Sure it takes me a couple of hours to fully recharge, but that's what a second battery is for, should I need one.
And how heavy is this 2nd battery? And if your battery dies then I suppose you can buy a second one easily enough at the newagents at the airport?
Also, I don't have to refill, nor throw away spent fuel cells. It sounds like manually refueling would be a pain in the arse [for a laptop].
Eh? It will be just like changing batteries in a walkman. Doesn't sound any great hardship to me.
Vehicles using fuel cells sound much more interesting
Do you know how many toxic batteries are disposed of each year? Even rechargable ones have a limited lifespan. I don't think this is any less important than car fuel cells, even if it's less glamerous.
What would be interesting would be a fuel cell laptop that got maybe 24 hours on a "charge".
Fuel cells are ultra-efficient but you can only get out the amount of energy stored in the fuel source. If you want it to last longer, either use a larger refill pack, or cut down the energy usage of the device.
This just seems like gadgetry for its own sake
You're not that guy that's still kicking himself for turning down The Beatles, are you?
Also, it states at the end of the article it will take 2-3 years to get to market. It's amazing that the poster of this story can't even read the article
"Toshiba will unveil a prototype DMFC at CeBit next week, but commercialisation of the technology is unlikely to take place until next year"
It says the Intel funded version won't be out 2-3 years.
With the size of the screen, and the speed of typing on a numeric keypad, it doesn't sound useful for IRC except in the deadest of channels. Even with a normal monitor the text flies off the screen in around a second when the conversation gets heated. If you are really such a masochist, I guess you can load in a Java applet that tunnels over port 80 to a gateway you are running at home.
It states "Camera built-in" but doesn't say anywhere on the site what resolution it is. Obviously fairly crappy then.
One of it's listed top 'features' is "DRM (Digital Rights Management)" and mentions an application called "Music DJ"... but it doesn't appear to play MP3s.
It talks about Internet connectivity, but doesn't even have a web browser (only now-defunct WAP technology).
Other than a pretty screen, bluetooth and Java (the first I'd rather have the longer battery life, the second my PC connecting cable cost me $15 which is cheap, and the third you would have to show me something useful it can do) it doesn't seem any more advanced than my Sony J70, which came free with my mobile subscription.
I can see this one dying a slow death at the bottom of the 'freebie' phones.
In fact, anyone with spare cash would go for the Sony P800.
What if I gave them my bank account with £0? Tell them to deposit into an empty account.. instead of providing your *real* account?
They will be quite happy with that arrangement, and will deposit the money in the account. After you put up a trivial sum of petty cash to bribe a small civil servant to stamp a document releasing the funds. In fact, now you've already spent that amount of cash, you may as well stump up the only slightly larger sum to also grease the bank official. Etc etc.
I'd never heard of the scam when it first arrived in my in-box. I thought it was a joke email, so I replied saying that if they were prepared to pay up front a flight and put me in a nice five-star hotel then we could talk about it. When they actually replied (didn't think they would) and spoke about arranging the flight, I realised that they were a bunch of crooks and I forwarded all my correspondance to Scotland Yard (who politely thanked me).
I agree with all the above posts that anyone stupid enough to want to get involved in such criminal activity truly deserved to lose every penny.
Lots of people use email as a replacement for mail. Lots of people forget that email is not much like mail at all.
Indeed. Unless it's digitally signed then you can have no confidence in it at all. If I get into trouble using written mail, I get hauled into court and expert witnesses will convince a jury I sent that letter. If someone attributes an email to me then I can deny it as anyone in the chain, from forwarder to sys admin to ISP, could have altered it. There is no non-repudiability.
If Abiword supported tables and pinched the Word filter from Star/Open Office, it would suit 99% of all my WP needs. In fact, if Office keeps going the way it is then it may actually become popular as "Word without the bloat"!
One of the main ones is that, yes the linux desktop borrows heavily from MS, and not the other way around, which a lot of people like to proclaim.
Not true. Though it's obviously a good idea to use innovations that work, no matter what the source, the linux desktop does not borrow heavily from MS. You can give it any personality you want. If you want it to look and act like WinXP you can. Likewise an Apple Mac or OSX. People have given the linux desktop all kinds of wacky personalities, which you can see on the KDE and Gnome web sites (and that doesn't count the other window managers such as Enlightenment, fluxbox, etc).
A lot of Linux advocates would like to make Linux more accessible to the man in the street. This involves weaning them off the M$ environment. In an effort to make this painless, key apps are emulated as close as possible to help them move environments. Hence the Outlook and Word clones. Relearning an application also means a loss in productivity for those considering switching their business to Linux.
Microsoft does borrow off everyone else in a big way. The original Windows stolen from Xerox, their look and feel from Apple, their taskbar from RiscOS (it had that look and feel in '89, though it first came out in '87). They produce little innovation except in their legal department.
In the companies I have worked for, there is definately a rivalry between the 'scripting language' group and the 'low-level language' group. The former calling the latter dinosaurs, and the latter saying 'yeah whatever, we get paid more than you do'. In reality this competition is a good thing and makes each group think seriously about what they can gain from each other. The former group get to learn the concept of "version control" and the latter can copy the libraries to improve their productivity. Personally I would pair one of each together in a team!
In my opinion, a good programmer can eg name three different sort algorithms, not name {insert low level language here} as his favourite language. A good programmer will also be able to go in and bug fix a language he has never seen before, given a basic guide to the syntax and decent comments in the code.
Solar works a lot better in the UK than you would imagine. The nearest retirement home to me is 100% solar powered. We certainly don't get the returns you would get in sunnier countries but it still works. There are articles on UK solar projects if you look in the archives of Future Energies.
Hydrogen - its an energy transportation mechanism, not a source. Its impact is little different than electrical wires with the exception that it allows you to "wire" a vehicle to a hydrogen generation plant that will likely be oil fueled. To date, it is cheaper to mass produce hydrogen from oil than any other substance.
The point is that you can generate it in so many ways. Using oil, solar powered hydro-electrolysis, on-the-fly in a methanol powered fuel-cell, etc. The point is that when oil runs out, there will be many other ways of powering the infrastructure that has been put in place.
Wind - oh come on. Those things are a noisy, ugly blight on the landscape.
Have you actually visited a modern wind-turbine?
Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw materials on these monstrosities?
Er, it's just a big dynamo. It's simple to contruct.
So what's the answer. Nuclear of course. Its the only answer.
There's your big mistake. Assuming there is *one* single solution. Maybe we need to move to a distributed environment where energy comes from multiple sources? Solar panels on the roof, a small turbine in the back yard, the ability to export energy into the neighbourhood to help smooth load spikes. To make up the shortfall each region can use tech most suited to their environment. Solar in sunnier climes, wind power in windy areas, tidal power where appropriate.
Plenty of stories about new technologies and think you can do to help can be found here.
It might be my imagination, but I remember computer programmer being a really nerdy and looked down upon profession until Bill Gates was named the richest man on the planet. Since then it appeared to me that it then got grudging respect from even Joe Bloggs in the street.
Up until now, google haven't been evil. Why? Mainly because it was started by geeks (Brin and Page were doing their Ph.D at Stan in '98), and the tradition continues (See this excellent article [wired.com]). But think of 10, 15 years into the future.
Exactly. I'm a huge fan of Google, but then I was also a huge fan of the late (and great) Jon Postel... Now he is gone, look how corrupt his successor ICANN is.
Clicking on the link and reading the press release, it clearly states: MSN now allows access to users of Opera 7, but is still targeting and sending users of earlier versions a broken page.
Have you any idea how expensive property in London is? 1/2 millions dollars will only get you a modest 2 bedroom flat in a reasonable area. There is no upper limit on the price of flats in the centre. Trust me, this is not feasable on any scale.
They're saying that their kernel does not include GPLed code, but another program of theirs (called the HAL), a separate piece of software, DOES include GPLed code and source will be available for this program. I'm not sure I believe them; hiding the function names after a complaint sure does seem like they know they're doing something wrong.
Their kernel does not contain GPL code, it's all written in-house. RISCOS has been around for over a decade and until recently ran on proprietry hardware using expansion cards called "podules" (real plug-and-play with drivers on-board in firmware). Castle have recently developed an additional module that plugs into RISCOS that allows it to talk to standard PC expansion cards. This their module which is an extension to the OS that they license from a 3rd party. Hope that clears it up a bit.
Phillip. (disclaimer: I've previously worked for Acorn, creator of RISCOS)
Red Hat and Mandrake distros come on 3x 640MB ISOs now to burn on CD. You wouldn't even be able to download more than 1/3 of the distro per day to burn!
Re:The article never makes its point
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
It shows no examples of immortal code.
The bubble sort. No matter how hard you try and kill it, there is always a fresh crop of undergrads that thinks it's ok to use in production code. It'll never die, despite there not being any excuse for ever using it.
Phillip.
Re:OSS and Immortal Code
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
This is hardly the type of case that one would want to use a poster-child for open source.
Who said anything about open source? One second look at the Simdesk front page throws up words like 'proprietry' and 'patented'. See next paragraph.
Particularly as it appears that Sim desk is actually closed source and that this story is yet another bash Microsoft for any reason at all story.
You are waaay off the mark. A big win for a company that is competing with M$ Office is news because breaking the M$ hold on the file formats is important for open source making headway into the desktop market.
At the moment, M$ can change its file format as much as it likes to cut off any competitors. Those offering compatibility have no choice except to play catch-up.
If large government departments and corporations start using "Office compatiable" software then they are going to be upset if M$ starts producing incompatiable WP files. These are the kind of people that M$ have to listen to.
When large segments of markets start using different competing "Office compatible" suites then they will start making their users saving by default to a format that they *know* will work in all the suites (eg Word v.XXX). Once everybody gets locked into this version, and it's difficult for M$ to change it without upsetting too many people, then instead of playing catch-up everybody (open source and proprietary) can concentrate on polishing accurate import and export filters. This would be excellent for consumers.
You don't think that maybe some of the slashdot editors are getting paid by a Microsoft competitor or something?
Judging by the.NET ads at the top of Slashdot, they are being paid by both sides.
And more importantly, where's the hydrogen-distributing power stations? And even more importantly, where's the cheap and plentiful hydrogen production mechanism?
It's this kind of apathetic crap that is the disease of todays society. Once people vote with their feet and start buying hydrogen cars then the capitalist market will ensure that there will be plenty of companies will step up to the plate and offer cheap hydrogen locally. With hydrogen being the most abundant substance in the universe, I'm sure it won't be long (and a few years isn't long when you talk about the future of our society) before hydrogen is a fraction of the price of gas.
Eventually I gave up trying to explain how all her electric system does is centralize the source of pollution to the power plant. She seemed oblivious to the fact that millions of tons of coal go up in smoke to make that electricity.
Wrong. A growing percentage of that energy is produced from renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal, etc).
I didn't even bother to bring up the fact that my furnace is much more efficient, and that all the work and money I put into upgrading my homes insulation over the last year means that the furnace fires up for at most an hour or two a day.
Your furnace is not particularly efficient. Do a Google on micro-CHP (Combined Heat and Power) to see how you can more than double your efficiency.
But there are plenty of flakes out there, ready to hop behind the wheel of a brand new hydrogen car, completely oblivious to how much energy it actually takes to drive.
Because it will reduce pollution and improve the quality of life for all of us? Not sure what a flake is (yank term?) but it sounds pretty good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. You hate to recharge your laptop, but you'll hate it more if you have to pay for fuel.
I hate even more being stuck on a 6hr train journey and the battery dying after 2hrs.
Phillip.
Sure it takes me a couple of hours to fully recharge, but that's what a second battery is for, should I need one.
And how heavy is this 2nd battery? And if your battery dies then I suppose you can buy a second one easily enough at the newagents at the airport?
Also, I don't have to refill, nor throw away spent fuel cells. It sounds like manually refueling would be a pain in the arse [for a laptop].
Eh? It will be just like changing batteries in a walkman. Doesn't sound any great hardship to me.
Vehicles using fuel cells sound much more interesting
Do you know how many toxic batteries are disposed of each year? Even rechargable ones have a limited lifespan. I don't think this is any less important than car fuel cells, even if it's less glamerous.
What would be interesting would be a fuel cell laptop that got maybe 24 hours on a "charge".
Fuel cells are ultra-efficient but you can only get out the amount of energy stored in the fuel source. If you want it to last longer, either use a larger refill pack, or cut down the energy usage of the device.
This just seems like gadgetry for its own sake
You're not that guy that's still kicking himself for turning down The Beatles, are you?
Phillip.
Also, it states at the end of the article it will take 2-3 years to get to market. It's amazing that the poster of this story can't even read the article
"Toshiba will unveil a prototype DMFC at CeBit next week, but commercialisation of the technology is unlikely to take place until next year"
It says the Intel funded version won't be out 2-3 years.
Sigh. Who can't read the article?
Phillip.
With the size of the screen, and the speed of typing on a numeric keypad, it doesn't sound useful for IRC except in the deadest of channels. Even with a normal monitor the text flies off the screen in around a second when the conversation gets heated. If you are really such a masochist, I guess you can load in a Java applet that tunnels over port 80 to a gateway you are running at home.
Phillip.
It states "Camera built-in" but doesn't say anywhere on the site what resolution it is. Obviously fairly crappy then.
One of it's listed top 'features' is "DRM (Digital Rights Management)" and mentions an application called "Music DJ"... but it doesn't appear to play MP3s.
It talks about Internet connectivity, but doesn't even have a web browser (only now-defunct WAP technology).
Other than a pretty screen, bluetooth and Java (the first I'd rather have the longer battery life, the second my PC connecting cable cost me $15 which is cheap, and the third you would have to show me something useful it can do) it doesn't seem any more advanced than my Sony J70, which came free with my mobile subscription.
I can see this one dying a slow death at the bottom of the 'freebie' phones.
In fact, anyone with spare cash would go for the Sony P800.
Phillip.
What if I gave them my bank account with £0? Tell them to deposit into an empty account.. instead of providing your *real* account?
They will be quite happy with that arrangement, and will deposit the money in the account. After you put up a trivial sum of petty cash to bribe a small civil servant to stamp a document releasing the funds. In fact, now you've already spent that amount of cash, you may as well stump up the only slightly larger sum to also grease the bank official. Etc etc.
Phillip.
I'd never heard of the scam when it first arrived in my in-box. I thought it was a joke email, so I replied saying that if they were prepared to pay up front a flight and put me in a nice five-star hotel then we could talk about it. When they actually replied (didn't think they would) and spoke about arranging the flight, I realised that they were a bunch of crooks and I forwarded all my correspondance to Scotland Yard (who politely thanked me).
I agree with all the above posts that anyone stupid enough to want to get involved in such criminal activity truly deserved to lose every penny.
Phillip.
Lots of people use email as a replacement for mail. Lots of people forget that email is not much like mail at all.
Indeed. Unless it's digitally signed then you can have no confidence in it at all. If I get into trouble using written mail, I get hauled into court and expert witnesses will convince a jury I sent that letter. If someone attributes an email to me then I can deny it as anyone in the chain, from forwarder to sys admin to ISP, could have altered it. There is no non-repudiability.
Phillip.
If Abiword supported tables and pinched the Word filter from Star/Open Office, it would suit 99% of all my WP needs. In fact, if Office keeps going the way it is then it may actually become popular as "Word without the bloat"!
Phillip.
One of the main ones is that, yes the linux desktop borrows heavily from MS, and not the other way around, which a lot of people like to proclaim.
Not true. Though it's obviously a good idea to use innovations that work, no matter what the source, the linux desktop does not borrow heavily from MS. You can give it any personality you want. If you want it to look and act like WinXP you can. Likewise an Apple Mac or OSX. People have given the linux desktop all kinds of wacky personalities, which you can see on the KDE and Gnome web sites (and that doesn't count the other window managers such as Enlightenment, fluxbox, etc).
A lot of Linux advocates would like to make Linux more accessible to the man in the street. This involves weaning them off the M$ environment. In an effort to make this painless, key apps are emulated as close as possible to help them move environments. Hence the Outlook and Word clones. Relearning an application also means a loss in productivity for those considering switching their business to Linux.
Microsoft does borrow off everyone else in a big way. The original Windows stolen from Xerox, their look and feel from Apple, their taskbar from RiscOS (it had that look and feel in '89, though it first came out in '87). They produce little innovation except in their legal department.
Phillip.
In the companies I have worked for, there is definately a rivalry between the 'scripting language' group and the 'low-level language' group. The former calling the latter dinosaurs, and the latter saying 'yeah whatever, we get paid more than you do'. In reality this competition is a good thing and makes each group think seriously about what they can gain from each other. The former group get to learn the concept of "version control" and the latter can copy the libraries to improve their productivity. Personally I would pair one of each together in a team!
In my opinion, a good programmer can eg name three different sort algorithms, not name {insert low level language here} as his favourite language. A good programmer will also be able to go in and bug fix a language he has never seen before, given a basic guide to the syntax and decent comments in the code.
Phillip.
Solar works a lot better in the UK than you would imagine. The nearest retirement home to me is 100% solar powered. We certainly don't get the returns you would get in sunnier countries but it still works. There are articles on UK solar projects if you look in the archives of Future Energies.
Phillip.
Hydrogen - its an energy transportation mechanism, not a source. Its impact is little different than electrical wires with the exception that it allows you to "wire" a vehicle to a hydrogen generation plant that will likely be oil fueled. To date, it is cheaper to mass produce hydrogen from oil than any other substance.
The point is that you can generate it in so many ways. Using oil, solar powered hydro-electrolysis, on-the-fly in a methanol powered fuel-cell, etc. The point is that when oil runs out, there will be many other ways of powering the infrastructure that has been put in place.
Wind - oh come on. Those things are a noisy, ugly blight on the landscape.
Have you actually visited a modern wind-turbine?
Has anybody even bothered to figure out the total energy cost of manufacturing and raw materials on these monstrosities?
Er, it's just a big dynamo. It's simple to contruct.
So what's the answer. Nuclear of course. Its the only answer.
There's your big mistake. Assuming there is *one* single solution. Maybe we need to move to a distributed environment where energy comes from multiple sources? Solar panels on the roof, a small turbine in the back yard, the ability to export energy into the neighbourhood to help smooth load spikes. To make up the shortfall each region can use tech most suited to their environment. Solar in sunnier climes, wind power in windy areas, tidal power where appropriate.
Plenty of stories about new technologies and think you can do to help can be found here.
Phillip.
It might be my imagination, but I remember computer programmer being a really nerdy and looked down upon profession until Bill Gates was named the richest man on the planet. Since then it appeared to me that it then got grudging respect from even Joe Bloggs in the street.
Phillip.
Up until now, google haven't been evil. Why? Mainly because it was started by geeks (Brin and Page were doing their Ph.D at Stan in '98), and the tradition continues (See this excellent article [wired.com]). But think of 10, 15 years into the future.
Exactly. I'm a huge fan of Google, but then I was also a huge fan of the late (and great) Jon Postel... Now he is gone, look how corrupt his successor ICANN is.
Phillip.
Clicking on the link and reading the press release, it clearly states:
MSN now allows access to users of Opera 7, but is still targeting and sending users of earlier versions a broken page.
Phillip.
Have you any idea how expensive property in London is? 1/2 millions dollars will only get you a modest 2 bedroom flat in a reasonable area. There is no upper limit on the price of flats in the centre. Trust me, this is not feasable on any scale.
Phillip.
They're saying that their kernel does not include GPLed code, but another program of theirs (called the HAL), a separate piece of software, DOES include GPLed code and source will be available for this program. I'm not sure I believe them; hiding the function names after a complaint sure does seem like they know they're doing something wrong.
Their kernel does not contain GPL code, it's all written in-house. RISCOS has been around for over a decade and until recently ran on proprietry hardware using expansion cards called "podules" (real plug-and-play with drivers on-board in firmware). Castle have recently developed an additional module that plugs into RISCOS that allows it to talk to standard PC expansion cards. This their module which is an extension to the OS that they license from a 3rd party. Hope that clears it up a bit.
Phillip.
(disclaimer: I've previously worked for Acorn, creator of RISCOS)
Red Hat and Mandrake distros come on 3x 640MB ISOs now to burn on CD. You wouldn't even be able to download more than 1/3 of the distro per day to burn!
Phillip.
Sadly, the geeks are one step ahead of you...
Phillip.
It shows no examples of immortal code.
The bubble sort. No matter how hard you try and kill it, there is always a fresh crop of undergrads that thinks it's ok to use in production code. It'll never die, despite there not being any excuse for ever using it.
Phillip.
it takes many iterations to create perfect code
s/perfect/sphagetti/
Phillip.
This is hardly the type of case that one would want to use a poster-child for open source.
.NET ads at the top of Slashdot, they are being paid by both sides.
Who said anything about open source? One second look at the Simdesk front page throws up words like 'proprietry' and 'patented'. See next paragraph.
Particularly as it appears that Sim desk is actually closed source and that this story is yet another bash Microsoft for any reason at all story.
You are waaay off the mark. A big win for a company that is competing with M$ Office is news because breaking the M$ hold on the file formats is important for open source making headway into the desktop market.
At the moment, M$ can change its file format as much as it likes to cut off any competitors. Those offering compatibility have no choice except to play catch-up.
If large government departments and corporations start using "Office compatiable" software then they are going to be upset if M$ starts producing incompatiable WP files. These are the kind of people that M$ have to listen to.
When large segments of markets start using different competing "Office compatible" suites then they will start making their users saving by default to a format that they *know* will work in all the suites (eg Word v.XXX). Once everybody gets locked into this version, and it's difficult for M$ to change it without upsetting too many people, then instead of playing catch-up everybody (open source and proprietary) can concentrate on polishing accurate import and export filters. This would be excellent for consumers.
You don't think that maybe some of the slashdot editors are getting paid by a Microsoft competitor or something?
Judging by the
Phillip.
And more importantly, where's the hydrogen-distributing power stations? And even more importantly, where's the cheap and plentiful hydrogen production mechanism?
It's this kind of apathetic crap that is the disease of todays society. Once people vote with their feet and start buying hydrogen cars then the capitalist market will ensure that there will be plenty of companies will step up to the plate and offer cheap hydrogen locally. With hydrogen being the most abundant substance in the universe, I'm sure it won't be long (and a few years isn't long when you talk about the future of our society) before hydrogen is a fraction of the price of gas.
Phillip.
Eventually I gave up trying to explain how all her electric system does is centralize the source of pollution to the power plant. She seemed oblivious to the fact that millions of tons of coal go up in smoke to make that electricity.
Wrong. A growing percentage of that energy is produced from renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal, etc).
I didn't even bother to bring up the fact that my furnace is much more efficient, and that all the work and money I put into upgrading my homes insulation over the last year means that the furnace fires up for at most an hour or two a day.
Your furnace is not particularly efficient. Do a Google on micro-CHP (Combined Heat and Power) to see how you can more than double your efficiency.
But there are plenty of flakes out there, ready to hop behind the wheel of a brand new hydrogen car, completely oblivious to how much energy it actually takes to drive.
Because it will reduce pollution and improve the quality of life for all of us? Not sure what a flake is (yank term?) but it sounds pretty good to me.
Phillip.