Amen, brother. I've never owned a laptop with a fan, nor do I intend to. The magnesium-alloy case on my Toughbook isn't thermally ideal, but with the little heatpipe spreading things out, it works great as a heatsink.
I've seen models, I think from Itronix, that actually include a heat exchanger. The air inside the laptop is circulated by one fan, and outside air is blown across the exchanger by another fan. They achieve desktop-like CPU clocks, with no dust intrusion. When it gets clogged with dust, just hose it off.:)
The magazine Pen Computing has a nice lean towards ruggedized machines. You can always count on them for brutally honest, brutally violent reviews of the latest from Panasonic, Melard, Itronix, and whoever the latest challenger seems to be.
The issue currently on the stands is the 2005 Buyers' Guide, which deserves a read. A few issues ago, they paid a visit to a durability testing lab. The photos of the shower stall, drop test, hinge exerciser, button pusher, and screen scratcher were hilarious.
My personal go-everywhere machine is a Toughbook CF-M34. It's tiny, doesn't weigh much, and takes whatever I dish out. The other day I had it standing on top of my car when a gust of wind shoved it over the edge. A little chunk of metal was liberated from the hind corner when it hit the concrete, but the running apps didn't crash, and there was no cracking of the case beyond the ding. Thank goodness for padded hard drive mountings!
The main concern you have with desert operation is dust. A washable keyboard will let you simply rinse the grit out from under the keys. Rubber port covers will keep gunk out of the PCMCIA slot, for instance, when it's not in use.
There's an option in the BIOS of my '34 for "high-temperature operation". What it does is stop charging the battery when it reaches 80%, since operating a lithium-ion battery above its rated temperature is as simple as derating its maximum charge. Going to 100% at high temperature would significantly shorten the cycle life of the battery.
If the Soekris looks attractive, also check out the Mikrotik routerboard series. They're equally cute and have some really slick power options.
EmbeddedX86, from Technologic Systems, is also in the same niche. I don't know if I'd recommend ANY of these machines for development like the original poster wanted, but if parent's embedded board sounds cool for your particular application, you owe it to yourself to check out all the options. Soekris boards are very cool.
And there's every chance that the motor-generators did more than provide intertia. A lot of mainframes use 400Hz AC power. The higher frequency means transformer cores can be smaller, and there's less ripple after rectification so filter capacitors don't have to be huge. "Rotary converters", as they're called, are a good way to convert betwixt DC of various ground references and AC of various frequencies and phases.
You'll find 400Hz-tolerant power supplies in a lot of millitary hardware too, as shipboard power is also 400Hz. I have some gear that'll take anything from 100-250 volts, 47-450Hz.
Of course, the other power philosophy says AC is silly, just use batteries and make all your equipment run natively from the DC power plant. If you're always on DC, there's no hiccup when the rectifiers lose their input.
Since the dawn of LCD technology, viewing angle has been intimately tied to contrast. I've always been surprised that people still sell "privacy filters" for laptop screens when all that's needed is a settings tweak to make the viewing angle very narrow.
This promises to go one better... feed a "Nice try, asshole" message to potential shoulder surfers!
I'd wager that you interact on a regular basis with plenty of people who were home-schooled, you just don't know it. A lot of us learn to dodge the question after we get sick of the stereotypes that you and your ilk perpetrate.
We used to have a system where, in high school somewhere, you either settled into a "vocational" training program that would prepare you for a basic job, or you got into the "college prep" courses if that's where you were headed. The mechanics of how that decision got made were far from perfect, but let's set that aside for now.
We're at a point now where politicians, employers, and students all want everyone to have a 2-year degree in something, anything, just something. If everyone has it, doesn't it become the new baseline, just like a high school diploma? That, in turn, further dillutes the subject matter taught in high school, because whatever we miss, they'll just catch up in remedial "101" classes, right?
What all this accomplishes is that it stretches out the schooling timeline, from 13 years to 15, delaying the point at which the workforce gains a productive worker. The education itself is no more complete or useful. It's just more costly.
What drives me up a wall is when you say "home schooling" and people automatically assume it means "religious nutcase indoctriniation".
It took me a while to understand why people never understood what I meant when I talked about home schooling. I guess the popular perception doesn't include the kids who public school shits on, or the parents who want better?
Agreed. I've long advocated a system of shorter "grades", on the order of a few weeks, so each subject could be taught in "units" or something. It would be normal to repeat a few here and there, and it would be normal to skip a few here and there.
Do this per-subject, so kids could still see "their friends" at a certain level even after repeating a unit in a subject they're not good in. Besides, there's every chance they'd catch back up after getting back on track.
There should also be more opportunity for older kids to teach younger kids. It actually benefits both groups (ever want to find the gaps in your knowledge? explain it to someone else!), and with the right supervision, it would foster a sense of responsibility rather than captivity.
I don't know about you, but I think if there's going to be an explosion and falling debris, I might as well be in good and close. Because a country with no space program (which is what we'd be left with) is no place I'd want to live.
These scientists put it all on the line to advance our understanding of the universe, and you're not begging for a chance to be as close as possible, wishing them well? I'm saddened.
PV is great for off-grid systems, it doesn't disrupt the local hydrology like a hydroelectric system, and it doesn't make any noise like a wind turbine. The energy per dollar is pretty poor, however.
You'd make a bigger dent in energy usage by putting solar water heaters on your own home and the homes of several friends. They have a much more direct energy cycle and a much shorter payback period, and they're just as silent and unobtrusive as photovoltaic.
Personally I hate fluorescent lights; they give me eyestrain and headaches, so I won't put them in all the fixtures in a room. If there's already daylight or incandescent light in a room, a CFL fixture works well as "fill-in" lighting, but never as the only source. YMMV.
Other important steps would be to consolidate servers (VMware can help) and put as much as possible onto low-power PCs. I can't find a good CPU comparison table of FLOPs per watt, but such data should be easy to compile.
I wonder about the embodied energy in LCD monitors, are they as expensive to produce, energy-wise, as photovoltaics? Large semiconductor devices of any sort are pretty tricky to manufacture. If anyone has this data, please link it.
If we lowered the driving age to 12, the majority of idiot drivers would be 12-15. If we raised it to 50, the worst drivers would be 50-53. Why do people ignore experience when they blame age for accidents?
I'm terrified by the suggestion that school grades could have an impact on insurance rates. Credit scores are bad enough. What's your ability to turn in paperwork got to do with your ability to watch the road, keep your tire pressure right, or anything else that actually influences safety?
The big risk isn't running out of oil. It's running out of oil suddenly. Or any other significant supply problem that moves faster than our ability to phase in replacements.
It's ironic that for decades, we've talked about how renewable energy will remain marginal until it gets cheaper than oil. Well, all it has to do right now is sit still, and oil will get more expensive in pretty short order.
Somehow I predict a lot of British drivers will have strange reception problems soon. Funny how "satellites in view" stays at 9 but "satellites locked" drops to 0, isn't it?
Driver's training in general should be a lot more rigorous. I understand that it's helpful to get kids behind the wheel for some real experience, but let's bring 'em back after a year, for a second course and a much tougher test.
If SUVs are light trucks, why don't they have to obey the truck speed limit?
Personally I'd like to see anything over 4000lbs (or whatever the 75th percentile of passenger car curb weights is) require a special class of license, with mandatory classroom time and a bring-your-own-vehicle slalom course.
Actually, I think every driver should requalify every few years in an obstacle course, and each vehicle should have a "personalized speed limit" determined by its success in the course. Would you affix an RFID tag to your bumpers if it signaled to the radar gun "This vehicle approved for 20% over posted speeds"?
My local nature center has a very accurate environmental monitoring system. There's a rock outside a window, and a guide which reads:
This is the weather rock. If you can't see the rock, it's night. If the rock is wet, it's raining. If the rock is white, there's been snow. If the rock is moving, there's a tornado. If the rock is gone, there was a tornado.
Now, pair one of those babies with a nice Axis network camera....
Vacations are nice! Try to remove anything that prevent you from taking one.
That also removes anything preventing them from giving you a loooooong vacation too. Remember: If your job is so automated you can do it from the deli, your job is also so automated they can do it from Delhi.
And a note about contact lists: If you have more than two people getting the notifications, you should have a 'war room' voice bridge set up, so all the involved people can call in and figure out which one's going to get out of bed, etc.
If you're really slick, you'll give this number to the alarm company, so they can "remind" each groggy responder of the number, and so someone at the alarm company can join the bridge and provide updates while you're driving in to the office. (Ask your local Asterisk geek to set up such a thing, or try a service such as Mr. Conference.
You might find that connecting the cellphone to the bridge device contradicts some term in the contract. If they figure out that this is what you're doing, they might decide to hit you with $0.50/min for all the "breach of contract" minutes, or something similarly evil.
The mobile-to-mobile minutes are free for two reasons. First, they don't have to pay a termination fee for moving the call to someone else's network. Second, it's a sales tool to get your friends to sign up. By doing this, you sabotage the second goal, and they'll try everything possible to make your life miserable.
That's actually an extremely good point. If life is sacred, could one say $deity holds the copyright on our DNA? It's obviously on a pretty liberal license, but...
If so, wouldn't that sort of mandate that genetically modified organisms be released under the same license, forbidding DNA patents?
Yep, that just adds to the irony factor. All they're buying for the 10x price difference is the classification of the circuit as HiCap in case it goes down.
Now really, since cells overlap a little, one site can go down without that much impact. I understand ordering T1s for the important sites, the ones near high-profile customers and stuff, but the average suburban site would do just fine on a cheaper circuit. I don't know how much of their operating costs go to paying for circuits, but I bet it's a significant chunk.
(Yet another reason TFA was redundant... slashdot's not only covered VZW's EVDO rollout before, but the previous mention included something USEFUL to do with it.)
There isn't already, and I'm not sure there's a market force to create such a thing, but you could do it easily enough in software if your machine can run both interfaces at once.
What I'm really waiting for is a phone that can switch between cellular networks and voip over wifi, along with some sort of back-end to enable those handoffs. It would solve the coverage problem in dense urban environments, and in upscale NIMBY neighborhoods where tower placement is a problem.
$80/mo was plenty for Ricochet to turn a profit, if they'd had users. Unfortunately, the service was barely advertised, and never to the right market. In many of their covered areas, they had under 1000 customers when the service shut down.
Operating costs for a cellular network are absurdly high compared to Ricochet. First, they only needed one site every 10 square miles or so, compared to every 2-3 for most cell networks, and denser in the city. Second, the equipment at the site used a lot less power, took up less space, and wasn't picky about how high it was mounted on the tower. That made the rent very cheap compared to what a cellco pays. Third, Ricochet operated in the 900MHz and 2.4GHz ISM bands, so there were no spectrum licenses to buy. That's a chunk of change right there. (*note)
The fourth big difference is one that Metricom missed out on: The initial network deployment didn't need to be nearly as dense as they did it. Ricochet would've worked fine with 1/4th as many sites, while there weren't many customers on it. As usage increased, they could've filled in sites where the load was heavy, to cut the hopcount and reduce saturation. Metricom's starry-eyed vision included throngs of customers pounding the service with data, so they never planned for a light rollout.
*note: In some extremely dense areas (NYC, SF, DC), Ricochet had the option of using 2.3GHz WCS spectrum, for which they bought licenses in those areas. The WCS was used as downlink-only, from the WAP site to the poletops. Uplink, which carried less traffic due to usage patterns, still rode the ISM bands.
Parent poster, I'd really like you to explain the "essentially no additional operating costs" comment regarding cellular networks. Costs scale with user numbers? That's just the opposite of my understanding, that the site and the rent and the circuits are a fixed cost, no matter how many users are on the site. At some point a busy site will outgrow a single T1 and need more, but that's comparatively rare. The cost for one user per tower, or a dozen users per tower, is exactly the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brother. I've never owned a laptop with a fan, nor do I intend to. The magnesium-alloy case on my Toughbook isn't thermally ideal, but with the little heatpipe spreading things out, it works great as a heatsink.
:)
I've seen models, I think from Itronix, that actually include a heat exchanger. The air inside the laptop is circulated by one fan, and outside air is blown across the exchanger by another fan. They achieve desktop-like CPU clocks, with no dust intrusion. When it gets clogged with dust, just hose it off.
The magazine Pen Computing has a nice lean towards ruggedized machines. You can always count on them for brutally honest, brutally violent reviews of the latest from Panasonic, Melard, Itronix, and whoever the latest challenger seems to be.
The issue currently on the stands is the 2005 Buyers' Guide, which deserves a read. A few issues ago, they paid a visit to a durability testing lab. The photos of the shower stall, drop test, hinge exerciser, button pusher, and screen scratcher were hilarious.
My personal go-everywhere machine is a Toughbook CF-M34. It's tiny, doesn't weigh much, and takes whatever I dish out. The other day I had it standing on top of my car when a gust of wind shoved it over the edge. A little chunk of metal was liberated from the hind corner when it hit the concrete, but the running apps didn't crash, and there was no cracking of the case beyond the ding. Thank goodness for padded hard drive mountings!
The main concern you have with desert operation is dust. A washable keyboard will let you simply rinse the grit out from under the keys. Rubber port covers will keep gunk out of the PCMCIA slot, for instance, when it's not in use.
There's an option in the BIOS of my '34 for "high-temperature operation". What it does is stop charging the battery when it reaches 80%, since operating a lithium-ion battery above its rated temperature is as simple as derating its maximum charge. Going to 100% at high temperature would significantly shorten the cycle life of the battery.
If the Soekris looks attractive, also check out the Mikrotik routerboard series. They're equally cute and have some really slick power options.
EmbeddedX86, from Technologic Systems, is also in the same niche. I don't know if I'd recommend ANY of these machines for development like the original poster wanted, but if parent's embedded board sounds cool for your particular application, you owe it to yourself to check out all the options. Soekris boards are very cool.
And there's every chance that the motor-generators did more than provide intertia. A lot of mainframes use 400Hz AC power. The higher frequency means transformer cores can be smaller, and there's less ripple after rectification so filter capacitors don't have to be huge. "Rotary converters", as they're called, are a good way to convert betwixt DC of various ground references and AC of various frequencies and phases.
You'll find 400Hz-tolerant power supplies in a lot of millitary hardware too, as shipboard power is also 400Hz. I have some gear that'll take anything from 100-250 volts, 47-450Hz.
Of course, the other power philosophy says AC is silly, just use batteries and make all your equipment run natively from the DC power plant. If you're always on DC, there's no hiccup when the rectifiers lose their input.
Since the dawn of LCD technology, viewing angle has been intimately tied to contrast. I've always been surprised that people still sell "privacy filters" for laptop screens when all that's needed is a settings tweak to make the viewing angle very narrow.
This promises to go one better... feed a "Nice try, asshole" message to potential shoulder surfers!
I'd wager that you interact on a regular basis with plenty of people who were home-schooled, you just don't know it. A lot of us learn to dodge the question after we get sick of the stereotypes that you and your ilk perpetrate.
We used to have a system where, in high school somewhere, you either settled into a "vocational" training program that would prepare you for a basic job, or you got into the "college prep" courses if that's where you were headed. The mechanics of how that decision got made were far from perfect, but let's set that aside for now.
We're at a point now where politicians, employers, and students all want everyone to have a 2-year degree in something, anything, just something. If everyone has it, doesn't it become the new baseline, just like a high school diploma? That, in turn, further dillutes the subject matter taught in high school, because whatever we miss, they'll just catch up in remedial "101" classes, right?
What all this accomplishes is that it stretches out the schooling timeline, from 13 years to 15, delaying the point at which the workforce gains a productive worker. The education itself is no more complete or useful. It's just more costly.
What drives me up a wall is when you say "home schooling" and people automatically assume it means "religious nutcase indoctriniation".
It took me a while to understand why people never understood what I meant when I talked about home schooling. I guess the popular perception doesn't include the kids who public school shits on, or the parents who want better?
Agreed. I've long advocated a system of shorter "grades", on the order of a few weeks, so each subject could be taught in "units" or something. It would be normal to repeat a few here and there, and it would be normal to skip a few here and there.
Do this per-subject, so kids could still see "their friends" at a certain level even after repeating a unit in a subject they're not good in. Besides, there's every chance they'd catch back up after getting back on track.
There should also be more opportunity for older kids to teach younger kids. It actually benefits both groups (ever want to find the gaps in your knowledge? explain it to someone else!), and with the right supervision, it would foster a sense of responsibility rather than captivity.
I don't know about you, but I think if there's going to be an explosion and falling debris, I might as well be in good and close. Because a country with no space program (which is what we'd be left with) is no place I'd want to live.
These scientists put it all on the line to advance our understanding of the universe, and you're not begging for a chance to be as close as possible, wishing them well? I'm saddened.
Busted! :) Thanks, parent... It always smelled funny to me but I'd never bothered to look it up.
I wonder who started that myth... hmm, starts with "big" ends with "oil"?
PV is great for off-grid systems, it doesn't disrupt the local hydrology like a hydroelectric system, and it doesn't make any noise like a wind turbine. The energy per dollar is pretty poor, however.
You'd make a bigger dent in energy usage by putting solar water heaters on your own home and the homes of several friends. They have a much more direct energy cycle and a much shorter payback period, and they're just as silent and unobtrusive as photovoltaic.
Personally I hate fluorescent lights; they give me eyestrain and headaches, so I won't put them in all the fixtures in a room. If there's already daylight or incandescent light in a room, a CFL fixture works well as "fill-in" lighting, but never as the only source. YMMV.
Other important steps would be to consolidate servers (VMware can help) and put as much as possible onto low-power PCs. I can't find a good CPU comparison table of FLOPs per watt, but such data should be easy to compile.
I wonder about the embodied energy in LCD monitors, are they as expensive to produce, energy-wise, as photovoltaics? Large semiconductor devices of any sort are pretty tricky to manufacture. If anyone has this data, please link it.
If we lowered the driving age to 12, the majority of idiot drivers would be 12-15. If we raised it to 50, the worst drivers would be 50-53. Why do people ignore experience when they blame age for accidents?
I'm terrified by the suggestion that school grades could have an impact on insurance rates. Credit scores are bad enough. What's your ability to turn in paperwork got to do with your ability to watch the road, keep your tire pressure right, or anything else that actually influences safety?
The big risk isn't running out of oil. It's running out of oil suddenly. Or any other significant supply problem that moves faster than our ability to phase in replacements.
It's ironic that for decades, we've talked about how renewable energy will remain marginal until it gets cheaper than oil. Well, all it has to do right now is sit still, and oil will get more expensive in pretty short order.
Somehow I predict a lot of British drivers will have strange reception problems soon. Funny how "satellites in view" stays at 9 but "satellites locked" drops to 0, isn't it?
Driver's training in general should be a lot more rigorous. I understand that it's helpful to get kids behind the wheel for some real experience, but let's bring 'em back after a year, for a second course and a much tougher test.
If SUVs are light trucks, why don't they have to obey the truck speed limit?
Personally I'd like to see anything over 4000lbs (or whatever the 75th percentile of passenger car curb weights is) require a special class of license, with mandatory classroom time and a bring-your-own-vehicle slalom course.
Actually, I think every driver should requalify every few years in an obstacle course, and each vehicle should have a "personalized speed limit" determined by its success in the course. Would you affix an RFID tag to your bumpers if it signaled to the radar gun "This vehicle approved for 20% over posted speeds"?
My local nature center has a very accurate environmental monitoring system. There's a rock outside a window, and a guide which reads:
This is the weather rock.
If you can't see the rock, it's night.
If the rock is wet, it's raining.
If the rock is white, there's been snow.
If the rock is moving, there's a tornado.
If the rock is gone, there was a tornado.
Now, pair one of those babies with a nice Axis network camera....
And a note about contact lists: If you have more than two people getting the notifications, you should have a 'war room' voice bridge set up, so all the involved people can call in and figure out which one's going to get out of bed, etc.
If you're really slick, you'll give this number to the alarm company, so they can "remind" each groggy responder of the number, and so someone at the alarm company can join the bridge and provide updates while you're driving in to the office. (Ask your local Asterisk geek to set up such a thing, or try a service such as Mr. Conference.
You might find that connecting the cellphone to the bridge device contradicts some term in the contract. If they figure out that this is what you're doing, they might decide to hit you with $0.50/min for all the "breach of contract" minutes, or something similarly evil.
The mobile-to-mobile minutes are free for two reasons. First, they don't have to pay a termination fee for moving the call to someone else's network. Second, it's a sales tool to get your friends to sign up. By doing this, you sabotage the second goal, and they'll try everything possible to make your life miserable.
That's actually an extremely good point. If life is sacred, could one say $deity holds the copyright on our DNA? It's obviously on a pretty liberal license, but...
If so, wouldn't that sort of mandate that genetically modified organisms be released under the same license, forbidding DNA patents?
Yep, that just adds to the irony factor. All they're buying for the 10x price difference is the classification of the circuit as HiCap in case it goes down.
Now really, since cells overlap a little, one site can go down without that much impact. I understand ordering T1s for the important sites, the ones near high-profile customers and stuff, but the average suburban site would do just fine on a cheaper circuit. I don't know how much of their operating costs go to paying for circuits, but I bet it's a significant chunk.
You mean like this?
(Yet another reason TFA was redundant... slashdot's not only covered VZW's EVDO rollout before, but the previous mention included something USEFUL to do with it.)
There isn't already, and I'm not sure there's a market force to create such a thing, but you could do it easily enough in software if your machine can run both interfaces at once.
What I'm really waiting for is a phone that can switch between cellular networks and voip over wifi, along with some sort of back-end to enable those handoffs. It would solve the coverage problem in dense urban environments, and in upscale NIMBY neighborhoods where tower placement is a problem.
$80/mo was plenty for Ricochet to turn a profit, if they'd had users. Unfortunately, the service was barely advertised, and never to the right market. In many of their covered areas, they had under 1000 customers when the service shut down.
Operating costs for a cellular network are absurdly high compared to Ricochet. First, they only needed one site every 10 square miles or so, compared to every 2-3 for most cell networks, and denser in the city. Second, the equipment at the site used a lot less power, took up less space, and wasn't picky about how high it was mounted on the tower. That made the rent very cheap compared to what a cellco pays. Third, Ricochet operated in the 900MHz and 2.4GHz ISM bands, so there were no spectrum licenses to buy. That's a chunk of change right there. (*note)
The fourth big difference is one that Metricom missed out on: The initial network deployment didn't need to be nearly as dense as they did it. Ricochet would've worked fine with 1/4th as many sites, while there weren't many customers on it. As usage increased, they could've filled in sites where the load was heavy, to cut the hopcount and reduce saturation. Metricom's starry-eyed vision included throngs of customers pounding the service with data, so they never planned for a light rollout.
*note: In some extremely dense areas (NYC, SF, DC), Ricochet had the option of using 2.3GHz WCS spectrum, for which they bought licenses in those areas. The WCS was used as downlink-only, from the WAP site to the poletops. Uplink, which carried less traffic due to usage patterns, still rode the ISM bands.
Parent poster, I'd really like you to explain the "essentially no additional operating costs" comment regarding cellular networks. Costs scale with user numbers? That's just the opposite of my understanding, that the site and the rent and the circuits are a fixed cost, no matter how many users are on the site. At some point a busy site will outgrow a single T1 and need more, but that's comparatively rare. The cost for one user per tower, or a dozen users per tower, is exactly the same.