Sender pays does not require monetary payment. The machine on the receiving end requires the sender to complete a math problem before accepting the email. There are classes of math problems that are hard to compute but easy to verify that they were done correctly, thus burdening the sender and not the recipient (factoring is one such problem, hashcash uses another). So the recipient can set the complexity level of the problem. This still allows completely annonymous email - which has very legitimate uses. There is also no need for any "authority" to validate anything. There are no reasons to implement exceptions.
Mailing list servers would be heavily burdened sending a lot of email, but there are ways around that. These things would require a little effort to implement, but then it would be done and over with. My personal preference would be to issue a (randomly generated) factoring problem for each email received. Since you have to subscribe to a mailing list (effort) you could do the following:
1) tell your mail server to always issue the same problem to mail from that address.
2) give the list server the problem and answer upon subscription - no work for them to actually do to send to you.
3) make it an extra hard problem so people forging email from the list server get an infeasibly hard problem and choke on it. It has to be that hard or they could expend the effort to solve it once and then spam away.
I think hashcash works differently and doesn't require any extra interactions - like issuing the problem to be solved (I thought it was dependant on the email content). But their solution is available for implementation today.
The point is that CPU time costs money, and that most people have a mostly idle CPU. A spammer wanting to send millions of emails couldn't handle the load, but your friends wouldn't mind. What about businesses like Amazon? While, spending 30 CPU seconds to send an email (order confirmation for example) is a burden, it's nothing compared to the total transaction dollar amount. Go ahead, charge me an extra nickle for that book order. Yes, I'm likely to raise my cost to a level that takes that long to compute - until my spam reaches a very low level. People I get email from generally won't mind - especially if their email software can do it in the background after they hit send.
Zombie networks would help the spammers, but when the Zombies start eating all their CPU sending mail (instead of all their network bandwidth) people will do something about it. Zombies are a different problem and "sender pays" may actually bring about its solution.
I really dislike white/black-lists and central authorities. They have their own associated problems. Sender pays doesn't require anything like that. It only requires a standard to be adopted and implemented in mail servers and client software.
The key to teaching teenagers programming is to give them assignments they'll be interested in. Picking a language that they might actually use in the real world is a close second, and that rules out the 2 languages you've chosen. With the possible exception of Borland Delphi, which seems to be slowly dying.
Python with PyGame is the way to go. All programming concepts can be taught through games. And when they're done with homework, they may actually continue to expand the programs beyond what was assigned. The value of this can not be under estimated.
Of course I am biased. I learned to program because someone told me that was how to make games. That's all it took. I wasn't interested in code or abstractions or anything - until I needed them for some game features. Every programming abstraction has a practical use in some game. Python I just picked up last year, but I really like it so far. PyGame? Looked at it, but haven't used it yet. It's SDL for Python - and I've used SDL with C. PyGame - Great idea for making games.
WTF is this Modula 2 stuff? I've never even known anyone who used it for anything. Really. Honest. And I write software for a living.
Would it be possible to have a vote or something to set up a "standard" total conversion? This way Linux Distros would know what to package. I'd really like to be able to "yum install quake3" on Fedora. I always thought a good 3D game should be included in every distro just to show off how cool free software can be, and to provide a way to verify 3D drivers are working.
FC3 came with BZflag, which kinda fit the bill. But they've removed it now - along with all screen savers, so there's no OpenGL apps by default.
This solution to spam is one that could at best reach an equilibrium with less spam but still plenty around. If people have to DDOS the spammers to make the problem go away, then it will never go away. If it did, people would stop being prepared to DDOS them and the problem will come back. This is not likely to be cyclical, but rather reach an equilibrium. It also doesn't account for zombies sending spam - unless you DDOS the sites that are advertised, and that's got another whole set of legal issues.
IMHO, sender pays (ala hash-cash or something like it) is the only way to make a meaningful dent in the spam problem. I know this fails one or two of the "reasons" on that list as to why it won't work, but doing nothing also doesn't work. Why don't Free programs implement this so people at least have the option of using it? I'd actually prefer a problem that can scale much larger - like taking a minute or even an hour on todays computers - so it will still be viable in the future. Yes, there are issues (like mailing lists) with this approach, but there are ways around those too. People have to be willing to do SOMETHING. If someone doesn't do something, someone else (think MS) will. Then we'll have a proprietary "standard" for dealing with it. You folks maintaining the software just have to get some nads and take a little initiative on this. If you wait for some company to devise a solution, they aren't going to just give it to you.
There is one concern that I don't hear people talk much about. I agree that people should be able to make modifications for their own use without having to provide anyone source code. I agree that source should only have to be given to people you give executables to. The problem I see is when a company gets the same classification as a person.
I'm have mixed feelings about the notion of a company owning a derived work with several people creating a derived work and many more people using it - and it's still considered the companys code.
I see a practical problem though if someone releases that derived work back to some original project on the net without approval of "the company". It could be months or years before anyone notices, and then what? The employee gets canned for giving away company "IP". Now can the company go after the public project that is using that "illegally obtained IP"? IANAL but I think the answer is yes based on other cases (people leaving and taking code with them and such). To me, the simplest thing to do is word the GPL 3 to indicate that "entities" are not considered people. This could create problems for all the code "owned" by say the Mozilla foundation or even the FSF (they require copyright assignments). It may also be an unhappy event for places like Google that probably have substantial "internal" derivative works - suddenly any one of their employees could redistribute those internal projects. Yes? No? I think that's a small price to pay to prevent the unintended (or intended for the conspiracy theory folks) tainting of any number of public projects.
Going out on a limb here - but not too far. Imagine not just one company but a consortium of companies and people who "jointly own" their derived works. You agree to be a member of this organization by some shrink wrap license, and now you're buying GPLed software without getting source code.
Even if code is placed on a company computer that is issued to an employee, that should be considered redistribution. Consider the cable box on the TV, or the XBox, or whatever platform that might be considered "leased".
The conflict that can arise from allowing closed distribution within an organization has not been explored in practice and should be headed off before someone tries it. IMHO this is as important to consider as the patent issues.
"In general, it's a little harder to render objects which don't have any vertices on screen compared to rendering objects which are entirely within the bounds of the screen"
Yeah, I remember dealing with those issues in a software polygon rasterizer. I moved to ray tracing 12 years ago, and those issues just evaporate along with a bunch of others. Of course one issue keeps cropping up... CPU speed....
"if you have sympathy for it, don't kill it. Look at a picture of what your baby looks like at its current age, and if you see a baby, let it live. If you see a fish, and you really want it gone, get rid of it. Short of The Big Guy coming down and explaining it, I doubt you'll ever get a better answer than that."
That's a very good personal definition. The problems arise when someone tries to tell OTHER people how to make the decision. All sides of the debate have their own opinion about when it's OK (never qualifies as when also), and they want to force that on everyone else. Imagine that as a society we agree to use the "personal" definition you suggest. Now Someone comes along and says "yeah, but I don't think it's really human/murder/whatever until about 3 months after birth." See? Even if we accept personal decisions, we are stuck with the same question "at what point do we not allow personal decisions". You may say "at birth of course". And someone says at 5 months, another says at conception. As long as it is legal to do, we already have the personal choice based on our own beliefs. The unresolvable debate is when to disallow that choice by law.
"Believe it or not, some of us shower, live in our own apartments, and actually go outdoors. Amazing!"
Yes, I'm married and have a house and social life. That doesn't mean there are women in my techie workplace;-) To be honest, there are a few. But that's the angle I was after. Not the total nerd anti-social thing - but that is another angle.
Going to Mars would be the cancer cure. The increase in cancer rates would just accelerate the evolution of humans who don't get cancer from radiation - on Mars. After some generations, people new to Mars would still have a 10% cancer rate, while the locals wouldn't have to worry.
My wife just tried Thunderbird. It imported email from 3 accounts in the Mozilla suite. It mixed up all the mail between accounts. I switched to Fedora this spring, which uses Evolution for email and I like it just fine. There is a
Windows port of Evolution in the works, but there is no firm timeframe for release yet. I see that it sent it's first message recently.
"It's not wise for a commercial site to tell a large block of potential customers - sorry, we won't interact with you, go load another browser."
No, but they can restrict themselves to a subset of the standards that are supported by most browsers, while recommending people use one that is "more standards compliant" so these issues can go away in the future. They used to say "best viewed with IEx or NetscapeX.x" - the whole reason for that was compliance issues. Actually, if a lot of commercial sites demanded people use FF or some other browser, most people would just roll over and use that browser the same way they rolled over and used IE and downloaded Flash. I still wouldn't force them to do it or they'd lose business - the same way they lose my business if they require IE today.
"Illustrator, fr'example, has features which are useless unless you're using it for professional print work. It has Adobe's complex, powerful and somewhat maddening color engine, full support for ICC profiles, soft-proofing, moving back and forth between color spaces, mixing multi-ink colors, filter and plug-in support, sophisticated type controls and support, etc. These are the features which make it much, much more than a "vector drawing program".
Sure, so if they expanded the feature table to include all those things, the free programs would be clearly lacking. That really was my point. To just put them in a seperate category because they are commercial makes the free stuff look bad for no reason. To extend the feature matrix a bit and show why the commercial software is better would be more informative, and IMHO a more honest way to show the differences. On the other hand, the guy who made the chart probably doesn't care about print features and would probably lump them together as a single "commercial print features" check box. You're right, I should have stopped a long time ago...
I object to the separation of "High end vector drawing programs" and other "Programs" described as less expensive. This separation is completely artificial and serves to belittle a whole list of programs for no specific reason. They should all be in the same chart and the features can allow people to draw their own conclusions. I have not used the commercial programs, but IMHO Inkscape will do everything I am likely to need in the near future.
Since this is a math guy, he might want to look at using Python (or other language) to generate SVG files. I've been doing this lately and it works nice and can be displayed/printed with Inkscape and a little Javascript allows animation in the Alpha release of Firefox 1.5.
Also very interesting is the correlation between SVG paths and CNC tool paths, but I have yet to build or buy a CNC.
I love it when professionals from other (non IT) fields post to slashdot. They're usually lurkers, but when they have something to say it's almost always more interesting than the usual stuff here. Good job ripping him a new one;-)
"If the format war isn't resolved, retailers could unite behind one format and force the issue by not stocking titles that are in the other format."
Yeah, except that 1) the collusion wouldn't go over too well with the FTC. and more importantly 2) retailers are whores. They'll sell anything to make a buck. They're just trying to avoid tough questions from the consumer in this case.
"The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate."
That's because the public is tired of being alienated by corporations. Tired of being a "resource" kept in a box (cubicle). Tired of following buisness "processes". The masses have been quitely wanting. Wanting recognition. It's sad that people feel great satisfaction from a few annonymous folks posting comments in response to their blog. This says a lot about the society we live in.
Anyone who discovered how to duplicate items in a MMOG should immediately exploit it to create lots of valuable items and sell them on ebay. One should not under any circumstances tell others how to do it, or that it can be done. Word getting out will surely dilute the opportunity and ultimately lead to some sort of fix for the problem. Letting the cat out of the bag to show off to your geeky friends instead of milking a goldmine is proof that someone is an absolute dumbass.
I always say: "If you can't trust yourself to keep a secret, why would you trust someone else?"
".Buy Longhorn, and be able to view this premium video content."
Most people don't care about watching video on their PC. I know someone who was all excited about his new "Media Center" PC when he got it. Then he discovered he can't play DVDs he recorded on anything else - including his DVD player in the living room. He doesn't talk about it any more, and obviously he doesn't bring over any cool shows he recorded either. The only thing I've ever really said about it is "why do you want to watch TV on a 17 inch monitor?". Now he's got a DVD recorder by the TV. It's just stupid, and when these issues come up, Joe consumer is just going to buy an HD-DVD player and connect it to his TV.
The real key to all this is to spread FireFox. If web sites decide they have to support alternative browsers, there just won't be any DRMed content anyway. The stuff you buy in the store most people don't view on the PC. This is an attempt by Hollywood to eliminate the distribution channels (and costs), but people just don't want to download movies and watch them on a PC - not most people.
Why not use 10 car batteries? How about Motorcycle batteries? For lighting there's no need to convert to AC to use regular bulbs. Other stuff could be a problem - I don't think you can't get a 120V inverter at home depot.
The 3/32" gap is between the rotor and stator. There are other magnets on the other side of the stator, so the full stator thickness plus 2 gaps lie between the 2 sets of magnets. This allows a lot of flux to circle back to an adjacent magnet rather than go through the stator coil to the other side. You can't make an arbitrarily thin stator, but you can use a metal core material. That would eliminate one set of magnets, but would also introduce cogging torque which may cause startup problems for them. We have 7-800W motors where I work now, and they have total magnetic material of about 3 or 4 of those magnets. They are commercially designed and manufactured, and they run full power at 800-1000rpm - not at all the same as the otherpower guys. I guess my point is that their "low tech" construction does entail some inefficiency in terms of materials. They really have to move up to 48V systems too, 100Amps will burn 10Watts per miliohm of resistance and 140Watts in their rectifiers. Material inefficiency is costly when you build it, but this electrical issue burns power all the time it's in operation. Even with all that, I do give those guys a lot of credit for actually building stuff that works and makes respectable amounts of power.
I've been doing 3 phase permanent magnet motor controllers for many years now, and I find the amount of magnetic material in the OtherPower alternators to absolutely insane. OTOH, I think they do it that way for simplicity of construction and to get zero cogging torque. i.e. They could use only 1 ring of magnets and use metal coil forms on a steel plate. The problem then is that the magnetic poles tend to "stick" to the metal ones and you get what's known as cogging torque - you can feel these sticky spots as you turn the motor. They also use an absolutely huge air gap (the full thickness of the coils) which leads to flux going between poles instead of throught the coils - another source of inefficiency. OTOH, they sell magnets to people wanting to replicate what they've done;-)
Cable TV always had commercials. The only channels that didn't were the premium ones like HBO and Skinemax. I think those have commercials between shows now (I don't get them 'cause they're extra). All the other channels have had commercials for at least 15 years. I just recently got CaTV because it was a cheap adder after internet - I'm still thinking about dropping it again. There is really nothing on cable of any value. Broadcast TV is alive and well - the few shows I do watch are available without cable, and if you've got the TV they're available in Hi-def as well.
I still think the broadcasters should all start using multicasting - they could put cable out of business. Let me plug this again: Digital Fox stations should air Fox Network, Fox News, Fox Kids, and the other one (is it Fox sports?). PBS should run their news/financial shows, PBS kids stuff, and some form of public servie - like 24 hour commercial free weather or a channel guide.
If all 8 stations available at my house would run just 2-3 subchannels it could make paying for cable look really stupid to most people.
Also, this transition has been coming for over a decade. Anyone who bought a TV in the last 5 years should have done a little research and planned ahead - for me that meant not paying more than a couple hundred dollars for a 27" TV that will be obsolete in a few years. The key is that it's always been "just a few years" down the road. Anyone who feels "fucked" should have spent less time in front of the TV and learned what's happening in the world.
I thought a HDMI input would accept unencrypted DVI as well. So I can't connect my PC to my TV if it's only got HDMI? If that's the case, I won't be buying any time soon - not until the prices come way down. I'm not paying $2000 for a TV that I can't feed my own video into. That's just stupid.
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Mailing list servers would be heavily burdened sending a lot of email, but there are ways around that. These things would require a little effort to implement, but then it would be done and over with. My personal preference would be to issue a (randomly generated) factoring problem for each email received. Since you have to subscribe to a mailing list (effort) you could do the following:
1) tell your mail server to always issue the same problem to mail from that address.
2) give the list server the problem and answer upon subscription - no work for them to actually do to send to you.
3) make it an extra hard problem so people forging email from the list server get an infeasibly hard problem and choke on it. It has to be that hard or they could expend the effort to solve it once and then spam away.
I think hashcash works differently and doesn't require any extra interactions - like issuing the problem to be solved (I thought it was dependant on the email content). But their solution is available for implementation today.
The point is that CPU time costs money, and that most people have a mostly idle CPU. A spammer wanting to send millions of emails couldn't handle the load, but your friends wouldn't mind. What about businesses like Amazon? While, spending 30 CPU seconds to send an email (order confirmation for example) is a burden, it's nothing compared to the total transaction dollar amount. Go ahead, charge me an extra nickle for that book order. Yes, I'm likely to raise my cost to a level that takes that long to compute - until my spam reaches a very low level. People I get email from generally won't mind - especially if their email software can do it in the background after they hit send.
Zombie networks would help the spammers, but when the Zombies start eating all their CPU sending mail (instead of all their network bandwidth) people will do something about it. Zombies are a different problem and "sender pays" may actually bring about its solution.
I really dislike white/black-lists and central authorities. They have their own associated problems. Sender pays doesn't require anything like that. It only requires a standard to be adopted and implemented in mail servers and client software.
The key to teaching teenagers programming is to give them assignments they'll be interested in. Picking a language that they might actually use in the real world is a close second, and that rules out the 2 languages you've chosen. With the possible exception of Borland Delphi, which seems to be slowly dying.
Python with PyGame is the way to go. All programming concepts can be taught through games. And when they're done with homework, they may actually continue to expand the programs beyond what was assigned. The value of this can not be under estimated.
Of course I am biased. I learned to program because someone told me that was how to make games. That's all it took. I wasn't interested in code or abstractions or anything - until I needed them for some game features. Every programming abstraction has a practical use in some game. Python I just picked up last year, but I really like it so far. PyGame? Looked at it, but haven't used it yet. It's SDL for Python - and I've used SDL with C. PyGame - Great idea for making games.
WTF is this Modula 2 stuff? I've never even known anyone who used it for anything. Really. Honest. And I write software for a living.
FC3 came with BZflag, which kinda fit the bill. But they've removed it now - along with all screen savers, so there's no OpenGL apps by default.
IMHO, sender pays (ala hash-cash or something like it) is the only way to make a meaningful dent in the spam problem. I know this fails one or two of the "reasons" on that list as to why it won't work, but doing nothing also doesn't work. Why don't Free programs implement this so people at least have the option of using it? I'd actually prefer a problem that can scale much larger - like taking a minute or even an hour on todays computers - so it will still be viable in the future. Yes, there are issues (like mailing lists) with this approach, but there are ways around those too. People have to be willing to do SOMETHING. If someone doesn't do something, someone else (think MS) will. Then we'll have a proprietary "standard" for dealing with it. You folks maintaining the software just have to get some nads and take a little initiative on this. If you wait for some company to devise a solution, they aren't going to just give it to you.
I'm have mixed feelings about the notion of a company owning a derived work with several people creating a derived work and many more people using it - and it's still considered the companys code. I see a practical problem though if someone releases that derived work back to some original project on the net without approval of "the company". It could be months or years before anyone notices, and then what? The employee gets canned for giving away company "IP". Now can the company go after the public project that is using that "illegally obtained IP"? IANAL but I think the answer is yes based on other cases (people leaving and taking code with them and such). To me, the simplest thing to do is word the GPL 3 to indicate that "entities" are not considered people. This could create problems for all the code "owned" by say the Mozilla foundation or even the FSF (they require copyright assignments). It may also be an unhappy event for places like Google that probably have substantial "internal" derivative works - suddenly any one of their employees could redistribute those internal projects. Yes? No? I think that's a small price to pay to prevent the unintended (or intended for the conspiracy theory folks) tainting of any number of public projects.
Going out on a limb here - but not too far. Imagine not just one company but a consortium of companies and people who "jointly own" their derived works. You agree to be a member of this organization by some shrink wrap license, and now you're buying GPLed software without getting source code.
Even if code is placed on a company computer that is issued to an employee, that should be considered redistribution. Consider the cable box on the TV, or the XBox, or whatever platform that might be considered "leased".
The conflict that can arise from allowing closed distribution within an organization has not been explored in practice and should be headed off before someone tries it. IMHO this is as important to consider as the patent issues.
Yeah, I remember dealing with those issues in a software polygon rasterizer. I moved to ray tracing 12 years ago, and those issues just evaporate along with a bunch of others. Of course one issue keeps cropping up... CPU speed....
That's a very good personal definition. The problems arise when someone tries to tell OTHER people how to make the decision. All sides of the debate have their own opinion about when it's OK (never qualifies as when also), and they want to force that on everyone else. Imagine that as a society we agree to use the "personal" definition you suggest. Now Someone comes along and says "yeah, but I don't think it's really human/murder/whatever until about 3 months after birth." See? Even if we accept personal decisions, we are stuck with the same question "at what point do we not allow personal decisions". You may say "at birth of course". And someone says at 5 months, another says at conception. As long as it is legal to do, we already have the personal choice based on our own beliefs. The unresolvable debate is when to disallow that choice by law.
Yes, I'm married and have a house and social life. That doesn't mean there are women in my techie workplace ;-) To be honest, there are a few. But that's the angle I was after. Not the total nerd anti-social thing - but that is another angle.
You read slashdot and are concerned about having sex with a co-worker? I'm confused on so many levels.
Going to Mars would be the cancer cure. The increase in cancer rates would just accelerate the evolution of humans who don't get cancer from radiation - on Mars. After some generations, people new to Mars would still have a 10% cancer rate, while the locals wouldn't have to worry.
My wife just tried Thunderbird. It imported email from 3 accounts in the Mozilla suite. It mixed up all the mail between accounts. I switched to Fedora this spring, which uses Evolution for email and I like it just fine. There is a Windows port of Evolution in the works, but there is no firm timeframe for release yet. I see that it sent it's first message recently.
No, but they can restrict themselves to a subset of the standards that are supported by most browsers, while recommending people use one that is "more standards compliant" so these issues can go away in the future. They used to say "best viewed with IEx or NetscapeX.x" - the whole reason for that was compliance issues. Actually, if a lot of commercial sites demanded people use FF or some other browser, most people would just roll over and use that browser the same way they rolled over and used IE and downloaded Flash. I still wouldn't force them to do it or they'd lose business - the same way they lose my business if they require IE today.
Sure, so if they expanded the feature table to include all those things, the free programs would be clearly lacking. That really was my point. To just put them in a seperate category because they are commercial makes the free stuff look bad for no reason. To extend the feature matrix a bit and show why the commercial software is better would be more informative, and IMHO a more honest way to show the differences. On the other hand, the guy who made the chart probably doesn't care about print features and would probably lump them together as a single "commercial print features" check box. You're right, I should have stopped a long time ago...
Since this is a math guy, he might want to look at using Python (or other language) to generate SVG files. I've been doing this lately and it works nice and can be displayed/printed with Inkscape and a little Javascript allows animation in the Alpha release of Firefox 1.5.
Also very interesting is the correlation between SVG paths and CNC tool paths, but I have yet to build or buy a CNC.
I love it when professionals from other (non IT) fields post to slashdot. They're usually lurkers, but when they have something to say it's almost always more interesting than the usual stuff here. Good job ripping him a new one ;-)
Yeah, except that 1) the collusion wouldn't go over too well with the FTC. and more importantly 2) retailers are whores. They'll sell anything to make a buck. They're just trying to avoid tough questions from the consumer in this case.
That's because the public is tired of being alienated by corporations. Tired of being a "resource" kept in a box (cubicle). Tired of following buisness "processes". The masses have been quitely wanting. Wanting recognition. It's sad that people feel great satisfaction from a few annonymous folks posting comments in response to their blog. This says a lot about the society we live in.
I always say: "If you can't trust yourself to keep a secret, why would you trust someone else?"
Most people don't care about watching video on their PC. I know someone who was all excited about his new "Media Center" PC when he got it. Then he discovered he can't play DVDs he recorded on anything else - including his DVD player in the living room. He doesn't talk about it any more, and obviously he doesn't bring over any cool shows he recorded either. The only thing I've ever really said about it is "why do you want to watch TV on a 17 inch monitor?". Now he's got a DVD recorder by the TV. It's just stupid, and when these issues come up, Joe consumer is just going to buy an HD-DVD player and connect it to his TV.
The real key to all this is to spread FireFox. If web sites decide they have to support alternative browsers, there just won't be any DRMed content anyway. The stuff you buy in the store most people don't view on the PC. This is an attempt by Hollywood to eliminate the distribution channels (and costs), but people just don't want to download movies and watch them on a PC - not most people.
Why not use 10 car batteries? How about Motorcycle batteries? For lighting there's no need to convert to AC to use regular bulbs. Other stuff could be a problem - I don't think you can't get a 120V inverter at home depot.
The 3/32" gap is between the rotor and stator. There are other magnets on the other side of the stator, so the full stator thickness plus 2 gaps lie between the 2 sets of magnets. This allows a lot of flux to circle back to an adjacent magnet rather than go through the stator coil to the other side. You can't make an arbitrarily thin stator, but you can use a metal core material. That would eliminate one set of magnets, but would also introduce cogging torque which may cause startup problems for them. We have 7-800W motors where I work now, and they have total magnetic material of about 3 or 4 of those magnets. They are commercially designed and manufactured, and they run full power at 800-1000rpm - not at all the same as the otherpower guys. I guess my point is that their "low tech" construction does entail some inefficiency in terms of materials. They really have to move up to 48V systems too, 100Amps will burn 10Watts per miliohm of resistance and 140Watts in their rectifiers. Material inefficiency is costly when you build it, but this electrical issue burns power all the time it's in operation. Even with all that, I do give those guys a lot of credit for actually building stuff that works and makes respectable amounts of power.
Austin City Limits would be cool too - especially in Hi definition.
I've been doing 3 phase permanent magnet motor controllers for many years now, and I find the amount of magnetic material in the OtherPower alternators to absolutely insane. OTOH, I think they do it that way for simplicity of construction and to get zero cogging torque. i.e. They could use only 1 ring of magnets and use metal coil forms on a steel plate. The problem then is that the magnetic poles tend to "stick" to the metal ones and you get what's known as cogging torque - you can feel these sticky spots as you turn the motor. They also use an absolutely huge air gap (the full thickness of the coils) which leads to flux going between poles instead of throught the coils - another source of inefficiency. OTOH, they sell magnets to people wanting to replicate what they've done ;-)
I still think the broadcasters should all start using multicasting - they could put cable out of business. Let me plug this again: Digital Fox stations should air Fox Network, Fox News, Fox Kids, and the other one (is it Fox sports?). PBS should run their news/financial shows, PBS kids stuff, and some form of public servie - like 24 hour commercial free weather or a channel guide. If all 8 stations available at my house would run just 2-3 subchannels it could make paying for cable look really stupid to most people.
Also, this transition has been coming for over a decade. Anyone who bought a TV in the last 5 years should have done a little research and planned ahead - for me that meant not paying more than a couple hundred dollars for a 27" TV that will be obsolete in a few years. The key is that it's always been "just a few years" down the road. Anyone who feels "fucked" should have spent less time in front of the TV and learned what's happening in the world.
I thought a HDMI input would accept unencrypted DVI as well. So I can't connect my PC to my TV if it's only got HDMI? If that's the case, I won't be buying any time soon - not until the prices come way down. I'm not paying $2000 for a TV that I can't feed my own video into. That's just stupid.