The only problem here is LEDs emit directional light. And there are no easy ways to "diffuse" the light
LEDs are intrinsically a point light source, just like a small incandescent lamp. A lot of them are fairly directional, but only because of their built-in lens. The LEDs can just as easily be produced without any lens (in lieu of a light fixture's much larger mirror) or with a simple flat reflector or inverted cone lens.
I am so sick of science writers who mess up the story because they don't understand the units of energy and power.
Amen. Granted, any battery will have limits as to how fast it can be charged/discharged, and the rectifiers and inverters that feed it will have similar limits. If writers would consistently get this right, then maybe we could assume that that's what they were referring to when they mention a power figure. As is, we have to second-guess them.
Therefore, to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars.
Most people realize that energy sources need to be diverse. It's a useful thought experiment to see what it'd cost to power the whole country or world using a given technology, but it's also easy to forget that each technology has shortcomings that can be compensated for with other technologies. For example, large-scale energy storage, in addition to allowing for more wind turbines to be hooked to the grid, also enables a higher percentage of our energy to be generated by cheaper base-load plants instead of by the more expensive peak-load plants.
Pumped storage is about 60-70% efficient, I wonder how this compares?
The sodium-sulfur batteries they are using are apparently 89-92% efficient (efficiency should increase with scale - these batteries must be kept at a temperature of about 300C and because of the square-cube law it's much easier to keep very big things hot). Large (>100kW) fully-inverting UPSs are often 94% efficient - the rectification/inversion needed for this could be similarly efficient.
Case law upholding a non-solicit? (I.e. you can't hire our employees or our ex-employees?) Damn, those are dime a dozen.
Specifically, an employee that has been laid off or fired. It'd be very pertinent to the discussion if you could cite one or two. I have googled for it, and all I found was armchair arguments, examples of when people quit (weren't fired), and many, many anecdotes of intimidation and out of court settlements. The most common theme I've found (both in past research and today) is that courts frown on employers preventing someone from making a living.
If your sucker employee signed standard boilerplate that kept them from taking any other job in the industry (leaving them flipping burgers or bagging groceries), then good luck enforcing that. If the contract was so specific as to say "You can't take a job with RIM", then I could see the courts being more agreeable to it. I'd still be very interested to see an example of it happening after a firing or layoff.
Almost every one of those type of agreements have some sort of clause in them counting people who had been employeed at all in the past X years (actively employeed or not) as employees.
Contract boilerplate is viral. Do you know of any case law upholding that? Just because someone signed something saying they wanna be a slave doesn't mean they are one.
This could be mitigated by using banks of capacitors. When fully charged, the banks would be run in parallel. After discharging to half voltage half of the capacitors would be placed in series with the other half, returning to the original voltage. Repeat until all of the capacitors are in series.
Ordinarily, this would work, but they are producing this as a monolithic unit - a single 281lb capacitor. You can also do it at the motor windings (similar to what they're starting to do with wind turbines), but you'd still need to design the rest of the electronics to cope with the wide voltage range (and size the wires to cope with the wide amperage range).
You'd have to be really careful with the switching circuitry too - if you make a positive-positive connection before you break a positive-negative connection, you're shorting out one of the capacitors. The patent notably omits any Equivalent Series Resistance specs, but given that this thing is internally wired as 31351 capacitors in parallel, I figure it could be on the scary side of one ohm (which makes it a lot worse than, say, a failed H-bridge stepper motor control hooked to traditional batteries). Hopefully the protection circuitry will be designed to interrupt at least 10000A.
Lead acid batteries start to degrade quickly once taken below 60% of nominal capacity
Well, this is a capacitor. It *can* be discharged to 0%, but its voltage drops steadily as it discharges, to 0 as well (batteries have a much flatter discharge curve). In theory, it'll store the power indicated. In practice, your 100kW switching power supply may only be able to accommodate 1000-3500V input voltages, instead of 0-3500V (yes - 3500V according to the patent).
The lens gets very very close to the disk and designing it to never be able to touch the disk is difficult.
The article specifically says the disc comes 'unchucked' - I take that to mean it falls off the center spindle, not merely that the disc warps enough through gyroscopic or vibration forces to let it make momentary contact.
It's not good for any disc drive to sit side ways.
I think it's fair to say that any disc drive can be (and should be) properly designed to tolerate operation at any angle. It also can (and should) be designed to tolerate a reasonable amount of movement of the drive.
That's kinda like asking "Where's the IBM of marble sculpture?"
You can mass-produce ICs. If you've found a way to mass-produce large parabolic or hyperbolic wavelength-accurate mirrors, well, you should definitely submit that one to Slashdot, OK?
MS doesn't have the power to coerce decent drivers out of the manufacturers
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot) and they do have the power to maintain a public knowledge base of third-party driver problems (stick).
Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.
If you have to put up with consumer-level crap, put up with someone else's consumer level crap. Last night I was helping someone configure their WBR-1310. After I set an ESSID, configured WPA2, set an admin password, and added a port forwarding rule, the router decided not to include a router option on its DHCP offers. Meaning none of the computers on their network got a default gateway IP. Resetting to factory defaults didn't fix it. Upgrading the firmware didn't fix it. Tech support couldn't fix it. Replacing the router with a different brand DID fix it.
Also, the DES-3226L rev Bs (kinda like the rev As in that they are both made by D-Link and both have 26 ports - but that's it) are an atrocity. The command line seems like it was put there to fulfill a checkbox requirement. The documentation for it (even the command completion help) doesn't match the actual commands at all, half the commands you'll never get to work, spanning tree is a total writeoff, and they tend to lose their config entirely a few times a year.
D-Link seriously needs to work on their quality control.
Recorded violins just don't sound like real violins.
That's a waveform problem, not a "subtle differences in volume" problem. Address the individual links in the chain until the quality problem is solved. It will probably be expensive.
And yes, of course I've attended live classical music.
You misspelled "dynamic range compression". The CD format has >90dB of dynamic range - more than your ear can hear in most environments. And if everyone was listening to CDs in their own private listening room, and didn't knee-jerk judge louder music to be better than quieter music, then that's how music might still get produced today. But they're not - music is listened to by people like your coworker, trying to play it just loud enough so they can hear the song in their cube but so that you're not bothered by it in yours, or in their cars over the sound of traffic, or at a rock concert where you can't hear yourself yell, etc. None of those people would be able to hear that single instrument tuning at the start of Beethoven's ninth in a reference recording.
It's certainly not a problem with speaker technology!
The point and purpose of Visa was not to create a way for banks to lend small sums of money (banks were spectacularly uninterested in this at the time, to the point where Visa almost didn't happen), but to create a better system of paying for things.
Great. I'm sure Dee feels his system is better for him too. Let me know when Dee gets off his butt and creates a new system that doesn't require a central clearing house, doesn't skim a few percent off the top, and can be used by any two ordinary people to pay each other in a theft-resistant manner, even via insecure postal mail. Until then, I'll presume he's still part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
That's correct. In fact, it's important to remember the cardinal rule of the airline business: The customer is always wrong.
LEDs are intrinsically a point light source, just like a small incandescent lamp. A lot of them are fairly directional, but only because of their built-in lens. The LEDs can just as easily be produced without any lens (in lieu of a light fixture's much larger mirror) or with a simple flat reflector or inverted cone lens.
Amen. Granted, any battery will have limits as to how fast it can be charged/discharged, and the rectifiers and inverters that feed it will have similar limits. If writers would consistently get this right, then maybe we could assume that that's what they were referring to when they mention a power figure. As is, we have to second-guess them.
Most people realize that energy sources need to be diverse. It's a useful thought experiment to see what it'd cost to power the whole country or world using a given technology, but it's also easy to forget that each technology has shortcomings that can be compensated for with other technologies. For example, large-scale energy storage, in addition to allowing for more wind turbines to be hooked to the grid, also enables a higher percentage of our energy to be generated by cheaper base-load plants instead of by the more expensive peak-load plants.
The sodium-sulfur batteries they are using are apparently 89-92% efficient (efficiency should increase with scale - these batteries must be kept at a temperature of about 300C and because of the square-cube law it's much easier to keep very big things hot). Large (>100kW) fully-inverting UPSs are often 94% efficient - the rectification/inversion needed for this could be similarly efficient.
If CO2 is produced in making the electricity, then wouldn't a tax mean electrolysis would still remain more expensive?
Sorry. I did indeed miss that.
Then why is most hydrogen not produced this way?
Specifically, an employee that has been laid off or fired. It'd be very pertinent to the discussion if you could cite one or two. I have googled for it, and all I found was armchair arguments, examples of when people quit (weren't fired), and many, many anecdotes of intimidation and out of court settlements. The most common theme I've found (both in past research and today) is that courts frown on employers preventing someone from making a living.
If your sucker employee signed standard boilerplate that kept them from taking any other job in the industry (leaving them flipping burgers or bagging groceries), then good luck enforcing that. If the contract was so specific as to say "You can't take a job with RIM", then I could see the courts being more agreeable to it. I'd still be very interested to see an example of it happening after a firing or layoff.
Contract boilerplate is viral. Do you know of any case law upholding that? Just because someone signed something saying they wanna be a slave doesn't mean they are one.
If you stop paying someone, they aren't your employee.
Ordinarily, this would work, but they are producing this as a monolithic unit - a single 281lb capacitor. You can also do it at the motor windings (similar to what they're starting to do with wind turbines), but you'd still need to design the rest of the electronics to cope with the wide voltage range (and size the wires to cope with the wide amperage range).
You'd have to be really careful with the switching circuitry too - if you make a positive-positive connection before you break a positive-negative connection, you're shorting out one of the capacitors. The patent notably omits any Equivalent Series Resistance specs, but given that this thing is internally wired as 31351 capacitors in parallel, I figure it could be on the scary side of one ohm (which makes it a lot worse than, say, a failed H-bridge stepper motor control hooked to traditional batteries). Hopefully the protection circuitry will be designed to interrupt at least 10000A.
Well, this is a capacitor. It *can* be discharged to 0%, but its voltage drops steadily as it discharges, to 0 as well (batteries have a much flatter discharge curve). In theory, it'll store the power indicated. In practice, your 100kW switching power supply may only be able to accommodate 1000-3500V input voltages, instead of 0-3500V (yes - 3500V according to the patent).
"Details of the implementation have been left as an exercise to the reader" isn't a particularly good way to get R&D funding.
The article specifically says the disc comes 'unchucked' - I take that to mean it falls off the center spindle, not merely that the disc warps enough through gyroscopic or vibration forces to let it make momentary contact.
It FALLS OFF. IT FALLS THE *@#$@# OFF.
I think it's fair to say that any disc drive can be (and should be) properly designed to tolerate operation at any angle. It also can (and should) be designed to tolerate a reasonable amount of movement of the drive.
That's kinda like asking "Where's the IBM of marble sculpture?"
You can mass-produce ICs. If you've found a way to mass-produce large parabolic or hyperbolic wavelength-accurate mirrors, well, you should definitely submit that one to Slashdot, OK?
Yggdrasil?
No. I merely think it'd be in their long-term best interest.
Microsoft has claimed for a long, long time that Windows' instability isn't Windows' fault; it's drivers. They should put up or shut up.
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot) and they do have the power to maintain a public knowledge base of third-party driver problems (stick).
Microsoft is only in this mess because they've been pawning that responsibility off on OEMs for years.
If you have to put up with consumer-level crap, put up with someone else's consumer level crap. Last night I was helping someone configure their WBR-1310. After I set an ESSID, configured WPA2, set an admin password, and added a port forwarding rule, the router decided not to include a router option on its DHCP offers. Meaning none of the computers on their network got a default gateway IP. Resetting to factory defaults didn't fix it. Upgrading the firmware didn't fix it. Tech support couldn't fix it. Replacing the router with a different brand DID fix it.
Also, the DES-3226L rev Bs (kinda like the rev As in that they are both made by D-Link and both have 26 ports - but that's it) are an atrocity. The command line seems like it was put there to fulfill a checkbox requirement. The documentation for it (even the command completion help) doesn't match the actual commands at all, half the commands you'll never get to work, spanning tree is a total writeoff, and they tend to lose their config entirely a few times a year.
D-Link seriously needs to work on their quality control.
That's a waveform problem, not a "subtle differences in volume" problem. Address the individual links in the chain until the quality problem is solved. It will probably be expensive.
And yes, of course I've attended live classical music.
You misspelled "dynamic range compression". The CD format has >90dB of dynamic range - more than your ear can hear in most environments. And if everyone was listening to CDs in their own private listening room, and didn't knee-jerk judge louder music to be better than quieter music, then that's how music might still get produced today. But they're not - music is listened to by people like your coworker, trying to play it just loud enough so they can hear the song in their cube but so that you're not bothered by it in yours, or in their cars over the sound of traffic, or at a rock concert where you can't hear yourself yell, etc. None of those people would be able to hear that single instrument tuning at the start of Beethoven's ninth in a reference recording.
It's certainly not a problem with speaker technology!
Watt? Horsepower? Michael Phelps? NSA datacenter electricity usage? Total solar output?
Great. I'm sure Dee feels his system is better for him too. Let me know when Dee gets off his butt and creates a new system that doesn't require a central clearing house, doesn't skim a few percent off the top, and can be used by any two ordinary people to pay each other in a theft-resistant manner, even via insecure postal mail. Until then, I'll presume he's still part of the problem.