. Obviously the rail company needs to spend capital to repair the flaw in the system, but that is superior to discovering and repairing the flaw after thousands of free trips have already been lost. In this case, the money lost in free trips can be reinvested into the service to improve it, rather than just flushed down the drain.
If companies can change their opinion of hackers that voluntarily point out security flaws to be more positive and less adversarial, everyone can potentially benefit.
Actually many of the theories are testable, but not in a direct fashion. For instance, continental drift is tough to measure. It happens really, really slow. We can, however pull out samples of the mid-atlantic sea floor and observe that it is spreading via magnetic evidence that is consistent with magnetic data gathered from around the globe at independent sites.
We obviously can't go back in time and check out the big bang, but we do have data gathered from the COBE mission that analyzed cosmic background radiation. The gathered data matches up almost perfectly with many big-bang related predictions. While we can't make a universe in a tea cup and observe what happens, we can make hypothesis and then see if the data we gather matches up. If it the data doesn't match, then either our hypothesis needs some work (or maybe is junk), or there was an error in our data collection. Either way, the scientific method, when followed rigorously, provides us with a way to eliminate error and bad theories. It's all pretty amazing.
We can't test everything directly--nobody's going to visit a black hole anytime soon--but we can make models and then compare them with real observations. It's called Science.
Silly, that's not a bug, it's a FEATURE. It's a subtle hint as to which browser you should--or rather should'nt--be using ;)