How efficient is your lawn mower? Not nearly as efficient as your automobile, is it? The car is bigger, so it's easier to get higher efficiencies. Now compare your car to a diesel locomotive. The locomotive is far more efficient than your car. Now compare the locomotive to a coal fired power plant. As bad as coal fired plants are, they are (especially the new ones) far more efficient than even the locomotive.
If everything ran on electric, we'd still be burning fossil fuels, but we'd be burning them more efficiently. And while you'll never ever ever be able to stick a CO2 scrubber on your car exhaust and sequester that under the ground, this is something that is quite possible (though perhaps too expensive to ever happen on a large scale) with a stationary coal plant.
And then there's always the possibility that we can use Uranium Nuclear, Thorium Nuclear, Wind, Solar, Hydro, Tidal, Wave, Geo-thermal, and a whole series of other sources for the electricity that don't emit carbon.
So, not just 'a bit off-topic'; 'a bit not thought out'.
That's mostly a sourcing problem. If you only have a 20Amp source, you can't ever charge at a rate greater than 20Amps. The thing is (and this varies quite a bit in the specifics with battery type), as a rule of thumb for the first 80% you can charge at extremely high charge rates. This is because internal resistance builds as you put charge into the battery.
You've probably seen 15minute quick chargers for AA NiMH and NiCAD batteries. These charge the first 80% or so with extremely high currents and then drop down to some fraction of C after that point as it builds towards full charge. Lithium based batteries can generally sustain even higher initial charge currents than Nickel based batteries, but are more prone to explosion if you don't monitor changes in heat and internal resistance accurately. So the 15minutes quoted by the OP is totally realistic if the charge station could meet the current demands (ie, is at an electrical substation, has battery or super cap packs charged during off-hours on site, etc), but there really is no reason for the OP to have said 15+ instead of 3+, 60-, or "time it takes to charge".
Keep in mind, the 3.5hours you quote for Tesla is only on 240V service at 20A. 120V service at 20A takes 7-8hours. 240V at 40A or 440V at 20A might be closer to 2hours. And that's for the Tesla, which has a pretty wide range. A light weight commuter electric might only have 40-60miles of charge, so a full charge at standard 240V might only be an hour, meaning high current quick charges could be even faster.
I agree. Why would anyone pay $15-$30/mo for phone service when you can mate something like Vitelity or Les.net with an unlocked PAP2 for less than $10/mo.:p
But, no.. if your voice quality was poor it's either because you have a bad internet connection, you don't have quality of service properly setup, or your router can't actually handle quality of service at the bandwidth you use. Try using your router as a simple access point (eg, disable DHCP) and install ZeroShell or another router distribution on a spare PC with 2 NICs. You might find that Linksys device running tomato/dd-wrt/openwrt/etc really wasn't as cool as you thought it was.
On Ubuntu: Click "Places" at the top of the screen and then "Home". Find the folder you want to share (You know, the yellow picture of a paper folder that has movies in it?) and right click it. Click "Properties" on the menu that appears. Now click "Sharing" and choose "Share this folder". Click OK a couple of times to close all the boxes.
This is from memory, but it should be pretty close.
>(whose anti-FiOS advertising has been getting downright nasty lately)
What's stopping the cable companies from running fiber to the home? I live in a town of not quite 100k and they already ran fiber to all the neighborhood distribution points. We don't have FiOS here, but in places where they do, the cable companies should STFU and run their own fiber to the homes.
Is that even true? If you choose "Download" and copy the URL it gives you for the wav file, you can't use the link unless your logged it. It's my assumption that to get a public URL of the scheme "google.com/voice/fm/*" you need to first choose the option to e-mail a voice mail and include a public link. Perhaps that's a poor assumption on my part. Do we have evidence that it's one way or the other?
I think that no one is going to trust an inflatable car.
I would. Thick material under high pressure cann be extremely strong and durable.
if the power requirements are too high- ship them to a recharger and back.
Bad bad bad bad idea. There goes your carbon/energy savings. Now we have semis shipping depleted batteries across the country for charging. Want to know why we use power lines instead of semi-shipped batteries to power our homes? It's vastly more efficient.
Your right that this is important, but either charge overnight at the station or, if necessary, string more powerlines. If you have to burn diesel fuel to charge a battery at a coal plant, you're doing it wrong. If you have to drain 30 batteries as part of charging 100 batteries at a wind station, you're still doing it wrong. Regardless of how the shipping trucks are powered, if you have to ship batteries to charge them, you're doing it all wrong.
And we still need a way to track battery wear. If I show up with a battery that's been cycled 30 times and get one that's been cycled 300, I may have a full charge, but the battery I have now no longer has the capacity (range) of the one I turned in. I should get some sort of rebate for trading a higher cap battery for a lesser one and pay extra for if I do the reverse. The only alternative I see is renting, rather than owning, the batteries.
A diy electric car using deep cycle lead acids might get 40 miles on 400lbs of batteries. The telsa roadster gets almost 300 miles on around 1000lbs of lithium-ion batteries. You wont go very far on 50 lbs of battery, even in a very light weight car.
My ammeter barely registered a difference between 1 drive in my computer and 4 drives in my computer with the system at idle (drives spinning). A drive might pull up to 15w at spindle spinnup, but doesn't use that much power when spinning. This statement certainly fits with my recollection.
Windows XP and any modern *nix (including OSX) have built in support for software raid on generic SATA/IDE controllers. Software raid is, IMHO, the *only* way to go for the reasons you state (controller card/motherboard goes and the data is gone). Linux's mdadm certainly works on generic drives of different sizes/makes and marks the drives location in the array at the start of the raid partition, allowing it to discover the right drives regardless of the controller/position you connect it to.
I'd agree not to use the fakeraid controllers built into most modern motherboards in raid mode, but I see no reason against software raid. I'd recommend it over fake raid any day and over hardware raid in most cases.
Body: A breath of fresh air in the murky air of pollution spewed by the RIAA/MPAA et. al.
Who spews the pollution? The RIAA/MPAA. Who's a breath of fresh air? Dr. Geist. Who is the poster criticizing? The RIAA/MPAA, and perhaps US Law. Who is the poster not criticizing? Dr. Geist or Canadian law. We can actually clean up the original a little bit and we arrive at:
Punctuated as a sentence Thank goodness for Dr. Geist: a breath of fresh air in the murky air of pollution spewed by the RIAA/MPAA et. al.
I don't see how you possibly could have arrived at your conclusion.
Vista has folder redirection for programs writing to/Program Files/ directly. Take a peak through the hidden folders in your/users/[username]. Did they remove this from Win7?
I guess, I'm not a Windows user, but I do occasionally have contact with Windows, still. I found a lot of annoyances in Vista, but not a lot in the way of incompatibilities--at least, nothing that shouldn't be expected, such as the 16bit thing on 64bit computers.
But I guess what you're telling me is that if it worked on Vista it should work on Win7? So then XP mode just helps to solve peoples complaints with Vista and isn't really warranted by anything in Win7 itself. It's just a nice extra for those who had trouble with Vista. Amirite?
alot of game installers were written to an inordinate amount of information to a Win 9x registry which they can't do in Vista/7.
Can't you just right-click, run as administrator? Me thinks the registry isn't the problem, but I don't doubt something else is. I believe UAC prompts if something tries to write to someplace in the system.dat portion, so running as administrator shouldn't even be required.
The ability to run 16 bit programs. Yes, there's still lots of them around.
Is Win7 64bit only? It can't be, they're touting it for netbooks. Did they drop support for 16bit from the 32bit release? Back when I used Windows, this was an issue on XP64, but I only encountered 32bit apps that had 16 bit installers, and it sounds like they've got something special for this case.
The ability to provide read/write access to c:\Program Files\ and c:\Windows\ or whatever they are called in Windows 7.
Don't they just prompt you with the UAC as in Vista? Hell, Vista also has a overlay of program files in c:\users\[username]\appdata\ (or there abouts) so a program storing config information in c:\program files\[application]\ can be redirected to your user folder. Again, this doesn't sound like anything new to Win7 or anything that would require XP mode.
IIRC, Office 2007 beta had PDF support, but then there was a lawsuit with Adobe and they pulled it from the public release. I guess they got things sorted out, or maybe Adobe found they don't have as much control over their format as they thought they did.
Our chip fab has that problem. They have equipment which only has an ISA interface to the computer and the company refuses to make a PCI one. Thus, it is either use an old computer, or buy a new board with ISA support.
I've run into similar problems. Did you know there's multiple different types of PCI slots? They're differentiated by a divider in the slot itself, much as AGP 4x was differentiated from 8x. Most PCI cards are universal cards and most slots are the newer, 3.3v(?) kind.
That's a neat trick. I had a lot of trouble when first trying 64bit windows due to 16bit installers. Generally, I'd extract the installer manually if Winzip/Winrar would handle it, or I'd find another machine to start the installer and then find where it extracted to in the temp folder and copy that over. Of course, that was before I found Gentoo and left the world of windows (mostly) behind.
I didn't even own a laptop until 2004. I'd been using desktops and handhelds exclusively. So I don't know what 2001 would want with me. I don't own any laptops that old.
If Sun had many more employees of that caliber (sic)
Yeah, it sure does suck when your employees are smart enough to recognize failure and learn from it. That's actually a sought after trait in my field. But you're probably right. Sun failed because too many of their employees learned from past mistakes.
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How efficient is your lawn mower? Not nearly as efficient as your automobile, is it? The car is bigger, so it's easier to get higher efficiencies. Now compare your car to a diesel locomotive. The locomotive is far more efficient than your car. Now compare the locomotive to a coal fired power plant. As bad as coal fired plants are, they are (especially the new ones) far more efficient than even the locomotive.
If everything ran on electric, we'd still be burning fossil fuels, but we'd be burning them more efficiently. And while you'll never ever ever be able to stick a CO2 scrubber on your car exhaust and sequester that under the ground, this is something that is quite possible (though perhaps too expensive to ever happen on a large scale) with a stationary coal plant.
And then there's always the possibility that we can use Uranium Nuclear, Thorium Nuclear, Wind, Solar, Hydro, Tidal, Wave, Geo-thermal, and a whole series of other sources for the electricity that don't emit carbon.
So, not just 'a bit off-topic'; 'a bit not thought out'.
That's mostly a sourcing problem. If you only have a 20Amp source, you can't ever charge at a rate greater than 20Amps. The thing is (and this varies quite a bit in the specifics with battery type), as a rule of thumb for the first 80% you can charge at extremely high charge rates. This is because internal resistance builds as you put charge into the battery.
You've probably seen 15minute quick chargers for AA NiMH and NiCAD batteries. These charge the first 80% or so with extremely high currents and then drop down to some fraction of C after that point as it builds towards full charge. Lithium based batteries can generally sustain even higher initial charge currents than Nickel based batteries, but are more prone to explosion if you don't monitor changes in heat and internal resistance accurately. So the 15minutes quoted by the OP is totally realistic if the charge station could meet the current demands (ie, is at an electrical substation, has battery or super cap packs charged during off-hours on site, etc), but there really is no reason for the OP to have said 15+ instead of 3+, 60-, or "time it takes to charge".
Keep in mind, the 3.5hours you quote for Tesla is only on 240V service at 20A. 120V service at 20A takes 7-8hours. 240V at 40A or 440V at 20A might be closer to 2hours. And that's for the Tesla, which has a pretty wide range. A light weight commuter electric might only have 40-60miles of charge, so a full charge at standard 240V might only be an hour, meaning high current quick charges could be even faster.
Umbrella. Raincoat. Rubber boots. If you're cheap, garbage bag. Umm.. This thing.
I agree. Why would anyone pay $15-$30/mo for phone service when you can mate something like Vitelity or Les.net with an unlocked PAP2 for less than $10/mo. :p
But, no.. if your voice quality was poor it's either because you have a bad internet connection, you don't have quality of service properly setup, or your router can't actually handle quality of service at the bandwidth you use. Try using your router as a simple access point (eg, disable DHCP) and install ZeroShell or another router distribution on a spare PC with 2 NICs. You might find that Linksys device running tomato/dd-wrt/openwrt/etc really wasn't as cool as you thought it was.
On Ubuntu: Click "Places" at the top of the screen and then "Home". Find the folder you want to share (You know, the yellow picture of a paper folder that has movies in it?) and right click it. Click "Properties" on the menu that appears. Now click "Sharing" and choose "Share this folder". Click OK a couple of times to close all the boxes.
This is from memory, but it should be pretty close.
>(whose anti-FiOS advertising has been getting downright nasty lately)
What's stopping the cable companies from running fiber to the home? I live in a town of not quite 100k and they already ran fiber to all the neighborhood distribution points. We don't have FiOS here, but in places where they do, the cable companies should STFU and run their own fiber to the homes.
Is that even true? If you choose "Download" and copy the URL it gives you for the wav file, you can't use the link unless your logged it. It's my assumption that to get a public URL of the scheme "google.com/voice/fm/*" you need to first choose the option to e-mail a voice mail and include a public link. Perhaps that's a poor assumption on my part. Do we have evidence that it's one way or the other?
I think that no one is going to trust an inflatable car.
I would. Thick material under high pressure cann be extremely strong and durable.
if the power requirements are too high- ship them to a recharger and back.
Bad bad bad bad idea. There goes your carbon/energy savings. Now we have semis shipping depleted batteries across the country for charging. Want to know why we use power lines instead of semi-shipped batteries to power our homes? It's vastly more efficient.
Your right that this is important, but either charge overnight at the station or, if necessary, string more powerlines. If you have to burn diesel fuel to charge a battery at a coal plant, you're doing it wrong. If you have to drain 30 batteries as part of charging 100 batteries at a wind station, you're still doing it wrong. Regardless of how the shipping trucks are powered, if you have to ship batteries to charge them, you're doing it all wrong.
And we still need a way to track battery wear. If I show up with a battery that's been cycled 30 times and get one that's been cycled 300, I may have a full charge, but the battery I have now no longer has the capacity (range) of the one I turned in. I should get some sort of rebate for trading a higher cap battery for a lesser one and pay extra for if I do the reverse. The only alternative I see is renting, rather than owning, the batteries.
A diy electric car using deep cycle lead acids might get 40 miles on 400lbs of batteries. The telsa roadster gets almost 300 miles on around 1000lbs of lithium-ion batteries. You wont go very far on 50 lbs of battery, even in a very light weight car.
The 4 door model Tesla Motors is working on will have removable batteries. They are working to get swap stations setup across the country.
A drive easily use 15w.
I call bullshit.
My ammeter barely registered a difference between 1 drive in my computer and 4 drives in my computer with the system at idle (drives spinning). A drive might pull up to 15w at spindle spinnup, but doesn't use that much power when spinning. This statement certainly fits with my recollection.
Wait, what?
Windows XP and any modern *nix (including OSX) have built in support for software raid on generic SATA/IDE controllers. Software raid is, IMHO, the *only* way to go for the reasons you state (controller card/motherboard goes and the data is gone). Linux's mdadm certainly works on generic drives of different sizes/makes and marks the drives location in the array at the start of the raid partition, allowing it to discover the right drives regardless of the controller/position you connect it to.
I'd agree not to use the fakeraid controllers built into most modern motherboards in raid mode, but I see no reason against software raid. I'd recommend it over fake raid any day and over hardware raid in most cases.
No, you misread. Let's review:
Subject: Thank goodness for Dr. Geist
Body: A breath of fresh air in the murky air of pollution spewed by the RIAA/MPAA et. al.
Who spews the pollution? The RIAA/MPAA. Who's a breath of fresh air? Dr. Geist. Who is the poster criticizing? The RIAA/MPAA, and perhaps US Law. Who is the poster not criticizing? Dr. Geist or Canadian law. We can actually clean up the original a little bit and we arrive at:
Punctuated as a sentence Thank goodness for Dr. Geist: a breath of fresh air in the murky air of pollution spewed by the RIAA/MPAA et. al.
I don't see how you possibly could have arrived at your conclusion.
Vista has folder redirection for programs writing to /Program Files/ directly. Take a peak through the hidden folders in your /users/[username]. Did they remove this from Win7?
I guess, I'm not a Windows user, but I do occasionally have contact with Windows, still. I found a lot of annoyances in Vista, but not a lot in the way of incompatibilities--at least, nothing that shouldn't be expected, such as the 16bit thing on 64bit computers.
But I guess what you're telling me is that if it worked on Vista it should work on Win7? So then XP mode just helps to solve peoples complaints with Vista and isn't really warranted by anything in Win7 itself. It's just a nice extra for those who had trouble with Vista. Amirite?
Well what the hell did they have on the Palm III series devices? I used to use that to control my TV.
alot of game installers were written to an inordinate amount of information to a Win 9x registry which they can't do in Vista/7.
Can't you just right-click, run as administrator? Me thinks the registry isn't the problem, but I don't doubt something else is. I believe UAC prompts if something tries to write to someplace in the system.dat portion, so running as administrator shouldn't even be required.
The ability to run 16 bit programs. Yes, there's still lots of them around.
Is Win7 64bit only? It can't be, they're touting it for netbooks. Did they drop support for 16bit from the 32bit release? Back when I used Windows, this was an issue on XP64, but I only encountered 32bit apps that had 16 bit installers, and it sounds like they've got something special for this case.
The ability to provide read/write access to c:\Program Files\ and c:\Windows\ or whatever they are called in Windows 7.
Don't they just prompt you with the UAC as in Vista? Hell, Vista also has a overlay of program files in c:\users\[username]\appdata\ (or there abouts) so a program storing config information in c:\program files\[application]\ can be redirected to your user folder. Again, this doesn't sound like anything new to Win7 or anything that would require XP mode.
IIRC, Office 2007 beta had PDF support, but then there was a lawsuit with Adobe and they pulled it from the public release. I guess they got things sorted out, or maybe Adobe found they don't have as much control over their format as they thought they did.
Our chip fab has that problem. They have equipment which only has an ISA interface to the computer and the company refuses to make a PCI one. Thus, it is either use an old computer, or buy a new board with ISA support.
I've run into similar problems. Did you know there's multiple different types of PCI slots? They're differentiated by a divider in the slot itself, much as AGP 4x was differentiated from 8x. Most PCI cards are universal cards and most slots are the newer, 3.3v(?) kind.
That's a neat trick. I had a lot of trouble when first trying 64bit windows due to 16bit installers. Generally, I'd extract the installer manually if Winzip/Winrar would handle it, or I'd find another machine to start the installer and then find where it extracted to in the temp folder and copy that over. Of course, that was before I found Gentoo and left the world of windows (mostly) behind.
Speaking of the 90s, I used to use the IRDA port on my Palm IIIxe as a universal remote. I have to say, I haven't tried on any of my laptops yet.
I didn't even own a laptop until 2004. I'd been using desktops and handhelds exclusively. So I don't know what 2001 would want with me. I don't own any laptops that old.
Did you even read the article?
[quote]It still makes sense.[/quote]
This is where you lost me.
If Sun had many more employees of that caliber (sic)
Yeah, it sure does suck when your employees are smart enough to recognize failure and learn from it. That's actually a sought after trait in my field. But you're probably right. Sun failed because too many of their employees learned from past mistakes.