Posts by Some Beggar 882 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jul 2009
"You do remember "1984" don't you?"
Yes. I've got three copies as it happens. On actual paper. What exactly does it have to do with the fact that it's easier to carry a Kindle rather than a bundle of disposable paperbacks or library books? Or the frankly bizarre idea you seem to have that my choice of e-reader can tell you something useful about my attitude to freedom.
"The problem is people buy books, music and videos because they DO want to keep them."
I buy paperbacks to read. When they're read they head straight to a charity shop. I'm pretty certain I'm not alone. Who wants a house filled with shelves of thumbed novels that you're never going to touch again?
I suppose if I anticipated living for a few thousand years in a vacuum of new creation then I might panic and start accumulating books and films to watch or read over and over again. It seems unlikely though.
Well thanks for calling me an idiot. My kindle is chock full of non-DRM'd material that required precisely bugger all "pissing around". I seem to have a somewhat different idea of what "pissing around" involves. Perhaps you could ask a youth to help you navigate the tricky world of the future? They can help you set the VCR and make the clock on your oven stop flashing while they're there.
No idea. How likely is an Amazon catastrophe? I wouldn't rely on DRM'd media for anything that I wanted to keep. E-books are a handy paperback replacement if you read and/or travel a lot. For stuff that I might actually want to dip into in the future I'd rather own a hardback or an "open" digital copy.
Burning people at the stake is carbon neutral if you use traditional faggots as fuel. In fact, given that you are eliminating the heretic's future fossil fuel consumption, it would probably act as a carbon sink.
We don't have heretics in science. We have successful theories and unsuccessful theories.
(we do occasionally strip naked and dance around an effigy of Karl Popper)
He wasn't. He's never really been taken seriously in the climate science community. The Gaia hypothesis isn't a falsifiable scientific theory and he's never put forward a convincing mechanism by which it can work. I don't think he has published any actual research on it for forty years. He's an author of popular books. He's quite a compelling personality which is why he gets dragged onto the telly and into the newspapers so often.
(the revenge of gaia sounds like a "mature interest" film)
"I might even trust that the American Association for the Advancement of Science have provided an accurate precis of the paper."
Really? I'm going to favour the anonymous coward on the internet messageboard of a website with a record for a strongly anti-science stance on climate change.
I'll quite possibly have to eat my poorly-focussed hat on this, but I would be amazed if this ever became anything more than a novelty. It cannot squeeze down to a practical depth to fit into a phone which is the big market for novel photo apps - and that's a physics limit more than an engineering limit. Even with the absurd rate of increase of pixel density in sensors, you still lose pixels geometrically with this system - crudely speaking, N planes of focus means you only get an Nth of the raw pixels of the sensor in the final image(s) - so you hit the noise limit for tiny pixels N times faster than with a 'normal' camera. And there are far less "clever" but far more practical methods of after-the-fact focussing. The small sensors and lenses on compacts and cameraphones effectively give infinite depth of field already and it isn't rocket science to measure and add a depth parameter to the raw image.
Most annoyingly of all, the focus on most Lytro images is terrible. The focal plane is never truly sharp regardless of where you try to refocus the image.
Light field image capture is a super clever solution to a problem that simply doesn't exist.
That said, five or so years ago when this was first proposed I brashly declared that it would never be anything more than vapourware so I don't have much of a track record here.
If you are backpacking then a more reliable source of energy is the inefficiency of walking and carrying stuff. We tend to bounce up and down as we walk. If you have a few kilos on your back and you bounce it up and down then you've got a few watts of power being wasted. I have no idea if anybody has built a practical way to harvest it but you can buy sneakers that harvest a trickle of energy from just walking so it can't be beyond the wit of man boffins.
Those rechargable tool battery packs are generally just a plastic case with a bunch of standard li-ion cells inside. You can get 12V pumps, lamps, radios, ... pretty much anything electrical. 12V DC has been a standard supply for yonks. If you don't need the extra volts then I'm not sure what the advantage would be. I suppose a battery-powered chainsaw would be quicker than a machete in the event of zombie apocapypse.
I think you've highlighted the biggest issue with that biolite thing. If it's so big that you need to carry it around in a car then you're basically carrying a cute but inefficient electricity generator inside a box that's already fitted with its own far more efficient electricity generator.
7000mAh is still pretty small. If you're wandering off for any length of time then you're better off with a proper 12V lead acid battery. They're not exactly pocket-sized but you get far more Watts per buck and per cubic centimetre. If they're used regularly I suspect they will have a better life time too.
Those femtocells are to provide cheapo indoor roaming for SoHo use so that people can use their mobiles rather than a cordless phone and so that the network gets some small-scale frequency re-use in areas with a concentration of users. They operate at such low power that they barely cover the area of an urban garden. They're also only licensed for use within the coverage area of the provider since they re-use its spectrum allocation. They ensure this by communicating with the existing cell network so if you take one out of range and switch it on it will simply refuse to work.
Can I throw a few more baffled question marks in here? Thanks.
????!!??!??
Battery management is almost always done inside a consumer electronics device rather than inside the charger. I can't think of a single exception to this from the last ten years. The only real difference between a dedicated charger and a USB socket is the maximum current you can draw.
I've got an old 78 player in a cherry cabinet with louvre doors for the volume. It even has wooden needles that you can re-sharpen with a natty little guillotine.
You don't get a more wooden sound than that. Unless you can actually press platters out of ebony.
Oh man ... can you press platters out of ebony? I'd totally out-hipster everybody if I had wooden records.
Ikea's business model works (or worked) really well because some time in the 1980s people decided that furniture was a consumable: buy cheap and replace often. I suspect that model might be breaking with people moving back to the prudent grandmother model of buying decent stuff less often and looking after it. So it makes some sort of sense to integrate consumer electronics because they still have a pretty fast replacement cycle.
The idea of replacing a sideboard just because I want to upgrade my telly brings me out in a cold working class miser sweat.
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