Li-ion @ 20 degrees C will lose about 20% of its capacity per year without usage. that means in a few short years it will be time for you to buy a new camera whether you want one or not. I bet there are lots of perfectly good cameras thrown away because their proprietary lithium ion batteries lost their capacity and got discontinued.
Of course, one can always rebuild the original Panasonic battery pack. just buy a similar voltage and slightly smaller size lithium ion (3.6 or 7.2v usually) on ebay and you should be able to retrofit it inside the original battery pack.
HTML/HTTP were never designed as a method for running remote applications and shouldn't be used as such. We spent all these years upgrading to the latest Core 2 Trio so we could make the internet connection the new bottleneck.
Yes I realise that for n00bs its all about the convenience of web apps but client-side apps need not be inconvenient. Look at the iPhone app store, n00bs love it and its full of client-server applications. If there was something like it for Windows and OS X we'd never need to work with a horrible "web application" ever again. Linux doesn't need any, package managers could do with a bit more eye-candy and buttons with round edges for n00bs but for the rest its fine.
I'm all for optimising web pages but one should focus on minimalism, only use AJAX in cases where it actually saves bandwidth rather than using it for useless playthings. Use a CSS compressor, gzip compression, strip out useless eye-candy and effects, use as little javascript as you can get away with.
Modern web design thrives on feature-creep and making one's own site look better (and more bloated) than the competitor's. The web devs have a skewed perception of how long it takes to load because most of them are using decent machines and accessing the server through 192.168.1.x
Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day. If you have a fairly efficient electricity grid you won't even need to store that much because the chances are it will be windy in some place within reach.
On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.
Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.
I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them
.. someone stood up to this nonsensical practice. For nearly 20 years we've had GSM openness in Europe and this sort of exclusive nonsense is making its way across the water in the form of the iPhone. For a while I have been thinking this is an attempt by the mobile phone operators to usher in a new wave of proprietary phones.
Heavy integration with online services, firmware branding and exclusive deals are nothing but bad news for us. I havn't bought a SIM-locked phone since 2001 and I hope to never have to buy one again. The openness of GSM is a great thing but people take it for granted here.
A lot of people buy locked phones because they are cheaper, but they shouldn't be cheaper. This was acceptable 10 years ago when not everybody had a phone but now there are too many phones. Producing more phones only generates more e-waste. There should be more countries like Belgium around where this shit with subsidising phones doesn't fly. At least then my collection of unlocked Nokias will be worth more than 20 cents
Exclusive handset deals are nothing more than a way of making people put up with a more expensive / lower quality network they wouldn't normally put up with.
They're recycled alright, but i read the whole thing on how they recycle those batteries and they're not used to make new batteries. The stuff ends up being used to make stainless steel.
Lithium mining is a dirty business. The batteries don't last very long. -20% per year @ 20 degrees C regardless of use for some of them.
Lithium ion will do for now, but the ultimate goal should be something more sustainable. something that doesn't wear down as fast. even throw in a mini gas turbine that runs on biofuels for long-range trips if that becomes a problem.
Even if we don't have fully ultracap-powered cars they should work as a good buffer for hydrogen powered ones, gets rid of the battery buffer requirement
Batteries are a dirty, nasty hard to recycle oldschool technology that dies after a few 100 charges, or maybe a few thousand if you're lucky. More research into ultracaps is needed - using better nano-tech to increase the surface area, testing of ultracapacitor-based systems and that sort of thing.
Well I see that as a good thing, all too many things these days are thrown on top of HTTP just because its convenient and the web 2.0 devs don't know anything else.
Since this project has the ambitious aim of taking over email I think they should start from scratch with their own protocol, rather than extending XMPP or piggybacking on HTTP, maybe a custom text based protocol with binary on the side for transferring files and the like. Sending stuff in base64 is one of the faults of email and XMPP currently and I think they should make these things as bandwidth efficient as reasonably possible.
What's also missing from Wave is a unified client-server protocol. They want to use HTTP for everything but web-based systems like this are inherently slow and inefficient and force a certain interface on the user. A client-server protocol would be much better
I'd say its fairly typical of most free online services how many inactive accounts do you think FB/Twitter/Flickr have? They probably don't publish this information because their shares would sink like a brick.
I know there are some very dedicated bloggers out there using blogspot and wordpress but most of the good blogs are on paid hosting (or better yet hosted at home), with their own domain and a customised theme. Its because these people actually give a crap about their blog. Most realise nobody reads their rants, don't put any effort into promoting the site and then give up. So nothing of value was lost, all the crap sinks to the bottom and anyone with a slight bit of interest keeps on blogging. Blogging is not for everyone, a lot of people don't have the patience for it. and there is nothing wrong with that
you could just have a Linux box on the same network as the filtered windows box. really if they wanted it to be more effective they should have put it in the rou.. shit i need to stop giving those chinese bastards ideas
"Cloud computing" is the new way of stopping software piracy. Client-side security such as DRM is doomed to fail but server-side has half a chance.
Web applications can be filled with ads and user-tracking but nobody complains because it doesn't have the same invasive mechanism as client based spyware. but as the browser is given more control, more access to hardware and more 'sploits surface the over all effect will be the same.
of course there should always be enough legitimate client-side FOSS around that people won't actually *need* to use web-apps
Still an app store is useful to have - people don't want to go through the trouble of downloading a file, opening and running an installer anymore. they want to click on a shiny shiny 2.0 button and the thing installs itself. They dont want to go to specific websites to download the app either. If there was something like this for the desktop, web applications wouldnt be so popular
For some reason that word reminds me of 'egg', and fertility treatment.
When will people stop making these typically "2.0-sounding" made up names with too many vowels? really they should have called it Oviboma or Ovijah or something
Thuraya SO-2510, check it out. I had one for a while - a nice little handset, also the smallest satellite phone in the world. Too bad the build quality isnt that great
It's the only way to be sure that your numbers are actually random.
You could use something that uses clock drift to generate random numbers like VIA Padlock but unless you have taken your processor apart, inspected with an electron microscope and put back together you will never know if its the real deal. Government back-doors, etc.
I wonder how many minutes of kiddy porn one can fit into the ~2 megabits per day generated by this.
True. You're not a real spy unless you build a UAV and fly it over North Korea, or a MAV if you have the balls (or a death wish).
It would be a fun project, launch it from Russia or South Korea - not China because NK & China are good communist brothers. You can have it connect to the interwebs using Thuraya, Inmarsat and maybe use an Orbcomm transceiver as backup. I suppose ideally you'd want a dirigible or something that can stay in the air for extended periods without producing much heat that missiles would pick up on. Once in the country's interior you could lower its altitude and get some nice detailed shots. You could control it directly by radio but this makes you far too easy to trace - internet connectivity allows you to GTFO once the thing is launched.
The problem would be getting something to power the thing - microjets pump out too much heat, solar power alone probably won't give you the required amount of oomph to fly the thing. You could go unpowered, launch when there is a good breeze blowing into North Korea and deflate once it reaches another country. There was a slashdot story about a bunch of students who made something similar but I don't think they ever flew it over North Korea
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
No, but the space industry is one of the few where things are built to last. Portable consumer electronics are among the worst for quality except for a few notable examples like the iPod Mini and the Nokia 6310(i). Soldered-in lithium batteries, surface-mount MLC flash memory and electrolytic capacitors don't last all that long. Satellites are over-engineered, if anything goes wrong with them you can't put it in a cardboard box with styrofoam and send it back to the manufacturer.
The quality of cars hasn't actually gone down - when The Wall was knocked down lots of old Soviet cars like the 2-stroke Trabant were abandoned for second-hand German cars. Of course manufacturers are filling up modern cars with cheap consumer electronics and cheap Chinese DC motors to move every little thing because apparently buyers are too lazy to use their hands for anything. So while all the in-car entertainment and motorised windows,cup holders, sun roofs and central locks might break the car itself (engine & chassis) will probably be in a better state after 20 years than a '70s car would have been after 20 years since engine technology has improved and the underside of the car is better protected from rust.
Slashdot Mirror
Li-ion @ 20 degrees C will lose about 20% of its capacity per year without usage. that means in a few short years it will be time for you to buy a new camera whether you want one or not. I bet there are lots of perfectly good cameras thrown away because their proprietary lithium ion batteries lost their capacity and got discontinued.
Of course, one can always rebuild the original Panasonic battery pack. just buy a similar voltage and slightly smaller size lithium ion (3.6 or 7.2v usually) on ebay and you should be able to retrofit it inside the original battery pack.
HTML/HTTP were never designed as a method for running remote applications and shouldn't be used as such. We spent all these years upgrading to the latest Core 2 Trio so we could make the internet connection the new bottleneck.
Yes I realise that for n00bs its all about the convenience of web apps but client-side apps need not be inconvenient. Look at the iPhone app store, n00bs love it and its full of client-server applications. If there was something like it for Windows and OS X we'd never need to work with a horrible "web application" ever again. Linux doesn't need any, package managers could do with a bit more eye-candy and buttons with round edges for n00bs but for the rest its fine.
I'm all for optimising web pages but one should focus on minimalism, only use AJAX in cases where it actually saves bandwidth rather than using it for useless playthings. Use a CSS compressor, gzip compression, strip out useless eye-candy and effects, use as little javascript as you can get away with.
Modern web design thrives on feature-creep and making one's own site look better (and more bloated) than the competitor's. The web devs have a skewed perception of how long it takes to load because most of them are using decent machines and accessing the server through 192.168.1.x
Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day. If you have a fairly efficient electricity grid you won't even need to store that much because the chances are it will be windy in some place within reach.
On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.
Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.
I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them
War is just a silly game of 'who runs out of soldiers first' played between two governments. If soldiers can be replaced by robots I'm all for it
but with CCTV cameras rather than broadband
.. someone stood up to this nonsensical practice. For nearly 20 years we've had GSM openness in Europe and this sort of exclusive nonsense is making its way across the water in the form of the iPhone. For a while I have been thinking this is an attempt by the mobile phone operators to usher in a new wave of proprietary phones.
Heavy integration with online services, firmware branding and exclusive deals are nothing but bad news for us. I havn't bought a SIM-locked phone since 2001 and I hope to never have to buy one again. The openness of GSM is a great thing but people take it for granted here.
A lot of people buy locked phones because they are cheaper, but they shouldn't be cheaper. This was acceptable 10 years ago when not everybody had a phone but now there are too many phones. Producing more phones only generates more e-waste. There should be more countries like Belgium around where this shit with subsidising phones doesn't fly. At least then my collection of unlocked Nokias will be worth more than 20 cents
Exclusive handset deals are nothing more than a way of making people put up with a more expensive / lower quality network they wouldn't normally put up with.
Wow. I'd never have thunk it. Thought it was short for "I had a poop"
Can we bring back the ordinary, sensible pre-Web 2.0 names please?
They're recycled alright, but i read the whole thing on how they recycle those batteries and they're not used to make new batteries. The stuff ends up being used to make stainless steel.
Lithium mining is a dirty business. The batteries don't last very long. -20% per year @ 20 degrees C regardless of use for some of them.
Lithium ion will do for now, but the ultimate goal should be something more sustainable. something that doesn't wear down as fast. even throw in a mini gas turbine that runs on biofuels for long-range trips if that becomes a problem.
Even if we don't have fully ultracap-powered cars they should work as a good buffer for hydrogen powered ones, gets rid of the battery buffer requirement
Batteries are a dirty, nasty hard to recycle oldschool technology that dies after a few 100 charges, or maybe a few thousand if you're lucky. More research into ultracaps is needed - using better nano-tech to increase the surface area, testing of ultracapacitor-based systems and that sort of thing.
Cobasys
Well I see that as a good thing, all too many things these days are thrown on top of HTTP just because its convenient and the web 2.0 devs don't know anything else.
Since this project has the ambitious aim of taking over email I think they should start from scratch with their own protocol, rather than extending XMPP or piggybacking on HTTP, maybe a custom text based protocol with binary on the side for transferring files and the like. Sending stuff in base64 is one of the faults of email and XMPP currently and I think they should make these things as bandwidth efficient as reasonably possible.
What's also missing from Wave is a unified client-server protocol. They want to use HTTP for everything but web-based systems like this are inherently slow and inefficient and force a certain interface on the user. A client-server protocol would be much better
I'd say its fairly typical of most free online services how many inactive accounts do you think FB/Twitter/Flickr have? They probably don't publish this information because their shares would sink like a brick.
I know there are some very dedicated bloggers out there using blogspot and wordpress but most of the good blogs are on paid hosting (or better yet hosted at home), with their own domain and a customised theme. Its because these people actually give a crap about their blog. Most realise nobody reads their rants, don't put any effort into promoting the site and then give up. So nothing of value was lost, all the crap sinks to the bottom and anyone with a slight bit of interest keeps on blogging. Blogging is not for everyone, a lot of people don't have the patience for it. and there is nothing wrong with that
you could just have a Linux box on the same network as the filtered windows box. really if they wanted it to be more effective they should have put it in the rou.. shit i need to stop giving those chinese bastards ideas
"Cloud computing" is the new way of stopping software piracy. Client-side security such as DRM is doomed to fail but server-side has half a chance. Web applications can be filled with ads and user-tracking but nobody complains because it doesn't have the same invasive mechanism as client based spyware. but as the browser is given more control, more access to hardware and more 'sploits surface the over all effect will be the same.
of course there should always be enough legitimate client-side FOSS around that people won't actually *need* to use web-apps
Still an app store is useful to have - people don't want to go through the trouble of downloading a file, opening and running an installer anymore. they want to click on a shiny shiny 2.0 button and the thing installs itself. They dont want to go to specific websites to download the app either. If there was something like this for the desktop, web applications wouldnt be so popular
For some reason that word reminds me of 'egg', and fertility treatment.
When will people stop making these typically "2.0-sounding" made up names with too many vowels? really they should have called it Oviboma or Ovijah or something
Thuraya SO-2510, check it out. I had one for a while - a nice little handset, also the smallest satellite phone in the world. Too bad the build quality isnt that great
Ultracapacitors would be ideal for a race, but I suspect nasty Lithium Ion batteries that die after a couple of years. Either way TFA doesn't say.
independent 4 wheel drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_GT
It's the only way to be sure that your numbers are actually random.
You could use something that uses clock drift to generate random numbers like VIA Padlock but unless you have taken your processor apart, inspected with an electron microscope and put back together you will never know if its the real deal. Government back-doors, etc.
I wonder how many minutes of kiddy porn one can fit into the ~2 megabits per day generated by this.
True. You're not a real spy unless you build a UAV and fly it over North Korea, or a MAV if you have the balls (or a death wish).
It would be a fun project, launch it from Russia or South Korea - not China because NK & China are good communist brothers. You can have it connect to the interwebs using Thuraya, Inmarsat and maybe use an Orbcomm transceiver as backup. I suppose ideally you'd want a dirigible or something that can stay in the air for extended periods without producing much heat that missiles would pick up on. Once in the country's interior you could lower its altitude and get some nice detailed shots. You could control it directly by radio but this makes you far too easy to trace - internet connectivity allows you to GTFO once the thing is launched.
The problem would be getting something to power the thing - microjets pump out too much heat, solar power alone probably won't give you the required amount of oomph to fly the thing. You could go unpowered, launch when there is a good breeze blowing into North Korea and deflate once it reaches another country. There was a slashdot story about a bunch of students who made something similar but I don't think they ever flew it over North Korea
More power to decentralised protocols like XMPP where anyone can run a server, even if all internet access is cut off to that particular country
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
No, but the space industry is one of the few where things are built to last. Portable consumer electronics are among the worst for quality except for a few notable examples like the iPod Mini and the Nokia 6310(i). Soldered-in lithium batteries, surface-mount MLC flash memory and electrolytic capacitors don't last all that long. Satellites are over-engineered, if anything goes wrong with them you can't put it in a cardboard box with styrofoam and send it back to the manufacturer.
The quality of cars hasn't actually gone down - when The Wall was knocked down lots of old Soviet cars like the 2-stroke Trabant were abandoned for second-hand German cars. Of course manufacturers are filling up modern cars with cheap consumer electronics and cheap Chinese DC motors to move every little thing because apparently buyers are too lazy to use their hands for anything. So while all the in-car entertainment and motorised windows,cup holders, sun roofs and central locks might break the car itself (engine & chassis) will probably be in a better state after 20 years than a '70s car would have been after 20 years since engine technology has improved and the underside of the car is better protected from rust.
you emit more carbon dioxide riding a trike than on a segway..