I noticed the same thing - and the Wikipedia lists the energy density of lead-acid batteries as 30 to 40 Wh/kg. What makes the SCIB pack worth using? I bet it's cheaper to use lead acid batteries, even if you have to replace them more often.
I believe the opposite is true. Greater compatibility leads to more choices, not less. You eliminate vendor lock-in and allow easy migration to other distros. Microsoft knows this; it's what prevents people from leaving Windows.
Let's face it: if Wine were 100% reliable, Windows would be dead. The LSB seems to accomplish much the same thing.
It's for rpm based commercial distros. Debian doesn't fit, and the "alien" program doesn't work on everything.
I note that Debian Etch is listed as planning to become LSB compliant on this page: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/LSB_Distribution_Status Ubuntu is already LSB-compliant. Neither of these appear to be "RPM-based commercial distros". Once Debian is LSB compliant, the alien program will work on any LSB-certified application.
Since I use Debian on servers and Debian-derived on desktop, I don't care about the LSB, I care more about the standards of the Debian project.
The idea is that it will no longer matter what distro you use: if an LSB application works in Red Hat, you know it will also work in Debian. Why is that a bad thing?
Ten years ago I helped raise Russian wild boars. They have incredible instincts. We used to joke that the boars had a wiretap inside of our kitchen. In the morning, we'd discuss which boar to kill. We'd get all ready, load the gun, and step outside. The pigs would look up from behind their fence, give a grunt of alarm, and the one we had chosen would run off into the bush. The rest would settle down and continue eating.
Trapping them for transport was also quite challenging. We had a small pen with a portcullis-style drop down gate. You'd drop the gate by pulling on a string. It was easy enough to lure the boars in there with food, but dropping the gate was another matter entirely. Even with ten meters of string, the boar would run out before we got close enough to pull it. We had to resort to seemingly unnecessary measures like 50 meters of string, which would be pulled while out of sight behind a building.
But if we weren't trapping anything that day, we could get as close as we wanted and they'd stay happily eating in the pen. They could also tell when the electric fence was down, and there'd be escapes if the power was out for more than a few hours.
It was all being burnt before there were oil fires. In fact, it's all still being burnt today. (Just check your tailpipe for proof).
No, the wells could only have increased emissions if the fires were removing oil from the ground faster than the operational, non-burning wells were.
Of course, you could always argue about catalytic converters and whether torching a barrel of oil is more or less harmful than burning the equivalent amount of gasoline, or what percentage of the oil is used to make plastic. But most of the carbon goes right into the air. The oil fires were just cutting out the middle-man, as it were.
Does this mean we can now send messages instantaneously using quantum entanglement? You have two particles that are entangled, each producing the same sequence of random values when measured. If we have two pairs of entangled particles, we have two channels and can therefore communicate faster than light speed?
"LSB-conforming systems promise to be able to install an LSB-compliant RPM. However, you need not limit yourself to that format, with the caveat that the packaging technology you choose must work on an LSB-compliant system. For example, a shell script with a tarball is an acceptable format. Your own installer is acceptable, too, as long as the installer itself is LSB compliant."
I don't know about the other stuff, but you're dead wrong on Stroustrup's position on arrays. Here's what he has to say on the matter:
What's wrong with arrays?
In terms of time and space, an array is just about the optimal construct for accessing a sequence of objects in memory. It is, however, also a very low level data structure with a vast potential for misuse and errors and in essentially all cases there are better alternatives. By "better" I mean easier to write, easier to read, less error prone, and as fast.
The two fundamental problems with arrays are that
* an array doesn't know its own size
* the name of an array converts to a pointer to its first element at the slightest provocation
Naturally, a programmer usually get the size right, but it's extra work and ever so often someone makes the mistake. I prefer the simpler and cleaner version using the standard library vector.
He goes on to make other arguments against using arrays, you can read them here.
Your daughtersoftiresias.org seems a tad biased, especially when it comes to batteries. They mention that the Prius batteries are warrantied for eight years, but don't mention that they're only ever depleted to 40-60% of their total charge to preserve battery life.[1] Using only half your power isn't feasible in electric cars, since your range is already low.
They talk about cheaper, longer-lasting batteries with high energy density. So where can I buy one? I notice a distinct lack of citations in this section. Perhaps they're mistaking things being worked on in a lab as products available to consumers? I see the statement "Supercapacitors also have extremely long lifespans." Great! But they also have less than 10% the energy density of lead-acid batteries, and the cost is prohibitive. They then go on to talk about the cost of running a car based solely on the cost to charge, ignoring the cost of periodically replacing the battery.
The cheapest car I've seen with a decent range is the Th!nk City [2], which costs 20,000 EUR up front, and goes up to 180 km per charge. You pay a monthly fee of 200 EUR, and they'll replace the battery every five years. Works out to 12,000 EUR (roughly 18,000 US) for a battery pack, which is pretty good. Your choice of lithium-ion or molten-salt battery. If you know of a cheaper car with that kind of range, I'd like to see it. (The Aptera also looks promising.)
Don't get me wrong - battery technology is advancing at a furious pace. But the affordable long-lasting battery they describe doesn't exist. (yet)
One is a flow of photons. One is a flow of electrons. When you consider a passive optical splitter, think of a prism that splits light into a rainbow of colors. Same kind of effect.
Right now one of the biggest challenges is buffering light. Slowing it down or stopping it. There are devices that do this, but they are very expensive or work poorly or both. If we could buffer light, we could create routers that are entirely optical, speeding up the internet immensely.
Right now, fiber optics come to a central Optical Network Terminal, and electrical devices convert the optical signal to an electrical one. You then get it piped into your router at home, and sent to your computer with Ethernet.
Electrical components are SLOW compared to optical components. It takes them longer to process the same data, adding latency and limiting bandwidth. Passive optical components that use unpowered optical splitters are far far faster.
Of course, with ISPs claiming their backbones can't handle more traffic (in the States), you might not see significant bandwidth or latency gains. But the "first mile" would no longer be a significant latency source/bandwidth bottleneck.
The Chinese already have a small proof-of-concept coal to oil plant, it costs 45 dollars US to produce and distribute barrel of oil. They have plans to massively increase production.
I also feel that peak oil is near for conventional supplies, but the unconventional stuff has the potential to keep us going for a very long time.
I was taking a University course on C++ and data structures. Big class, maybe 150 people in a theatre-like room. At the front of the room was a PC, connected to a projector so we could see screen. This was a Solaris system. The prof had emailed the lecture slides to himself.
So to get the slides, he opens a terminal, and types pine. A big list of all his email fills the screen. He starts looking for his lecture notes... at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.
At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.
I have had problems with DRM. Starwars Battlefront II will load incredibly slowly and then fail with a "You must insert the original CD to play this game" message. Which infuriates me, since it IS the original CD. I'm directed to a website about enabling DMA, which is already enabled! If I keep trying over and over again, eventually it lets me play.
At the speeds they're talking about in the article, Mach 6 and above, would it be feasible to use a scramjet to reach low earth orbit? At a certain elevation the atmosphere would no longer be dense enough to power the scramjet's air intake. But by that time, could it have gained enough velocity to enter a stable orbit?
If so, it seems to me that scramjets would pave the way for cheap, re-useable spacecraft.
To my mind, the serious flaw here is that the highest cost of running an electric car is having to periodically replace the batteries. If you talk to the owners of lead-acid battery cars, they'll tell you they replace them an average of once per year. These things are only good for a few hundred deep-discharge/recharge cycles.
Of course, the electric company might not deep-discharge your batteries, but they're still wearing them out. The battery is the weakest part of an electric car. Expensive and barely adequate to move you around. I'd prefer to wait until my battery's capacity had dropped below the point of being usable, and then let them store power in it while I buy myself a new one.
That article seems a little over the edge. He calls molecular biology a pseudo-science, dismisses the nobel peace prize, and claims the the green revolution was an under-handed plot by the US to turn foreign workers into a cheap labor pool. It's full of insinuations and hints towards a sinister secret agenda. I didn't bother to read the whole thing, as the craziness level was far beyond acceptable thresholds.
Darl McBride in front of Judge Judy... sounds like good watching. She always handles cases the same way - she starts off speaking softly and slowly, as if she's making a deliberate effort to be calm. She then gets worked up into a rage as she's presented with multiple transparent lies.
It'd be perfect, as long as she understood the technical jargon. I especially look forward to the part where the plaintiff and defendant comment on the verdict at the end of the show.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed the same thing - and the Wikipedia lists the energy density of lead-acid batteries as 30 to 40 Wh/kg. What makes the SCIB pack worth using? I bet it's cheaper to use lead acid batteries, even if you have to replace them more often.
I believe the opposite is true. Greater compatibility leads to more choices, not less. You eliminate vendor lock-in and allow easy migration to other distros. Microsoft knows this; it's what prevents people from leaving Windows.
Let's face it: if Wine were 100% reliable, Windows would be dead. The LSB seems to accomplish much the same thing.
It's for rpm based commercial distros. Debian doesn't fit, and the "alien" program doesn't work on everything.
I note that Debian Etch is listed as planning to become LSB compliant on this page: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/LSB_Distribution_Status Ubuntu is already LSB-compliant. Neither of these appear to be "RPM-based commercial distros". Once Debian is LSB compliant, the alien program will work on any LSB-certified application.
Since I use Debian on servers and Debian-derived on desktop, I don't care about the LSB, I care more about the standards of the Debian project.
The idea is that it will no longer matter what distro you use: if an LSB application works in Red Hat, you know it will also work in Debian. Why is that a bad thing?
You could still use NAT. You just won't need to. Your block of IPs won't cost any more than your current, single IP address does.
And yet if my boss gets aroused and starts singing "Hold Me in Your Arms" by the Trews, I would not become paralyzed.
Or... wait...
Ten years ago I helped raise Russian wild boars. They have incredible instincts. We used to joke that the boars had a wiretap inside of our kitchen. In the morning, we'd discuss which boar to kill. We'd get all ready, load the gun, and step outside. The pigs would look up from behind their fence, give a grunt of alarm, and the one we had chosen would run off into the bush. The rest would settle down and continue eating.
Trapping them for transport was also quite challenging. We had a small pen with a portcullis-style drop down gate. You'd drop the gate by pulling on a string. It was easy enough to lure the boars in there with food, but dropping the gate was another matter entirely. Even with ten meters of string, the boar would run out before we got close enough to pull it. We had to resort to seemingly unnecessary measures like 50 meters of string, which would be pulled while out of sight behind a building.
But if we weren't trapping anything that day, we could get as close as we wanted and they'd stay happily eating in the pen. They could also tell when the electric fence was down, and there'd be escapes if the power was out for more than a few hours.
It was all being burnt before there were oil fires. In fact, it's all still being burnt today. (Just check your tailpipe for proof).
No, the wells could only have increased emissions if the fires were removing oil from the ground faster than the operational, non-burning wells were.
Of course, you could always argue about catalytic converters and whether torching a barrel of oil is more or less harmful than burning the equivalent amount of gasoline, or what percentage of the oil is used to make plastic. But most of the carbon goes right into the air. The oil fires were just cutting out the middle-man, as it were.
Does this mean we can now send messages instantaneously using quantum entanglement? You have two particles that are entangled, each producing the same sequence of random values when measured. If we have two pairs of entangled particles, we have two channels and can therefore communicate faster than light speed?
I haven't looked at LSB 4, but in LSB 3 you'd make a standard .RPM package and it would supposedly install on any LSB-compliant Linux distribution.
See here for more: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Developers/LSB_Tutorial#Porting_your_code_to_the_LSB
"LSB-conforming systems promise to be able to install an LSB-compliant RPM. However, you need not limit yourself to that format, with the caveat that the packaging technology you choose must work on an LSB-compliant system. For example, a shell script with a tarball is an acceptable format. Your own installer is acceptable, too, as long as the installer itself is LSB compliant."
I don't know about the other stuff, but you're dead wrong on Stroustrup's position on arrays. Here's what he has to say on the matter:
What's wrong with arrays?
In terms of time and space, an array is just about the optimal construct for accessing a sequence of objects in memory. It is, however, also a very low level data structure with a vast potential for misuse and errors and in essentially all cases there are better alternatives. By "better" I mean easier to write, easier to read, less error prone, and as fast.
The two fundamental problems with arrays are that
* an array doesn't know its own size
* the name of an array converts to a pointer to its first element at the slightest provocation
Naturally, a programmer usually get the size right, but it's extra work and ever so often someone makes the mistake. I prefer the simpler and cleaner version using the standard library vector.
He goes on to make other arguments against using arrays, you can read them here.
Then I suspect Google's web accelerator will become a most excellent service to use.
Your daughtersoftiresias.org seems a tad biased, especially when it comes to batteries. They mention that the Prius batteries are warrantied for eight years, but don't mention that they're only ever depleted to 40-60% of their total charge to preserve battery life.[1] Using only half your power isn't feasible in electric cars, since your range is already low.
They talk about cheaper, longer-lasting batteries with high energy density. So where can I buy one? I notice a distinct lack of citations in this section. Perhaps they're mistaking things being worked on in a lab as products available to consumers? I see the statement "Supercapacitors also have extremely long lifespans." Great! But they also have less than 10% the energy density of lead-acid batteries, and the cost is prohibitive. They then go on to talk about the cost of running a car based solely on the cost to charge, ignoring the cost of periodically replacing the battery.
The cheapest car I've seen with a decent range is the Th!nk City [2], which costs 20,000 EUR up front, and goes up to 180 km per charge. You pay a monthly fee of 200 EUR, and they'll replace the battery every five years. Works out to 12,000 EUR (roughly 18,000 US) for a battery pack, which is pretty good. Your choice of lithium-ion or molten-salt battery. If you know of a cheaper car with that kind of range, I'd like to see it. (The Aptera also looks promising.)
Don't get me wrong - battery technology is advancing at a furious pace. But the affordable long-lasting battery they describe doesn't exist. (yet)
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius
2. http://www.think.no/think/Think-Models-Concepts/TH!NK-i-city-i/Market-plans
I doubt too many people will be buying these, so... way to make yourself easy to track as you move around from camera to camera.
So, on average even aluminum is stronger than this material? Aluminum is a very soft metal. It must be a mistake in the article...
One is a flow of photons. One is a flow of electrons. When you consider a passive optical splitter, think of a prism that splits light into a rainbow of colors. Same kind of effect.
Right now one of the biggest challenges is buffering light. Slowing it down or stopping it. There are devices that do this, but they are very expensive or work poorly or both. If we could buffer light, we could create routers that are entirely optical, speeding up the internet immensely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network
Right now, fiber optics come to a central Optical Network Terminal, and electrical devices convert the optical signal to an electrical one. You then get it piped into your router at home, and sent to your computer with Ethernet. Electrical components are SLOW compared to optical components. It takes them longer to process the same data, adding latency and limiting bandwidth. Passive optical components that use unpowered optical splitters are far far faster. Of course, with ISPs claiming their backbones can't handle more traffic (in the States), you might not see significant bandwidth or latency gains. But the "first mile" would no longer be a significant latency source/bandwidth bottleneck.
The Chinese already have a small proof-of-concept coal to oil plant, it costs 45 dollars US to produce and distribute barrel of oil. They have plans to massively increase production.
I also feel that peak oil is near for conventional supplies, but the unconventional stuff has the potential to keep us going for a very long time.
I was taking a University course on C++ and data structures. Big class, maybe 150 people in a theatre-like room. At the front of the room was a PC, connected to a projector so we could see screen. This was a Solaris system. The prof had emailed the lecture slides to himself.
So to get the slides, he opens a terminal, and types pine. A big list of all his email fills the screen. He starts looking for his lecture notes... at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.
At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.
The lecture itself was great.
If the guy is from slashdot, I'd estimate he'd figure it out after about three years of marriage.
I have had problems with DRM. Starwars Battlefront II will load incredibly slowly and then fail with a "You must insert the original CD to play this game" message. Which infuriates me, since it IS the original CD. I'm directed to a website about enabling DMA, which is already enabled! If I keep trying over and over again, eventually it lets me play.
So there.
At the speeds they're talking about in the article, Mach 6 and above, would it be feasible to use a scramjet to reach low earth orbit? At a certain elevation the atmosphere would no longer be dense enough to power the scramjet's air intake. But by that time, could it have gained enough velocity to enter a stable orbit?
If so, it seems to me that scramjets would pave the way for cheap, re-useable spacecraft.
To my mind, the serious flaw here is that the highest cost of running an electric car is having to periodically replace the batteries. If you talk to the owners of lead-acid battery cars, they'll tell you they replace them an average of once per year. These things are only good for a few hundred deep-discharge/recharge cycles.
Of course, the electric company might not deep-discharge your batteries, but they're still wearing them out. The battery is the weakest part of an electric car. Expensive and barely adequate to move you around. I'd prefer to wait until my battery's capacity had dropped below the point of being usable, and then let them store power in it while I buy myself a new one.
That article seems a little over the edge. He calls molecular biology a pseudo-science, dismisses the nobel peace prize, and claims the the green revolution was an under-handed plot by the US to turn foreign workers into a cheap labor pool. It's full of insinuations and hints towards a sinister secret agenda. I didn't bother to read the whole thing, as the craziness level was far beyond acceptable thresholds.
Internet service through the power lines.
Darl McBride in front of Judge Judy... sounds like good watching. She always handles cases the same way - she starts off speaking softly and slowly, as if she's making a deliberate effort to be calm. She then gets worked up into a rage as she's presented with multiple transparent lies.
It'd be perfect, as long as she understood the technical jargon. I especially look forward to the part where the plaintiff and defendant comment on the verdict at the end of the show.