"This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long."
From the description: " supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage."
Wow you didn't even get past the first sentence! This isn't designed to power your house for life, it's for an blackout, when a summer storm just knocked out power and it's 100 degrees out and you don't have a $500+ 7000w gas generator laying around. Your car engine is far more powerful than any gas generator and it has gas tank much larger than generators, problem is you can't power your house with the engine on idle, it needs to be revved up a bit, and leaving your car outside revved up for hours risks it being stolen and is hard on the engine unless you know exactly how high the RPMs should be.
Unfortunately they're designing this for the Nissan Leaf which is an electric vehicle with no gas engine so when the battery is dead on your Leaf from powering your house in a blackout you now have no power and no method of transportation. Not smart.
His linkedin goes into a bit more detail:"The Unlimited Detail system consists of a compiler that takes point cloud data and converts it in to a compressed format, the engine is then capable of accessing this data in such a way that it only accesses the pixels needed on screen and ignores the others generating real-time graphics that look like unlimited polygons. it is also the best available way of displaying laser scanned environments, they can be of unlimited size and this will not slow down the system."
Compression? Showing only the information needed on the screen? They already do both of those. Also of interest is he was CEO of "Unlimited Detail" from 1995 until 2010, so apparently this guy has never held a job or graduate college.
Wonder how long the Australian gov't will wait before arresting him for fraud?
"The random read performance depends on four factors, not one: the areal density, the seek/settle time, the rotational latency, and whether the data is in the drive's buffer cache already."
I've tested 15,000rpm drives on xp, vista and 7. Boot-up and starting programs is night and day difference, but you don't really notice the difference any other time.
"it's fairly sequential reading (of multiple mostly sequential stripes in alternation), which is why the modern 5400 RPM drives spank older 7200 RPM and 10k RPM drives."
True, but very few people do a lot of sequential reading, unless you're doing a lot of video editing with large-ish files, ~100+ mB, where a older 50mB/sec 7200rpm drive would be beat by a modern 5400rpm 100+ mB/sec drive due to the areal density, but you have to go back several years to find a 7200rpm drive that only does 50mB/sec.
Lottery winnings have about a 50% tax in the US. Thats why all the news articles state "blah blah won $100 million in the lottery, or about $46 million after taxes."
My issue with requiring Internet to play is I no longer own the game, it still belongs to whoever I bought it from. Maybe that sounds tinfoil hatish but it's true, if blizzard decides someday to start charging monthly for the game I already paid for all that will happen is an article on/.
Blizzard is not the company I grew up with. They've been corrupted by WoW and it's only a matter of time before they think everyone that plays one of their games should pay a monthly fee. Requiring a constant Internet connection is just step 1
Agreed. While he's not charging for this extension and it is useful there are I'm sure hundreds of very useful Chrome extensions out there and/. is not the place to post all of them.
I'd also like to comment that I disagree with CmdrTaco (sorry!!) to add an option to only allow sound from the visible tab since I listened to internet radio and leave those running in a background tab.
Instead I would like there to be maybe a small speaker icon on the tab itself, perhaps on the right side next to the X, that would appear if there was sound coming from that tab. That I would find useful.
Nooooo! I must be super intelligent because I use Opera INTERNET STUDY SAID SO!
Pointless study is pointless. This isn't even a fair study:
"AptiQuant, a "psychometric consulting" firm that provides hiring exams for businesses, gave online IQ tests to more than 100,000 people. Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using."
"Organic searches or advertisements" of what? If I'm searching for a job and this company does hiring exams, guess what browser I'm going to be using with online job forms? IE, since I've seen plenty of online job applications specifically state they are most compatible with IE.
And they used online IQ tests to test the users. Last time I checked those were as fake as a 3 dollar bill. Even companies selling online IQ tests admit they're fake:"There are many so-called ‘IQ tests’ online. The vast majority these or more are not scientifically valid or reliable." (their emphasis)
"but you can certainly construct tests, not entirely artificial, where RPM matters more than density, within reason."
You don't need tests, you can definitely notice a quicker boot-up and snappier performance when using a 15,000 RPM drive. Those milliseconds add up fast!
I always wanted a 15,000 RPM drive, so when they dropped to ~$40 on ebay (they're cheaper than that now) a few years back I picked one up along with a cheap PCI SCSI card. The difference was very noticeable, XP booted much faster than normal, and the transfer rate maxed out the PCI bus. I still have it in one of my PCs.
"I'm always quick to point out that a new 5400 RPM laptop drive approaches the speed of the early 15,000 RPM desktop drives"
True, but no one buys a 15,000 RPM drive for transfer rates, they buy them for access time, which you can't increase with higher areal density. Even our modern 3TB drives are no match for a 10 yr old 15,000 RPM drive.
That is why smartphones are trouncing all game consoles. Apple put iOS devices in everyone's hands and then said "have fun developers" and made it cheap and easy for developers to make games and either give them away and make $$ from in-app purchases or sell them for 99 cents or more. Consumers obviously loved this, their $50 PC game is now free or only a few dollars. Sure, graphics aren't perfect but that never mattered, look how bad the Wii killed the PS3 and Xbox360 despite having inferior graphics or how the original 4-shades of grey Gameboy beat the 4096 color Sega Game Gear.
If Nintendo wants to survive they need to create an easy to use app store and make it incredibly simple and cheap for developers to join and create games.
but people will find out because when the criminals use the credit cards or the social security numbers they stole and are caught and an investigation is done it will lead back to the financial company. When a financial company is breached they don't steal one credit card they steal millions which means there's millions of chances to get caught. The law basically gives the financial company a free pass as long as they report it, it's like a kid telling his mom he stole the cookies and being told not to do it again compared to lying about it and being beaten when the truth is discovered, it's in the company's best interest to report it.
Hate to say it but I told you so: "Google+ gives just too much power to Google. They already own our search, our emails, our videos and many people have Android OS phones, but now they want facebook and twitter? What's left? What won't belong to Google if we all leave facebook and join Google+?"
There's a US law stating that companies must report if your credit card information is stolen but I'm having a hard time finding that law at the moment. I remember it being enacted by Congress and the UK is working on their own version.
"This makes my commute so much more pleasant, I can watch videos and^J^J^ NO CARRIER"
Did the window break? That's a few hundred dollars now and glass has been around for umpteen years, I can't wait to see the cost of replacing a ~27" touchscreen.
The problem with Paypal is they're established and they have a 800# call center and they're in the US. I call this a "problem" because I don't like them but these problems make them the only half-way legitimate solution. There's tons of alternatives, Bitcoin, Google Checkout and something called AlertPay, but Bitcoin is not established and they have no customer support, AlertPay is in Canada (no US laws) and too new to know if they're legitimate, and Google Checkout has it'sshareofcomplaints and they don't even have a 800 number.
If Google can't seem to come up with a decent Paypal alternative there's no way in hell anyone else will. Paypal's been around 10+ years and they're linked to eBay, it would take a miracle for a reputable alternative to spring up and become dominate because the alternative would have to convince millions of businesses and customers who are accustomed to Paypal to switch. Also it's important to note that Paypal has never been hacked in 10+ years which is very important for a company that stories credit card and bank account info.
"Its not. It costs $6 just to rent a single movie and their free movies are lame. "
VUDU is the same. You can only rent movies to stream, unlike netflix where you pay once a month for all-you-can-eat. And VUDU has been around for 4 years. Yes, FOUR, and it hasn't gone mainstream yet, while Netflix is everywhere.
since these are in consumer's homes I'm sure they're not going to ship you a traditional rack of servers.
Intel's been talking about using Atom cpus for servers because they cut power by 75%. I'd imagine they'd ship you something the size of a microwave with a dozen or so CPUs in it. If the server is also a good 8-port wifi bgn router and they agree to give me free high-speed broadband (since they're using a good portion of it) and they install it in my existing central heating unit then I'd consider allowing them to put one in my basement.
"Note that these are not fully integrated, so people are segregated by the service I use to broadcast. "
Thank god! I'm a little worried by a facebook-clone (google+) linked with my email (gmail) linked with my youtube linked with my twitter (google+) linked with my search (google) linked with my Android phone linked with GPS. I really really don't like the idea of all of these communicating with each other whenever they want.
Google+ gives just too much power to Google. They already own our search, our emails, our videos and many people have Android OS phones, but now they want facebook and twitter? What's left? What won't belong to Google if we all leave facebook and join Google+?
Slashdot Mirror
"This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long."
From the description:
" supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage."
Wow you didn't even get past the first sentence! This isn't designed to power your house for life, it's for an blackout, when a summer storm just knocked out power and it's 100 degrees out and you don't have a $500+ 7000w gas generator laying around. Your car engine is far more powerful than any gas generator and it has gas tank much larger than generators, problem is you can't power your house with the engine on idle, it needs to be revved up a bit, and leaving your car outside revved up for hours risks it being stolen and is hard on the engine unless you know exactly how high the RPMs should be.
This is not a new idea, this guy did it with his Prius in 2009, but I'm glad a manufacture is finally designing a car that can function as a generator rather than the "backyard mechanics" method consumers had to use in the past.
Unfortunately they're designing this for the Nissan Leaf which is an electric vehicle with no gas engine so when the battery is dead on your Leaf from powering your house in a blackout you now have no power and no method of transportation. Not smart.
"Looks like the Australians just got scammed for 2 million."
Worse than that, he did this over a year ago. Here's his video from February 2010 which is basically the same as the July 2011 version.
His linkedin goes into a bit more detail: "The Unlimited Detail system consists of a compiler that takes point cloud data and converts it in to a compressed format, the engine is then capable of accessing this data in such a way that it only accesses the pixels needed on screen and ignores the others generating real-time graphics that look like unlimited polygons. it is also the best available way of displaying laser scanned environments, they can be of unlimited size and this will not slow down the system."
Compression? Showing only the information needed on the screen? They already do both of those. Also of interest is he was CEO of "Unlimited Detail" from 1995 until 2010, so apparently this guy has never held a job or graduate college.
Wonder how long the Australian gov't will wait before arresting him for fraud?
"The random read performance depends on four factors, not one: the areal density, the seek/settle time, the rotational latency, and whether the data is in the drive's buffer cache already."
About 99% of random read performance depends on RPM, the other 1% is everything else. As for areal density and buffer: Techwarelabs short stroked a 7200rpm 1.5tb to 300gb and only got 10.3ms while 2004's (ok 7 yrs not 10 like I originally said) Fujitsu MAU3147 15,000rpm SCSI drive has a average random access time of 5.7 milliseconds. That Fujitsu is a 73gb drive with a much smaller buffer (8 vs 32mb) and much lower areal density than the 1.5tb drive and it's still nearly twice as fast at accessing data randomly. In case you think that's some kind of fluke Tomshardware tested a 450gb 15,000rpm SAS drive. It got 6.0ms.
I've tested 15,000rpm drives on xp, vista and 7. Boot-up and starting programs is night and day difference, but you don't really notice the difference any other time.
"it's fairly sequential reading (of multiple mostly sequential stripes in alternation), which is why the modern 5400 RPM drives spank older 7200 RPM and 10k RPM drives."
True, but very few people do a lot of sequential reading, unless you're doing a lot of video editing with large-ish files, ~100+ mB, where a older 50mB/sec 7200rpm drive would be beat by a modern 5400rpm 100+ mB/sec drive due to the areal density, but you have to go back several years to find a 7200rpm drive that only does 50mB/sec.
"I'm sure a modern 3TB drive would match or beat a 10 year old 15k RPM drive if you used short stroking* [tomshardware.com] on the modern drive."
You would be wrong. 2004's (ok 7 yrs) Fujitsu MAU3147 15,000rpm SCSI drive has a average random access time of 5.7 milliseconds. Tomhardware short-stroked a 7200rpm 250gb SATA drive down to only 12gb and only got 8.5 milliseconds. They also tested a 15,000 SAS in the same test and got 6.0ms.
Techwarelabs short stroked a 7200rpm 1.5tb to 300gb and only got 10.3ms
There is no replacement for RPM.
Lottery winnings have about a 50% tax in the US. Thats why all the news articles state "blah blah won $100 million in the lottery, or about $46 million after taxes."
My issue with requiring Internet to play is I no longer own the game, it still belongs to whoever I bought it from. Maybe that sounds tinfoil hatish but it's true, if blizzard decides someday to start charging monthly for the game I already paid for all that will happen is an article on /.
Blizzard is not the company I grew up with. They've been corrupted by WoW and it's only a matter of time before they think everyone that plays one of their games should pay a monthly fee. Requiring a constant Internet connection is just step 1
Agreed. While he's not charging for this extension and it is useful there are I'm sure hundreds of very useful Chrome extensions out there and /. is not the place to post all of them.
I'd also like to comment that I disagree with CmdrTaco (sorry!!) to add an option to only allow sound from the visible tab since I listened to internet radio and leave those running in a background tab.
Instead I would like there to be maybe a small speaker icon on the tab itself, perhaps on the right side next to the X, that would appear if there was sound coming from that tab. That I would find useful.
Nooooo! I must be super intelligent because I use Opera INTERNET STUDY SAID SO!
Pointless study is pointless. This isn't even a fair study: "AptiQuant, a "psychometric consulting" firm that provides hiring exams for businesses, gave online IQ tests to more than 100,000 people. Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using."
"Organic searches or advertisements" of what? If I'm searching for a job and this company does hiring exams, guess what browser I'm going to be using with online job forms? IE, since I've seen plenty of online job applications specifically state they are most compatible with IE.
And they used online IQ tests to test the users. Last time I checked those were as fake as a 3 dollar bill. Even companies selling online IQ tests admit they're fake: "There are many so-called ‘IQ tests’ online. The vast majority these or more are not scientifically valid or reliable." (their emphasis)
"held in the Houston home of Hanson's parents, the couple stood before a 30-inch monitor in the backyard."
Why did my brain automatically read basement instead of backyard?
"but you can certainly construct tests, not entirely artificial, where RPM matters more than density, within reason."
You don't need tests, you can definitely notice a quicker boot-up and snappier performance when using a 15,000 RPM drive. Those milliseconds add up fast!
I always wanted a 15,000 RPM drive, so when they dropped to ~$40 on ebay (they're cheaper than that now) a few years back I picked one up along with a cheap PCI SCSI card. The difference was very noticeable, XP booted much faster than normal, and the transfer rate maxed out the PCI bus. I still have it in one of my PCs.
"I'm always quick to point out that a new 5400 RPM laptop drive approaches the speed of the early 15,000 RPM desktop drives"
True, but no one buys a 15,000 RPM drive for transfer rates, they buy them for access time, which you can't increase with higher areal density. Even our modern 3TB drives are no match for a 10 yr old 15,000 RPM drive.
Nintendo needs an app store.
That is why smartphones are trouncing all game consoles. Apple put iOS devices in everyone's hands and then said "have fun developers" and made it cheap and easy for developers to make games and either give them away and make $$ from in-app purchases or sell them for 99 cents or more. Consumers obviously loved this, their $50 PC game is now free or only a few dollars. Sure, graphics aren't perfect but that never mattered, look how bad the Wii killed the PS3 and Xbox360 despite having inferior graphics or how the original 4-shades of grey Gameboy beat the 4096 color Sega Game Gear.
If Nintendo wants to survive they need to create an easy to use app store and make it incredibly simple and cheap for developers to join and create games.
but people will find out because when the criminals use the credit cards or the social security numbers they stole and are caught and an investigation is done it will lead back to the financial company. When a financial company is breached they don't steal one credit card they steal millions which means there's millions of chances to get caught. The law basically gives the financial company a free pass as long as they report it, it's like a kid telling his mom he stole the cookies and being told not to do it again compared to lying about it and being beaten when the truth is discovered, it's in the company's best interest to report it.
Hate to say it but I told you so: "Google+ gives just too much power to Google. They already own our search, our emails, our videos and many people have Android OS phones, but now they want facebook and twitter? What's left? What won't belong to Google if we all leave facebook and join Google+?"
So essentially Bitcoin is great for sending a guy on a forum some money, but very poor if you're setting up a shopping cart for a business.
There's a US law stating that companies must report if your credit card information is stolen but I'm having a hard time finding that law at the moment. I remember it being enacted by Congress and the UK is working on their own version.
So pirate it.... Leave the purchasing of apps to the iOS chumps...
This is what makes the thought of developing for Android so enticing...
Shame you posted as AC, I think that's a very Insightful comment.
"This makes my commute so much more pleasant, I can watch videos and^J^J^ NO CARRIER"
Did the window break? That's a few hundred dollars now and glass has been around for umpteen years, I can't wait to see the cost of replacing a ~27" touchscreen.
The problem with Paypal is they're established and they have a 800# call center and they're in the US. I call this a "problem" because I don't like them but these problems make them the only half-way legitimate solution. There's tons of alternatives, Bitcoin, Google Checkout and something called AlertPay, but Bitcoin is not established and they have no customer support, AlertPay is in Canada (no US laws) and too new to know if they're legitimate, and Google Checkout has it's share of complaints and they don't even have a 800 number.
If Google can't seem to come up with a decent Paypal alternative there's no way in hell anyone else will. Paypal's been around 10+ years and they're linked to eBay, it would take a miracle for a reputable alternative to spring up and become dominate because the alternative would have to convince millions of businesses and customers who are accustomed to Paypal to switch. Also it's important to note that Paypal has never been hacked in 10+ years which is very important for a company that stories credit card and bank account info.
"Its not. It costs $6 just to rent a single movie and their free movies are lame. "
VUDU is the same. You can only rent movies to stream, unlike netflix where you pay once a month for all-you-can-eat. And VUDU has been around for 4 years. Yes, FOUR, and it hasn't gone mainstream yet, while Netflix is everywhere.
And VUDU wants 99 cents to $5.99. Come on, $5.99 is about what I pay Netflix for the month, and you want me to give you that for just one movie? No thanks, not when I have redbox down the street with $1 DVDs and $2 games.
IT'S A TRAP!
since these are in consumer's homes I'm sure they're not going to ship you a traditional rack of servers.
Intel's been talking about using Atom cpus for servers because they cut power by 75%. I'd imagine they'd ship you something the size of a microwave with a dozen or so CPUs in it. If the server is also a good 8-port wifi bgn router and they agree to give me free high-speed broadband (since they're using a good portion of it) and they install it in my existing central heating unit then I'd consider allowing them to put one in my basement.
"And how many of those on eBay will you get a box with a brick?"
box with a brick? Now you're just being ridiculous
Agreed.
"Note that these are not fully integrated, so people are segregated by the service I use to broadcast. "
Thank god! I'm a little worried by a facebook-clone (google+) linked with my email (gmail) linked with my youtube linked with my twitter (google+) linked with my search (google) linked with my Android phone linked with GPS. I really really don't like the idea of all of these communicating with each other whenever they want.
Google+ gives just too much power to Google. They already own our search, our emails, our videos and many people have Android OS phones, but now they want facebook and twitter? What's left? What won't belong to Google if we all leave facebook and join Google+?
"When will we have the first "He took my Facebook pics and created a sex doll out of me" lawsuits?"
Probably awhile, since you could print out a girl's photo and paste it to a sex doll now, only difference would be the level of realism... although Kim Kardashian is already suing someone because they naturally look like her (brunette with dark eyes) so I might be wrong.