I'll bet you drive a car with an automatic spark advance. Beats me how today's drivers expect to maximize performance and economy if they leave that to stupid automation.
To make it even more confusing, as a native Spanish speaker, I use the same word "fósforo" for both the chemical element and the luminescent substances.
As an embarrassingly typical American, I'll try to remember that if I ever manage to learn Spanish as well as you've mastered English.:)
Perhaps, but it seems like you're confused between voltage and current. If a driver uses a switching current regulator, and doesn't have a supply-side filter, it's going to be drawing full current for part of its duty cycle and no current during the rest. Maybe it has a filter to smooth that demand, maybe not -- as you said, a car's electrical system is pretty noisy to begin with.
It might be that all the publications quoting efficiency figures for LEDs and HIDs are wrong. Or it might be that your current meter is wrong. For that matter, it could be that your eyes looking at your garage door aren't quite as accurate as, oh, say, a photographic exposure meter, never mind an integrating sphere. I'm not saying that your HIDs aren't brighter than your LEDs -- just that, without specifying what you're using to measure current or brightness, you're not giving us much to go on.
The other consderation is that with lasers, a primary concern is heat dissipation. Top lasers are only about 33% effective, meaning you generate twice as much heat as you do light. Therefore from the get-go cooling is a concern. Whereas with LEDs cooling is the last thing anyone thinks about.
How's that for a 'programmer'?
About the same as a lighting engineer saying "with computers so fast today, code efficiency is the last thing anyone thinks about."
You'll find that cooling is the first thing almost everyone thinks about when designing high-power (multi-watt) LED lighting systems, because LEDs will cook themselves in a jiffy if you do it wrong.
As best I can tell, blue LEDs in general are more efficient than blue solid-state lasers, but not by a whole lot -- less than a factor of two. But with a blue-LED emitter coated in yellow phosphor, you've got all the heat from both LED inefficiency and phosphor inefficiency being dissipated in the same small area. With the headlight design here, the emitter and the phosphor are separated, and I'll be that makes the thermal engineering a good bit easier.
I can see why you're convinced, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to be seeing the same results you do. Maybe your new car has a bad light-handling design, or poor driving electronics, or maybe there's a measurement error. How are you measuring current? Are you sure you can accurately measure a high-frequency chopped DC signal with lots of harmonics?
The stuff that glows yellow when you hit it with blue light is a "phosphor". Yellow phosphorus is the stuff that catches fire on exposure to air. Different materials. I've seen a number of news articles that get this wrong.
It gets confusing, because while phosphors are intended to be luminescent (emitting light when stimulated by another form of energy), they can be phosphorescent (continuing to glow after the stimulus is removed) or just fluorescent (only emitting while the stimulus is applied). But "fluor" apparently never caught on as a noun, I guess.
Pedantry aside, your main point's correct, though (and deserves more mod points). These lights don't emit "laser beams", just LED-style white light (a lot of blue mixed with a broad range of green through red).
Cheap switching power supplies crank out plenty of harmonics, and you don't need a very high percentage of the power lighting an entire high-rise to overwhelm cellular signals.
As for compliant lights (and drivers), I think most certifications specify "when installed according to specifications". For an industrial-scale lighting installation, I'd bet there are plenty of places where contractors could cut corners on grounding or shielding, throwing a product out of compliance.
I'm no expert, though, so I'll defer to those who are.
Well, I'll tell you what. Since gold is a store of guaranteed value, you'll appreciate the deal I'm about to offer -- I'll sell you all the gold you want at last February's price! Sure, since then it's dropped from $1600/oz to $1250/oz -- but, since gold is the true measure of value, that shouldn't matter to you. You shouldn't even care that I'm making $300 or so per ounce on the deal. After all, I'm just getting worthless greenbacks, and you're getting the real stuff.
Of all the thing you want to post to Slashdot about, for some reason the slashdot beta ranks at the top?
Indeed.
Shew, fly!
I think you're looking for "shoo". We'll shoo if Dice makes it clear that they want us to. This whole demonstration is intended to make sure they understand that.
Oh, come on, moderators. Yes, I deserve punishment for being on-topic during this time of trouble. But can't you unite behind the Overrated flag enough to award me the coveted Score: -1, Insightful?
I've never felt the urge to pile on with "off-topic" spam -- until now. We've tried lobbying, we've tried rational discussion, we've tried voting; none seem to have any effect. So, now, we're "movin' on up" to the equivalent of rioting in the streets.
You know, I have no great love for government regulation, but I have even less love for "how much tinfoil can I wrap around my head and still manage to cram it up my backside" paranoia.
At its peak during the 1960s and 1970s, the motor-vehicle death rate in the US topped 50,000 per year. It's come down a bit since then -- but the fatalities per mile have decreased almost fivefold.
Now, perhaps that decrease has come in spite of things like seat-belts (and laws mandating their use), crumple zones, air bags, anti-lock brakes, and so forth. If only Evil Government Regulators had refrained from slapping the Free Market's Invisible Hand, perhaps most of those hundreds of thousands of crash victims would still be alive today -- thrown to safety, no doubt, instead of being trapped by those murderous belts.
But it seems to me that safety regulations have brought us, well, quite a bit more than "a little temporary safety", and I honestly don't see that they've cost me any "essential liberties". These regulations take place on a slope that hasn't proven all that slippery, and the prospect of more regulations frankly does not fill me with dread.
We can build systems that react more quickly and consistently than any human. Every year's technological advances expand the domains in which we can do this. If we can use such systems to prevent unnecessary death and suffering, LET'S GET ON WITH IT.
I've only got n=5 or so, but each of the stores I've gone into in the last year or two had the parts cabinets. Sometimes I had to ask where they were, but they were there.
Sure, there'll be a limited selection -- just like there was in the 70s and 80s. If you're expecting a double-wide strip-mall slot to hold inventory as broad as DigiKey, yeah, you're gonna be disappointed.
Also, I don't know where everybody was finding the stores staffed by knowledgeable greybeards back in the 80s, but I learned from the beginning not to ask technical questions of the folks behind the counter.
I'm a bit luckier than that -- it's strictly facial features for me (well, and names, but that's common enough that everyone makes allowances for it anyhow). Once I start conversing with someone, I can recognize them and recall their context pretty easily -- or determine, with high certainty, that I really don't know them.
Hey, guys -- THEY STILL SELL PARTS. They've just compacted them into a set of shallow drawers, rather than displaying them on pegboard. I haven't counted, but it seems to me that they've got a better selection of components than they did in the 80s. Besides the obvious (how many varieties of blue LEDs and microcontrollers did they carry in 1980?), they've still got fairly robust coverage of things like DC connectors and resistors/capacitors/other passive stuff.
I miss having the nerd stuff prominently displayed, but if they need to give more square footage to phones to stay afloat, I'm happy to pull out drawers instead of seeing it all disappear.
(Remember Lafayette Electronics, another chain that sold components? If so, you're old, too.)
I can't remember faces, and I have a lot of trouble recognizing them. It's not full-blown prosopagnosia, but it's a real problem in daily life -- for example, if I run into a familiar co-worker at a grocery store, I'm likely not to recognize them, and I might come across as cold or distant. I compensated by being friendly to everyone, which earned me a reputation for being nice, if a bit spacy. And I can recognize my family, even "picture" them in my mind -- but I couldn't tell you what shape my wife's nose or ears are. Sketching people is right out.
I'd love to have heads-up subtitles on people, not to be creepy, just to put me on even footing with the rest of the world. If the price is that I have to feed knowledge of who I'm seeing to the Overmind, though, I'm not sure I'd strike the bargain.
If you're writing and executing sloppy code on your server, it's your problem.
If you're writing sloppy code and executing it on my machine, along with hundreds of thousands of others, you're wasting my resources and theirs.
No, calculating one md5 hash isn't going to make any difference to anyone, no matter where you do it. Doing whatever it is that Gawker's code-bonobos are doing cuts my battery life in half. That's kind of a big deal to me -- enough to make me avoid their sites when I'm running unplugged. And it turns out to be easier just to avoid the sites entirely.
(d) "Telecommunications service" means the two-way transmission of
signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, messages, data or other
information of any nature by wire, radio, light waves or other
electromagnetic means, offered to the public generally.
Please explain what interaction with "the public generally" is not mediated by "electromagnetic means". I look forward to all the lawsuits seeking to block municipal water and sewer service, since that involves bulk movement of matter in response to pressure, which is solely mediated by electromagnetic means.
You may like the duck analogy, but it does not correctly illustrate this phenomenon.:)
Joking aside, I realize that I don't know enough about the model domain to evaluate my analogy. The similarities I see are that electron holes, like these "monopoles", are actually emergent from the behavior of other entities; they exist only in certain specialized materials, not in free space; and, finally, they share some characteristics with the physical anti-electron (positron), but differ in many important ways. Electron holes give rise to their own effects, which have led to the whole of solid-state electronics. I'm wondering whether these "model monopoles" will have practical applications as well, or whether they're mostly just an experimental curiosity.
I like the "electron hole" analogy. Electron holes aren't as spectacular as positrons; they don't annihilate electrons and generate gamma-ray photons. They can, however, "annihilate" an electron in a semiconductor to produce a visible photon -- and that's how we get LEDs.
This "monopole" won't let us build super-motors or disintegrate protons at will. But I wonder if, recreated in a more robust medium, it could have its own interesting uses?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet you drive a car with an automatic spark advance. Beats me how today's drivers expect to maximize performance and economy if they leave that to stupid automation.
It is. It's just expressed in base-1.
To make it even more confusing, as a native Spanish speaker, I use the same word "fósforo" for both the chemical element and the luminescent substances.
As an embarrassingly typical American, I'll try to remember that if I ever manage to learn Spanish as well as you've mastered English. :)
Perhaps, but it seems like you're confused between voltage and current. If a driver uses a switching current regulator, and doesn't have a supply-side filter, it's going to be drawing full current for part of its duty cycle and no current during the rest. Maybe it has a filter to smooth that demand, maybe not -- as you said, a car's electrical system is pretty noisy to begin with.
It might be that all the publications quoting efficiency figures for LEDs and HIDs are wrong. Or it might be that your current meter is wrong. For that matter, it could be that your eyes looking at your garage door aren't quite as accurate as, oh, say, a photographic exposure meter, never mind an integrating sphere. I'm not saying that your HIDs aren't brighter than your LEDs -- just that, without specifying what you're using to measure current or brightness, you're not giving us much to go on.
The other consderation is that with lasers, a primary concern is heat dissipation. Top lasers are only about 33% effective, meaning you generate twice as much heat as you do light. Therefore from the get-go cooling is a concern. Whereas with LEDs cooling is the last thing anyone thinks about.
How's that for a 'programmer'?
About the same as a lighting engineer saying "with computers so fast today, code efficiency is the last thing anyone thinks about."
You'll find that cooling is the first thing almost everyone thinks about when designing high-power (multi-watt) LED lighting systems, because LEDs will cook themselves in a jiffy if you do it wrong.
As best I can tell, blue LEDs in general are more efficient than blue solid-state lasers, but not by a whole lot -- less than a factor of two. But with a blue-LED emitter coated in yellow phosphor, you've got all the heat from both LED inefficiency and phosphor inefficiency being dissipated in the same small area. With the headlight design here, the emitter and the phosphor are separated, and I'll be that makes the thermal engineering a good bit easier.
I can see why you're convinced, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to be seeing the same results you do. Maybe your new car has a bad light-handling design, or poor driving electronics, or maybe there's a measurement error. How are you measuring current? Are you sure you can accurately measure a high-frequency chopped DC signal with lots of harmonics?
The stuff that glows yellow when you hit it with blue light is a "phosphor". Yellow phosphorus is the stuff that catches fire on exposure to air. Different materials. I've seen a number of news articles that get this wrong.
It gets confusing, because while phosphors are intended to be luminescent (emitting light when stimulated by another form of energy), they can be phosphorescent (continuing to glow after the stimulus is removed) or just fluorescent (only emitting while the stimulus is applied). But "fluor" apparently never caught on as a noun, I guess.
Pedantry aside, your main point's correct, though (and deserves more mod points). These lights don't emit "laser beams", just LED-style white light (a lot of blue mixed with a broad range of green through red).
Cheap switching power supplies crank out plenty of harmonics, and you don't need a very high percentage of the power lighting an entire high-rise to overwhelm cellular signals.
As for compliant lights (and drivers), I think most certifications specify "when installed according to specifications". For an industrial-scale lighting installation, I'd bet there are plenty of places where contractors could cut corners on grounding or shielding, throwing a product out of compliance.
I'm no expert, though, so I'll defer to those who are.
Well, I'll tell you what. Since gold is a store of guaranteed value, you'll appreciate the deal I'm about to offer -- I'll sell you all the gold you want at last February's price! Sure, since then it's dropped from $1600/oz to $1250/oz -- but, since gold is the true measure of value, that shouldn't matter to you. You shouldn't even care that I'm making $300 or so per ounce on the deal. After all, I'm just getting worthless greenbacks, and you're getting the real stuff.
Thank you for acknowledging us. I'd like to see a new SlashDot that's even better than the old. Please let us help you define it.
Of all the thing you want to post to Slashdot about, for some reason the slashdot beta ranks at the top?
Indeed.
Shew, fly!
I think you're looking for "shoo". We'll shoo if Dice makes it clear that they want us to. This whole demonstration is intended to make sure they understand that.
Oh, come on, moderators. Yes, I deserve punishment for being on-topic during this time of trouble. But can't you unite behind the Overrated flag enough to award me the coveted Score: -1, Insightful?
We certainly don't take it very well when foreign manufacturers do this...
I've never felt the urge to pile on with "off-topic" spam -- until now. We've tried lobbying, we've tried rational discussion, we've tried voting; none seem to have any effect. So, now, we're "movin' on up" to the equivalent of rioting in the streets.
And, yep, I'm signing my name.
You know, I have no great love for government regulation, but I have even less love for "how much tinfoil can I wrap around my head and still manage to cram it up my backside" paranoia.
At its peak during the 1960s and 1970s, the motor-vehicle death rate in the US topped 50,000 per year. It's come down a bit since then -- but the fatalities per mile have decreased almost fivefold.
Now, perhaps that decrease has come in spite of things like seat-belts (and laws mandating their use), crumple zones, air bags, anti-lock brakes, and so forth. If only Evil Government Regulators had refrained from slapping the Free Market's Invisible Hand, perhaps most of those hundreds of thousands of crash victims would still be alive today -- thrown to safety, no doubt, instead of being trapped by those murderous belts.
But it seems to me that safety regulations have brought us, well, quite a bit more than "a little temporary safety", and I honestly don't see that they've cost me any "essential liberties". These regulations take place on a slope that hasn't proven all that slippery, and the prospect of more regulations frankly does not fill me with dread.
We can build systems that react more quickly and consistently than any human. Every year's technological advances expand the domains in which we can do this. If we can use such systems to prevent unnecessary death and suffering, LET'S GET ON WITH IT.
I've only got n=5 or so, but each of the stores I've gone into in the last year or two had the parts cabinets. Sometimes I had to ask where they were, but they were there.
Sure, there'll be a limited selection -- just like there was in the 70s and 80s. If you're expecting a double-wide strip-mall slot to hold inventory as broad as DigiKey, yeah, you're gonna be disappointed.
Also, I don't know where everybody was finding the stores staffed by knowledgeable greybeards back in the 80s, but I learned from the beginning not to ask technical questions of the folks behind the counter.
I'm a bit luckier than that -- it's strictly facial features for me (well, and names, but that's common enough that everyone makes allowances for it anyhow). Once I start conversing with someone, I can recognize them and recall their context pretty easily -- or determine, with high certainty, that I really don't know them.
Hey, guys -- THEY STILL SELL PARTS. They've just compacted them into a set of shallow drawers, rather than displaying them on pegboard. I haven't counted, but it seems to me that they've got a better selection of components than they did in the 80s. Besides the obvious (how many varieties of blue LEDs and microcontrollers did they carry in 1980?), they've still got fairly robust coverage of things like DC connectors and resistors/capacitors/other passive stuff.
I miss having the nerd stuff prominently displayed, but if they need to give more square footage to phones to stay afloat, I'm happy to pull out drawers instead of seeing it all disappear.
(Remember Lafayette Electronics, another chain that sold components? If so, you're old, too.)
Yeah, I could really use this as a prosthetic.
I can't remember faces, and I have a lot of trouble recognizing them. It's not full-blown prosopagnosia, but it's a real problem in daily life -- for example, if I run into a familiar co-worker at a grocery store, I'm likely not to recognize them, and I might come across as cold or distant. I compensated by being friendly to everyone, which earned me a reputation for being nice, if a bit spacy. And I can recognize my family, even "picture" them in my mind -- but I couldn't tell you what shape my wife's nose or ears are. Sketching people is right out.
I'd love to have heads-up subtitles on people, not to be creepy, just to put me on even footing with the rest of the world. If the price is that I have to feed knowledge of who I'm seeing to the Overmind, though, I'm not sure I'd strike the bargain.
If you're writing and executing sloppy code on your server, it's your problem.
If you're writing sloppy code and executing it on my machine, along with hundreds of thousands of others, you're wasting my resources and theirs.
No, calculating one md5 hash isn't going to make any difference to anyone, no matter where you do it. Doing whatever it is that Gawker's code-bonobos are doing cuts my battery life in half. That's kind of a big deal to me -- enough to make me avoid their sites when I'm running unplugged. And it turns out to be easier just to avoid the sites entirely.
I use JS as a carpenter would use his hammer...
And most posters here feel that, to paraphrase the old saw about C++, "When JavaScript is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb."
Yes, and thank you for dropping my laptop's battery life from 5 hours to 2 hours.
Tell me, do you work at Gawker?
(d) "Telecommunications service" means the two-way transmission of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, messages, data or other information of any nature by wire, radio, light waves or other electromagnetic means, offered to the public generally.
Please explain what interaction with "the public generally" is not mediated by "electromagnetic means". I look forward to all the lawsuits seeking to block municipal water and sewer service, since that involves bulk movement of matter in response to pressure, which is solely mediated by electromagnetic means.
You may like the duck analogy, but it does not correctly illustrate this phenomenon. :)
Joking aside, I realize that I don't know enough about the model domain to evaluate my analogy. The similarities I see are that electron holes, like these "monopoles", are actually emergent from the behavior of other entities; they exist only in certain specialized materials, not in free space; and, finally, they share some characteristics with the physical anti-electron (positron), but differ in many important ways. Electron holes give rise to their own effects, which have led to the whole of solid-state electronics. I'm wondering whether these "model monopoles" will have practical applications as well, or whether they're mostly just an experimental curiosity.
I like the "electron hole" analogy. Electron holes aren't as spectacular as positrons; they don't annihilate electrons and generate gamma-ray photons. They can, however, "annihilate" an electron in a semiconductor to produce a visible photon -- and that's how we get LEDs.
This "monopole" won't let us build super-motors or disintegrate protons at will. But I wonder if, recreated in a more robust medium, it could have its own interesting uses?