Flywheels in portable devices have several drawbacks, the biggest of which is the angular momentum. You can't have a laptop that does a backflip every time it's jostled.
And think about the noise and vibration a big, heavy rotor would cause.
Over here (.nl) we already have something like this. The recycling fee is added to the product's retail price. Disposing of the product is free: its vendor is required to take it back and dispose of it.
Stories about software developers using the latest and greatest hardware always worry me. If they only see their product's performance on bleeding-edge computers, chances are it'll only perform properly on bleeding-edge computers. Now, this is okay for applications that really do take advantage of this power, but often there's no reason for such bloat.
An example: Eudora 3.1 on my Macintosh IIci (33 MHz 68040) was faster than Eudora 5.1 on my Mac G3/233. Eudora 5.1 offers some new features, but nothing to justify a >tenfold speed decrease.
In other words, go ahead and use recent computers to build and compile on, but do keep some four year-old heaps around to test your product's performance.
Interesting, but not for concerts
on
Targeted Sound Beams
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· Score: 5, Interesting
From the article: Pompei imagined that instead of loudspeakers blaring the same cacophony of instruments to all parts of the room, it would be more interesting to selectively spotlight the soloist to the left side of the audience, while featuring the percussion up front, and then switching them around.
But when I go to a concert, I want to hear all the instruments - without having to move around the room.
Also, I get the impression that current tests are being carried out in silent environments with few obstacles. In a concert, you'd have to crank up the volume of such a 'sound spotlight' in order to hear it over the 'general' sound system. And in a crowded hall, the sound from the beam would be reflected more.
This would cause the sound generated by the spotlight to 'leak' out of the beam area, making it less effective.
And (also important in a concert) the audio engineer can't hear what he's doing with the spotlights, making it very hard to get right.
This gist of my comments were that cases such as Falung Gong, Lu Xinhua or Tiananmen -- real and deplorable as they are -- are exceptional in the experience of the average Chinese.
I'm not so sure about 'exceptional'. Things may be improving, but the Chinese govt has a long way to go before it can claim a similar respect for human rights to US and European governments have. Taking a look at a recent report by Open Doors on the situation for Christians in China, I'd say persecution is not that exceptional, and with 80 million people in jeopardy, certainly can't be called 'incidents'.
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Flywheels in portable devices have several drawbacks, the biggest of which is the angular momentum. You can't have a laptop that does a backflip every time it's jostled. And think about the noise and vibration a big, heavy rotor would cause.
Googling for Spacewars turns up several results that say the game is from 1961, not '62. Is The Times Wrong?
It seems a joint (govt/vendors) organization [English version too] is responsible for disposal.
Over here (.nl) we already have something like this. The recycling fee is added to the product's retail price. Disposing of the product is free: its vendor is required to take it back and dispose of it.
Stories about software developers using the latest and greatest hardware always worry me. If they only see their product's performance on bleeding-edge computers, chances are it'll only perform properly on bleeding-edge computers. Now, this is okay for applications that really do take advantage of this power, but often there's no reason for such bloat.
An example: Eudora 3.1 on my Macintosh IIci (33 MHz 68040) was faster than Eudora 5.1 on my Mac G3/233. Eudora 5.1 offers some new features, but nothing to justify a >tenfold speed decrease.
In other words, go ahead and use recent computers to build and compile on, but do keep some four year-old heaps around to test your product's performance.
From the article: Pompei imagined that instead of loudspeakers blaring the same cacophony of instruments to all parts of the room, it would be more interesting to selectively spotlight the soloist to the left side of the audience, while featuring the percussion up front, and then switching them around.
But when I go to a concert, I want to hear all the instruments - without having to move around the room.
Also, I get the impression that current tests are being carried out in silent environments with few obstacles. In a concert, you'd have to crank up the volume of such a 'sound spotlight' in order to hear it over the 'general' sound system. And in a crowded hall, the sound from the beam would be reflected more. This would cause the sound generated by the spotlight to 'leak' out of the beam area, making it less effective.
And (also important in a concert) the audio engineer can't hear what he's doing with the spotlights, making it very hard to get right.
This gist of my comments were that cases such as Falung Gong, Lu Xinhua or Tiananmen -- real and deplorable as they are -- are exceptional in the experience of the average Chinese.
I'm not so sure about 'exceptional'. Things may be improving, but the Chinese govt has a long way to go before it can claim a similar respect for human rights to US and European governments have. Taking a look at a recent report by Open Doors on the situation for Christians in China, I'd say persecution is not that exceptional, and with 80 million people in jeopardy, certainly can't be called 'incidents'.