One problem with blue LEDs is that the human eye has poor sensitivity to blue, at least resolution-wise.
The cones for blue light are more sensitive to blue light levels, but there are less of them so they render less resolution than red or green. This means that those bright blue LEDs are going to irritate your eyes, and allow you to see less than LEDs in any other color. Yes, electronics with blue LEDs are bad for anything other than the noon day sun.
If I had mod points, I'd have modded you up. I don't think most people realize that they are going to do so much more for the energy usage of the world by simply properly insulating things and getting efficient appliances. (Change your air conditioner filters frequently folks.) I use compact flash bulbs too as it's about all I can do while renting, but in terms of real world savings they do next to nothing.
There is a major problem with Windows and Microsoft that you do not talk about: licensing for a server. Good luck dealing with the cost for 100 people on a domain, with mail server.
Yeah, you're going to need some deep pockets to set up a very large multi-domain Exchange system. Of course, the only people that do that are large corporations, and that kind of money is chump change to them. Of course, it does completely marry them to Outlook/Active Directory/Windows, but that's pretty standard for large corporations anyway. (The seamless integration is pretty spectacular, with the drawback being vendor lockin.)
In a 200 person organization, that only needs email and none of the other features in Exchange/Outlook (do these exist?) you could set up just Qmail, or some other free solution for for much cheaper, and have a single admin that administers it and many other things. The problem is that when that admin leaves, good luck finding a person qualified to take his place. Exchange admins are easy to find, and easy to train, so long term costs can actually end up being lower with Exchange.
Also, what is an experienced admin (I assume you are either that, or a consultant) using Vista on your work computer? Most Windows admins I know run 2k for getting the job done, or XP for some game compatibility (ahem). None that I know would touch Vista, and have outright told companies that getting it would be ruinious.
If you have a single laptop in your organization, the updated wireless alone is reason to migrate to XP. Everyone has their preferences, but unless you're trying to nurse old hardware, XP has a number of benefits. Vista, however... Well, I don't think anything else negative needs to be said about it, so I will point out the one always overlooked benefit: Resolution independent scaling. Finally, 10cm of desktop space can be the same if you're running a 24" or 17" display at 1920x1200. No more squinting from text being super tiny, or screwed up windows from improper scaling. If they hadn't screwed up every other part of the OS, this would be a huge selling point. As it is, we are crossing our fingers for SP1 to unscrew things.
I think we can come to a consensus on this issue concerning servers: Graphical display code is inherently unstable. Remote graphical interfaces take a magnatude more bandwidth than an interactive text based interface. Why are you using servers that will not function if the graphical subsystem fails to init, or crashes due to a Admin based bug from 3rd party software?
I'm reasonably sure I haven't seen a 2003 box blue screen either. I have seen an application take over to the point that it is essentially locked, and I've had it hang on shutdown (presumably from a rogue process). I've also had Linux do the same thing, so I can't really complain.
I haven't seen many server apps that force some sort of GUI window to run, although they typically have a GUI configuration screen. I've had the GUI configuration screen lock up, but that doesn't take down the app or the system itself. Still, for latency sensitive applications like VoIP, you don't want a GUI mucking about. I assume this is one of the main reasons that Windows Server 2008 will have a GUI-less version. Personally, I wish Windows had been designed around the idea of connection via SSH to do command line configurations, but things mostly work as is.
Anyway, back on topic. Qmail sounds great for ISP level things. For corporate, I'd go Exchange 2007. For personal, there are too many options to list.
It would be a real shame if this thread went solid without this post being modded up to combat the over anxious nut job.
Personally, I've used all sorts of random RCA cables laying around for a SPDIF connection and never had an issue. I've even used an incredibly cheap RCA splitter, to connect two SPDIF sources with video RCA cables to a single SDIF receiver. Granted, it didn't work with both sources transmitting at the same time, but if only one was transmitting then it worked fine most of the time. You _might_ hear a single pop for ever 10+ hours of listening.
Except that with the exception of playing a CD, the vast majority of the time audio carried over SPDIF is going to be compressed as DTS or DD. All of the timing will occur in the internal logics while decompressing the audio.
Of course, now a lot of audio on newer equipment is being transmitted over HDMI, which makes this whole discussion moot.
I just noticed the exact same thing happened to me as Arterion. I guess that I'd approved the older Windows Desktop Search when I just automatically approved everything when we first set WSUS up. That makes me a bit nervous, especially since I don't see anything resembling a WDS 2.6 installed on any of the desktops. I know that the latest revisions install a search bar in the task bar. What exactly does WDS 3.01 do? Does it keep searches separate for each user? Does it move the index with a roaming profile?
Awesome, I used to work for MSNIA tech support also. (In SLC during 2001-2002) The real weirdness didn't start until I got into their level 3 support. One of our side duties was to answer snail mail that people mailed to MSN. People mailed the weirdest crap to us. One lady taped a bunch of different colored sheets of paper together and wrote a message down it saying MS should make itself responsible for filtering the internet for the world. It was probably 10 feet long, so we hung it from the ceiling for a trophy. One lady was completely ballistic because sometimes it took more than 5 seconds for email to go between her and her daughter. No amount of explaining would convince her that this was normal.
Almost all the callers had talked to tech support for at least a couple of hours before talking to us, and some for over 40 hours. It was insane. I can understand why some people were starting to completely lose it. What was most funny was talking to someone who had spent the equivalent of a work week talking to support, and managing to fix their problem in under 10 minutes. At that point people were usually confused and speechless (as if I'd just told them I might die if someone didn't give me a new liver). The sudden sound of silence was priceless, but you had to get them off the phone fast before they got their wits about them and remembered how much time they'd wasted on a simple issue.
Safety requirements in the US make automobiles an order of magnitude more expensive. With aircraft it is even worse. Producing safe aircraft is less of a concern in Nigeria for several reasons; human error is a much bigger factor in accidents there, people are more worried about getting from point A to point B at all than getting there safely, you are probably safer in an unsafe aircraft than driving along the ground in many areas, the life expectancy isn't very good anyway, and some people might actually be able to afford to operate or own an aircraft that costs 1/20th the cost for only half the safety.
If Nigeria could produce helicopters capable of carrying 4 people 60MPH at 15ft above the ground for only a few thousand, I guarantee they would be selling them as fast as they could build them to all of the other countries around them. Countries without all of the safety regulations that make our travel so safe and expensive. Toy radio controlled helicopters here cost more than that.
I'm thinking you could use one to cover some of that ground that is relatively flat, but not quite flat enough to speed over in a land vehicle. There is a lot of unused land out there that people want to get from one side to the other of. In the US we have a decent freeway system over our flatlands. In Nigeria, they have a decent amount of dirt.
That is interesting. I'm thinking that the sheer production numbers of automobiles help ensure that production flaws in their engines are quickly worked out, and unlikely.
That said, helicopters are a heck-of-a lot more complex and failure prone than a prop engine plane. I would be extremely nervous about getting into one that was home built, even if I was only falling 7 feet.
Ah, now that wasn't very nice. TFA says the helicopter has only flown to 7 feet, and the one he is planning will fly to 15 feet. I don't know any helicopter that reaches terminal velocity in 7 feet, let alone 15. Retard.
Which do you think is safer, an experienced high speed driver doing 150MPH in a high performance sports car, or a ninety year old driving a beat up pickup truck down the highway? Personally, I think this guy is an idiot, but chances are that he's safer driving at those speeds than half the people on the road right now.
Speeding tickets make money in some isolated areas where the pay to the officers is very low and the speeds are very high. In most areas speeding tickets cost significantly more to produce and prosecute than they bring in.
The post contains facts, but it doesn't use them fully. So, $10,000/Kg for geosynchronous orbit, eh? Does that price drop if you know you're going to send up 50 launches to the same location? What's the lowest mass you could make a panel for each Watt produced? (Remember that you don't need all of the support and protective glass you need in the atmosphere.) Honestly, I would be surprised if panels being used in an ultra large array in space has a mass 1/10th what they do in Earth, and I wouldn't be surprised at 1/100th, for a given Kilowatt rating.
What about using large sheets of reflective foil to reflect even more light at the panels? That would have an almost negligible weight.
Let's say (extremely optimistically) that you could produce 100 Watts for every Kg of material sent up. Running essentially 24 hours/day would give you 2.4 kilowatt hours each day. In a year that's 876 kilowatt hours, or $876 worth at the previously mentioned military energy rates. That means it would take about 12 years to pay off, assuming energy rates don't vary. That really isn't bad at all.
Of course, that leaves out a lot of details such an maintenance, assembly, orbit corrections, meteor showers, etc, but it certainly isn't a financial impossibility. If/when launch costs drop, and some more R&D goes into focusing on Watts per Kilogram solar power, this stuff becomes a great idea.
**Now if you could get robots up into space or on the moon that were able to refine raw materials to make more panels and put them into place, then you've just created an essentially limitless source of power. Of course, by the time those exist, cold fusion will probably be old news.
Ummmm no. In simplified terms, the reason solar panels only convert a certain % of light to energy is they only convert a certain range of wavelengths. In space that would have more light in that range of wavelength (as well as all other wavelengths) hitting the panel, and thus it would produce more energy. A 160 Watt panel is rated to produce that much sitting on Earth in certain areas with a certain amount of light, they aren't rated to only produce that much ever.
The hardest part of this is actually the radiator to get rid of the waste heat.
No, the hardest part will be getting the stuff up there. Rocket fuel to geosynchronous orbit is really friggin expensive. It doesn't really matter how efficient a power conversion method for sunlight is. What matters is the power produced per Kg of mass. Is a steam turbine with associated radiators, etc, actually going to have more Watts/Kilogram than a bunch of really thin solar panels?
(Remember that solar panels in space don't need all of the protective layers to protect from dust and atmosphere. A micrometeor punching a tiny hole in it will just make it a little less efficient. A steam turbine has to deal with and protect against a vacuum and associated issues.)
Actually, the cost of building the panels and their density is negligible. It's more of a question of the mass of the object and it's survivability in orbit.
Space is big, really friggin big, and geosynchronous orbit is really far out there. They could build a solar array 100 miles on each side (10,000 square miles) and it would appear to be a small moon in the middle of the night, and barely visible the rest of the time. So the physical dimensions of the object aren't really that important. The problem is getting stuff out there, which requires the use of tons of expensive rocket fuel.
Build a cheap way to get stuff into geosynchronous orbit, and you've just solved the world's energy problems.
There is a big difference. And I can assure you that when I worked for Microsoft, in their MSN department, I used to personally read the email of quite a few strangers. It was all to try and fix different issues, but you have to read the from and to lines to find messages. And you can't help but see parts of the message when looking at the headers and such. Trust me, whatever you may think, other people's email just isn't that interesting.
Of course, when you can read a person's email, see personal information and order receipts, and read the email of most of their friends, you can learn quite a bit about a person. Enough to screw with their head in hilarious ways. Not that I ever would have done that, of course.
As an aside, there are a few things worth mentioning about their backend, at least when I used to work there. They store their email as a single plain text, like most sensible email servers. They don't break it down into objects like Exchange. They log the past 40 or so IP addresses that you logged into your account from. They track the date/time of every single time your password is changed. If you had MSN dialup or DSL, they authenticated against your email every time you connected, using RADIUS I believe. Most send/receive issues are not Hotmail's servers fault. Hotmail's spam filter is probably the worst in existence. MSN's Usenet servers would randomly (around 50%) reject correct passwords. We would tell people their clients were flakey, but it was in fact the authentication connection between the Usenet and Email servers that didn't quite work.
Unfortunately there are a lot of judges out there that really don't have a clue. Now if I were in charge, the world would be a perfect place. Lawsuits would make sense, and the guilty would be forced to hand scrub toilets in porta-potties throughout the desert.
Sorry about that. I really meant something along the lines of somewhat-frivolous lawsuits. Lawsuits where there is enough merit to take to trial, but the primary purpose is to feign injury. Or possibly using it to obtain excessive damages. Or sometimes a lawsuit is used simply to delay the other party from being able to act. I've seen those types of tactics used against city governments and it costs them millions that they could be spending on infrastructure for their citizens.
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That should be "compact flash bombs". You know, for intruders.
The cones for blue light are more sensitive to blue light levels, but there are less of them so they render less resolution than red or green. This means that those bright blue LEDs are going to irritate your eyes, and allow you to see less than LEDs in any other color. Yes, electronics with blue LEDs are bad for anything other than the noon day sun.
If I had mod points, I'd have modded you up. I don't think most people realize that they are going to do so much more for the energy usage of the world by simply properly insulating things and getting efficient appliances. (Change your air conditioner filters frequently folks.) I use compact flash bulbs too as it's about all I can do while renting, but in terms of real world savings they do next to nothing.
If the companion cube does happen to speak to you, we recommend you disregard it's advice.
Yeah, you're going to need some deep pockets to set up a very large multi-domain Exchange system. Of course, the only people that do that are large corporations, and that kind of money is chump change to them. Of course, it does completely marry them to Outlook/Active Directory/Windows, but that's pretty standard for large corporations anyway. (The seamless integration is pretty spectacular, with the drawback being vendor lockin.)
In a 200 person organization, that only needs email and none of the other features in Exchange/Outlook (do these exist?) you could set up just Qmail, or some other free solution for for much cheaper, and have a single admin that administers it and many other things. The problem is that when that admin leaves, good luck finding a person qualified to take his place. Exchange admins are easy to find, and easy to train, so long term costs can actually end up being lower with Exchange.
If you have a single laptop in your organization, the updated wireless alone is reason to migrate to XP. Everyone has their preferences, but unless you're trying to nurse old hardware, XP has a number of benefits. Vista, however... Well, I don't think anything else negative needs to be said about it, so I will point out the one always overlooked benefit: Resolution independent scaling. Finally, 10cm of desktop space can be the same if you're running a 24" or 17" display at 1920x1200. No more squinting from text being super tiny, or screwed up windows from improper scaling. If they hadn't screwed up every other part of the OS, this would be a huge selling point. As it is, we are crossing our fingers for SP1 to unscrew things.
I'm reasonably sure I haven't seen a 2003 box blue screen either. I have seen an application take over to the point that it is essentially locked, and I've had it hang on shutdown (presumably from a rogue process). I've also had Linux do the same thing, so I can't really complain.
I haven't seen many server apps that force some sort of GUI window to run, although they typically have a GUI configuration screen. I've had the GUI configuration screen lock up, but that doesn't take down the app or the system itself. Still, for latency sensitive applications like VoIP, you don't want a GUI mucking about. I assume this is one of the main reasons that Windows Server 2008 will have a GUI-less version. Personally, I wish Windows had been designed around the idea of connection via SSH to do command line configurations, but things mostly work as is.
Anyway, back on topic. Qmail sounds great for ISP level things. For corporate, I'd go Exchange 2007. For personal, there are too many options to list.
It would be a real shame if this thread went solid without this post being modded up to combat the over anxious nut job.
Personally, I've used all sorts of random RCA cables laying around for a SPDIF connection and never had an issue. I've even used an incredibly cheap RCA splitter, to connect two SPDIF sources with video RCA cables to a single SDIF receiver. Granted, it didn't work with both sources transmitting at the same time, but if only one was transmitting then it worked fine most of the time. You _might_ hear a single pop for ever 10+ hours of listening.
Except that with the exception of playing a CD, the vast majority of the time audio carried over SPDIF is going to be compressed as DTS or DD. All of the timing will occur in the internal logics while decompressing the audio.
Of course, now a lot of audio on newer equipment is being transmitted over HDMI, which makes this whole discussion moot.
Yeah, that's what got us. I'm curious if MikeyVB could check that and answer on the status.
I just noticed the exact same thing happened to me as Arterion. I guess that I'd approved the older Windows Desktop Search when I just automatically approved everything when we first set WSUS up. That makes me a bit nervous, especially since I don't see anything resembling a WDS 2.6 installed on any of the desktops. I know that the latest revisions install a search bar in the task bar. What exactly does WDS 3.01 do? Does it keep searches separate for each user? Does it move the index with a roaming profile?
Awesome, I used to work for MSNIA tech support also. (In SLC during 2001-2002) The real weirdness didn't start until I got into their level 3 support. One of our side duties was to answer snail mail that people mailed to MSN. People mailed the weirdest crap to us. One lady taped a bunch of different colored sheets of paper together and wrote a message down it saying MS should make itself responsible for filtering the internet for the world. It was probably 10 feet long, so we hung it from the ceiling for a trophy. One lady was completely ballistic because sometimes it took more than 5 seconds for email to go between her and her daughter. No amount of explaining would convince her that this was normal.
Almost all the callers had talked to tech support for at least a couple of hours before talking to us, and some for over 40 hours. It was insane. I can understand why some people were starting to completely lose it. What was most funny was talking to someone who had spent the equivalent of a work week talking to support, and managing to fix their problem in under 10 minutes. At that point people were usually confused and speechless (as if I'd just told them I might die if someone didn't give me a new liver). The sudden sound of silence was priceless, but you had to get them off the phone fast before they got their wits about them and remembered how much time they'd wasted on a simple issue.
Safety requirements in the US make automobiles an order of magnitude more expensive. With aircraft it is even worse. Producing safe aircraft is less of a concern in Nigeria for several reasons; human error is a much bigger factor in accidents there, people are more worried about getting from point A to point B at all than getting there safely, you are probably safer in an unsafe aircraft than driving along the ground in many areas, the life expectancy isn't very good anyway, and some people might actually be able to afford to operate or own an aircraft that costs 1/20th the cost for only half the safety.
If Nigeria could produce helicopters capable of carrying 4 people 60MPH at 15ft above the ground for only a few thousand, I guarantee they would be selling them as fast as they could build them to all of the other countries around them. Countries without all of the safety regulations that make our travel so safe and expensive. Toy radio controlled helicopters here cost more than that.
I'm thinking you could use one to cover some of that ground that is relatively flat, but not quite flat enough to speed over in a land vehicle. There is a lot of unused land out there that people want to get from one side to the other of. In the US we have a decent freeway system over our flatlands. In Nigeria, they have a decent amount of dirt.
That is interesting. I'm thinking that the sheer production numbers of automobiles help ensure that production flaws in their engines are quickly worked out, and unlikely.
That said, helicopters are a heck-of-a lot more complex and failure prone than a prop engine plane. I would be extremely nervous about getting into one that was home built, even if I was only falling 7 feet.
Ah, now that wasn't very nice. TFA says the helicopter has only flown to 7 feet, and the one he is planning will fly to 15 feet. I don't know any helicopter that reaches terminal velocity in 7 feet, let alone 15. Retard.
Which do you think is safer, an experienced high speed driver doing 150MPH in a high performance sports car, or a ninety year old driving a beat up pickup truck down the highway? Personally, I think this guy is an idiot, but chances are that he's safer driving at those speeds than half the people on the road right now.
Speeding tickets make money in some isolated areas where the pay to the officers is very low and the speeds are very high. In most areas speeding tickets cost significantly more to produce and prosecute than they bring in.
The post contains facts, but it doesn't use them fully. So, $10,000/Kg for geosynchronous orbit, eh? Does that price drop if you know you're going to send up 50 launches to the same location? What's the lowest mass you could make a panel for each Watt produced? (Remember that you don't need all of the support and protective glass you need in the atmosphere.) Honestly, I would be surprised if panels being used in an ultra large array in space has a mass 1/10th what they do in Earth, and I wouldn't be surprised at 1/100th, for a given Kilowatt rating.
What about using large sheets of reflective foil to reflect even more light at the panels? That would have an almost negligible weight.
Let's say (extremely optimistically) that you could produce 100 Watts for every Kg of material sent up. Running essentially 24 hours/day would give you 2.4 kilowatt hours each day. In a year that's 876 kilowatt hours, or $876 worth at the previously mentioned military energy rates. That means it would take about 12 years to pay off, assuming energy rates don't vary. That really isn't bad at all.
Of course, that leaves out a lot of details such an maintenance, assembly, orbit corrections, meteor showers, etc, but it certainly isn't a financial impossibility. If/when launch costs drop, and some more R&D goes into focusing on Watts per Kilogram solar power, this stuff becomes a great idea.
**Now if you could get robots up into space or on the moon that were able to refine raw materials to make more panels and put them into place, then you've just created an essentially limitless source of power. Of course, by the time those exist, cold fusion will probably be old news.
Ummmm no. In simplified terms, the reason solar panels only convert a certain % of light to energy is they only convert a certain range of wavelengths. In space that would have more light in that range of wavelength (as well as all other wavelengths) hitting the panel, and thus it would produce more energy. A 160 Watt panel is rated to produce that much sitting on Earth in certain areas with a certain amount of light, they aren't rated to only produce that much ever.
No, the hardest part will be getting the stuff up there. Rocket fuel to geosynchronous orbit is really friggin expensive. It doesn't really matter how efficient a power conversion method for sunlight is. What matters is the power produced per Kg of mass. Is a steam turbine with associated radiators, etc, actually going to have more Watts/Kilogram than a bunch of really thin solar panels?
(Remember that solar panels in space don't need all of the protective layers to protect from dust and atmosphere. A micrometeor punching a tiny hole in it will just make it a little less efficient. A steam turbine has to deal with and protect against a vacuum and associated issues.)
Actually, the cost of building the panels and their density is negligible. It's more of a question of the mass of the object and it's survivability in orbit.
Space is big, really friggin big, and geosynchronous orbit is really far out there. They could build a solar array 100 miles on each side (10,000 square miles) and it would appear to be a small moon in the middle of the night, and barely visible the rest of the time. So the physical dimensions of the object aren't really that important. The problem is getting stuff out there, which requires the use of tons of expensive rocket fuel.
Build a cheap way to get stuff into geosynchronous orbit, and you've just solved the world's energy problems.
There is a big difference. And I can assure you that when I worked for Microsoft, in their MSN department, I used to personally read the email of quite a few strangers. It was all to try and fix different issues, but you have to read the from and to lines to find messages. And you can't help but see parts of the message when looking at the headers and such. Trust me, whatever you may think, other people's email just isn't that interesting.
Of course, when you can read a person's email, see personal information and order receipts, and read the email of most of their friends, you can learn quite a bit about a person. Enough to screw with their head in hilarious ways. Not that I ever would have done that, of course.
As an aside, there are a few things worth mentioning about their backend, at least when I used to work there. They store their email as a single plain text, like most sensible email servers. They don't break it down into objects like Exchange. They log the past 40 or so IP addresses that you logged into your account from. They track the date/time of every single time your password is changed. If you had MSN dialup or DSL, they authenticated against your email every time you connected, using RADIUS I believe. Most send/receive issues are not Hotmail's servers fault. Hotmail's spam filter is probably the worst in existence. MSN's Usenet servers would randomly (around 50%) reject correct passwords. We would tell people their clients were flakey, but it was in fact the authentication connection between the Usenet and Email servers that didn't quite work.
Links?
I'm going to go with the people claiming experience, as it makes the most sense AND it matches up with my own limited knowledge.
Unfortunately there are a lot of judges out there that really don't have a clue. Now if I were in charge, the world would be a perfect place. Lawsuits would make sense, and the guilty would be forced to hand scrub toilets in porta-potties throughout the desert.
Sorry about that. I really meant something along the lines of somewhat-frivolous lawsuits. Lawsuits where there is enough merit to take to trial, but the primary purpose is to feign injury. Or possibly using it to obtain excessive damages. Or sometimes a lawsuit is used simply to delay the other party from being able to act. I've seen those types of tactics used against city governments and it costs them millions that they could be spending on infrastructure for their citizens.