So it streams video over WiFi and is controlled via the cloud. Do we want to start a betting pool on how long till the first hack to override the device and display Goatse.cx on everyone's TVs?
Okay, judging from earlier comments you clearly have a hate-on for Stardock. I happen to disagree, since obviously i like both StarCon 2 and (most of) Stardock's games.
However i'm not sure how you can say they don't publish games any more. How do you think games get on Steam? Believe it or not Valve is not the publisher of every game for sale on Steam.
So Stardock got the rights for Star Control but _not_ Master of Orion? I wonder if they were outbid, or decided to pass on it since they have Galactic Civilizations, their own decently reviewed and decently selling turn based 4x space game. They can always make GalCiv 3 not that they've passed on the opportunity to make MoO 3 (it's too bad no one ever made a third MoO game before) but even after all this time i think perhaps the MoO name might have given them some cachet (and thus sales) that GalCiv wouldn't get.
As for Star Control, despite the issues with the original release of Elemental i have a moderate amount of faith in Stardock's ability to handle the game well, but they've demonstrated themselves to be both credible as a developer (Galactic Civilizations, Political/Corporate Machine) and as a publisher (Sins of a Solar Empire with Ironcald Games.) So i wonder if they're going to develop this game themselves, or farm it out to someone else. Someone like, i dunno, Toys for Bob?:)
That's a bit disingenuous. You can't pick out a single stage of the process and compare that while ignoring everything else if you want an honest assessment of the efficiency.
Let's make up an example. Let's say you have a source of fuel, a power plant that can burn that fuel, a testing ground that's 100 miles further away from the fuel source than the power plant, and two vehicles that can utilize the fuel. Internal combustion cars are generally about 15% efficient. Electric engine cars are 85-90% efficient. Fossil fuel power plants are about 33% efficient. Your transmission numbers are 99.86% for gasoline and 99.25% for electricity over 100 miles.
So over a distance of 100 miles Electric cars are still almost twice as efficient, even with the extra losses in transmission. (Admittedly this is for "normal" internal combustion cars, i don't have the figures to hand for the average efficiency of hybrid cars.)
Doing a little quick math (it's been forever since i've had to solve for a variable, so i'm just plugging it into a spreadsheet) it looks like the break-even point is about 10,700 miles. So if the distance from the fuel source was over 10,700 miles, you'd be better shipping the fuel to the car rather than converting it to electricity on-site and transmitting it to the destination. Though obviously over such an extreme distance a lot of other factors would come into play and overwhelm the simple equation.
There may be more accurate numbers out there, so the exact outcome might differ, it's clear that better efficiency in just a single stage of the operation does not dictate an overall higher efficiency.
"I know that for a while people thought 4" screens were overkill, too big for people's hands, etc. I'm using a 5" Galaxy now and, while it took some getting used to, it's manageable with one hand (and I don't have large hands)."
Is it comfortable, or just manageable? I've tried the Galaxy S4, and i certainly _could_ use it with one hand, but it doesn't seem like it would be comfortable. There's no way i can wrap my fingers all the way around the back and simultaneously reach the entire screen with my thumb. I can reach _most_ of the screen if balance the phone on my hand rather than wrapping my fingers around it, but if i'm going to be comfortable with a $600 device i need to feel like i've got a decent grip on it when i use it. (This is aside from the fact that it doesn't seem to fit comfortably in my pocket.)
You said it wasn't a superphone. You listed a number of reasons why you believe it isn't a superphone. One of those reasons was a small display size. Therefore you are conflating a large display size with superphone status, regardless of what other qualities you also require.
Part of the reason large screens are a hallmark of the current set of superphones is because so many people view it as a requirement when it's really not. "It's not a superphone because a it doesn't have a large screen." and "It needs to have a large screen because the current set of superphones have large screens." Is just circular logic.
Please do not conflate screen size with "superphone" status.
If you want to count screen resolution, fine, though DPI would be an even better measurement. But not size.
I've tried the Galaxy S4. It's too big for my hands. It's too big for my pocket. It was too big even to fit in the cup-holder in my car where i currently put my Nexus One.
I was excited about the rumors i heard a few days ago that the Moto X was going to be a superphone in a smaller package. But now i am not only disappointed by the less powerful processor and the smaller storage space (presuming there is no microSD slot) but also by the screen size, because it's so large! 4.4" may be smaller than the Galaxy S4 and HTC One, but i was really hoping for something around 4".
For every other spec bigger is undoubtedly better, as long as you're willing to pay the price for it, both in terms of cash and (possibly, depending on the feature) battery life. However screen size, and thus the size of the entire phone, is very much a matter of preference, depending on both the size of the hands of the consumer and how they like to use it. A person with tiny hands who's okay with using their phone two handed and carrying it in a purse, bag, or holster might be fine with a 5" or larger "phablet," while an average person who wants to use their phone mostly one-handed and stick it in their pocket along with some other junk might want a much smaller phone.
If there was a Galaxy S4 Mini or an HTC One Mini that reduced the display size (and possibly the resolution, as long as they kept the DPI) but kept all the other specs the same (same battery life, not necessarily the same mAh) then i would be all over that. But since there's not i was hoping the Moto X would demonstrate that a superphone in a small package could sell well. But instead it's (what has become) a mid-size phone with good but not outstanding specs.
You are correct. I didn't actually mean literal losses of energy, just that each step there would be an increase in entropy, mostly due to the production of waste heat, and thus a loss in overall efficiency and a loss of energy available in the final step to perform the "useful" work that we humans designed the system to carry out.
Thank you! I'm glad that _someone_ else in this thread understands thermodynamics!:)
And yes, there are certainly other factors to consider besides pure energy efficiency issues, but the original claim that power plants are much more inefficient than the internal combustion engines in cars seems ludicrous, though admittedly i do not have the numbers handy to prove that viewpoint.
*sigh* Look, i don't pretend to be an expert on thermodynamics, but i've at least taken some courses that involved it in college, if you've done the same i'd really like to hear about who is teaching the course in such a way as to give you the ideas you currently seem to hold.
Declaring "I don't believe you know what you're talking about, so i'm not going to examine the evidence you claim shows you know what you're talking about" is the epitome of bad logic and bad science. If you have information to show that your view is correct then please present it. However everything i learned in college and all the information i'm able to gather now seems to support my view, while all you've presented so far is an argument based on the greek etymology of the word "thermodynamics". Yes, the origin of the field was a study of heat, but that's not _all_ that it was about. You can't go around simplifying entire areas of science just based on the name. If that were a valid approach then Astrology would be a real science.
You sand:
Look at what you copy / pasted about thermodynamics. Then explain to me how that affects transmission over an electric wire: it does not. Then eaxplain to me how it affects loading a battery: again, it does not. Then explain to me how it affects discharging a battery: still, it does not. Then explain to me how it affects the electric engine: again again, it does not... should I continue?
Thermodynamics isn't the _cause_ of anything. Thermodynamics is the study of energy in systems. It's a way of measuring things, its laws are not specific laws about any individual process but general laws about _all_ processes. Look at the article for Thermodynamic systems. You have to define the area you're talking about and account for what's within that area, and what might cross over the boundary form the outside.
Let's look at a very simple example. Some air in a piston. If the piston is compressed, the air in the chamber is compressed. In order to satisfy PV=nRT (the equation for the Ideal gas law) then as the volume of the air is reduced, either the pressure has to go up, or the temperature has to go down. Since the heat energy in the gas can't just disappear (first law of thermodynamics) the pressure goes up. The Laws of Thermodynamics do not tell you how much the pressure will go up, the Ideal gas law tells you how much the pressure goes.
What the Laws of Thermodynamics tell you is that the piston isn't going to magically move on its own, something has to supply the energy to do that work, and in order for the model of your thermodynamic system to be complete you need to account for that source of energy. Either there's some store of power inside the system (springs or a battery or such) or some source of power crossing the the boundary (electrical wires supplying electrical power or physical rods supplying kinetic power.) And now that the work has been done the compressed air now has potential energy "pushing back" against the piston that also needs to be accounted for. Potential mechanical energy is most definitely within the realm of thermodynamics, and if we originally moved the piston with an electric motor using electric current, and as you claim electric current isn't covered by thermodynamics, then we've just created potential energy out of "nothing" and broken the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.
The origin of thermodynamics as a real science was centered around engines, "what happens if we put work into this system" and "how do we get work out of this system". Work, and thus energy, is a fundamental part of thermodynamics. Every article i've linked to and the dictionary definition itself all include "work" as part of thermodynamics. What is so hard about this to get? Look at the
Okay, either A: you are so convinced of your viewpoint that you did not look at the links and try to learn a little more, B: you think wikipedia is a massive conspiracy out to deceive you, or C: you're a troll who is just pretending that either A or B are true. I'm really hoping it's A, because otherwise we seem to agree, and it would be relatively simple for you to just learn a little more about the subject.
In "real live" we do _not_ have superconductors, not that we can use in day to day applications at any rate. "High temperature" superconductors currently top out at about -140 C, or about -220 F. I assure you, the wires transmitting electricity from power plants to where it is used are not being cooled by liquid nitrogen (the birds that perch on the power lines are certainly not freezing their feet off) thus they are not superconductors, thus they are losing energy to heat, thus they are following the laws of thermodynamics. (Actually, superconductors follow the laws of thermodynamics too, since they aren't doing any work.)
Thermodynamics is not just volume/pressure/temperature. It sounds like you're thinking of the Ideal gas law, which is an important thermodynamic concept but not the whole of thermodynamics. Look, if you don't want to trust wikipedia, here's a dictionary definition: "the science concerned with the relations between heat and mechanical energy or work, and the conversion of one into the other: modern thermodynamics deals with the properties of systems for the description of which temperature is a necessary coordinate." It's not just PV=nRT, work and energy are involved too.
Or maybe you trust MIT? Here's a webpage from one of their courses. The bottom part has a lot of the PV=nRT stuff you think is what thermodynamics is all about, but the top part is about how work and electricity are involved.
If we _did_ have superconductors we could use to transmit all our electricity _and_ we never did anything useful with that electricity but just let it go around and around in circles, _then_ it wouldn't by a thermodynamic system, but why would we do that? Except for storing it for short periods like a battery there's no reason to produce tons of electricity but never use it to do anything. The whole purpose of generating power is to do work, and thus create/influence thermodynamic systems.
In real life, there is thermodynamics in the generation of the electricity, there is thermodynamics in the transmission of the power to the destination because of losses due to resistance, there is thermodynamics in the battery of the car (batteries do not hold charge indefinitely, they lose charge over time, even if very slowly, and those losses result in either the generation of heat or the generation of work by rearranging chemicals in the battery, thus thermodynamics) there is thermodynamics in the transmission from the battery to the engine (though admittedly the loss over such a short distance is very small) and there is most definitely thermodynamics involved in converting that electricity into mechanical force to rotate the wheels and make the car go.
If heat is generated or work is done thermodynamics is involved. Saying something has "absolutely nothing to do with thermodynamics, even if heat is produced as side product" is ignoring the very fundamentals of thermodynamics.
Yes I'm anal about it. Because someone again abused the term: Thermodynamics.
Electric power has nothing to do with thermodynamics.
If you think electric power has nothing to do with thermodynamics, then you haven't studied enough about electric power and thermodynamics. "Thermodynamics is a branch of natural science concerned with heat and its relation to energy and work." They may not have been clear on the notion when the laws of thermodynamics were first being formulated, but we now know that fundamentally all energy is the same thing regardless what form it takes. "Heat" is just the simplest form of energy (to generalize a bit,) and what all energy tends to end up as in the end as it maximizes its entropy.
The reason electrical systems aren't 100% efficient is become some of the energy is lost, and that lost energy ends up as heat. The laws of thermodynamics are not stingy, (well, not in this sense,) they concern themselves with energy/work as well as just mass and "normal" heat.
It is the laws of thermodynamics that guarantee that some amount of useful energy is lost due to an increase in entropy at every stage of every process, including both generating and transmitting power to electric cars and refining and delivering gasoline to combustion engines.
You seem to have a perfectly good grasp of the basics, you're just complaining about people using a term that is entirely accurate and appropriate.
The numbers in the two articles are wrong anyway... (claiming only 36% of the energy produced in a plant is converted by the car into movement is just nonsense)
I could easily believe that. Thermodynamics is a lossy game, and if you wanted to get really anal about it there are a lot of steps in the process where you could compound that loss. What i _don't_ believe is that doing the same math in the same detail on the entire chain for combustion engines, from when the oil comes out of the ground to when you put the pedal to the metal, would come out anywhere near as good as 36%.
It should be noted that A: the memory of witnesses for specific events is notoriously unreliable and B: even very small cuts on the face can bleed profusely.
It certainly doesn't look like he was severely injured, but i for one can't tell well enough to say there are no cuts in there. There may have been a small cut that bled a lot. There may have been a very tiny cut that still bled a moderate amount and in her stressed out state her brain exaggerated it. Or some trick of the lighting combined with wishful thinking might have fooled her into believing she'd hurt him more than she actually had.
A lot of the other details seem to have been corroborated, so you probably shouldn't obsess over that one split second impression.
That's a fair argument (though as tbannist pointed out if it's only a 20% difference that still might not swing the balance) but it's a different argument than the original one about fragmentation which i felt was inaccurate.
"some 33 percent of Android devices run some variant (either 4.1.x or 4.2.x) of the 'Jelly Bean' build,"
"According to recent data from research firm IDC, Android's market-share stood at 75 percent in the first quarter of 2013 â" up from 59.1 percent in the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS owned 17.3 percent of the market"
Targeting just 4.2 is perhaps rather overly specific, unless there are major differences in programming for 4.2 vs 4.1 that i'm not aware of? Given the above numbers if a developer were to target just Jelly Bean they would hit 0.75 * 0.33, or 25% of the total market, compared to the 0.173 * 0.93, or 16% of the total market. That seems like a pretty reasonable choice to me.
You are again (all ACs are the same, right?) arguing a false dichotomy and pairing it with just plain wrongness. Let's take this a step at a time.
- "Asserting that Google has "many products that are close to breaking even or even make a profit" would suggest that they have at least a couple other significant contributors to their bottom line."
If by "significant" you mean "significant compared to their advertising revenue" then i didn't say that, and the one does not imply the other. If by "significant" you just mean "a lot of money by most people's standards" then yes, i stand behind that and will show why below.
- "When 95% of your revenues (not PROFITS) are from advertising, that leaves a pretty small slice of the pie for those "many" other profitable (or near-profitable) products and services."
That's true, but a pretty small slice of the pie is still a slice of the pie. And if the original pie is HUGE then even a very small slice of it could be significant.
Also, why do you stress that it's revenues rather than profits? That actually hurts your case. I know it isn't so, but imagine if 95% of their revenue was from advertising, but the costs of that advertising actually exceeded the revenue, and thus 100% of their profits were from non-advertising? If they couldn't see any way to improve those margins then it would make absolute sense to shut down all their advertising even though it meant losing 95% of their revenue. In a less extreme case, if 95% of their revenue is from ads but only 90% of their profit was from ads, expanding into other areas would make a lot of sense. In reality i suspect that their profits are at _least_ 95% from ads, but if you don't happen to know the exact numbers it only makes your position weaker to stress the revenue part.
- "Perhaps you'd like to name just 3 major sources of revenue - of the MANY you claim exist - for Google that aren't some form of selling ads?"
I don't have Google's financials memorized, and i'm not sure why i have to prove it, especially since i didn't make the original claim. Someone said they had a lot of products/areas that were close to or even slightly over breaking even. You tried to disprove that by saying "They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising." A quick check shows Google earned about 14 billion last quarter. 5% of that is $700 million. For anyone not in Google's league that would be a very large chunk of change. Though i don't happen to know exactly which divisions that revenue is split between, it helps support (though does not prove) the original commenter's claim that there are other divisions making money.
- "I know this is a hard truth to swallow, but Google is an advertising company [...]"
Did i ever say otherwise? Just because their primary business is advertising doesn't mean they can't expand into other areas. And as long as those other areas are pulling in close to $3 billion a year there's no reason for them to shut down any of those areas that are currently making a profit or look like they will be soon.
Well, it's either the exact same consume outrage that caused them to recant in the first place, or the exact same nothing that's preventing Sony from doing the same thing with the PS4 a year from now.
So you weren't going to buy one before when they were doing stuff you didn't like, and now that they've agreed not to do that you're still not going to buy one and think everyone else should do the same?
Maybe you weren't going to buy one anyways, but let's imagine you actually did manage to convince everyone who cared about the issue to follow your lead.
So then, Microsoft capitulates on the DRM, but despite the change the only people who buy the new XBox were people who were actually okay with that DRM in the first place. That would mean that A: Microsoft would have no reason not to just unchange their mind and put the DRM back in, and B: they would have very little reason to listen to consumer complaints about such issues in the future.
they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.
No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.
I agree with most of the rest of the stuff you said, however there's absolutely no discrepancy between "they have many products that are close to breaking even or even make a profit" and "95% of their revenue is from a single product."
Given exactly how much they make from ads it's not surprising that their other areas may not seem competitive. However that does not mean a priori that there is no reason to continue those ventures. Sure, a profit of $100 million from [insert product here] might not seem like a lot compared to the dozens of billions they get from advertising, but $100 million of profit is $100 million of profit. And then of course there's things like Android, where they don't see a lot of direct profit but it is an important part of the ecosystem.
I first started seeing "XBone" references during the E3 conference, but it's quite possible it's been around since the rumors about the restrictions started making the rounds on the net. However my favorite "joke" name, given the randomness with which Microsoft seems to be choosing the number to follow "XBox", is the "XBox 1984."
This is kind of a silly thing to worry about. If the government wants to shut down your communication they can already do it. They just talk to your carrier and all of the sudden your calls and texts aren't going through. They could probably even disguise it as some kind of a temporary connectivity issue if they wanted, unlike bricking your phone with a kill-switch which would be really obvious.
Having a kill-switch offers no benefit to the government, nor to the carriers. It only benefits the users, aka the potential mugging victims.
People can believe in anything, whether it's true or not. I believe if i drop something it will fall. I believe if i go to the local store i will be able to trade money for goods. I believe that the scientific method when followed with rigor produces reasonably accurate and occasionally very useful results.
Some people may believe in science on more of a "faith" basis, not understanding the process but accepting it based on results. Some people believe in religion because of faith. Some people believe in religion because of things they perceive as being caused by supernatural powers (things which scientists would generally credit to selection bias and other fallacies.) Some people believe in superstitions, and sometimes those people are otherwise effectively non-religious.
And some people believe that the moon is larger than the sun or other entirely incorrect facts, not because of any issue of faith, but because they're just uninformed.
That's not true either. I could honestly believe there was an intelligent being who created our current universe and simultaneously believe in the process of science. Believing in one does not generally require disbelieving in the other. There are some specific religions that are antithetical to science in their details, but that is a different issue.
It's already been done! The new spam cloaker is 90% effective at removing spam from history! You're now receiving one tenth the spam you were before! Unfortunately since the rest was erased from history you just don't remember how much spam you were actually getting before the machine was turned on, but believe us there was quite a lot of it! You may _think_ you're getting a lot now, but that's really practically nothing!
Slashdot Mirror
So it streams video over WiFi and is controlled via the cloud. Do we want to start a betting pool on how long till the first hack to override the device and display Goatse.cx on everyone's TVs?
Okay, judging from earlier comments you clearly have a hate-on for Stardock. I happen to disagree, since obviously i like both StarCon 2 and (most of) Stardock's games.
However i'm not sure how you can say they don't publish games any more. How do you think games get on Steam? Believe it or not Valve is not the publisher of every game for sale on Steam.
So Stardock got the rights for Star Control but _not_ Master of Orion? I wonder if they were outbid, or decided to pass on it since they have Galactic Civilizations, their own decently reviewed and decently selling turn based 4x space game. They can always make GalCiv 3 not that they've passed on the opportunity to make MoO 3 (it's too bad no one ever made a third MoO game before) but even after all this time i think perhaps the MoO name might have given them some cachet (and thus sales) that GalCiv wouldn't get.
:)
As for Star Control, despite the issues with the original release of Elemental i have a moderate amount of faith in Stardock's ability to handle the game well, but they've demonstrated themselves to be both credible as a developer (Galactic Civilizations, Political/Corporate Machine) and as a publisher (Sins of a Solar Empire with Ironcald Games.) So i wonder if they're going to develop this game themselves, or farm it out to someone else. Someone like, i dunno, Toys for Bob?
That's a bit disingenuous. You can't pick out a single stage of the process and compare that while ignoring everything else if you want an honest assessment of the efficiency.
.28822
Let's make up an example. Let's say you have a source of fuel, a power plant that can burn that fuel, a testing ground that's 100 miles further away from the fuel source than the power plant, and two vehicles that can utilize the fuel. Internal combustion cars are generally about 15% efficient. Electric engine cars are 85-90% efficient. Fossil fuel power plants are about 33% efficient. Your transmission numbers are 99.86% for gasoline and 99.25% for electricity over 100 miles.
So overall efficiencies are:
Gas: 1 * 0.9986 * 0.15 = 0.14979
Electrical = 1 * 0.33 * 0.9925 * 0.88 =
So over a distance of 100 miles Electric cars are still almost twice as efficient, even with the extra losses in transmission. (Admittedly this is for "normal" internal combustion cars, i don't have the figures to hand for the average efficiency of hybrid cars.)
Doing a little quick math (it's been forever since i've had to solve for a variable, so i'm just plugging it into a spreadsheet) it looks like the break-even point is about 10,700 miles. So if the distance from the fuel source was over 10,700 miles, you'd be better shipping the fuel to the car rather than converting it to electricity on-site and transmitting it to the destination. Though obviously over such an extreme distance a lot of other factors would come into play and overwhelm the simple equation.
Sources:
http://consumerenergycenter.org/transportation/consumer_tips/vehicle_energy_losses.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1273932
There may be more accurate numbers out there, so the exact outcome might differ, it's clear that better efficiency in just a single stage of the operation does not dictate an overall higher efficiency.
"I know that for a while people thought 4" screens were overkill, too big for people's hands, etc. I'm using a 5" Galaxy now and, while it took some getting used to, it's manageable with one hand (and I don't have large hands)."
Is it comfortable, or just manageable? I've tried the Galaxy S4, and i certainly _could_ use it with one hand, but it doesn't seem like it would be comfortable. There's no way i can wrap my fingers all the way around the back and simultaneously reach the entire screen with my thumb. I can reach _most_ of the screen if balance the phone on my hand rather than wrapping my fingers around it, but if i'm going to be comfortable with a $600 device i need to feel like i've got a decent grip on it when i use it. (This is aside from the fact that it doesn't seem to fit comfortably in my pocket.)
You said it wasn't a superphone. You listed a number of reasons why you believe it isn't a superphone. One of those reasons was a small display size. Therefore you are conflating a large display size with superphone status, regardless of what other qualities you also require.
Part of the reason large screens are a hallmark of the current set of superphones is because so many people view it as a requirement when it's really not. "It's not a superphone because a it doesn't have a large screen." and "It needs to have a large screen because the current set of superphones have large screens." Is just circular logic.
Please do not conflate screen size with "superphone" status.
If you want to count screen resolution, fine, though DPI would be an even better measurement. But not size.
I've tried the Galaxy S4. It's too big for my hands. It's too big for my pocket. It was too big even to fit in the cup-holder in my car where i currently put my Nexus One.
I was excited about the rumors i heard a few days ago that the Moto X was going to be a superphone in a smaller package. But now i am not only disappointed by the less powerful processor and the smaller storage space (presuming there is no microSD slot) but also by the screen size, because it's so large! 4.4" may be smaller than the Galaxy S4 and HTC One, but i was really hoping for something around 4".
For every other spec bigger is undoubtedly better, as long as you're willing to pay the price for it, both in terms of cash and (possibly, depending on the feature) battery life. However screen size, and thus the size of the entire phone, is very much a matter of preference, depending on both the size of the hands of the consumer and how they like to use it. A person with tiny hands who's okay with using their phone two handed and carrying it in a purse, bag, or holster might be fine with a 5" or larger "phablet," while an average person who wants to use their phone mostly one-handed and stick it in their pocket along with some other junk might want a much smaller phone.
If there was a Galaxy S4 Mini or an HTC One Mini that reduced the display size (and possibly the resolution, as long as they kept the DPI) but kept all the other specs the same (same battery life, not necessarily the same mAh) then i would be all over that. But since there's not i was hoping the Moto X would demonstrate that a superphone in a small package could sell well. But instead it's (what has become) a mid-size phone with good but not outstanding specs.
You are correct. I didn't actually mean literal losses of energy, just that each step there would be an increase in entropy, mostly due to the production of waste heat, and thus a loss in overall efficiency and a loss of energy available in the final step to perform the "useful" work that we humans designed the system to carry out.
:)
Thank you! I'm glad that _someone_ else in this thread understands thermodynamics!
And yes, there are certainly other factors to consider besides pure energy efficiency issues, but the original claim that power plants are much more inefficient than the internal combustion engines in cars seems ludicrous, though admittedly i do not have the numbers handy to prove that viewpoint.
Declaring "I don't believe you know what you're talking about, so i'm not going to examine the evidence you claim shows you know what you're talking about" is the epitome of bad logic and bad science. If you have information to show that your view is correct then please present it. However everything i learned in college and all the information i'm able to gather now seems to support my view, while all you've presented so far is an argument based on the greek etymology of the word "thermodynamics". Yes, the origin of the field was a study of heat, but that's not _all_ that it was about. You can't go around simplifying entire areas of science just based on the name. If that were a valid approach then Astrology would be a real science.
You sand:
Look at what you copy / pasted about thermodynamics. Then explain to me how that affects transmission over an electric wire: it does not. Then eaxplain to me how it affects loading a battery: again, it does not. Then explain to me how it affects discharging a battery: still, it does not. Then explain to me how it affects the electric engine: again again, it does not ... should I continue?
Thermodynamics isn't the _cause_ of anything. Thermodynamics is the study of energy in systems. It's a way of measuring things, its laws are not specific laws about any individual process but general laws about _all_ processes. Look at the article for Thermodynamic systems. You have to define the area you're talking about and account for what's within that area, and what might cross over the boundary form the outside.
Let's look at a very simple example. Some air in a piston. If the piston is compressed, the air in the chamber is compressed. In order to satisfy PV=nRT (the equation for the Ideal gas law) then as the volume of the air is reduced, either the pressure has to go up, or the temperature has to go down. Since the heat energy in the gas can't just disappear (first law of thermodynamics) the pressure goes up. The Laws of Thermodynamics do not tell you how much the pressure will go up, the Ideal gas law tells you how much the pressure goes.
What the Laws of Thermodynamics tell you is that the piston isn't going to magically move on its own, something has to supply the energy to do that work, and in order for the model of your thermodynamic system to be complete you need to account for that source of energy. Either there's some store of power inside the system (springs or a battery or such) or some source of power crossing the the boundary (electrical wires supplying electrical power or physical rods supplying kinetic power.) And now that the work has been done the compressed air now has potential energy "pushing back" against the piston that also needs to be accounted for. Potential mechanical energy is most definitely within the realm of thermodynamics, and if we originally moved the piston with an electric motor using electric current, and as you claim electric current isn't covered by thermodynamics, then we've just created potential energy out of "nothing" and broken the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.
The origin of thermodynamics as a real science was centered around engines, "what happens if we put work into this system" and "how do we get work out of this system". Work, and thus energy, is a fundamental part of thermodynamics. Every article i've linked to and the dictionary definition itself all include "work" as part of thermodynamics. What is so hard about this to get? Look at the
Okay, either A: you are so convinced of your viewpoint that you did not look at the links and try to learn a little more, B: you think wikipedia is a massive conspiracy out to deceive you, or C: you're a troll who is just pretending that either A or B are true. I'm really hoping it's A, because otherwise we seem to agree, and it would be relatively simple for you to just learn a little more about the subject.
In "real live" we do _not_ have superconductors, not that we can use in day to day applications at any rate. "High temperature" superconductors currently top out at about -140 C, or about -220 F. I assure you, the wires transmitting electricity from power plants to where it is used are not being cooled by liquid nitrogen (the birds that perch on the power lines are certainly not freezing their feet off) thus they are not superconductors, thus they are losing energy to heat, thus they are following the laws of thermodynamics. (Actually, superconductors follow the laws of thermodynamics too, since they aren't doing any work.)
Electicity being transmitted over our current power lines experiences loss due to resistance. "Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 6.6% in 1997 and 6.5% in 2007." Those loses end up as heat, so it's a thermodynamic system. When the power arrives wherever it's going it is used to perform work, therefore it's a thermodynamic system.
Thermodynamics is not just volume/pressure/temperature. It sounds like you're thinking of the Ideal gas law, which is an important thermodynamic concept but not the whole of thermodynamics. Look, if you don't want to trust wikipedia, here's a dictionary definition: "the science concerned with the relations between heat and mechanical energy or work, and the conversion of one into the other: modern thermodynamics deals with the properties of systems for the description of which temperature is a necessary coordinate." It's not just PV=nRT, work and energy are involved too.
Or maybe you trust MIT? Here's a webpage from one of their courses. The bottom part has a lot of the PV=nRT stuff you think is what thermodynamics is all about, but the top part is about how work and electricity are involved.
If we _did_ have superconductors we could use to transmit all our electricity _and_ we never did anything useful with that electricity but just let it go around and around in circles, _then_ it wouldn't by a thermodynamic system, but why would we do that? Except for storing it for short periods like a battery there's no reason to produce tons of electricity but never use it to do anything. The whole purpose of generating power is to do work, and thus create/influence thermodynamic systems.
In real life, there is thermodynamics in the generation of the electricity, there is thermodynamics in the transmission of the power to the destination because of losses due to resistance, there is thermodynamics in the battery of the car (batteries do not hold charge indefinitely, they lose charge over time, even if very slowly, and those losses result in either the generation of heat or the generation of work by rearranging chemicals in the battery, thus thermodynamics) there is thermodynamics in the transmission from the battery to the engine (though admittedly the loss over such a short distance is very small) and there is most definitely thermodynamics involved in converting that electricity into mechanical force to rotate the wheels and make the car go.
If heat is generated or work is done thermodynamics is involved. Saying something has "absolutely nothing to do with thermodynamics, even if heat is produced as side product" is ignoring the very fundamentals of thermodynamics.
Yes I'm anal about it. Because someone again abused the term: Thermodynamics.
Electric power has nothing to do with thermodynamics.
If you think electric power has nothing to do with thermodynamics, then you haven't studied enough about electric power and thermodynamics. "Thermodynamics is a branch of natural science concerned with heat and its relation to energy and work." They may not have been clear on the notion when the laws of thermodynamics were first being formulated, but we now know that fundamentally all energy is the same thing regardless what form it takes. "Heat" is just the simplest form of energy (to generalize a bit,) and what all energy tends to end up as in the end as it maximizes its entropy.
The reason electrical systems aren't 100% efficient is become some of the energy is lost, and that lost energy ends up as heat. The laws of thermodynamics are not stingy, (well, not in this sense,) they concern themselves with energy/work as well as just mass and "normal" heat.
It is the laws of thermodynamics that guarantee that some amount of useful energy is lost due to an increase in entropy at every stage of every process, including both generating and transmitting power to electric cars and refining and delivering gasoline to combustion engines.
You seem to have a perfectly good grasp of the basics, you're just complaining about people using a term that is entirely accurate and appropriate.
The numbers in the two articles are wrong anyway ... (claiming only 36% of the energy produced in a plant is converted by the car into movement is just nonsense)
I could easily believe that. Thermodynamics is a lossy game, and if you wanted to get really anal about it there are a lot of steps in the process where you could compound that loss. What i _don't_ believe is that doing the same math in the same detail on the entire chain for combustion engines, from when the oil comes out of the ground to when you put the pedal to the metal, would come out anywhere near as good as 36%.
Now that the possibility has been suggested, this needs to be a thing.
It should be noted that A: the memory of witnesses for specific events is notoriously unreliable and B: even very small cuts on the face can bleed profusely.
It certainly doesn't look like he was severely injured, but i for one can't tell well enough to say there are no cuts in there. There may have been a small cut that bled a lot. There may have been a very tiny cut that still bled a moderate amount and in her stressed out state her brain exaggerated it. Or some trick of the lighting combined with wishful thinking might have fooled her into believing she'd hurt him more than she actually had.
A lot of the other details seem to have been corroborated, so you probably shouldn't obsess over that one split second impression.
That's a fair argument (though as tbannist pointed out if it's only a 20% difference that still might not swing the balance) but it's a different argument than the original one about fragmentation which i felt was inaccurate.
"some 33 percent of Android devices run some variant (either 4.1.x or 4.2.x) of the 'Jelly Bean' build,"
"According to recent data from research firm IDC, Android's market-share stood at 75 percent in the first quarter of 2013 â" up from 59.1 percent in the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS owned 17.3 percent of the market"
Targeting just 4.2 is perhaps rather overly specific, unless there are major differences in programming for 4.2 vs 4.1 that i'm not aware of? Given the above numbers if a developer were to target just Jelly Bean they would hit 0.75 * 0.33, or 25% of the total market, compared to the 0.173 * 0.93, or 16% of the total market. That seems like a pretty reasonable choice to me.
You are again (all ACs are the same, right?) arguing a false dichotomy and pairing it with just plain wrongness. Let's take this a step at a time.
- "Asserting that Google has "many products that are close to breaking even or even make a profit" would suggest that they have at least a couple other significant contributors to their bottom line."
If by "significant" you mean "significant compared to their advertising revenue" then i didn't say that, and the one does not imply the other. If by "significant" you just mean "a lot of money by most people's standards" then yes, i stand behind that and will show why below.
- "When 95% of your revenues (not PROFITS) are from advertising, that leaves a pretty small slice of the pie for those "many" other profitable (or near-profitable) products and services."
That's true, but a pretty small slice of the pie is still a slice of the pie. And if the original pie is HUGE then even a very small slice of it could be significant.
Also, why do you stress that it's revenues rather than profits? That actually hurts your case. I know it isn't so, but imagine if 95% of their revenue was from advertising, but the costs of that advertising actually exceeded the revenue, and thus 100% of their profits were from non-advertising? If they couldn't see any way to improve those margins then it would make absolute sense to shut down all their advertising even though it meant losing 95% of their revenue. In a less extreme case, if 95% of their revenue is from ads but only 90% of their profit was from ads, expanding into other areas would make a lot of sense. In reality i suspect that their profits are at _least_ 95% from ads, but if you don't happen to know the exact numbers it only makes your position weaker to stress the revenue part.
- "Perhaps you'd like to name just 3 major sources of revenue - of the MANY you claim exist - for Google that aren't some form of selling ads?"
I don't have Google's financials memorized, and i'm not sure why i have to prove it, especially since i didn't make the original claim. Someone said they had a lot of products/areas that were close to or even slightly over breaking even. You tried to disprove that by saying "They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising." A quick check shows Google earned about 14 billion last quarter. 5% of that is $700 million. For anyone not in Google's league that would be a very large chunk of change. Though i don't happen to know exactly which divisions that revenue is split between, it helps support (though does not prove) the original commenter's claim that there are other divisions making money.
- "I know this is a hard truth to swallow, but Google is an advertising company [...]"
Did i ever say otherwise? Just because their primary business is advertising doesn't mean they can't expand into other areas. And as long as those other areas are pulling in close to $3 billion a year there's no reason for them to shut down any of those areas that are currently making a profit or look like they will be soon.
Well, it's either the exact same consume outrage that caused them to recant in the first place, or the exact same nothing that's preventing Sony from doing the same thing with the PS4 a year from now.
So you weren't going to buy one before when they were doing stuff you didn't like, and now that they've agreed not to do that you're still not going to buy one and think everyone else should do the same?
Maybe you weren't going to buy one anyways, but let's imagine you actually did manage to convince everyone who cared about the issue to follow your lead.
So then, Microsoft capitulates on the DRM, but despite the change the only people who buy the new XBox were people who were actually okay with that DRM in the first place. That would mean that A: Microsoft would have no reason not to just unchange their mind and put the DRM back in, and B: they would have very little reason to listen to consumer complaints about such issues in the future.
they have quite a few other products that either manage to substantially offset their costs or give profits.
No, they really don't. 95+% of their revenues are generated by advertising. They make virtually NO money from any source that is not advertising. Go look at their financial statements.
I agree with most of the rest of the stuff you said, however there's absolutely no discrepancy between "they have many products that are close to breaking even or even make a profit" and "95% of their revenue is from a single product."
Given exactly how much they make from ads it's not surprising that their other areas may not seem competitive. However that does not mean a priori that there is no reason to continue those ventures. Sure, a profit of $100 million from [insert product here] might not seem like a lot compared to the dozens of billions they get from advertising, but $100 million of profit is $100 million of profit. And then of course there's things like Android, where they don't see a lot of direct profit but it is an important part of the ecosystem.
I first started seeing "XBone" references during the E3 conference, but it's quite possible it's been around since the rumors about the restrictions started making the rounds on the net. However my favorite "joke" name, given the randomness with which Microsoft seems to be choosing the number to follow "XBox", is the "XBox 1984."
This is kind of a silly thing to worry about. If the government wants to shut down your communication they can already do it. They just talk to your carrier and all of the sudden your calls and texts aren't going through. They could probably even disguise it as some kind of a temporary connectivity issue if they wanted, unlike bricking your phone with a kill-switch which would be really obvious.
Having a kill-switch offers no benefit to the government, nor to the carriers. It only benefits the users, aka the potential mugging victims.
People can believe in anything, whether it's true or not. I believe if i drop something it will fall. I believe if i go to the local store i will be able to trade money for goods. I believe that the scientific method when followed with rigor produces reasonably accurate and occasionally very useful results.
Some people may believe in science on more of a "faith" basis, not understanding the process but accepting it based on results. Some people believe in religion because of faith. Some people believe in religion because of things they perceive as being caused by supernatural powers (things which scientists would generally credit to selection bias and other fallacies.) Some people believe in superstitions, and sometimes those people are otherwise effectively non-religious.
And some people believe that the moon is larger than the sun or other entirely incorrect facts, not because of any issue of faith, but because they're just uninformed.
That's not true either. I could honestly believe there was an intelligent being who created our current universe and simultaneously believe in the process of science. Believing in one does not generally require disbelieving in the other. There are some specific religions that are antithetical to science in their details, but that is a different issue.
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You're welcome!