If the windmills are so fscking wonderful, why aren't they being built in New York City?
Upstate New Yorkers have good reason to be suspicious of the proposal. In many states like New York, the legislature is effectively controlled by politicians from a major urban area. Citizens who live in rural areas can go pound sand. This often results in the legislature dumping undesirable projects in rural areas, safely out of sight from the big city. The big city wants water, power and trash disposal, but it doesn't want the power plants, sewage treatment plants and land fills that go along with it.
It can. I built a Heathkit digital clock, back when you could buy electronic kits and electronic digital clocks were rare. It used the AC line as the frequency reference for the digital clock circuits. I think it used a low-voltage secondary winding on the power transformer and a schmitt trigger to generate a 60 Hz square wave. If you checked the clock against WWV, it was never off by more than a second or two. If the power company had a large load during the day, they would run the system slightly faster than 60 Hz overnight, so everyone's clock kept the proper time.
That's assuming that the ISP has a clue. I've run into too many local NTP servers that are grossly in error and the person responsible for the server no longer works there, doesn't understand NTP, never checks to see that the server is still working, or doesn't care that the server is broken.
There is much more to a time and frequency distribution system than a GPS receiver producing 1 PPS, unless your requirements are very minimal. You still need a very stable local oscillator, time code generators, etc. You also have to consider redundancy and single points of failure.
NTP is a cheap and effective way of distributing time to systems that do not need high-quality time.
Even with a thicker skull, the eye sockets are a weak point. They used to perform lobotomies by pushing an ice pick through the back of the eye socket and moving it around.
The design and organization of modern computer memory is strongly influenced by the base 2 numbering system. That isn't true for hard disks and many other devices. A hard disk doesn't care if the sector or word size is not a power of 2. At the hardware level, it just stores sequences of bits.
The thing is merely a crappy switching regulator WITHOUT a transformer. To be a PSU, it is necessary to step down 120V or 240V down to a more managable 5V or 12V.
You don't have to have a transformer. You can convert the AC line voltage to a pulse-width-modulated train of pulses with a high-speed switch. A low-pass filter can then be used to convert the pulse train to DC.
One of the primary functions of a power supply is to provide voltage regulated DC to the attached hardware. This can be difficult with modern PC hardware, where the amount of power drawn from the power supply can vary over a large range in a very short period of time. A microprocessor can switch from sleep mode to egg frying mode in a matter of microseconds, with a huge jump in power consumption.
You're probably thinking about linear power supplies, that used multiple secondary transformer wirings to supply power to the DC regulation circuits. Switching power supplies get rid of that big power transformer and the inefficient linear voltage regulators. With a switching power supply, you can produce a regulated DC output by pulse-width-modulating a power source and filtering it to DC.
That's not so great if someone steals the drive and computer. I'd rather have a random key (128-bit or 256-bit) on a removable USB key, than depend on a user supplied password, which can probably be guessed or hacked in a number of ways.
I have something similar (NOMAD OM-43) that I use to record indoor temperature and relative humidity. It can be programmed and downloaded via an RS-232 port. It will run for a very long time on a lithium battery. If can be useful if you have stuff that is sensitive to temperature and humidity, like musical instruments, photographic film, magnetic tape, etc. It's also interesting to have a historical record of the actual conditions, as opposed to what they are supposed to be.
I've seen thousands of 1/2" and 1" reel-to-reel mag tapes that are still in good shape and readable, even after being stored for 30 years in a tape archive facility. They were recorded on professional-grade Ampex tape, which wasn't cheap.
You are confusing design life with actual life. The design requirements for a hard drive may say that it has to meet its performance and reliability specifications for 5 years. That doesn't mean that it might not last longer.
Cheap and good are mutually exclusive when it comes to mag tape. I've never seen a cheap mag tape drive that was worth a damn. Even $1000 tape drives have disappointing long-term reliability. All of the high quality tape drives that I've used cost $20K or more. They will work reliably for decades if properly maintained.
There is a fundamental difference between stamped CDs and CD-R/RW discs. Stamped CDs have physical indentations, CD-Rs use a layer of heat-sensitive dye, CD-RWs use a heat-sensitive phase change material. All three are going to degrade and fail in different ways.
From what I've read, the CRT manufacturers know that their industry is going the way of the vacuum tube, and have drawn up long-term schedules for closing all of their CRT manufacturing plants. The only uncertainty is how long it will take for flat panel displays to replace CRTs.
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Stratum 3 and sending out time that was off by hundreds of milliseconds or worse.
Upstate New Yorkers have good reason to be suspicious of the proposal. In many states like New York, the legislature is effectively controlled by politicians from a major urban area. Citizens who live in rural areas can go pound sand. This often results in the legislature dumping undesirable projects in rural areas, safely out of sight from the big city. The big city wants water, power and trash disposal, but it doesn't want the power plants, sewage treatment plants and land fills that go along with it.
It can. I built a Heathkit digital clock, back when you could buy electronic kits and electronic digital clocks were rare. It used the AC line as the frequency reference for the digital clock circuits. I think it used a low-voltage secondary winding on the power transformer and a schmitt trigger to generate a 60 Hz square wave. If you checked the clock against WWV, it was never off by more than a second or two. If the power company had a large load during the day, they would run the system slightly faster than 60 Hz overnight, so everyone's clock kept the proper time.
That's assuming that the ISP has a clue. I've run into too many local NTP servers that are grossly in error and the person responsible for the server no longer works there, doesn't understand NTP, never checks to see that the server is still working, or doesn't care that the server is broken.
NTP is a cheap and effective way of distributing time to systems that do not need high-quality time.
See the "iburst" keyword in ntp.conf. This results in a burst of ntp packets at startup.
Even with a thicker skull, the eye sockets are a weak point. They used to perform lobotomies by pushing an ice pick through the back of the eye socket and moving it around.
You can thank FDR for neutering the Supreme Court and rendering your argument moot.
There are exceptions, like IBM mainframe DASD. If you are a large enough customer, you can order drives with non-standard parameters.
The design and organization of modern computer memory is strongly influenced by the base 2 numbering system. That isn't true for hard disks and many other devices. A hard disk doesn't care if the sector or word size is not a power of 2. At the hardware level, it just stores sequences of bits.
Sorry, kid. The short bus left five minutes ago.
Then there is the mandatory oscilloscope with a Lissajous pattern.
You don't have to have a transformer. You can convert the AC line voltage to a pulse-width-modulated train of pulses with a high-speed switch. A low-pass filter can then be used to convert the pulse train to DC.
One of the primary functions of a power supply is to provide voltage regulated DC to the attached hardware. This can be difficult with modern PC hardware, where the amount of power drawn from the power supply can vary over a large range in a very short period of time. A microprocessor can switch from sleep mode to egg frying mode in a matter of microseconds, with a huge jump in power consumption.
You're probably thinking about linear power supplies, that used multiple secondary transformer wirings to supply power to the DC regulation circuits. Switching power supplies get rid of that big power transformer and the inefficient linear voltage regulators. With a switching power supply, you can produce a regulated DC output by pulse-width-modulating a power source and filtering it to DC.
That's not so great if someone steals the drive and computer. I'd rather have a random key (128-bit or 256-bit) on a removable USB key, than depend on a user supplied password, which can probably be guessed or hacked in a number of ways.
I have something similar (NOMAD OM-43) that I use to record indoor temperature and relative humidity. It can be programmed and downloaded via an RS-232 port. It will run for a very long time on a lithium battery. If can be useful if you have stuff that is sensitive to temperature and humidity, like musical instruments, photographic film, magnetic tape, etc. It's also interesting to have a historical record of the actual conditions, as opposed to what they are supposed to be.
I've seen thousands of 1/2" and 1" reel-to-reel mag tapes that are still in good shape and readable, even after being stored for 30 years in a tape archive facility. They were recorded on professional-grade Ampex tape, which wasn't cheap.
You are confusing design life with actual life. The design requirements for a hard drive may say that it has to meet its performance and reliability specifications for 5 years. That doesn't mean that it might not last longer.
Cheap and good are mutually exclusive when it comes to mag tape. I've never seen a cheap mag tape drive that was worth a damn. Even $1000 tape drives have disappointing long-term reliability. All of the high quality tape drives that I've used cost $20K or more. They will work reliably for decades if properly maintained.
PROMs have their own failure modes, like fusible links that reconnect themselves after being blown and trapped charges that dissipate over time.
There is a fundamental difference between stamped CDs and CD-R/RW discs. Stamped CDs have physical indentations, CD-Rs use a layer of heat-sensitive dye, CD-RWs use a heat-sensitive phase change material. All three are going to degrade and fail in different ways.
From what I've read, the CRT manufacturers know that their industry is going the way of the vacuum tube, and have drawn up long-term schedules for closing all of their CRT manufacturing plants. The only uncertainty is how long it will take for flat panel displays to replace CRTs.
Many stores, at least in the USA, will tell you that the manufacturer is responsible for fixing or replacing defective merchandise.
Why bother compressing it? 16-bit stereo is only about 1.5 Mbps.