JavaScript requires the teaching of an environment and pre-existing objects like DOM
Of course it doesn't require those, you idiot and everyone who voted you insightful. The Code Academy Getting Started with Programming is in JavaScript and doesn't cover the DOM, CSS, or anything else that goes on in a browser.
Your argument is like saying kids shouldn't learn mechanical engineering by looking at car engines, because car engines are hooked up to all those distracting car interiors and dashboards, and once you shift out of neutral, you have to learn the vast messy subject of driving. So kids should study freestanding steam engines, no potential distractions there.
The environment that JavaScript runs in is a huge feature because it's the web pages where everyone spends much of their time! Once you learn the language, you can start doing canvas graphics (are you seriously proposing BASIC's shitty graphics instead?) Once you learn about objects, you learn that the browser and the window in which your script runs in are themselves objects that you can mess with. What's more motivating, peeking under the covers of Facebook and a million other websites or learning some ivory-tower language and its own limited environment disconnected to everything else the kid does on a computer? Your claim "this is motivated by business" is laughable. It would be profoundly stupid to begin with any language other than JavaScript when the other essential computer course is "Learning how the web works (HTML and HTTP)."
It is hilarious to see people writing web platforms are dead... on a web site. And you're flat-out stupid to write shoving the web browser into the stack for as a middle-man for no reason, when the browser is a universal zero-install runtime for many kinds of fantastic software. And some organizations do want ChromeOS instead of current desktop O.S.es, and if users who only use their laptops to go online understood the benefits it offers, many of them would want ChromeOS too.
I agree Dart and NaCl are divisive distractions, but so are iOS and Android apps that add no value over a well-written web site or web app. Meanwhile Google is not alone trying to extend web technologies to do more; Boot 2 Gecko, Tizen, WebOS are all adding new web APIs, while the next-generations of traditional toolkits like Gnome Shell, QML, even Windows 8 are all racing to embrace Web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Standardization efforts like W3C, DAP and WAC lag behind, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to adapt a single web app to various APIs than to write native apps for each platform from scratch.
The open Web competes with other technologies, but it's also growing to encompass more functionality. Google's both working for and against it.
Alan Parsons says I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics. Agreed, maybe people without a dedicated room or who are renting feel limited in what they can do, but it makes a big difference.
If you have small or "bookshelf" speakers, put them on rigid stands. Read up on speaker positioning; get some test signals off the web and really well-recorded music you're familiar with; then play one channel at a time while someone moves that speaker around (and you try out different listening positions); then adjust both speakers to get a good stereo spread. Use rugs and drapes to absorb first order reflections off the floor, side walls, and rear wall.
I paid Rives Audio to consult on my room layout, they suggested firing across the room instead of along it, putting sound deadening panels on the rear wall, using bookshelves to break up the side wall reflections etc. Money well spent. Meanwhile despite instant worldwide friction-free distribution, artists don't make enough from recording sales to pay for Alan Parsons and wind up making crappy home recordings or taking rough mixes from live gigs.
Actually, crap audio sounds worse on good speakers. The cheap speakers act as a filter, plus the ear/mind compensates so you clean up the sound. It's 'good enough'. Many people say this, but not in my experience. I've played YouTube off a laptop, MP3s through smartphone headphone jacks, mono FM radio, and cassettes through my $20,000 system. At the same volume level, everything sounds better than on my $150 PC speaker system. No matter what the original is, distorting it some more and reproducing it through bad speakers doesn't help.
I truly hope some day you get to hear several $5000 speaker pairs through a decent front-end in a room with reasonably good acoustics so you can appreciate how wrong your first claim is. A great stereo setup puts a convincing (I hesitate to say "life-like" because that's not the goal of a lot of recordings) group of musicians in space in front of you, and you hear musical details you didn't know were there. I say several because speakers fall so short of reproducing live music that reasonable people prefer very different speaker designs (compact monitors, towers, horns, flat panels, omnidirectional, etc.).
As for cables, I had radio interference and noise using ~$10 Radio Shack RCA interconnects. Switching one channel to a quality Blue Jeans Cable for ~$50 dramatically reduced it as confirmed by an SPL meter. I'm confident that paying increasingly outrageous sums beyond that for audiophile cables would produce minimal audible benefits, if any. As Alan Parsons points out, room acoustics are more important and I have yet to mount the diffuser panels on my ceiling that the acoustic consultant recommended.
In the latest stable release on my G1G1 XO-1, pressing View Source (Fn + Space) opens up a nifty project source code browser for Chat, Paint, Read and other Python activities I tried (it's pretty cool!).
The Sugar Journal is just different. If you don't name you get Paint Activity, Chat Activity, etc. which is no worse than having New document.odp, New document(2).odp, etc. It's BETTER for kids because there's no folders to navigate. The Sugar developers have smoothed a lot of the rough edges and improved things, e.g. the default when you start an activity is to resume your last document.
PDF support was terrible, but you can blame Evince and Poppler for not managing memory better on a device with only 128kB RAM. These days the Read activity remembers the last page you're on and has bookmarking with notes! You can flip the screen and close the keyboard and still use the arrow and game keys work to move/zoom/page around, so maybe it works better as an e-reader. (Also you can now open PDFs within the browser, but that doesn't work as well.)
As people work on the software it slowly improves, and new releases incorporate improvements in Fedora, GTK, Abiword, etc. The constructionist (or is it constructivist, I get my pedagogical terms confused) activities like Scratch and Turtle Blocks are impressive. But I don't think many adults would enjoy using an XO over a conventional laptop or desktop. I had run Sugar under qemu so I knew I wouldn't be blown away by my G1G1 laptop, regardless of Nicholas Negroponte's sales hype. I think OLPC has it exactly right these days, provide laptops to anyone with a credible project that advances their educational aims.
OLPC's customers are educational organizations that can implement "one laptop per child".
A lot of the OLPC software effort is easing the hard work of a deployment: managing reflashing hundreds of machines at once with a new distribution, restoring to a stable image, device backup, school servers, service & repair, etc. That's more involved than "selling low-cost computers" and it's different from "the democratization of computers". Android and ChromeOS have some similar facilities and someone could base large educational rollouts on them, but there's little money in it, so it seems if a non-profit is still the way to go.
You're confused (or writing poorly about fish). OLPC never "jettisoned" Sugar. The OLPC software distribution now offers a choice between the Sugar UI and a Gnome desktop, and supports running a version of Windows XP from SD card; OLPC provided these choices in response to those education customers. Of the 2.5M XO laptops out there, no large deployment is running Microsoft Windows. In many Sugar activities, pressing View Source (Fn + Space) opens up the Python source code (it's pretty cool!), and the source code from the firmware up is readily available.
Anonymous Coward wrote My complaint with OLPC is rather than try to optimize the original hardware design to make it cheaper and more capable, they simply designed a completely new device. The original XO-1 with AMD Geode LX was followed by the faster more powerful XO-1.5 with Via C7-M, an option for a non-membrane regular-style keyboard, and now an Marvell Sheeva ARM-based XO-1.75 is nearing beta. All use the same Yves Béhar/fuseproject industrial design and reuse some components such as the battery as the XO-1, so these worthwhile revisions didn't get much coverage.
According to the deployments page, there are "2.5 million XOs in the field as of November, 2011", mostly in Uruguay and Peru.
emscripten and JSLinux suggest this is irrelevant
on
MAME Running In Chrome
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emscripten can compile C code, or anything that can produce LLVM bitcode, directly into JavaScript, allowing heavyweight code like Ruby/Python/Lua, physics engines, raytracing, FreeType, text-to-speech, etc. to run in a browser. JSLinux emulates the 386 instruction set to the point it can boot a stock Linux kernel, start a terminal, and run ELF executables like the Busybox command-line utilities in a browser (JSLinux's Fabrice Bellard could probably do MAME in JavaScript in his sleep one-handed.) So despite the innovations in Native Client, targeting JavaScript in an HTML5 browser is the way forward. And until Google implements Portable Native Client, NaCl doesn't even give you the ability to run in any Chrome browser, you need an architecture-specific executable. But portable NaCl is just running LLVM bytecode, and emscripten is already turning that into plain JavaScript without requiring a new black box in each web page.
Does anyone know if any of the native apps in ChromeOS/ChromiumOS and Android are written in NaCL or PNaCl? That would make some sense.
Stop thinking there's a single silver bullet. Driving a fundamentally more efficient car thanks to electric propulsion and regenerative braking is part of addressing energy consumption. And "so-called green" is as meaningless a phrase as "green".
That lifecycle study was produced by a UK "anything but batteries" consortium looking for government money for efficient internal combustion engine and flywheel (?!?) technology. It all hinges on your electricity generation mix (its 500 g CO2 per kWh iseems sky-high), but even an EV owner in a midwest coal-fired state can put solar panels on the roof.
Meanwhile your Lingenfelter C6 (nice car!) is based off a Corvette that gets 19mpg combined EPA. At 12,000 miles a year, every year it will consume 630 gallons of gasoline, or 2 tons, that turns into 6 tons of CO2. And each gallon took an additional ~0.25 gallons to produce, spill, and deliver. Even without the solar panels, if you live in a natural gas or hydro powered area (here's the EPA's map), an EV is "all that much better". And that's before you consider all the geopolitical, terrorist, financial, etc. downsides of gasoline.
It takes about 1000 gallons of embodied energy to make a 1.5-ton car, and most of the resources are recyclable. Meanwhile your 2001 Buick Regal gets 21 mpg combined according to the EPA. Over 120,000 miles it will consume 3,300 more gallons of gasoline than a 50 mpg Prius; that's 10 *TONS* more gasoline which turns into 32 *TONS* of CO2. (Here's a spreadsheet.) And every one of those gallons took additional fuel to produce, spill, and deliver.
That's why every reputable study concludes 75-90% of the lifetime pollution of a car occurs in its operation, not its production.
I'm not knocking you for driving an old car, so long as you don't drive much. But everyone who smugly puts down Prius/Leaf/Volt drivers for hurting the environment with their shiny new toys is misguided.
The Model S battery is swappable at a Tesla store, though Tesla is vague on the details.
An EV's battery pack weighs many hundreds of pounds and is integrated into the vehicle — under the floor in the Model S, in the trunk of the Focus Electric, in a T-shape in the Volt. How can you standardize that? Within that pack are sheets or modules of batteries that CAN be individually replaced in servicing, but they are offered by various battery suppliers and are integrated into thermal/electrical/safety monitoring systems, so swapping 7 modules becomes very time consuming.
Next problem is cost. A car battery isn't like a propane tank: the metal part costs way more than the fuel/electricity. Also, you'll only occasionally be swapping batteries, but if you get a dud you'll be recharging it over and over and eventually trying to sell it with your car. No one wants to swap their $10,000 pristine battery pack for a clapped-out battery that's only holding 70% of its original charge.
Better Place had your idea, they have a standardized QuickDrop swappable battery system that you can get in the Renault Fluence Z.E. (and NO other car model) and then exchange at a robotic swap station. To solve the dud problem, BP owns the battery and supplies you charge. But that makes buying/leasing the car a three-way deal, and it means a third party has to make money off what should be a cheap operation (recharging from the wall) while financing lots of extra batteries and building extremely expensive swap stations. You'll pay BP big $$$ for the convenience one way or another. BP is trying to make it work in Israel and Denmark (while doing a lot of PR and spin and shilling forums with crap about how they're big in China).
If and when battery density and economy both quadruple, you could imagine a car carrying half a dozen 40 pound standardized modules that you can add to for long trips or swap out for fully charged ones. Honda Power Systems is thinking along these lines, they announced a "Loop battery" concept about the size of a small briefcase that you can use to power a neighborhood EV ("golf cart"), then remove to power home tools, electronics, etc. Similarly, another Japanese automaker (Suzuki?) showed a scooter that can carry one or two removable battery packs.
The Leaf's optional DC fast charge to 80% takes 30 minutes from a 50 kW CHAdeMO charging station. There are 800 in Japan, 150 in Europe and a handful in the USA, though supposedly most Nissan dealers will be installing them.
Some (all?) Model S variants will support Tesla's own 90 kW Supercharger, which will give a 50% charge boost in 30 minutes (150 mile range in a 300 mile pack). Also the Model S pack is swappable, so for a long trip you could borrow a 300 mile pack from a Tesla store (for now Tesla is vague on the details).
Meanwhile some USA and European car makers have endorsed a proposed third DC fast charger, the SAE J1772 "combo-coupler" with two extra fat pins beyond the current plug that almost all plug-in cars for DC charging up to 90 kW. The joy of standards...
30 minutes is still longer than a gas vehicle, but it makes the occasional long-distance trip (on which you didn't take your family's other car, or rent, or fly) more practical. I'm sure it's not enough for you, from your comments you seem allergic to EVs for a host of reasons. But you don't speak or buy for everyone.
Also Bugzilla, the Thunderbird e-mail client and Sunbird/Lightning calendar, SeaMonkey suite, and several other browser projects http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ . Plus unlike Google all their internal tools to run a big software operation are open source: Tinderbox, the LXR, MXR, DXR code indexers, Litmus test system, the addons.mozilla.org source code, and contributions to other projects like dashboards, data mining, python frameworks, etc.
Plus Mozilla has contributed $$ and programming towards SQLite, Cairo and various open source/free software initiatives.
Doesn't matter what actual studies find. ABC News will film someone who'll definitively state "The only reason I'm alive today is because the prostate/breast/colorectal/whatever screening caught my cancer. I just can't understand those doctors wanting to stop the test that saved my life!" Intercut the scientifically illiterate telegenic reporter nodding sympathetically. Then go back to Diane Sawyer in the studio giving the network's medical expert 37 seconds to explain how on earth *NOT* finding cancers is a good idea. And he'll just say "Uh, it's complicated... go talk to your doctor."
This stuff is just too hard for people, they don't have the math skills for it. But that doesn't prevent them from "knowing" what's right.
Good question, I don't think you can. The CSS Print Profile keeps track of a current page counter, but I think you only have access to the current page number for presentation and styling; you can't query another element and ask what page it's on. So you have to do references by section number, and when printing arrange for the current section's number to show up in the page header or footer.
How is it a "leap of faith" to drive within the range of the vehicle? Range anxiety seems to plague people who don't own an electric car... actual owners not so much. Every morning they get in a car they've cheaply "refueled" overnight, do their usual boring commute and shopping run, and return home. If you sometimes find yourself in the middle of nowhere on an unplanned road trip to Vegas, use a different vehicle. There's probably one nearby, since most households in the USA have multiple cars.
(reposting as myself, sorry.) Attempts to explain the mechanics of DNA leave me with so many burning questions I end up as a bemused pile of ash with some ACGT letters in it. Besides "What controls the HOX genes and their clusters?"
Article says When the time is right, the strand begins to unwind, so is there another clock that turns on this clock?
the genes encoding the formation of cervical vertebrae come off the spool and become activated. Beware passive voice, what activates them?
Does the HOX clock run in every cell? If not, which ones? If each one, what keeps them in sync? Some cells are 3 days old during this process, some are brand new
Wikipedia explains the protein product of the Hox gene Antennapedia activates genes that specify the structures of the 2nd thoracic segment, but when new cells form in that area weeks later, how do they know their place? Do they have a little piece of Antennapedia stuck on their office door, or a "You are here" pin on the map? (Perhaps Regulation is achieved via protein concentration gradients, called morphogenic fields "explains" that, but that just raises more questions.)
The article title is the mechanism that gives shape to life Go look at any medical illustration and the names given to every protrusion and fold and layer, remember there are thousands more illustrations with that level of detail, then re-read the HOX explanation. I've got about 5 orders of magnitude more structure in me than 30-odd slices. Is the HOX system reused to control the layout of my arm down to five jointed fingers? If not, what takes its place at lower levels?
I'm in awe that we can puzzle out our own creation, but either our understanding or the explanations of it are riddled with gaps.
According to "everyone", climate science is 100% settled and there is no questioning it
You fabricate a complete bullshit misrepresentation in order to make skepticism look reasonable.
Obviously an entire scientific field isn't 100% settled, duh. Just go to the global warming Wikipedia page, climate models don't agree whether the low emission world results in a 1.5 to 1.9 C warming in the 21st century., or whether the high emission scenario results in a 3.4 to 6.1 C of warming. The intense debates about climate sensitivity, the role of polar ice sheets, heat storage of the oceans, etc. are very real, but pretty boring. They tend to only get reported in the mainstream press when denialist assholes twist them. For example, the german researchers saying the the sun has been burning more brightly and its influence on climate has been undervalued got mangled in an Investor's Business Daily editorial into the utter lie that "researchers at the Max Planck Institute report [this accounts]for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years."
What's missing from the scientific process is a scenario, model, theory, ANYTHING that doesn't predict warming. When scientific popularisers say "the debate is over", that is probably what they are referring to. Or maybe they're saying the greenhouse effect is based on basic physics that's not sensibly open to question, so increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases WILL lead to warming. Or maybe they're saying the only credible explanation for the observed warming in recent decades is the increase in anthropogenic greehouse gases. Just because people make vague low-content statement doesn't mean they're untrue.
There are some very specific statements in support of the 100% solid set in stone idea. From the 2010 report of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering (the second one on climate change ordered by Republican bozos in Congress to delay action), Advancing the Science of Climate Change:
Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.
All 2M+ XO laptops in all the deployments run Linux. Development of the open source Fedora spin and the Sugar user interface for kids continues at a reasonable pace.
2. Run off fuels so explosive they make gasoline look like water.
3. Run off an energy storage medium that has to be produced. If you make the hydrogen from steam reformation of natural gas, it's still fossil fuel and only slightly better carbon footprint than burning the natural gas directly in the engine. If you make the H2 from electrolysis of water powered by renewable energy, it's hugely expensive and with 1/3 as many batteries or windmills you could just feed the electricity directly into batteries.
4. Rely on a hugely expensive non-existent infrastructure. Right now there are billions of EV charging points, also called "wall sockets", millions of more powerful 240V points ready to be wired up (called "oven and electric dryer circuits"), and thousands of level 2 240V public charging stations. As the standard battle described in the RTFA settles, fast DC charging stations can be built along highways for ~$40,000 each. Meanwhile there are a handful of $500,000 hydrogen refueling stations in the entire USA, Gropinator Ahhnold's Hydrogen Highway in California is dead, and the oil companies and car companies are stalled on the chicken-and-egg of "WHEN you build your cars in volume, maybe we'll build some stations" while hoping for government handouts to break the impasse.
H2 may still have a role as a better range-extender than a combustion engine powered by gasoline/bioethanol/whatever, but it's got to show up first. It's likely to start with fleet vehicles run from a central depot. (Go to http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/locator/stations/ and look for electric and H2 stations in your area, though ignore the private H2 refueling stations.)
That doesn't work because the car doesn't know how much current it can pull from the outlet. Is it a NEMA-6 or NEMA-14 outlet, is it on a 15A or 50A circuit? The SAE J1772 standard describes how the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment uses additional pins in the connector to signal how much current it can deliver, and when the electrician sets up the EVSE she makes sure it's on an appropriately powerful circuit. But SAE J1772 240V AC doesn't give you fast charging. The spec goes to 80A, but even at 19.2 kW you're looking at well over an hour to charge a 25 kWh battery pack. The next problem is an onboard charger that can handle that much AC power gets hot and is expensive. Of all EV cars on the road, only the Tesla Roadster handles more than 10 kW AC.
Since EVs are already handling huge DC voltages flowing from the brake regen to the batteries, it's cheaper to provide them high-voltage high-current DC for fast charging, though it makes the charging station much more expensive. When it comes to DC fast charging, CHAdeMO is already big in Japan with their standard (up to 62 kW) and is available as an option on the Leaf, but SAE J1772 committee decided not to adopt it and instead added two chunky DC pins to their connector (up to 90 kW)
What you propose is sort of what's happened in Europe. Domestic supply is already 240V and standardized at about 13A, so regardless of what receptacle is on your vehicle, you drive around with a connecting cable that fits it and plug the other end into whatever your country's uses for "domestic wall outlet in a waterproof box" and get ~3 kW. The SAE J1772 240V AC spec isn't very interesting to Europe, so some German companies (that have yet to make EVs in volume) instead promote another standard, IEC 62196 VDE-AR-E 2623-2-2, the "Mennekes" connector. It bridges the European domestic 240V supply for up to 400 V three-phase AC and 63A for a maximum of 44 kW, but that still has the problem of EVs including that powerful an on-board AC charger.
It's fun to see a bunch of armchair engineers designing battery swap while seemingly ignorant of the real world.
Better Place sells you electric miles. They own the battery packs, so there's no issue with getting a tired one. You charge at home, you charge at one of their public chargers, and the sexy part is the robotic battery swap station. They are rolling it out in Denmark and Israel, so we can see the problems with their model: swap stations and spare batteries cost a fortune so blanket coverage is only practical in compact countries (like Denmark and Israel), only one manufacturer has committed to using their standardized QuickDrop battery on only one model (Renault Fluence Z.E.) , and to make it profitable BP has to charge you a lot more than it would cost to lease a battery as part of your car and cheaply recharge it yourself. We'll see how many EV drivers in those two countries value the BP approach, meanwhile beware BP's happy PR talk spin mode.
Tesla's upcoming Model S has a swappable battery pack. Pull into a Tesla store and they could swap your pack with a charged one for a long trip. It's sort of like a dealer putting snow tires on your car for a winter journey. They haven't figured out the details.
The seductive idea of replacing individual standardized battery sheets doesn't work in the real world where each weighs 20+ pounds (and an electric car has 10-40 of them), is mounted in a special enclosure with thermal management, has massive thick connectors carrying large voltages, etc.
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JavaScript requires the teaching of an environment and pre-existing objects like DOM
Of course it doesn't require those, you idiot and everyone who voted you insightful. The Code Academy Getting Started with Programming is in JavaScript and doesn't cover the DOM, CSS, or anything else that goes on in a browser.
Your argument is like saying kids shouldn't learn mechanical engineering by looking at car engines, because car engines are hooked up to all those distracting car interiors and dashboards, and once you shift out of neutral, you have to learn the vast messy subject of driving. So kids should study freestanding steam engines, no potential distractions there.
The environment that JavaScript runs in is a huge feature because it's the web pages where everyone spends much of their time! Once you learn the language, you can start doing canvas graphics (are you seriously proposing BASIC's shitty graphics instead?) Once you learn about objects, you learn that the browser and the window in which your script runs in are themselves objects that you can mess with. What's more motivating, peeking under the covers of Facebook and a million other websites or learning some ivory-tower language and its own limited environment disconnected to everything else the kid does on a computer? Your claim "this is motivated by business" is laughable. It would be profoundly stupid to begin with any language other than JavaScript when the other essential computer course is "Learning how the web works (HTML and HTTP)."
It is hilarious to see people writing web platforms are dead... on a web site. And you're flat-out stupid to write shoving the web browser into the stack for as a middle-man for no reason, when the browser is a universal zero-install runtime for many kinds of fantastic software. And some organizations do want ChromeOS instead of current desktop O.S.es, and if users who only use their laptops to go online understood the benefits it offers, many of them would want ChromeOS too.
I agree Dart and NaCl are divisive distractions, but so are iOS and Android apps that add no value over a well-written web site or web app. Meanwhile Google is not alone trying to extend web technologies to do more; Boot 2 Gecko, Tizen, WebOS are all adding new web APIs, while the next-generations of traditional toolkits like Gnome Shell, QML, even Windows 8 are all racing to embrace Web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Standardization efforts like W3C, DAP and WAC lag behind, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to adapt a single web app to various APIs than to write native apps for each platform from scratch.
The open Web competes with other technologies, but it's also growing to encompass more functionality. Google's both working for and against it.
Alan Parsons says I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics.
Agreed, maybe people without a dedicated room or who are renting feel limited in what they can do, but it makes a big difference.
If you have small or "bookshelf" speakers, put them on rigid stands. Read up on speaker positioning; get some test signals off the web and really well-recorded music you're familiar with; then play one channel at a time while someone moves that speaker around (and you try out different listening positions); then adjust both speakers to get a good stereo spread. Use rugs and drapes to absorb first order reflections off the floor, side walls, and rear wall.
I paid Rives Audio to consult on my room layout, they suggested firing across the room instead of along it, putting sound deadening panels on the rear wall, using bookshelves to break up the side wall reflections etc. Money well spent. Meanwhile despite instant worldwide friction-free distribution, artists don't make enough from recording sales to pay for Alan Parsons and wind up making crappy home recordings or taking rough mixes from live gigs.
Actually, crap audio sounds worse on good speakers. The cheap speakers act as a filter, plus the ear/mind compensates so you clean up the sound. It's 'good enough'.
Many people say this, but not in my experience. I've played YouTube off a laptop, MP3s through smartphone headphone jacks, mono FM radio, and cassettes through my $20,000 system. At the same volume level, everything sounds better than on my $150 PC speaker system. No matter what the original is, distorting it some more and reproducing it through bad speakers doesn't help.
I truly hope some day you get to hear several $5000 speaker pairs through a decent front-end in a room with reasonably good acoustics so you can appreciate how wrong your first claim is. A great stereo setup puts a convincing (I hesitate to say "life-like" because that's not the goal of a lot of recordings) group of musicians in space in front of you, and you hear musical details you didn't know were there. I say several because speakers fall so short of reproducing live music that reasonable people prefer very different speaker designs (compact monitors, towers, horns, flat panels, omnidirectional, etc.).
As for cables, I had radio interference and noise using ~$10 Radio Shack RCA interconnects. Switching one channel to a quality Blue Jeans Cable for ~$50 dramatically reduced it as confirmed by an SPL meter. I'm confident that paying increasingly outrageous sums beyond that for audiophile cables would produce minimal audible benefits, if any. As Alan Parsons points out, room acoustics are more important and I have yet to mount the diffuser panels on my ceiling that the acoustic consultant recommended.
In the latest stable release on my G1G1 XO-1, pressing View Source (Fn + Space) opens up a nifty project source code browser for Chat, Paint, Read and other Python activities I tried (it's pretty cool!).
The Sugar Journal is just different. If you don't name you get Paint Activity, Chat Activity, etc. which is no worse than having New document.odp, New document(2).odp, etc. It's BETTER for kids because there's no folders to navigate. The Sugar developers have smoothed a lot of the rough edges and improved things, e.g. the default when you start an activity is to resume your last document.
PDF support was terrible, but you can blame Evince and Poppler for not managing memory better on a device with only 128kB RAM. These days the Read activity remembers the last page you're on and has bookmarking with notes! You can flip the screen and close the keyboard and still use the arrow and game keys work to move/zoom/page around, so maybe it works better as an e-reader. (Also you can now open PDFs within the browser, but that doesn't work as well.)
As people work on the software it slowly improves, and new releases incorporate improvements in Fedora, GTK, Abiword, etc. The constructionist (or is it constructivist, I get my pedagogical terms confused) activities like Scratch and Turtle Blocks are impressive. But I don't think many adults would enjoy using an XO over a conventional laptop or desktop. I had run Sugar under qemu so I knew I wouldn't be blown away by my G1G1 laptop, regardless of Nicholas Negroponte's sales hype. I think OLPC has it exactly right these days, provide laptops to anyone with a credible project that advances their educational aims.
OLPC's customers are educational organizations that can implement "one laptop per child".
A lot of the OLPC software effort is easing the hard work of a deployment: managing reflashing hundreds of machines at once with a new distribution, restoring to a stable image, device backup, school servers, service & repair, etc. That's more involved than "selling low-cost computers" and it's different from "the democratization of computers". Android and ChromeOS have some similar facilities and someone could base large educational rollouts on them, but there's little money in it, so it seems if a non-profit is still the way to go.
You're confused (or writing poorly about fish). OLPC never "jettisoned" Sugar. The OLPC software distribution now offers a choice between the Sugar UI and a Gnome desktop, and supports running a version of Windows XP from SD card; OLPC provided these choices in response to those education customers. Of the 2.5M XO laptops out there, no large deployment is running Microsoft Windows. In many Sugar activities, pressing View Source (Fn + Space) opens up the Python source code (it's pretty cool!), and the source code from the firmware up is readily available.
Anonymous Coward wrote
My complaint with OLPC is rather than try to optimize the original hardware design to make it cheaper and more capable, they simply designed a completely new device.
The original XO-1 with AMD Geode LX was followed by the faster more powerful XO-1.5 with Via C7-M, an option for a non-membrane regular-style keyboard, and now an Marvell Sheeva ARM-based XO-1.75 is nearing beta. All use the same Yves Béhar/fuseproject industrial design and reuse some components such as the battery as the XO-1, so these worthwhile revisions didn't get much coverage.
According to the deployments page, there are "2.5 million XOs in the field as of November, 2011", mostly in Uruguay and Peru.
emscripten can compile C code, or anything that can produce LLVM bitcode, directly into JavaScript, allowing heavyweight code like Ruby/Python/Lua, physics engines, raytracing, FreeType, text-to-speech, etc. to run in a browser. JSLinux emulates the 386 instruction set to the point it can boot a stock Linux kernel, start a terminal, and run ELF executables like the Busybox command-line utilities in a browser (JSLinux's Fabrice Bellard could probably do MAME in JavaScript in his sleep one-handed.) So despite the innovations in Native Client, targeting JavaScript in an HTML5 browser is the way forward. And until Google implements Portable Native Client, NaCl doesn't even give you the ability to run in any Chrome browser, you need an architecture-specific executable. But portable NaCl is just running LLVM bytecode, and emscripten is already turning that into plain JavaScript without requiring a new black box in each web page.
Does anyone know if any of the native apps in ChromeOS/ChromiumOS and Android are written in NaCL or PNaCl? That would make some sense.
Stop thinking there's a single silver bullet. Driving a fundamentally more efficient car thanks to electric propulsion and regenerative braking is part of addressing energy consumption. And "so-called green" is as meaningless a phrase as "green".
That lifecycle study was produced by a UK "anything but batteries" consortium looking for government money for efficient internal combustion engine and flywheel (?!?) technology. It all hinges on your electricity generation mix (its 500 g CO2 per kWh iseems sky-high), but even an EV owner in a midwest coal-fired state can put solar panels on the roof.
Meanwhile your Lingenfelter C6 (nice car!) is based off a Corvette that gets 19mpg combined EPA. At 12,000 miles a year, every year it will consume 630 gallons of gasoline, or 2 tons, that turns into 6 tons of CO2. And each gallon took an additional ~0.25 gallons to produce, spill, and deliver. Even without the solar panels, if you live in a natural gas or hydro powered area (here's the EPA's map), an EV is "all that much better". And that's before you consider all the geopolitical, terrorist, financial, etc. downsides of gasoline.
It takes about 1000 gallons of embodied energy to make a 1.5-ton car, and most of the resources are recyclable. Meanwhile your 2001 Buick Regal gets 21 mpg combined according to the EPA. Over 120,000 miles it will consume 3,300 more gallons of gasoline than a 50 mpg Prius; that's 10 *TONS* more gasoline which turns into 32 *TONS* of CO2. (Here's a spreadsheet.) And every one of those gallons took additional fuel to produce, spill, and deliver.
That's why every reputable study concludes 75-90% of the lifetime pollution of a car occurs in its operation, not its production.
I'm not knocking you for driving an old car, so long as you don't drive much. But everyone who smugly puts down Prius/Leaf/Volt drivers for hurting the environment with their shiny new toys is misguided.
The Model S battery is swappable at a Tesla store, though Tesla is vague on the details.
An EV's battery pack weighs many hundreds of pounds and is integrated into the vehicle — under the floor in the Model S, in the trunk of the Focus Electric, in a T-shape in the Volt. How can you standardize that? Within that pack are sheets or modules of batteries that CAN be individually replaced in servicing, but they are offered by various battery suppliers and are integrated into thermal/electrical/safety monitoring systems, so swapping 7 modules becomes very time consuming.
Next problem is cost. A car battery isn't like a propane tank: the metal part costs way more than the fuel/electricity. Also, you'll only occasionally be swapping batteries, but if you get a dud you'll be recharging it over and over and eventually trying to sell it with your car. No one wants to swap their $10,000 pristine battery pack for a clapped-out battery that's only holding 70% of its original charge.
Better Place had your idea, they have a standardized QuickDrop swappable battery system that you can get in the Renault Fluence Z.E. (and NO other car model) and then exchange at a robotic swap station. To solve the dud problem, BP owns the battery and supplies you charge. But that makes buying/leasing the car a three-way deal, and it means a third party has to make money off what should be a cheap operation (recharging from the wall) while financing lots of extra batteries and building extremely expensive swap stations. You'll pay BP big $$$ for the convenience one way or another. BP is trying to make it work in Israel and Denmark (while doing a lot of PR and spin and shilling forums with crap about how they're big in China).
If and when battery density and economy both quadruple, you could imagine a car carrying half a dozen 40 pound standardized modules that you can add to for long trips or swap out for fully charged ones. Honda Power Systems is thinking along these lines, they announced a "Loop battery" concept about the size of a small briefcase that you can use to power a neighborhood EV ("golf cart"), then remove to power home tools, electronics, etc. Similarly, another Japanese automaker (Suzuki?) showed a scooter that can carry one or two removable battery packs.
The Leaf's optional DC fast charge to 80% takes 30 minutes from a 50 kW CHAdeMO charging station. There are 800 in Japan, 150 in Europe and a handful in the USA, though supposedly most Nissan dealers will be installing them.
Some (all?) Model S variants will support Tesla's own 90 kW Supercharger, which will give a 50% charge boost in 30 minutes (150 mile range in a 300 mile pack). Also the Model S pack is swappable, so for a long trip you could borrow a 300 mile pack from a Tesla store (for now Tesla is vague on the details).
Meanwhile some USA and European car makers have endorsed a proposed third DC fast charger, the SAE J1772 "combo-coupler" with two extra fat pins beyond the current plug that almost all plug-in cars for DC charging up to 90 kW. The joy of standards...
30 minutes is still longer than a gas vehicle, but it makes the occasional long-distance trip (on which you didn't take your family's other car, or rent, or fly) more practical. I'm sure it's not enough for you, from your comments you seem allergic to EVs for a host of reasons. But you don't speak or buy for everyone.
Also Bugzilla, the Thunderbird e-mail client and Sunbird/Lightning calendar, SeaMonkey suite, and several other browser projects http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ . Plus unlike Google all their internal tools to run a big software operation are open source: Tinderbox, the LXR, MXR, DXR code indexers, Litmus test system, the addons.mozilla.org source code, and contributions to other projects like dashboards, data mining, python frameworks, etc.
Plus Mozilla has contributed $$ and programming towards SQLite, Cairo and various open source/free software initiatives.
Doesn't matter what actual studies find. ABC News will film someone who'll definitively state "The only reason I'm alive today is because the prostate/breast/colorectal/whatever screening caught my cancer. I just can't understand those doctors wanting to stop the test that saved my life!" Intercut the scientifically illiterate telegenic reporter nodding sympathetically. Then go back to Diane Sawyer in the studio giving the network's medical expert 37 seconds to explain how on earth *NOT* finding cancers is a good idea. And he'll just say "Uh, it's complicated... go talk to your doctor."
This stuff is just too hard for people, they don't have the math skills for it. But that doesn't prevent them from "knowing" what's right.
Because HTML has shitty support for vector graphics
You're mistaken, there's <canvas> and <SVG>. Here's a basic summary comparing them. You can also do some impressive vector effects just with CSS, such as animating graphs and pie charts.
Good question, I don't think you can. The CSS Print Profile keeps track of a current page counter, but I think you only have access to the current page number for presentation and styling; you can't query another element and ask what page it's on. So you have to do references by section number, and when printing arrange for the current section's number to show up in the page header or footer.
... ever since jslinux booted a Linux 2.6.20 image.
In Firefox, JavaScript runs 386!
How is it a "leap of faith" to drive within the range of the vehicle? Range anxiety seems to plague people who don't own an electric car... actual owners not so much. Every morning they get in a car they've cheaply "refueled" overnight, do their usual boring commute and shopping run, and return home. If you sometimes find yourself in the middle of nowhere on an unplanned road trip to Vegas, use a different vehicle. There's probably one nearby, since most households in the USA have multiple cars.
(reposting as myself, sorry.) Attempts to explain the mechanics of DNA leave me with so many burning questions I end up as a bemused pile of ash with some ACGT letters in it. Besides "What controls the HOX genes and their clusters?"
I'm in awe that we can puzzle out our own creation, but either our understanding or the explanations of it are riddled with gaps.
According to "everyone", climate science is 100% settled and there is no questioning it
You fabricate a complete bullshit misrepresentation in order to make skepticism look reasonable.
Obviously an entire scientific field isn't 100% settled, duh. Just go to the global warming Wikipedia page, climate models don't agree whether the low emission world results in a 1.5 to 1.9 C warming in the 21st century., or whether the high emission scenario results in a 3.4 to 6.1 C of warming. The intense debates about climate sensitivity, the role of polar ice sheets, heat storage of the oceans, etc. are very real, but pretty boring. They tend to only get reported in the mainstream press when denialist assholes twist them. For example, the german researchers saying the the sun has been burning more brightly and its influence on climate has been undervalued got mangled in an Investor's Business Daily editorial into the utter lie that "researchers at the Max Planck Institute report [this accounts]for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years."
What's missing from the scientific process is a scenario, model, theory, ANYTHING that doesn't predict warming. When scientific popularisers say "the debate is over", that is probably what they are referring to. Or maybe they're saying the greenhouse effect is based on basic physics that's not sensibly open to question, so increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases WILL lead to warming. Or maybe they're saying the only credible explanation for the observed warming in recent decades is the increase in anthropogenic greehouse gases. Just because people make vague low-content statement doesn't mean they're untrue.
There are some very specific statements in support of the 100% solid set in stone idea. From the 2010 report of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and Engineering (the second one on climate change ordered by Republican bozos in Congress to delay action), Advancing the Science of Climate Change:
All 2M+ XO laptops in all the deployments run Linux. Development of the open source Fedora spin and the Sugar user interface for kids continues at a reasonable pace.
Stop spreading a meme that wasn't ever true.
Because fuel cells:
1. Cost a fortune.
2. Run off fuels so explosive they make gasoline look like water.
3. Run off an energy storage medium that has to be produced. If you make the hydrogen from steam reformation of natural gas, it's still fossil fuel and only slightly better carbon footprint than burning the natural gas directly in the engine. If you make the H2 from electrolysis of water powered by renewable energy, it's hugely expensive and with 1/3 as many batteries or windmills you could just feed the electricity directly into batteries.
4. Rely on a hugely expensive non-existent infrastructure. Right now there are billions of EV charging points, also called "wall sockets", millions of more powerful 240V points ready to be wired up (called "oven and electric dryer circuits"), and thousands of level 2 240V public charging stations. As the standard battle described in the RTFA settles, fast DC charging stations can be built along highways for ~$40,000 each. Meanwhile there are a handful of $500,000 hydrogen refueling stations in the entire USA, Gropinator Ahhnold's Hydrogen Highway in California is dead, and the oil companies and car companies are stalled on the chicken-and-egg of "WHEN you build your cars in volume, maybe we'll build some stations" while hoping for government handouts to break the impasse.
H2 may still have a role as a better range-extender than a combustion engine powered by gasoline/bioethanol/whatever, but it's got to show up first. It's likely to start with fleet vehicles run from a central depot. (Go to http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/locator/stations/ and look for electric and H2 stations in your area, though ignore the private H2 refueling stations.)
That doesn't work because the car doesn't know how much current it can pull from the outlet. Is it a NEMA-6 or NEMA-14 outlet, is it on a 15A or 50A circuit? The SAE J1772 standard describes how the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment uses additional pins in the connector to signal how much current it can deliver, and when the electrician sets up the EVSE she makes sure it's on an appropriately powerful circuit. But SAE J1772 240V AC doesn't give you fast charging. The spec goes to 80A, but even at 19.2 kW you're looking at well over an hour to charge a 25 kWh battery pack. The next problem is an onboard charger that can handle that much AC power gets hot and is expensive. Of all EV cars on the road, only the Tesla Roadster handles more than 10 kW AC.
Since EVs are already handling huge DC voltages flowing from the brake regen to the batteries, it's cheaper to provide them high-voltage high-current DC for fast charging, though it makes the charging station much more expensive. When it comes to DC fast charging, CHAdeMO is already big in Japan with their standard (up to 62 kW) and is available as an option on the Leaf, but SAE J1772 committee decided not to adopt it and instead added two chunky DC pins to their connector (up to 90 kW)
What you propose is sort of what's happened in Europe. Domestic supply is already 240V and standardized at about 13A, so regardless of what receptacle is on your vehicle, you drive around with a connecting cable that fits it and plug the other end into whatever your country's uses for "domestic wall outlet in a waterproof box" and get ~3 kW. The SAE J1772 240V AC spec isn't very interesting to Europe, so some German companies (that have yet to make EVs in volume) instead promote another standard, IEC 62196 VDE-AR-E 2623-2-2, the "Mennekes" connector. It bridges the European domestic 240V supply for up to 400 V three-phase AC and 63A for a maximum of 44 kW, but that still has the problem of EVs including that powerful an on-board AC charger.
It's fun to see a bunch of armchair engineers designing battery swap while seemingly ignorant of the real world.
Better Place sells you electric miles. They own the battery packs, so there's no issue with getting a tired one. You charge at home, you charge at one of their public chargers, and the sexy part is the robotic battery swap station. They are rolling it out in Denmark and Israel, so we can see the problems with their model: swap stations and spare batteries cost a fortune so blanket coverage is only practical in compact countries (like Denmark and Israel), only one manufacturer has committed to using their standardized QuickDrop battery on only one model (Renault Fluence Z.E.) , and to make it profitable BP has to charge you a lot more than it would cost to lease a battery as part of your car and cheaply recharge it yourself. We'll see how many EV drivers in those two countries value the BP approach, meanwhile beware BP's happy PR talk spin mode.
Tesla's upcoming Model S has a swappable battery pack. Pull into a Tesla store and they could swap your pack with a charged one for a long trip. It's sort of like a dealer putting snow tires on your car for a winter journey. They haven't figured out the details.
The seductive idea of replacing individual standardized battery sheets doesn't work in the real world where each weighs 20+ pounds (and an electric car has 10-40 of them), is mounted in a special enclosure with thermal management, has massive thick connectors carrying large voltages, etc.