Why does everyone still care? It became incredibly obvious about 2 weeks after the first beta came out that it was simply an alternative GUI for PearPC. Knowing that, people should have stopped paying attention to it except for noting that it is another instance of someone abusing open source code and EULAs. You don't think that they would/could ever release a full version of their product, sell it for money, and live up to the performace claims?
Ya! Where do these Mac people get their ideas from. The same underpaid Tawanese make Mac motherboards, and most of the other components are the exact same brands as PC ones (HD, optical, ect). The only thing Mac makes are the nice pretty plastic and metal cases, and the keyboards and mice. And the keyboards and mice are pretty darn unreliable, from seeing them in action in a computer lab. That pretty clear and white plastic does not stand up well to abuse of high schoolers.
That is because the chip design hasn't changed much at all between the 533 and the 1300. In order to clock it higher with the same design and manufacturing techniques, the processor needs more power, and therefore leaks more as heat.
You didn't prove anything. So it would take 325 lb to run minimal electronics for 20 hours, and 20lb for 15 hours of heat. Lets work it out. One week is 168 hours, or 8.4 x 325lb of batteries, 2730 lb. If they want two laptops, a switch, a TV, a sophisticated climate control system and lots of lights, we are getting over 10,000 lb of lead acid batteries. Propane faires better at 224 lb for a week of heat, but probably more for cookin their filet mignone.
What is with bringing back this OS from the dead? Sure, BeOS had some nifty features for its day, but nowadays, a jorunaling file system and OpenGL support are not things to write home about. BeOS died because, amoung other reasons, the complete lack of compatable applications. Renaming it does not change that. I think we should invest more energy into fixing the major problems with Linux.
But a week? And remember, these people arent "roughing it", they are neveau-riche who's one home is this place. I think they plan on showering. Electricty would not be too much of an issue if they had some nice expensive high effiency solar pannels on the huge roof and some big batterys in the "basement". I still don't see how they would have enough room for huge water and propane tanks (remember, they can't go without heat, its not all that warm in England).
My 4 cylinder VW Passat, with a turbocharger, can get over 100 MPG for 30 seconds or so, while I am on a flat highway with cruise control on. Of course with a smaller more aero-dynamic car with a electric motor assist, this is greatly magnified.
Hubble is meant to run mainly off solar power. Shooting it out of the solar system would make it useless after it got a short distance from the sun. Its communication system is not made to broadcast very far, and giving it a high velocity would drastically decrease its ability to take clear pictures. Also, it isn't really made for "extra-terrestrial contact". It doesn't have any greeting plaque, just some dirty pictures written on it by astronauts and the various labels and warnings on the parts.
It is completely possible that a modified Prius could sustain 180 MPG for more than a couple dozen miles. The more powerful the battery, the more the electric motor can help the car accelerate, which is what uses the most gas in the conventional motor. That way, the gas engine pretty much just powers the car while it is coasting, and those of you with newer cars with the "instantanious MPG readout" can attest that over 100 MPG can be attained for relatively long periods if you are crusing on a flat highway.
Since it has such dinky screens, you could display the website on the top one, and have all the navigation stuff on the bottom touch screen. That would free up precious pixels for displaying the website (trust me, even then it would not be pleasant, the DS screens are lower res than Pocket PCs.
Compairing prices really does not make sense. I am sure they are putting so much extra into this vehicle, that if they did buy a stock Airstream, they would have to tear it completely appart and rebuild it. Plus, a standard camper does not make you self suffient for a week. It caries a can of propane, enough for a couple of meals, a small tank of water for 2-3 days, if you don't shower or use the onboard restroom. Electricity is supplied by the engine's generator, hence you only have electricity as long as you are plugged in or have the engine running. Plus, being a rich.com geek, I'm sure everything in the camper that could possibly be computerized is, and networked to boot: Automatic window shades, lighting, coffee maker, ect... ~$500,000 US does not sound to bad to me for a vehicle like that!
It takes a lot less energy to keep a coffee cup slightly warm than it does to melt a bucket of cheese or chocolate. Anyway, warming up a dinky coffee cup is probably pretty taxing to the USB port already, which supports 5v at 500mA maximum draw from a powered port or hub, which is only 2.5 watts. Firewire supports something like 30W of maximum draw, which is still not very much for a heating element, but you could probably eventually melt some cheese with that.
The sad thing is, you could actually do this. Well, maybe USB is too wimpy to heat up cheese or chocolate, but a Firewire Fondue set would be completely possible.
It would get cheaper and bigger, if Memory Stick was not a propriatary format that is only manufactured by Sony and a few other companies. This monopoly makes it so that Sony doesn't have to compete by offering larger cards. That is why Sony Memory Sticks enjoy almost no market share, outside of Technophobes who purchase Sony Cameras not realizing that they will be extorted for storage.
Apple has not "moved" from hard drives to flash. They now have two flash based iPods, and six hard drive based iPods. In some situations, flash does make sense. For movies, it does not. A full length movie of decent quality, in MPEG4 (or equivalent) compression, is about 700 MB. My latest casual search of Froogle reveals that 1 GB Memory Stick DUOs go for $120 US (1 GB CompactFlash cards are $60 US). That means for every movie you want to take with you at a time, that is $120. Sony's new UMD Disk is not really an option, since there are no blank media or drives available, and we are at the mercy of Sony and the MPAA to extort money from us to rerelease a limited selection of titles we already own on DVD, but have to purchase again.
Maybe eventually they will come out with a more entertainment-centric PSP, with a hard drive for storing movies instead of dinky and expensive Memory Sticks. They did it with that limited edition DVR PS2. On the other hand, Sony has a 10 year history of making very stupid decisions...
What about us poor Windows users? There are quite a lot of us, and I'm sure you would want to educate us heathens to the benifits of open source software. Somebody please port it!
Not 100 Mhz, but 10 MHz. Anyone ever seen a 186 running above that? I have a XPort sitting on my desk (well, not this one, but my other desk). Also, I am not sure of the total flash, but I know that it only had 16 "slots" available to the user, each of which is under 10k.
I have an XPort. Although it is definitely the same form factor, this new one is magnitudes more powerful. I have forgotten the exact specs, so don't troll me for getting something wrong, but the XPort has a 386 processor at ~10 Mhz, only 2k of RAM, and something like 64k of Flash available to the user. It ran a barebones operating system that couldn't really do that much, besides host small HTML pages and monitor a serial port for activity. It is not much of a functional computer. A 55 MHz ARM with 8 MB of RAM and 2 MB of ROM can do a whole lot more, in fact, it can fairly easily kick the but of any Palm OS 4.1 or earlier device.
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I have had water in my basement server room for weeks, since the heavy spring rains have started. My servers are plently cool, as a result.
Why does everyone still care? It became incredibly obvious about 2 weeks after the first beta came out that it was simply an alternative GUI for PearPC. Knowing that, people should have stopped paying attention to it except for noting that it is another instance of someone abusing open source code and EULAs. You don't think that they would/could ever release a full version of their product, sell it for money, and live up to the performace claims?
Ya! Where do these Mac people get their ideas from. The same underpaid Tawanese make Mac motherboards, and most of the other components are the exact same brands as PC ones (HD, optical, ect). The only thing Mac makes are the nice pretty plastic and metal cases, and the keyboards and mice. And the keyboards and mice are pretty darn unreliable, from seeing them in action in a computer lab. That pretty clear and white plastic does not stand up well to abuse of high schoolers.
That is because the chip design hasn't changed much at all between the 533 and the 1300. In order to clock it higher with the same design and manufacturing techniques, the processor needs more power, and therefore leaks more as heat.
Tungstun, hydrogen, fresh water, air...
You didn't prove anything. So it would take 325 lb to run minimal electronics for 20 hours, and 20lb for 15 hours of heat. Lets work it out. One week is 168 hours, or 8.4 x 325lb of batteries, 2730 lb. If they want two laptops, a switch, a TV, a sophisticated climate control system and lots of lights, we are getting over 10,000 lb of lead acid batteries. Propane faires better at 224 lb for a week of heat, but probably more for cookin their filet mignone.
What is with bringing back this OS from the dead? Sure, BeOS had some nifty features for its day, but nowadays, a jorunaling file system and OpenGL support are not things to write home about. BeOS died because, amoung other reasons, the complete lack of compatable applications. Renaming it does not change that. I think we should invest more energy into fixing the major problems with Linux.
But a week? And remember, these people arent "roughing it", they are neveau-riche who's one home is this place. I think they plan on showering. Electricty would not be too much of an issue if they had some nice expensive high effiency solar pannels on the huge roof and some big batterys in the "basement". I still don't see how they would have enough room for huge water and propane tanks (remember, they can't go without heat, its not all that warm in England).
Of course it is moving fast, but a velocity fast enough to escape the solar system poses even more problems with exposure and light frequency shift.
My 4 cylinder VW Passat, with a turbocharger, can get over 100 MPG for 30 seconds or so, while I am on a flat highway with cruise control on. Of course with a smaller more aero-dynamic car with a electric motor assist, this is greatly magnified.
Hubble is meant to run mainly off solar power. Shooting it out of the solar system would make it useless after it got a short distance from the sun. Its communication system is not made to broadcast very far, and giving it a high velocity would drastically decrease its ability to take clear pictures. Also, it isn't really made for "extra-terrestrial contact". It doesn't have any greeting plaque, just some dirty pictures written on it by astronauts and the various labels and warnings on the parts.
It is completely possible that a modified Prius could sustain 180 MPG for more than a couple dozen miles. The more powerful the battery, the more the electric motor can help the car accelerate, which is what uses the most gas in the conventional motor. That way, the gas engine pretty much just powers the car while it is coasting, and those of you with newer cars with the "instantanious MPG readout" can attest that over 100 MPG can be attained for relatively long periods if you are crusing on a flat highway.
I think it would be much more useful for everyone to be thinking you are running ettercap while you are playing Mario.
Since it has such dinky screens, you could display the website on the top one, and have all the navigation stuff on the bottom touch screen. That would free up precious pixels for displaying the website (trust me, even then it would not be pleasant, the DS screens are lower res than Pocket PCs.
Compairing prices really does not make sense. I am sure they are putting so much extra into this vehicle, that if they did buy a stock Airstream, they would have to tear it completely appart and rebuild it. Plus, a standard camper does not make you self suffient for a week. It caries a can of propane, enough for a couple of meals, a small tank of water for 2-3 days, if you don't shower or use the onboard restroom. Electricity is supplied by the engine's generator, hence you only have electricity as long as you are plugged in or have the engine running. Plus, being a rich .com geek, I'm sure everything in the camper that could possibly be computerized is, and networked to boot: Automatic window shades, lighting, coffee maker, ect... ~$500,000 US does not sound to bad to me for a vehicle like that!
The tipoff is the 2GB of standard RAM. Apple ALWAYS under-powers their computers in terms of RAM.
It takes a lot less energy to keep a coffee cup slightly warm than it does to melt a bucket of cheese or chocolate. Anyway, warming up a dinky coffee cup is probably pretty taxing to the USB port already, which supports 5v at 500mA maximum draw from a powered port or hub, which is only 2.5 watts. Firewire supports something like 30W of maximum draw, which is still not very much for a heating element, but you could probably eventually melt some cheese with that.
The sad thing is, you could actually do this. Well, maybe USB is too wimpy to heat up cheese or chocolate, but a Firewire Fondue set would be completely possible.
It would get cheaper and bigger, if Memory Stick was not a propriatary format that is only manufactured by Sony and a few other companies. This monopoly makes it so that Sony doesn't have to compete by offering larger cards. That is why Sony Memory Sticks enjoy almost no market share, outside of Technophobes who purchase Sony Cameras not realizing that they will be extorted for storage. Apple has not "moved" from hard drives to flash. They now have two flash based iPods, and six hard drive based iPods. In some situations, flash does make sense. For movies, it does not. A full length movie of decent quality, in MPEG4 (or equivalent) compression, is about 700 MB. My latest casual search of Froogle reveals that 1 GB Memory Stick DUOs go for $120 US (1 GB CompactFlash cards are $60 US). That means for every movie you want to take with you at a time, that is $120. Sony's new UMD Disk is not really an option, since there are no blank media or drives available, and we are at the mercy of Sony and the MPAA to extort money from us to rerelease a limited selection of titles we already own on DVD, but have to purchase again.
Maybe eventually they will come out with a more entertainment-centric PSP, with a hard drive for storing movies instead of dinky and expensive Memory Sticks. They did it with that limited edition DVR PS2. On the other hand, Sony has a 10 year history of making very stupid decisions...
The real question is, can someone port it to natively support the Windows GUI, not the GTK approximation?
What about us poor Windows users? There are quite a lot of us, and I'm sure you would want to educate us heathens to the benifits of open source software. Somebody please port it!
Next people will be buying TiTiVoVos to skip over the adds TiVo displays whilst skipping over adds.
Not 100 Mhz, but 10 MHz. Anyone ever seen a 186 running above that? I have a XPort sitting on my desk (well, not this one, but my other desk). Also, I am not sure of the total flash, but I know that it only had 16 "slots" available to the user, each of which is under 10k.
I have an XPort. Although it is definitely the same form factor, this new one is magnitudes more powerful. I have forgotten the exact specs, so don't troll me for getting something wrong, but the XPort has a 386 processor at ~10 Mhz, only 2k of RAM, and something like 64k of Flash available to the user. It ran a barebones operating system that couldn't really do that much, besides host small HTML pages and monitor a serial port for activity. It is not much of a functional computer. A 55 MHz ARM with 8 MB of RAM and 2 MB of ROM can do a whole lot more, in fact, it can fairly easily kick the but of any Palm OS 4.1 or earlier device.