PCs from the get-go used a NEC 765 chip and are still compatible. What controller did the Amstrad use? This or the WD 187x chip? Or god forbid a proprietary controller.
I used to write floppy/hard disk bios and drivers and if I can help in any way drop me a line.
But my exes dad was, he was the head of the anti truct division of the justice department in Los Angeles for 15 years.
He had two seminal cases: 1) He beat Howard Hughes in court and 2) he was the guy behind US. Vs. Brown Shoe which I understand was a landmark case and is required reqading for anti trust lawyers today. Never mind Reagan gutted most anti-trust law.
To run afoul of the Sherman anti trust act you must control 2% of the total means of production of something. This is clearly not the case.
This is off the top of my head. Queue NewYorkCountryLawyer dude to correct me (as usual).
"Which means that a lot of CO2 is consumed by these plants right? I'm now wondering, if these marine plants only have access to dissolved CO2 in the water would it help to diffuse CO2 into the water? Wouldn't this be a good alternative being that there are so many "Easy Extraction" machines in the seas? "
Give that man a cookie. He figured it out. Add co2 and you at least double plant growth. More plants means more things that feed on plants. More of them means more of the things that eat them and so on and so forth till maybe, just maybe, all the large fish that are now all but extinct (tuna, cod, salmon) might bounce back. Maybe.
Dollars to donuts the move to dumpo c02 into the ground was political, not technical.
"A much better solution is carbon mineral sequestration - turning the carbon into rocks of some kind."
Does it strike anybody else as odd that plant growth is always carbon limited yet we have all this carbon to get rid of?
I don't know much about this stuff but I do know my aquarium plants with suck co2 out of the water and deposit carbonate salts in a process called "biogenic decalcification". And that aquarists all over pay big bucks to add co2 to their tanks to double their plant growth.
"China is also a world leader in solar thermal production and use, accounting for 55 percent of global solar heating capacity (excluding pool systems)or 52 million square meters of collectorsby the end of 2003, reports Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Janet Sawin in Vital Signs 2005. China aims to boost its production capacity of one specific type of collector, solar heat panels, to 51 million square meters by the end of 2005, which would make it the world leader in solar heat panel production, according to an official from the National Engineering Research Center for Renewable Energy.
Several upcoming events, such as the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Shanghai Expo 2010, and the 2007 World Conference on Solar Energy, will further stimulate Chinas solar energy industry. According to China Daily, solar power and terrestrial heat will be used at various Olympic venues; for example, 2-3 megawatt solar generators will power the sports facilities. The Shanghai city government, meanwhile, has drafted a three-year plan to boost municipal use of solar energy by 2007, including setting up several power generators with a combined capacity of 5,000 kilowatts, undertaking 30 projects that combine urban construction with solar energy, and installing solar panels at the factories of 20-30 heavy industries. A proposal has also been approved to install thousands of rooftop solar panels on commercial and residential buildings and educational institutions, according to Shanghai Daily.
With these and other initiatives, China is playing an important role in providing global solar energy markets with the policy support and legal protection they need. Worldwatch Institute statistics show that world PV cell production reached an estimated 1,200 megawatts in 2004, while the global market for solar thermal collectors grew some 50 percent between 2001 and 2004. As Chinas solar market emerges, it will be instrumental to moving the world to greater energy efficiency and environmental sustainability."
I have a coworker that is very interested in living off grid, and is also an engineer, and cheap to boot. As much as he wanted solar, he couldn't afford it. Why? The payback period (without subsidies) is 100 years! "
What kind of engineer? Sanitation enginneer? That's just utterly rediculous.
No spud, you don't run electric space heaters, dryers and stoves off solar. The first thing you do is get rid of all the overconsumptive stuff.
If your serious about living off grid you'll be clever and make it work (I did) for less than a years electricity. If you just add up the watts you use and figure out how many panels and batteries you'll need, then yeah, I can see that taking 100 years in some cases.
There's a certain feelin you get when you achieve sustainability off grid. It's utterly righteous. And I can leave the damn lights on as long as I want.
Keep in mind if you bought a domain name in the past 10 years you paid for this.
Back when domains were $100 for two years, 30% went into an "intellectual infrastructure fund". This was set up by Don Mitchell of the National Science Foundation who has aegis over domains and administered the NSI contract.
Don felt the internet did well because of the IETF process (not the IETF per se) and created this fund to keep that "pure". Ie it wouldn't need corporate sponsors. He though the money wouold be used for workshops, research grants what have you.
When ICANN reared it's ugly head Mike Roberts convinced congress to give him the money to build internet2 in the US. Never mind that people all over the world paid into that fund.
It's an overpriced testbed that has absolutely nothing to do with reality or what the next version of the Internet will be.
I worked at a computer manufacturor in the late 70's and early 80s in LA and started on 8-bit micros and was there for ther introduction of 16 bit chips.
I was used to PDP-11s keep in mind.
The problem wasn't the 68000 wasn't ready, it was ready. There were just no support chips yet. Intel actually delivered a complete solution: CTC chips, PIC's, serial ports, dma controllers, i/o processors (that nobody but us used).
Motorola had a CPU and that's it. A vastly *superior* CPU, but the hardware guys wanted to build systems not wait for the rest of the stuff they needed. So we all held our noses and went x86. And bought Amigas as soon as they were out (I have serial #11. Still.)
This crap as all in one chip these days, but back then computers had several large black chips inside them.
Do you mean root (".") or TLD (".com" et al) servers. Sorry to ask but a lot of people say "root" but mean "tld".
Anyway, primary the root zozne yourself. Run a copy of.com locally. Stop sucking on the tit of US government run DNS servers; we've been babied for 20 years and we really at this point should be doing this stuff for ourselves.
Somebody ought to look in the wayback machine for alternic.net. I have a vague memory of Kashpureff doing this well before 2001. Talk abourt irony. (He went to jail for hacking the internic. Back then it was considered bad. Not sure about today)
"The culture of DOS programming was corrupted from the beginning and you can partly blame IBM for a crappy BIOS. Were it not for the crappy BIOS, programmers wouldn't have had to resort to writing directly to hardware to get an acceptable speed on the screen."
Are you talking about games?
I once, back in the dark ages, reverse engineered Lotus 1-2-3 for Bell abnd Howell and never had a problem using the bios at all. I was used to cp/m and assembly and it was so simnilar to that there wasn't much of a learning curve.
I dsid write a grapohics hack once that talked directly to PC screen memory; PC's didn't do animation well. In the day you bought an Amiga if that's what your schtick was. In fact Flash can trace it's lineage back to a certain Amiga program, but it was years before a PC had the hardware to do those sorts of things. It just wasn't meant for animation.
All the other I/O stuff seemed to work ok via the Bios though.
Oh yeah and as of last week count me in as another "no more windows machines here, just mac's now". Buh bye Bill. It hasn't been fun. More like 18 years of pure unadulterated suckage. I haven't RTFA yetm but in true/. style I agree with it nonetheless. Snark.
"It uses 6800 of the 18650 LiIon cells. These things are on the order of $7 apiece at the cheapest retail price."
If you're planning on buying 10,000 or so LiIon cells you probably aren't gonna pay retail. Divide by 5 to get the real price that divide that by 2 to get the price FOB Shanghai.
I've been playing with light color for ages. Some placees you want 5000 or 6500K lighting, other places you want a softer light more like the 2700K warm white.
They now make warm white LEDs so it's nice to have the same design options as fluorescent.
Yeah well stop trying to run your electric dryer and stove.
I spent $5k on junk and now don't pay $11,000 yr to run this place. I have computers, lights, power tools and 35 fishtanks going so far. That's after 2 weeks work re-engineering stuff.
Reduced expectations are key. Being single helps:-)
Yeah well, start measuring the wattage draw from flourescents. I'm seeing numbers way higher than the rated wattage. I have a lot of flourescents to grow high-light aquarium plants. I can do it with leds. Much much harder with fluorescents from small scale solar.
I can't explain it either. It's in an unheated room in a stone chamber. I don't understand what's going on but the several boxes of bicarb in there I figure will mitigate any disasters. Plus for the time being it's running my lights. Mabe one day I'll put a new battery in there. Turns out a 7Ahr $8 SLA battery will do it.
Let me correct that for you. *small* batteries need charge controllers. The smallest industrial Exide battery (800 Ahr 1500 lbs) doesn't need one for anything your gonna throw at it with consumer grade solar panels and wind turbines.
But no, you don't want to overcharge small batteries. Charge controllers are pretty stupid cheap though frankly, and most wind wurbines have them built in to boot.
Um, up here poeple build collectors out of plywood, lines with styrofpam, black PVC tubes and a glass front. They go into a hot weater heater which you insulate the hell out of. From Marcvh to October they supply 100% of your hot water. I'm not sure anybody I know has spent more than $100 on one.
But ya gotta make them, not buy them to be effective really. At least that's what I've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
" Both Germany and the U.S. have ratified the Bern Copyright Convention (of sometime in the seventies)"
The US ratified it January 1, 1990.
PCs from the get-go used a NEC 765 chip and are still compatible. What controller did the Amstrad use? This or the WD 187x chip? Or god forbid a proprietary controller.
I used to write floppy/hard disk bios and drivers and if I can help in any way drop me a line.
Caveat: IANAL.
But my exes dad was, he was the head of the anti truct division of the justice department in Los Angeles for 15 years.
He had two seminal cases: 1) He beat Howard Hughes in court and 2) he was the guy behind US. Vs. Brown Shoe which I understand was a landmark case and is required reqading for anti trust lawyers today. Never mind Reagan gutted most anti-trust law.
To run afoul of the Sherman anti trust act you must control 2% of the total means of production of something. This is clearly not the case.
This is off the top of my head. Queue NewYorkCountryLawyer dude to correct me (as usual).
" Which means that a lot of CO2 is consumed by these plants right? I'm now wondering, if these marine plants only have access to dissolved CO2 in the water would it help to diffuse CO2 into the water? Wouldn't this be a good alternative being that there are so many "Easy Extraction" machines in the seas? "
Give that man a cookie. He figured it out. Add co2 and you at least double plant growth. More plants means more things that feed on plants. More of them means more of the things that eat them and so on and so forth till maybe, just maybe, all the large fish that are now all but extinct (tuna, cod, salmon) might bounce back. Maybe.
Dollars to donuts the move to dumpo c02 into the ground was political, not technical.
" A much better solution is carbon mineral sequestration - turning the carbon into rocks of some kind."
Does it strike anybody else as odd that plant growth is always carbon limited yet we have all this carbon to get rid of?
I don't know much about this stuff but I do know my aquarium plants with suck co2 out of the water and deposit carbonate salts in a process called "biogenic decalcification". And that aquarists all over pay big bucks to add co2 to their tanks to double their plant growth.
" Despite /.ers insistence that it is dying, coal will be around in the US (and certainly in China) "
Maybe. But China has more solar deployed than any nation on earth (Wikipedia).
See also: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/41
"China is also a world leader in solar thermal production and use, accounting for 55 percent of global solar heating capacity (excluding pool systems)or 52 million square meters of collectorsby the end of 2003, reports Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Janet Sawin in Vital Signs 2005. China aims to boost its production capacity of one specific type of collector, solar heat panels, to 51 million square meters by the end of 2005, which would make it the world leader in solar heat panel production, according to an official from the National Engineering Research Center for Renewable Energy.
Several upcoming events, such as the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Shanghai Expo 2010, and the 2007 World Conference on Solar Energy, will further stimulate Chinas solar energy industry. According to China Daily, solar power and terrestrial heat will be used at various Olympic venues; for example, 2-3 megawatt solar generators will power the sports facilities. The Shanghai city government, meanwhile, has drafted a three-year plan to boost municipal use of solar energy by 2007, including setting up several power generators with a combined capacity of 5,000 kilowatts, undertaking 30 projects that combine urban construction with solar energy, and installing solar panels at the factories of 20-30 heavy industries. A proposal has also been approved to install thousands of rooftop solar panels on commercial and residential buildings and educational institutions, according to Shanghai Daily.
With these and other initiatives, China is playing an important role in providing global solar energy markets with the policy support and legal protection they need. Worldwatch Institute statistics show that world PV cell production reached an estimated 1,200 megawatts in 2004, while the global market for solar thermal collectors grew some 50 percent between 2001 and 2004. As Chinas solar market emerges, it will be instrumental to moving the world to greater energy efficiency and environmental sustainability."
I have a coworker that is very interested in living off grid, and is also an engineer, and cheap to boot. As much as he wanted solar, he couldn't afford it. Why? The payback period (without subsidies) is 100 years! "
What kind of engineer? Sanitation enginneer? That's just utterly rediculous.
No spud, you don't run electric space heaters, dryers and stoves off solar. The first thing you do is get rid of all the overconsumptive stuff.
If your serious about living off grid you'll be clever and make it work (I did) for less than a years electricity. If you just add up the watts you use and figure out how many panels and batteries you'll need, then yeah, I can see that taking 100 years in some cases.
There's a certain feelin you get when you achieve sustainability off grid. It's utterly righteous. And I can leave the damn lights on as long as I want.
" Sure, that may work for a town of 1,300, but how about a city of 13,000? 130,000? 1,300,000? 13,000,000?"
Use more wind turbines? Is this a trick question?
" If the alternatives were cheap, they would be in place now."
(looks aruond the house) Um, they are.
It used to cost me $11,000/yr to run this place. I spent $5K on stuff and now my operaqting cost is zero.
No, you don't get to keep your electric dryer. Changes must be made. You will make them sooner or later, I just happen to be done now.
Pumping co2 into the ground is the dumbest idea since Bush entering politics.
Keep in mind if you bought a domain name in the past 10 years you paid for this.
Back when domains were $100 for two years, 30% went into an "intellectual infrastructure fund". This was set up by Don Mitchell of the National Science Foundation who has aegis over domains and administered the NSI contract.
Don felt the internet did well because of the IETF process (not the IETF per se) and created this fund to keep that "pure". Ie it wouldn't need corporate sponsors. He though the money wouold be used for workshops, research grants what have you.
When ICANN reared it's ugly head Mike Roberts convinced congress to give him the money to build internet2 in the US. Never mind that people all over the world paid into that fund.
It's an overpriced testbed that has absolutely nothing to do with reality or what the next version of the Internet will be.
"Your theories might be nice for hobbyists, but serious big businesses buy professional commercial tools"
Yeah and they REALLY ENJOY doing that.
I worked at a computer manufacturor in the late 70's and early 80s in LA and started on 8-bit micros and was there for ther introduction of 16 bit chips.
I was used to PDP-11s keep in mind.
The problem wasn't the 68000 wasn't ready, it was ready. There were just no support chips yet. Intel actually delivered a complete solution: CTC chips, PIC's, serial ports, dma controllers, i/o processors (that nobody but us used).
Motorola had a CPU and that's it. A vastly *superior* CPU, but the hardware guys wanted to build systems not wait for the rest of the stuff they needed. So we all held our noses and went x86. And bought Amigas as soon as they were out (I have serial #11. Still.)
This crap as all in one chip these days, but back then computers had several large black chips inside them.
Do you mean root (".") or TLD (".com" et al) servers. Sorry to ask but a lot of people say "root" but mean "tld".
.com locally. Stop sucking on the tit of US government run DNS servers; we've been babied for 20 years and we really at this point should be doing this stuff for ourselves.
Anyway, primary the root zozne yourself. Run a copy of
Somebody ought to look in the wayback machine for alternic.net. I have a vague memory of Kashpureff doing this well before 2001.
Talk abourt irony. (He went to jail for hacking the internic. Back then it was considered bad. Not sure about today)
" They don't give a crap because if you want to make money, you work on Windows"
I learned to live without money instead. It was less painfull.
" The culture of DOS programming was corrupted from the beginning and you can partly blame IBM for a crappy BIOS. Were it not for the crappy BIOS, programmers wouldn't have had to resort to writing directly to hardware to get an acceptable speed on the screen."
/. style I agree with it nonetheless. Snark.
Are you talking about games?
I once, back in the dark ages, reverse engineered Lotus 1-2-3 for Bell abnd Howell and never had a problem using the bios at all. I was used to cp/m and assembly and it was so simnilar to that there wasn't much of a learning curve.
I dsid write a grapohics hack once that talked directly to PC screen memory; PC's didn't do animation well. In the day you bought an Amiga if that's what your schtick was. In fact Flash can trace it's lineage back to a certain Amiga program, but it was years before a PC had the hardware to do those sorts of things. It just wasn't meant for animation.
All the other I/O stuff seemed to work ok via the Bios though.
Oh yeah and as of last week count me in as another "no more windows machines here, just mac's now". Buh bye Bill. It hasn't been fun. More like 18 years of pure unadulterated suckage. I haven't RTFA yetm but in true
" It uses 6800 of the 18650 LiIon cells. These things are on the order of $7 apiece at the cheapest retail price."
If you're planning on buying 10,000 or so LiIon cells you probably aren't gonna pay retail. Divide by 5 to get the real price that divide that by 2 to get the price FOB Shanghai.
" "Assuming you drive it 200 miles a day"
Wasn't the range 400 miles last year? Bloody laptop batteries never give what they promise.
(one has to wonder if one of those little drink-cooler looking Honda generators in the trunk or back might give you an extra few miles)
Ok, ceeded. I don't really need to drill granite though...
I've been playing with light color for ages. Some placees you want 5000 or 6500K lighting, other places you want a softer light more like the 2700K warm white.
They now make warm white LEDs so it's nice to have the same design options as fluorescent.
" except water pressure isn't "free" by any stretch of the imagination"
It is if you collect rainwater in the attic (then filter it through carbon and UV).
"However, the economics are awful."
:-)
Yeah well stop trying to run your electric dryer and stove.
I spent $5k on junk and now don't pay $11,000 yr to run this place. I have computers, lights, power tools and 35 fishtanks going so far. That's after 2 weeks work re-engineering stuff.
Reduced expectations are key. Being single helps
Yeah well, start measuring the wattage draw from flourescents. I'm seeing numbers way higher than the rated wattage. I have a lot of flourescents to grow high-light aquarium plants. I can do it with leds. Much much harder with fluorescents from small scale solar.
I can't explain it either. It's in an unheated room in a stone chamber. I don't understand what's going on but the several boxes of bicarb in there I figure will mitigate any disasters. Plus for the time being it's running my lights. Mabe one day I'll put a new battery in there. Turns out a 7Ahr $8 SLA battery will do it.
Huh.
" Batteries need charge-controllers"
Let me correct that for you. *small* batteries need charge controllers. The smallest industrial Exide battery
(800 Ahr 1500 lbs) doesn't need one for anything your gonna throw at it with consumer grade solar panels and
wind turbines.
But no, you don't want to overcharge small batteries. Charge controllers are pretty stupid cheap though frankly,
and most wind wurbines have them built in to boot.
Um, up here poeple build collectors out of plywood, lines with styrofpam, black PVC tubes and a glass front. They go into a hot weater heater which you insulate the hell out of. From Marcvh to October they supply 100% of your hot water. I'm not sure anybody I know has spent more than $100 on one.
But ya gotta make them, not buy them to be effective really. At least that's what I've seen.