I didn't say it wouldn't work just that it is inefficient. You are also comparing a freezer (a cooling element) to a heat pump (while working as a heating element).
Heat pumps are called heat pumps because they take heat from one place and put it somewhere else. You cannot say that a freezer is merely a cooling element. Look at what's on the other end of it. As for efficiency, it's very, very easy to make a heat pump with a Coefficient of Performance (that is, watts moved + watts spent per watts spent) greater than 1. In fact, a broken, non-functional heat pump (that manages to still consume power) has a COP of 1! Look up Carnot Efficiency to see what is theoretically possible. Look up heat pump COP to see what is currently achievable.
While the dehumidifier is constantly trying to dry out the air in the car there is humid air seeping in.
There's no reason to try and get the car less humid than the air around it (if the interior has a wet bulb temperature less than the exterior wet bulb temperature, the windows will not fog up on the inside, because the car won't get colder than ambient and if the exterior air reaches the exterior wet bulb temperature, it rains). There are many, many reasons why cars get more humid than the air around them.
I fail to see the advantage since that warm air you are pumping in between the two pieces of glass must go somewhere
You would never, ever ever ever ever let cabin air in between the panes! You'd get moisture in there! There's lots of ways to heat something up without blowing air through it - use a little imagination.
Perhaps, but I think for much of what you propose the laws of physics are against you.
Go look up "Coefficient of Performance". Also look up "Carnot efficiency" to get an idea of the limit of what's theoretically possible. And after you're done with that...
at 0 degrees F the efficiency is worse than electric resistive heat.
This is a matter of choosing the right working fluids and pressures. The freezer in my house happily removes heat from 0 degree F air.
Solar panels are quite expensive and I doubt it would provide sufficient power to dehumidify a car.
The idea is that it would work slowly, constantly.
Even if it could be done cheaply and effectively too low of humidity is quite uncomfortable.
Everything in moderation. Cars are constantly accumulating moisture through people exhaling, wet/muddy shoes on the carpet, snow falling in from the roof when they open the door, etc. In the summer this largely takes care of itself, and you rarely worry about foggy windows. This would help in the winter, too.
Double paned windows would be impossible to defrost since the cold outer pane would never get warm enough to keep freezing rain from accumulating. That "waste" heat isn't exactly wasted.
You misunderstand. Yes, they would help insulate the car's interior from its exterior if necessary, but my suggestion was that it would be easier to heat them from the inside (the middle). This would let you defrost them faster and with less energy than a normal window.
The seats are going to be heated with inefficient, and inexpensive, resistive heating
Quite likely, yes. It'd be more expensive, but they could also use a pumped liquid (from a central heat pump) a la radiant flooring. If you go with the former, but the car still had a heat pump for other uses, it may still be a tossup as to which one would use more power, because those resistive elements would have less to heat.
Cooling is going to have to be by use of some kind of heat pump.
For cooling to near or below outside ambient temps, yes. For the initial cooling of a car that's been parked in the sun, a fanned vent or A/C economizer would be helpful.
All the gadgets I suggest would of course only be practical if they can be cheap enough, small enough, and be of enough positive benefit. But some things that are being written off as impractical would be practical if they were cheaply mass-produced.
Whilst you could sweat it out in a baking hot car, you can't drive with misted up or frozen wind shield. Heating and cooling both use huge amounts of power
That's very true. I don't see a way to address this without using up battery power that could have driven the car several miles further. However, I do see ways to reduce its effect:
Heating via heat pump - this can be 4x more efficient than resistive heat, and a heat pump designed to be operated in reverse can do your A/C too.
Continuous dehumidification - perhaps using power from a small solar panel to run a small dehumidifier which drains outside, or reheating some silica gel when the car is plugged into the grid (again, venting the moisture outside). Lowering the wet bulb temperature inside the car reduces the need to use heat to unfog windows.
Double-paned windows - these would be bulkier and more expensive to produce, but you could quickly heat just the insides of them. They would also be much quieter.
Heated seats - directly heat the passengers' cores instead of everything else in the car.
The grandparent probably meant 95% (technically, 95.6%), not 90%. Ethanol is hygroscopic (it absorbs water). If you have 100% ethanol, and leave it exposed to air (or attempt repeated distillations), it'll become 95.6% ethanol + 4.4% water (Everclear). Additives can prevent this - the grandparent mentioned benzene and Wikipedia mentions glycerol. If you're drinking it, you probably want to stick with that 4.4% water. Maybe a little more than that, actually.
I'm not sure why this guy paid $400 for an 80 Gb SSD. I just upgraded my music server to a 64 Gb SSD, and it only cost $100. Maybe the one he got is a fancier, faster drive?
Price/GB for SSDs seems to be largely proportional to the number of write operations per second the SSD can handle. Once a handful of manufacturers solve that particular puzzle, I expect prices will drop significantly.
I looked at the PDF of the takedown. Yes, it mentioned those four things as "particularly egregious" but it was a blanket take-down demand. Let's examine the basis they list for their complaint and their demand:
Accordingly, we hereby demand that you immediately remove the above-mentioned objectionable and harmful content from your website, as well as terminate the Blog author's account.
(emphasis mine)
If Wordpress hadn't exhibited some common sense, Fake Chuck would have had to find a new home.
...in a science museum, looking at an exhibit so massive it required the entire building to be designed around it, whose entire point was to show this effect
And they couldn't even put it in a vacuum chamber?:)
Thanks. That link is much clearer than the original article, and describes a (relatively) simple experiment to reproduce the results.
Now go update the Wikipedia article on photons: "A photon [...] is described by exactly three continuous parameters: the components of its wave vector, which determine its wavelength Î and its direction of propagation."
Fascinating. I'm certainly not an expert in particle physics, but since photons are both particles and waves, is particle spin entirely distinct from electromagnetic polarization?
The article appears to be referring to right or left circular polarization, as opposed to horizontal or vertical polarization. A horizontally-oriented dipole transmitting near a vertically-oriented dipole will be heard much more faintly - 20db+ quieter. Similarly, a left-polarized antenna won't interfere with a right-polarized antenna. But a circularly-polarized antenna will still interfere with a horizontally or vertically polarized antenna - it'll only be 3db weaker.
In my digging, I also found these which I think might help me. I'd STFW'd all these before but come up empty handed until I reread every Citrix support article I could find:
as long as your clients are all using version 9 or newer client software they will use the new MPS4... if your clients are windows machines
Well, you taught me something new. Unfortunately the examples I listed above were indeed using the new UPD (the printer was autocreated using the "Citrix Universal Printer" driver instead of whatever driver was configured as the UPD driver - I do notice the latter behavior when connecting from my Linux box, now that you pointed it out.)
What rendering bugs are you running into with the UPD?
I haven't been keeping a laundry list, but two examples include an HP Photosmart C6200 printing everything in an exact right-to-left mirror image (HP recommends mapping this to the Officejet 5700 driver - that didn't work and we ended up mapping it to the HP Officejet driver, losing color printing) and Calyx Point not rendering any fonts intelligibly on HP 3030/3055/3330 printers.
I suppose it's possible I haven't been configuring something correctly, but in my experience it generally doesn't work any better than, say, mapping all client printers to the same driver would.
The MPS4 UPD literally presents the clients available features and then picks up the Windows EMF file and ships it off to the client to run through the driver locally.
Huh? Then why is there a specific driver selected to be the universal driver for each printing language (PS, PCL5c, PCL4, etc), which is used on the server to render the job? Am I doing something wrong?
You're doing it wrong, we support ~30 users per server
Exactly how does one do it right when they're using Windows? Our Citrix servers (also quad-core 4GB servers) tend to act squirrelly with more than 20 users and often roll over and die above 30 (regardless of how much free RAM we have and how idle the CPUs and disks are). Granted we're still running PS4 and Windows Server 2003. Printing is usually the first thing to die (too many rendering bugs in the Universal Driver, and we can't replace all our printers with 10-year-old monsters so we can use all-Microsoft drivers that MS would support). We actually had a Citrix sales rep and his tech consultant wingman out to look at our environment a few months ago and their recommendation (I shit you not) was to set up half a dozen virtual machines on each physical server and run Citrix within each of them so we'd have fewer users on each one.
I ran into very similar limits on Windows Server 2000 + Terminal Services at the job I was at before this one. About the only apps in common between the companies were Office, IE, and Acrobat.
Also - can anyone comment on XPS printing in XenApp 5?
What I want to know is if the RAID controller had a battery backup unit installed so write caching could be enabled. There is no BBU shown in the article's picture of the controller.
I recently built a new Exchange server with 6 X-25Ms (we couldn't get the 64GB X25-Es when we ordered it) hooked to a 3ware 9650 in three separate RAID1 arrays. Turning on write caching switches the whole feel of the system from disappointingly sluggish to there-is-no-way-these-tire-marks-were-made-by-a-'64-Buick-Skylark-convertible fast.
For something arcane like Vorbis (or the video codecs they'd like pursued) you can spend money on hundreds or thousands of programmer man-years and not get anything better. Not that many people on the planet really have their head wrapped around the problem (both the math and the psychoacoustic/psychovisual). You're looking for the right person at the right place at the right time, and you won't know whether you actually had any of the above until you've spent your money.
OP refers to usage #1 (a linear mapping of dates from c. 4700 BC onward).
You'd seriously use this for doing calculations between two dates on a modern calendar? You'd convert beginning-of-the-day-midnight to middle-of-the-day-midnight and back again? You'd flip a coin and decide whether or not to store dates internally in a common timezone? You'd add in your own leap years when necessary? (which brings us back to this bug - please look at what exactly the faulty source code was trying to do!)
There are very good reasons for internally storing dates as ordinal. But unless there is a good reason not to, please use your operating system's (or SQL database's, etc) native format/epoch for it, and please use their code, not your own, for calculating those dates. And if you do find yourself in a position where you're the one writing that code for others' benefit, please be at least as pedantic as I have been in this thread. Society at large is counting on you.
And maybe after society rebuilds itself from global catastrophe, and all memory of the Roman Empire or the frickin' month of July have been long forgotten, they'll be right.
I highly recommend that in cases like this, programmers be good Catholics and abide by the decree of Pope Gregory XIII. Software written to work with modern dates should use Gregorian, not Julian. Or did you mean ordinal?
From the article you linked to: The use of Julian date to refer to the day-of-year (ordinal date) is usually considered to be incorrect, however it is widely used that way in the earth sciences and computer programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Before they collapse and die, can you get them to fix the HTTP "Referer" field name?
Heat pumps are called heat pumps because they take heat from one place and put it somewhere else. You cannot say that a freezer is merely a cooling element. Look at what's on the other end of it. As for efficiency, it's very, very easy to make a heat pump with a Coefficient of Performance (that is, watts moved + watts spent per watts spent) greater than 1. In fact, a broken, non-functional heat pump (that manages to still consume power) has a COP of 1! Look up Carnot Efficiency to see what is theoretically possible. Look up heat pump COP to see what is currently achievable.
There's no reason to try and get the car less humid than the air around it (if the interior has a wet bulb temperature less than the exterior wet bulb temperature, the windows will not fog up on the inside, because the car won't get colder than ambient and if the exterior air reaches the exterior wet bulb temperature, it rains). There are many, many reasons why cars get more humid than the air around them.
You would never, ever ever ever ever let cabin air in between the panes! You'd get moisture in there! There's lots of ways to heat something up without blowing air through it - use a little imagination.
I invite you to keep thinking.
Go look up "Coefficient of Performance". Also look up "Carnot efficiency" to get an idea of the limit of what's theoretically possible. And after you're done with that...
...form your own opinion.
This is a matter of choosing the right working fluids and pressures. The freezer in my house happily removes heat from 0 degree F air.
The idea is that it would work slowly, constantly.
Everything in moderation. Cars are constantly accumulating moisture through people exhaling, wet/muddy shoes on the carpet, snow falling in from the roof when they open the door, etc. In the summer this largely takes care of itself, and you rarely worry about foggy windows. This would help in the winter, too.
You misunderstand. Yes, they would help insulate the car's interior from its exterior if necessary, but my suggestion was that it would be easier to heat them from the inside (the middle). This would let you defrost them faster and with less energy than a normal window.
Quite likely, yes. It'd be more expensive, but they could also use a pumped liquid (from a central heat pump) a la radiant flooring. If you go with the former, but the car still had a heat pump for other uses, it may still be a tossup as to which one would use more power, because those resistive elements would have less to heat.
For cooling to near or below outside ambient temps, yes. For the initial cooling of a car that's been parked in the sun, a fanned vent or A/C economizer would be helpful.
All the gadgets I suggest would of course only be practical if they can be cheap enough, small enough, and be of enough positive benefit. But some things that are being written off as impractical would be practical if they were cheaply mass-produced.
That's very true. I don't see a way to address this without using up battery power that could have driven the car several miles further. However, I do see ways to reduce its effect:
The grandparent probably meant 95% (technically, 95.6%), not 90%. Ethanol is hygroscopic (it absorbs water). If you have 100% ethanol, and leave it exposed to air (or attempt repeated distillations), it'll become 95.6% ethanol + 4.4% water (Everclear). Additives can prevent this - the grandparent mentioned benzene and Wikipedia mentions glycerol. If you're drinking it, you probably want to stick with that 4.4% water. Maybe a little more than that, actually.
I accidentally the yttrium arsenide plasma. Can you fix?
Price/GB for SSDs seems to be largely proportional to the number of write operations per second the SSD can handle. Once a handful of manufacturers solve that particular puzzle, I expect prices will drop significantly.
And to think I almost went with Sado-m Ass Services!
I looked at the PDF of the takedown. Yes, it mentioned those four things as "particularly egregious" but it was a blanket take-down demand. Let's examine the basis they list for their complaint and their demand:
(emphasis mine)
If Wordpress hadn't exhibited some common sense, Fake Chuck would have had to find a new home.
And they couldn't even put it in a vacuum chamber? :)
Thanks. That link is much clearer than the original article, and describes a (relatively) simple experiment to reproduce the results.
Now go update the Wikipedia article on photons: "A photon [...] is described by exactly three continuous parameters: the components of its wave vector, which determine its wavelength Î and its direction of propagation."
Fascinating. I'm certainly not an expert in particle physics, but since photons are both particles and waves, is particle spin entirely distinct from electromagnetic polarization?
The article appears to be referring to right or left circular polarization, as opposed to horizontal or vertical polarization. A horizontally-oriented dipole transmitting near a vertically-oriented dipole will be heard much more faintly - 20db+ quieter. Similarly, a left-polarized antenna won't interfere with a right-polarized antenna. But a circularly-polarized antenna will still interfere with a horizontally or vertically polarized antenna - it'll only be 3db weaker.
Probably because it's labelled "Microsoft Update" - implying that it updates anything from Microsoft on the computer.
If Microsoft wants everyone to use a new "Computer Update" service, then they better call it that and see how many people they can get to click on it.
Does this article (Presentation Server Client 10.x Introduces a New Method for Printing Documents From the Advanced Universal Print Driver) describe the registry key you're talking about?
In my digging, I also found these which I think might help me. I'd STFW'd all these before but come up empty handed until I reread every Citrix support article I could find:
Intermittent Client Printer Autocreation Failures
Mirrored/Inverted Print Jobs Appear when Printing from Presentation Server 4.0 (I'll have to doublecheck what client version the user had installed - it might be 9.x)
And this monster:
Case Study: Intermittent Client Printer Creation and Deletion Failures
Of course, I'm merely optimistic here, not happy. There's a wide, wide gulf between the two.
Well, you taught me something new. Unfortunately the examples I listed above were indeed using the new UPD (the printer was autocreated using the "Citrix Universal Printer" driver instead of whatever driver was configured as the UPD driver - I do notice the latter behavior when connecting from my Linux box, now that you pointed it out.)
I haven't been keeping a laundry list, but two examples include an HP Photosmart C6200 printing everything in an exact right-to-left mirror image (HP recommends mapping this to the Officejet 5700 driver - that didn't work and we ended up mapping it to the HP Officejet driver, losing color printing) and Calyx Point not rendering any fonts intelligibly on HP 3030/3055/3330 printers.
I suppose it's possible I haven't been configuring something correctly, but in my experience it generally doesn't work any better than, say, mapping all client printers to the same driver would.
Huh? Then why is there a specific driver selected to be the universal driver for each printing language (PS, PCL5c, PCL4, etc), which is used on the server to render the job? Am I doing something wrong?
Exactly how does one do it right when they're using Windows? Our Citrix servers (also quad-core 4GB servers) tend to act squirrelly with more than 20 users and often roll over and die above 30 (regardless of how much free RAM we have and how idle the CPUs and disks are). Granted we're still running PS4 and Windows Server 2003. Printing is usually the first thing to die (too many rendering bugs in the Universal Driver, and we can't replace all our printers with 10-year-old monsters so we can use all-Microsoft drivers that MS would support). We actually had a Citrix sales rep and his tech consultant wingman out to look at our environment a few months ago and their recommendation (I shit you not) was to set up half a dozen virtual machines on each physical server and run Citrix within each of them so we'd have fewer users on each one.
I ran into very similar limits on Windows Server 2000 + Terminal Services at the job I was at before this one. About the only apps in common between the companies were Office, IE, and Acrobat.
Also - can anyone comment on XPS printing in XenApp 5?
What I want to know is if the RAID controller had a battery backup unit installed so write caching could be enabled. There is no BBU shown in the article's picture of the controller.
I recently built a new Exchange server with 6 X-25Ms (we couldn't get the 64GB X25-Es when we ordered it) hooked to a 3ware 9650 in three separate RAID1 arrays. Turning on write caching switches the whole feel of the system from disappointingly sluggish to there-is-no-way-these-tire-marks-were-made-by-a-'64-Buick-Skylark-convertible fast.
For something arcane like Vorbis (or the video codecs they'd like pursued) you can spend money on hundreds or thousands of programmer man-years and not get anything better. Not that many people on the planet really have their head wrapped around the problem (both the math and the psychoacoustic/psychovisual). You're looking for the right person at the right place at the right time, and you won't know whether you actually had any of the above until you've spent your money.
Agreed, they are definitely above us. Hey, devs! Shit your code on the toilet, not on us!
You'd seriously use this for doing calculations between two dates on a modern calendar? You'd convert beginning-of-the-day-midnight to middle-of-the-day-midnight and back again? You'd flip a coin and decide whether or not to store dates internally in a common timezone? You'd add in your own leap years when necessary? (which brings us back to this bug - please look at what exactly the faulty source code was trying to do!)
There are very good reasons for internally storing dates as ordinal. But unless there is a good reason not to, please use your operating system's (or SQL database's, etc) native format/epoch for it, and please use their code, not your own, for calculating those dates. And if you do find yourself in a position where you're the one writing that code for others' benefit, please be at least as pedantic as I have been in this thread. Society at large is counting on you.
And maybe after society rebuilds itself from global catastrophe, and all memory of the Roman Empire or the frickin' month of July have been long forgotten, they'll be right.
I highly recommend that in cases like this, programmers be good Catholics and abide by the decree of Pope Gregory XIII. Software written to work with modern dates should use Gregorian, not Julian. Or did you mean ordinal?
From the article you linked to: The use of Julian date to refer to the day-of-year (ordinal date) is usually considered to be incorrect, however it is widely used that way in the earth sciences and computer programming.