You seem to be forgetting that the ultracaps will be outputting at 5volts for a computer. a voltage regulator will keep it that way. At 5 volts the capacitor we shall say has 60 amps of available power.
Laptop batteries are around 12V, and I can't see any reason a supercapacitor would be any different.
To recharge said capacitor you will need 300 watts of power, but the power grid outputs at 120 volts. 300/120 is 2.5 amps.
Batteries and capacitors aren't measured in amps, but amp/hours. At 300 watts, it'll take 1 hour to recharge your theoretical capacitor (assuming I read your specs right). The question, though, was doing it in one minute, which requires 60x the instantaneous current draw, which would be 150 amps for 1 minute. Obviously, the capacitor isn't 150 amps, but that is the current-rating the wires and outlet in question would need to be able to handle for the 1-minute charging time.
Seriously, it's funny how fast food is always blamed for increasing obesity in the western world. I'd say we Europeans on average eat about as much fast food as Americans, but we also travel by train and bus a lot more.
Ah yes, collective denial. Europe isn't that far behind the US as far as obesity is concerned. Whatever you're doing, it doesn't work...
Could be two circuits on one fuse, or perhaps the previous owner was an idiot and installed a higher power fuse... That'll be a great story to tell the fire department when the insulation around the wires in your walls melts and causes an electrical fire.
Of course, this is all assuming the wiring is original, as you said. It wouldn't be surprising for the wiring on a 80 year-old house to have been replaced sometime long before now.
The circuits in my house max out at 15 amps, but the wiring is probably 80 years old.
I doubt that very much. I lived in a 50 year-old house not long ago. All 2-prong outlets that I wouldn't trust to handle 10 amps (not that you can plug practically anything into those outlets anymore). Modern circuits, with 3-prong double-insulated outlets are 15 amps max. How did you determine they can handle 15amps? It's certainly not accurate.
That and the fact that I know most people can run their microwave longer than 90 seconds at a time.
Normal microwaves are well-under 15 amps. Only the very massive large capacity microwaves (eg. you'll find in restaurants) exceed 15 amps, and they're wired for special 240V outlets anyhow.
Of course, it's pretty common to have a couple high-power outlets in homes, usually one in the kitchen, garage or basement for such high-power appliances.
He was pointing out that a fast charge block could charge your battery in 5 seconds while still drawing less current from the grid than a 60W lightbulb.
"The Grid" isn't a problem, it can quite easily handle many extra amps being pulled through it. The problem is in the wiring needed to transfer that kind of power. Charging a 60watt battery in 5 seconds would require incredibly massive power cables and connectors, otherwise they'll melt under the huge current. Extremely high voltages would be very dangerous. And even if the connectors weren't a problem, do you really expect a tiny laptop (supercapacitor) battery to be built extra massive to be able to handle that kind of current?
Anyone that drives plenty, and uses their laptop more than momentarily, likely already has a 12v adapter or inverter. I don't see stopping at a gas station (every hour!) for a charge being an alternative.
Second, these capacitors would also have a rapid discharge time.
Yes, that's why capacitors are used in electronics at all. But that's not a reason to use them as laptop batteries. I don't see what use you are advocating here.
But after 3 years, it's due for replacement anyway by the standards I work with, and is reclaimed by the vendors or sold off to hobbyists. Are you seeing it earlier than that?
Absolutely. Whenever there's a large batch of new equipment (ie. with 100+ new PSUs) I'll find a couple with defects immediately, and even then, it's occasionally just subtle errors. Then, when they're nearing a year old I start expecting to see a few (less than 5%) of the machines experiencing unexplained reliability problem, like segfaults (and bus errors), or just a couple spontaneous reboots. A PSU swap almost always completely fixes it.
A few years ago, when bad caps were such a problem, PSU failures were even more common, but they were certainly much more obvious.
Ownership is the legal right to restrict the actions of others (namely the freedom to walk off with things).
Freedom != Anarchy
Property is an absolute necessity, second only to life. If I can't stop someone from taking the clothes off my back, and food from my mouth, I'm seriously restricted in my own freedom.
The same goes for your own life. You aren't free if anyone can just kill you, yet others aren't 'free' if they are prevented from killing you.
Since I was 17 more than four hundred thousand people have died participating in an activity that machines can now do flawlessly (if very slowly). This blows my mind.
You're exaggerating, in the extreme.
I'm willing to bet every (human) driver in this country would have succeeded with flying colors on this course as well. In fact the odds of a driver getting killed in an accident any specific day are extremely slim, and they'd be much smaller still, if you restrict that to low-speed driving, during the day, etc., etc.
The skill of these robotic drivers can only be determined with any reasonable accuracy after they have driven many MILLIONS of miles. Only then can you say they are, on average, safer than human drivers. And even then, it would still be insanely ridiculous to claim they drive flawlessly.
The power supply failures I've seen have been more profound and immediate, and I kept that in mind.
Sometimes that happens. Often, though, a marginal PSU provides stable power until it has been stressed for a while, only then you start getting bus errors and the like.
If they turn around and say it's due to my computer, I don't expect them to just guess "it's because you run Linux".
That's fine. Expecting them to be able to remotely diagnose the problem (that is not with their system) isn't reasonable, however.
But the incredibly fast charge time would be the killer app for this.
I don't see it. If there are available outlets, I'd be using them, rather than my battery. (High-power) electrical outlets don't magically show up on an airplane, halfway through the flight and disappear 5 minutes later...
when you can charge it in a minute or two does that really matter?
To recharge current laptop batteries in 1 minute on 120V would require a 30 amp outlet, while standard outlets max-out at 15 (and I don't recommend maxing them out, BTW).
I believe that has been debunked as an urban legend.
Absolutely not. That guy lacks any real-world experience, so he assumes nobody uses batteries in a regular enough pattern to develop a memory effect... Absolutely incorrect.
The only thing he said that is really true is that people over-use the term "memory effect" all too often, when really they're just talking about the effects of cell aging.
Power supplies are one of the *least* likely components to fail: memory is the most vulnerable, CPU's are second especially with cooling issues.
That's precisely the opposite of all my years of experience.
(If not counting fans) PSUs are by far the #1 component to fail, and motherboards are #2, right about the same level as hard drive failures. From there, RAM failure is a much less frequent problem, and CPUs far less frequent still.
Of course, this is from my experience with shops that have halfway decent techs. Terrible cases, insufficient cooling, cables improperly installed (blocking fans) can always cause a system to self-destruct, but then it's not a question of failures, it's a question of what part some incompetent idiot in tech put a screwdriver through this time...
Yes, I expect them to guess right, or to say "we don't know". I don't expect a wrong guess from "commercial support".
There's no way they can possibly be expected to make such determinations, across a range of 3rd party hardware. Of course they should have said "hardware failure... possibly the PSU" or something along those lines. But in any case, you shouldn't be getting hardware advice from your software support company, no matter how much you are paying them.
Ever called your gas station for advice because your car stalled? Ever called NBC to ask why your TV doesn't turn on? Ever called Betty Crocker because your stove won't stay lit?
Last time they took me though a whole mess to run dumps for them and such and told me it was a bad power supply, luckily I did not believe them and when IBM ran the diags it was a bad cpu... nice job guys.
You think that RedHat support, over the phone, could CONCEIVABLY be able to tell the difference between a defective CPU and a flaky power supply, particularly when they have no association with the hardware maker, and PSUs don't have any kind of data interface to the rest of the system?
The fact that they conclusively informed you it was a hardware fault, rather than a software bug, is the most you could possibly ask from the best support service, anywhere. This is the direct opposite of Microsoft, who CONSTANTLY blame perfectly good hardware, when (eg.) 99% of the time it is in fact some bug in their software.
Three autonomous vehicles crossed the finish line within the 6-hour time limit here at the DARPA Urban Challenge in Victorville, CA.
Why is NOW the first time I've heard where it was being held? I looked through the past/. articles, and NONE of the pages linked bothered to put in the two magic words to tell readers where it was being held. You had to navigate DARPA's site to find that info, so basically, only those people already determined to go would find out where it was happening.
Had I at all known it was being held so close, I would certainly have gone and watched.
Yes, but 3/4 of the energy is wasted by the ICE, so you can divide that by 4 to figure out how much a battery or capacitor-powered electric vehicle will need.
Your problem is that you are looking at a square peg, and assuming it has to go in that round hole.
if you have a car with a 10 gallon tank and you fill it up in 2 minutes
How fast a car CAN be fueled-up is irrelevant to anyone outside of NASCAR. Refueling electric cars is quite simple, you just need to get your mind away from trying to copy a "gas station" model. The only reason we have gas stations at all is because gas is too difficult to handle, and far too dangerous to be conveniently located where we (humans) are already going. Making another stop for fuel is NOT a benefit, it's a necessary EVIL we've grown accustomed to, but the end of petroleum signals the end of that necessity.
Here in California, we've long had refueling stations for electric cars. They are just little boxes at the front of a parking space (at airports and shopping malls) where you plug in your car, swipe your credit card, and go away for a couple hours. With newer, faster-charging batteries, that shouldn't be difficult to cut down to 30 minutes or less, and put such charging stations at every few fast-food restaurants along the highways. Then, instead of wasting 10 minutes looking around for a gas station, and standing around while your car is refueling, you just spend 30 seconds hooking it up, and it magically gets charged without any thought or effort on your part...
No support for Linux or Mac machines (about 10% of the US market right now)
In fact, no support for any Windows versions before XP (Using 2000? Too bad). No support for Windows (even XP/Vista) if using any web browser other than IE.
Only a small subset of their movies support this option, mostly stuff from the 80s and earlier
There's plenty of stuff from the 90s, and what's more, there's were lots of good movies from the 80s and earlier that I still enjoy watching, almost all of which aren't available for watching online...
Scrolling through the top 50 is a sad, sad experience.
I'm wondering when they'll get rid of CCD entirely and move to a 4 "pixel" sensor with a DLP chip in between handling the scanning, instead of a bunch of piddly pixels on a 1/3" ccd.
It doesn't take any skills at all to predict the demise of the CCD, in favor of CMOS sensors.
They're in the best (pro) digital cameras out there right now, and they're continually decreasing sensor noise, so it might not be long before a digital camera can actually take a picture at night and not look like fuzzy crap.
The sensors could be larger, with focusing lenses in between.
There's nothing limiting sensor size now... Except the fact that nobody seems to want 10+ megapixel cameras to begin with, so there's no point to it.
There's no reason a DLP couldn't work in reverse, I don't think.
Maybe the fact that DLP is just a chip with a bunch of tiny mirrors, and not an optical sensor of any kind? You might as well propose replacing CCDs with bananas.
When I go to Netflix I see "Watch movies instantly on your PC". Did I miss something?
Yes you did... Try actually USING the service. Whatever they're using does a HORRIBLE job with the conversion from DVD.
Lots of aliasing, like they use some incredibly crappy deinterlacing filter. The video is scaled out to square pixels, even though WMV supports aspects just fine. Anyone who knows one bit about video encoding will force dimensions to multiples of 16, but the videos I've seen aren't even multiples of 4... huge waste of bits. And that, unfortunately, holds true... don't even try watching at any bitrate below the max (some 6000kbps), even with a file size of 2GBs it looks like a 1-CD rip you might find floating around on some P2P network.
Their inverse telecine filter is crap, if it exists at all. Progressive DVDs (film) are encoded passably, but anime I've seen is HORRIBLE. Take Ninja Scroll, use some braindead deinterlacing filter that blurs the two fields, so you have the old telecine ghosts every 5th frame and it looks like complete crap... then drop one out of every 5 frames (but be sure to keep the horrible blurred frames) to make sure you completely destroy the picture... then you've just started to approximate what the Netflix conversion process does.
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No, it would be a HUGE security hole to do otherwise.
Laptop batteries are around 12V, and I can't see any reason a supercapacitor would be any different.
Batteries and capacitors aren't measured in amps, but amp/hours. At 300 watts, it'll take 1 hour to recharge your theoretical capacitor (assuming I read your specs right). The question, though, was doing it in one minute, which requires 60x the instantaneous current draw, which would be 150 amps for 1 minute. Obviously, the capacitor isn't 150 amps, but that is the current-rating the wires and outlet in question would need to be able to handle for the 1-minute charging time.
Ah yes, collective denial. Europe isn't that far behind the US as far as obesity is concerned. Whatever you're doing, it doesn't work...
Could be two circuits on one fuse, or perhaps the previous owner was an idiot and installed a higher power fuse... That'll be a great story to tell the fire department when the insulation around the wires in your walls melts and causes an electrical fire.
Of course, this is all assuming the wiring is original, as you said. It wouldn't be surprising for the wiring on a 80 year-old house to have been replaced sometime long before now.
I doubt that very much. I lived in a 50 year-old house not long ago. All 2-prong outlets that I wouldn't trust to handle 10 amps (not that you can plug practically anything into those outlets anymore). Modern circuits, with 3-prong double-insulated outlets are 15 amps max. How did you determine they can handle 15amps? It's certainly not accurate.
Normal microwaves are well-under 15 amps. Only the very massive large capacity microwaves (eg. you'll find in restaurants) exceed 15 amps, and they're wired for special 240V outlets anyhow.
Of course, it's pretty common to have a couple high-power outlets in homes, usually one in the kitchen, garage or basement for such high-power appliances.
"The Grid" isn't a problem, it can quite easily handle many extra amps being pulled through it. The problem is in the wiring needed to transfer that kind of power. Charging a 60watt battery in 5 seconds would require incredibly massive power cables and connectors, otherwise they'll melt under the huge current. Extremely high voltages would be very dangerous. And even if the connectors weren't a problem, do you really expect a tiny laptop (supercapacitor) battery to be built extra massive to be able to handle that kind of current?
Yes, that's exactly how it works.
No, I'm talking about moving 55 watts over a 1 minute period.
No, after 1 MINUTE it adds up to 30 amps.
If your "given point" is a fraction of a second, I suppose...
I'm pretty well convinced at this point you haven't the slightest idea how electricity works.
Anyone that drives plenty, and uses their laptop more than momentarily, likely already has a 12v adapter or inverter. I don't see stopping at a gas station (every hour!) for a charge being an alternative.
Yes, that's why capacitors are used in electronics at all. But that's not a reason to use them as laptop batteries. I don't see what use you are advocating here.
Absolutely. Whenever there's a large batch of new equipment (ie. with 100+ new PSUs) I'll find a couple with defects immediately, and even then, it's occasionally just subtle errors. Then, when they're nearing a year old I start expecting to see a few (less than 5%) of the machines experiencing unexplained reliability problem, like segfaults (and bus errors), or just a couple spontaneous reboots. A PSU swap almost always completely fixes it.
A few years ago, when bad caps were such a problem, PSU failures were even more common, but they were certainly much more obvious.
Freedom != Anarchy
Property is an absolute necessity, second only to life. If I can't stop someone from taking the clothes off my back, and food from my mouth, I'm seriously restricted in my own freedom.
The same goes for your own life. You aren't free if anyone can just kill you, yet others aren't 'free' if they are prevented from killing you.
You're exaggerating, in the extreme.
I'm willing to bet every (human) driver in this country would have succeeded with flying colors on this course as well. In fact the odds of a driver getting killed in an accident any specific day are extremely slim, and they'd be much smaller still, if you restrict that to low-speed driving, during the day, etc., etc.
The skill of these robotic drivers can only be determined with any reasonable accuracy after they have driven many MILLIONS of miles. Only then can you say they are, on average, safer than human drivers. And even then, it would still be insanely ridiculous to claim they drive flawlessly.
Sometimes that happens. Often, though, a marginal PSU provides stable power until it has been stressed for a while, only then you start getting bus errors and the like.
That's fine. Expecting them to be able to remotely diagnose the problem (that is not with their system) isn't reasonable, however.
You've proven you can charge a laptop battery in an hour. Now multiple 0.5 amps by 60 to see that it'll take a 30 amp outlet for 1-minute charging.
I don't see it. If there are available outlets, I'd be using them, rather than my battery. (High-power) electrical outlets don't magically show up on an airplane, halfway through the flight and disappear 5 minutes later...
To recharge current laptop batteries in 1 minute on 120V would require a 30 amp outlet, while standard outlets max-out at 15 (and I don't recommend maxing them out, BTW).
Absolutely not. That guy lacks any real-world experience, so he assumes nobody uses batteries in a regular enough pattern to develop a memory effect... Absolutely incorrect.
The only thing he said that is really true is that people over-use the term "memory effect" all too often, when really they're just talking about the effects of cell aging.
That's precisely the opposite of all my years of experience.
(If not counting fans) PSUs are by far the #1 component to fail, and motherboards are #2, right about the same level as hard drive failures. From there, RAM failure is a much less frequent problem, and CPUs far less frequent still.
Of course, this is from my experience with shops that have halfway decent techs. Terrible cases, insufficient cooling, cables improperly installed (blocking fans) can always cause a system to self-destruct, but then it's not a question of failures, it's a question of what part some incompetent idiot in tech put a screwdriver through this time...
There's no way they can possibly be expected to make such determinations, across a range of 3rd party hardware. Of course they should have said "hardware failure... possibly the PSU" or something along those lines. But in any case, you shouldn't be getting hardware advice from your software support company, no matter how much you are paying them.
Ever called your gas station for advice because your car stalled? Ever called NBC to ask why your TV doesn't turn on? Ever called Betty Crocker because your stove won't stay lit?
You think that RedHat support, over the phone, could CONCEIVABLY be able to tell the difference between a defective CPU and a flaky power supply, particularly when they have no association with the hardware maker, and PSUs don't have any kind of data interface to the rest of the system?
The fact that they conclusively informed you it was a hardware fault, rather than a software bug, is the most you could possibly ask from the best support service, anywhere. This is the direct opposite of Microsoft, who CONSTANTLY blame perfectly good hardware, when (eg.) 99% of the time it is in fact some bug in their software.
What a great basis to bash an organization...
Why is NOW the first time I've heard where it was being held? I looked through the past
Had I at all known it was being held so close, I would certainly have gone and watched.
Yes, but 3/4 of the energy is wasted by the ICE, so you can divide that by 4 to figure out how much a battery or capacitor-powered electric vehicle will need.
Your problem is that you are looking at a square peg, and assuming it has to go in that round hole.
How fast a car CAN be fueled-up is irrelevant to anyone outside of NASCAR. Refueling electric cars is quite simple, you just need to get your mind away from trying to copy a "gas station" model. The only reason we have gas stations at all is because gas is too difficult to handle, and far too dangerous to be conveniently located where we (humans) are already going. Making another stop for fuel is NOT a benefit, it's a necessary EVIL we've grown accustomed to, but the end of petroleum signals the end of that necessity.
Here in California, we've long had refueling stations for electric cars. They are just little boxes at the front of a parking space (at airports and shopping malls) where you plug in your car, swipe your credit card, and go away for a couple hours. With newer, faster-charging batteries, that shouldn't be difficult to cut down to 30 minutes or less, and put such charging stations at every few fast-food restaurants along the highways. Then, instead of wasting 10 minutes looking around for a gas station, and standing around while your car is refueling, you just spend 30 seconds hooking it up, and it magically gets charged without any thought or effort on your part...
Just wait until the mole-men get wind of it... Then you'll be sorry.
In fact, no support for any Windows versions before XP (Using 2000? Too bad). No support for Windows (even XP/Vista) if using any web browser other than IE.
There's plenty of stuff from the 90s, and what's more, there's were lots of good movies from the 80s and earlier that I still enjoy watching, almost all of which aren't available for watching online...
Scrolling through the top 50 is a sad, sad experience.
As I said, standard live-action film is passible. Their Anime conversions, however, will look horrible even if you watch it on a 9" screen.
It doesn't take any skills at all to predict the demise of the CCD, in favor of CMOS sensors.
They're in the best (pro) digital cameras out there right now, and they're continually decreasing sensor noise, so it might not be long before a digital camera can actually take a picture at night and not look like fuzzy crap.
There's nothing limiting sensor size now... Except the fact that nobody seems to want 10+ megapixel cameras to begin with, so there's no point to it.
Maybe the fact that DLP is just a chip with a bunch of tiny mirrors, and not an optical sensor of any kind? You might as well propose replacing CCDs with bananas.
Yes you did... Try actually USING the service. Whatever they're using does a HORRIBLE job with the conversion from DVD.
Lots of aliasing, like they use some incredibly crappy deinterlacing filter. The video is scaled out to square pixels, even though WMV supports aspects just fine. Anyone who knows one bit about video encoding will force dimensions to multiples of 16, but the videos I've seen aren't even multiples of 4... huge waste of bits. And that, unfortunately, holds true... don't even try watching at any bitrate below the max (some 6000kbps), even with a file size of 2GBs it looks like a 1-CD rip you might find floating around on some P2P network.
Their inverse telecine filter is crap, if it exists at all. Progressive DVDs (film) are encoded passably, but anime I've seen is HORRIBLE. Take Ninja Scroll, use some braindead deinterlacing filter that blurs the two fields, so you have the old telecine ghosts every 5th frame and it looks like complete crap... then drop one out of every 5 frames (but be sure to keep the horrible blurred frames) to make sure you completely destroy the picture... then you've just started to approximate what the Netflix conversion process does.