TFA says it's a $170 flashlight. It's got a lifetime warranty, but I always lose flashlights before they fail on me.
What I want to know is, how quickly does it self-discharge? It doesn't do me any good to have it charge in 90 seconds if I don't need it until the power goes out.
There's a really simple answer to this: use high-quality non-rechargeable batteries in your it-must-work-when-the-power-goes-out flashlight and change them once every few years. You can get Lithim chemistry AA batteries that have a claimed shelf life of over 10 years.
Then, use a separate flashlight with rechargeable batteries for when you just need it for a few minutes and can wait for a recharge, or can tolerate slightly-flat batteries.
The ultracapacitor flashlights are a very costly solution to a problem that, for most situations, is easily remedied with traditional flashlights and properly selected batteries that cost 1/20th as much. Hell, you can get a new 4-pack of lithium AAs every year for two decades and come out ahead cost-wise.
The ultracapacitors are for a different application, methinks. Like for the military, as suggested, where cost isn't an issue, power sources are readily available, and performance drives everything.
Their test system is a monster 8-core, dual CPU setup, with only 2 GB of RAM. (Hell, I've got 2 GB of RAM in my dinky single-core Athlon 2800+ desktop.)
RAM is cheap and CPUs are expensive. Their system is not particularly representative since it seems to be biased in the other direction. Further, when the tests include reads and writes that are guaranteed to fill up all available RAM (sequential ops of 4 and 8 GB), the design is flawed because I/O to swap may contaminate the results.
Maybe they can fill up the four open banks on their motherboard (nice of them to show us the photo) and re-run the tests with a more realistic setup, or at least more balanced on the RAM/CPU ratio. Even better, ditch the dual quad-core Xeon (how many Linux users have that?!?) and use a more common format. The ostensible purpose is real-world testing, after all.
Have you compared the output of a high-end digital camera to the output of a high-end film camera with high-quality film?
I have.
I'm a semi-pro photographer (have had 5 solo shows of my work). I had top-of-the-line 35 mm Olympus equipment when I was shooting film (still miss my OM4T bodies, as the design had unique features that made it easy to get the exposure dead on). I switched to Canon pro-grade digital equipment a few years ago. Recently, I had cause to compare some of my digital images with film equivalents of the same subjects. These were taken at comparable ISOs (I normally shoot at 50 or 100 ISO). I used to shoot both chromes and negs; Kodachrome or Ektar, primarily.
The digital image quality blew the film quality away. There was no comparison. The small number of images I took with my Bronica 645 were comparable in quality to what I get with my modern Canon digital equipment. The 35mm film was not up to the capability of modern digital imaging.
With the data I have available, your assertion that digital will never surpass film is a little shortsighted and a few years too late.
Also, it is ignorant of the fact that modern digital camera sensors are working with relatively small numbers of photons -- to the point where at the highest ISO ratings you are most certainly no longer performing analog sensing as the CCD wells are literally counting photons. (The assertion is also ignorant of the fact that film, at its base, is a digital mechanism as well. When a photon hits a grain of silver halide, it converts the entire crystal -- a digital phenomenon. The only reason the process appears to have an analog behavior is because film manufacturers were able to fit millions of very very tiny silver halide crystals in the area of a negative.)
That idea is more-or-less exactly what Lisp Machines did two decades ago, with two big exceptions: (1) the hibernate partition (called a "band" in the contemporary parlance) was written out upon user command, typically after all of the appropriate initializations and customizations had been completed. And, (2) it was typically written once, so that subsequent boots were, in the modern parlance, equivalent to wake from disk hibernate, but it was a pristine copy of a hibernated state.
Both of these exceptions make it, IMO, a more useful feature, and so I continue to hope that we see it in personal computers in the near future.
I'm on faculty at one of the biggest hospitals in the US. One that you have heard of (not the Mayo Clinic, but in that class). All of the physicians use pagers here.
As it is, Lisp faces real problems in garbage collection and system resource management, or at least it has traditionally faced such problems.
You are confusing reputation with reality.
LISP was the first language that required garbage collection, and that radical idea was fought tooth-and-nail by the rest of academia and industry. But the garbage collection technology developed was fast and reliable (I knew many of the people intimately involved in making the GC for Scheme at MIT). There was certainly an overhead that was paid for running a GC, but the smart folks at various academic and research institutions figured out how to minimize that overhead, and, moreover, spread it out pretty evenly so that your mission-critical system didn't suddenly go autistic for 30 seconds while it went through a sweep.
Fast forward to today. You do realize that Perl has a built-in garbage collection system, right? And that Perl runs thousands upon thousands of web sites, some of which are quite large and commercially successful? That there are thousands of people using it every day?
So, my conclusion: having or not having a garbage collector is not a relevant issue. Lisp just does not, "face real problems in garbage collection and system resource management," nor did it "traditionally [face] such problems." You are parroting an old and stale bit of propaganda.
If these issues were so crippling, as you imply, then how would it be possible to write an entire operating system in LISP? Perhaps you never saw any of the machines like that, but they were legion. There were at least three reasonably successful companies started on that very idea.
But your final paragraph above ("But I've also cleaned up...") complains about something that has absolutely nothing to do with LISP, but with poor programming. I've taught LISP at MIT, and find that people who have learned LISP from the classic text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (notice the title does not say anything about LISP or Scheme) are far better programmers than those who have not. The people who have not been taught LISP make more of the egregious errors you suggest, because the standard way of learning LISP, in the classroom with SICP, beats the idea of proper use of abstraction into the students.
In other words, and politely, most of your post is bunk.
I would have hoped that the American people would be smart enough to know that the crisis was a bi-partisan failure. From Credit Default Swaps passing the Senate as a rider 98-0, to the Bush Administration sounding the alarm in 2003 but being ignored, to Barney Frank famously telling the House Republicans that there is nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and getting the backing of House Democrats), to the Republicans blocking the Fannie/Freddie bill once it reached the Senate, there is plenty of blame to spread around.
This is exactly why I voted against every incumbent in every race. In uncontested races, I wrote in an alternate. The present government is incompetent, and no matter who was running against the incumbents, they couldn't be worse than what we have now.
Sigh. It's great that you're excited and all, but just because there's a new technology for turning electrical input into mechanical work doesn't mean it is an advance in speakers. For example, piezoelectrics were touted as the be-all-end-all for speaker design when they came out. But, it turns out, they are rather bad at being designed into speakers, and even then, they aren't that accurate (although there are certainly exceptions).
The fundamental problem in speaker design is the inescapable mismatch of mechanical impedance between the relatively solid (ie, low mechanical impedance) speaker and the relatively non-solid (ie, high mechanical impedance) air. Using horn loading helps this a lot (the best speakers I've ever hear were horn loaded) as this serves as a mechanical transformer between the speaker and the room air. But what helps more than anything else for a given amount of engineering effort and cost is doing all of the bandpass filtering well before the final amplification stage and having exactly one acoustic driver per amplifier output stage. (If you don't already understand the reasons for this, just ask, I'd love to tell you about them!)
Now, will a curtain of this nanotube stuff work as a speaker? Sounds probable. Will it work well? I doubt it, since to accurately reproduce sound, the actuating mechanism (ie, the cone in a conventional speaker) needs to be as rigid as possible so that the acoustic wave it produces accurately corresponds to the electrical signal delivered to it. Internal distortions in the actuating surface (waves on the cone of a conventional speaker, or on the surface of this nanotube stuff) distorts the output. The larger the actuating surface, the more important its rigidity (read: it needs an extremely low internal mechanical impedance).
The ideal sound source for reproduction is a physical point, not a sheet. The reason speakers have physical extent, rather than being points, is the coupling issue touched upon above: they need to have extent that is comparable to the wavelength they are trying to reproduce in order to have sufficient coupling to the atmosphere -- unless an acoustic coupling mechanism is used, like a horn.
The first thing to realise, regardless of which side of the debate you are, is that there is a lot more politics than science being done on climate change.
Absolutely true.
The basic problem that nearly everyone I speak with about climate change does not realize is that over geologic history, such as we understand it, the earth's temperature has varied quite substantially, and we are currently in a relatively cool period. OK, most people say, not getting the next point: what sort of hubris do we, as humans, have to assume the current climate is the optimal, ideal, perfect one, that we should defend and strive to maintain?
It is pure human egocentrism, and, by extension, politics.
Yes, I think that we, as a race, should work to reduce our impact on the globe, but to think that the underlying climate will not change if we completely eliminate the impact of our activity is naive.
Here in the US, oscilloscopes are often sold by traditional salesmen. Decent, new, scopes are high-ticket, high-margin items and with little difficulty, you can ask sales reps from each of the companies you're considering to come by with a demo unit to show off, and possibly loan to you for a while. The downside is that you'll get the physical equivalent of spam, the visiting salesman, bugging you until you make a decision, and then periodically thereafter.
This advice counts extra if you're buying more than one or two units.
If you're looking for basic debugging scopes (not HF, digital sampling, etc.) then get used, recalibrated Tek equipment. That's what I did for my lab. Really good UI, good performance, reliable, but doesn't do any of the fancy stuff like real-time FFT, sampling, ethernet dumps, etc.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement
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1000-mph Car Planned
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· Score: 2, Informative
Remember the wheels are travelling on the ground at mach 1.4, if they were uncovered the top of the wheel would be travelling at mach 2.8 with regards to the local airflow. That's up there with the SR71 in terms of velocity.
Not only that, but it happens at close to 1 atm whereas the SR71 hits those immense speeds in the stratosphere. This car is an incredible aerodynamic engineering challenge!
McMaster is amazing. I have yet to encounter another company that is nearly as efficient.
When I was in LA, my morning orders would arrive often THE SAME AFTERNOON, which includes the latency of the university delivery system where I worked.
Now that I am in Boston, my orders arrive THE NEXT DAY without fail, again, including the latency of a large institutional delivery system.
Sure, sure, you say, that's easy, just pick the ultra-fast-pronto-first-thing delivery when you place your order. This was with their normal, everyday delivery that is INEXPENSIVE to boot.
I forget exactly how many warehouses they have across the US. In Boston, it seems like everything is coming from their NJ plant.
On-topic... If we can generate stem-cells applicable to human research trans-specially, who other than PETA would continue to object?
The goal of the field is to use stem cells derived from the person being treated. The idea is it would run something like this: take a few vials of blood or a bit of adipose tissue (subcutaneous fat), send them to the lab to be turned into stem cells or precursor heart / kidney / pancreas / brain cells, inject into or near the appropriate tissue (maybe just give as a transfusion), and things will Just Work.
The only -- ONLY -- reason people are in an uproar about this sort of work is because fetal stem cells are being used by many researchers in the field, and obtaining fetal tissue is politically charged. (There's good scientific reasons to use fetal stem cells that have to do with host rejection.) Once we can take adult cells and turn them back into pluripotent stem cells (fixing the telomeres along the way, even), or barring that can get the equivalent naive stem cells from placenta or umbilical cord tissue, we won't require fetal tissue any more and the whole issue will fade quietly as it should.
Unfortunately, I'm on vacation, so don't have my references handy, but there are lots and lots and lots of people working on creating stem cells from adults, and there has been remarkable progress.
So, this is a long-winded way of saying that I doubt anyone in research team from the article is considering the application for their work to be to use xenograft stem cells (from a different species), but to instead use human fat cells to create new heart tissue.
It is from all the space dust that gets into the ships/station(s) by the air locks as well as carried in from suits/objects that are worn or used in space. That is how you smell space.
Also don't forget that any object that's brought outside of a spacecraft (like a spacesuit) is exposed to lots of ionizing radiation. When the object is brought back inside and the volatiles created on its surface allowed to mix with the internal atmosphere to create an odor, I can imagine there might be a characteristic smell.
No serious colorimetric work is yet being done with LCDs
Well I'm a Very Serious Photographer With Color Managed Systems, and I can tell you you're full of hooey.
There are a number of Serious LCD monitors now, some with advanced features like wide gamuts, and good enough viewing angles so that you can move side to side within at least the range of the monitor and see no shift.
What you said might have been true about two years ago, but the industry has moved well beyond all Serious work being done on CRT's these days.
Thanks for the pointer. I'll definitely look them up.
I have yet, however, to see a scientific paper that uses LCDs to map the early visual system, where being precise about color uniformity is hugely important -- but that does not mean it hasn't been done. The visual neuroscientists who do color work whom I'm familiar with are all using CRTs or, now that I think of it, DLP based projectors. No LCDs. Maybe that will change.
LCDs have one tremendous advantage from the visual neuroscience perspective: stable light output when viewed at short time scales (except the newer displays that use pulsing backlights... what a stupid idea). The light output from a CRT flickers no matter how fast the refresh rate; the visual system responds at up to about 135 Hz, even though you aren't strongly aware of it above about 80 Hz or so (it depends hugely on individual, viewing conditions, contrast of the image, etc.). With an LCD with a constant backlight, the light output from any given pixel is more-or-less step shaped, changing at update, rather than impulse shaped like from a CRT. This is why a 60 Hz refresh rate on an LCD looks stable as a rock, but 60 Hz on a CRT drives most people crazy. I'd love to be able to use a 75 Hz refresh rate LCD in my experiments rather than a 180 Hz refresh CRT. Will definitely look up the EIZO monitors!
Mr. Graphic Designer wants older matte screens because they supposedly reproduce colors better (the same reason they held onto CRTs well after LCDs debuted).
I'm Mr. Dabbles in Graphic Design Person. You need to remove the "supposedly" in your statement above, especially when it comes to CRTs vs LCDs. High end LCDs are almost as good as decent CRTs, mostly because LCDs significantly change color with viewing angle. When you're worried about graphic design or photography, getting the color right is really important, and even slight color shifts are unacceptable.
I'm also Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work. No serious colorimetric work is yet being done with LCDs for the very same reason: a green dot needs to be exactly the same green whether it's presented in the middle of the screen or at the edge. With CRTs that's the case. With LCDs, assuming the viewing position is the same, the viewing angle changes slightly between those two screen locations, and the color is altered.
I had cause to use a glossy screen laptop recently. Couldn't wait to get rid of it, as I was distracted by my own reflection, or a reflection of the things behind me, or the lights, or whatever else was at the right (or wrong?) angle. Until LCD screens get some really good antiglare coating, matte is the way to go.
1. How well does your email system work with non-Windows operating systems?
2. When a user is not running Windows, does he have access to full features?
3. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to search his mail?
4. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to download his mail in a seamless fashion without having to call IT for instructions?
5. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your best installations?
6. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your worst installations?
7. Why should we hire you?
8. Why should we hire your competitor?
9. When your system has failed in the past, what is your mean time to restoration of operation?
10. What is your worst time to restoration of operation?
11. What is your mean delivery time?
12. What is your mean delivery rate? If it is not above 99.99999% (seven 9s) provide details of the failures, and the protocols you have in place to track and correct them.
13. What is your archival plan?
14. What is your plan for retiring accounts?
15. What is your disaster recovery plan?
16. What is your tech support plan for our IT department?
17. What is your tech support plan for our users?
18. What is your training support plan for our admins?
19. How healthy is your company? Can we expect you to be in business for 5 years? 10? 20?
20. What happens to our data if you fail before our contract is up?
21. What happens to our data after our contract is up and you're still in business?
22. How recently has your system been broken in to? How long did it take you to detect it? And to respond? Is that typical of break-ins to your system?
23. What privacy and security controls to you have in place?
24. What would you do, or have you done, when faced with a subpoena for data on your users, who will be our students, faculty, and administrators?
25. What authority will you give or not give to our faculty and administrators over student data?
And that's just off the top of my head. Be sure to get the answers in writing.
If an airplane can have its control mechanisms interfered with by a simple wireless device then what the hell are they thinking?
The real problem is not well-designed and properly functioning equipment that has passed various and reasonably stringent safety standards testing, but crap manufactured with less attention to detail, or with fraudulent testing certification, or once-properly-functioning equipment that has been badly repaired. Stuff that leaks EM can leak a significant amount.
That said, my understanding is that the primary reason to turn electronics off inflight when said electronics contains transmitters (cell phones, radios, so forth) is to prevent interference between the device and the flight crew's communications with the ground and other planes. A malfunctioning or el-cheapo cell phone that's splattering its 1W all over the frequency band and is mere meters from the plane's antenna will be reasonably difficult to reject compared to the ground based towers five miles away. TVs are an entirely different issue -- they have local oscillators (that work very nicely as small transmitters, thankyouverymuch) right in the frequencies that are used for air-to-ground communications. That was, unfortunately, an oversight on the part of the FCC when allocating the spectrum.
To summarize, it's not so much the right stuff working the right way that is the issue, but poorly designed or malfunctioning stuff that is the worry.
But -- they gain hugely compared to standard flat panels in structural rigidity for the same amount of material.
As mentioned on their web site, the tubes are far more wind tolerant than large panels. Also remember that just because a solar cell isn't pointing directly at the sun doesn't mean it completely loses efficiency -- it primarily loses efficiency because it's not getting as many photons striking the surface as if it were oriented correctly.
A good comparison on how much insolation they'll catch is to imagine a single long sheet of flat solar collector the length of one of their tubes, and the same width as the diameter of the tube. Then, you'll need a mechanism for maintaining ideal positioning by rotating about the long axis. And, you'll need to make it two-sided to catch the reflected energy.
And now, make the comparison: the two systems will obtain approximately the same insolation (the rear flat panel in this thought experiment will be somewhat less efficient than the Solyndra equivalent, but let's assume it will be as efficient -- doing it correctly will only help the Solyndra argument). The Solyndra tubes will be far more rigid for the same thickness of base material. They won't need a steering mechanism. They might or might not be easier to manufacture.
And the penalty for these advantages (dredging out the old highschool geometry) is... pi x D / 2D = about 1.6 more active material for the same insolation.
So, it's an engineering tradeoff, given the constraint of making a more wind-tolerant solar panel that is more-or-less long and thin, you have 60% higher coating and base material costs because you're making tubes rather than (long) flat panels, plus whatever additional manufacturing costs that might or might not be different for making tubes vs sheets, and you gain in not having to provide a steering mechanism. Of course, as stated above, this is assuming you want to capture a given insolation.
I can easily see it being a design worth investigating. I can also see, as other posters have pointed out, that it would make emminent sense if you were to combine these tubes with long parabolic reflectors. And, come to think of it, these will still have decent residual power generation even when it has snowed, due to the reflected capture -- a flat panel will lose far more collection efficiency when covered in snow.
Moreover, since the idea is non-obvious, they'll have good patent protection and therefore an ideal marketing position. Exclusive, strong, cheap, wind tolerant, still works when covered in snow -- no wonder they're booming.
This idea is a VERY GOOD one, and has been around for decades. Unfortunately, it failed to get into the mainstream.
In the 1980s, there was an architecture called the Lisp Machine designed and initially constructed in the MIT AI Lab. The architecture has a long and storied history, but one aspect is relevant here: these machines had a feature where you, the user, could set up your machine just as you liked it, and snapshot the state of the machine into a particular part of the disk, creating what was called a band. These bands (you could have more than one) were effectively the same as current suspend-to-disk partitions with one huge difference: you could cold boot into them. So, instead of a huge and long initialization process that loaded this and that package, you effectively did all of that work once and cached the result, saving time and effort whenever you needed to power up the machine, or bring it to a known state.
It's a great idea. I hope it gains traction under Linux.
Yeah, I think the GP post is looking for a conspiracy where there isn't one. If you look at the Google version in the GP post, lots of other buildings' tops are saturated out by overexposure. The large expanse of saturated white with hints of shadow in question matches very nicely to, as the parent post put it, "a lot of pavement," or, maybe, a lot of concrete pavement. No trickery involved, just a badly exposed photo in the Google map.
I take data for a living. I'm a scientist. I work in a biological science where noise is often as large as or greater than the signal of interest. Your proposal suffers, unfortunately, from many potential sources of error based on variation in behavior between different people, and also variation in behavior for a single individual over time. You're trying to measure a signal that we expect to be 10% on a baseline variation that's likely to be close to 50%.
A better way would be to try to measure both conditions on the same person, with repeated random switching: one day with device, next day possibly the same or possibly without the device, and so forth. Then, in a post-hoc manner, sort mileage results from each day into with-device or without-device conditions. There is quite likely a 7-day variation in driving habits, so you have to also record day of week for each measurement and validate that you have an equal number of Mondays, Tuesdays, etc. in each class. And THEN you need, as you suggest, to do it with a relatively large population of people. And do it for a long time, with equal number of days from each participant, and make all of the measurements at least in the same time of year, if not on exactly the same days.
But, when it comes down to it, this is all a heapload of work to compensate for uncontrolled variables. Why not use the right tools? Take a single car, put it on a dyno, make measurements of fuel efficiency for set conditions without the device, then enable the device take more measurements, and, to be certain, re-take the without measurements to demonstrate that the baseline didn't change. Dynos are exactly the right tool, as they're designed to measure power and specific fuel consumption, among other things.
Ultrasonication is almost exactly what a fuel injector does.
Don't forget, though, that while petroleum based fuels are indeed made up of hydrocarbons which tend to be electrically neutral, most, if not all, consumer fuels are laced with additives, not the least of which are detergents. Detergents, while electrically neutral, are highly polar and so would be greatly affected by externally applied static E fields, or dynamic E/B fields.
Are you calling yourself a charlatan? You keep talking about SUVs when they have nothing whatever to do with engine efficiency.
... and, oddly, neither does your post. You complain that the OP should be talking about engine efficiency, rather than vehicle efficiency, and the proceed to make an argument based on vehicle efficiency. Not only that, but your argument is severely flawed: you start with a purely anecdotal chain of three vehicles and use it to draw conclusions about the entire industry, neatly ignoring the fourth vehicle you mention at the end of your argument that doesn't fit into the chain. That's not sound, defensible logic, and were you to attempt to publish it as science, you'd be laughed out of the room.
You, sir, are doing exactly what you are accusing the OP of doing, and doing more of it.
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TFA says it's a $170 flashlight. It's got a lifetime warranty, but I always lose flashlights before they fail on me.
What I want to know is, how quickly does it self-discharge? It doesn't do me any good to have it charge in 90 seconds if I don't need it until the power goes out.
There's a really simple answer to this: use high-quality non-rechargeable batteries in your it-must-work-when-the-power-goes-out flashlight and change them once every few years. You can get Lithim chemistry AA batteries that have a claimed shelf life of over 10 years.
Then, use a separate flashlight with rechargeable batteries for when you just need it for a few minutes and can wait for a recharge, or can tolerate slightly-flat batteries.
The ultracapacitor flashlights are a very costly solution to a problem that, for most situations, is easily remedied with traditional flashlights and properly selected batteries that cost 1/20th as much. Hell, you can get a new 4-pack of lithium AAs every year for two decades and come out ahead cost-wise.
The ultracapacitors are for a different application, methinks. Like for the military, as suggested, where cost isn't an issue, power sources are readily available, and performance drives everything.
Their test system is a monster 8-core, dual CPU setup, with only 2 GB of RAM. (Hell, I've got 2 GB of RAM in my dinky single-core Athlon 2800+ desktop.)
RAM is cheap and CPUs are expensive. Their system is not particularly representative since it seems to be biased in the other direction. Further, when the tests include reads and writes that are guaranteed to fill up all available RAM (sequential ops of 4 and 8 GB), the design is flawed because I/O to swap may contaminate the results.
Maybe they can fill up the four open banks on their motherboard (nice of them to show us the photo) and re-run the tests with a more realistic setup, or at least more balanced on the RAM/CPU ratio. Even better, ditch the dual quad-core Xeon (how many Linux users have that?!?) and use a more common format. The ostensible purpose is real-world testing, after all.
Have you compared the output of a high-end digital camera to the output of a high-end film camera with high-quality film?
I have.
I'm a semi-pro photographer (have had 5 solo shows of my work). I had top-of-the-line 35 mm Olympus equipment when I was shooting film (still miss my OM4T bodies, as the design had unique features that made it easy to get the exposure dead on). I switched to Canon pro-grade digital equipment a few years ago. Recently, I had cause to compare some of my digital images with film equivalents of the same subjects. These were taken at comparable ISOs (I normally shoot at 50 or 100 ISO). I used to shoot both chromes and negs; Kodachrome or Ektar, primarily.
The digital image quality blew the film quality away. There was no comparison. The small number of images I took with my Bronica 645 were comparable in quality to what I get with my modern Canon digital equipment. The 35mm film was not up to the capability of modern digital imaging.
With the data I have available, your assertion that digital will never surpass film is a little shortsighted and a few years too late.
Also, it is ignorant of the fact that modern digital camera sensors are working with relatively small numbers of photons -- to the point where at the highest ISO ratings you are most certainly no longer performing analog sensing as the CCD wells are literally counting photons. (The assertion is also ignorant of the fact that film, at its base, is a digital mechanism as well. When a photon hits a grain of silver halide, it converts the entire crystal -- a digital phenomenon. The only reason the process appears to have an analog behavior is because film manufacturers were able to fit millions of very very tiny silver halide crystals in the area of a negative.)
That idea is more-or-less exactly what Lisp Machines did two decades ago, with two big exceptions: (1) the hibernate partition (called a "band" in the contemporary parlance) was written out upon user command, typically after all of the appropriate initializations and customizations had been completed. And, (2) it was typically written once, so that subsequent boots were, in the modern parlance, equivalent to wake from disk hibernate, but it was a pristine copy of a hibernated state.
Both of these exceptions make it, IMO, a more useful feature, and so I continue to hope that we see it in personal computers in the near future.
I'm on faculty at one of the biggest hospitals in the US. One that you have heard of (not the Mayo Clinic, but in that class). All of the physicians use pagers here.
As it is, Lisp faces real problems in garbage collection and system resource management, or at least it has traditionally faced such problems.
You are confusing reputation with reality.
LISP was the first language that required garbage collection, and that radical idea was fought tooth-and-nail by the rest of academia and industry. But the garbage collection technology developed was fast and reliable (I knew many of the people intimately involved in making the GC for Scheme at MIT). There was certainly an overhead that was paid for running a GC, but the smart folks at various academic and research institutions figured out how to minimize that overhead, and, moreover, spread it out pretty evenly so that your mission-critical system didn't suddenly go autistic for 30 seconds while it went through a sweep.
Fast forward to today. You do realize that Perl has a built-in garbage collection system, right? And that Perl runs thousands upon thousands of web sites, some of which are quite large and commercially successful? That there are thousands of people using it every day?
So, my conclusion: having or not having a garbage collector is not a relevant issue. Lisp just does not, "face real problems in garbage collection and system resource management," nor did it "traditionally [face] such problems." You are parroting an old and stale bit of propaganda.
If these issues were so crippling, as you imply, then how would it be possible to write an entire operating system in LISP? Perhaps you never saw any of the machines like that, but they were legion. There were at least three reasonably successful companies started on that very idea.
But your final paragraph above ("But I've also cleaned up ...") complains about something that has absolutely nothing to do with LISP, but with poor programming. I've taught LISP at MIT, and find that people who have learned LISP from the classic text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (notice the title does not say anything about LISP or Scheme) are far better programmers than those who have not. The people who have not been taught LISP make more of the egregious errors you suggest, because the standard way of learning LISP, in the classroom with SICP, beats the idea of proper use of abstraction into the students.
In other words, and politely, most of your post is bunk.
I would have hoped that the American people would be smart enough to know that the crisis was a bi-partisan failure. From Credit Default Swaps passing the Senate as a rider 98-0, to the Bush Administration sounding the alarm in 2003 but being ignored, to Barney Frank famously telling the House Republicans that there is nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and getting the backing of House Democrats), to the Republicans blocking the Fannie/Freddie bill once it reached the Senate, there is plenty of blame to spread around.
This is exactly why I voted against every incumbent in every race. In uncontested races, I wrote in an alternate. The present government is incompetent, and no matter who was running against the incumbents, they couldn't be worse than what we have now.
Sigh. It's great that you're excited and all, but just because there's a new technology for turning electrical input into mechanical work doesn't mean it is an advance in speakers. For example, piezoelectrics were touted as the be-all-end-all for speaker design when they came out. But, it turns out, they are rather bad at being designed into speakers, and even then, they aren't that accurate (although there are certainly exceptions).
The fundamental problem in speaker design is the inescapable mismatch of mechanical impedance between the relatively solid (ie, low mechanical impedance) speaker and the relatively non-solid (ie, high mechanical impedance) air. Using horn loading helps this a lot (the best speakers I've ever hear were horn loaded) as this serves as a mechanical transformer between the speaker and the room air. But what helps more than anything else for a given amount of engineering effort and cost is doing all of the bandpass filtering well before the final amplification stage and having exactly one acoustic driver per amplifier output stage. (If you don't already understand the reasons for this, just ask, I'd love to tell you about them!)
Now, will a curtain of this nanotube stuff work as a speaker? Sounds probable. Will it work well? I doubt it, since to accurately reproduce sound, the actuating mechanism (ie, the cone in a conventional speaker) needs to be as rigid as possible so that the acoustic wave it produces accurately corresponds to the electrical signal delivered to it. Internal distortions in the actuating surface (waves on the cone of a conventional speaker, or on the surface of this nanotube stuff) distorts the output. The larger the actuating surface, the more important its rigidity (read: it needs an extremely low internal mechanical impedance).
The ideal sound source for reproduction is a physical point, not a sheet. The reason speakers have physical extent, rather than being points, is the coupling issue touched upon above: they need to have extent that is comparable to the wavelength they are trying to reproduce in order to have sufficient coupling to the atmosphere -- unless an acoustic coupling mechanism is used, like a horn.
The first thing to realise, regardless of which side of the debate you are, is that there is a lot more politics than science being done on climate change.
Absolutely true.
The basic problem that nearly everyone I speak with about climate change does not realize is that over geologic history, such as we understand it, the earth's temperature has varied quite substantially, and we are currently in a relatively cool period. OK, most people say, not getting the next point: what sort of hubris do we, as humans, have to assume the current climate is the optimal, ideal, perfect one, that we should defend and strive to maintain?
It is pure human egocentrism, and, by extension, politics.
Yes, I think that we, as a race, should work to reduce our impact on the globe, but to think that the underlying climate will not change if we completely eliminate the impact of our activity is naive.
Here in the US, oscilloscopes are often sold by traditional salesmen. Decent, new, scopes are high-ticket, high-margin items and with little difficulty, you can ask sales reps from each of the companies you're considering to come by with a demo unit to show off, and possibly loan to you for a while. The downside is that you'll get the physical equivalent of spam, the visiting salesman, bugging you until you make a decision, and then periodically thereafter.
This advice counts extra if you're buying more than one or two units.
If you're looking for basic debugging scopes (not HF, digital sampling, etc.) then get used, recalibrated Tek equipment. That's what I did for my lab. Really good UI, good performance, reliable, but doesn't do any of the fancy stuff like real-time FFT, sampling, ethernet dumps, etc.
Remember the wheels are travelling on the ground at mach 1.4, if they were uncovered the top of the wheel would be travelling at mach 2.8 with regards to the local airflow. That's up there with the SR71 in terms of velocity.
Not only that, but it happens at close to 1 atm whereas the SR71 hits those immense speeds in the stratosphere. This car is an incredible aerodynamic engineering challenge!
McMaster is amazing. I have yet to encounter another company that is nearly as efficient.
When I was in LA, my morning orders would arrive often THE SAME AFTERNOON, which includes the latency of the university delivery system where I worked.
Now that I am in Boston, my orders arrive THE NEXT DAY without fail, again, including the latency of a large institutional delivery system.
Sure, sure, you say, that's easy, just pick the ultra-fast-pronto-first-thing delivery when you place your order. This was with their normal, everyday delivery that is INEXPENSIVE to boot.
I forget exactly how many warehouses they have across the US. In Boston, it seems like everything is coming from their NJ plant.
On-topic... If we can generate stem-cells applicable to human research trans-specially, who other than PETA would continue to object?
The goal of the field is to use stem cells derived from the person being treated. The idea is it would run something like this: take a few vials of blood or a bit of adipose tissue (subcutaneous fat), send them to the lab to be turned into stem cells or precursor heart / kidney / pancreas / brain cells, inject into or near the appropriate tissue (maybe just give as a transfusion), and things will Just Work.
The only -- ONLY -- reason people are in an uproar about this sort of work is because fetal stem cells are being used by many researchers in the field, and obtaining fetal tissue is politically charged. (There's good scientific reasons to use fetal stem cells that have to do with host rejection.) Once we can take adult cells and turn them back into pluripotent stem cells (fixing the telomeres along the way, even), or barring that can get the equivalent naive stem cells from placenta or umbilical cord tissue, we won't require fetal tissue any more and the whole issue will fade quietly as it should.
Unfortunately, I'm on vacation, so don't have my references handy, but there are lots and lots and lots of people working on creating stem cells from adults, and there has been remarkable progress.
So, this is a long-winded way of saying that I doubt anyone in research team from the article is considering the application for their work to be to use xenograft stem cells (from a different species), but to instead use human fat cells to create new heart tissue.
It is from all the space dust that gets into the ships/station(s) by the air locks as well as carried in from suits/objects that are worn or used in space. That is how you smell space.
Also don't forget that any object that's brought outside of a spacecraft (like a spacesuit) is exposed to lots of ionizing radiation. When the object is brought back inside and the volatiles created on its surface allowed to mix with the internal atmosphere to create an odor, I can imagine there might be a characteristic smell.
No serious colorimetric work is yet being done with LCDs
Well I'm a Very Serious Photographer With Color Managed Systems, and I can tell you you're full of hooey.
There are a number of Serious LCD monitors now, some with advanced features like wide gamuts, and good enough viewing angles so that you can move side to side within at least the range of the monitor and see no shift.
What you said might have been true about two years ago, but the industry has moved well beyond all Serious work being done on CRT's these days.
Thanks for the pointer. I'll definitely look them up.
I have yet, however, to see a scientific paper that uses LCDs to map the early visual system, where being precise about color uniformity is hugely important -- but that does not mean it hasn't been done. The visual neuroscientists who do color work whom I'm familiar with are all using CRTs or, now that I think of it, DLP based projectors. No LCDs. Maybe that will change.
LCDs have one tremendous advantage from the visual neuroscience perspective: stable light output when viewed at short time scales (except the newer displays that use pulsing backlights ... what a stupid idea). The light output from a CRT flickers no matter how fast the refresh rate; the visual system responds at up to about 135 Hz, even though you aren't strongly aware of it above about 80 Hz or so (it depends hugely on individual, viewing conditions, contrast of the image, etc.). With an LCD with a constant backlight, the light output from any given pixel is more-or-less step shaped, changing at update, rather than impulse shaped like from a CRT. This is why a 60 Hz refresh rate on an LCD looks stable as a rock, but 60 Hz on a CRT drives most people crazy. I'd love to be able to use a 75 Hz refresh rate LCD in my experiments rather than a 180 Hz refresh CRT. Will definitely look up the EIZO monitors!
Mr. Graphic Designer wants older matte screens because they supposedly reproduce colors better (the same reason they held onto CRTs well after LCDs debuted).
I'm Mr. Dabbles in Graphic Design Person. You need to remove the "supposedly" in your statement above, especially when it comes to CRTs vs LCDs. High end LCDs are almost as good as decent CRTs, mostly because LCDs significantly change color with viewing angle. When you're worried about graphic design or photography, getting the color right is really important, and even slight color shifts are unacceptable.
I'm also Mr. Professional Visual Neuroscientist Who Does Some Colorimetric Work. No serious colorimetric work is yet being done with LCDs for the very same reason: a green dot needs to be exactly the same green whether it's presented in the middle of the screen or at the edge. With CRTs that's the case. With LCDs, assuming the viewing position is the same, the viewing angle changes slightly between those two screen locations, and the color is altered.
I had cause to use a glossy screen laptop recently. Couldn't wait to get rid of it, as I was distracted by my own reflection, or a reflection of the things behind me, or the lights, or whatever else was at the right (or wrong?) angle. Until LCD screens get some really good antiglare coating, matte is the way to go.
1. How well does your email system work with non-Windows operating systems?
2. When a user is not running Windows, does he have access to full features?
3. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to search his mail?
4. Does every user, independent of operating system, have the ability to download his mail in a seamless fashion without having to call IT for instructions?
5. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your best installations?
6. What are the names and contact information of 5 of your worst installations?
7. Why should we hire you?
8. Why should we hire your competitor?
9. When your system has failed in the past, what is your mean time to restoration of operation?
10. What is your worst time to restoration of operation?
11. What is your mean delivery time?
12. What is your mean delivery rate? If it is not above 99.99999% (seven 9s) provide details of the failures, and the protocols you have in place to track and correct them.
13. What is your archival plan?
14. What is your plan for retiring accounts?
15. What is your disaster recovery plan?
16. What is your tech support plan for our IT department?
17. What is your tech support plan for our users?
18. What is your training support plan for our admins?
19. How healthy is your company? Can we expect you to be in business for 5 years? 10? 20?
20. What happens to our data if you fail before our contract is up?
21. What happens to our data after our contract is up and you're still in business?
22. How recently has your system been broken in to? How long did it take you to detect it? And to respond? Is that typical of break-ins to your system?
23. What privacy and security controls to you have in place?
24. What would you do, or have you done, when faced with a subpoena for data on your users, who will be our students, faculty, and administrators?
25. What authority will you give or not give to our faculty and administrators over student data?
And that's just off the top of my head. Be sure to get the answers in writing.
If an airplane can have its control mechanisms interfered with by a simple wireless device then what the hell are they thinking?
The real problem is not well-designed and properly functioning equipment that has passed various and reasonably stringent safety standards testing, but crap manufactured with less attention to detail, or with fraudulent testing certification, or once-properly-functioning equipment that has been badly repaired. Stuff that leaks EM can leak a significant amount.
That said, my understanding is that the primary reason to turn electronics off inflight when said electronics contains transmitters (cell phones, radios, so forth) is to prevent interference between the device and the flight crew's communications with the ground and other planes. A malfunctioning or el-cheapo cell phone that's splattering its 1W all over the frequency band and is mere meters from the plane's antenna will be reasonably difficult to reject compared to the ground based towers five miles away. TVs are an entirely different issue -- they have local oscillators (that work very nicely as small transmitters, thankyouverymuch) right in the frequencies that are used for air-to-ground communications. That was, unfortunately, an oversight on the part of the FCC when allocating the spectrum.
To summarize, it's not so much the right stuff working the right way that is the issue, but poorly designed or malfunctioning stuff that is the worry.
But -- they gain hugely compared to standard flat panels in structural rigidity for the same amount of material.
As mentioned on their web site, the tubes are far more wind tolerant than large panels. Also remember that just because a solar cell isn't pointing directly at the sun doesn't mean it completely loses efficiency -- it primarily loses efficiency because it's not getting as many photons striking the surface as if it were oriented correctly.
A good comparison on how much insolation they'll catch is to imagine a single long sheet of flat solar collector the length of one of their tubes, and the same width as the diameter of the tube. Then, you'll need a mechanism for maintaining ideal positioning by rotating about the long axis. And, you'll need to make it two-sided to catch the reflected energy.
And now, make the comparison: the two systems will obtain approximately the same insolation (the rear flat panel in this thought experiment will be somewhat less efficient than the Solyndra equivalent, but let's assume it will be as efficient -- doing it correctly will only help the Solyndra argument). The Solyndra tubes will be far more rigid for the same thickness of base material. They won't need a steering mechanism. They might or might not be easier to manufacture.
And the penalty for these advantages (dredging out the old highschool geometry) is ... pi x D / 2D = about 1.6 more active material for the same insolation.
So, it's an engineering tradeoff, given the constraint of making a more wind-tolerant solar panel that is more-or-less long and thin, you have 60% higher coating and base material costs because you're making tubes rather than (long) flat panels, plus whatever additional manufacturing costs that might or might not be different for making tubes vs sheets, and you gain in not having to provide a steering mechanism. Of course, as stated above, this is assuming you want to capture a given insolation.
I can easily see it being a design worth investigating. I can also see, as other posters have pointed out, that it would make emminent sense if you were to combine these tubes with long parabolic reflectors. And, come to think of it, these will still have decent residual power generation even when it has snowed, due to the reflected capture -- a flat panel will lose far more collection efficiency when covered in snow.
Moreover, since the idea is non-obvious, they'll have good patent protection and therefore an ideal marketing position. Exclusive, strong, cheap, wind tolerant, still works when covered in snow -- no wonder they're booming.
This idea is a VERY GOOD one, and has been around for decades. Unfortunately, it failed to get into the mainstream.
In the 1980s, there was an architecture called the Lisp Machine designed and initially constructed in the MIT AI Lab. The architecture has a long and storied history, but one aspect is relevant here: these machines had a feature where you, the user, could set up your machine just as you liked it, and snapshot the state of the machine into a particular part of the disk, creating what was called a band. These bands (you could have more than one) were effectively the same as current suspend-to-disk partitions with one huge difference: you could cold boot into them. So, instead of a huge and long initialization process that loaded this and that package, you effectively did all of that work once and cached the result, saving time and effort whenever you needed to power up the machine, or bring it to a known state.
It's a great idea. I hope it gains traction under Linux.
Also, here is another photo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RamsteinAB.jpg
Looks to me like there is a lot of pavement.
Yeah, I think the GP post is looking for a conspiracy where there isn't one. If you look at the Google version in the GP post, lots of other buildings' tops are saturated out by overexposure. The large expanse of saturated white with hints of shadow in question matches very nicely to, as the parent post put it, "a lot of pavement," or, maybe, a lot of concrete pavement. No trickery involved, just a badly exposed photo in the Google map.
I take data for a living. I'm a scientist. I work in a biological science where noise is often as large as or greater than the signal of interest. Your proposal suffers, unfortunately, from many potential sources of error based on variation in behavior between different people, and also variation in behavior for a single individual over time. You're trying to measure a signal that we expect to be 10% on a baseline variation that's likely to be close to 50%.
A better way would be to try to measure both conditions on the same person, with repeated random switching: one day with device, next day possibly the same or possibly without the device, and so forth. Then, in a post-hoc manner, sort mileage results from each day into with-device or without-device conditions. There is quite likely a 7-day variation in driving habits, so you have to also record day of week for each measurement and validate that you have an equal number of Mondays, Tuesdays, etc. in each class. And THEN you need, as you suggest, to do it with a relatively large population of people. And do it for a long time, with equal number of days from each participant, and make all of the measurements at least in the same time of year, if not on exactly the same days.
But, when it comes down to it, this is all a heapload of work to compensate for uncontrolled variables. Why not use the right tools? Take a single car, put it on a dyno, make measurements of fuel efficiency for set conditions without the device, then enable the device take more measurements, and, to be certain, re-take the without measurements to demonstrate that the baseline didn't change. Dynos are exactly the right tool, as they're designed to measure power and specific fuel consumption, among other things.
Ultrasonication is almost exactly what a fuel injector does.
Don't forget, though, that while petroleum based fuels are indeed made up of hydrocarbons which tend to be electrically neutral, most, if not all, consumer fuels are laced with additives, not the least of which are detergents. Detergents, while electrically neutral, are highly polar and so would be greatly affected by externally applied static E fields, or dynamic E/B fields.
There is no shortage of comments about us selling out or running advertisements as stories.
I know, I know, because you are running advertisements as stories!
Sometimes the answers are just so, right there for me.
Are you calling yourself a charlatan? You keep talking about SUVs when they have nothing whatever to do with engine efficiency.
... and, oddly, neither does your post. You complain that the OP should be talking about engine efficiency, rather than vehicle efficiency, and the proceed to make an argument based on vehicle efficiency. Not only that, but your argument is severely flawed: you start with a purely anecdotal chain of three vehicles and use it to draw conclusions about the entire industry, neatly ignoring the fourth vehicle you mention at the end of your argument that doesn't fit into the chain. That's not sound, defensible logic, and were you to attempt to publish it as science, you'd be laughed out of the room.
You, sir, are doing exactly what you are accusing the OP of doing, and doing more of it.