Unless an American revolutionized hydrogen fusion You mean like Robert Bussard? He's almost there but can't get funding because it would prove that the billions that have been spent on Deuterium/Tokamak research have been pointless, at least in terms of developing commercially practical fusion power.
Also, hydrogen (deuterium-tritium) fusion isn't the way to go...the vast majority of the energy ends up in a high-velocity neutron that can't be captured effectively and will just irradiate the reactor housing, turning it into nuclear waste.
It's not really that AC loses power over distance more than DC, it's that higher voltages lose less power over long distances than lower voltages. Due to the constantly-varying nature of AC, it is easily 'transformed' between voltages. However, this is a two-edged sword since AC can be easily converted for transmission, but that same AC property of constantly varying voltage causes losses due to impedance (essentially frequency-dependant 'resistance' due to inductance in the lines).
With modern switching power electronics (close to 100% efficient...100% is theoretically possible), AC-DC, DC-DC and DC-AC conversions are fairly easy and there is talk of using high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) to replace the current high-voltage alternating-current transmission lines to eliminate the reactive power losses (due to impedance in the transmission lines). If the grid were changed over to HVDC then an eventual switch to high-temperature super conductors could virtually eliminate long-distance transmission losses (except for whatever coolant might be required to keep the lines in the super-conducting range).
Because phones are tied to specific vendors/networks. These same vendors often restrict the software and hardware capabilities of their phones to encourage you to buy more services from them.
Oh, certainly. I'm not saying that I don't understand why someone wants their phone to do literally everything. It just bothers me that the minority of the populace that do want higher-quality electronics are basically being marginalized. Noone really makes PDA's anymore, except for HP, and their's are worse in every way than the ones Dell used to put out. Palm hasn't updated their line in upwards of a year and the only devices I've seen running WM6.0 have been smart-phones.
Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a camera, a phone, a PDA, and a laptop?
Because they want a good quality camera, phone, PDA, laptop, etc. not a all-in-one gadget with a mediocre everything?
Precisely. My phone is my link to the outside world (calls, text and tethering via bluetooth) but I take my pictures with my camera, keep track of appointments and contacts with my PDA (along with using it for GPS) and surf the web etc etc etc with my Thinkpad.
My laptop can and will always provide a better internet experience than a device with a weaker processor, less storage space and a ~3" screen. Simple physics inhibit a great-quality set of optics in a reasonably sized phone, and stupid carrier lock-downs prevent most phones from really doing anything that useful.
I also have a watch with a built in compass (helps when using my PDA to navigate around cities on foot).
I'm going to assume something major changed between 6.04 and 7.04 because it's totally usable on my machine. Part of it is my brother being used to his perpetually bogged-down XP box (3GHz P4, 1.5GB RAM, R9700), bogged down of his own doing, I might add. But it does run faster. I'm going to assume some of that stems from offloading rendering to the (admittedly obsolete) dedicated card, but it's still nice to use. Not as snappy as my P4 dell lappy that has 7.10 on it, but that graphics card isn't supported as well, so it's actually much less reliable.
And before anyone makes a joke about Linux having poor driver support...I can't even play any 3d games with my brand-new nVidia 8600GTS because some stupid driver bug keeps getting stuck in some infinite loop after between 30 seconds and 30 minutes of play. XFX seems to suspect insufficient power on my 12V rail...but I've seen people run 8800's on the same PS, so somehow I doubt that's it.
I have an old Gateway P2-450 with it's max of 384 MB of RAM and a Radeon 7500 graphics card. XP was sluggish to the point of being unpleasant to use. Ubuntu 7.04 runs great with their desktop effects enabled! Sure, compiling big software packages takes a while, but for simple web browsing and whatnot, it's a joy to use. Enough so that my youngest brother (who's not technically inclined at all) has taken a liking to Linux because of how nicely it runs.
Toms Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista / just published extensive Vista Enterprise benchmarks, comparing them to XP Pro.
The result:
At best, the computer won't run any slower.
At worst, it will run software abysmally slow or not at all. OpenGL support seems nonexistant, judging from the horrendous drop in performance in UT2004 (>30% drop) and the rendering of 3D/CAD/CAE software unusable (80-90% drops in performance).
This is idiotic on Microsoft's part. Now businesses will be even more opposed to upgrading to Vista, since either they're going to have to stop using their engineering/graphics software (at least until vendors work on their Vista support) or they're going to have to split their computer infrastructure and support both XP and Vista, while seeing, at beast, negligible gains under Vista.
Businesses are not going to be sold on the promise of Aero glass, especially not when Vista's recommended system requirements are so high, relative to those for XP (I have a P2 450 with 384MB of RAM running XP Home passably, it certainly won't be able to run Vista).
I have one of those cards. I lined my wallet with as soon as my bank informed me that I would received an RFID-equipped credit-card at no extra charge!
I'm currently working at a company specializing in Ti and Ti alloys/composites.
I have little to no faith in this actually producing anything substantial within the next several years.
Why? I have read about this same guy pitching his process for the past several years, and my company has a file on him going back almost a decade; he's been saying his process will yield results 'soon' for far too long for me to readily believe him.
Last year, even, I read a presentation he gave, and it consisted of little more than a brief high-school chemistry explanation of electrolysis (which is all this is, same process that produces hydrogen and oxygen from water) and stating a hope that they will build an experimental cell soon. Apparently he's gotten that far, but 200 mg aren't going to help much to combat the currently sky-rocketing Ti prices.
And yes, they are very high right now. Half our work is focused on improving Ti recycling processes so that scrap can be used more widely; the rest of the work is biomedical applications where cost is not an issue.
The point is: Yes, if this works it could mean a much cheaper/environmentally friendly (I'm a little doubtful of this; yea, there won't be concentrated TiCl or Cl gas lying around, but it's an electrolytic process, it will use lots of electricity, and that will produce extra waste) process. This is a conceptually simple process; basically it requires experimentation to get the parameters right. He has spent very little time actually experimenting.
I have the MZ-S1 (the white "sport" model) and I love it. It sounds great, never skips and I just keep it in my backpack and basically never worry about battery life. I keep a few discs along with an RCA adapter cable in my backpack and I can always call up a couple of hours of great sounding music. My only real complaint is the obtuseness of the menu system on mine. Maybe it was only this model, I haven't really used any others, but I don't go through the menu at all. I use the Play/Pause/Stop/Next/Previous/Volume joystick and the hold switch, and that's it. But that's OK, because that's all I need to enjoy my music. ~40 tracks at LP2 (light compression) somewhat negates the need for a menu system when I just play discs through and don't bother looking for specific tracks.
However, I only have a few hours of music on me at a time (as opposed to the 84+ hours on my computer) because Sonic Stage is a crime against humanity and likely kills puppies too. The scary thing is, it's a big improvement over the disingenuously named "OpenMG Jukebox" that it replaced. OpenMG was the software with, what I thought of as a "three strikes" rule, except that a "strike" was writing legally acquired music to a legally acquired portable music player! I almost gave up right there! Granted, that was over 4 years ago and I'm still using my player. Real player now supports NetMD players and that's a big improvement, but still not great. I'd be elated if someone made a NetMD Winamp plugin.
Regardless, this summer I'm planning on replacing it with an iAdudio X5L, 120x the capacity, much wider media support (since neither Real nor Sonicstage support Ogg Vorbis, FLAC or others) and a color screen, as well as a slimmer form-factor, meanign that it'll actually fit into my pockets along with my wallet and PDA.
I too, expressed surprise when I found out that the PSP would not use/be backwards compatible with MiniDiscs, it just seemed dumb. I might have considered getting one if that meant that I could share media between a portable gaming system and my music player, same as I'd want a flash-based player I'd get to use SD so that I could splurge on a big card that could be used by my PDA (Dell Axim) as well.
In summary, it's sad when an obviously paranoid upper management cripples what is otherwise excellent hardware with crappy/offensive/dangerous software (similar to the rootkit fiasco, in my mind, and why I avoid buying Sony products from now on)
I'd like to ask what keeps you personally from reading e-books?
Absolutely nothing.
I do regular read eBooks. I use the microsoft reader that came on my PPC. The only thing that pisses me off is paying hardcover prices for a bunch of ones and zeroes. They should be glad I'm buying the ebook version, neither did they have to pay for any paper nor did it take up shelf space. But I buy them anyway because I want to read books, and carrying around a real one just doesn't work for me.
Initially I got a hardcover copy of one of the relatively recent Honor Harrington books from Baen and noted that there was a CD with the entire series on it (as metioned in the parent), in numerous formats, along with some other Baen books! A few months later, when I got my PPC, I loaded a few books onto a storage card and I was forever hooked on eBooks. I love it because I can carry hours of reading material with me at all times; if I have a free couple of minutes somewhere I can just pull out my Axim and read a couple of pages while waiting for my order to come up or while I'm sitting in the airport, wherever.
I know there's DRM built into the Microsoft Reader books I buy, but as of yet it hasn't caused me any problems::knocks on wood::. I also don't try reading books on both my laptop and my PPC, but I could imagine that might cause problems.
I will still read real books, I don't bring my PPC on vacation, for example, but for everyday use, I don't know if I could live without my eBooks.
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It's not really that AC loses power over distance more than DC, it's that higher voltages lose less power over long distances than lower voltages. Due to the constantly-varying nature of AC, it is easily 'transformed' between voltages. However, this is a two-edged sword since AC can be easily converted for transmission, but that same AC property of constantly varying voltage causes losses due to impedance (essentially frequency-dependant 'resistance' due to inductance in the lines). With modern switching power electronics (close to 100% efficient...100% is theoretically possible), AC-DC, DC-DC and DC-AC conversions are fairly easy and there is talk of using high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) to replace the current high-voltage alternating-current transmission lines to eliminate the reactive power losses (due to impedance in the transmission lines). If the grid were changed over to HVDC then an eventual switch to high-temperature super conductors could virtually eliminate long-distance transmission losses (except for whatever coolant might be required to keep the lines in the super-conducting range).
Because phones are tied to specific vendors/networks. These same vendors often restrict the software and hardware capabilities of their phones to encourage you to buy more services from them.
Oh, certainly. I'm not saying that I don't understand why someone wants their phone to do literally everything. It just bothers me that the minority of the populace that do want higher-quality electronics are basically being marginalized. Noone really makes PDA's anymore, except for HP, and their's are worse in every way than the ones Dell used to put out. Palm hasn't updated their line in upwards of a year and the only devices I've seen running WM6.0 have been smart-phones.
Because they want a good quality camera, phone, PDA, laptop, etc. not a all-in-one gadget with a mediocre everything?
Precisely. My phone is my link to the outside world (calls, text and tethering via bluetooth) but I take my pictures with my camera, keep track of appointments and contacts with my PDA (along with using it for GPS) and surf the web etc etc etc with my Thinkpad. My laptop can and will always provide a better internet experience than a device with a weaker processor, less storage space and a ~3" screen. Simple physics inhibit a great-quality set of optics in a reasonably sized phone, and stupid carrier lock-downs prevent most phones from really doing anything that useful. I also have a watch with a built in compass (helps when using my PDA to navigate around cities on foot).I'm going to assume something major changed between 6.04 and 7.04 because it's totally usable on my machine. Part of it is my brother being used to his perpetually bogged-down XP box (3GHz P4, 1.5GB RAM, R9700), bogged down of his own doing, I might add. But it does run faster. I'm going to assume some of that stems from offloading rendering to the (admittedly obsolete) dedicated card, but it's still nice to use. Not as snappy as my P4 dell lappy that has 7.10 on it, but that graphics card isn't supported as well, so it's actually much less reliable. And before anyone makes a joke about Linux having poor driver support...I can't even play any 3d games with my brand-new nVidia 8600GTS because some stupid driver bug keeps getting stuck in some infinite loop after between 30 seconds and 30 minutes of play. XFX seems to suspect insufficient power on my 12V rail...but I've seen people run 8800's on the same PS, so somehow I doubt that's it.
I have an old Gateway P2-450 with it's max of 384 MB of RAM and a Radeon 7500 graphics card. XP was sluggish to the point of being unpleasant to use. Ubuntu 7.04 runs great with their desktop effects enabled! Sure, compiling big software packages takes a while, but for simple web browsing and whatnot, it's a joy to use. Enough so that my youngest brother (who's not technically inclined at all) has taken a liking to Linux because of how nicely it runs.
Toms Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista / just published extensive Vista Enterprise benchmarks, comparing them to XP Pro.
The result:
At best, the computer won't run any slower.
At worst, it will run software abysmally slow or not at all. OpenGL support seems nonexistant, judging from the horrendous drop in performance in UT2004 (>30% drop) and the rendering of 3D/CAD/CAE software unusable (80-90% drops in performance).
This is idiotic on Microsoft's part. Now businesses will be even more opposed to upgrading to Vista, since either they're going to have to stop using their engineering/graphics software (at least until vendors work on their Vista support) or they're going to have to split their computer infrastructure and support both XP and Vista, while seeing, at beast, negligible gains under Vista.
Businesses are not going to be sold on the promise of Aero glass, especially not when Vista's recommended system requirements are so high, relative to those for XP (I have a P2 450 with 384MB of RAM running XP Home passably, it certainly won't be able to run Vista).
Or just do this: http://wvp.diablops.com/content/view/37/
I have one of those cards. I lined my wallet with as soon as my bank informed me that I would received an RFID-equipped credit-card at no extra charge!
You don't need to hold out any longer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminum# Nanophase_aluminum
I'm currently working at a company specializing in Ti and Ti alloys/composites.
I have little to no faith in this actually producing anything substantial within the next several years.
Why? I have read about this same guy pitching his process for the past several years, and my company has a file on him going back almost a decade; he's been saying his process will yield results 'soon' for far too long for me to readily believe him.
Last year, even, I read a presentation he gave, and it consisted of little more than a brief high-school chemistry explanation of electrolysis (which is all this is, same process that produces hydrogen and oxygen from water) and stating a hope that they will build an experimental cell soon. Apparently he's gotten that far, but 200 mg aren't going to help much to combat the currently sky-rocketing Ti prices.
And yes, they are very high right now. Half our work is focused on improving Ti recycling processes so that scrap can be used more widely; the rest of the work is biomedical applications where cost is not an issue.
The point is: Yes, if this works it could mean a much cheaper/environmentally friendly (I'm a little doubtful of this; yea, there won't be concentrated TiCl or Cl gas lying around, but it's an electrolytic process, it will use lots of electricity, and that will produce extra waste) process. This is a conceptually simple process; basically it requires experimentation to get the parameters right. He has spent very little time actually experimenting.
I have the MZ-S1 (the white "sport" model) and I love it. It sounds great, never skips and I just keep it in my backpack and basically never worry about battery life. I keep a few discs along with an RCA adapter cable in my backpack and I can always call up a couple of hours of great sounding music. My only real complaint is the obtuseness of the menu system on mine. Maybe it was only this model, I haven't really used any others, but I don't go through the menu at all. I use the Play/Pause/Stop/Next/Previous/Volume joystick and the hold switch, and that's it. But that's OK, because that's all I need to enjoy my music. ~40 tracks at LP2 (light compression) somewhat negates the need for a menu system when I just play discs through and don't bother looking for specific tracks. However, I only have a few hours of music on me at a time (as opposed to the 84+ hours on my computer) because Sonic Stage is a crime against humanity and likely kills puppies too. The scary thing is, it's a big improvement over the disingenuously named "OpenMG Jukebox" that it replaced. OpenMG was the software with, what I thought of as a "three strikes" rule, except that a "strike" was writing legally acquired music to a legally acquired portable music player! I almost gave up right there! Granted, that was over 4 years ago and I'm still using my player. Real player now supports NetMD players and that's a big improvement, but still not great. I'd be elated if someone made a NetMD Winamp plugin. Regardless, this summer I'm planning on replacing it with an iAdudio X5L, 120x the capacity, much wider media support (since neither Real nor Sonicstage support Ogg Vorbis, FLAC or others) and a color screen, as well as a slimmer form-factor, meanign that it'll actually fit into my pockets along with my wallet and PDA. I too, expressed surprise when I found out that the PSP would not use/be backwards compatible with MiniDiscs, it just seemed dumb. I might have considered getting one if that meant that I could share media between a portable gaming system and my music player, same as I'd want a flash-based player I'd get to use SD so that I could splurge on a big card that could be used by my PDA (Dell Axim) as well. In summary, it's sad when an obviously paranoid upper management cripples what is otherwise excellent hardware with crappy/offensive/dangerous software (similar to the rootkit fiasco, in my mind, and why I avoid buying Sony products from now on)
Actually, in the Solidworks eDrawings EULA, it states you are not allowed to use the software to develop nuclear, or other weapons of mass destruction. I wonder if Sun's said something similar. http://www.solidworks.com/pages/programs/eDrawings /e2_license.html
I'd like to ask what keeps you personally from reading e-books? Absolutely nothing. I do regular read eBooks. I use the microsoft reader that came on my PPC. The only thing that pisses me off is paying hardcover prices for a bunch of ones and zeroes. They should be glad I'm buying the ebook version, neither did they have to pay for any paper nor did it take up shelf space. But I buy them anyway because I want to read books, and carrying around a real one just doesn't work for me. Initially I got a hardcover copy of one of the relatively recent Honor Harrington books from Baen and noted that there was a CD with the entire series on it (as metioned in the parent), in numerous formats, along with some other Baen books! A few months later, when I got my PPC, I loaded a few books onto a storage card and I was forever hooked on eBooks. I love it because I can carry hours of reading material with me at all times; if I have a free couple of minutes somewhere I can just pull out my Axim and read a couple of pages while waiting for my order to come up or while I'm sitting in the airport, wherever. I know there's DRM built into the Microsoft Reader books I buy, but as of yet it hasn't caused me any problems ::knocks on wood::. I also don't try reading books on both my laptop and my PPC, but I could imagine that might cause problems.
I will still read real books, I don't bring my PPC on vacation, for example, but for everyday use, I don't know if I could live without my eBooks.