Spectra has been selling a "Solar Cube" system for years now, which seems to be just what these folks from MIT are making. Same application and everything. I wonder how different the MIT thing is.
With real live cops it is more sporting: they might not see you and you can talk your way out of it sometimes. With the machines it's bam, you get a ticket no matter what, even in the (admittedly rare) case that you had to speed up to avoid something else more dangerous.
If they're going to install ticket cameras, then where's my self-driving car that won't go over the speed limit??
Anyway, the point they make in the article is that these cameras aren't actually making the roads safer at all, they're just a way for the state to make money off motorists.
I think that for Linux to really take off in the desktop area, all of the Linux programs that people would want to use should be ported to, and work well on, both Windows and Mac. That way, people using those platforms could start using all the cool apps available for Linux, but under the OS that they are already used to. Once people are using all free apps, the underlying OS will be a lot less important.
Getting (native) GTK working well on Mac would be a major improvement; that way both Qt and GTK, the two major free toolkits, would be available for developers on all platforms.
I hear KDE is coming out with a native Mac release. I am really looking forward to it.
Sky WindPower? Argh. In the solar industry in California there is PowerLight, SunPower, Sun Light and Power, Sun Power and Geothermal... Just to name a few. I was hoping there would be more interesting names from now on in the alternative energy biz.
Actually I'm not sure that the analogy is so good; the whole point of having the sensor on the garage door is so that if something is blocking the door it will not shut. Having the sensor at the top means that things smaller than eight feet or so (like people, pets, cars, or most other things you might store in a garage) will not trip the sensor, and get hit by the door. So putting the sensor at the top is pretty useless; you might at well not have a sensor at all.
One great thing about FOSS is that it tries to adhere to standards and have things be more or less portable. But people still use non-portable APIs (e.g. ALSA), and there are really not that many people with the knowledge and motivation to port things to Windows or Mac from Linux where most of the apps are written.
I like GNOME, but saying that GTK is portable is only technically correct; you CAN port it, but it's not exactly easy or even possible in all cases. There is a Windows port, which is great, but the Mac OS X port is still not really usable (although there has been some great progress lately). I would love to see a fully ported GTK and QT for Windows and OS X, with established generic build systems; this would expose FOSS programs to a much larger user base, and allow more people to get involved in development too. These days it can be harder to set up the build system than to actually hack on the code.
I have seen a few projects that have really focused on getting things to run on the Big Three platforms (Lilypond is my favorite example) and they have really healthy communities around them, partly because anyone with a computer can use the software.
I worked for a place that was working on this too. They used lithium bromide to suck the water out of the air, and then extracted the water by reverse osmosis. Presumably you could do power the RO unit with solar panels.
My friend was reading a cigar catalog today. As if that wasn't silly enough, there was an ad inside for a "kinetic watch winder". It is a device "for people who own multiple kinetic watches". You put your spare watches on a little wheel and it spins them for you. Oh the irony.
My company is going through financial troubles right now because the head of the company is an engineer. He is a great guy and smart, but his real talents lie in engineering, not in business.
IMHO the CEO's job is to meet with people and push the company in directions that will make the company better and more profitable. This requires people skills and finance skills, not engineering skills. The CTO can be written in as a joint partner, make just as much cash, have loads of influence, and not be bothered with as much management b.s.
Sure, a an engineer CAN be a great CEO, but what's the point?
This works especially well when combined with solar panels, since they output DC anyway; why waste energy converting to AC and then back again? Especially since the power is generated on-site so it doesn't have to deal with the resitive loss of travel down miles of power lines, although I realize there can be a lot of wiring inside the building too. Seems like if you're running a large facility with big machines that are contantly running, it makes sense to have some DC infrastructure. The supermarket down the street has about a megawatt of PV on the roof, and uses all DC refrigerators and air conditioning.
I used to work at a company that was developing a "watermaker in a box"; basically a low-power reverse-osmosis unit in a plastic crate. It's powered by solar panels and uses a 12v deep cycle battery to store power. It can theoretically make about 150 gallons a day. It looks like they finished it and are marketing it. They are targetting boats and RVs, so there would be some kinks to work out in using it in poor rural villages, but it seems like it could be adaptable. They were also working on a bigger "washing-machine sized" system with higher output for the Nigerian government (at least I think it was Nigeria), but about a year ago there was some serious political unrest there and the project fell through.
If you are serious, go to Wikibooks.org, part of the Wikimedia project (same people who do Wikipedia). It looks like someone has already started a book on the GIMP. Maybe you could add to it or use some of it.
This can happen at Wiktionary (English version here). That is the first thing I thought of when I read the title of this articll the Wikipedia people thought of a multilingual wiki dictionary a while back, when thye still had to go around saying "please expand this article, Wikipedia is not a dictionary". I see that Wiktionary only has about 5 English entries for Swahili words. Hopefully this guy will make the content on his site available under a GFDL-compatible license so that it can be assimilated into Wiktionary.
I used to work for a RO company; essentially the membrane splits salty water into extra salty water ("brine") and clean product water. A simplistic explanation is that the polar water molecules split the salt lattice into ions, which get surrounded by more H20 molecules. This means you get big H20/ion clumps that can't squeeze through the membrane, and a bunch more smaller plain old H20 molecules that do get pushed through the membrane. Typically before the membrane you have some prefilters to get out the bigger chunks like bacteria and stuff. Some modern RO systems can be run off solar panels, which would be ideal in a desert application. See also Wikipedia's articles on reverse osmosis and RO desalinization.
The company I worked for actually had a military contract to see if they could get water from air, using lithium bromide. They had a proof of concept thing done, but they were still working out the bugs when I left.
I think that this is one of the few advantages to having a military with huge amounts of cash; they can fund interesting new technologies that need to actually perform in harsh environments. Although maybe instead of killing people, they could do something more interesting and helpful, like explore the depths of the ocean, or the surface of the moon. Just a thought.
Scientific types aren't the only ones who use trig; a couple weeks ago a friend of mine wanted to draw a perfect pentagram on his guitar. We didn't have a a compass or protractor, just rulers and a calculator. It was fun determining the points on the diagram; we hadn't used trig in years, but it really wasn't hard, just basic sines and cosines.
This also reminds me of M.C. Escher; his repeating tiled diagrams (like the
reptiles one) were all based on tiling the plane with geometric figures. I imagine he used trig and other math quite extensively in his work.
(Actually, my pain level is "negative," since from time to time tasks crop up like mass file renaming, which I get done in a few moments but the Windows users take hours and hours to do. Manually. One file at a time. For hundreds and hundreds of files. THAT is pain.)
Cool that you're running Linux without problems. But I have to say that listing mass file renames as a downside to Windows is getting a bit old: ok, on Unix you can do it easily, if you can grok sh or perl or your programming language of choice, but come on now: a
Google search turns up plenty of free file rename tools for windows. Heck, there were even programs to do this on Mac OS 9 and earlier. And the best part is, it was all point-and-click. For the record, another quick web search turns up some GUI renamer tools for Unix too.
On a whim, I tried viewing the article with slashdot/slashdot as the login and password for an existing member, and it worked. That's one to remember for the next time an article requires registration to view: if that account doesn't exist, create it so others can use it. It's easy enough to remember.
Sure, you can call 'open -a Whatever' to run a Mac program from the command line but I was specifically talking about the unix binary; the open command won't pass command line args like --help, --version, etc. to it. You have to run the binary explicitly AFAIK, like '/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/bin /inkscape --help'
I have been using Inkscape on OS X a lot lately, and it works pretty well; there is an Inkscape.app so when you open an SVG file in the Finder, it will open X11 and then open the file with Inkscape.
The unix binary is somewhere inside the.app (which is really just a special type of directory) so you can call it from the command line. This is useful because you can convert SVG files to PNG or PS via the command line with Inkscape. This is really nice for me since I have been making a lot of technical illustrations lately; I do them all in Inkscape's GUI and then I run a Makefile to batch convert them into PNGs or PS files for inclusion into documentation, web pages, etc. Someone also got sponsorship from Google's Summer of Code to work on auto line routing, e.g. for connecting pieces of a schematic; I am really looking forward to this.
There are a few minor glitches; the most noticeable to me is that Inkscape.app won't open a file from the Finder if Inkscape is already running.
Also, Hubert Figuiere, one of AbiWord's developers, has been working on a GTK port to OS X, although it's not in usable shape yet, from what I understand.
My two favorite open source projects are MediaWiki and GNU Lilypond.
MediaWiki is Wikipedia's kickass wiki implementation that has tons of cool features. Wiki was around before MediaWiki, sure, but MW pretty much sets the bar. And of course it powers Wikpedia and all of its sister projects, which are pretty amazing and innovative too.
GNU Lilypond is a music typesetter that aims to produce beautiful sheet music. This is cool because most computer-printed scores look like crap. Lilypond gets flak because it has no dedicated GUI; you have to write the syntax in ASCII (UTF-8 is in the dev version), like a music programming language. But who cares, its syntax is a context-free grammar, which means it's theoretically easy for GUI score editors to pipe output to Lilypond for printing. Now if they would just come up with a more stable syntax...:-p
And of course there's things like the WikiTeX extension for MediaWiki that lets you embed Lilypond code (and TeX, and SVG, and lots of other stuff) into wiki code...
When I used to ride a unicycle regularly I dreamed of a thing like this. Literally. Except in my dreams it was more of a freewheel than a motor. I would sort of "coast" with my feet on the pedals, which is impossible on a normal uni since the cranks are attached directly to the hub. It got to the point where I could start lucid dreaming; I would notice that I was riding without pedalling and my first thought was "Cool! I knew I'd get the hang of this eventually!" And then "oh, wait I must be dreaming." If I had a bunch of spare cash I would definitely make one of these, or maybe pay this guy to make one. You never know, there could be a niche market for this if he could figure out how to get the price down (e.g. bulk orders of parts, like a batch of custom hubs). Anyway IMO this is way cool.
Funny about skates too. I used to hop up stairs and go off-road on my uni but never learned to skate worth a damn. Something about having the wheels strapped to my feet freaked me out. At least on a uni you can bail if things go wrong...
Slashdot Mirror
Spectra has been selling a "Solar Cube" system for years now, which seems to be just what these folks from MIT are making. Same application and everything. I wonder how different the MIT thing is.
Is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?
That link on removing the magnets gives a lot of difficult solutions. Here's what I do:
* Bend open plate with the magnets and clamp it into a vise. (Usually the plate is a "U" shape, with the magnets inside the U.
* Heat up the plate with a heat gun: the magnets are glued on there, and this will melt the glue.
* Pull off the magnet with some pliers.
Easy, and it works every time.
With real live cops it is more sporting: they might not see you and you can talk your way out of it sometimes. With the machines it's bam, you get a ticket no matter what, even in the (admittedly rare) case that you had to speed up to avoid something else more dangerous.
If they're going to install ticket cameras, then where's my self-driving car that won't go over the speed limit??
Anyway, the point they make in the article is that these cameras aren't actually making the roads safer at all, they're just a way for the state to make money off motorists.
I think that for Linux to really take off in the desktop area, all of the Linux programs that people would want to use should be ported to, and work well on, both Windows and Mac. That way, people using those platforms could start using all the cool apps available for Linux, but under the OS that they are already used to. Once people are using all free apps, the underlying OS will be a lot less important.
Getting (native) GTK working well on Mac would be a major improvement; that way both Qt and GTK, the two major free toolkits, would be available for developers on all platforms.
I hear KDE is coming out with a native Mac release. I am really looking forward to it.
I'm surprised not to see any mention of the International Dark-Sky Association; this is what they are all about.
Sky WindPower? Argh. In the solar industry in California there is PowerLight, SunPower, Sun Light and Power, Sun Power and Geothermal... Just to name a few. I was hoping there would be more interesting names from now on in the alternative energy biz.
Actually I'm not sure that the analogy is so good; the whole point of having the sensor on the garage door is so that if something is blocking the door it will not shut. Having the sensor at the top means that things smaller than eight feet or so (like people, pets, cars, or most other things you might store in a garage) will not trip the sensor, and get hit by the door. So putting the sensor at the top is pretty useless; you might at well not have a sensor at all.
Isn't this also how the free software movement started out?
One great thing about FOSS is that it tries to adhere to standards and have things be more or less portable. But people still use non-portable APIs (e.g. ALSA), and there are really not that many people with the knowledge and motivation to port things to Windows or Mac from Linux where most of the apps are written. I like GNOME, but saying that GTK is portable is only technically correct; you CAN port it, but it's not exactly easy or even possible in all cases. There is a Windows port, which is great, but the Mac OS X port is still not really usable (although there has been some great progress lately). I would love to see a fully ported GTK and QT for Windows and OS X, with established generic build systems; this would expose FOSS programs to a much larger user base, and allow more people to get involved in development too. These days it can be harder to set up the build system than to actually hack on the code. I have seen a few projects that have really focused on getting things to run on the Big Three platforms (Lilypond is my favorite example) and they have really healthy communities around them, partly because anyone with a computer can use the software.
I worked for a place that was working on this too. They used lithium bromide to suck the water out of the air, and then extracted the water by reverse osmosis. Presumably you could do power the RO unit with solar panels.
My friend was reading a cigar catalog today. As if that wasn't silly enough, there was an ad inside for a "kinetic watch winder". It is a device "for people who own multiple kinetic watches". You put your spare watches on a little wheel and it spins them for you. Oh the irony.
My company is going through financial troubles right now because the head of the company is an engineer. He is a great guy and smart, but his real talents lie in engineering, not in business.
IMHO the CEO's job is to meet with people and push the company in directions that will make the company better and more profitable. This requires people skills and finance skills, not engineering skills. The CTO can be written in as a joint partner, make just as much cash, have loads of influence, and not be bothered with as much management b.s.
Sure, a an engineer CAN be a great CEO, but what's the point?
This works especially well when combined with solar panels, since they output DC anyway; why waste energy converting to AC and then back again? Especially since the power is generated on-site so it doesn't have to deal with the resitive loss of travel down miles of power lines, although I realize there can be a lot of wiring inside the building too. Seems like if you're running a large facility with big machines that are contantly running, it makes sense to have some DC infrastructure. The supermarket down the street has about a megawatt of PV on the roof, and uses all DC refrigerators and air conditioning.
I used to work at a company that was developing a "watermaker in a box"; basically a low-power reverse-osmosis unit in a plastic crate. It's powered by solar panels and uses a 12v deep cycle battery to store power. It can theoretically make about 150 gallons a day. It looks like they finished it and are marketing it. They are targetting boats and RVs, so there would be some kinks to work out in using it in poor rural villages, but it seems like it could be adaptable. They were also working on a bigger "washing-machine sized" system with higher output for the Nigerian government (at least I think it was Nigeria), but about a year ago there was some serious political unrest there and the project fell through.
Anyway, here's a link: Aquifier 150
If you are serious, go to Wikibooks.org, part of the Wikimedia project (same people who do Wikipedia). It looks like someone has already started a book on the GIMP. Maybe you could add to it or use some of it.
This can happen at Wiktionary (English version here). That is the first thing I thought of when I read the title of this articll the Wikipedia people thought of a multilingual wiki dictionary a while back, when thye still had to go around saying "please expand this article, Wikipedia is not a dictionary". I see that Wiktionary only has about 5 English entries for Swahili words. Hopefully this guy will make the content on his site available under a GFDL-compatible license so that it can be assimilated into Wiktionary.
I used to work for a RO company; essentially the membrane splits salty water into extra salty water ("brine") and clean product water. A simplistic explanation is that the polar water molecules split the salt lattice into ions, which get surrounded by more H20 molecules. This means you get big H20/ion clumps that can't squeeze through the membrane, and a bunch more smaller plain old H20 molecules that do get pushed through the membrane. Typically before the membrane you have some prefilters to get out the bigger chunks like bacteria and stuff. Some modern RO systems can be run off solar panels, which would be ideal in a desert application. See also Wikipedia's articles on reverse osmosis and RO desalinization.
The company I worked for actually had a military contract to see if they could get water from air, using lithium bromide. They had a proof of concept thing done, but they were still working out the bugs when I left.
I think that this is one of the few advantages to having a military with huge amounts of cash; they can fund interesting new technologies that need to actually perform in harsh environments. Although maybe instead of killing people, they could do something more interesting and helpful, like explore the depths of the ocean, or the surface of the moon. Just a thought.
Scientific types aren't the only ones who use trig; a couple weeks ago a friend of mine wanted to draw a perfect pentagram on his guitar. We didn't have a a compass or protractor, just rulers and a calculator. It was fun determining the points on the diagram; we hadn't used trig in years, but it really wasn't hard, just basic sines and cosines.
This also reminds me of M.C. Escher; his repeating tiled diagrams (like the reptiles one) were all based on tiling the plane with geometric figures. I imagine he used trig and other math quite extensively in his work.
(Actually, my pain level is "negative," since from time to time tasks crop up like mass file renaming, which I get done in a few moments but the Windows users take hours and hours to do. Manually. One file at a time. For hundreds and hundreds of files. THAT is pain.)
Cool that you're running Linux without problems. But I have to say that listing mass file renames as a downside to Windows is getting a bit old: ok, on Unix you can do it easily, if you can grok sh or perl or your programming language of choice, but come on now: a Google search turns up plenty of free file rename tools for windows. Heck, there were even programs to do this on Mac OS 9 and earlier. And the best part is, it was all point-and-click. For the record, another quick web search turns up some GUI renamer tools for Unix too.
On a whim, I tried viewing the article with slashdot/slashdot as the login and password for an existing member, and it worked. That's one to remember for the next time an article requires registration to view: if that account doesn't exist, create it so others can use it. It's easy enough to remember.
Sure, you can call 'open -a Whatever' to run a Mac program from the command line but I was specifically talking about the unix binary; the open command won't pass command line args like --help, --version, etc. to it. You have to run the binary explicitly AFAIK, like '/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/bin /inkscape --help'
I have been using Inkscape on OS X a lot lately, and it works pretty well; there is an Inkscape.app so when you open an SVG file in the Finder, it will open X11 and then open the file with Inkscape.
The unix binary is somewhere inside the .app (which is really just a special type of directory) so you can call it from the command line. This is useful because you can convert SVG files to PNG or PS via the command line with Inkscape. This is really nice for me since I have been making a lot of technical illustrations lately; I do them all in Inkscape's GUI and then I run a Makefile to batch convert them into PNGs or PS files for inclusion into documentation, web pages, etc. Someone also got sponsorship from Google's Summer of Code to work on auto line routing, e.g. for connecting pieces of a schematic; I am really looking forward to this.
There are a few minor glitches; the most noticeable to me is that Inkscape.app won't open a file from the Finder if Inkscape is already running.
Also, Hubert Figuiere, one of AbiWord's developers, has been working on a GTK port to OS X, although it's not in usable shape yet, from what I understand.My two favorite open source projects are MediaWiki and GNU Lilypond.
:-p
MediaWiki is Wikipedia's kickass wiki implementation that has tons of cool features. Wiki was around before MediaWiki, sure, but MW pretty much sets the bar. And of course it powers Wikpedia and all of its sister projects, which are pretty amazing and innovative too.
GNU Lilypond is a music typesetter that aims to produce beautiful sheet music. This is cool because most computer-printed scores look like crap. Lilypond gets flak because it has no dedicated GUI; you have to write the syntax in ASCII (UTF-8 is in the dev version), like a music programming language. But who cares, its syntax is a context-free grammar, which means it's theoretically easy for GUI score editors to pipe output to Lilypond for printing. Now if they would just come up with a more stable syntax...
And of course there's things like the WikiTeX extension for MediaWiki that lets you embed Lilypond code (and TeX, and SVG, and lots of other stuff) into wiki code...
When I used to ride a unicycle regularly I dreamed of a thing like this. Literally. Except in my dreams it was more of a freewheel than a motor. I would sort of "coast" with my feet on the pedals, which is impossible on a normal uni since the cranks are attached directly to the hub. It got to the point where I could start lucid dreaming; I would notice that I was riding without pedalling and my first thought was "Cool! I knew I'd get the hang of this eventually!" And then "oh, wait I must be dreaming." If I had a bunch of spare cash I would definitely make one of these, or maybe pay this guy to make one. You never know, there could be a niche market for this if he could figure out how to get the price down (e.g. bulk orders of parts, like a batch of custom hubs). Anyway IMO this is way cool.
Funny about skates too. I used to hop up stairs and go off-road on my uni but never learned to skate worth a damn. Something about having the wheels strapped to my feet freaked me out. At least on a uni you can bail if things go wrong...