I think even CANDU has limitations of energy extraction that prevent it from extracting as much energy from the fuel as a breeder+reprocessing cycle like the IFR (and PRISM seems to be very similar to the IFR).
I don't know if "efficiency" is the right word... This implies that 95% of the energy available is wasted as heat which can never be used again.
That isn't the case with traditional light water reactors - they don't waste much more heat than any other heat-engine-based plant - however, 95% of the potential energy in their fuel simply can't be used in the first place!
I believe one of the statistics of the Integral Fast Reactor project was that the United States' existing spent fuel stockpiles would be able to provide 100% of the country's electric needs for at least a century.
The GEH PRISM proposal looks very similar to the IFR, except using a "small modular" plant design - smaller plants mean less risk and easier containment if one of them fails. (Fukushima taught us a "large plants are bad" lesson - Fukushima would have been MUCH more manageable with some physical separation between the troubled units.)
Of note in the diagrams - PRISM only provides its optimal efficiency claims with reprocessing - with reprocessing, they can extract nearly all of the potential energy in the fuel and the residual waste is only dangerous for 300 years. Without reprocessing, the waste is dangerous for 300k years and they maybe get another 5% of the energy.
Same here - Back in 2008, T-Mobile was completely nonfunctional for at least 10 miles, and I live along a fairly major road (New York SR 17, soon to be I-86) - even along a major road like that, T-Mo users received no service until they got to Exit 67 in Vestal.
Sprint isn't much better.
I hate AT&T for how they handle device releases, but at least they do have coverage.
Yeah - I've always had good customer service from AT&T, but I always go to my local corporate-owned store.
Now device availability and firmware maintenance - AT&T is an utterly epic fucking failure here. They're unable to do even simple things that take people mere hours to figure out on XDA.
Yup, I'm fairly certain the iPhone is the reason for AT&T's epic failure to handle Android properly, and AT&T's complacence thanks to the iPhone is why Verizon made such an incredible about-face when it came to device availability - it used to be Verizon was the LAST carrier you wanted to be on if you wanted a decent smartphone (for example, 9 month delays for the Treo 650 and the XV6800 for "carrier certification issues" - translation: we haven't finished crippling the software yet.), but that completely changed with them embracing Android in 2010.
Most likely a lot of early adopters saw "Motorola" and assumed "locked bootloader", which meant "stay the fuck away".
I was completely shocked to find out the Xoom was supposed to be a "Google Experience" device along the lines of the Nexus line - I have to say I'm disappointed in Google for permitting a "Google Experience" device to have a locked bootloader.
The Xoom was a market dud compared to the Transformer and Tab 10.1 - It was more expensive than the Tab 10.1 but didn't offer any of the features the Transformer or Tab 10.1 carried - it was heavier and thicker than the Tab, and it was MUCH more expensive than the TF even after purchasing the TF's dock.
If Asus Transformers weren't shipping, then why was it impossible to order one that wasn't being price-scalped for at least 2-3 months after release? Even the traditional "non-scalping" vendors like Amazon were selling for $20-30 above MSRP.
Even after devices stopped being unobtainium, accessories were selling like crazy - even in June it was impossible to find chargers for the device.
Similarly - you are utterly and completely deluded if you think that a manufacturer would keep shipping tablets that weren't selling, and that retailers would keep these devices on the shelves. If you seriously think this is possible, I have one word for you: Touchpad.
Do you REALLY think Samsung is stupid enough to release two new tablet variants (the Tab 8.9 and the Tab 7.0 Plus) if the Tab 10.1 isn't selling well? If there's so little demand for the Tab 10.1, why is Apple so afraid of it?
I have a netbook I almost never touch, and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 with a Bluetooth keyboard. There is one main reasn I use the Tab 10.1 - portability.
Portability is not just about the size - the Tab 10.1 is a little better than the netbook in size but not by much.
Where it blows away the netbook in portability is turn-on time and battery life - It gets the same "screen on" time as the netbook, but unlike the netbook, I can put it to sleep and wake it up in less than a second, and its battery life while sleeping is VERY good (maybe 5%/day sleep drain).
As a result I rarely need to carry a charger around, and when I get somewhere, I can immediately turn it on and start using it.
Even my HTC Rhodium running xdandroid (about as far from an officially supported Android port as one can get - the device was a native Windows Mobile device and had a fairly weak CPU) had no problem scrolling through menus.
Also, it was one of the many pre- Honeycomb Android tablets that never really caught on... Had the device been a Honeycomb device from the get-go (not possible given its release date...) it probably would have done much better.
Dell has, in general, failed to execute properly when it comes to Android. The Streak 5 was "meh" and didn't catch on, while Samsung's Galaxy Note is proving popular. Similarly, the Streak 7 was a dud, while Samsung's Galaxy Tab series did well enough to spawn a variety of Honeycomb devices in multiple screen sizes (10.1, 8.9, and the new 7.0 Plus).
To achieve the best battery life, most devices are sold with CPU frequency governors that are biased towards keeping the clock speed low unless you REALLY need it. A tiny bit of lag on unlock is a classic example of this.
That's not really Nokia's problem - their problem is that they never really seemed to figure out how to do swappable radio technologies like the other manufacturers did - and also, as i understand, usually "rolled their own" radio interfaces. This worked great for GSM because that was where their expertise was, but meant that they had major troubles getting any CDMA device to even pass basic carrier certifications.
So that meant they were locked out of around 50% of the North American market.
Touchwiz isn't too bad - it was actually an improvement for Honeycomb especially in terms of video playback (stock HC video player wouldn't scale up standard def content properly.) It's not the steaming turd of Blur or HTC's Senseless bloat. (Which has been responsible for at least one HTC device not receiving Gingerbread from HTC even though I believe it runs Cyanogenmod 7 very well.)
Samsung has at least given developers excellent phones to work with - minimal bootloader locking (signing checks and warnings that unsigned code is being run, but unsigned code is not forbidden unlike HTC or Moto devices), and Samsung has donated devices to a lot of developers (Galaxy S IIs to the porting team that did the original GalaxyS, and a whole ton of devices to Supercurio for audio/screen tuning.)
The worst of AT&T is how long they hold back Android updates. The international I9000 (Galaxy S) and the AT&T Captivate are so similar that all one needs to do to run I9000 firmware on a Captivate is to change the keylayout file. Despite this - the Cappy got Froyo AFTER the I9000 got Gingerbread, and the Cappy still doesn't have Gingerbread. Similarly, the I777 was released six months after its international sibling, the I9100, with only small hardware changes (most of which were already present in the SHW-M250* Korean Galaxy S IIs).
Yeah, Android is doing very well on Verizon because VZW put more effort into Android back when AT&T had iPhone exclusivity.
For a LONG time it was clear that AT&T was intentionally holding back Android device releases to avoid pissing off Apple. What Android devices AT&T had were either way underspecced or had massive carrier crippling.
AT&T is still pretty bad in this regard. What Apple's worst nightmare should be is some manufacturer growing big enough balls to tell AT&T to go fuck themselves as far as carrier mangling goes.
Even in the days when NVidia didn't give you drivers, it was far easier to make the desktop drivers work and install with.inf mods (What was the name of the site that specialized in them?) - I NEVER had problems getting the "latest and greatest" on my Dells with NVidia chipsets.
Similar modifications existed for ATI drivers, but it was a miracle for them to work at all.
Yup, I have yet to ever see evidence that ATI has learned the concept of regression testing.
It seems like on a regular basis, Game X needs driver revision M or lower, and Game Y needs driver revision N or higher with ATI cards. So you're screwed if you want to play both games.
Every time I have had the misfortune of dealing with an ATI video chipset, it's been utter driver hell. NVidia does a much better job of regression testing, and they also do a MUCH better job of long term support of older chipsets. I still remember the hell I went through trying to update drivers for a friend's Dell 600M with an ATI chipset - compared to it, my own Dell laptops were ANCIENT but it was FAR easier to find up-to-date drivers for their NVidia chipsets that worked, as opposed to hours of trial and error with the ATI drivers to find one that would provide proper 3D acceleration AND drive her external monitor at a non-wacky resolution.
This is pretty much what happened in the P4 days. Intel got complacent and started gouging customers, and that allowed AMD to gain HUGE amounts of market share.
I wouldn't be surprised if Intel is REALLY regretting selling off XScale to Marvell - Intel had an ARM business for a while, but it just didn't do particularly well, so they sold it.
Probably 1-2 years later, the ARM market started exploding.
I would not be surprised if Intel is quietly working on getting back into the ARM business.
Primarily Sprint - I think ALL of Sprint's Android devices are infected with it and have been for quite some time.
It's new for AT&T - The Shitrocket is the first device I know of to have it in the originally sold factory firmware. The current Infuse firmware doesn't have it (but the Gingerbread update will, and it was in the Rogers Gingerbread release in July, although CIQ for the Rogers Infuse was one of the easier implementations to remove), and the Galaxy S II does not have it (and it doesn't appear to be in the update leaks, however I need to check again.) I think some of AT&T's newer HTCs have it but I haven't paid attention.
So far it's primarily a North American thing. I'm fairly certain CIQ in the form implemented by most North American carriers is illegal per European privacy laws. Supposedly more benign forms of CIQ exist, but they have never actually been seen in a released device.
"like apple, they could have owned the phone companies. they had the hot product and they could have dictated 'do not be evil to our customers!' to the phone companies." No, they were a newcomer in the market. In the portable device industry, they didn't have the clout that Apple had thanks to iTunes + iPod. As a result, Apple is still the only company that can successfully tell a North American carrier to fuck themselves.
And anyway - yes Google allowed it. The whole point of Android is its openness - unfortunately, on some devices, the carrier abuses that openness. Don't like it, go buy a Nexus.
It's iPod + iTunes all over again. The content providers insisted on DRM, which eventually led to Apple being able to leverage the iPod's success to make iTunes the dominant music store. Then that iTunes success led to more iPod sales - eventually Apple used this leverage to kill DRM.
The industry bitched about how powerful Apple had become, but without DRM, Apple would never have been able to leverage the synergy of iTunes + iPod as well as they did and gain so much power. The Apple music juggernaut is 100% the music industry's own doing. They insisted on DRM, and Apple used that as a tool with which to dominate the industry.
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I think even CANDU has limitations of energy extraction that prevent it from extracting as much energy from the fuel as a breeder+reprocessing cycle like the IFR (and PRISM seems to be very similar to the IFR).
I don't know if "efficiency" is the right word... This implies that 95% of the energy available is wasted as heat which can never be used again.
That isn't the case with traditional light water reactors - they don't waste much more heat than any other heat-engine-based plant - however, 95% of the potential energy in their fuel simply can't be used in the first place!
I believe one of the statistics of the Integral Fast Reactor project was that the United States' existing spent fuel stockpiles would be able to provide 100% of the country's electric needs for at least a century.
The GEH PRISM proposal looks very similar to the IFR, except using a "small modular" plant design - smaller plants mean less risk and easier containment if one of them fails. (Fukushima taught us a "large plants are bad" lesson - Fukushima would have been MUCH more manageable with some physical separation between the troubled units.)
Of note in the diagrams - PRISM only provides its optimal efficiency claims with reprocessing - with reprocessing, they can extract nearly all of the potential energy in the fuel and the residual waste is only dangerous for 300 years. Without reprocessing, the waste is dangerous for 300k years and they maybe get another 5% of the energy.
The Galaxy Note is a Galaxy S II with a higher CPU clock, 720p screen, and the Wacom pen interface added.
Even if they completely fuck up the pen interface, the remainder of the Note is a refinement of one of Samsung's top sellers.
And yes - Samsung does know how to do Android well. The biggest flaws in my I777 are all problems that were inflicted by AT&T.
Same here - Back in 2008, T-Mobile was completely nonfunctional for at least 10 miles, and I live along a fairly major road (New York SR 17, soon to be I-86) - even along a major road like that, T-Mo users received no service until they got to Exit 67 in Vestal.
Sprint isn't much better.
I hate AT&T for how they handle device releases, but at least they do have coverage.
Yeah - I've always had good customer service from AT&T, but I always go to my local corporate-owned store.
Now device availability and firmware maintenance - AT&T is an utterly epic fucking failure here. They're unable to do even simple things that take people mere hours to figure out on XDA.
Yup, I'm fairly certain the iPhone is the reason for AT&T's epic failure to handle Android properly, and AT&T's complacence thanks to the iPhone is why Verizon made such an incredible about-face when it came to device availability - it used to be Verizon was the LAST carrier you wanted to be on if you wanted a decent smartphone (for example, 9 month delays for the Treo 650 and the XV6800 for "carrier certification issues" - translation: we haven't finished crippling the software yet.), but that completely changed with them embracing Android in 2010.
Most likely a lot of early adopters saw "Motorola" and assumed "locked bootloader", which meant "stay the fuck away".
I was completely shocked to find out the Xoom was supposed to be a "Google Experience" device along the lines of the Nexus line - I have to say I'm disappointed in Google for permitting a "Google Experience" device to have a locked bootloader.
The Xoom was a market dud compared to the Transformer and Tab 10.1 - It was more expensive than the Tab 10.1 but didn't offer any of the features the Transformer or Tab 10.1 carried - it was heavier and thicker than the Tab, and it was MUCH more expensive than the TF even after purchasing the TF's dock.
Where's your evidence to back this?
If Asus Transformers weren't shipping, then why was it impossible to order one that wasn't being price-scalped for at least 2-3 months after release? Even the traditional "non-scalping" vendors like Amazon were selling for $20-30 above MSRP.
Even after devices stopped being unobtainium, accessories were selling like crazy - even in June it was impossible to find chargers for the device.
Similarly - you are utterly and completely deluded if you think that a manufacturer would keep shipping tablets that weren't selling, and that retailers would keep these devices on the shelves. If you seriously think this is possible, I have one word for you: Touchpad.
Do you REALLY think Samsung is stupid enough to release two new tablet variants (the Tab 8.9 and the Tab 7.0 Plus) if the Tab 10.1 isn't selling well? If there's so little demand for the Tab 10.1, why is Apple so afraid of it?
I have a netbook I almost never touch, and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 with a Bluetooth keyboard. There is one main reasn I use the Tab 10.1 - portability.
Portability is not just about the size - the Tab 10.1 is a little better than the netbook in size but not by much.
Where it blows away the netbook in portability is turn-on time and battery life - It gets the same "screen on" time as the netbook, but unlike the netbook, I can put it to sleep and wake it up in less than a second, and its battery life while sleeping is VERY good (maybe 5%/day sleep drain).
As a result I rarely need to carry a charger around, and when I get somewhere, I can immediately turn it on and start using it.
Even my HTC Rhodium running xdandroid (about as far from an officially supported Android port as one can get - the device was a native Windows Mobile device and had a fairly weak CPU) had no problem scrolling through menus.
Also, it was one of the many pre- Honeycomb Android tablets that never really caught on... Had the device been a Honeycomb device from the get-go (not possible given its release date...) it probably would have done much better.
Dell has, in general, failed to execute properly when it comes to Android. The Streak 5 was "meh" and didn't catch on, while Samsung's Galaxy Note is proving popular. Similarly, the Streak 7 was a dud, while Samsung's Galaxy Tab series did well enough to spawn a variety of Honeycomb devices in multiple screen sizes (10.1, 8.9, and the new 7.0 Plus).
Simple answer: Power consumption.
To achieve the best battery life, most devices are sold with CPU frequency governors that are biased towards keeping the clock speed low unless you REALLY need it. A tiny bit of lag on unlock is a classic example of this.
That's not really Nokia's problem - their problem is that they never really seemed to figure out how to do swappable radio technologies like the other manufacturers did - and also, as i understand, usually "rolled their own" radio interfaces. This worked great for GSM because that was where their expertise was, but meant that they had major troubles getting any CDMA device to even pass basic carrier certifications.
So that meant they were locked out of around 50% of the North American market.
Touchwiz isn't too bad - it was actually an improvement for Honeycomb especially in terms of video playback (stock HC video player wouldn't scale up standard def content properly.) It's not the steaming turd of Blur or HTC's Senseless bloat. (Which has been responsible for at least one HTC device not receiving Gingerbread from HTC even though I believe it runs Cyanogenmod 7 very well.)
Samsung has at least given developers excellent phones to work with - minimal bootloader locking (signing checks and warnings that unsigned code is being run, but unsigned code is not forbidden unlike HTC or Moto devices), and Samsung has donated devices to a lot of developers (Galaxy S IIs to the porting team that did the original GalaxyS, and a whole ton of devices to Supercurio for audio/screen tuning.)
The worst of AT&T is how long they hold back Android updates. The international I9000 (Galaxy S) and the AT&T Captivate are so similar that all one needs to do to run I9000 firmware on a Captivate is to change the keylayout file. Despite this - the Cappy got Froyo AFTER the I9000 got Gingerbread, and the Cappy still doesn't have Gingerbread. Similarly, the I777 was released six months after its international sibling, the I9100, with only small hardware changes (most of which were already present in the SHW-M250* Korean Galaxy S IIs).
Yeah, Android is doing very well on Verizon because VZW put more effort into Android back when AT&T had iPhone exclusivity.
For a LONG time it was clear that AT&T was intentionally holding back Android device releases to avoid pissing off Apple. What Android devices AT&T had were either way underspecced or had massive carrier crippling.
AT&T is still pretty bad in this regard. What Apple's worst nightmare should be is some manufacturer growing big enough balls to tell AT&T to go fuck themselves as far as carrier mangling goes.
Even in the days when NVidia didn't give you drivers, it was far easier to make the desktop drivers work and install with .inf mods (What was the name of the site that specialized in them?) - I NEVER had problems getting the "latest and greatest" on my Dells with NVidia chipsets.
Similar modifications existed for ATI drivers, but it was a miracle for them to work at all.
It doesn't help that Intel integrated graphics made GREAT leaps forward in Sandy Bridge.
Yup, I have yet to ever see evidence that ATI has learned the concept of regression testing.
It seems like on a regular basis, Game X needs driver revision M or lower, and Game Y needs driver revision N or higher with ATI cards. So you're screwed if you want to play both games.
Every time I have had the misfortune of dealing with an ATI video chipset, it's been utter driver hell. NVidia does a much better job of regression testing, and they also do a MUCH better job of long term support of older chipsets. I still remember the hell I went through trying to update drivers for a friend's Dell 600M with an ATI chipset - compared to it, my own Dell laptops were ANCIENT but it was FAR easier to find up-to-date drivers for their NVidia chipsets that worked, as opposed to hours of trial and error with the ATI drivers to find one that would provide proper 3D acceleration AND drive her external monitor at a non-wacky resolution.
This is pretty much what happened in the P4 days. Intel got complacent and started gouging customers, and that allowed AMD to gain HUGE amounts of market share.
I wouldn't be surprised if Intel is REALLY regretting selling off XScale to Marvell - Intel had an ARM business for a while, but it just didn't do particularly well, so they sold it.
Probably 1-2 years later, the ARM market started exploding.
I would not be surprised if Intel is quietly working on getting back into the ARM business.
Which "Galaxy" - The Captivate, the S II, or the Shitrocket?
Allison lied to you - the Shitrocket is definitively confirmed to have Carrier IQ. Most likely the HTC Vivid also has it.
The Galaxy S II does not have it.
The Captivate does not have it, but Gingerbread for the Cappy might have it.
The Infuse does not have it, but Gingerbread for the Infuse will.
Primarily Sprint - I think ALL of Sprint's Android devices are infected with it and have been for quite some time.
It's new for AT&T - The Shitrocket is the first device I know of to have it in the originally sold factory firmware. The current Infuse firmware doesn't have it (but the Gingerbread update will, and it was in the Rogers Gingerbread release in July, although CIQ for the Rogers Infuse was one of the easier implementations to remove), and the Galaxy S II does not have it (and it doesn't appear to be in the update leaks, however I need to check again.) I think some of AT&T's newer HTCs have it but I haven't paid attention.
So far it's primarily a North American thing. I'm fairly certain CIQ in the form implemented by most North American carriers is illegal per European privacy laws. Supposedly more benign forms of CIQ exist, but they have never actually been seen in a released device.
"like apple, they could have owned the phone companies. they had the hot product and they could have dictated 'do not be evil to our customers!' to the phone companies."
No, they were a newcomer in the market. In the portable device industry, they didn't have the clout that Apple had thanks to iTunes + iPod. As a result, Apple is still the only company that can successfully tell a North American carrier to fuck themselves.
And anyway - yes Google allowed it. The whole point of Android is its openness - unfortunately, on some devices, the carrier abuses that openness. Don't like it, go buy a Nexus.
It's iPod + iTunes all over again. The content providers insisted on DRM, which eventually led to Apple being able to leverage the iPod's success to make iTunes the dominant music store. Then that iTunes success led to more iPod sales - eventually Apple used this leverage to kill DRM.
The industry bitched about how powerful Apple had become, but without DRM, Apple would never have been able to leverage the synergy of iTunes + iPod as well as they did and gain so much power. The Apple music juggernaut is 100% the music industry's own doing. They insisted on DRM, and Apple used that as a tool with which to dominate the industry.