Archive for May, 2006
May 30th, 2006
Today (for some unknown reason) I decided to take a look at Micro$oft’s Vista page and see what all the hoopla is on this perpetual marketing drive known as Windows. It seems that they have copied a lot of the Mac OS X Tiger features. What are known as Widgets in OSX are Gadgets in Vista. The fancy new search feature in Vista is called Spotlight in Tiger, and we’ll see if it works as well.
The part I really liked in the Vista Hype was the security tab. Here are a few quotes…
Microsoft believes the best approach to stopping malware is to layer security features.
This is just a fancy way of saying… “We don’t have time to fix the low level problems with our operating system so we are throwing a bunch of band-aids at them.” Didn’t Microsoft invent most of the ‘features’ that malware writers exploit?
In addition to using these built-in Windows Vista features, you should help keep your computer healthy by using antivirus software such as Windows OneCare or an antivirus solution from one of Microsoft’s partners. Whichever option you choose, remember to update your antivirus software regularly. These updates are generally available through a subscription from your antivirus vendor.
Microsoft’s solution for everything, “buy something else.” It’s often thought that Macs are more expensive than PC’s. Once you buy the spyware scanner, the virus blocker, the disk utility package and all the other little things that seem necessary under Windows, my PowerBook was a pretty good deal.
I really enjoyed the Networking section too. Other than a few improvements in Wireless networking (most notable being the introduction of WPA2) there was nothing about making computers actually talk to each other. It was all about drawing pretty pictures of all the problems that your Windows computer is having talking to other Windows computers. All the while my Mac is talking to all of your Windows computers and printers (plus the Novell, and Linux boxes) that your Vista machine can’t seem to get working, but now you know why, because you can see the picture of the other computers with their little red ‘X’s on them.
May 19th, 2006
It seems that some ’scientist’ has ‘discovered’ a way to turn water into H2 and O2 and then burn it in an engine (thereby converting it back into water) to make power. This is bunk!! I don’t care what process you use, or what ‘discovery’ you make. It doesn’t matter whether you vibrate the molecule, heat it, electrify it or tickle it, there is NO way that you can get more energy out of a system than you put into it. It takes more energy to break the water molecule apart than you get from burning the H2 that’s produced. The Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees this to be the case regardless of the technology.
Hydrogen could be a great fuel. It is true that the only byproduct of burning hydrogen is water. Fire is an oxidation reaction. If you oxidize hydrogen you get water. It’s a wonderful thing, except that there aren’t really any hydrogen mines out there. The predominate source of hydrogen production is natural gas. There are some refinery processes that produce hydrogen and I’m sure that there’s a tiny bit of it in air that could be extracted by expending an enormous amount of energy. This remides me of the cartoon of the toothpick factory where they use a whole tree to make one toothpick.
Electrolysis is the process that causes water to split into hydrogen and oxygen. The process requires large amounts of electricity. Electrolysis may be the way to proceed, but we have to stop thinking of hydrogen as an energy source and start thinking of it as an energy storage mechanism.
The biggest problem that the electric car has is energy storage. Batteries are very expensive and their energy density is terrible. Batteries are getting better all the time but they are not quite ready for the masses. If we use the electricity to make hydrogen then use the hydrogen to power the car then we have something worth thinking about. There are a couple of problems with this idea. One is how to store the stuff. When you take a molecule of water (H2O) and split it you get hydrogen and oxygen in the perfect mixture to burn. In essence you’ve made rocket fuel. You will want to separate them as quickly as possible and get rid of the oxygen. We also need to pressurize the hydrogen for storage. This takes more electricity to accomplish.
The second problem lies with the efficiency of the electrolysis process. I don’t know what these efficiencies are but if it can be done with a fairly small amount of wasted energy then we’d have an energy storage mechanism that can store a lot more energy than a battery could. It would also eliminate the whole charging cycle for the car because the hydrogen production would work around the clock.
I don’t know if this idea is remotely feasible because I don’t know what the efficiencies of the processes are. I may do a little more research and see if it’s even possible. I’ll let you know.
May 17th, 2006
I just installed this blogging software (Wordpress) onto my web server. I have never really used a ‘blog before but I decided to give it a try.
I suspect that I’ll spend a lot of time on these pages commenting on the days events. I’m sure that I’ll do a fair amount of talking about airplanes. There will be the occasional debunk of the latest free energy ideas. Knowing me, there’ll be a lot of controversy over this whole universe-happening-by-accident stupidty known as evolution.
I promise that there will be no talk about Hollywood or who was that last to leave on Survivor. I couldn’t care less who Tom Cruise is married to or what his kids names are.