Don't we call a 'dumb tablet' a "monitor"? Y'know, those crazy devices that have(ever since the earliest digital displays, even if you don't want to count the analog ones), explicitly depended on a more capable device to directly fill a tiny amount of storage(corresponding to one frame worth, sometimes less if there is a clever timing sync involved) with the necessary data?
Christ, Bezos, just swapping a wire for a wireless link doesn't make it novel...
As far as the RPi, it was more of a warning than a complaint. If I'm buying a laptop(particularly a business-class one) I damn well expect VGA because that is still the standard for projector wiring(all but the oldest projectors in service will support DVI/HDMI/something else; but the conference room wiring probably won't); but it otherwise seems slightly insane for computers to have an extraneous DAC and LCDs to have an extraneous ADC, just so that two otherwise digital devices can communicate over a not-particularly-good analog connector from 1987...
Given that that is what they do, though, and the submitter's question makes it sound like he'll be dealing with cheap and/or donor parts, knowing that RPis don't do VGA is something that seemed important.
I have nothing against them as a company, or as innovators(for reasons I'd rather not revisit, I once enjoyed the better part of a day grovelling through their documentation on simulating various PC timers, while ensuring certain sorts of consistency under varying CPU loads and across host migrations, a surprisingly hairy business).
I just strongly suspect that they are pretty much screwed.
The free version gives Vmware workstation a run for its money(if you are OK with running your day-to-day OS on top of it, rather than it on top of your OS, or you have a second machine); but it is the toy seats by the standards of what they aren't exactly giving away.
VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.
Vmware is arguably facing a serious structural squeeze: Outside of a few neat-but-not-necessarily-all-that-widely-used features, virtualization technology is being commodified pretty aggressively. Vmware is still arguably the easiest to use; but that doesn't help them much with customers who are running enough servers that having a few gurus in house is cheaper than paying the license fees. Even worse, at the same time that team FOSS is chipping away at the large-scale market, Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for the outfits who aren't going to go for Xen or KVM; but need to run Windows Server stuff anyway, and probably have some MS-comfortable guys in the shop.
If it were just a squeeze from one direction or the other, I'd be less pessimistic; but forces are converging on them from both sides. Unless Vmware discounts their licenses to nearly free, their high volume customers aren't likely to stick with them, and having strong enterprise support and brand recognition isn't exactly going to save them from Microsoft(who has the same thing) on the low-volume smaller shop end. Blood Bath.
You know, it would not surprise me if there was a community into doing so, and that would be kinda awesome ^_^
http://www.edisonia.com/ Recording and playback hardware, along with new blanks manufactured to period spec. (No association with them, though I've seen blanks that I think were produced by them used to record a couple of live performances)
It wouldn't save you from an emotionally defective nervous luddite; but the rPi does have the advantage of being trivially easy to 'blow away' and dump a stock image on. Re-imaging conventional computers isn't exactly news to anybody with an IT department; but it's a bit more complex than 'pop out SD card, shove into cardreader, clickety-click on the dd script that dumps a reasonably recent Rasbian image on the card, replace SD card in previously dysfunctional rPi.'
It's just a softball for the algorithm that promises to cut it down for 'time-conscious' readers(seriously, when did having the attention span of a crack-addled monkey get redefined as a good thing?) By repeating approximately one sentence worth of actual information more or less verbatim, it sharply increases the odds that the system will actually work...
but I guess vynil mastering needs a LOT more care than cd mastering. Unless you like to see needles jumping.
I suspect that the opposite is true: Vinyl cutting is definitely on the fiddly side of of things you would actually want to do in the field; but it can be done. Cutting CD pits in the field is sufficiently difficult that it just isn't done. Dye/laser based systems are cheap as chips; but to the best of my knowledge no mechanical pit-cutter has ever been used, certainly not in rooms with normal sized dust and crud.
Some people have become accustomed to these artifacts and so prefer them.
My personal theory is that (most) people's musical tastes, both in terms of medium and in terms of genre, tend to fossilize around the time that they either graduate high school or first get laid. Once fossilized, any vices and inconveniences of the medium are imbued with a warm sentimentality and the preferred genre is enshrined as real music, as compared to the outdated stuff listened to by those who came before them, and the noise listened to by damn kids these days.
Does anybody know what sort of bandwidth a record can manage? Telephone lines were never good enough, within audible bands(DSL obviously did a bit better, where available) to hit even 64kb/s, which is sort of the low-water-mark for vaguely-listenable mp3s. Do records have enough bandwidth that you could coax 128kb/s, or even more, out of a suitably formatted recording using the various modem techniques?
It's disgusting how so-called 'audiophiles' can bear to listen to music that has been tainted by electricity. Back in my day, we used Edison Cylinders, recorded entirely by the soundwaves emitted by the performance! (It is actually a neat process to watch, a horn concentrates the incoming sound and a sharp stylus attached to the diaphragm cuts the groove in the cylinder, 100% passive, except for the guy who brushes away the wax shavings)
'[Mass killers such as Lanza] don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'
Ok, that's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
Always remember that people blame video games in ways that are a substantial number of years behind the times. Has anybody actually kept a 'score sheet' since the days when mapping out your masochistically difficult roguelike RPG on graph paper(because the game damn well isn't going to do it for you, fucking wimp) was a thing?
If this were actually 'the work of a video gamer' it would be a list of achievements with names derived from witty allusions to what was required to unlock them...
"A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research'"
Has Officer Donut ever seen a doctoral thesis? You'd have to be going to a pretty shitty school if you can get a PhD for going all OCD on the media clippings file and copying down a spreadsheet full of kill stats...
Those oxygen mask things might have a nice muffling effect... Plus, depending on the gas mix, you might be able to kick the hyperventilating passengers into blissed-out euphoria, rather than dizziness and further panic.
I accidentally left mine on one flight and it was drained afterwards.
This is obviously handset/chipset dependent; but many cellphones will adjust their RF power use depending on signal strength. No point in shouting if the tower is nearby, you do what you have to(within technical and FCC limits) if you are at the edge of range. At cruising altitude, your phone probably spent hours screaming desperately into an uncaring void for an answer that would never come...
These rules are stupid and were based on the fear of the unknown instead of actual studies and evidence.
I have my concerns about cellphones... Not because they'll crash the plane; but because listening to 60 people babble loudly and relentlessly will make me wish that the would...
Anything silent, no problem; but if air travel features the TSA, little kids kicking the back of your seat, and cellphone chatter, it isn't going to be pretty.
I don't know how composite figures in; but my understanding is that the chip they chose(and there options were somewhat constrained, if they wanted to hit their BoM) didn't have VGA support, full stop, since it was designed for cellphones or something. HDMI/Single-link DVI are pretty much functionally identical(yes, HDMI has various additional bits and pieces; but unless an HDMI part implements one of the higher-bandwidth HDMI features or throws up its hands and refuses to work with a non-HDCP device, that isn't really relevant) and HDMI connectors are smaller, simpler, and cheaper than DVI ones.
VGA and S-Video might have been possible; but would have required a full active converter stage, which would not have been cheap. I assume that the chip has some sort of interface for driving small LCDs(either LVDS or one of the weird ones used by smaller, less demanding, LCDs); but I don't know whether they bothered to break it out. Absolutely nothing on the shelf speaks that externally, so it probably wasn't a priority.
The one potential issue with the rPi is VGA, or lack thereof.
For some insane reason, even to this day, when they barely sell analog CRTs anymore, bottom-of-range LCDs still come with only a VGA port. I don't know why throwing an extra ADC stage into the mix is economically viable; but them's the breaks.
An rPi will happily enough drive an HDMI display, with a basic HDMI cable, or a DVI display, with a passive adapter cable that costs barely more than a straight HDMI cable; but if you want VGA, prepare to pay more than the rPi cost for an active(which means powered, which probably means a nasty little wall-wart) converter box. It also has composite; but composite video brutalizes text pretty badly, making it ill suited for most computer applications.
If you are buying everything new the premium to get a monitor with some sort of digital-in isn't all that big(probably smaller than a VGA converter, and a lot more elegant) and the classier brand of off-lease donor gear should also have DVI support; but don't expect VGA to work, because it won't.
Given that all aerogels are extremely tenuous foams, I would strongly suspect that all of them are pretty good insulators(even if one were made of a very good conductor of heat, like silver, there is just so little solid and so much trapped-gas-pocket that good insulation is to be suspected). However, if the aerogel is made of a material that burns in oxygen, the same combination of a tiny amount of solid with plenty of gas probably results in a very swift burn once you get it started.
I'd suspect that a carbon aerogel would be only slightly worse as an insulator than a silica one; but I wouldn't try taking a blowtorch to it(except to see what happens...)
At the density levels we are talking about here, I'd assume that the surface area is absolutely enormous(particularly per unit weight) so normally-negligible things like gases absorbed onto the surface might become a significant factor, as well as those mechanically trapped within the pores.
The insulative properties are also pretty dramatic. There is another picture floating around with some crayons in place of the flower. That little stunt might not work as well with carbon aerogels as it does with silica ones, though...
I'm assuming that the 'density' figure given is a 'weight of graphene in a given volume' one, rather than one that includes the gasses occupying the pores/cells of the material?
It would be quite shocking indeed if something largely saturated in nitrogen and oxygen were less dense than helium...
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Don't we call a 'dumb tablet' a "monitor"? Y'know, those crazy devices that have(ever since the earliest digital displays, even if you don't want to count the analog ones), explicitly depended on a more capable device to directly fill a tiny amount of storage(corresponding to one frame worth, sometimes less if there is a clever timing sync involved) with the necessary data?
Christ, Bezos, just swapping a wire for a wireless link doesn't make it novel...
As far as the RPi, it was more of a warning than a complaint. If I'm buying a laptop(particularly a business-class one) I damn well expect VGA because that is still the standard for projector wiring(all but the oldest projectors in service will support DVI/HDMI/something else; but the conference room wiring probably won't); but it otherwise seems slightly insane for computers to have an extraneous DAC and LCDs to have an extraneous ADC, just so that two otherwise digital devices can communicate over a not-particularly-good analog connector from 1987...
Given that that is what they do, though, and the submitter's question makes it sound like he'll be dealing with cheap and/or donor parts, knowing that RPis don't do VGA is something that seemed important.
I have nothing against them as a company, or as innovators(for reasons I'd rather not revisit, I once enjoyed the better part of a day grovelling through their documentation on simulating various PC timers, while ensuring certain sorts of consistency under varying CPU loads and across host migrations, a surprisingly hairy business).
I just strongly suspect that they are pretty much screwed.
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/compare-kits.html
The free version gives Vmware workstation a run for its money(if you are OK with running your day-to-day OS on top of it, rather than it on top of your OS, or you have a second machine); but it is the toy seats by the standards of what they aren't exactly giving away.
VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.
Vmware is arguably facing a serious structural squeeze: Outside of a few neat-but-not-necessarily-all-that-widely-used features, virtualization technology is being commodified pretty aggressively. Vmware is still arguably the easiest to use; but that doesn't help them much with customers who are running enough servers that having a few gurus in house is cheaper than paying the license fees. Even worse, at the same time that team FOSS is chipping away at the large-scale market, Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for the outfits who aren't going to go for Xen or KVM; but need to run Windows Server stuff anyway, and probably have some MS-comfortable guys in the shop.
If it were just a squeeze from one direction or the other, I'd be less pessimistic; but forces are converging on them from both sides. Unless Vmware discounts their licenses to nearly free, their high volume customers aren't likely to stick with them, and having strong enterprise support and brand recognition isn't exactly going to save them from Microsoft(who has the same thing) on the low-volume smaller shop end. Blood Bath.
You know, it would not surprise me if there was a community into doing so, and that would be kinda awesome ^_^
http://www.edisonia.com/ Recording and playback hardware, along with new blanks manufactured to period spec. (No association with them, though I've seen blanks that I think were produced by them used to record a couple of live performances)
It wouldn't save you from an emotionally defective nervous luddite; but the rPi does have the advantage of being trivially easy to 'blow away' and dump a stock image on. Re-imaging conventional computers isn't exactly news to anybody with an IT department; but it's a bit more complex than 'pop out SD card, shove into cardreader, clickety-click on the dd script that dumps a reasonably recent Rasbian image on the card, replace SD card in previously dysfunctional rPi.'
It's just a softball for the algorithm that promises to cut it down for 'time-conscious' readers(seriously, when did having the attention span of a crack-addled monkey get redefined as a good thing?) By repeating approximately one sentence worth of actual information more or less verbatim, it sharply increases the odds that the system will actually work...
but I guess vynil mastering needs a LOT more care than cd mastering. Unless you like to see needles jumping.
I suspect that the opposite is true: Vinyl cutting is definitely on the fiddly side of of things you would actually want to do in the field; but it can be done. Cutting CD pits in the field is sufficiently difficult that it just isn't done. Dye/laser based systems are cheap as chips; but to the best of my knowledge no mechanical pit-cutter has ever been used, certainly not in rooms with normal sized dust and crud.
Some people have become accustomed to these artifacts and so prefer them.
My personal theory is that (most) people's musical tastes, both in terms of medium and in terms of genre, tend to fossilize around the time that they either graduate high school or first get laid. Once fossilized, any vices and inconveniences of the medium are imbued with a warm sentimentality and the preferred genre is enshrined as real music, as compared to the outdated stuff listened to by those who came before them, and the noise listened to by damn kids these days.
Can I listen to it on my mp3 player?
Does anybody know what sort of bandwidth a record can manage? Telephone lines were never good enough, within audible bands(DSL obviously did a bit better, where available) to hit even 64kb/s, which is sort of the low-water-mark for vaguely-listenable mp3s. Do records have enough bandwidth that you could coax 128kb/s, or even more, out of a suitably formatted recording using the various modem techniques?
It's disgusting how so-called 'audiophiles' can bear to listen to music that has been tainted by electricity. Back in my day, we used Edison Cylinders, recorded entirely by the soundwaves emitted by the performance! (It is actually a neat process to watch, a horn concentrates the incoming sound and a sharp stylus attached to the diaphragm cuts the groove in the cylinder, 100% passive, except for the guy who brushes away the wax shavings)
EVE players but we know Lanza didn't play EVE. EVE players usually end up on the receiving end of massacres, like in Benghazi, than going on them.
Isn't EVE a honeypot that attempts to neutralize potential white-collar criminals by giving them opportunities for epic fraud... With Spaceships!
'[Mass killers such as Lanza] don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'
Ok, that's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
Always remember that people blame video games in ways that are a substantial number of years behind the times. Has anybody actually kept a 'score sheet' since the days when mapping out your masochistically difficult roguelike RPG on graph paper(because the game damn well isn't going to do it for you, fucking wimp) was a thing?
If this were actually 'the work of a video gamer' it would be a list of achievements with names derived from witty allusions to what was required to unlock them...
"A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research'"
Has Officer Donut ever seen a doctoral thesis? You'd have to be going to a pretty shitty school if you can get a PhD for going all OCD on the media clippings file and copying down a spreadsheet full of kill stats...
Those oxygen mask things might have a nice muffling effect... Plus, depending on the gas mix, you might be able to kick the hyperventilating passengers into blissed-out euphoria, rather than dizziness and further panic.
I accidentally left mine on one flight and it was drained afterwards.
This is obviously handset/chipset dependent; but many cellphones will adjust their RF power use depending on signal strength. No point in shouting if the tower is nearby, you do what you have to(within technical and FCC limits) if you are at the edge of range. At cruising altitude, your phone probably spent hours screaming desperately into an uncaring void for an answer that would never come...
You are never going to get people to pay attention to those instructions. That's human nature.
"Hi kids! I'm Fuzzy, the natural selection wolf! Obey my instructions and you just might make it out alive!"
These rules are stupid and were based on the fear of the unknown instead of actual studies and evidence.
I have my concerns about cellphones... Not because they'll crash the plane; but because listening to 60 people babble loudly and relentlessly will make me wish that the would...
Anything silent, no problem; but if air travel features the TSA, little kids kicking the back of your seat, and cellphone chatter, it isn't going to be pretty.
I don't know how composite figures in; but my understanding is that the chip they chose(and there options were somewhat constrained, if they wanted to hit their BoM) didn't have VGA support, full stop, since it was designed for cellphones or something. HDMI/Single-link DVI are pretty much functionally identical(yes, HDMI has various additional bits and pieces; but unless an HDMI part implements one of the higher-bandwidth HDMI features or throws up its hands and refuses to work with a non-HDCP device, that isn't really relevant) and HDMI connectors are smaller, simpler, and cheaper than DVI ones.
VGA and S-Video might have been possible; but would have required a full active converter stage, which would not have been cheap. I assume that the chip has some sort of interface for driving small LCDs(either LVDS or one of the weird ones used by smaller, less demanding, LCDs); but I don't know whether they bothered to break it out. Absolutely nothing on the shelf speaks that externally, so it probably wasn't a priority.
The one potential issue with the rPi is VGA, or lack thereof.
For some insane reason, even to this day, when they barely sell analog CRTs anymore, bottom-of-range LCDs still come with only a VGA port. I don't know why throwing an extra ADC stage into the mix is economically viable; but them's the breaks.
An rPi will happily enough drive an HDMI display, with a basic HDMI cable, or a DVI display, with a passive adapter cable that costs barely more than a straight HDMI cable; but if you want VGA, prepare to pay more than the rPi cost for an active(which means powered, which probably means a nasty little wall-wart) converter box. It also has composite; but composite video brutalizes text pretty badly, making it ill suited for most computer applications.
If you are buying everything new the premium to get a monitor with some sort of digital-in isn't all that big(probably smaller than a VGA converter, and a lot more elegant) and the classier brand of off-lease donor gear should also have DVI support; but don't expect VGA to work, because it won't.
Given that all aerogels are extremely tenuous foams, I would strongly suspect that all of them are pretty good insulators(even if one were made of a very good conductor of heat, like silver, there is just so little solid and so much trapped-gas-pocket that good insulation is to be suspected). However, if the aerogel is made of a material that burns in oxygen, the same combination of a tiny amount of solid with plenty of gas probably results in a very swift burn once you get it started.
I'd suspect that a carbon aerogel would be only slightly worse as an insulator than a silica one; but I wouldn't try taking a blowtorch to it(except to see what happens...)
At the density levels we are talking about here, I'd assume that the surface area is absolutely enormous(particularly per unit weight) so normally-negligible things like gases absorbed onto the surface might become a significant factor, as well as those mechanically trapped within the pores.
The insulative properties are also pretty dramatic. There is another picture floating around with some crayons in place of the flower. That little stunt might not work as well with carbon aerogels as it does with silica ones, though...
I'm assuming that the 'density' figure given is a 'weight of graphene in a given volume' one, rather than one that includes the gasses occupying the pores/cells of the material?
It would be quite shocking indeed if something largely saturated in nitrogen and oxygen were less dense than helium...