if you search a site called 'Internet Tablet Talk' you'll see some enterprising types have already got the Android preview version running on a Nokia N810 web-pad
Apple has a real reason to not implement a full modern Bluetooth stack - if they do it on the iPhone it will be expected/demanded/hacked onto the ipod Touch, and people would then use an iPod Touch with a cheapo bluetooth phone rather than paying the premium for an iPhone
Google announced quite clearly before the launch that due to coding deadlines the phone would be issued with a limited Bluetooth stack and full features would be added later, and user developers were welcome to make their own solutions in the meantime...
What i REALLY want is an ATX power supply for my PC that has a 12-volt POWER IN line on it so I can have a stack of sealed-lead-acid batteries behind it wired to a solar panel on the roof, and so it would switch back to mains on-the-fly when the battery power got too low.. preferably without crashing the O/S
in a few years time, the batteries from the first batch of Toyota Prius / Honda Insight hybrid cars will be getting down to about the 50% efficiency point where it makes sense to replace them.
How about if all these 50%-degraded car packs get resold as home power storage? They're still good enough for that if they are cheap enough, and it puts off the need to recycle their chemicals for a few more years....
the grid system is inefficient, storage isn't generally available, too much old and inefficient electrical equipment is in use, and the power generating infrastructure isn't well-adapted to demand stats
I see that as 4 tangentially related problems subject to different solutions.
There are good arguments being made for a HV DC power grid to allow easier synchronisation of unpredictable renewables power generation resources to the existing stable network (this is a b*tch to achieve right now as frequency of a fluctuating AC supply can go up and down as well as current and voltage)
Surplus electrical power can be stored - either as heat to run a turbine, water in a pump-store, turned to hydrogen or anhydrous ammonia to run a generator-set, or even potentially in a large flywheel for short periods.
Advertising and tax breaks can give people good economic and ethical reasons to replace their consumer electronics with modern, less power-hungry kit...
.. peak power availability occurs in daylight, when conventional generation can be topped-up using solar. if peak consumption is moving towards the late evening and nighttime hours, this represents a future issue.
PHEV charging demand was seen as a good thing as the night was seen as a low-demand time. Maybe thats not going to be the case soon....
My employers make and sell consumer television sets.
One of the large power companies pays the proportionate costs of our advertising for all the TVs we sell which consumes less than x watts (Sorry - can't reveal the figure).
They do this because its in their interests to get lower-consumption TVs out there, and paying our advertising is easier than paying for additional capacity.
A Prius battery is normally on a 100% down to 80% charge discharge cycle
When they start getting down to 50%ish residual capacity most batteries will be replaced. The discarded 50%-capable Prius batteries can then be used for solar power storage in homes. Then your solar cell gets much more useful...
I daresay a 50cc lightweight diesel or petrol (gasoline) engine connected to a generator and set up to run at its most efficient speed will become commonplace.. mounted underfloor in most electric vehicles
If it produces say 20% of the power needed to run the vehicle in normal use, that would provide a limp-home facility or the ability to charge the battery by leaving the vehicle parked with the internal generator running for an hour or so... or alternatively the ability to extend the range by that proportion by starting it as you start your journey.
There is a real demand for plug-in hybrids despite whatever concerns Toyota management sees with the adoption of the technology.
As with Diesel Hybrids - Toyota may not want to make them but if there is a demand - and there is, for economy & ecology reasons in both cases - they will be made and sold. But Toyota wont get the profit from making them. That'll go to a more enterprising car company that makes what people want.
... for me the killer app of the only-available Android phone is the keyboard, as I don't like touchscreens (I prefer to type than touch a flat surface as I can more easily do it without looking), and also the promise of a full bluetooth implementation and an uncensored marketplace
I suspect 'killer app' is always going to be a subjective & personal interpretation. It's not a good way describe a feature.
While some cars sold here run better on premium fuel (and sufficiently so to defray the higher cost entirely) no cars are sold in the UK that cannot run on regular 95-RON petrol (gasoline), as it is the ubiquitous standard and in some places, all thats available. Your argument does hold true with diesels but because of sulphur not octane/cetane
By fitting slightly larger wheels (for better overall gearing and lower rolling resistance) and good low-roll res tyres on a vehicle this sort of efficiency gain is achievable without any suspicious attachments to the system.
I suspect unless the tests done with this gadget were blind tests on unsuspecting users, the test-effect where the driver knows at some level that they are meant to be driving efficiently is largely responsible.
The gains seen could easily have been created just through good driving techniques such as decelerating in high gear, timing acceleration to coincide with flat or downhill roads, not revving or idling when stationary, etc
True - however our cars are generally smaller and haven't historically matched American demands for interior space, also our most-efficient vehicles require low-sulphur diesel fuel which still is not generally available in some parts of the US, although it has become much more common than it was.
Thanks, that was part of my point. Capacitors have in common with Lead-Acid accumulators the ability to dump biblical amounts of power in an instant... and it may be easier to unthinkingly short a circuit than it is to unthinkingly introduce a flame to a fual tank
I drive a diesel car. It feels safer (low-volatility compared to petrol)
Asus, however accidentally / carelessly, have just made themselves the obvious target of a lawsuit for distribution of tools for copyright infringement...
Probably my memory playing up. On learning that I was developing an interest in electricity and computers, a local elderly gentleman (in the real, British, sense) gifted to me a large amount of old electrical equipment to play with and learn from
Most of it dated from the mid 40s to early 50s and was 40-50 years old at the time, I learned a lot from it but my memories may be confused as to what came from where. I remember a love of the design of the large tube capacitors with their crenellated electric-blue cases and stamped capacity figures, which was only slightly attenuated when one of them nearly blew my head off...
Ultracapacitors may have proven brilliant usages (especially in transport and electricity storage) but is anyone else nervous about being around that degree of stored energy?
As a teenager I was slightly injured by a 50-year-old 3300mfd cap I'd salvaged from a valve radio, which went off like a small bomb despite only holding 12 volts at the time. I for one would treat an ultracapacitor as a potential source of devastation until proved safe by a long period of use...
Slashdot Mirror
if you search a site called 'Internet Tablet Talk' you'll see some enterprising types have already got the Android preview version running on a Nokia N810 web-pad
Android on a Netbook would be superb
Apple has a real reason to not implement a full modern Bluetooth stack - if they do it on the iPhone it will be expected/demanded/hacked onto the ipod Touch, and people would then use an iPod Touch with a cheapo bluetooth phone rather than paying the premium for an iPhone
Google announced quite clearly before the launch that due to coding deadlines the phone would be issued with a limited Bluetooth stack and full features would be added later, and user developers were welcome to make their own solutions in the meantime...
What i REALLY want is an ATX power supply for my PC that has a 12-volt POWER IN line on it so I can have a stack of sealed-lead-acid batteries behind it wired to a solar panel on the roof, and so it would switch back to mains on-the-fly when the battery power got too low.. preferably without crashing the O/S
in a few years time, the batteries from the first batch of Toyota Prius / Honda Insight hybrid cars will be getting down to about the 50% efficiency point where it makes sense to replace them.
How about if all these 50%-degraded car packs get resold as home power storage? They're still good enough for that if they are cheap enough, and it puts off the need to recycle their chemicals for a few more years....
No, I disagree.
the grid system is inefficient, storage isn't generally available, too much old and inefficient electrical equipment is in use, and the power generating infrastructure isn't well-adapted to demand stats
I see that as 4 tangentially related problems subject to different solutions.
There are good arguments being made for a HV DC power grid to allow easier synchronisation of unpredictable renewables power generation resources to the existing stable network (this is a b*tch to achieve right now as frequency of a fluctuating AC supply can go up and down as well as current and voltage)
Surplus electrical power can be stored - either as heat to run a turbine, water in a pump-store, turned to hydrogen or anhydrous ammonia to run a generator-set, or even potentially in a large flywheel for short periods.
Advertising and tax breaks can give people good economic and ethical reasons to replace their consumer electronics with modern, less power-hungry kit...
.. peak power availability occurs in daylight, when conventional generation can be topped-up using solar. if peak consumption is moving towards the late evening and nighttime hours, this represents a future issue.
PHEV charging demand was seen as a good thing as the night was seen as a low-demand time. Maybe thats not going to be the case soon....
My employers make and sell consumer television sets.
One of the large power companies pays the proportionate costs of our advertising for all the TVs we sell which consumes less than x watts (Sorry - can't reveal the figure).
They do this because its in their interests to get lower-consumption TVs out there, and paying our advertising is easier than paying for additional capacity.
have a look at Flickr. They've completely f*cked it up and removed loads of useful features
A Prius battery is normally on a 100% down to 80% charge discharge cycle
When they start getting down to 50%ish residual capacity most batteries will be replaced. The discarded 50%-capable Prius batteries can then be used for solar power storage in homes. Then your solar cell gets much more useful...
I daresay a 50cc lightweight diesel or petrol (gasoline) engine connected to a generator and set up to run at its most efficient speed will become commonplace.. mounted underfloor in most electric vehicles
If it produces say 20% of the power needed to run the vehicle in normal use, that would provide a limp-home facility or the ability to charge the battery by leaving the vehicle parked with the internal generator running for an hour or so... or alternatively the ability to extend the range by that proportion by starting it as you start your journey.
There is a real demand for plug-in hybrids despite whatever concerns Toyota management sees with the adoption of the technology.
As with Diesel Hybrids - Toyota may not want to make them but if there is a demand - and there is, for economy & ecology reasons in both cases - they will be made and sold. But Toyota wont get the profit from making them. That'll go to a more enterprising car company that makes what people want.
... for me the killer app of the only-available Android phone is the keyboard, as I don't like touchscreens (I prefer to type than touch a flat surface as I can more easily do it without looking), and also the promise of a full bluetooth implementation and an uncensored marketplace
I suspect 'killer app' is always going to be a subjective & personal interpretation. It's not a good way describe a feature.
While some cars sold here run better on premium fuel (and sufficiently so to defray the higher cost entirely) no cars are sold in the UK that cannot run on regular 95-RON petrol (gasoline), as it is the ubiquitous standard and in some places, all thats available. Your argument does hold true with diesels but because of sulphur not octane/cetane
By fitting slightly larger wheels (for better overall gearing and lower rolling resistance) and good low-roll res tyres on a vehicle this sort of efficiency gain is achievable without any suspicious attachments to the system.
I suspect unless the tests done with this gadget were blind tests on unsuspecting users, the test-effect where the driver knows at some level that they are meant to be driving efficiently is largely responsible.
The gains seen could easily have been created just through good driving techniques such as decelerating in high gear, timing acceleration to coincide with flat or downhill roads, not revving or idling when stationary, etc
True - however our cars are generally smaller and haven't historically matched American demands for interior space, also our most-efficient vehicles require low-sulphur diesel fuel which still is not generally available in some parts of the US, although it has become much more common than it was.
"Does Windows 7 have lower system requirements re RAM, CPU speed and Hard Drive space to operate satisfactorily with all features enabled?"
If the answer to any of these questions is 'no" then it isn't worth buying
Oh Noes!! tom cruise missiles....
- more than happen through diesel fuel in a car igniting. By an order of magnitude.
Thanks, that was part of my point. Capacitors have in common with Lead-Acid accumulators the ability to dump biblical amounts of power in an instant... and it may be easier to unthinkingly short a circuit than it is to unthinkingly introduce a flame to a fual tank
I drive a diesel car. It feels safer (low-volatility compared to petrol)
Asus, however accidentally / carelessly, have just made themselves the obvious target of a lawsuit for distribution of tools for copyright infringement...
Probably my memory playing up. On learning that I was developing an interest in electricity and computers, a local elderly gentleman (in the real, British, sense) gifted to me a large amount of old electrical equipment to play with and learn from
Most of it dated from the mid 40s to early 50s and was 40-50 years old at the time, I learned a lot from it but my memories may be confused as to what came from where. I remember a love of the design of the large tube capacitors with their crenellated electric-blue cases and stamped capacity figures, which was only slightly attenuated when one of them nearly blew my head off...
Ultracapacitors may have proven brilliant usages (especially in transport and electricity storage) but is anyone else nervous about being around that degree of stored energy?
As a teenager I was slightly injured by a 50-year-old 3300mfd cap I'd salvaged from a valve radio, which went off like a small bomb despite only holding 12 volts at the time. I for one would treat an ultracapacitor as a potential source of devastation until proved safe by a long period of use...
take care - someone always gets affronted
Time to call up a few friends
Regards
GSV Steely Glint
(cc Fates amenable to change, Ethics Gradient)