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User: Calinous

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  1. How about energy storage? on Google Goes Green · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wind might always blow at very high altitudes - but solar works only during the day. So, you either have storage, you ramp coal power plants up and down from day to night, or black out the customers

  2. Re:Great scott! on Google Goes Green · · Score: 1

    As coal cost increases, energy cost will increase too. This will drive the cost of anything up - so, while your "cost per energy" target is shifting down, your "cost to build a power generating facility" goes up.
          Still, more ups than downs

  3. Re:Yay old tech on Football Field-Sized Kite Powers Latest Freighter · · Score: 1

    I love old sail ships (the square riggers, of which the late tea clippers were the the greatest examples).
          Yet, a real sail ship have some great deficiencies compared to a kite-powered one:
    1. Great heeling moment from winds (as winds will push high on the masts). A commercial ship needs much less keel weight than a square rigger ever has or would. A kite, being bolted to the deck, has greatly reduced heeling moment from the same force
    2. All the masts and yards will clutter deck area (complicating loading and unloading). Current ships have a clean deck (tankers only have fire fighting equipments on deck). The kite sail is bolted on bow, and is stored there when it isn't needed).
    3. The sails went up and down the masts. Great crews were needed for quick changing of sails (one set with another). If using large masts that contain the sails, you end up with mass at high heights, that is there when you need it or not. If your sails move down from the masts, you need crew to install/remove them and spaces to store them. The many sails you see on a tea clipper were there because the crew was unable to manage larger, heavier sails.
    5. The ships' structure must be greatly changed to be able to mount sails and masts. The masts are secured with a web of lines, and they are stepped on keel. No current commercial ship has the keel strength and bulwarks/deck strength to support big masts.
      For reference, Cutty Sark had 1500 or so tons capacity and had >3000 square meters of sail area. Now, your ship have displacement vary with the cube of the size, and propulsion needs vary by the square of the size. As such, an obsolete Suezmax tanker with 160,000 tons dead weight would be 100 times bigger, almost 5 times longer and would need 25 times more sail area. On five masts, that is 15,000 square meters a mast, or 100 by 150 meters if using 150m high masts. The ship's length would be around 400m

  4. Re:They might be able to get this off the ground.. on Football Field-Sized Kite Powers Latest Freighter · · Score: 1

    Excess power? The kite is "steerable" in the wind - so you could get almost zero power if you align it right.
          The current kites are too small to have large wind gradients - especially when they are at their working height. The initial phase of launch and recovery (especially recovery) could be interesting, but the ship might maneuver to the best position to retrieve the kite

  5. Re:Most of the power? on Football Field-Sized Kite Powers Latest Freighter · · Score: 1

    Yes, with a great increase in food use. And transit duration.

  6. Re:Whew! on Vista Makes CNET UK's List of "Worst Consumer Tech" · · Score: 2

    Microsoft Natural Keyboards.
          I can't think of anything else, except some of their games

  7. Re:the ever elusive desktop on More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor · · Score: 1

    While technically possible (and most probable technically easy), Microsoft won't ever port any operating system feature back.
          Was making USB devices work in Windows NT really impossible?

  8. Re:too cold on Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's why overclocking works best with externally heated processors.

          There are plenty of problems in sub-zero temperatures - but electronics love it. The fastest processors run cooled with liquid nitrogen. I don't think Siberia is so cold that the nitrogen in air liquefies

  9. Re:Save money on Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia · · Score: 1

    Yes, just that there is less technology overall, and much much more space.
          Nobody went to Syberia by his/her own accord/desire. That place was far away (until Aeroflot introduced flights to those places), and winter is freezing

  10. Re:Save money on Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia · · Score: 1

    Plenty of places have that extreme continental climate - just that the winters are not so cold (the summers can be hotter than that).
          Designing cooling/heating systems for Syberia are not so different than for other places - especially when the temperature change is slow (seasonal)

  11. Re:the ever elusive desktop on More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just to know: most of the Windows applications you would use (especially corporate applications) would run just fine on an Windows 2000 Workstation.
          Vista-only applications are a long way in the future

  12. Re:The solution is simple on BSA Software Piracy Fight Smacks of RIAA Crackdown · · Score: 1

    Even after the move (which came with other benefits), they were still using Windows on one or two computers (to run some accounting application)

  13. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong, but... on New Software Could Warn Sailors of Rogue Waves · · Score: 1

    Tales of these date back to time of Columbus, only because men didn't really encountered them before (or had no chance of survival, or nobody told the stories, or losses at sea were much too common).
          This kind of waves are just as normal as torrential rains. I doubt global warming started by the time Noah build his ship

  14. Re:512M of ram? on A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC · · Score: 1

    No, it ain't cheap.
          Most cheap mainboards use dual channel memory with two DIMM slots. And come with two DIMMs.
          So, to upgrade from 512MB to 1GB, you would drop the 512MB and buy 1GB.
    On not so expensive mainboards, you would usually have four DIMM slots, and upgrading would be just adding two more DIMMs

  15. Re:Solid State? on Western Digital Touts New 'Green' Drives · · Score: 1

    Power efficiency?
          compared to a 160GB laptop drive, you end up with:
    about a fifth of power use
    a tenth of capacity
    probably a lower weight
    no noise
    half the average speed and a fifth of burst speed
    depending on scenario, somewhat lower performance to a fifth of the performance
          As for power efficiency, you have:
    Half the capacity/power use
    Better performance/power (from somewhat lower to more than 5 times better, depending on the scenario)
    More $ multiplied by Watts

  16. Re:Solid State? on Western Digital Touts New 'Green' Drives · · Score: 1

    Please excuse my harshness.
          You will find here a comparison of HDD power use (and others characteristics):
    http://www.anan/ dtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2982

    Power Draw Idle / Load .16W / .48W .87W / 2.42W 9.19W / 10.02W
                                                    SSD 16GB 2.5" Laptop Raptor

    So, a 5W reduction in power would bring a 500GB 3.5" HDD power envelope at 10 times a 16GB, 2.5" SSD
          Note that the SSD was an early model. Newer models will probably increase the power consumption (double it, let's say)

  17. Re:DVD release on Illegal Downloaders to be Blocked By French Government? · · Score: 1

    Why I hate at cinemas (it doesn't happen every time, but too often) when in the first week in town, in the 6th of 7th day the movie is in that cinema, you end up with the reels cut short.
          The rest - phones, people commenting on the movie, people with 4 years old children at "Passion of Jesus", no air conditioning, chairs 12 years old and plenty of similar things - and the endless stream of advertisements and commercials at the start - is just icing on the cake

  18. Re:Solid State? on Western Digital Touts New 'Green' Drives · · Score: 1

    You want to compare a 500GB hard drive that uses 5-15W against a SSD of 32 or 64GB that uses only 2 to 5W? You're welcome

  19. Re:Duh? on Most Parents Don't Game With Their Kids · · Score: 1

    Mod parent up. A divorce is better than vicious fights between parents (or the continuous hostility between parents, that reflects in their relation with the child/children)

  20. Re:quarterly? on EVE Online's First Quarterly Economics Report Published · · Score: 1

    They sometime makes comparisons with the previous quarter (not the same quarter of the previous year). However, every time I've seen this, it was worded so you couldn't understand something else (the move from loss to profit is usually specified like this)

  21. Re:You forgot the first step... on The Nuclear Power Renaissance · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just to define long time...
          The sarcophagus over the Chernobyl reactor was built some 20 years ago, and it might survive another 20.

          Long term for current radioactive waste would be something like 10,000 years

  22. Re:Too Complicated to Run? on MIT Releases the Source of MULTICS, Father of UNIX · · Score: 1

    What is funny, is how many things are in current gcc, that you won't find in PL/I. What about object oriented features?
          Compare the PL/I with one of the first C implementations to get it straight

  23. Re:What happens when... on Stopping Cars With Microwave Radiation · · Score: 1

    What about microprocessors in rockets? What about microprocessors in missiles/torpedoes? What about microprocessors in deep sea diving vehicles?
          People were launching systems with active electronics using big guns. We are talking about 1950 technology, using 1935+ naval guns. Over 10,000g of acceleration - and it worked. Why the ignition control wouldn't survive to much lower stresses?

  24. Re:Hardware RNG on Loophole in Windows Random Number Generator · · Score: 1

    I don't really follow Microsoft's updates. However, from what I remember, many of them (if not most of them) affects Windows 2000, XP and 2003.
          While Vista might be free from this problem, I'd bet my money on XP having it.

  25. Re:On the Contrary ... on $200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart · · Score: 1

    Windows 98 is faster than Linux on an Internet connected PC - at least in the first days. After that, there would be plenty of small applications sharing the Internet access (and less so the processor and memory).
          By the time you protect a Windows 98 machine to be as virus/worm/... proof as a Linux machine, you end up with a slower overall performance.
          But there are a few kinds of people:
    1. Those willing and able to work with Linux. Some of them would buy new computers and install Linux, others would buy old computers and install Linux. For $200, you might be able to buy a better PC (old) than the one in the article
    2. People who want Windows - they would probably buy a not much more expensive PC with Windows preinstalled.
    3. People who mostly use Internet, and a word processor, and maybe some more things. This PC would be great - cheap, and does all they need to do. Those people are the target