My guess is this thing pumps water from surface level, into the ground, and back up to surface level through thin copper tubing (the thinner and more coiled the more surface area) while air is forced by these coils. Easy to power and it should work well enough for a decent amount of water to condense on the coils. Either this or a similar idea using the peltier effect.
Equip one of these with solar panels to bring in even more power and you might be onto something, although I have the same questions about the effects on the environment as everyone else does.
Maybe we should build these on the polar ice caps to drop fresh water on the ice to freeze?:)
This is a point. Before this past holiday season, multiple vendors were offering $50 gift cards and $100 rebates on Xbox 360's and these rebates and incentives weren't endorsed by MS.
I don't know where you are, but there are literally small fortunes / mountains of PS3's laying unpurchased at retailers in the central Florida area. No joke, the EB games that I frequent told me they've had more PS3's returned than sold since the first of the year. That's just kinda sad...
The feature itself is a selling point, but the PS3 always had this feature. I doubt this will help sales at this point seeing how dead the sales are. I don't think that most consumers were even aware of the graphical glitches the PS3 had rendering PS2 and PS games.
Also, the hottest game on the market right now is still Guitar Hero 2 and, until Sony can offer us a way to plug in the Guitar Hero guitar and play it on the PS3, most everyone I know is going to have to have their PS2 sitting next to their PS3 (if they choose to buy one) anyway. Bleh.
Yeah, well, I paid $300 to play Twilight Princess. Anything else that comes out (and I'm sure there will be tons of things that come out) will make that initial investment even better. The key is, $300 wasn't too much for me to put down at once for 2 fun games and the promise of multiple other titles I'll have fun with down the road. $650 is a VERY LARGE initial investment. That's putting $650 down right now for one game, with promises of more games to come in the future. I could have much more fun spending that $650 elsewhere NOW and picking up a PS3 when it depreciates.
Square recently did Mario Hoops 3 on 3, so you can't rule out them doing a true sequel to SMRPG. Honestly though, if Nintendo just gave me Mother 3 I'd be more than happy for a while....
That's really all I have to say. Panzer Dragoon Saga is one of the most breathtaking gaming experiences ever. I'm one of the few people fortunate enough to have played it and I'd love to see a sequel or even a next gen remake of the original. That game pushed the Sega Saturn to it's limits. Everything about the game was beautiful, the voice acting and music incredible, and the battle system was truely innovative. They really did everything right with that one.
Square has a tendancy to do that and polarize fans.
Personally, I thought Chrono Cross was brilliant and like it better than Chrono Trigger. Then again, I also loved Legend of Mana which remains to be one of my top 5 favorite Playstation games of all time. I like it much better than the SD2 and 3, but it's also a completely different game. Then again, FFVII totally changed the FF series around and many people (not me) declare it the best of the series.
People get really upset when you change up something they love. I think Square's problem is that they try to sell games based solely on IP instead of creating new IP when they have new ideas.
So, they pissed of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who bought an N64 at launch in anticipation of FFVII, yet you don't think they'd repeat history with FFXII?
If FFXII doesn't switch, they can't/won't switch FFXIII...simply because they'd be splitting a series across multiple systems in the same generation. That would cause more of a backlash than just switching consoles, imo.
Square produced for the NES and helped solidify Nintendo's winning lead with the SNES, giving Nintendo 2 generations of dominance. Square was poised to release FFVII on the N64. After promising this, even after the release of the N64, Square pulled away and put it out on the Playstation. In Japan, Sony was really struggling to hold market share against Sega. Sony was the underdog of this generation and this decision pretty much gave Sony the edge they needed to win the generation. The Playstation turns out being a runaway success and this spills over to the PS2, much as the NES's runaway success spilled over into the SNES era.
I'm not saying this will happen, and I'm actually doubting it, but Square could just as easily pull this stunt and decide to release FFXII on the 360 after a year of promising it on the PS3. It wouldn't be the first time that Square switched over to supporting the underdog. And, if Sony doesn't get it's act together soon, I honestly wouldn't blame them if they did. The PS3 has been a total trainwreck so far.
Agreed, although it's not that I can't afford it, it's that I feel you can get more for your money elsewhere. When the market deems something worth the price, then it's obviously worth the price to the market. The UI on the product is great, it just depends on if UI is more important to you than more storage space and additional options. This is why the geek and consumer markets will always be polarized. They can be melded together, it's just rare that they do. Geeks who design products for geeks usually aren't commercial and user interface designers by trade. Then again, geek's don't pull out the roll of duct tape for aesthetics, they do it because it works. That might not be the best comparison, but I think it gets my point across.
I never said there were no mp3 players with better interfaces than the iPod (I think my Sony Vaio mp3 player has the best interface), the main arguement was that Apple's UI isn't a bad UI and that it's better than most of it's competition.
Also, as a former Rio owner I felt the interface was clunky. Not hard to use, just clunky and bland.
You're right on two out of the three. They do scratch easily and they are overpriced. You may not be a fan of the interface (I myself am not an apple zealot when it comes to UI), but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that the user interface is bad. Look at 95% of the other products on the market. Apple consistently has easier to use, more intuitive UI's than practically all of it's competitors. This is Apple's strength and they play off of this constantly with all of their products. That's like saying Nintendo makes crappy videogames. You may not like the hardware, you may not like the games, but you'll have a hard time convincing people that they make bad games. That's their bread and butter. They use it to push their hardware.
One of the largest issues with ethanol, especially derived from corn, is the fact that if widely adopted it will be so appealing to developing nations to start producing it that we will see some major environmental consequences.
Many developing/3rd world nations will have two options: Convert current crop fields to corn fields or cut down rainforest for crop space. It's obvious why cutting down rainforest is bad, but converting current crop fields (or even using available crop land) for corn couls be disasterous for the development of these countries. Not only would it make them more reliant on the rest of the world for produce, it would ruin their farmlands. Corn will ruin farmland. It syphons more nutrients from the soil than practically any other crop. It renders the land it's grown on useless for years, much more so than other crops. So, when they have to rotate crop fields to grow more corn, they end up with useless land.
As was stated in the article, using corn over sugar cane is silly to begin with, and the fuel savings/environmental impact savings aren't as high as one would be made to believe, and can actually be worse without planning. This is another concern with third world nation production of ethanol, all the possible steps probably won't be taken to reduce environmental impact. It will be about turning the most profit, not about being eco friendly.
There are a lot of good articles out there about how the cons of ethanol outweigh the pro's and how, when it comes down to it, we're spinning out wheels on a solutions that's not THAT much better than gasoline to begin with. It's hardly even a good transitionary fuel source.
The thing is, you shouldn't have to do this. CD burning should work and work easily, especially for a desktop solution that's trying to be an easy desktop alternate to WinXP. The original poster did nothing but common desktop tasks that I would expect most people to do on a regular basis with XP. CD burning on OSes should be trivial at this point.
So now, on top of not being able to sit in the seat and having the guy in front of me crush me knees when he tries to lean back, I have to listen to chatty cathy two rows back talk the entire trip? Shame the free liquor is only in first class....
Even for people who don't get their hands on a Wii until later next year, $5 is a bargain for Opera. It's a great browser and a great price seeing all the extra considerations and functionality that has to be programmed in to work well on the Wii at 480i/p. I remember spending more than that on a copy before they went free.
My only question is, how is Nintendo going to block users from playing emulated games via the web? That could seriously hurt Virtual Console game sales if someone can figures out all the logistics behind getting the remote to work correctly through the web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is this thing pumps water from surface level, into the ground, and back up to surface level through thin copper tubing (the thinner and more coiled the more surface area) while air is forced by these coils. Easy to power and it should work well enough for a decent amount of water to condense on the coils. Either this or a similar idea using the peltier effect.
:)
Equip one of these with solar panels to bring in even more power and you might be onto something, although I have the same questions about the effects on the environment as everyone else does.
Maybe we should build these on the polar ice caps to drop fresh water on the ice to freeze?
This is a point. Before this past holiday season, multiple vendors were offering $50 gift cards and $100 rebates on Xbox 360's and these rebates and incentives weren't endorsed by MS.
I don't know where you are, but there are literally small fortunes / mountains of PS3's laying unpurchased at retailers in the central Florida area. No joke, the EB games that I frequent told me they've had more PS3's returned than sold since the first of the year. That's just kinda sad...
The feature itself is a selling point, but the PS3 always had this feature. I doubt this will help sales at this point seeing how dead the sales are. I don't think that most consumers were even aware of the graphical glitches the PS3 had rendering PS2 and PS games.
Also, the hottest game on the market right now is still Guitar Hero 2 and, until Sony can offer us a way to plug in the Guitar Hero guitar and play it on the PS3, most everyone I know is going to have to have their PS2 sitting next to their PS3 (if they choose to buy one) anyway. Bleh.
Yeah, well, I paid $300 to play Twilight Princess. Anything else that comes out (and I'm sure there will be tons of things that come out) will make that initial investment even better. The key is, $300 wasn't too much for me to put down at once for 2 fun games and the promise of multiple other titles I'll have fun with down the road. $650 is a VERY LARGE initial investment. That's putting $650 down right now for one game, with promises of more games to come in the future. I could have much more fun spending that $650 elsewhere NOW and picking up a PS3 when it depreciates.
I think you'll like Superstar Saga, check it out.
Square recently did Mario Hoops 3 on 3, so you can't rule out them doing a true sequel to SMRPG. Honestly though, if Nintendo just gave me Mother 3 I'd be more than happy for a while....
That's really all I have to say. Panzer Dragoon Saga is one of the most breathtaking gaming experiences ever. I'm one of the few people fortunate enough to have played it and I'd love to see a sequel or even a next gen remake of the original. That game pushed the Sega Saturn to it's limits. Everything about the game was beautiful, the voice acting and music incredible, and the battle system was truely innovative. They really did everything right with that one.
Square has a tendancy to do that and polarize fans.
Personally, I thought Chrono Cross was brilliant and like it better than Chrono Trigger. Then again, I also loved Legend of Mana which remains to be one of my top 5 favorite Playstation games of all time. I like it much better than the SD2 and 3, but it's also a completely different game. Then again, FFVII totally changed the FF series around and many people (not me) declare it the best of the series.
People get really upset when you change up something they love. I think Square's problem is that they try to sell games based solely on IP instead of creating new IP when they have new ideas.
No, because FFIV was FFII in the US...
I wonder if this will be known as FFVI in Japan?
So, they pissed of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who bought an N64 at launch in anticipation of FFVII, yet you don't think they'd repeat history with FFXII?
If FFXII doesn't switch, they can't/won't switch FFXIII...simply because they'd be splitting a series across multiple systems in the same generation. That would cause more of a backlash than just switching consoles, imo.
For histories sake:
Square produced for the NES and helped solidify Nintendo's winning lead with the SNES, giving Nintendo 2 generations of dominance. Square was poised to release FFVII on the N64. After promising this, even after the release of the N64, Square pulled away and put it out on the Playstation. In Japan, Sony was really struggling to hold market share against Sega. Sony was the underdog of this generation and this decision pretty much gave Sony the edge they needed to win the generation. The Playstation turns out being a runaway success and this spills over to the PS2, much as the NES's runaway success spilled over into the SNES era.
I'm not saying this will happen, and I'm actually doubting it, but Square could just as easily pull this stunt and decide to release FFXII on the 360 after a year of promising it on the PS3. It wouldn't be the first time that Square switched over to supporting the underdog. And, if Sony doesn't get it's act together soon, I honestly wouldn't blame them if they did. The PS3 has been a total trainwreck so far.
Agreed, although it's not that I can't afford it, it's that I feel you can get more for your money elsewhere. When the market deems something worth the price, then it's obviously worth the price to the market. The UI on the product is great, it just depends on if UI is more important to you than more storage space and additional options. This is why the geek and consumer markets will always be polarized. They can be melded together, it's just rare that they do. Geeks who design products for geeks usually aren't commercial and user interface designers by trade. Then again, geek's don't pull out the roll of duct tape for aesthetics, they do it because it works. That might not be the best comparison, but I think it gets my point across.
I never said there were no mp3 players with better interfaces than the iPod (I think my Sony Vaio mp3 player has the best interface), the main arguement was that Apple's UI isn't a bad UI and that it's better than most of it's competition.
Also, as a former Rio owner I felt the interface was clunky. Not hard to use, just clunky and bland.
You're right on two out of the three. They do scratch easily and they are overpriced. You may not be a fan of the interface (I myself am not an apple zealot when it comes to UI), but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that the user interface is bad. Look at 95% of the other products on the market. Apple consistently has easier to use, more intuitive UI's than practically all of it's competitors. This is Apple's strength and they play off of this constantly with all of their products. That's like saying Nintendo makes crappy videogames. You may not like the hardware, you may not like the games, but you'll have a hard time convincing people that they make bad games. That's their bread and butter. They use it to push their hardware.
One of the largest issues with ethanol, especially derived from corn, is the fact that if widely adopted it will be so appealing to developing nations to start producing it that we will see some major environmental consequences.
Many developing/3rd world nations will have two options: Convert current crop fields to corn fields or cut down rainforest for crop space. It's obvious why cutting down rainforest is bad, but converting current crop fields (or even using available crop land) for corn couls be disasterous for the development of these countries. Not only would it make them more reliant on the rest of the world for produce, it would ruin their farmlands. Corn will ruin farmland. It syphons more nutrients from the soil than practically any other crop. It renders the land it's grown on useless for years, much more so than other crops. So, when they have to rotate crop fields to grow more corn, they end up with useless land.
As was stated in the article, using corn over sugar cane is silly to begin with, and the fuel savings/environmental impact savings aren't as high as one would be made to believe, and can actually be worse without planning. This is another concern with third world nation production of ethanol, all the possible steps probably won't be taken to reduce environmental impact. It will be about turning the most profit, not about being eco friendly.
There are a lot of good articles out there about how the cons of ethanol outweigh the pro's and how, when it comes down to it, we're spinning out wheels on a solutions that's not THAT much better than gasoline to begin with. It's hardly even a good transitionary fuel source.
I see the light! Bill....Bill, is that you?
Everquest on the go!
Now nerds world over can actually leave their house while waiting for 12 hours spawns to pop.
I don't know about you, but I can drag and drop files to my cd burner in XP and hit the burn button and it takes care of everything.
Of course I don't do this, because I don't like the software built into XP...but the fact remains that you can do it and it's very easy to do.
The thing is, you shouldn't have to do this. CD burning should work and work easily, especially for a desktop solution that's trying to be an easy desktop alternate to WinXP. The original poster did nothing but common desktop tasks that I would expect most people to do on a regular basis with XP. CD burning on OSes should be trivial at this point.
Apparently you didn't get the joke. Time magazine declared everyone man of the year this year....
So now, on top of not being able to sit in the seat and having the guy in front of me crush me knees when he tries to lean back, I have to listen to chatty cathy two rows back talk the entire trip? Shame the free liquor is only in first class....
There have been retarded turtles roaming the earth for 150 million years now. God speed, retarded little turtles....God speed.
Look around the net. There's multiple sites where you can play NES games in the browser.
Even for people who don't get their hands on a Wii until later next year, $5 is a bargain for Opera. It's a great browser and a great price seeing all the extra considerations and functionality that has to be programmed in to work well on the Wii at 480i/p. I remember spending more than that on a copy before they went free.
My only question is, how is Nintendo going to block users from playing emulated games via the web? That could seriously hurt Virtual Console game sales if someone can figures out all the logistics behind getting the remote to work correctly through the web browser.