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bbot

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Comic on unprovability of the Reimann hypothesis, with number theory digression

irregularwebcomic.net

1 pointsby bbothace 16 años-1 comments

Bloom Energy makes fuel cell, Google and Ebay are first customers

engadget.com

1 pointsby bbothace 16 años-1 comments

Creating an account on the SCP wiki is like pissing glass

bbot.org

1 pointsby bbothace 17 años-1 comments

Metaplace to shut down in nine days, delete everything. Jscott somewhat unhappy.

ascii.textfiles.com

1 pointsby bbothace 17 años-1 comments

comments

hace 16 añosdiscuss

Maybe a disclaimer in the title that it only works in Safari on Macs, so linux users don't waste their time clicking?

hace 16 añosdiscuss

A one paragraph press release, with no implementation detail? How is this hacker news?

hace 16 añosdiscuss

Their blog is a prime example of why you should keep engineers away from the public.

http://notionink.wordpress.com/

"I have closely observed a different kind of integrations evolving in the consumer electronics domain. Take iPad for example. Most of the people involved in its product engineering have experience in Automobile Engineering. Today you talk about extrusion, milling and drilling in the CE products! Right now, its pioneered by Apple of course! iPod was extruded. There is a lot of drilling in the aluminium Mac Air. And you will see milling as the major engineering exercise in iPad. It’s fascinating, isn’t it! There is even internal “Heat Flow” analysis which takes care that your product doesn’t get fried up!

Automobile engineering will extrude consumer electronics to such an extent, that those who have automobile product engineering will soon become the most sought after resources in CE industry. Here you talk about heat flows, CNC milling processes, extrusion, sand blasting, moving components and what not! [...]

As more and more products will be made of metals, material and metallurgical engineering will have the most of the fun. Imaging the next generation of product made specifically to give you a 18 degree celsius feel! Imagine the body designed which change colors with external temperature! Wouldn’t it be fun that we can create a “Drum Application” where drummers can practise on the screen of Adam! The time is about to come. It’s nearer than we think. The dawn of innovation is here!"

It's a lot of bizzare wankery about manufacturing processes, with little to no actual content. Definite evidence of kool-aid drinking.

"Designed with best of the features, all necessary functionality and easy to use. Because they have a point here! To give a ‘feel’ you need to take away functionalities (the reason why there is no I/O ports in iPad). How many products were used to made of metals?"

Yeah, no i/o connectors! Like the dock connector, or the headphone jack, which aren't on the ipad at all!

hace 16 añosdiscuss

I like how they censor the title of Dudebro, My Shit Is Fucked So I Got To Shoot/Slice You II: It's Straight Up Dawg Time.

It seems to miss the point somewhat.

hace 16 añosdiscuss

The claim is "interesting " insofar as it is astoundingly unlikely, and almost certainly untrue.

The chemistry of solid oxide fuel cells are well understood. It only works one way. They don't produce hydrogen when you feed them voltage. It's like spinning the flywheel on a car engine backwards, and expecting gasoline to pour back into the fuel tank.

hace 16 añosdiscuss

Doubtful.

Solid oxide fuel cells are very efficient, but have lousy power density. A big cabinet full of Bloom fuel cells does 25 kilowatts. That's a lot of electricity, but it's only 33 horsepower. You would need two cabinets and a bank of capacitors, for lousy performance. Then you would need a tank of compressed natural gas, which also doesn't have awesome power density numbers, after you spend the power to compress it.

And, of course, solid oxide fuel cells aren't a turn-the-key-and-go kind of power source. They run at 1000C, and take an hour to get that warm, all while burning fuel.

More general concerns:

It's supposed to be multi-fuel, and is designed for third world use. But solid oxide fuel cells are notorious for having problems with catalyst poisoning. How have they solved that?

They mention that it's reversible, in that it can take air and electricity, and produce fuel. This is troubling, in that it is utter bullshit. No fuel cell can do this.

And of course, how is this green? It burns natural gas! It may be greener than a gas turbine power plant, but it still produces carbon dioxide.

hace 16 añosdiscuss

Yes.

1.) Mostly to complain about things, and to do a little writing. Well, almost entirely to complain about things.

2.) Unexpectedly, it's become a minor obsession. If I don't post something once a week, I feel like I'm letting my readers (both of them) down.

hace 16 añosdiscuss

Some basic spec comparisons:

A Intel i7 900 series processor has a die size of 296 mm^2, with a process size of 45 nm.

The GA144 has a die size of 21 mm^2, at a process size of 130 nm, which is a couple generations old. If the i7 900 series was manufactured at 130 nm, it'd be 2488 mm^2.

So, it's smaller. A lot smaller.

I'd compare MIPS too, but that would be worse than useless, since it implies that it actually means something, which is far from the truth. Comparing raw instructions per second values between different architectures means nothing.

(Plus, Intel have passworded their datasheets!)

But it really doesn't look good. The Greenarray guys might manage some deep magic that makes their processor twice as fast per transistor, but it's still 118 times smaller. There's just not enough silicon!

hace 17 añosdiscuss

I used to use Fedora, until I found out that one of its leads used to develop malware for the FBI.

http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/04/current-red-hat-linux-em...

At which point I switched to Ubuntu.

Now, that may seem a bit hasty, but I'd rather not have the FBI involved with my operating system at all, thank you.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

You're a whole five hours behind the times.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/18/notion-ink-smartpad-comes...

Pixel Qi screen, Tegra CPU, Android OS. No physical keyboard, though, which is a shame.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

    In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications.

Argh. Why would you do this with a performace-limited machine?

I bought a Pre the day it came out. Great phone, lovely hardware, beautiful UI. And horribly, uselessly slow.

I bitched about this extensively after I got it (http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2009/06/09/jesusphone_day_two/...) five months later and a dozen OS updates later, it isn't a whole lot faster.

The problem is, fundamentally, is that it's a phone, and it's got a small, cheap, and slow CPU. Presented with this obvious limitation, why would you then go ahead and an obfuscatory layer between the application and the processor, one that slows everything down?

And here we see Google doing the same damn thing with netbooks, another computing device known for, and pretty much defined by, small, cheap, and slow CPUs.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

80legs is kinda evil.

You see, it runs on Plura, which is essentially spyware piggybacked on the flash game du jour. Desktop Tower Defense is one of their clients. When you play DTD, they sell access to your computer, and use your CPU and your network connection to spider web pages.

80legs is so cheap because they don't have to pay for servers. Does that sound entirely ethical to you?

hace 17 añosdiscuss

So, like the Archive Team?

http://archiveteam.org/

hace 17 añosdiscuss

I upvoted the topic, since it was already highly scored.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

Adding another me too post...

I use http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/ for http://bbot.org/blog/

Its basically Jekyll, But In Bash. I use http://js-kit.com/ for commenting, which is a JS applet that sits at the bottom of the permlink pages and displays commenting.

JS-Kit seems to be rebranding every six months, so fully I expect them to pull a Sidekick any time now and take all my comments with them, but it's okay, since it was trivially easy to implement, and because I don't care.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

I use the delegation <link> on my personal site to point at my openid provider, so when I sign it, it shows up as bbot.org, which is amusing.

  <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
  <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://bbot.myopenid.com/" />

I don't use it a whole lot, though, other than for livejournal commenting and stackoverflow.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

Yeah yeah yeah. Apple sucks, the app store sucks, the long tail sucks. We get it. Can we stop spamming HN with these posts, now?

hace 17 añosdiscuss

Oh Joel. Your next post will be straight up trolling, right? A Last Measure redirect, maybe?

Also, there's no duct tape here, other than it involves Jamie himself, and perhaps what a hideously ugly hack the javascript version of Dali is.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

If I wanted to speed up SSL transactions, I'd just buy a full cryptographic accelerator, which usually include a hardware random number generator. Like, say, the IBM 4764, which does various ciphers, has a hRNG, and is hilariously expensive, being made by IBM.

hace 17 añosdiscuss

That's not how you spell "Kaizen".