If I had a tribble for every time one of these solar energy articles came out with their pages full of nothing.... I could make a lot of fur coats.
Could someone in the research field please hold on to their excitement until they can post a report that has words like "WILL, SHALL, DEFINITELY, HAS, IS" instead of the wimpy "could, may, might, has potential to, in 5 years if all goes well....."
I got sucked in by one years ago and pestered the company for information about their new "product" which was due out "soon".... and that was nearly 10 years ago.
So many advances in tiny little cells on a research bench, and so many promising advances. Yet none of them seem to show up at the local hardware store.
I understand that advances in quantum materials science is cool, and can change everything just like the invention of the transistor did once. But seriosly folks - the number of speculative postings based on these barely germinated lab experiments seem a little bit like the kid who cried "Solar revolution", or was that wolf?
There are a lot of methods that can ameliorate this, especially if you take samples of the soil back to the lab and process them for grain size, etc.
Nevertheless, if you have a lot of experience with this, you might find a chat with my spouse interesting as she has done extensive analysis of the effectiveness of XRF vs ICP etc in her work of late, notably relating to lead and manganese. So far the Niton units stack up pretty well against ICP if the samples are processed well.
I got to play with the first kind. The serial port for uploading the data is a bitch sometimes, as is the software which I think isnt meant to run on Vista. On the other hand, the results for Lead and Manganese are suprisingly accurate compared to ICP, from what I understand from my scientist wife. (I only do the interfacing, she does the science).
Makes me want to borrow it and go on a sampling rampage of everyday imported goods with paint on them.
I have access to one of these via my wife, who is using one to do research on soil metals for her Phd. I have to ask nicely to get access, because it has a radioactive source of ionizing radiation in it, but I could get it if I was really curious. The things are so handy, theyre more prevalent than you might think.
I recently scoffed at the 720p MJPEG codec used by my shiny new Pentax Optio camera.
Who knew that its ancient and inefficient CODEC is its saving grace when it comes to the topic of TFA.
But seriously, this is a case of Moores law making old stuff (mjpeg) work even for modern resolutions. I lacks the elegance of modern compression, but as long as the camera has fast/huge storage and fast raw processing power, we can use it and probably be happy with it too. The place where the fancy compression is always going to be key is distribution where the bandwidth is limited, be it spinning off a disk or streaming off the net.
Great, now the ISPs will have even higher speeds to lie to us about in their advertising.
Seriously. All this means is that we will hit our caps faster, and/or will feel the throttling more painfully.
When you are being throttled to 25Kb/s, it dosen't matter how fast your last mile can go - It becomes all about making long-haul ISP links cheap as dirt so the ISP dosent feel a need to throttle their oversubscribed backhaul link to the 'net.
I liked the idea, and went on to read more about the protocol. I can definitely see some uses for this on earth.
One example would be on cruising sailboats that only have occasional access to inexpensive wifi hotspots, and the rest of the time have to use slow SSB links. Another example might be for use in automotive networking, where a car sometimes has access to a real network, sometimes a cellular, and sometimes just some low-fi sattelite.
But really, this all sounds eerily familiar. Could if be FidoNet and UUCP in space?
I still want to see it implemented in the next Linux kernel though.
Thats right folks - for every time you see the words "May", "Might Somday", "Could eventually", you get to cover a number.
Bonus if you get to catch one or more instances of "In 5 years", "with continued funding", or "commercial quantities"
It seems the only people making flexibles these days are also selling them for a huge markup, and the technology is a lot less efficient than the monocrystal cells. But at least you can buy it. Today.
I used to actually follow up these articles by contacting the companies involved, and asking when they would be able to sell to me as a consumer. I still cant buy any of their products. Any of them.
I wouldn't worry too much about using the laptop on Base camp or above.
I designed a wireless network and configured a number of HP rugged laptops and tablet PCs as part of the Egan/University research expedition a few years back. The idea was for the laptops to be used by the researchers and to relay data back to the universities. By the end of a couple days at base camp, everyone was mostly too oxygen-starved to use the machines to a degree that would have justified all the extra stuff. I think up there a simple digital camera with large capacity and simple controls is a good idea. And a pad of paper.
For the record, we had HP rugged notebooks - and the heated hard disk units survived. I also had a backup USB drive loaded with PuppyLinux, but they never needed it, the drives survived the trip. Actually, the only major faults were cables being destroyed by Yaks or windstorms. Bring extra cables. A thuraya phone works well there too.
As if having the worlds shipping subject to hijacking and piracy - Now pirates could make off with your own data center.
On the other hand, it gives a whole new meaning to the term "capital flight" - if the IRS looks like it might be about to sieze your assets, you can float the whole head office to another jurisdiction - or set it up on a tropical island with a volcano.
This is a great platform, if you dont mind the slower speed of the C3/7 processors - but the thing that I have been a little miffed about is the unsupportability to run VMware - hopefully the C7 may fix this.
I have archtected Puppy Linux in a laptop on an expedition to Mt. Everest - the Flash/CDROM combination will enable the laptops to work above 18000ft, where a lot of hard disks "pop" out.
I stopped listening to radio a long time ago - my MP3-cd player for the car was the best money I ever spent. Aside from our commercial-free public radio (CBC) I have only occasionall listened to commercial radio, and was driven off by the advertising within a few minutes. The only thing that is missing from my de-commercialized listening experience is a way to inject new music and news into the stream of music I have chosen so as to keep it fresh.
So - why not broadcast cue information about which stations are playing what so my (yet to be invented) intelligent radio/player can dash seamlessly between stations and canned tracks whilst avoiding the blaring Ads with tivo-like grace. We do it with the remote on television to avoid the chaff, why not with radio?
I am putting a laptop onto Mt. Everest next month, and want to run Asterisk on it. Only problem is the latency on the channel and the Maoist Rebels. Oh, and the fact that most hard disks seem to be only rated to run up to 10000 feet. And the nasty temperature swings and the fact that most of the climbers will be too tired to bother running the lab right.
I just filled in their "Customer response" weblet, and told them that their site was unuseable because it contradicts the spirit and underlying form of the WWW. Enough of us drop in and tell them their site stinks - well, the/. effect might just show them that a lot of people are reading their TOS and are voting with their feet.
Outsourcing to Canada has been going on for a while, mostly because of Canada's trusted status in matters of security. Even the evil Haliburton corporations big clusters are now living happily in Toronto along with dozens of others. I should know - I installed them - (and my karma aches for it)
I once built an HA cluster that had a role in the 911 system, at a major telco switch vendor. Apparently the fines for a vendor bungle in this are in the millions of dollars per minute of downtime. I dont know which switches these are, but such penalties could affect that vendor in fines and their bottom line. It looks like Verizon shot itself in the foot, but keep an eye out for a dip in share prices for some of the switch vendors in case the blame gets spread around.
Imagine the alternative uses for this - a clever program hacker could arrange for truly interesting information about products to be shown as well - like mini documentaries on the human rights abuses or environmental impacts of the product. I would even be interested in paying to have alternate-info-verts available on demand.
A new tool for raising social consciousness and fermenting activism?
Now that the source is out there, I wonder how long it will take for anonymous hackers to start submitting fixes to M$ for problems in the code that havent been detected yet. How long until independent patches are available to make it more secure from Big Brother, and more stable.
Is this the beginning of the Kazaa-Lite-ing of windows?
Most of the radio stations in my area either will never play your fave song, or they will play it every half hour because they are flogging it for the music companies.
But people do die in these actions - perhaps not americans, but lots and lots and lots of people die in a variety of horrible ways. Make no mistake about that.
These pirates are a little too fresh obsessed - crappy camera vids, then crappy VHS rips -its only going to hurt the box office if the movie is so bad people wouldnt want to see it on the big screen in the first place. I suspect that if all movies were available on opening night in VHS quality on the net, the great movies would do better, and the crappy ones would be destroyed at the box office.
Its getting ahrder and harder to find truly tactile keyboards that are free of thos fscking windows keys. I might consider a replacement for my lexmark-IBM clicky if they came up with the same keyboard, only in a wireless or USB version.
... That I religiously remove, subvert, and hunt for with a passion and paranoia that makes the germ-fearing people from those cleaning-product commercials seem like dogfood munching toddlers?
I wonder if future antiviral systems will begin to be modelled more on the mammalian immune system, which seems to work reasonably well, considering the constant barrage of invaders we deal with daily.
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If I had a tribble for every time one of these solar energy articles came out with their pages full of nothing.... I could make a lot of fur coats.
Could someone in the research field please hold on to their excitement until they can post a report that has words like "WILL, SHALL, DEFINITELY, HAS, IS" instead of the wimpy "could, may, might, has potential to, in 5 years if all goes well....."
I got sucked in by one years ago and pestered the company for information about their new "product" which was due out "soon".... and that was nearly 10 years ago.
So many advances in tiny little cells on a research bench, and so many promising advances. Yet none of them seem to show up at the local hardware store.
I understand that advances in quantum materials science is cool, and can change everything just like the invention of the transistor did once. But seriosly folks - the number of speculative postings based on
these barely germinated lab experiments seem a little bit like the kid who cried "Solar revolution", or was that wolf?
There are a lot of methods that can ameliorate this, especially if you take samples of the soil back to the lab and process them for grain size, etc.
Nevertheless, if you have a lot of experience with this, you might find a chat with my spouse interesting as she has done extensive analysis of the effectiveness of XRF vs ICP etc in her work of late, notably relating to lead and manganese. So far the Niton units stack up pretty well against ICP if the samples are processed well.
I got to play with the first kind. The serial port for uploading the data is a bitch sometimes, as is the software which I think isnt meant to run on Vista. On the other hand, the results for Lead and Manganese are suprisingly accurate compared to ICP, from what I understand from my scientist wife. (I only do the interfacing, she does the science).
Makes me want to borrow it and go on a sampling rampage of everyday imported goods with paint on them.
I have access to one of these via my wife, who is using one to do research on soil metals for her Phd. I have to ask nicely to get access, because it has a radioactive source of ionizing radiation in it, but I could get it if I was really curious. The things are so handy, theyre more prevalent than you might think.
I recently scoffed at the 720p MJPEG codec used by my shiny new Pentax Optio camera.
Who knew that its ancient and inefficient CODEC is its saving grace when it comes to the topic of TFA.
But seriously, this is a case of Moores law making old stuff (mjpeg) work even for modern resolutions. I lacks the elegance of modern compression, but as long as the camera has fast/huge storage and fast raw processing power, we can use it and probably be happy with it too. The place where the fancy compression is always going to be key is distribution where the bandwidth is limited, be it spinning off a disk or streaming off the net.
Great, now the ISPs will have even higher speeds to lie to us about in their advertising.
Seriously. All this means is that we will hit our caps faster, and/or will feel the throttling more painfully.
When you are being throttled to 25Kb/s, it dosen't matter how fast your last mile can go - It becomes all about
making long-haul ISP links cheap as dirt so the ISP dosent feel a need to throttle their oversubscribed backhaul link to the 'net.
I liked the idea, and went on to read more about the protocol.
I can definitely see some uses for this on earth.
One example would be on cruising sailboats that only have occasional access to inexpensive wifi hotspots, and the rest of the time have to use slow SSB links. Another
example might be for use in automotive networking, where a car sometimes has access to a real network, sometimes a cellular, and sometimes just some low-fi sattelite.
But really, this all sounds eerily familiar. Could if be FidoNet and UUCP in space?
I still want to see it implemented in the next Linux kernel though.
Thats right folks - for every time you see the words "May", "Might Somday", "Could eventually", you get to cover a number.
Bonus if you get to catch one or more instances of "In 5 years", "with continued funding", or "commercial quantities"
It seems the only people making flexibles these days are also selling them for a huge markup, and the technology is a lot less efficient than the monocrystal cells. But at least you can buy it. Today.
I used to actually follow up these articles by contacting the companies involved, and asking when they would be able to sell to me as a consumer. I still cant buy any of their products. Any of them.
I wouldn't worry too much about using the laptop on Base camp or above.
I designed a wireless network and configured a number of HP rugged laptops and tablet PCs as part of the Egan/University research expedition a few years back. The idea was for the laptops to be used by the researchers and to relay data back to the universities. By the end of a couple days at base camp, everyone was mostly too oxygen-starved to use the machines to a degree that would have justified all the extra stuff. I think up there a simple digital camera with large capacity and simple controls is a good idea. And a pad of paper.
For the record, we had HP rugged notebooks - and the heated hard disk units survived. I also had a backup USB drive loaded with PuppyLinux, but they never needed it, the drives survived the trip. Actually, the only major faults were cables being destroyed by Yaks or windstorms. Bring extra cables. A thuraya phone works well there too.
As if having the worlds shipping subject to hijacking and piracy - Now pirates could make off with your own data center.
On the other hand, it gives a whole new meaning to the term "capital flight" - if the IRS looks like it might be about to sieze your assets, you can float the whole head office to another jurisdiction - or set it up on a tropical island with a volcano.
This is a great platform, if you dont mind the slower speed of the C3/7 processors - but the thing that I have been a little miffed about is the unsupportability to run VMware - hopefully the C7 may fix this.
I have archtected Puppy Linux in a laptop on an expedition to Mt. Everest - the Flash/CDROM combination will enable the laptops to work above 18000ft, where a lot of hard disks "pop" out.
I stopped listening to radio a long time ago - my MP3-cd player for the car was the best money I ever spent. Aside from our commercial-free public radio (CBC) I have only occasionall listened to commercial radio, and was driven off by the advertising within a few minutes. The only thing that is missing from my de-commercialized listening experience is a way to inject new music and news into the stream of music I have chosen so as to keep it fresh.
So - why not broadcast cue information about which stations are playing what so my (yet to be invented) intelligent radio/player can dash seamlessly between stations and canned tracks whilst avoiding the blaring Ads with tivo-like grace. We do it with the remote on television to avoid the chaff, why not with radio?
I am putting a laptop onto Mt. Everest next month, and want to run Asterisk on it. Only problem is the latency on the channel and the Maoist Rebels. Oh, and the fact that most hard disks seem to be only rated to run up to 10000 feet. And the nasty temperature swings and the fact that most of the climbers will be too tired to bother running the lab right.
I just filled in their "Customer response" weblet, and told them that their site was unuseable because it contradicts the spirit and underlying form of the WWW. Enough of us drop in and tell them their site stinks - well, the /. effect might just show them that a lot of people are reading their TOS and are voting with their feet.
Add some plating and a weapon mount and even the disabled will be unable to resist the Empires call to battle in Iraq....
Outsourcing to Canada has been going on for a while, mostly because of Canada's trusted status in matters of security. Even the evil Haliburton corporations big clusters are now living happily in Toronto along with dozens of others. I should know - I installed them - (and my karma aches for it)
I once built an HA cluster that had a role in the 911 system, at a major telco switch vendor. Apparently the fines for a vendor bungle in this are in the millions of dollars per minute of downtime. I dont know which switches these are, but such penalties could affect that vendor in fines and their bottom line. It looks like Verizon shot itself in the foot, but keep an eye out for a dip in share prices for some of the switch vendors in case the blame gets spread around.
Imagine the alternative uses for this - a clever program hacker could arrange for truly interesting information about products to be shown as well - like mini documentaries on the human rights abuses or environmental impacts of the product. I would even be interested in paying to have alternate-info-verts available on demand.
A new tool for raising social consciousness and fermenting activism?
Now that the source is out there, I wonder how long it will take for anonymous hackers to start submitting fixes to M$ for problems in the code that havent been detected yet. How long until independent
patches are available to make it more secure from Big Brother, and more stable.
Is this the beginning of the Kazaa-Lite-ing of windows?
Most of the radio stations in my area either will never play your fave song, or they will play it every half hour because they are flogging it for the music companies.
But people do die in these actions - perhaps not americans, but lots and lots and lots of people die in a variety of horrible ways. Make no mistake about that.
These pirates are a little too fresh obsessed - crappy camera vids, then crappy VHS rips -its only going to hurt the box office if the movie is so bad people wouldnt want to see it on the big screen in the first place. I suspect that if all movies were available on opening night in VHS quality on the net, the great movies would do better, and the crappy ones would be destroyed at the box office.
When they pry it out of my cold dead hands.
Its getting ahrder and harder to find truly tactile keyboards that are free of thos fscking windows keys. I might consider a replacement for my lexmark-IBM clicky if they came up with the same keyboard, only in a wireless or USB version.
... That I religiously remove, subvert, and hunt for with a passion and paranoia that makes the germ-fearing people from those cleaning-product commercials seem like dogfood munching toddlers?
I wonder if future antiviral systems will begin to be modelled more on the mammalian immune system, which seems to work reasonably well, considering the constant barrage of invaders we deal with daily.