Why is it wrong exactly? Imagine you have a field. If I cut through it to save myself walking around it, I haven't damaged you or your property. Now if I build a road through your field to save myself time, that's wrong, but simply using someone else's property in a non-destructive way, I don't see the problem. So no high-bandwidth or criminal usage of my network, but for innocent email checking or browsing and chatting, come one come all (I have a fonero (FON.com)). I think notions of private property have gotten out of hand, and I think that if we were talking about DMCA stuff then everyone would be on my side. But this is somehow different, I don't see it.
Fair use.
I like the black look, that's how I type in a terminal or a word processor (well blue background anyway). And I like the look allot, but LCD displays offer no energy savings in this configuration. Because you need to be applying a voltage to the LC cell in order to get black, black actually uses MORE power than white with LCDs, although not very much. A real power savings does occur with CRTs, plasma monitors, and OLEDs. But since LCDs make up the majority of new monitors, I wonder if this would make any difference at all?
I work for a solar research company (private enterprise, for profit, looking to make solar as cheap as possible) and one thing that strikes me about this sort of news is that if it were true we could buy it already. The fact is that the solar market is enormous already, never mind how big it will get once the price comes down (and the price is coming down), so if someone had a technology that was even marginally cheaper than the current state of the art, that brought the price down even a little, then there are very few barriers to get that thing to the market.
So when and article appears on slashdot which promises to change the world of solar energy, you can know that it is genuine if they are backing a product for sale. Because if they had a technology that worked VCs would be knocking down their doors. Otherwise, it's dismissible, for now.
...then don't RTFA. You don't have to read an comment on every article in slashdot. I understand that people are getting sick of the overhype, and that that itself is becomming the news story, but this product is undeniably is at the center of something interesting. I can think of few recent announcements that mattered so much to nerds, so let us have our news for nerds and if you're sick of joining in then read another FA.
I maintain 12 macs for different friends and family. The people using them are not power users, but they know how to configure their machines. Anyway, of the 12, ONE person moved their doc to the side. Something to do with Final Cut Pro and wanting to have the video time slider at the very bottom of the screen. Other than that, everyone leaves it on the bottom.
The trouble with sidestepping the ESRB is that it would give the government, and people like Jack Thompson, a greater excuse to push for a government body to rate video games. This is something Jack wants to do, and he has the support of people on both sides. The only argument against letting a government besieged by lobbiest decide what goes and what does not is that there exists a voluntary, industry run rating board and everyone is respecting that board. The moment that falls through they will have good reason to push a mandatory government rating system down our throats.
So I agree that rockstar should sell direct from their website, but they should continue to go to the ESRB so that parents know that games like Manhunt 2 are not appropriate for their five year old. I think that kind of information is useful, no matter what channels the game sells in.
I don't know what he is talking about. I run OSX at home and Fedora at work and it is far from difficult to find freeware for every need I have. I do my coding in Pythonusing ActiveState, I write my articles in TexShop, I do scripts in TextWrangler (which is excellent). I have 11 programs open now, of those only Adobe Illustrator and Pages are closed and cost me money (over and above the OS). The others, safari, firefox (both at the same time, don't ask), terminal, textwrangler, azareus, skype, itunes, preview, and omni outliner didn't cost me a penny. I could go on. Realisitically, whenever I need to do something new, convert a file, edit something that I'm not familiar with, or create a program, I find it is easy to come across quality free programs online. Check the apple.com website, search for software, you'll be surprised.
I rarely post on slashdot, choosing to browse instead, but I find that this is too hard to resist. Honestly, this is not Science, the author is constantly chiming in with "a leading scientific journal" and "a very important climatologist". If he had legitimate sources he could, I don't know, reference them perhaps. Furthermore, he claims that because a single (unreferenced) article disputes the findings of UN reports it has been "overturned". I'm sorry, it's just terribly frustrating that this sort of thing gets published and muddles the picture.
One last comment, what did he mean by the Canadian Government copying the graph to every household. Is he suggesting that some sort of mass mailing happened, because none did.
Nice to see these went somewhere, we were working with PN junctions containing Tritium at the University of Toronto back in 2001. I figured, as I knew, I would through out some facts for those who were curious:
1 - Tritium, a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen, has a half life of around 14 years.
2 - Tritium undergoes beta decay, where one of it's neutrons emits a beta electron and becomes a proton (which is non radioactive). It becomes Helium-3, which is not radioactive.
3 - The beta electron has an average path length in silicon of around 1 micron, in other words beta electrons do not get very far before they decay.
4 - When the beta electron decays it will knock a valence electron off a silicon atom, which will generate an electron-hole pair. These are swept apart by the intrinsic field set up by a PN junction.
I recall when I was looking at this, I found that the deliverable power levels were really low (read nanoAmperes) and the fact that they dropped over seven years was bothersome as well. One of the problems we encountered was that as the tritium decayed, we found that the dangling bonds left behind in the semiconductors would degrade the performance of the batteries faster than would be predicted by just looking at the half life. In fact, I recall really poor performance in just a few days.
Anyway, that was about 4 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it wrong exactly? Imagine you have a field. If I cut through it to save myself walking around it, I haven't damaged you or your property. Now if I build a road through your field to save myself time, that's wrong, but simply using someone else's property in a non-destructive way, I don't see the problem. So no high-bandwidth or criminal usage of my network, but for innocent email checking or browsing and chatting, come one come all (I have a fonero (FON.com)). I think notions of private property have gotten out of hand, and I think that if we were talking about DMCA stuff then everyone would be on my side. But this is somehow different, I don't see it. Fair use.
I like the black look, that's how I type in a terminal or a word processor (well blue background anyway). And I like the look allot, but LCD displays offer no energy savings in this configuration. Because you need to be applying a voltage to the LC cell in order to get black, black actually uses MORE power than white with LCDs, although not very much. A real power savings does occur with CRTs, plasma monitors, and OLEDs. But since LCDs make up the majority of new monitors, I wonder if this would make any difference at all?
How is USB not a viable alternative? It's a fixed form port that can be upgraded in speed while maintaining backwards compatibility.
I work for a solar research company (private enterprise, for profit, looking to make solar as cheap as possible) and one thing that strikes me about this sort of news is that if it were true we could buy it already. The fact is that the solar market is enormous already, never mind how big it will get once the price comes down (and the price is coming down), so if someone had a technology that was even marginally cheaper than the current state of the art, that brought the price down even a little, then there are very few barriers to get that thing to the market. So when and article appears on slashdot which promises to change the world of solar energy, you can know that it is genuine if they are backing a product for sale. Because if they had a technology that worked VCs would be knocking down their doors. Otherwise, it's dismissible, for now.
...then don't RTFA. You don't have to read an comment on every article in slashdot. I understand that people are getting sick of the overhype, and that that itself is becomming the news story, but this product is undeniably is at the center of something interesting. I can think of few recent announcements that mattered so much to nerds, so let us have our news for nerds and if you're sick of joining in then read another FA.
I maintain 12 macs for different friends and family. The people using them are not power users, but they know how to configure their machines. Anyway, of the 12, ONE person moved their doc to the side. Something to do with Final Cut Pro and wanting to have the video time slider at the very bottom of the screen. Other than that, everyone leaves it on the bottom.
The trouble with sidestepping the ESRB is that it would give the government, and people like Jack Thompson, a greater excuse to push for a government body to rate video games. This is something Jack wants to do, and he has the support of people on both sides. The only argument against letting a government besieged by lobbiest decide what goes and what does not is that there exists a voluntary, industry run rating board and everyone is respecting that board. The moment that falls through they will have good reason to push a mandatory government rating system down our throats. So I agree that rockstar should sell direct from their website, but they should continue to go to the ESRB so that parents know that games like Manhunt 2 are not appropriate for their five year old. I think that kind of information is useful, no matter what channels the game sells in.
I don't know what he is talking about. I run OSX at home and Fedora at work and it is far from difficult to find freeware for every need I have. I do my coding in Pythonusing ActiveState, I write my articles in TexShop, I do scripts in TextWrangler (which is excellent). I have 11 programs open now, of those only Adobe Illustrator and Pages are closed and cost me money (over and above the OS). The others, safari, firefox (both at the same time, don't ask), terminal, textwrangler, azareus, skype, itunes, preview, and omni outliner didn't cost me a penny. I could go on. Realisitically, whenever I need to do something new, convert a file, edit something that I'm not familiar with, or create a program, I find it is easy to come across quality free programs online. Check the apple.com website, search for software, you'll be surprised.
I rarely post on slashdot, choosing to browse instead, but I find that this is too hard to resist. Honestly, this is not Science, the author is constantly chiming in with "a leading scientific journal" and "a very important climatologist". If he had legitimate sources he could, I don't know, reference them perhaps. Furthermore, he claims that because a single (unreferenced) article disputes the findings of UN reports it has been "overturned". I'm sorry, it's just terribly frustrating that this sort of thing gets published and muddles the picture. One last comment, what did he mean by the Canadian Government copying the graph to every household. Is he suggesting that some sort of mass mailing happened, because none did.
Nice to see these went somewhere, we were working with PN junctions containing Tritium at the University of Toronto back in 2001. I figured, as I knew, I would through out some facts for those who were curious: 1 - Tritium, a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen, has a half life of around 14 years. 2 - Tritium undergoes beta decay, where one of it's neutrons emits a beta electron and becomes a proton (which is non radioactive). It becomes Helium-3, which is not radioactive. 3 - The beta electron has an average path length in silicon of around 1 micron, in other words beta electrons do not get very far before they decay. 4 - When the beta electron decays it will knock a valence electron off a silicon atom, which will generate an electron-hole pair. These are swept apart by the intrinsic field set up by a PN junction. I recall when I was looking at this, I found that the deliverable power levels were really low (read nanoAmperes) and the fact that they dropped over seven years was bothersome as well. One of the problems we encountered was that as the tritium decayed, we found that the dangling bonds left behind in the semiconductors would degrade the performance of the batteries faster than would be predicted by just looking at the half life. In fact, I recall really poor performance in just a few days. Anyway, that was about 4 years ago.