Wrong. The technology used in the fuel cells is just not there yet. For one reference see the current on-line Scientific American, who have an article on this which states "Toyota hopes to reduce its costs per fuel cell vehicle to around $50,000 by 2015. And note the word hopes, this may never happen, while battery capacity can already beat the range given in the article, and with this same research effort would very likely do far far better. And no need to build hydrogen fuel stations, jut some way to recharge cars when on a long trip.
One of the main barriers to the widespread adoption of fuel cell vehicles has been the lack of an adequate hydrogen-refueling infrastructure.
What hype. Gee, they can make hydrogen from water and electricity. This is news? It's important to note that this home system claims to be able to give a hydrogen power car a 25 mile ability to travel. Which works out to a maximum destination of half that without a way to refuel until you get home. Also worth noting is that another tiny little barrier to a hydrogen powered car is that the current fuel cells used in hydrogen cars drives the price of the car to over $1,000,000 US per car (Ownership of the few existing prototypes is being retained by the auto companies because they can't realistically sell them.) Sure, the companies say that they hope to drive the price down to $40,000, but they don't ever seem to give any data to explains how they came up with that number.
While it would be interesting if the hope of making cost effective fuel cells became reality (it might not), it certainly seems more desirable, more practical and safer to not got through the hydrogen separation process in the first place. If the effort expended on fuel cell development were instead focused on battery, super capacitor and other electricity storage technology, a car could likely be recharged with electricity at home rather than being refueled with hydrogen. The range would be much greater (heck, it's already much greater than the 25 mile total travel capacity stated in the article), and a number of other problems would be avoided as well, including the problem of storing that hydrogen (it tends to leak out of anything and you don't want thick walled compressed gas tanks burning up range with their weight), and it is extremely dangerous in gas form in an accident.
And I say this completely expecting some eco-geek will mod me down because they didn't think through the hydrogen issue and think it's a good thing.
I find that pretty hard to accept. Sure, the chip may be complex, but certainly also is a DVD player, which contains a precision optics electro-mechanical device, as well as sharing many things in common with a converter box. This isn't exactly brand new technology, one local station here has been broadcasting in HD since 1966. If the industry has been dragging their feet on producing devices (and it certainly seems that they have been), that just might be because they saw these $40 coupons as a government goldmine and lobbied for them and waited for them. And as to chips, you know what they say, the first one costs a million bucks, the next ones are a penny a piece. I really doubt that there is much that you could say to convince me that a DTV converter should cost over twice what a DVD player costs, or that there are really free market forces at work here. As soon as the coupons are no longer available, the price will drop fast. Perhaps delayed a little because of whatever inventory is in the supply chain that the retailers have already overpaid for and will try to pass that inflated price along to the consumer, but it will be kept artificially inflated by the coupon program until then.
Do you mean other than those $60 converter boxs and $40 Government coupons that expire in less than 80 days after people receive them? The coupons are a great deal for the importers and sellers, but in reality the customer ends up paying about whet they would if there were no coupon program, perhaps more when you realize they pay sales tax on the entire ticket price. In a world where I can buy a DVD player in a local store for $29 or less, these much simpler converter boxes should not be costing $60.
on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now
When I tried to submit this story back on June 14 with a link to a Wired article it was rejected. Now it's affecting you and it becomes interesting? Yea, I know we aren't to take the rejecting process personally, but sometimes it seems the editors just want to post dups and make Cowboy Neal jokes rather than look at what they are offered or give any feedback on why something was rejected weeks ago but is now of international interest.
So you want to jump on my EZ-bake over quip (intended for what I though was obvious exateration, didn't Ralph Nader and his lot tell us that our kids couldn't have them long ago anyway?), but choose to ignore the bigger issue of mercury contamination in our homes and landfills, why? And the added costs to consumers (if alternatives were really cheaper the free market would take care of itself)? And the issues of the daylight saving time energy debacle?
I thought he was a thespian. And not all that great of one. What made him a damn actor? Are you showing some bias issues here? And the rest of them are politicians. And many politicians are lawyers. Pretty easy choice of which to believe there.
That's why you needed lots of them. My original math was off by a factor of 2 (damn bytes and words), so I had even more cores. Intel is so behind the times.
Are you talking about the same government that has now outlawed the further manufacturer and sale of inexpensive incandescent light bulbs (to take effect in a few years), leaving us with the option of pricey fluorescent ones that are an environmental mercury hazard whenever one breaks? And lets not ever talk about the problems of running your EZ-bake oven with a fluorescent bulb, or your Lava-Lamp, or even trying to find a fluorescent bulb at will not self destruct if you use it as the light inside your oven (neat place for a mercury melt-down). I don't see completely outlawing incandescent bulbs as very hands off.
Are you talking about the same government that mandated that we switch to daylight saving time earlier in the spring and later in the fall, to save energy, even though it "broke" lots of watches and clocks that knew the old schedule to make the switch automatically? And, by the way, even though it turns out that the change really costs more energy, rather than saving anything?
I could go on, but I think we see where this is headed. You believe that the government is going to solve the problem for you. I believe what Ronald Regan said.
I've worked on several different OS's and learned their internals intimately. Although I have used Linux a moderate amount I have no such understanding of the internal Linux architecture, so this slashdot post caught my interest. However, I RTFA, such as it is, but come away only with the belief that this is a further effort to make the OS look much more obscure and cryptic than any OS actually is. If anyone really learns much about the Linux OS from this thing I would be amazed.
expected to go on sale in early 2009 for under $100
Westinghouse is the first major electronics manufacturer
So what does Westinghouse even make that might use this? And I'm certainly not talking about other companies who just license the Westinghouse and their logo and sell stuff under the Westinghouse name. This would be pretty overpriced for even a Laptop power supply / charger, and as far as I know Westinghouse isn't in the laptop business. The article mentions LCD TVs, computer monitors and digital photo frames. I have never seen decent TV with a wall wart, and never hope to see one. It would be absolutely prohibitive for most wall wart base things, like photo frames, phones (in-home as well as cell chargers), answering machines, DTV converter boxes, amplifying antennas, home routers, and small toys. Monitors doesn't sound very realistic, and I have yet to see a Westinghouse branded one. The problem isn't just that companies like Apple want proprietary supplies and connectors to protect their profit margin, but it's also that this supposed "standard" doesn't have a good "killer-app" to rally behind. At this point USB looks like a far better choice of standards than this (for lower powered devices), and far more affordable. Sure it doesn't so everything this system could, but this system will never meet that promise either as long as it claims to be an (expensive) solution for everyone but is really for no one.
I really didn't get very involved in this. I felt that the kid learned something important from it, and I wasn't too upset by his choice. I certainly don't want to teach him that the thing to do is find a troupe where the local parents disregard the stated objectives of the groups official leaders. That was some years ago, and I'm much happier with the route he went than if he had participated in the hyprocacy.
You know what I told my child to do? (You are wrong.) Your child is not mature enough to make such choices for himself? On the other hand, by just keeping "that private", you support and strengthen a society wide system of discrimination against those who choose reason over religious babble. I don't go out of my way to tell others my beliefs, my kid doesn't either, and, in fact I've never even had an atheist ring my doorbell and try to tell me about science, but I've had plenty of religious wackos who seem to see a need to knock on my door and tell me their religious belief, as well as some Boy Scouts asking for my support. I don't advocate aggressively spreading my belief, but I certainly consider it moral cowardice to keep one's belief quite when asked, just to keep things "convenient".
My kid was told that he couldn't join, because he said that he didn't believe in their "supreme being". One scout leader, high example of morality that they are, told him to "just lie", but he would not. I should support a group like this?
I agree that no router should crash based just on packets it passes. But there are a few issues here. If SP3 is causing something akin to a DOS, and a router's tables are filling up due to bad packets, it might very reasonably decide that things are so bad that the best thing for it to do is a reset. We don't blame the router maker when an external DOS attack interrupts Internet access, why blame it if the DOS is from Microsoft software on the inside?
And there is also the potential issue of this being UPNP related. UPNP is a completely bogus thing, but Microsoft strong armed the industry to support it and it's in most routers and many users don't know to disable it. UPNP could certainly give ways to cause this issue, and I only hold the router itself responsible to the extent that it supports this blasphemy.
If you object to an onslaught of advertisements and self serving "press releases" thinly disguised as technical articles, then you really should be here. Slashdot jumped the shark and went to the dark side some time ago.
Readers with kids in school right now may have the best perspective....
Readers with kids in school right now may have a bit of a bias on just how educated and how intelligent their precious little gems are. I'm just saying that there are a lot of different ways to study this issue, but asking parents if they think their kids should be given harder tests (and by corollary, lower grades) many not be the most objective way to look at this.
Did you mean to say "Fire the teachers and pay the replacements more"? As a taxpayer I'm sick and tired of seeing the awful results of the educational system, and the teachers unions mounting the charge that the reason we have such bad teachers is the supposedly low pay, but at the same time suggesting that if the pay is raised it would be completely wrong to get rid of the current dregs of the teaching profession and replace them with those better teachers that the higher pay will supposedly attract.
In the picture, the Eee Box is standing next to a paperback book.
That's a rather deceptive statement. The/. summary could have just said the dimensions ( 8.5" x 7" x 1" ) rather than taking more space to say they were given in the article. But the book used is not the size of what most readers have come to know as a "paperback book". While it is not a hard cover book, it is the size of a hard cover book, known as a "trade book" in the industry, not a much smaller paperback. And unfortunately, the picture doesn't give much else in the way of a reference, so may people are likely suckered into this belief that the computer is the size of a paperback. It's still a nicely compact system, I don't dispute that, but there seems to be an effort here to mislead.
It's sad to see more and more/. "articles" just being ads for products, and it's even sadder when deceptive hype is injected and the editors don't clean it up. And I have to think this was deliberate, why else say "although the actual dimensions are listed..." when the true 8.5" x 7" x 1" would have been more more concise, more informative and less deceptive?
I suspect that would be a very bad thing to say to someone who at this point is open to accepting guidance. I would stress that while some say "Rights holders must get paid one way or another", that it would be very wrong to assume guilt of theft on an innocent person's part and tax them in some way, such as for blank media that is used for perfectly legal personal data uses, taxes on Internet connections that are then handed over to the RIAA or MPAA, or restrictions on P2P networks that are used for many very legitimate uses.
I would also talk some about how the MPAA and RIAA have been greatly abusing their positions, acting much like racketters and threatening people when they have no proof, strong arming with threats of lawsuits, doing many illegal things to attack people's computers and networks, illegally planting files that they then claim represent copyrighted material, and outright having agents doing illegal denial of service attacks on completely legal businesses. It might not hurt to mention that the real artists and creators of the works in question have historically be cheated by the the companies that the RIAA and MPAA work for, and that the real creators of the works never see any profit from the RIAA and MPAA gangster like activity. Perhaps the RIAA and the MPAA deserve a much closer look before one delving into the issue of file sharing and how to separate the perfectly legal file sharing from that which might not be.
If you have made those points and the MP is still showing an interest in talking, you might want to get to the issue of "property" itself. I'll assume that your country or some local subdivision of it has some sort of tax on real property. If that's the case, you might want to ask why corporations can amass vast amounts of "intellectual property", expect the government to go out of it's way to provide special protections for it, and yet that property, which the corporations will insist is very real, is not taxed. Perhaps if any file sharing enforcement does need to be done, it should be financed by the people who want their property protected, not by the individuals who are doing perfectly legal file sharing (including artists who are trying to distribute their works and not fall under the control of the RIAA racketter labels who would cheat them of their rightful profits).
...ability to remote boot games from other users (so you dont need to rely on finding people with the same games)...
In a perfect world this might be interesting. In the real world, if you build such a platform, I can assure you that some script kiddy is going to play games with your system that you will not like.
In an era where the president considers his oath to uphold the Constitution a joke, and our freedoms are being taken away with laws like the Patriot Act, when the government is compiling lists even of the library books that you read, when peaceful protest is limited to "free speech zones" where no one will ever hear the protesters, and so many many more abuses, why in the world would you take the step of building a list of targets for those who abuse their power and provide them not just ideas on who to shut down but good technical discussion on the target's capabilities, providing them ammunition to use in their further attacks against the people?
OK, I'll play along, although I fully realize that if I say something that someone else doesn't agree with I'll get marked down as a "troll". I suggest for the first target of this list SLASHDOT. This is a website that references individuals to all sorts of technology and information that is inconvenient to the government. It must be silenced.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. The technology used in the fuel cells is just not there yet. For one reference see the current on-line Scientific American, who have an article on this which states "Toyota hopes to reduce its costs per fuel cell vehicle to around $50,000 by 2015. And note the word hopes, this may never happen, while battery capacity can already beat the range given in the article, and with this same research effort would very likely do far far better. And no need to build hydrogen fuel stations, jut some way to recharge cars when on a long trip.
What hype. Gee, they can make hydrogen from water and electricity. This is news? It's important to note that this home system claims to be able to give a hydrogen power car a 25 mile ability to travel. Which works out to a maximum destination of half that without a way to refuel until you get home. Also worth noting is that another tiny little barrier to a hydrogen powered car is that the current fuel cells used in hydrogen cars drives the price of the car to over $1,000,000 US per car (Ownership of the few existing prototypes is being retained by the auto companies because they can't realistically sell them.) Sure, the companies say that they hope to drive the price down to $40,000, but they don't ever seem to give any data to explains how they came up with that number.
While it would be interesting if the hope of making cost effective fuel cells became reality (it might not), it certainly seems more desirable, more practical and safer to not got through the hydrogen separation process in the first place. If the effort expended on fuel cell development were instead focused on battery, super capacitor and other electricity storage technology, a car could likely be recharged with electricity at home rather than being refueled with hydrogen. The range would be much greater (heck, it's already much greater than the 25 mile total travel capacity stated in the article), and a number of other problems would be avoided as well, including the problem of storing that hydrogen (it tends to leak out of anything and you don't want thick walled compressed gas tanks burning up range with their weight), and it is extremely dangerous in gas form in an accident.
And I say this completely expecting some eco-geek will mod me down because they didn't think through the hydrogen issue and think it's a good thing.
I find that pretty hard to accept. Sure, the chip may be complex, but certainly also is a DVD player, which contains a precision optics electro-mechanical device, as well as sharing many things in common with a converter box. This isn't exactly brand new technology, one local station here has been broadcasting in HD since 1966. If the industry has been dragging their feet on producing devices (and it certainly seems that they have been), that just might be because they saw these $40 coupons as a government goldmine and lobbied for them and waited for them. And as to chips, you know what they say, the first one costs a million bucks, the next ones are a penny a piece. I really doubt that there is much that you could say to convince me that a DTV converter should cost over twice what a DVD player costs, or that there are really free market forces at work here. As soon as the coupons are no longer available, the price will drop fast. Perhaps delayed a little because of whatever inventory is in the supply chain that the retailers have already overpaid for and will try to pass that inflated price along to the consumer, but it will be kept artificially inflated by the coupon program until then.
Do you mean other than those $60 converter boxs and $40 Government coupons that expire in less than 80 days after people receive them? The coupons are a great deal for the importers and sellers, but in reality the customer ends up paying about whet they would if there were no coupon program, perhaps more when you realize they pay sales tax on the entire ticket price. In a world where I can buy a DVD player in a local store for $29 or less, these much simpler converter boxes should not be costing $60.
When I tried to submit this story back on June 14 with a link to a Wired article it was rejected. Now it's affecting you and it becomes interesting? Yea, I know we aren't to take the rejecting process personally, but sometimes it seems the editors just want to post dups and make Cowboy Neal jokes rather than look at what they are offered or give any feedback on why something was rejected weeks ago but is now of international interest.
So you want to jump on my EZ-bake over quip (intended for what I though was obvious exateration, didn't Ralph Nader and his lot tell us that our kids couldn't have them long ago anyway?), but choose to ignore the bigger issue of mercury contamination in our homes and landfills, why? And the added costs to consumers (if alternatives were really cheaper the free market would take care of itself)? And the issues of the daylight saving time energy debacle?
I thought he was a thespian. And not all that great of one. What made him a damn actor? Are you showing some bias issues here? And the rest of them are politicians. And many politicians are lawyers. Pretty easy choice of which to believe there.
That's why you needed lots of them. My original math was off by a factor of 2 (damn bytes and words), so I had even more cores. Intel is so behind the times.
Heck, my original computer had 229376 cores. They were arranged in 28k 16 bit words.
Are you talking about the same government that mandated that we switch to daylight saving time earlier in the spring and later in the fall, to save energy, even though it "broke" lots of watches and clocks that knew the old schedule to make the switch automatically? And, by the way, even though it turns out that the change really costs more energy, rather than saving anything?
I could go on, but I think we see where this is headed. You believe that the government is going to solve the problem for you. I believe what Ronald Regan said.
Who was dumb enough to let them in?????
I've worked on several different OS's and learned their internals intimately. Although I have used Linux a moderate amount I have no such understanding of the internal Linux architecture, so this slashdot post caught my interest. However, I RTFA, such as it is, but come away only with the belief that this is a further effort to make the OS look much more obscure and cryptic than any OS actually is. If anyone really learns much about the Linux OS from this thing I would be amazed.
So basically the courts ordered someone to stop breaking the law? Yea, that's gonna change their whole attitude.
Westinghouse is the first major electronics manufacturer
So what does Westinghouse even make that might use this? And I'm certainly not talking about other companies who just license the Westinghouse and their logo and sell stuff under the Westinghouse name. This would be pretty overpriced for even a Laptop power supply / charger, and as far as I know Westinghouse isn't in the laptop business. The article mentions LCD TVs, computer monitors and digital photo frames. I have never seen decent TV with a wall wart, and never hope to see one. It would be absolutely prohibitive for most wall wart base things, like photo frames, phones (in-home as well as cell chargers), answering machines, DTV converter boxes, amplifying antennas, home routers, and small toys. Monitors doesn't sound very realistic, and I have yet to see a Westinghouse branded one. The problem isn't just that companies like Apple want proprietary supplies and connectors to protect their profit margin, but it's also that this supposed "standard" doesn't have a good "killer-app" to rally behind. At this point USB looks like a far better choice of standards than this (for lower powered devices), and far more affordable. Sure it doesn't so everything this system could, but this system will never meet that promise either as long as it claims to be an (expensive) solution for everyone but is really for no one.
I really didn't get very involved in this. I felt that the kid learned something important from it, and I wasn't too upset by his choice. I certainly don't want to teach him that the thing to do is find a troupe where the local parents disregard the stated objectives of the groups official leaders. That was some years ago, and I'm much happier with the route he went than if he had participated in the hyprocacy.
You know what I told my child to do? (You are wrong.) Your child is not mature enough to make such choices for himself? On the other hand, by just keeping "that private", you support and strengthen a society wide system of discrimination against those who choose reason over religious babble. I don't go out of my way to tell others my beliefs, my kid doesn't either, and, in fact I've never even had an atheist ring my doorbell and try to tell me about science, but I've had plenty of religious wackos who seem to see a need to knock on my door and tell me their religious belief, as well as some Boy Scouts asking for my support. I don't advocate aggressively spreading my belief, but I certainly consider it moral cowardice to keep one's belief quite when asked, just to keep things "convenient".
My kid was told that he couldn't join, because he said that he didn't believe in their "supreme being". One scout leader, high example of morality that they are, told him to "just lie", but he would not. I should support a group like this?
And there is also the potential issue of this being UPNP related. UPNP is a completely bogus thing, but Microsoft strong armed the industry to support it and it's in most routers and many users don't know to disable it. UPNP could certainly give ways to cause this issue, and I only hold the router itself responsible to the extent that it supports this blasphemy.
If you object to an onslaught of advertisements and self serving "press releases" thinly disguised as technical articles, then you really should be here. Slashdot jumped the shark and went to the dark side some time ago.
Readers with kids in school right now may have a bit of a bias on just how educated and how intelligent their precious little gems are. I'm just saying that there are a lot of different ways to study this issue, but asking parents if they think their kids should be given harder tests (and by corollary, lower grades) many not be the most objective way to look at this.
Did you mean to say "Fire the teachers and pay the replacements more"? As a taxpayer I'm sick and tired of seeing the awful results of the educational system, and the teachers unions mounting the charge that the reason we have such bad teachers is the supposedly low pay, but at the same time suggesting that if the pay is raised it would be completely wrong to get rid of the current dregs of the teaching profession and replace them with those better teachers that the higher pay will supposedly attract.
That's a rather deceptive statement. The /. summary could have just said the dimensions ( 8.5" x 7" x 1" ) rather than taking more space to say they were given in the article. But the book used is not the size of what most readers have come to know as a "paperback book". While it is not a hard cover book, it is the size of a hard cover book, known as a "trade book" in the industry, not a much smaller paperback. And unfortunately, the picture doesn't give much else in the way of a reference, so may people are likely suckered into this belief that the computer is the size of a paperback. It's still a nicely compact system, I don't dispute that, but there seems to be an effort here to mislead.
It's sad to see more and more /. "articles" just being ads for products, and it's even sadder when deceptive hype is injected and the editors don't clean it up. And I have to think this was deliberate, why else say "although the actual dimensions are listed..." when the true 8.5" x 7" x 1" would have been more more concise, more informative and less deceptive?
I suspect that would be a very bad thing to say to someone who at this point is open to accepting guidance. I would stress that while some say "Rights holders must get paid one way or another", that it would be very wrong to assume guilt of theft on an innocent person's part and tax them in some way, such as for blank media that is used for perfectly legal personal data uses, taxes on Internet connections that are then handed over to the RIAA or MPAA, or restrictions on P2P networks that are used for many very legitimate uses.
I would also talk some about how the MPAA and RIAA have been greatly abusing their positions, acting much like racketters and threatening people when they have no proof, strong arming with threats of lawsuits, doing many illegal things to attack people's computers and networks, illegally planting files that they then claim represent copyrighted material, and outright having agents doing illegal denial of service attacks on completely legal businesses. It might not hurt to mention that the real artists and creators of the works in question have historically be cheated by the the companies that the RIAA and MPAA work for, and that the real creators of the works never see any profit from the RIAA and MPAA gangster like activity. Perhaps the RIAA and the MPAA deserve a much closer look before one delving into the issue of file sharing and how to separate the perfectly legal file sharing from that which might not be.
If you have made those points and the MP is still showing an interest in talking, you might want to get to the issue of "property" itself. I'll assume that your country or some local subdivision of it has some sort of tax on real property. If that's the case, you might want to ask why corporations can amass vast amounts of "intellectual property", expect the government to go out of it's way to provide special protections for it, and yet that property, which the corporations will insist is very real, is not taxed. Perhaps if any file sharing enforcement does need to be done, it should be financed by the people who want their property protected, not by the individuals who are doing perfectly legal file sharing (including artists who are trying to distribute their works and not fall under the control of the RIAA racketter labels who would cheat them of their rightful profits).
Please let us know how your evening goes.
In a perfect world this might be interesting. In the real world, if you build such a platform, I can assure you that some script kiddy is going to play games with your system that you will not like.
OK, I'll play along, although I fully realize that if I say something that someone else doesn't agree with I'll get marked down as a "troll". I suggest for the first target of this list SLASHDOT. This is a website that references individuals to all sorts of technology and information that is inconvenient to the government. It must be silenced.