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User: Agripa

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  1. Re:What's the point in wating for markets to turn on AMD Launches New Processor Socket Despite Poor Economy · · Score: 1

    It still requires BIOS support though as far as I know. Asus has been good about ECC support but Gigabyte leaves it out on the embedded graphics chipsets for some reason.

  2. Re:LOL on New Law Will Require Camera Phones To "Click" · · Score: 1

    That could depend on which wildlife you wish to photograph.

  3. Re:In particular on Obama Edicts Boost FOIA and .gov Websites · · Score: 1

    If he wanted a semi-auto he could just build 15-25 AR-15s for what he's spend on that single select fire M-16, which, although very tempting is satisfying in a much different way.

    I presume he wants an M-4 for the barrel length and not the select fire capability. Otherwise he could have just said M-16 which would indeed be very expensive. The former is still a restricted weapon being a short barreled rifle, but at least one can register and pay the tax on it. Just this past year someone posted their form 1140 for a 11.5 inch barreled M-15 stating "Zombies" as the reason why they intend to make the firearm.

    It's funny how a law in the Internal Revenue Code for the collection of tax revenue can be used for prohibition.

  4. Re:In particular on Obama Edicts Boost FOIA and .gov Websites · · Score: 1

    What this OP really wants is his own M4.

    Registering a post 1986 M4 legally is out of the question but I am not aware of anything preventing you from building the equivalent of an semiautomatic M4 from an M15 receiver. You would have to go through the process of registering it as a short barreled rifle and pay the tax of course.

  5. Re:In summary on RAM Disk Puts New Spin On the SSD · · Score: 1

    and you can't power off your PC for the night.

    I was a little surprised they did not include a way to tap the ATX 5 volt standby voltage.

  6. Re:Blindness on A Step Toward an Invisibility Cloak · · Score: 1

    Invisible man stories have always bothered me because of this. How does he see if his retina and various eye structures are invisible? H. G. Wells addressed this to a limited extent.

  7. Re:Cap and trade on Tapping the Earth For Home Heating and Cooling · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As I see it, the big problem is that cap and trade is spectacularly susceptable to rent seeking and regulatory capture. A carbon tax levied on non-renewable energy to offset negative externalities is much easier to both administer and understand while providing incentives through economics.

  8. Re:fixed angle panels are sub-optimum on Switching To Solar Power — Six Months Later · · Score: 1

    A couple servos and a few lines of code could make that fairly simple.

    The extra mechanical complexity and cost is significant. From what I have read, the further from the equator you are, the lower the return of adding a tracking system. In a lot of cases, the extra money spent on tracking would be better invested just adding more panels assuming there is room.

    The easy compromise would be to just build the frame so you could manually adjust the elevation every 3 to 6 months.

  9. Re:A waste of time on Switching To Solar Power — Six Months Later · · Score: 1

    The subsidy should have the effect of lowering peak power demand. Presumably this cost is less then the infrastructure upgrade and operation costs to meet peak power requirements without homeowner installed solar power systems never mind the costs of rolling blackouts.

  10. Re:Easily abused as a biological weapon. on Implant Raises Cellular Army To Attack Cancer · · Score: 1

    Why bother with this roundabout way anyhow? If you absolutely want to kill everyone you shoot, it would be much easier and quicker to make a poisoned bullet.

    This technique has been used for assassination.

  11. Re:eSATA is here already on USB 3.0 Is Ten Times Faster; Get It In 2010 · · Score: 1

    So don't make your primary boot device a removable drive. Make it the internal drive and you don't have a problem.

    Some BIOS implementations for whatever reason mangle the boot device order when enumeration after POST shows a change in possible boot devices on USB or SATA.

  12. Re:PIO vs. DMA on USB 3.0 Is Ten Times Faster; Get It In 2010 · · Score: 3, Informative

    That was the impression I got from the various sources I have read. I also think I remember reading that they are planning to fix this with USB 3.

    I read through Intel's EHCI specifications and from what I understood, while DMA is supported it still requires double buffering because of alignment issues. The interrupt rate and required CPU supervision were probably not a problem until the 480 Mbits/sec transfer rate was implemented.

  13. Re:The problem with Core i7 on 45nm Phenom II Matches Core 2 Quad, Trails Core i7 · · Score: 1

    As far as $200 for a motherboard goes: if you want a GOOD motherboard with a decent RMA process, a motherboard is generally going to cost at least $225 anyway, ...

    What would be a good motherboard with a decent RMA process for a Phenom II then?

    NewEgg lists AM2+ motheboards from Asus and Gigabyte in the range of $80 to $190. Of those, the high end integrated graphics ones are about $140 and even they support dual Crossfire.

  14. Re:Ice Storms on Home Generators (or How DTE Energy Ruined My Holidays) · · Score: 1

    For the love of god please get a real transformer.

    I considered a transformer from Grainger but the cost did not outweigh the enjoyment I got building my own phase splitter out of some big transformers I already had. This was especially the case given that I was unsure if everything would work out satisfactory. I think of it as a working demo.

  15. Re:convection currents on Home Generators (or How DTE Energy Ruined My Holidays) · · Score: 1

    The fans I have seen for this application either have a stirling engine or a thermocouple pile based on a peltier module. They are self contained requiring no external electrical hookup.

  16. Ice Storms on Home Generators (or How DTE Energy Ruined My Holidays) · · Score: 1

    After the 2007 to 2008 ice storms around St. Louis knocked out power for almost a week I opted for a temporary solution involving a portable gas generator.

    I picked up a Kipor 3000 watt open frame inverter style generator relatively cheap from Amazon. The regulation is not quite good enough to support sensitive electronics during large load changes (like a furnace blower) but I have a couple of online UPSes for that. I am in the process of building a wheeled enclosure for it to provide weather protection and sound deadening. It also needs a charger for the starter battery.

    I built a phase splitter (early picture here and it weighs more than 100 pounds) to covert the generator's 120 volt output to split phase 240 volts and added a temporary transfer switch in my basement next to the circuit breaker panel. Just for kicks, I picked up a pair of 20 amp AC current meters which look like they belong in a nuclear power station.

    I already added a weather proof feedthrough to the basement so that the generator can be operated outside while feeding the phase splitter inside via a heavy duty 10 gauge extension cord.

    Eventually I will hire an electrician to mount a real transfer switch outside next to the power meter so line crews have access and know the situation.

  17. Re:Low-amp thermoelectric? on Home Generators (or How DTE Energy Ruined My Holidays) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    is there some way to directly convert the heat difference into enough electricity to drive the stove's fan

    Thermally driven fans are available for wood stoves. The ones I have seen mount inline with the exhaust pipe and use the thermal temperature difference to operated the fan but stove mounted ones for just circulating air around the stove are available also.

  18. Re:The FCC doing something vaguely intelligent? on Content Filtering Pulled From Free Broadband Proposal · · Score: 2, Informative

    By this logic every product/service is within the federal government's reach -- because if something still was not, they would just need one person to drive across a State's border and buy it.

    Fortunately, this logic is not applied to much -- but it is already applied to radio and TV. Which is an outrage.

    Unfortunately, that ship sailed long ago:

    Wickard thus establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself "commercial," in that it is not produced for sale, if it concludes that failure to regulate that class of activity would undercut the regulation of the interstate market in that commodity.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

    The government also contended that consuming one's locally grown marijuana for medical purposes affects the interstate market of marijuana, and hence that the federal government may regulate--and prohibit--such consumption.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

    Justice Thomas' dissent from Gonzales vs. Raich:

    If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption (not because it is interstate commerce, but because it is inextricably bound up with interstate commerce), then Congress' Article I powers -- as expanded by the Necessary and Proper Clause -- have no meaningful limits. Whether Congress aims at the possession of drugs, guns, or any number of other items, it may continue to "appropriate state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce."

    . . .

    If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison's assurance to the people of New York that the "powers delegated" to the Federal Government are "few and defined", while those of the States are "numerous and indefinite."

  19. Re:It's still a dumb idea on Content Filtering Pulled From Free Broadband Proposal · · Score: 1

    You mention doppler shift, despite the fact these are electromagnetic waves, and you have to be in something moving very very fast to observe this effect. Anything land based won't get near those speeds

    Going from fast to slow effects measured terrestrially: You can hear the doppler shift of a carrier transmitted by LEO satalite using a SSB receiver and it is significant enough to require continuous tuning. GPS receivers correct for doppler shift from the 12 hour orbit GPS satalites. A common police radar gun design uses doppler shift by mixing the reflected wave with the transmitted one and measuring the frequency difference. Weather radar often uses doppler shift to measure cloud velocities and look for tornado formation. Roanoke style doppler direction finding equipment measures doppler shift using a standard FM receiver by measuring phase differences in the recovered audio.

  20. Re:memory or video card error? on Tales From the Support Crypt · · Score: 1

    While not a technical support issue I ran into a similar problem with a disconnected speaker. We had a S-100 bus CP/M development system which booted to the ROM monitor from where you could type "BS" for boot system. The previous programmer who had used the system found that objectionable and used the EPROM programmer to make a new system EPROM substituting "BF" (Boot Files) for "BS". He neglected to calculate and write a new checksum however so every time the system was reset or powered on, it beeped and reported a checksum error. His solution for that was to cut the wires going to the speaker inside of the terminal.

  21. Re:weight vs. density/mass on EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor · · Score: 1

    IMHO the Tesla already has an excessive range of 250 miles. Most days 50 miles would be ample for me. Since the battery pack / capacitor is fairly expensive, large and heavy, it would be nice if it were broken into 50 lb modules so I could buy just buy however many I need.

    50 pounds might be a little light for each module. Last time I ran through the calculations, it came out to about 7 pounds per mile for lithium chemistry batteries although the Tesla should do better.

    I am a little fuzzy on lithium cell characteristics but aging could preclude simple modular configuration without battery equalization on the power converter side. That may not actually be bad if having modular converters is economical which it may very well be and it would be a good way to increase the available surface area for heat dissipation.

  22. Re:52 kilowatt Hours? on EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor · · Score: 1

    The semiconductors and control circuitry used in power electronics these days are good enough that it really isn't a problem any more.

    It is always a problem. If the input stage has to handle both high voltage and high current at different points of the discharge curve, then the power density of the converter will suffer. Wide input voltage range trades off with other desirable characteristics.

  23. Re:Check out the patent on EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor · · Score: 1

    200 amp 240 volt mid-point neutral service is ubiquitous in the US although higher is possible. I anticipate that the next step up would be to bring the third phase down.

  24. Re:Interesting specifications on EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor · · Score: 1

    Please, no 3.5kV electronics in any of my "consumer electronics." Especially an iPod; how the heck do you step up 5V USB power to 3.5kV effectively? For everything else, I just don't want a short if I drop it...

    Cold cathode fluorescent tubes can run in that range but they usually use a capacitor ballast and the impedance level is very high which also makes the lead wiring tricky. Insulation breakdown in the transformer secondary or associated wiring is a common failure mode but the high impedance limits the destructiveness.

    My suspicion is that component failure mode for the power converter used with these batteries if they work as advertised will include "disappearance".

  25. Re:May not explode, but.... on EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor · · Score: 1

    I had much the same experience with a home built 1200 volt DC strobe supply. The valuable lesson learned was not to use a power supply output capacitance larger than necessary. I accidentally discharged it from the tip of my index finger to my elbow while knocking myself off of a ladder leading to a new appreciation of forearm musculature. Picking up a big energized neon sign transformer by the insulators was not as painful.