There is s vast difference between a universal wireless charging "surface" or "plate" where your electronics go at night versus recharging at a distance of 10 feet.
Then there is also a difference between the "idle" power loss versus "zero" while turned OFF & of the transmitters efficiency in getting power to a remoted device. I could imagine only 25% or less of the transmitter's input getting to the remote device.
Time matters. Batteries are going to get better quicker if A123Systems & others are right, meaning charging with a standard cord may be the cheapest & best method giving a 5-10 minute recharge, as opposed to overnight.
Ain't going to be easy. Lots of VC money is going to be burned up. The good news is the U.S. government is not picking and funding a single winner, as they tend to do when they back a "bill".
Gosh I used to hate Circuit City "salesmen" as they were abrasively aggressive...that is until they found I wanted a stack of disks instead of a $2k wide screen TV, whereupon they literally wheeled off to the next marke through the metal detectors.
As a guess based on my experience, the actual implementation of a design, with prototyping, testing for failure modes, integral monitoring, sensors and such, I will bet that another 1-2 dozen patents will be filed and $10s of millions will be spent getting or trying to get the "pre-production" version over a 3-5 year time frame. If they leverage by working with an existing battery manufacturer, maybe they get it to 2-3 years.
Given that the initial results suggest an energy density increase of an order of magnitude, I suspect VCs are already crawling into Palo Alto & up to Standford.
What happens between the "experiment" where a 10/1 advantage is produced, to the final produceable & safe product, it is not uncommon to see 10/1 advantages slip to 5/1.
Other notes in this thread have joked at 10 times the explosive power, which battery manufacturers have worked out in existing batteries, but this one will offer BIGGER challenges. I wouldn't know how to calculate the "explosive power" of the end design if safeties failed, but this will be critical.
Any serious damage which might cause a catastrophic short would cause some companies to NOT accept these batteries, like airlines for instance. My pure guess is that physical damage, in say an automobile accident, or similar "mashing", will make the design of safety features be what takes the most time and effort.
I've applied for a patent for the carefully aimed use of airborne chairs for intimidation of employees, particularly when they are threatening to resign to go to work for a competitor.
The question is whether gPhone can establish a profound ecosystem of its own. It might do so & still not materially affect Apple, since Apple is offering an integraded personal digital ecosystem that gPhone is not aiming for in Android.
Besides everything else, I predict that given Google's tight relationship with Apple, we will see Google ads at some point on the iPhone.
With the volume of handsets worldwide, there is plenty of room for 2-3 GREAT players.
I always wrote in the exceptions, being the projects and areas I had already worked on previously, including ones I just did research on, and laid them all out in an addendum to the agreement. Most of the items were not related to the company, but some were, but they always signed and hired me.
This is why companies have outside auditors for their accounting departments.
Should not companies now figure out how to audit their IT deparments regularly?
This is NOT that uncommon, after reading some of the stuff written by the forensic snoops hired by private companies (who mostly do not want anyone to know that anything was compromised...shareholders & investors for instance).
Cloned 10.4.10 to an external and did the Leopard Upgrade just to see what happens on my MBPro. It seemed HotSpotVPN caused some things in the System to choke up on CPU use, with lots of errors in the Console. This was sort of expected given prior releases, and that is why I did the "Upgrade" as a test.
An hour after the 1st install, I wiped it and did a virgin install on an empty partition, and added necessary applications and utilities one by one. So far so good, and I'll eventually clone the install for an emergency boot volume with all applications.
An "Upgrade" to Leopard on a near virgin Mac Mini w/o 3rd party applications did work fine w/o any known glitch to date, which was expected.
I'm going to take a go slow attitude, expect to install 10.5.1 in a month, and get a good handle on getting clones done & verifying copies work before using Leopard full time.
Lots of nitpicking of the solution and Wolfram and such have been posted. Let the nitpickers contribute!
It takes a push from various people, and communication and conflicts of opinions to wind up exciting someone to sit down and solve some excruciating problem.
I don't care whether it is math, mechanics, biology or physics, someone has to do the HARD work, and Wolfram contributed in his own promotional way, and Alex Smith solved the SOB of the smallest Turing problem, with a significant set of input from the judging panel requesting addtional work.
A community of interested people wound up involved in getting an advanced solution. Then others said "but what good is it in requiring an infinite memory/tape". Similar things were said about past inventions, until other inventors figured out how to make the prior/first invention practical.
I love math, but am not a mathemetician, so I have to contribute with the mundane discoveries and designs I do in my arena of medical product design, and they too will live on beyond me.
The complainers should leave something that outlives them. That is what makes for a great society.
When I as a customer have to pay for the OS, and then have to put in my own time at $xy per hour to "fix" the OS, when routine actions occur, as described elsewhere.
Top management decisions at MS are loading up their legitimate customers with extra work, lost income and frustration. Frustration is what doomed T-Mobile's relationship with me, and I dumped them in spite of their cancellation fee (reduce my "plan" and they automatically tack on another 2 year minimum period before I could cancel for free - that is the definition of CRAP.).
Not all the frustrations come from DRM. For heaven's sake, Registry glitches and other things that don't or stop working are a pain in XP. My WiFi on XP simply disappeared as an option in the Networking section. That has NEVER happened on my Macs.
If I ever get a chance to run SolidWorks on something other than Windows, I'll be one of the first to jump ship from Microsoft...forever.
We have sunspot variablity, how about that for cyclic behavior, unrelated to humans.
We have had 2 dozen ice ages in the last millions of years, and most certainly humans didn't cause those either.
To be very specific, some repetitive factor cause the cooling, and then at the depth of the ice ages, something (unrelated to humans) caused the climate to warm up.
Until we know why this has repeatedly occurred, we will not know what, if anything, humans can do about it. Oh that is except move out of the way of the encroaching water or ice, depending on your politics.
Trusting Either one could/can lead to big problems. At least with the later, you can extract your data & move to a new computer.
Government controlled Space Power Beams might easily make Post-Toasties of your private plane or house if a control problem occurred, or worse yet a hacker took over (probably from the RBN).
I have to use Windows for one single heavy duty application, so I have no choice. But I loaded a new hard drive with Win XP Pro XP2, the updates at that time (2 years ago or so) and the application.
The Dell has never been back on line since then, and has never sufferred a BSOD, nor any update issues, and has stayed up virtually 100% of the time, performing flawlessly.
All work on the web is done on my MacBook Pro, thank you, and it has never suffered any downtime, either. Well it didn't until I filled up its hard drive and needed a larger one.
I am seriously tempted to repeat Win XP SP2 install on a new Dell to take the next version of the application I must run. The last thing I want is crap from the web shutting me down for various crapo reasons.
There was not any engineering detail to go on from the video, I agree. But trashing the idea without getting the numbers is bad science, more akin to the nightly news.
The whole concept is interesting, because it can work with wood and cloth instead of mylar and aluminum. The "first world" part would be the magnet, coils and the DC rectifier/converter to allow a user to likely charge a battery.
How many of these generators and how big they would be to extract a usable 10 watts of charging power in a 5-10 mph wind hasn't been defined, but with a couple models, that can be determined.
You never learn anything by bitching. Buckling up and testing is the way this & other ideas will be understood and improved. For the 3rd world, just a minimal LED lamp array can make the difference between studying at night or not.
Try going in with pad and paper and writing part numbers and prices down, or better yet, just obviously photographing the price tags, and see what happens.
Probably only 1% of the "artists" in the recording field ever have a "Promotor/Distributor" who funds promotions and inventory. Brittney and Prince are amongst probably 0.1% of artists who have a "Real Label" instead of a vanity printed CD.
Hence for the 99%+ of artists, it still comes down to quality of their work and their individual promotion work.
Back to the same old B.S. that has caused turmoil in Hollywood since I can remember.
Artist makes contract with "BigCo", and "BigCo" agrees to a % of the "sales" as they define them, and then "BigCo" sets the price of the movie, book, or music where they want to get their profits they want. That was the way of the 20th Century.
In the 19th Century, artists of all types made money on direct sales, direct live acts and there was little other than a shop that might sell works for a % of the sale.
Now I wonder if the 21st Century Artist is not moving back to the 19th Century methods, where the artist controls things more, since it is the Artist inspiring the viewers, listeners, readers of his work that counts for quality artistic expression. If Artists have something hot, that your subset of the human race likes, the Internet allows those mutual groups to find each other in lots of ways.
I think the Internet is leveling the playing field, and artists are likely to see a resurgence of interest...provided they have quality work.
Windows Update is not a backdoor, since it is known.
After reading all the comments, my suspicion is that there are OTHER backdoors, that will never be spoken of, because they are put in at the behest of the NSA.
The NSA will be looking for various spies and such, but the whole mess begs the question of what happens when a black hat in the Baltics or Bejing figures out how to access and control any Windows computer it can get to on the Internet?
Critical proprietary information does NOT belong on computers connected to the Internet.
What this means is that once the Chinese or Estonian hackers figure out how to do what Microsoft just did, then THEY OWN YOUR DATA.
How any corporation in its right mind could tolerate what is obviously an insecure platform to run proprietary & highly secret information on for generating profits for their shareholders is simply beyond my grasp.
Its has done me well, but I also use Win XP specifically for 3D solids mechanical plastic part design, because no reputable software for 3D mech design is on the Mac (yes I have used Ashlar).
I also run Win XP w/Boot Camp sometimes on my MacBook Pro and it is OK for occassional work (oldest model Mac Book Pro).
But, I envision running the next MacBook Pro with a solid state hard drive and kicking my old Dells out the door by probably January 2008 at MacWorld.
iPhone, in spite of massive FUD, has been zero learning curve, everything basically worked, and bi-directional synching is seconds per day to accomplish. This is a FIRST for a cell phone, in spite of what Microsoft's & Palm's CEOs so loudly stated with such verve before the iPhone launch.
Apple's product work, work well, and don't require $2000 training classes.
I am not surprised that Apple's market share is growing 3 times the PC growth.
I don't think anyone else is surprised at the growth either. Apple's team new they were right and stayed the course for 10 years to make this all happen. That is what it takes.
Slashdot Mirror
There is s vast difference between a universal wireless charging "surface" or "plate" where your electronics go at night versus recharging at a distance of 10 feet.
Then there is also a difference between the "idle" power loss versus "zero" while turned OFF & of the transmitters efficiency in getting power to a remoted device. I could imagine only 25% or less of the transmitter's input getting to the remote device.
Time matters. Batteries are going to get better quicker if A123Systems & others are right, meaning charging with a standard cord may be the cheapest & best method giving a 5-10 minute recharge, as opposed to overnight.
Ain't going to be easy. Lots of VC money is going to be burned up. The good news is the U.S. government is not picking and funding a single winner, as they tend to do when they back a "bill".
They spun around just like guys on Segways, but I wasn't looking at their feet.
Gosh I used to hate Circuit City "salesmen" as they were abrasively aggressive...that is until they found I wanted a stack of disks instead of a $2k wide screen TV, whereupon they literally wheeled off to the next marke through the metal detectors.
It should have been written as "...Exploded in space outside any galaxy or identified solar system".
Picky yes, but it gets tiring reading "news" where the writers of the public blurbs just don't know enough to get the details right.
As a guess based on my experience, the actual implementation of a design, with prototyping, testing for failure modes, integral monitoring, sensors and such, I will bet that another 1-2 dozen patents will be filed and $10s of millions will be spent getting or trying to get the "pre-production" version over a 3-5 year time frame. If they leverage by working with an existing battery manufacturer, maybe they get it to 2-3 years.
Given that the initial results suggest an energy density increase of an order of magnitude, I suspect VCs are already crawling into Palo Alto & up to Standford.
What happens between the "experiment" where a 10/1 advantage is produced, to the final produceable & safe product, it is not uncommon to see 10/1 advantages slip to 5/1.
Other notes in this thread have joked at 10 times the explosive power, which battery manufacturers have worked out in existing batteries, but this one will offer BIGGER challenges. I wouldn't know how to calculate the "explosive power" of the end design if safeties failed, but this will be critical.
Any serious damage which might cause a catastrophic short would cause some companies to NOT accept these batteries, like airlines for instance. My pure guess is that physical damage, in say an automobile accident, or similar "mashing", will make the design of safety features be what takes the most time and effort.
I've applied for a patent for the carefully aimed use of airborne chairs for intimidation of employees, particularly when they are threatening to resign to go to work for a competitor.
The question is whether gPhone can establish a profound ecosystem of its own. It might do so & still not materially affect Apple, since Apple is offering an integraded personal digital ecosystem that gPhone is not aiming for in Android.
Besides everything else, I predict that given Google's tight relationship with Apple, we will see Google ads at some point on the iPhone.
With the volume of handsets worldwide, there is plenty of room for 2-3 GREAT players.
EVERYTHING you might invent. That is overbroad.
I always wrote in the exceptions, being the projects and areas I had already worked on previously, including ones I just did research on, and laid them all out in an addendum to the agreement. Most of the items were not related to the company, but some were, but they always signed and hired me.
This is why companies have outside auditors for their accounting departments.
Should not companies now figure out how to audit their IT deparments regularly?
This is NOT that uncommon, after reading some of the stuff written by the forensic snoops hired by private companies (who mostly do not want anyone to know that anything was compromised...shareholders & investors for instance).
Cloned 10.4.10 to an external and did the Leopard Upgrade just to see what happens on my MBPro. It seemed HotSpotVPN caused some things in the System to choke up on CPU use, with lots of errors in the Console. This was sort of expected given prior releases, and that is why I did the "Upgrade" as a test.
An hour after the 1st install, I wiped it and did a virgin install on an empty partition, and added necessary applications and utilities one by one. So far so good, and I'll eventually clone the install for an emergency boot volume with all applications.
An "Upgrade" to Leopard on a near virgin Mac Mini w/o 3rd party applications did work fine w/o any known glitch to date, which was expected.
I'm going to take a go slow attitude, expect to install 10.5.1 in a month, and get a good handle on getting clones done & verifying copies work before using Leopard full time.
is doing a demonstration project, but $2 million doesn't by crap these days. It takes more than $2million just for the power supplies.
Google for "Tri-Alpha Energy"
Lots of nitpicking of the solution and Wolfram and such have been posted. Let the nitpickers contribute!
It takes a push from various people, and communication and conflicts of opinions to wind up exciting someone to sit down and solve some excruciating problem.
I don't care whether it is math, mechanics, biology or physics, someone has to do the HARD work, and Wolfram contributed in his own promotional way, and Alex Smith solved the SOB of the smallest Turing problem, with a significant set of input from the judging panel requesting addtional work.
A community of interested people wound up involved in getting an advanced solution. Then others said "but what good is it in requiring an infinite memory/tape". Similar things were said about past inventions, until other inventors figured out how to make the prior/first invention practical.
I love math, but am not a mathemetician, so I have to contribute with the mundane discoveries and designs I do in my arena of medical product design, and they too will live on beyond me.
The complainers should leave something that outlives them. That is what makes for a great society.
When I as a customer have to pay for the OS, and then have to put in my own time at $xy per hour to "fix" the OS, when routine actions occur, as described elsewhere.
Top management decisions at MS are loading up their legitimate customers with extra work, lost income and frustration. Frustration is what doomed T-Mobile's relationship with me, and I dumped them in spite of their cancellation fee (reduce my "plan" and they automatically tack on another 2 year minimum period before I could cancel for free - that is the definition of CRAP.).
Not all the frustrations come from DRM. For heaven's sake, Registry glitches and other things that don't or stop working are a pain in XP. My WiFi on XP simply disappeared as an option in the Networking section. That has NEVER happened on my Macs.
If I ever get a chance to run SolidWorks on something other than Windows, I'll be one of the first to jump ship from Microsoft...forever.
The short article is mere speculation, and certainly not driven by any scientific polling data.
Opinion, speculation, heresay and whatever, but not much worthy of the pixels to paint on my screen.
We have sunspot variablity, how about that for cyclic behavior, unrelated to humans.
We have had 2 dozen ice ages in the last millions of years, and most certainly humans didn't cause those either.
To be very specific, some repetitive factor cause the cooling, and then at the depth of the ice ages, something (unrelated to humans) caused the climate to warm up.
Until we know why this has repeatedly occurred, we will not know what, if anything, humans can do about it. Oh that is except move out of the way of the encroaching water or ice, depending on your politics.
Trusting Either one could/can lead to big problems. At least with the later, you can extract your data & move to a new computer.
Government controlled Space Power Beams might easily make Post-Toasties of your private plane or house if a control problem occurred, or worse yet a hacker took over (probably from the RBN).
I have to use Windows for one single heavy duty application, so I have no choice. But I loaded a new hard drive with Win XP Pro XP2, the updates at that time (2 years ago or so) and the application.
The Dell has never been back on line since then, and has never sufferred a BSOD, nor any update issues, and has stayed up virtually 100% of the time, performing flawlessly.
All work on the web is done on my MacBook Pro, thank you, and it has never suffered any downtime, either. Well it didn't until I filled up its hard drive and needed a larger one.
I am seriously tempted to repeat Win XP SP2 install on a new Dell to take the next version of the application I must run. The last thing I want is crap from the web shutting me down for various crapo reasons.
There was not any engineering detail to go on from the video, I agree. But trashing the idea without getting the numbers is bad science, more akin to the nightly news.
The whole concept is interesting, because it can work with wood and cloth instead of mylar and aluminum. The "first world" part would be the magnet, coils and the DC rectifier/converter to allow a user to likely charge a battery.
How many of these generators and how big they would be to extract a usable 10 watts of charging power in a 5-10 mph wind hasn't been defined, but with a couple models, that can be determined.
You never learn anything by bitching. Buckling up and testing is the way this & other ideas will be understood and improved. For the 3rd world, just a minimal LED lamp array can make the difference between studying at night or not.
Try going in with pad and paper and writing part numbers and prices down, or better yet, just obviously photographing the price tags, and see what happens.
I try to follow the money.
I understand why the Symantec shill said what he said, and that is understandable.
A white list on my machine I control is one thing.
A white list controlled by Symantec is something I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, let alone load.
Probably only 1% of the "artists" in the recording field ever have a "Promotor/Distributor" who funds promotions and inventory. Brittney and Prince are amongst probably 0.1% of artists who have a "Real Label" instead of a vanity printed CD.
Hence for the 99%+ of artists, it still comes down to quality of their work and their individual promotion work.
Back to the same old B.S. that has caused turmoil in Hollywood since I can remember.
Artist makes contract with "BigCo", and "BigCo" agrees to a % of the "sales" as they define them, and then "BigCo" sets the price of the movie, book, or music where they want to get their profits they want. That was the way of the 20th Century.
In the 19th Century, artists of all types made money on direct sales, direct live acts and there was little other than a shop that might sell works for a % of the sale.
Now I wonder if the 21st Century Artist is not moving back to the 19th Century methods, where the artist controls things more, since it is the Artist inspiring the viewers, listeners, readers of his work that counts for quality artistic expression. If Artists have something hot, that your subset of the human race likes, the Internet allows those mutual groups to find each other in lots of ways.
I think the Internet is leveling the playing field, and artists are likely to see a resurgence of interest...provided they have quality work.
Windows Update is not a backdoor, since it is known.
After reading all the comments, my suspicion is that there are OTHER backdoors, that will never be spoken of, because they are put in at the behest of the NSA.
The NSA will be looking for various spies and such, but the whole mess begs the question of what happens when a black hat in the Baltics or Bejing figures out how to access and control any Windows computer it can get to on the Internet?
Critical proprietary information does NOT belong on computers connected to the Internet.
What this means is that once the Chinese or Estonian hackers figure out how to do what Microsoft just did, then THEY OWN YOUR DATA.
How any corporation in its right mind could tolerate what is obviously an insecure platform to run proprietary & highly secret information on for generating profits for their shareholders is simply beyond my grasp.
Bo
Its has done me well, but I also use Win XP specifically for 3D solids mechanical plastic part design, because no reputable software for 3D mech design is on the Mac (yes I have used Ashlar).
I also run Win XP w/Boot Camp sometimes on my MacBook Pro and it is OK for occassional work (oldest model Mac Book Pro).
But, I envision running the next MacBook Pro with a solid state hard drive and kicking my old Dells out the door by probably January 2008 at MacWorld.
iPhone, in spite of massive FUD, has been zero learning curve, everything basically worked, and bi-directional synching is seconds per day to accomplish. This is a FIRST for a cell phone, in spite of what Microsoft's & Palm's CEOs so loudly stated with such verve before the iPhone launch.
Apple's product work, work well, and don't require $2000 training classes.
I am not surprised that Apple's market share is growing 3 times the PC growth.
I don't think anyone else is surprised at the growth either. Apple's team new they were right and stayed the course for 10 years to make this all happen. That is what it takes.