While solar for electrical generation is still barely cost-effective if at all (and I have seen a few studies indicating that it takes more energy to produce most solar cells than they are likely to produce in their lifetime), solar hot water heat is DIRT CHEAP and very efficient.
And it works very well even in areas with not much sunlight. My father installed a solar hot water heater in the family's first house when I was a little kid. The backup gas-fired heater barely got used, even in the dead of winter in central New Jersey.
It definately can't replace everything, but if you like long hot showers, solar can pay for itself very quickly.:)
I'm much more inclined to believe the 3x current claim vs. a 3x capacity claim. In general, increasing current handling capability is simply a function of increasing electrode surface area. They've just figured out a way to significantly increase that surface area, which doesn't do much for capacity but will help current handling capability.
The one thing I wonder is what tradeoffs they might not be telling us about. Lead-acid battery manufacturers have used the same trick for years to make extremely high-discharge-rate batteries (think automotive starter motors...).
The thing is that electrodes with high surface area tend to be very thin, and as a result, degrade quickly (and permanently) if discharged too far. This is why you see lead-acid batteries specifically marketed as "deep cycle" - They have thicker electrodes, which reduces their current handling capacity, but increases their ability to survive deep discharging.
i.e. "deep cycle" batteries can reliably be cycled down to 50% of their capacity over and over again, while I believe automotive batteries take a small amount of permanent damage if cycled below even 90% of their capacity. They're designed not for energy storage capacity, but the ability to deliver short high-power bursts. (100+ amperes for a few seconds at most followed by minutes or even hours of charging.)
The article linked to states: $30-40/ton for input materials 2 tons of offal per barrel
Translates to $60-80 per barrel for raw materials ALONE. The technology is apparently pretty damned good.
Note that in many other countries (such as Europe), using such waste products for feedstock has been banned, and producers of that waste have to PAY to get rid of it.
In short, if CWT opened a plant in Europe, they would not only not need to pay for their raw input materials, they would actually GET PAID to take those materials, in addition to the ability to sell the oil produced from the process.
It's all in the article... While CWT made a bet on the price of their raw materials and lost in the case of their first plant, their strategy is to begin refining things they KNOW they can get for free or even get paid to process. (See the comments in the article about sewage, and poultry offal in Europe.)
It's a known fact that the best way to control an FPS is with mouselook. People who don't use mouselook are called "keyboarders" (even people using gamepads or joysticks) and are usually painfully obvious to mouse users. I remember my freshman year playing QuakeWorld in my dorm against other guys on my hall. One of em' insisted on using his gamepad - even though he repeatedly got owned badly because he turned so damn slowly compared to the mouse users.
This new adapter is kind of cool, but it apparently lacks one of the two main advantages of mouselook - Being able to turn rapidly. I can turn 90 or even 180 degrees with a mouse in a tiny fraction of the time it takes someone using a keyboard or gamepad.
The biggest flaw with your argument is that many Indians come to the United States for higher education.
ESPECIALLY in graduate programs. I would say that around half the students in Rutgers' graduate electrical engineering program are Indian (and I don't mean of Indian descent.) Over 80% of the students in the program are Asian (Indian, Chinese, or Korean), and nearly all of them are foreign and not just of Asian descent.
It says a lot of sad things about American attitudes towards education that almost all of the graduate engineering students at a state-funded school are not only from out of state, but from out of the country.
The idea behind blitzkrieg isn't a massive bombing campaign - It's to advance in an invasion so rapidly that the enemy has no time to fall back and regroup.
I think the point here is not that collisions exist, but that there is now a way to generate a collision reliably with fewer operations.
But as said earlier - not only must a collision be generated, that collision must be meaningful. A good example was that while it might become easy to generate "collision" data for a gzipped tar file's hash, it would still be extremely difficult to generate a collision that had the following properties: Understood by gzip without errors Understood by tar after gunzipping Had meaningful files after being untarred
We can choose which of the "bundled" apps to install.
Windows users can't without jumping through MAJOR hoops. (Microsoft claims it is not possible at all, but software like Win98Lite showed people otherwise).
Windows - We cannot install Windows without installing IE.
RedHat, Gentoo, whatever - Lynx, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla - What browser do you want to use today? Or maybe you don't want any at all! You can make that choice.
Internally, Netscape browsers were ALWAYS referred to as Mozilla.
Back at the beginning of the browser wars, when Netscape was dominant, IE put the "Mozilla" into their useragent string to make sites treat IE as being similar to Mozilla (aka Netscape Navigator).
Paramount would probably increase the viewership estimates SIGNIFICANTLY if they did something like that. There are a LOT of people who Torrent Enterprise, it's typically one of the most popular torrents on many sites when new eps get released.
Which is in direct contradiction to the now-broken Nielsen ratings.
The type of people who watch Enterprise happen to be the most likely to embrace BitTorrent and similar technologies.
As a result, supposed two shows air at the same time. Given the choice of downloading one and watching/recording the other, I chose to download Enterprise. Why?
1) Enterprise is popular. It typically has the largest BT swarms, and often the best S/L ratio (another testament to the types of users who watch Enterprise - geek types are more likely to leave the torrent running after completion.) 2) Given a choice between recording CBS and recording UPN, I choose recording CBS. UPN needs to petition the FCC for a transmitter power increase in the NYC area. Sad when your flagship station's transmitter is a piece of shit and your signal crashes people's MPEG encoders. 3) Higher quality from the Torrent. A combination of signal issues and the fact that UPN's HD signal in the NYC area is shit.
I've seen some describe this as a potential future for TV where the content providers are smart enough to embrace new technologies. Instead of BT being used to pirate episodes, fans pay a modest fee to subscribe to the tracker that provides their favorite episodes.
The fee covers production costs, the fans themselves do the distribution.
In Dark Age of Camelot, the endgame is "realm vs. realm" - The game is split into three realms. You may not attack anyone from your own realm, but there is an area in the game called the Frontiers that is basically one large war zone where the three realms fight.
In DAoC, the "fun" for most people is in the frontier, fighting other players. But there is little monetary reward in this (in fact, it's often a money sink), and hence you NEVER see the Chinese farmers in the frontier. (And yes, over the past 2-3 months there has been a huge upsurge in Chinese players whom everyone hates because they're rude, steal camps, and often are horrible players who can't be given advice because they don't understand it.)
Plus I can just quit and log out whenever I feel like it. As someone said, these people can't. Even worse, they have to meet a quota when they barely know how to play the game and don't know enough English to take advice from more experienced players. (I've basically blacklisted any of the "farmer" guilds from joining any group I'm in - I tell the group leader not to invite them and leave shortly afterwards if they get invited anyway. They're invariably incompetent and incapable of listening to advice.)
MythTV wasn't hard to get running for you due to design deficiencies in MythTV - It was hard for you to get running due to bad hardware. Every problem you describe with MythTV other than the IR blaster issue looked like non-Myth-specific hardware problems to me.
With good hardware, MythTV is easy to get running. The hardest part on my Gentoo box was getting ivtv (drivers for Hauppauge PVR-x50 cards, etc) running on 2.6.
It is possible to install Myth without X. It's a bit of a PITA nowadays, but it can be done.
Now relying purely on framebuffer, on the other hand... BAD IDEA. Ditching X means ditching hardware scaling, hardware IDCT, and hardware motion compensation, critical to: a) Running a frontend on a slower system b) Viewing HDTV at all. It's a pain without hardware MoComp and IDCT, but there's no way in hell you're going to do it with software scaling.
It can be a pain to install (much easier thanks to stuff like KnoppMyth, Jarod's HOWTO for FC, and emerge on Gentoo), but once it's running it is SWEET.
I really like how Myth handles streaming to remote frontends, and it has a lot of nice plugins.
I tried Freevo once and didn't like it at all. I use Myth and love it.
Slashdot Mirror
While solar for electrical generation is still barely cost-effective if at all (and I have seen a few studies indicating that it takes more energy to produce most solar cells than they are likely to produce in their lifetime), solar hot water heat is DIRT CHEAP and very efficient.
:)
And it works very well even in areas with not much sunlight. My father installed a solar hot water heater in the family's first house when I was a little kid. The backup gas-fired heater barely got used, even in the dead of winter in central New Jersey.
It definately can't replace everything, but if you like long hot showers, solar can pay for itself very quickly.
The WRT54G also has serious thermal problems when the CPU operates at heavy load.
A friend of mine bought one, it would crash every 10-15 minutes if you were running WEP with light-moderate WLAN use.
30 minutes or so if WEP were off.
2-3 hours even at moderate-heavy loads if you were only using the wired ports.
Best bet might be some sort of Mini-ITX box.
I'm much more inclined to believe the 3x current claim vs. a 3x capacity claim. In general, increasing current handling capability is simply a function of increasing electrode surface area. They've just figured out a way to significantly increase that surface area, which doesn't do much for capacity but will help current handling capability.
The one thing I wonder is what tradeoffs they might not be telling us about. Lead-acid battery manufacturers have used the same trick for years to make extremely high-discharge-rate batteries (think automotive starter motors...).
The thing is that electrodes with high surface area tend to be very thin, and as a result, degrade quickly (and permanently) if discharged too far. This is why you see lead-acid batteries specifically marketed as "deep cycle" - They have thicker electrodes, which reduces their current handling capacity, but increases their ability to survive deep discharging.
i.e. "deep cycle" batteries can reliably be cycled down to 50% of their capacity over and over again, while I believe automotive batteries take a small amount of permanent damage if cycled below even 90% of their capacity. They're designed not for energy storage capacity, but the ability to deliver short high-power bursts. (100+ amperes for a few seconds at most followed by minutes or even hours of charging.)
Rip while on AC.
Then watch from the HD on battery.
The article linked to states:
$30-40/ton for input materials
2 tons of offal per barrel
Translates to $60-80 per barrel for raw materials ALONE. The technology is apparently pretty damned good.
Note that in many other countries (such as Europe), using such waste products for feedstock has been banned, and producers of that waste have to PAY to get rid of it.
In short, if CWT opened a plant in Europe, they would not only not need to pay for their raw input materials, they would actually GET PAID to take those materials, in addition to the ability to sell the oil produced from the process.
It's all in the article... While CWT made a bet on the price of their raw materials and lost in the case of their first plant, their strategy is to begin refining things they KNOW they can get for free or even get paid to process. (See the comments in the article about sewage, and poultry offal in Europe.)
Which is why I don't play console FPS games.
I HATE the controls, and there isn't anything short of direct keyboard/mouse support that can change that.
Because it maps mouse movements into controller movement, you get only half of the advantages of mouselook with the XFPS.
Advantage 1: More accurate aiming. You DO apparently get this
Advantage 2: Faster turning. You DON'T with the XFPS apparently.
It's a known fact that the best way to control an FPS is with mouselook. People who don't use mouselook are called "keyboarders" (even people using gamepads or joysticks) and are usually painfully obvious to mouse users. I remember my freshman year playing QuakeWorld in my dorm against other guys on my hall. One of em' insisted on using his gamepad - even though he repeatedly got owned badly because he turned so damn slowly compared to the mouse users.
This new adapter is kind of cool, but it apparently lacks one of the two main advantages of mouselook - Being able to turn rapidly. I can turn 90 or even 180 degrees with a mouse in a tiny fraction of the time it takes someone using a keyboard or gamepad.
The general conclusion of the reviewer was, "nice concept, doesn't work that well in Halo because mouse sensitivity is way too low."
In short, hardcore keyboard-and-mousers like myself will still hate it. I crank my mouse sensitivity WAY up in FPS games.
Your ID is not low.
And the original poster's is definately high enough to forgive him for Slashdot Noobism.
The biggest flaw with your argument is that many Indians come to the United States for higher education.
ESPECIALLY in graduate programs. I would say that around half the students in Rutgers' graduate electrical engineering program are Indian (and I don't mean of Indian descent.) Over 80% of the students in the program are Asian (Indian, Chinese, or Korean), and nearly all of them are foreign and not just of Asian descent.
It says a lot of sad things about American attitudes towards education that almost all of the graduate engineering students at a state-funded school are not only from out of state, but from out of the country.
"blitzkrieg" translates to "lightning war".
The idea behind blitzkrieg isn't a massive bombing campaign - It's to advance in an invasion so rapidly that the enemy has no time to fall back and regroup.
I think the point here is not that collisions exist, but that there is now a way to generate a collision reliably with fewer operations.
But as said earlier - not only must a collision be generated, that collision must be meaningful. A good example was that while it might become easy to generate "collision" data for a gzipped tar file's hash, it would still be extremely difficult to generate a collision that had the following properties:
Understood by gzip without errors
Understood by tar after gunzipping
Had meaningful files after being untarred
We can choose which of the "bundled" apps to install.
Windows users can't without jumping through MAJOR hoops. (Microsoft claims it is not possible at all, but software like Win98Lite showed people otherwise).
Windows - We cannot install Windows without installing IE.
RedHat, Gentoo, whatever - Lynx, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla - What browser do you want to use today? Or maybe you don't want any at all! You can make that choice.
When will tab-completion be enabled in the Windows command line interface by default or a simple menu item choice, rather than as a registry hack?
Internally, Netscape browsers were ALWAYS referred to as Mozilla.
Back at the beginning of the browser wars, when Netscape was dominant, IE put the "Mozilla" into their useragent string to make sites treat IE as being similar to Mozilla (aka Netscape Navigator).
Paramount would probably increase the viewership estimates SIGNIFICANTLY if they did something like that. There are a LOT of people who Torrent Enterprise, it's typically one of the most popular torrents on many sites when new eps get released.
Which is in direct contradiction to the now-broken Nielsen ratings.
That other show in question typically syndicates its reruns a year behind the showings on Sci-Fi.
And guess which network it's syndicated on? UPN.
The type of people who watch Enterprise happen to be the most likely to embrace BitTorrent and similar technologies.
As a result, supposed two shows air at the same time. Given the choice of downloading one and watching/recording the other, I chose to download Enterprise. Why?
1) Enterprise is popular. It typically has the largest BT swarms, and often the best S/L ratio (another testament to the types of users who watch Enterprise - geek types are more likely to leave the torrent running after completion.)
2) Given a choice between recording CBS and recording UPN, I choose recording CBS. UPN needs to petition the FCC for a transmitter power increase in the NYC area. Sad when your flagship station's transmitter is a piece of shit and your signal crashes people's MPEG encoders.
3) Higher quality from the Torrent. A combination of signal issues and the fact that UPN's HD signal in the NYC area is shit.
Ever heard of BitTorrent?
I've seen some describe this as a potential future for TV where the content providers are smart enough to embrace new technologies. Instead of BT being used to pirate episodes, fans pay a modest fee to subscribe to the tracker that provides their favorite episodes.
The fee covers production costs, the fans themselves do the distribution.
That image seems to wind up in the Targum and Medium pretty often. :)
(I'm a grad student at RU right now.)
Ahh, the concept of the "grind"
In Dark Age of Camelot, the endgame is "realm vs. realm" - The game is split into three realms. You may not attack anyone from your own realm, but there is an area in the game called the Frontiers that is basically one large war zone where the three realms fight.
In DAoC, the "fun" for most people is in the frontier, fighting other players. But there is little monetary reward in this (in fact, it's often a money sink), and hence you NEVER see the Chinese farmers in the frontier. (And yes, over the past 2-3 months there has been a huge upsurge in Chinese players whom everyone hates because they're rude, steal camps, and often are horrible players who can't be given advice because they don't understand it.)
Plus I can just quit and log out whenever I feel like it. As someone said, these people can't. Even worse, they have to meet a quota when they barely know how to play the game and don't know enough English to take advice from more experienced players. (I've basically blacklisted any of the "farmer" guilds from joining any group I'm in - I tell the group leader not to invite them and leave shortly afterwards if they get invited anyway. They're invariably incompetent and incapable of listening to advice.)
MythTV wasn't hard to get running for you due to design deficiencies in MythTV - It was hard for you to get running due to bad hardware. Every problem you describe with MythTV other than the IR blaster issue looked like non-Myth-specific hardware problems to me.
With good hardware, MythTV is easy to get running. The hardest part on my Gentoo box was getting ivtv (drivers for Hauppauge PVR-x50 cards, etc) running on 2.6.
It is possible to install Myth without X. It's a bit of a PITA nowadays, but it can be done.
Now relying purely on framebuffer, on the other hand... BAD IDEA. Ditching X means ditching hardware scaling, hardware IDCT, and hardware motion compensation, critical to:
a) Running a frontend on a slower system
b) Viewing HDTV at all. It's a pain without hardware MoComp and IDCT, but there's no way in hell you're going to do it with software scaling.
It can be a pain to install (much easier thanks to stuff like KnoppMyth, Jarod's HOWTO for FC, and emerge on Gentoo), but once it's running it is SWEET.
I really like how Myth handles streaming to remote frontends, and it has a lot of nice plugins.
I tried Freevo once and didn't like it at all. I use Myth and love it.