I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.

The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.

I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".

Or we build storage.

You don't HAVE to generate it within a fraction of a second of when it's used - that's just been convenient so far. So it's not with renewables? Fine! Store that juice!

When Bill Gates says:

"There's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it's cloudy and you don't have sun or you don't have wind."

he's totally wrong.

For starters, there's Vanadium Redox. A flow battery (pumped electrolyte): Power limited by the size of the reaction device's electrode and membrane assembly. Energy storage limited by the size of the tanks. It's mainly used for utility-level energy storage down under (Oz or Nz, I think), because the patents are still fresh and the little startup doesn't want to license it to others. Vanadium is some substantial percentage of the Earth's crust so there's no shortage. Using the same element (in different sets of oxidation states - vanadium has (at least) 6 of 'em) for BOTH electrodes means leakage of small amounts of the element through the dilectric membrane doesn't poison the battery.

Lithum cells are already good enough to run laptops, cars, and houses, and are improving at a Moore's Law like rate. The elements are also not rare and the use of several nanotech techniques on the electrodes have drastically increased the lifetime and other useful properties. (We just had reports of yet another breakthrough within the last day or so, doubling the capacity and extending the life.) The fast-charge/discharge cells are also extremely efficient. (They have to be, because every horsepower is 3/4 kW, so even a few percent of loss would translate to enormous heat in an automotive application.) The main problem is to get companies to "pull the trigger" on deploying them - and risk their new production line being rendered obsolete before the product hits the market by NEXT month's breakthroughs.

Lead-acids need to be replaced once or twice per decade. But they have been the workhorses for off-grid since Edison's and Nikola Tesla's days, and still are today (though not for long, if Elon Musk and the five billion dollars of investments in his lithium battery plant have anything to say about it).

Nickel-Iron wet cells are a technology developed by Edison. They have more loss than lead-acids. But they literally last for centuries. If you have a moderately steady renewable source (like some combination of enough wind and a big enough windmill, enough sun and a big enough solar array, or a stream and a big enough hydro system) you'll have enough more power than you need to keep them topped off. They're just fine for covering days, or even a couple weeks, of bad generation weather, or down-for-maintenance situations. That IS what they were in at least one hydro plant I know of. (The problem is finding them: They last so long you only need to buy them ONCE, so there aren't many plants.)

That's just four FAMILIES of entirely adequate solutions. There ARE more.

So Bill is either uninformed, talking through his hat, or starting on the "embrace" stage of yet another:
  - Embrace
  - Extend
  - Extinguish
  - PROFIT!

we have a way to turn electricity directly into heat. But there is no direct way to turn heat into electricity. It has to go thru a second step of mechanical energy to spin a magnet to create electricity.

You can go from electricity directly to heat because that increases entropy. You can't go from heat to anything useful because that decreases entropy, and entropy of a closed system only increases. The best you can do is a heat engine, working off a temperature DIFFERENCE. (Some of them also work backward as heat pumps, to go from electricity to heat more effectively, by also grabbing some heat from elsewhere to include in the hot end output.)

There ARE at least two major forms of electronic heat engines - direct from temperature differences to electricity, with only charge carriers as the moving parts: Thermoelectrics (thermocouples, peltier junctions, and thermopiles of them) and thermionics (both heat-driven vacuum diode generators and a FET-like semiconductor analog of them). Both are discussed in other responses to the parent post.

TEs are ridiculously inefficient and aren't looking to be much better anytime soon

Because thermoelectric effect devices leak heat big time.

However there's also thermionics. The vacuum-tube version is currently inefficient - about as inefficient as slightly behind-the-curve solar cells - due to space charge accumulation discouraging current, but I've seen reports of a semiconductor close analog of it (as an FET is a semiconductor close analog of a vacuum triode) that IS efficient, encouraging the space charge to propagate through the drift region by doping tricks (that I don't recall offhand). The semiconductor version beats the problems that plague thermoelectrics because the only charge carriers crossing the temperature gradient are the ones doing so in an efficient manner, so the bulk of the thermal leakage is mechanical rather than electrical, and the drift region can be long enough to keep that fraction down.

Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.

I got the impression from the (sketchy) article that repeater AMPLIFIERS were still needed but repeater REGENERATORS were not.

Then again - another part of the article makes it look like an additional result was that they could boost this less-subject-to-degradation-by-nonlinear-distortions signal at the start until the fibre itself was acting non-linearly, in order to get a signal strong enough to survive a much longer hop.

So it's not clear to me whether the distance was achieved by:
  - long hops enabled by strong signals, and NO amplifiers
  - longer propagation without regenaration using JUST amplifers
  - a combination of the two: Both getting long total length without regeneration AND being able to use stronger signals and thus use larger space between the amplifier-type repeaters.

Since the diameter of the earth is 7 926.3352 miles, this could conceivably remove any need for repeaters.

I got the impression from the (sketchy) article that repeater AMPLIFIERS were still needed but repeater REGENERATORS were not.

I.e. you still needed to boost the strength of the signal to make up for the losses. But the progressive degradation of the quality of the signal - with data from different frequency bands bleeding into other bands (especially in the amplifiers themselves) due to nonlinear "mixing" processes - had been headed off, by synchronizing the frequencies of all the carriers to exact multiples of a common basic difference-between-the-carriers frequency.

This apparently sets up a situation where the distortion products of each carrier's interaction with nonlinear processes cancel out with respect to trying to recover the signals on another carrier - much the way the modulation products do in OFDM modulation schemes. In OFDM it allows you to make essentially total use of the bandwidth. In this system it lets you use simple, cheap, amplifiers to get your signal boost, rather than ending the fibre before things get too intertwingled, demodulating all the signals back to data streams and recovered clocking, then generating a fresh set of modulated light streams for the next hop - MUCH more expensive and power hungry.

I interpret this differently.

AMD cpu division has been losing money hands over fists since the first i series for quite some time. It doesn't matter if it fits your needs. It only matters if they can compete with Intel. They can't.

ATI however brings in some money I guess. So this is a test to see if the intel version sells 4x more. If it does perhaps it is time for AMD to leave Intel to the x86 to remain solvent? It pains me to type this as I went AMD since the athlonXP days to the phenom II I just retired last summer.

Sorry Hairy but in Star Wars the OLD republic where I got 20 FPS I now get 40 fps iwth the same video card since I went from a 2.6 ghz 6 core phenom II to a 3.5 ghz i7 which is only 4 core. If I wasn't so cheap ... or I should say ex would allow me to spend $150 for a 2010 i5 when I bought my phenom I would not have had this problem.

Also AMD really does suck with power management. You won't see my MS Surface carrying an AMD anytime soon. My coworker like you is an AMD fanboy but he admits for a notebook he won't touch AMD.

As tablets take over as the Surface and WIndows 10 with universal metro apps and 2 SDK's to port IOS and Android apps with 85% of the original code to IWndows Phone/Windows 10 take off in the coming years this will be ever so important. True WIndows 8.1 was frustrating and both of us hated it with a passion, but I concede it rocks on a surface and Windows 10 is what 8 should have been.

So I could be wrong but a test to dip the waters is my 1st guess. Second AMD could be preparing to leave the cpu market entirely since Intel is about to embark .14 nm skylake. What is AMD .28??? Slower performance, more heat, and more power sadly since they sold of global foundaries. Global foundaries are reserving .14 nm chips for phones. AMD is too small of a market to give a crap about. Ouch ...

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

Windows 10 will help. Windows Server 2016 can install in just 8 gigs of space so my guess is 10.1 will be even more efficient

That is a poor way to do this.

No apps SHOULD NOT write to the registry ever with the exception of an installation. Yes ask a DBA about forks or run Firefox for extended periods of time whose profile on SQLite will slow its startup over time :-)

Also what about security? Do you really want any app writting to it? If your browser writes to it and have a crafty Russian Flash app then through a bypass a website can do whatever it wants via your registry. This is a no no from that perspective as well.

Infact Windows 7 has virtualized registry changes to not corrupt the real copy. When an app you install fails it will ask you if it installed properly? This is to undo the changes.

The proper way is to have a service that runs as admin but even that should not write to the registry all the time and UAC prevents this which is what pissed people off about Vista. Microsoft's plan was to get the users mad at the vendors for writting shitty annoying apps. Not MS for it's OS. But Vista forced poorly written apps to be rewritten for Windows7 which will not impact the system.

Run the disk cleanup app under accessories -> system tools?

Select the updates/system files option. Now run the scan it will trim the SXS and temporary files used for system updates after your 7 system restarts.

I disagree.

Windows 7 is still very snappy on my AMD phenom II. XP had WIndows ROT problems with poorly written apps and even updates which forked the registry many times which impaled the startup process. I have not seen a slowdown at all. I do admit I upgraded to an i7 and now have 8.1 on it but I occasionally use the other system.

I think he has .net framework recompiles going which happen after these updates are one of those defective evo 840 drives which will halt after a few months without a patch to fix the charge leakage bug.