Plants user solar energy. They don't move. Things that move, need to eat plants, or eat animals that eat plants.
Why? There isn't enough energy in the sunlight to sustain the metabolic rate required for movement. In billions of years, nature hasn't figured out how to covert enough sunlight into energy to sustain an animal's movement other than by concentrating it first into vegetable matter which can be eaten.
For humans to make use of energy, we pretty much have to burn something. We have to release solar energy stored as food, then in most cases concentrated in the form of hydrocarbons.
Fission energy, fancy as it may be, is still about just making water hot. For that matter, if they get there, so will fusion energy be.
We humans are stunningly good at burning things and making excuses for the things we do that are essentially asocial. Aside from that, we're not exactly all that and a bag of chips.
There's no such thing as free energy. The trick we need to find is how to tap bigger forces. Tidal forces with tethered floating generators which rise and fall with the tides and capture that motion as energy would be good. Finding that so called vacume energy between particals would be a fairly useful trick as well.
Making giant solar panels which turn sunlight into energy at less efficiency than plants, then waste most of it in transmission and storage overhead is ultimately not going to win.
More near term, we need to find or engineer a crop which is ideally suited to concentrating sunlight into a hydrocarbon or sugar that can be stored, transported without sigificant loss, then burned.
Unless one of you/. people has found a really efficient ENDOTHERMIC reaction. That would be very cool.:-)
Rome. Recent rumors indicate that God is considering dropping support for the five digit hand. Indicating that five digits is simply too complex for the average non-diety to master smoothly, a single digit version is to be released in the near future. Those more advanced primates who wish to continue to use "tools" will have the option of pressing the other single digitted appendage to their nose to access alternate uses for the primary digit.
I'm not usually so critical, but I also read the per square inch number and did the math on their 10x14 and figured I must be missing something, because there's no way you're they're generating that much power on that size array at that cost.
I suspect that they have very small "units" which have high efficiency but but they're mixing the article to also talk about their current flagship product, which must not use this newest technology.
Better at knowing times tables? Better at the intuitive leaps that define higher math? Better at the years of effort to solve some complex issue? Better at competing in a fairly agressive battle over ideas at the academic level for attention?
What is Math? There are dozens of different types of mathematics, each with different kinds of thinking. In some, visualization is critical. In some, pure mechanics wins the day.
My wife sure does manage the checkbook better. Does that mean anything other than that I should let her do it?
Penetration definitely occurred. And not just to T-Mobile.
Pretty much anyone who uses that services got "Penetrated" pretty well -- and if you weren't doing your work over a good vpn with encryption, well, lets just say that it probably hurt.
First of all, Have you considered that the issue could already be the walls themselves? You have not described your apartment, but many apartments have foil backed insulation or even chickenwire backed adobe or plaster in the walls.
Second, you're probably getting as much overlap from portable phones as you are from AP's in the building.
My advice differs from so many others. I say, centrally locate your AP in the apartment at the same plane as you'll generally be holding your laptop. That usually means about 30 inches for tabletop, about 20" if its actually on your lap keeping your genetals warm (and isn't that really why we all want Pentium 4 HT processors?).
If you're still not connecting on any channel, you probably have a config issue. Start with the basics. Reset the unit to factory config and change only the password. let it broadcast its SSID. Connect, then starting tightening it down. Don't sweat the hackers until you have something of value. Clearly, they don't need your bandwidth.
Also, learn about what blocks this frequency. In a nutshell, water. Anything with water. PEOPLE, for example, are excellent at blocking wifi. Your walls may have plaster that was water based. Chip off a piece and put it in the microwave for a few seconds. If it heats up, it will block wifi. The same goes for PVC plastics. Most won't, some will. A chip in the microwave for a few seconds will tell you.
I can't tell you how many times I see people in a coffee shop with wifi connection problems, when they've set the 900 ounce mochofrappafuckamacallit right next to their wifi card. DOH! If the signal is iffy, that's more than enough to kill it off.
Finally -- make sure you hit the basics. Get the latest (actually, sometimes teh second to latest) drives for teh wifi card and the AP, as well as any firmware upgrades. Don't laugh, sometimes it's really not plugged in.
You're in an apartment. Run some damn wires. Snake them under the carpet or hang the from the ceiling. Put lights on them and make them festive. Let your geek flag fly.
....I'd have a harder time getting work done. How many support calls have you taken by pulling off the freeway into the nearest middle class neighborhood and popping open the laptop with netstumbler? Does it ever take more than 5 minutes?
The fact is, the code wasn't designed to be secure. I realize its not hip and cool to like Lotus Notes, but compare it Exchange for a minute:
Notes has roughly 50% of the installed and in use corproate email market in the us, more like 60% in Europe -- though seat counts are nearly impossible to validate for Microsoft at this point.
That means, just as many targets. However, since 1991 when most of the world first saw Notes, it had built in public/private key encryption and authentication certificates and was inherenly designed for security. Mearly stamping a name on a document (a "Note" technically) prevents anyone else from seeing it. Period. In all the years since, there have only been a few denial of service attacks, and as far as I know, only 1 reported incident of potential data loss. Today, the current version can open and use the data files from the original version.
For years, Notes (and rightly so) had a horrible user interface by comparison, yet it still did well in the market. Why? It has been secure, stable, and operating system agnostic from day one.
so much for the 'monoculture' arguement. The truth is, hacking windows is low hanging fruit and makes for a fun target because the software was never designed to be secure.
after standing in line to get a pass to use the wifi a couple of years ago, the women at the counter looked at me and said simply "You are elephant?" -- of course, I had no idea how to reply to this. I said "no, I am not Elephant." to which she repeated "Elephant? You are elephant?"
It took me a few seconds to figure out, they were reading the name of people's PC's off the wifi so they could assign the ID. That way, the didn't charge people who had broken configurations and couldn't use the system -- avoiding all the return issues. Clever. The guy in front of me had a PC named "Elephant".
The funny thing is, my initials are "AP" and at the time I had an eMachines box. For whatever reason I'd named my laptop that after restoring some data, so the actual machine name was:
...Now, I can expect even more phone calls with even less customer service as the lowest end of the marketing and support business gets even lower end.
While the best outsourcing phone banks do a reasonable job, the average ones are crap, and this will set the low end bar lower than ever.
Fiarly soon, we can expect little differentiation between a call to a vendor for help with our firewall, and say....line noise. Oh, wait, I have a sonicwall. I've already passed that mark.
instead of cardio equipment like treadmills and excersize bikes, high quality weight machines, with the cables tied to hidden flywheels would be an excellent source of power. That makes sense.
Rewards also come to mind. A "company store" approach to keep "workers" in debt has been effective in many developing countries. Perhaps has a similar solution then. Condomns and lubricant for example, could be sold at a premium. Not to mention, given the concern you mentioned, perhaps "soap on a rope" would be a premium product for its less liklihood of dropping to the floor.
...its not a bad idea. The more things are against the law, the cheaper power gets -- but, given that most of the prisons are filled with drug crimes, I'm not sure your average opiate addict will generate as much energy at all.
As to those soon to be jailed for (gasp) copying specific paterns of magnetically polarized rust (file sharing and music sharing) -- The average 12 year old inhaler sucking thick lensed computer kid isn't likely to be the best source of power either.
Besides, the cable tv provided to prisons consumes too much power. It becomes a drain on the output of the "plant".
A person can generate about 1/4 horsepower with an excersize bike. Given the daily rate for unskilled labor in many countries now, we could simply rig up a giant wheel like what Conan the Barbarian pushed around as a slave in that clearly prophetic movie.
Given the cost of building a nuke plant, then running it, getting rid of the waste, (hiding it really well for a really long time), and cleaning up after it -- it would be cheaper per kilowatt to simply have a bunch of low paid people push giant logs around in a circle.
The economics are outstanding. Its great excersize, and the power companies would be incented to provide health care at the same time. It provides plenty of jobs for unskilled labor, and could quickly be set up in the lowest income countries.
All in all, its a win-win. Best of all, it doesn't suffer from the one drawback everyone is clearly afraid to speak about with wind-power, which is the potential for slowing down the rotation of the earth! Clearly a danger if ever there was one. Why, if we slowed down the earth, and there was no centrifugal force apposing the gravity of our planet we would all be crushed! Oh the horror.
Interesting how this coincides with the new tanks
on
US to Pay to go to ISS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...for the shuttle. We hear today that the shuttle's fuel tanks are now safer, but that it may cost a bit more.
Now the pressure will start for resuming shuttle flights. At the same time the Russians say they'll charge money to ferry the astronauts.
Though the case was nice, it wasn't quite as fit and finished as it looked. The plastic panels were cheap and ill fitting, and behind them were poorly concealed openings.
Worse, their software is bad. Its written in that barely comprehensible language I've taken to calling "allYourBaseLish" and is very clunky to use. Specifically the FM Radio Tuner in the T2 case is neat in the theory, and unusable in practice.
If this is similar, then All your asus are belong to someone else.
Yes, yes. We all know that enough heat renders the little guys just too languid to do much but sip beer and hang out in the sauna.
Is it any surprise though, that constantly sitting around with a laptop on your lap might have an effect similar to "birth control glasses" -- those thick black rimmed glasses with tape in the middle?
One further note: This may be a POSITIVE aspect of laptops if used right. What we need to do, is distribute P4 Hyperthreading notebooks with Doom3 to all the sales and marketing staff as soon as possible!
IBM has more revenue per day that many world economies. Apple cannot buy IBM as a manufacturing arm.
Also, Manufacturing is becomming a commodity item to be done in countries that are growing out of the developmental stage and into the technology one. Its a step in the growth of a country's economics.
The cultural hell that was the merger of IBM and Lotus would be nothing compared to this.
Also, Apple is the ultimate end-user oriented company. They sell, talk, and work directly to the end user desktop. IBM has proven over and over that they've great at mass manufacturing new technologies at great expense and even more great at inventing new ones. The stink, however, at direct customer interface. The smaller the point of contact the worse they are.
IBM did great with Fujitsu and Dell -- selling components for PC's (in Dell's case, tons and tons of Travelstar and Deskstar drive) but try to go buy one directly from IBM yourself. Its very hard. They just don't know how to do deal with people.
This isn't the kind of company that could absorb those skills from Apple either. Apple would dissapear with the great IBM universe and never be the same.
no, Apple works best as a swift and lithe innovator. Let IBM make the guts, let the Apple folks package it and sell it.
Its a growing community, to be sure. I live in a small town in Maine, so although there are a lot of wanna be geeks and of course everyone's brother thinks they're a 'computer guy' the number of people who actually know what they're doing is astonishingly low.
Well, keep doing the good work. Live train, train train to live -- and all that.
First, there are three, not two kinds of hire. Employees, Contractors, and Consultants.
Contractors are like employees in that they are paid for time not results per se, and are direct reports to the company. Consultants do not do either (at least not real ones)
First, assume 40% goes to taxes. Bango.
Next, assume Healthcare costs are roughly 3 times what they are as an employee. Slammo.
Finally, understand you have no real rights and so can be terminated at will.
For that reason, Contractors on site for short duration (1 week to 3 months) tend to cost about twice the loaded salary of an employee. A "loaded" salary is about 1.5 * base pay. For longer term contracts, the pay is much closer to that of the employee because that's pretty much what you're doing.
Short term example: So a $50,000/year job cost the employer around $75,000 and should be paid for a contractor at about $150,000 per year.
Longer Term example: So a $50,000/year job cost the employer around $75,000 and should be paid for a contractor at about $100,000 per year.
The best thing about being a contractor, is you get a lot of experience by moving from company to company. The worst is that you never really know your job, have no security, and may be unemployed at any time. Vacation time is hard to get, and in some companies you're dirt.
Consulting is the best -- if you have the stomache for the ups and downs, are a REALLY self motivated person, and have communication skills that come close to matching your geek skills.
I make an excellent living writing code, consulting (not contracting-- there is a big difference) and supporting my customers. I have a few small 'packaged' products as well.
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Plants user solar energy. They don't move. Things that move, need to eat plants, or eat animals that eat plants.
/. people has found a really efficient ENDOTHERMIC reaction. That would be very cool. :-)
Why? There isn't enough energy in the sunlight to sustain the metabolic rate required for movement. In billions of years, nature hasn't figured out how to covert enough sunlight into energy to sustain an animal's movement other than by concentrating it first into vegetable matter which can be eaten.
For humans to make use of energy, we pretty much have to burn something. We have to release solar energy stored as food, then in most cases concentrated in the form of hydrocarbons.
Fission energy, fancy as it may be, is still about just making water hot. For that matter, if they get there, so will fusion energy be.
We humans are stunningly good at burning things and making excuses for the things we do that are essentially asocial. Aside from that, we're not exactly all that and a bag of chips.
There's no such thing as free energy. The trick we need to find is how to tap bigger forces. Tidal forces with tethered floating generators which rise and fall with the tides and capture that motion as energy would be good. Finding that so called vacume energy between particals would be a fairly useful trick as well.
Making giant solar panels which turn sunlight into energy at less efficiency than plants, then waste most of it in transmission and storage overhead is ultimately not going to win.
More near term, we need to find or engineer a crop which is ideally suited to concentrating sunlight into a hydrocarbon or sugar that can be stored, transported without sigificant loss, then burned.
Unless one of you
Rome. Recent rumors indicate that God is considering dropping support for the five digit hand. Indicating that five digits is simply too complex for the average non-diety to master smoothly, a single digit version is to be released in the near future. Those more advanced primates who wish to continue to use "tools" will have the option of pressing the other single digitted appendage to their nose to access alternate uses for the primary digit.
I'm not usually so critical, but I also read the per square inch number and did the math on their 10x14 and figured I must be missing something, because there's no way you're they're generating that much power on that size array at that cost.
I suspect that they have very small "units" which have high efficiency but but they're mixing the article to also talk about their current flagship product, which must not use this newest technology.
What does being "better at math" mean?
Better at knowing times tables? Better at the intuitive leaps that define higher math? Better at the years of effort to solve some complex issue? Better at competing in a fairly agressive battle over ideas at the academic level for attention?
What is Math? There are dozens of different types of mathematics, each with different kinds of thinking. In some, visualization is critical. In some, pure mechanics wins the day.
My wife sure does manage the checkbook better. Does that mean anything other than that I should let her do it?
Penetration definitely occurred. And not just to T-Mobile.
Pretty much anyone who uses that services got "Penetrated" pretty well -- and if you weren't doing your work over a good vpn with encryption, well, lets just say that it probably hurt.
First of all, Have you considered that the issue could already be the walls themselves? You have not described your apartment, but many apartments have foil backed insulation or even chickenwire backed adobe or plaster in the walls.
Second, you're probably getting as much overlap from portable phones as you are from AP's in the building.
My advice differs from so many others. I say, centrally locate your AP in the apartment at the same plane as you'll generally be holding your laptop. That usually means about 30 inches for tabletop, about 20" if its actually on your lap keeping your genetals warm (and isn't that really why we all want Pentium 4 HT processors?).
If you're still not connecting on any channel, you probably have a config issue. Start with the basics. Reset the unit to factory config and change only the password. let it broadcast its SSID. Connect, then starting tightening it down. Don't sweat the hackers until you have something of value. Clearly, they don't need your bandwidth.
Also, learn about what blocks this frequency. In a nutshell, water. Anything with water. PEOPLE, for example, are excellent at blocking wifi. Your walls may have plaster that was water based. Chip off a piece and put it in the microwave for a few seconds. If it heats up, it will block wifi. The same goes for PVC plastics. Most won't, some will. A chip in the microwave for a few seconds will tell you.
I can't tell you how many times I see people in a coffee shop with wifi connection problems, when they've set the 900 ounce mochofrappafuckamacallit right next to their wifi card. DOH! If the signal is iffy, that's more than enough to kill it off.
Finally -- make sure you hit the basics. Get the latest (actually, sometimes teh second to latest) drives for teh wifi card and the AP, as well as any firmware upgrades. Don't laugh, sometimes it's really not plugged in.
You're in an apartment. Run some damn wires. Snake them under the carpet or hang the from the ceiling. Put lights on them and make them festive. Let your geek flag fly.
....I'd have a harder time getting work done. How many support calls have you taken by pulling off the freeway into the nearest middle class neighborhood and popping open the laptop with netstumbler? Does it ever take more than 5 minutes?
The fact is, the code wasn't designed to be secure. I realize its not hip and cool to like Lotus Notes, but compare it Exchange for a minute:
Notes has roughly 50% of the installed and in use corproate email market in the us, more like 60% in Europe -- though seat counts are nearly impossible to validate for Microsoft at this point.
That means, just as many targets. However, since 1991 when most of the world first saw Notes, it had built in public/private key encryption and authentication certificates and was inherenly designed for security. Mearly stamping a name on a document (a "Note" technically) prevents anyone else from seeing it. Period. In all the years since, there have only been a few denial of service attacks, and as far as I know, only 1 reported incident of potential data loss. Today, the current version can open and use the data files from the original version.
For years, Notes (and rightly so) had a horrible user interface by comparison, yet it still did well in the market. Why? It has been secure, stable, and operating system agnostic from day one.
so much for the 'monoculture' arguement. The truth is, hacking windows is low hanging fruit and makes for a fun target because the software was never designed to be secure.
after standing in line to get a pass to use the wifi a couple of years ago, the women at the counter looked at me and said simply "You are elephant?" -- of course, I had no idea how to reply to this. I said "no, I am not Elephant." to which she repeated "Elephant? You are elephant?"
;-)
It took me a few seconds to figure out, they were reading the name of people's PC's off the wifi so they could assign the ID. That way, the didn't charge people who had broken configurations and couldn't use the system -- avoiding all the return issues. Clever. The guy in front of me had a PC named "Elephant".
The funny thing is, my initials are "AP" and at the time I had an eMachines box. For whatever reason I'd named my laptop that after restoring some data, so the actual machine name was:
APeMachine (or APEmachine)...
You know Linux isn't for business, silly.
--mpm--
...Now, I can expect even more phone calls with even less customer service as the lowest end of the marketing and support business gets even lower end.
While the best outsourcing phone banks do a reasonable job, the average ones are crap, and this will set the low end bar lower than ever.
Fiarly soon, we can expect little differentiation between a call to a vendor for help with our firewall, and say....line noise. Oh, wait, I have a sonicwall. I've already passed that mark.
instead of cardio equipment like treadmills and excersize bikes, high quality weight machines, with the cables tied to hidden flywheels would be an excellent source of power. That makes sense.
Rewards also come to mind. A "company store" approach to keep "workers" in debt has been effective in many developing countries. Perhaps has a similar solution then. Condomns and lubricant for example, could be sold at a premium. Not to mention, given the concern you mentioned, perhaps "soap on a rope" would be a premium product for its less liklihood of dropping to the floor.
Excellent ideas, sir.
...its not a bad idea. The more things are against the law, the cheaper power gets -- but, given that most of the prisons are filled with drug crimes, I'm not sure your average opiate addict will generate as much energy at all.
As to those soon to be jailed for (gasp) copying specific paterns of magnetically polarized rust (file sharing and music sharing) -- The average 12 year old inhaler sucking thick lensed computer kid isn't likely to be the best source of power either.
Besides, the cable tv provided to prisons consumes too much power. It becomes a drain on the output of the "plant".
Look at the math.
A person can generate about 1/4 horsepower with an excersize bike. Given the daily rate for unskilled labor in many countries now, we could simply rig up a giant wheel like what Conan the Barbarian pushed around as a slave in that clearly prophetic movie.
Given the cost of building a nuke plant, then running it, getting rid of the waste, (hiding it really well for a really long time), and cleaning up after it -- it would be cheaper per kilowatt to simply have a bunch of low paid people push giant logs around in a circle.
The economics are outstanding. Its great excersize, and the power companies would be incented to provide health care at the same time. It provides plenty of jobs for unskilled labor, and could quickly be set up in the lowest income countries.
All in all, its a win-win. Best of all, it doesn't suffer from the one drawback everyone is clearly afraid to speak about with wind-power, which is the potential for slowing down the rotation of the earth! Clearly a danger if ever there was one. Why, if we slowed down the earth, and there was no centrifugal force apposing the gravity of our planet we would all be crushed! Oh the horror.
...for the shuttle. We hear today that the shuttle's fuel tanks are now safer, but that it may cost a bit more.
Now the pressure will start for resuming shuttle flights. At the same time the Russians say they'll charge money to ferry the astronauts.
Hmmm. I wonder when that phone call took place?
Though the case was nice, it wasn't quite as fit and finished as it looked. The plastic panels were cheap and ill fitting, and behind them were poorly concealed openings.
Worse, their software is bad. Its written in that barely comprehensible language I've taken to calling "allYourBaseLish" and is very clunky to use. Specifically the FM Radio Tuner in the T2 case is neat in the theory, and unusable in practice.
If this is similar, then All your asus are belong to someone else.
Yes, yes. We all know that enough heat renders the little guys just too languid to do much but sip beer and hang out in the sauna.
Is it any surprise though, that constantly sitting around with a laptop on your lap might have an effect similar to "birth control glasses" -- those thick black rimmed glasses with tape in the middle?
One further note: This may be a POSITIVE aspect of laptops if used right. What we need to do, is distribute P4 Hyperthreading notebooks with Doom3 to all the sales and marketing staff as soon as possible!
-- AP
IBM has more revenue per day that many world economies. Apple cannot buy IBM as a manufacturing arm.
Also, Manufacturing is becomming a commodity item to be done in countries that are growing out of the developmental stage and into the technology one. Its a step in the growth of a country's economics.
Its probably fair to say that IBM would claim that they are all for freedom of though.
;-)
In fact, each of their employees, when asked, would also say that IBM is all for freedom of though.
After, a memo was circulated indicating that this was the stated policy.
The cultural hell that was the merger of IBM and Lotus would be nothing compared to this.
Also, Apple is the ultimate end-user oriented company. They sell, talk, and work directly to the end user desktop. IBM has proven over and over that they've great at mass manufacturing new technologies at great expense and even more great at inventing new ones. The stink, however, at direct customer interface. The smaller the point of contact the worse they are.
IBM did great with Fujitsu and Dell -- selling components for PC's (in Dell's case, tons and tons of Travelstar and Deskstar drive) but try to go buy one directly from IBM yourself. Its very hard. They just don't know how to do deal with people.
This isn't the kind of company that could absorb those skills from Apple either. Apple would dissapear with the great IBM universe and never be the same.
no, Apple works best as a swift and lithe innovator. Let IBM make the guts, let the Apple folks package it and sell it.
-- ME
Its a growing community, to be sure. I live in a small town in Maine, so although there are a lot of wanna be geeks and of course everyone's brother thinks they're a 'computer guy' the number of people who actually know what they're doing is astonishingly low.
Well, keep doing the good work. Live train, train train to live -- and all that.
With the small town I'm in, they need all the help they can get.
So, by day(and night) I'm a not so mild mannered computer geek; while by night (and day) I run into burning buildings.
First, there are three, not two kinds of hire. Employees, Contractors, and Consultants.
Contractors are like employees in that they are paid for time not results per se, and are direct reports to the company. Consultants do not do either (at least not real ones)
First, assume 40% goes to taxes. Bango.
Next, assume Healthcare costs are roughly 3 times what they are as an employee. Slammo.
Finally, understand you have no real rights and so can be terminated at will.
For that reason, Contractors on site for short duration (1 week to 3 months) tend to cost about twice the loaded salary of an employee. A "loaded" salary is about 1.5 * base pay. For longer term contracts, the pay is much closer to that of the employee because that's pretty much what you're doing.
Short term example: So a $50,000/year job cost the employer around $75,000 and should be paid for a contractor at about $150,000 per year.
Longer Term example: So a $50,000/year job cost the employer around $75,000 and should be paid for a contractor at about $100,000 per year.
The best thing about being a contractor, is you get a lot of experience by moving from company to company. The worst is that you never really know your job, have no security, and may be unemployed at any time. Vacation time is hard to get, and in some companies you're dirt.
Consulting is the best -- if you have the stomache for the ups and downs, are a REALLY self motivated person, and have communication skills that come close to matching your geek skills.
I make an excellent living writing code, consulting (not contracting-- there is a big difference) and supporting my customers. I have a few small 'packaged' products as well.
I wouldn't give it up for anything.
And thank you very much.