When I was a student at Cornell, I worked in the Department of Plasma Physics one summer. We got some money from a startup company to do some research on these same types of plasma lamps. I looked at the spectrum of the light these lamps using a spectrometer. Of particular interest to me was the spectrum during the time when the lamp was starting up. I discovered some spectral lines and was able to determine which elements were present inside the bulb (i.e. reverse engineering). I recall there was sulfur, argon, and trace amounts of a other noble gases like krypton. In any case, here are my thoughts on these bulbs.
The benefits:
Super efficient light (2x as efficient as LEDs)
Gorgeous spectrum. Matches the spectrum of the sun VERY closely. Beautiful white light is emitted and it is extremely intense. I was instructed by my professor to not look directly at the bulb when it was powered on.
The Drawbacks:
The lamps take about 10 seconds to start up.
After they are powered off, you have to wait about 2 minutes before you can turn them back on again. This is because certain elements inside the bulbs (like sulfur) need to cool down, solidify, and redeposited themselves back onto the interior walls of the quartz bulb.
They must be mounted atop a very large (about 25cm x 25cm x 15cm) magnetron that generates microwaves.
The bulb must be surrounded by a Faraday cage (in this case, a metal screen) so that the microwaves are confined to the area around the bulb only.
The magnetron is bulky, heavy, and noisy
The bulb itself gets VERY hot. They can be a fire hazard.
They definately have some good applications, like for use in stadiums, airports, etc. However, I think there needs to be more research done to make them usable in homes and automobiles.
The mormons I know are very friendly, caring, family oriented, smart, and law abiding. I'm paying close attention to Romney this election because I think it will be good for America to have someone with those qualities in office. Running a country isn't that much different from running a business. It all boils down to doing cost/benefit analysis on a bunch of huge multivariable problems. I think Romney has the best brain for that compared to the other candidates. He has already proven he can do successfully with his own business (Bain & Company).
Energy savings : How much more energy is requried to manufacture a CFL compared to an incandescent? When this is factored into the energy savings equation, are CFs still more efficient than incandescents? My guess is that CFLs are still more efficient overall, but it would be nice to know how much energy is requried to manufacture a CFL compared to an incandescent.
Reliability : I bought 25 CFLs for my house to replace all the incandescents. Two of them died at ~500 hours. One of them died at ~1000 hours. Whats up with that? I thought these things were supposed to last ~6000 hours? The bulbs I got were 13W CFLs from Home Depot. There are six bulbs per box and a box costs $10. Has anyone else also experienced high "infant mortality" CFL failures?
Size : I've noticed some light fixtures cannot accept CFLs because they are too long (measured from the top of the bulb to the base screw).
Dimmer : Most CFLs aren't dimmable. The dimmable florescent lights I've seen (in hospitals for example) behave differently than incandescents when dimmed. The spectrum of incandescent lights changes when it dims. The dimmer you make it, the "warmer" (i.e. longer wavelength) the light gets. This color change is desireable by some people and doesn't happen in CFLs.
Pollution : CFLs contain mercury. How are people supposed to safely discard them? Toss them in the garbage or put them in the recycling?
WoW runs fine using the most recent version of Wine on my Gentoo GNU/Linux box. I use the proprietary nVidia drivers for my Nvidia GeForce 7600 PCI-express video card. WoW never crashes when running under Wine on my box.
Give people the option on Dell's website to select Operating System Not Installed. Clearly explain in layman's terms what that means; you won't be able to play World of Warcraft unless buy and install Microsoft Windows separately (sort of like "Batteries Not Included"). Yes, I know WoW runs under Wine on GNU/Linux but that probably isn't something the average user will be able achieve easily.
Give people the option to receive a GNU/Linux distribution CD-ROM with their system. Dell should not attempt to provide software support for any GNU/Linux distribution since it will be too expensive. Their "Home" users are for the most part not computer savvy, and won't know what to do when their USB device doesn't "just work" under GNU/Linux. Instead, Dell should direct GNU/Linux users to obtain software support from the respective GNU/Linux distribution website (RedHat, Ubuntu, SuSe, etc)
Dell should Ship with the PC their excellent Diagnostic Test Software boot CD-ROM. If you've used this, you'll know that it is best PC hardware testing software out there. It tests every single hardware component of your PC. Dell could use this to provide hardware support for the systems they sell.
Here is what I think governemnts should do:
Make it ILLEGAL for PC manufacturers to install "craplets" -- software that just slows down your computer and wastes hard drive space. Example: AOL Free Trial! Then GNU/Linux PCs would actually have a competitive price advantage over Microsoft Windows based PCs. Currently, OEMs make about $70 per PC by installing craplets on their PCs. These craplets typically only run on Microsoft Windows. This is one reason why PCs that ship with Microsoft Windows are cheaper than Linux PCs. This would be a win-win since Microsoft doesn't want craplets on PCs either. Many craplets are not Vista compatible, and actually cause problems that make Vista "look bad" to the consumer.
So I just went to the Dell and HP websites. They don't allow me to choose between XP and Vista. The only option is Vista. What kind of crap is that? I'm purchasing for a small business, and don't want to have to jump through any extra hoops to buy PCs online that run XP. I tested Vista. It isn't compatible with all of our software, so I don't want it. I do want XP though.
Is Microsoft forcing OEMs to sell PCs with Vista and not XP because they want to make their Vista sales numbers look good?
Microsoft reports is 2007 1Q results: "We sold x million copies of Vista in Febuary 2007. People must love it!!"
Couldn't an organized crowd just pull the metal screens off their windows and use them as shields? Last I checked, those work great against microwaves. You could even make clothing made of flexible metal mesh to block the incoming rays.
Happy New Year. This post is 3 hours old and there are still no replies. Could all the Slashdotters be asleep?
Back on topic...
I did notice when I was evaluating the final version of Vista that the Sound Recorder in Vista only let me save audio in Microsoft's proprietary (and lossy) format. There was no option to save the audio as PCM. So if the user were to modify and save that file repeatedly, the audio quality would get worse and worse each time he/she saved the file.
Sorta like one program I used that automatically re-saved your images (including lossy JPGs) if you rotated them. Rotate them 200 times and your photo becomes all full of image artifacts (blurry). This might make software easier to use (Fisher Price like), but is really bad design.
1) The auction house keeps a percentage of the sale value of all items sold (like Ebay). This in effect destroys in game currency, and deflates the economy a little.
2) Souldbound items. This prevents items from flooding the market (high supply) and consequently bringing prices down.
3) The creation of new types of items. As soon as Blizzard creates a new item, (.e.g My Purple Sword of Instant Kills), it is scarce and everyone wants it.
Balmer thinks that if hardware were cheaper, people would have more money left over. If people have more money to spend, they can better afford Microsoft software. Balmer thinks that if people could afford Microsoft software, then they would rather buy it than pirate it. He probably thinks that it is less of a hassle to buy software than pirate to it. There are people who think the opposite for good reasons.
However, like traffic tickets and sales tax, MS Windows is a regressive tax; it hurts the poor much more than the rich. The solution is to scale the price of Windows so that it is a fixed percentage (like 10% maybe) of the total PC cost, but with a max cap of say $200. Under this pricing scheme, a $300 PC would cost $330 if you wanted Windows on it. A $10000 PC would cost $200 if you wanted Windows on it. That would make Windows more affordable in developing countries where cheap PCs are in high demand.
As far as the big picture is concerned, what Balmer ought to consider is what _Microsoft_ does that is wrong and evil. Exploiting the poor is evil. A lot of people simply don't realize just how _evil_ exploitation really is because they haven't lived in 3rd world countries. Strongarming businesses is also wrong. Releasing insecure software which forces IT folks to spend countless hours dealing with spyware, viruses, and/or trojans is evil too. No wonder Microsoft has an image problem!
I think the main reason why OEM hardware manufacterers still don't sell PCs with no OS installed is because Windows allows them to test their PC's hardware. This comes in handy when you have to provide support for your product. Instead, what OEMs should do is include test software on a bootable CD that tests all the PC's hardware. What do people think about this?
I got all the C1VN hardware working under Gentoo linux including the camera. I'm running the 2.6.5 kernel and the camera works with Gnomemeeting and lots of other v4l software including transcode which allows me to make highly compressed videos.
Why not just copy the recently downloaded fragmented file onto a new partition? The copied file won't have any fragmentation if the new partition is defraged.
I have a 'download' partition, and several 'archive' partitions. Once any one of my downloads is complete, I just move the file from the 'download' partition, to one of the 'archive' partitions. Copying the file can remove its fragmentation...
According to the Deseret News article, Linus says: "The real reason why people don't like SCO, and Darl McBride in particular, is that he is so dishonest."
The article also says that Darl McBride "graduated from Brigham Young University after serving as a missionary with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Japan."
Whats up with that!? So this guy is a Latter-day Saint AND a returned missionary?! Latter-day Saints are supposed to be HONEST. This tidbit of information about Darl is particulary upsetting to me because I'm a member of the Mormon church too except I'm a huge linux fan and very anti-SCO. I even served a mission and went to BYU like he did, except I only went for a year before transferring into Cornell.
My point is that not only is Darl is a discrace to the linux community but also to the church. LDS Church members who aren't "honest in all their dealings with their fellow man" are supposed to be forbidden from entering temples. Therefore, this guy should get excommunicated ASAP if he hasn't already because he's tainting the church's image!
OK I'm excited about 8GB in a flash card because I think it would be cool to have a full fledged linux installation on a PDA which you can easily fit into 8GB.
However, all you people who are excited about flash memory replacing hard drives because they're quieter need to realize something; these cards have a 10Mb/second interface which is SLOW compared to 100Mb/second+ speeds of a desktop/laptop hard drive. Copying disk images and or 700MB movies onto it is going to take about 10 minutes per disk as opposed to less than 1 minute... Plus, I could be wrong on this but don't these cards have a lifetime of like ~700 writes?
Uh, I got windows 98 to work very well under bochs. Its actually quit fast (all things considered) on my 2.4GHz P4. I even have working sound and networking. Dont believe me? See this screenshot that I'm going to take right now...
I just remembered I have a homepage at Cornell (my university network..) that can handle the/. bandwidth demand. Try this link for the
Windows XP under bochs HOWTO & screenshots.
Back in early 2001 I once got a solar panel that supposedly output 16 volts DC at 3 amps which was exactly what my Sony Picturebook C1VN needed. I thought it was cool to be able to power my laptop from the sun so just in case World War III broke out and the national power grid were knocked out, I'd still be able to play Diablo II.
So once the panel arrived, I put it out on my roof under the hot sun and connected it the laptop. I held my breath, pressed the laptop power on button, and... bzzt! pop! The thing shut off. Dangit! And stayed off...
Perplexed, I decided to measure the output voltage of the solar panel with my volt meter. It turned out the panel was outputing 60Volts! Sheesh was there like no ozone over my city that day? Pissed that my laptop wouldn't turn on, I put it aside and tried to figure out a way that I could send it back to the manufacterer so I could get it replaced. Well, three days later the thing resurrected itself! It just mysteriously started working again and its worked ever since.
Now here's another story. The Hitachi 12 gig hard disks they put into those Sony Picturebooks were failing for picturebook users all over the place. Mine was still cranking along but one day it failed in the same manner that everyone else's Picturebook drives were failing. So I upgraded the drive with a 30 gig IBM drive.
The warranty on the Picturebook has long expired so a month ago I decided to examine the drive closer to figure out what could be wrong with it since I had nothing to lose and I needed a drive to put into an old 200mhz desktop linux box. So, I aggresivly pealed off those "If you remove this sticker, you'll void your warranty" stickers that were all over the drive, unscrewed the lid, and looked inside. I saw all these nice, clean, disk platters and heads that swept over them. I smacked the drive a few times, bonked it on my desk surface, tapped the heads with a screwdriver, and finally blew all the dust I got on the platters in the process off with my dirty, moist breath. I put the thing back together, plugged it into my 2.5" to 3.5" disk converted, hooked it up to that old 200mhz desktop, and it WORKED!
Slashdot Mirror
The benefits:
The Drawbacks:
They definately have some good applications, like for use in stadiums, airports, etc. However, I think there needs to be more research done to make them usable in homes and automobiles.
Check our my post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/23/5 It drew a lot of responses from kernel developers.
The mormons I know are very friendly, caring, family oriented, smart, and law abiding. I'm paying close attention to Romney this election because I think it will be good for America to have someone with those qualities in office. Running a country isn't that much different from running a business. It all boils down to doing cost/benefit analysis on a bunch of huge multivariable problems. I think Romney has the best brain for that compared to the other candidates. He has already proven he can do successfully with his own business (Bain & Company).
Energy savings : How much more energy is requried to manufacture a CFL compared to an incandescent? When this is factored into the energy savings equation, are CFs still more efficient than incandescents? My guess is that CFLs are still more efficient overall, but it would be nice to know how much energy is requried to manufacture a CFL compared to an incandescent.
Reliability : I bought 25 CFLs for my house to replace all the incandescents. Two of them died at ~500 hours. One of them died at ~1000 hours. Whats up with that? I thought these things were supposed to last ~6000 hours? The bulbs I got were 13W CFLs from Home Depot. There are six bulbs per box and a box costs $10. Has anyone else also experienced high "infant mortality" CFL failures?
Size : I've noticed some light fixtures cannot accept CFLs because they are too long (measured from the top of the bulb to the base screw).
Dimmer : Most CFLs aren't dimmable. The dimmable florescent lights I've seen (in hospitals for example) behave differently than incandescents when dimmed. The spectrum of incandescent lights changes when it dims. The dimmer you make it, the "warmer" (i.e. longer wavelength) the light gets. This color change is desireable by some people and doesn't happen in CFLs.
Pollution : CFLs contain mercury. How are people supposed to safely discard them? Toss them in the garbage or put them in the recycling?
WoW runs fine using the most recent version of Wine on my Gentoo GNU/Linux box. I use the proprietary nVidia drivers for my Nvidia GeForce 7600 PCI-express video card. WoW never crashes when running under Wine on my box.
Here is what I think governemnts should do:
So I just went to the Dell and HP websites. They don't allow me to choose between XP and Vista. The only option is Vista. What kind of crap is that? I'm purchasing for a small business, and don't want to have to jump through any extra hoops to buy PCs online that run XP. I tested Vista. It isn't compatible with all of our software, so I don't want it. I do want XP though. Is Microsoft forcing OEMs to sell PCs with Vista and not XP because they want to make their Vista sales numbers look good? Microsoft reports is 2007 1Q results: "We sold x million copies of Vista in Febuary 2007. People must love it!!"
Couldn't an organized crowd just pull the metal screens off their windows and use them as shields? Last I checked, those work great against microwaves. You could even make clothing made of flexible metal mesh to block the incoming rays.
Wouldn't a silencer on the sniper rifle defeat this system?
Happy New Year. This post is 3 hours old and there are still no replies. Could all the Slashdotters be asleep?
Back on topic...
I did notice when I was evaluating the final version of Vista that the Sound Recorder in Vista only let me save audio in Microsoft's proprietary (and lossy) format. There was no option to save the audio as PCM. So if the user were to modify and save that file repeatedly, the audio quality would get worse and worse each time he/she saved the file.
Sorta like one program I used that automatically re-saved your images (including lossy JPGs) if you rotated them. Rotate them 200 times and your photo becomes all full of image artifacts (blurry). This might make software easier to use (Fisher Price like), but is really bad design.
I believe this is the correct link to the story: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/100506-micro soft-antipiracy.html?t5
Scarcity in WoW is created in three ways:
1) The auction house keeps a percentage of the sale value of all items sold (like Ebay). This in effect destroys in game currency, and deflates the economy a little.
2) Souldbound items. This prevents items from flooding the market (high supply) and consequently bringing prices down.
3) The creation of new types of items. As soon as Blizzard creates a new item, (.e.g My Purple Sword of Instant Kills), it is scarce and everyone wants it.
Balmer thinks that if hardware were cheaper, people would have more money left over. If people have more money to spend, they can better afford Microsoft software. Balmer thinks that if people could afford Microsoft software, then they would rather buy it than pirate it. He probably thinks that it is less of a hassle to buy software than pirate to it. There are people who think the opposite for good reasons.
However, like traffic tickets and sales tax, MS Windows is a regressive tax; it hurts the poor much more than the rich. The solution is to scale the price of Windows so that it is a fixed percentage (like 10% maybe) of the total PC cost, but with a max cap of say $200. Under this pricing scheme, a $300 PC would cost $330 if you wanted Windows on it. A $10000 PC would cost $200 if you wanted Windows on it. That would make Windows more affordable in developing countries where cheap PCs are in high demand.
As far as the big picture is concerned, what Balmer ought to consider is what _Microsoft_ does that is wrong and evil. Exploiting the poor is evil. A lot of people simply don't realize just how _evil_ exploitation really is because they haven't lived in 3rd world countries. Strongarming businesses is also wrong. Releasing insecure software which forces IT folks to spend countless hours dealing with spyware, viruses, and/or trojans is evil too. No wonder Microsoft has an image problem!
I think the main reason why OEM hardware manufacterers still don't sell PCs with no OS installed is because Windows allows them to test their PC's hardware. This comes in handy when you have to provide support for your product. Instead, what OEMs should do is include test software on a bootable CD that tests all the PC's hardware. What do people think about this?
I experienced the same thing. I set PQmagic7 to resize an ext3 volume. During the process it failed, and the partition went bye bye. argghhh!
I got all the C1VN hardware working under Gentoo linux including the camera. I'm running the 2.6.5 kernel and the camera works with Gnomemeeting and lots of other v4l software including transcode which allows me to make highly compressed videos.
Why not just copy the recently downloaded fragmented file onto a new partition? The copied file won't have any fragmentation if the new partition is defraged. I have a 'download' partition, and several 'archive' partitions. Once any one of my downloads is complete, I just move the file from the 'download' partition, to one of the 'archive' partitions. Copying the file can remove its fragmentation...
According to the Deseret News article, Linus says: "The real reason why people don't like SCO, and Darl McBride in particular, is that he is so dishonest."
The article also says that Darl McBride "graduated from Brigham Young University after serving as a missionary with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Japan."
Whats up with that!? So this guy is a Latter-day Saint AND a returned missionary?! Latter-day Saints are supposed to be HONEST. This tidbit of information about Darl is particulary upsetting to me because I'm a member of the Mormon church too except I'm a huge linux fan and very anti-SCO. I even served a mission and went to BYU like he did, except I only went for a year before transferring into Cornell.
My point is that not only is Darl is a discrace to the linux community but also to the church. LDS Church members who aren't "honest in all their dealings with their fellow man" are supposed to be forbidden from entering temples. Therefore, this guy should get excommunicated ASAP if he hasn't already because he's tainting the church's image!
OK I'm excited about 8GB in a flash card because I think it would be cool to have a full fledged linux installation on a PDA which you can easily fit into 8GB. However, all you people who are excited about flash memory replacing hard drives because they're quieter need to realize something; these cards have a 10Mb/second interface which is SLOW compared to 100Mb/second+ speeds of a desktop/laptop hard drive. Copying disk images and or 700MB movies onto it is going to take about 10 minutes per disk as opposed to less than 1 minute... Plus, I could be wrong on this but don't these cards have a lifetime of like ~700 writes?
Uh, I got windows 98 to work very well under bochs. Its actually quit fast (all things considered) on my 2.4GHz P4. I even have working sound and networking. Dont believe me? See this screenshot that I'm going to take right now...
I just remembered I have a homepage at Cornell (my university network..) that can handle the /. bandwidth demand. Try this link for the
Windows XP under bochs HOWTO & screenshots.
crap my Tripod website is getting overloaded. Anyone got a place where I can temporarilly host my bochs Windows XP screenshots and HOWTO?
I got bochs v2.1 to run Windows XP without any problems. The trick is to configure bochs with --enable-cpu-level=5 --disable-sse.
Here are some screenshots and a howto
Back in early 2001 I once got a solar panel that supposedly output 16 volts DC at 3 amps which was exactly what my Sony Picturebook C1VN needed. I thought it was cool to be able to power my laptop from the sun so just in case World War III broke out and the national power grid were knocked out, I'd still be able to play Diablo II.
:)
So once the panel arrived, I put it out on my roof under the hot sun and connected it the laptop. I held my breath, pressed the laptop power on button, and... bzzt! pop! The thing shut off. Dangit! And stayed off...
Perplexed, I decided to measure the output voltage of the solar panel with my volt meter. It turned out the panel was outputing 60Volts! Sheesh was there like no ozone over my city that day? Pissed that my laptop wouldn't turn on, I put it aside and tried to figure out a way that I could send it back to the manufacterer so I could get it replaced. Well, three days later the thing resurrected itself! It just mysteriously started working again and its worked ever since.
Now here's another story. The Hitachi 12 gig hard disks they put into those Sony Picturebooks were failing for picturebook users all over the place. Mine was still cranking along but one day it failed in the same manner that everyone else's Picturebook drives were failing. So I upgraded the drive with a 30 gig IBM drive.
The warranty on the Picturebook has long expired so a month ago I decided to examine the drive closer to figure out what could be wrong with it since I had nothing to lose and I needed a drive to put into an old 200mhz desktop linux box. So, I aggresivly pealed off those "If you remove this sticker, you'll void your warranty" stickers that were all over the drive, unscrewed the lid, and looked inside. I saw all these nice, clean, disk platters and heads that swept over them. I smacked the drive a few times, bonked it on my desk surface, tapped the heads with a screwdriver, and finally blew all the dust I got on the platters in the process off with my dirty, moist breath. I put the thing back together, plugged it into my 2.5" to 3.5" disk converted, hooked it up to that old 200mhz desktop, and it WORKED!
Pretty cool eh?