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bulanga

30 karma · joined January 8, 2009

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bulanga··on Surface area required to power the whole world by solar power
That's right, storage is all too often forgotten.

Some ways energy can be stored:

- kinetic energy storage e.g. spinning flywheel

- potential energy storage e.g. pump water at an altitude

- thermal energy e.g I read somewhere that molten salt can store heat for hours. i.e. steam can be produced to spin a turbine.

bulanga··on Why the Apple iPad has no Java or Flash
there's also the fact that phones have relatively limited memory. I suspect the Dalvik VM runtime memory footprint is much lower than that of the JVM.
bulanga··on PI to 2.7 trillion places on a desktop
In case you didn't know, this is the guy who started ffmpeg which does the heavy lifting in projects like VLC, etc.
bulanga··on Termite : Erlang-style concurrency for Gambit Scheme
Does anyone know how processes are implemented in termite?

I remember looking at candygram a while ago (erlang style message passing for python) and reading that a 'process' uses the OS's underlying thread so you can't scale the number of processes like you could on erlang.

Not that it's been a bottleneck for me but I'm just curious.

bulanga··on French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
I seriously doubt they cost that much.

The only electronics on the bike I can think of is the head light LED and the dynamo to power it. The rest of the electronics are in the docking stations.

I'm thinking the $3500 price probably includes the docking station which is kinda misleading.

bulanga··on Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1
> None of the apps skipped a beat.

out of curiosity, how can you tell if the apps skipped a beat? It's hard enough when you have to focus on 2 audio streams, I can't image how you can deal with 2 dozen?

Perhaps there was some code monitoring dropped frames and such

bulanga··on Dean Kamen Takes His Island Off-Grid
thanks that's very helpful indeed.
bulanga··on Dean Kamen Takes His Island Off-Grid
> 2. Water Tower

I have though of doing this for my house in the past.

Before I start building the tower I wanted to have a feel for how much energy one can store using this method. I live next to the sea so water is no issue.

Say to power 1 low energy 20watt light bulb for a few hours how large would the tower have to be and how high from the ground.

I'd really appreciate a link to a resource explaining the maths behind this.

bulanga··on What Solitary Confinement Does to the Brain
yes I thought the same and it reminded me of this video by Matthieu Ricard:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1424079446171087119...

More specifcally at this point: 37 min 23 sec he shows a picture of a grinning monk who's just come out of 6 years of meditation. He seems to have had a rather pleasant time.

bulanga··on Oberon, a delightfully insane system
Unfortunately I can't try Parallels (again). I already tried their demo version a while ago when I was trying to decide whether to purchase VMWare or Parallels.

It seems possible though to get it running with VMWare so I'll do some further investigation.

bulanga··on Oberon, a delightfully insane system
ok good to know. I'm going to take another look.
bulanga··on Oberon, a delightfully insane system
shame it doesn't work in VMWare.

I tried both isos, the 7MB and 77MB one and tweaked a little bit with the settings but I just get a black screen, it doesn't seem to boot at all.

If anyone does manage to get it going could you please post some instructions? Thanks.

bulanga··on 'Jaunty Jackalope' Ubuntu 9.04 springs into beta
things I liked: (been using an alpha for a couple of weeks now)

* the new notification 'bubbles' in the top right hand corner look good

* coming out of hibernate/suspend mode reconnects me to my wifi connection (never seemed to work in the past)

bulanga··on Ask HN: Help me make HN work well on the iPhone
any chance you could get it working on the Wii? Sometimes I like to sit back in my sofa and browse HN from the Wii. It renders ok but could do with a few tweaks. I usually use the Column mode for browsing where the width of the page in made to match that of the screeen i.e no horizontal scrolling needed. I don't think I'm the only one accessing HN from this console?
bulanga··on Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?
I use the native OSX emacs in the terminal with the fonts increased a fair bit. It loads really fast (~ 1 second) I tried Aquamacs but didn't like the fact that it was significantly slower when starting. I'm a new emacs user so I don't really see the need for all the bells and whistles the larger packages tend to offer. If I need anything I just install it from emacswiki.org. Also I found dotfiles.com quite useful for customising my setup.
bulanga··on ARM based processors coming to Linux netbooks
> If you want to run Windows, then you'll want to pass on ARM netbooks

not necessarily. Remember Windows Mobile already runs on ARM so Microsoft already has plenty of experience porting to RISC machines (not to mention DEC alphas way back) I think MS could do it fairly easily if there really wanted to.