Michigan hasn't had a good governor in ages. I got my subsidized state engineering education, then had to leave the state to find a worthwhile job.
It's beautiful country, and there's certainly the potential to create some high-tech centers, but it's going to take a good hard push and lots of support.
The wire hanger antenna is supposed to be better than most of the commercial versions --- it's basically free so I'd suggest making one and trying it before dismissing it.
William
I may be an electrical engineer, but I don't have a 75 to 300 ohm matching transformer just lying around, hence it's not free.
Really, it's a principle thing. I was getting the digital signal fine until they used the DTV transition date as a convenient time to drop their power. Why should I have to do work and spend money to increase their ratings? Until then, I can deal without it, but it doesn't make me any less angry that it happened, and that they didn't feel the need to tell anyone their power would drop.
Yeah, I'm already using a UHF/VHF antenna intended for digital TV. I've also tried orienting the antenna higher (other apartments are in the way) and rotating for any directionality, but nothing. I can get the other stations transmitted from the same tower, but not NBC. In my circumstances, I'm pretty sure the only way I will get the station again is if they increase their transmit power.
My NBC decided to disappear before the hockey game. Apparently they dropped their transmit power to avoid a collision with another station, yet didn't feel the need to tell anybody in advance. So even though I was perfectly able to watch their digital station before, now I get nothing.
I believe the "nightlights" are meant to carry only a "You have no TV because you ignored the PSAs, maybe you'll listen now" PSA, as well as emergency broadcasts. They won't let the straggers watch Lost for a few more weeks.
I'm tempted to think that anyone who doesn't have cable, satellite, and/or use Internet-based downloads just plain doesn't care all that much about television anyway.
I live in suburban Baltimore and have both FiOS and DTV over-the-air. I want to watch the occasional sporting event or network TV show, and it's not worth paying monthly for cable what I paid once for my antenna. I figure that money will be better spent on something fun (or savings), rather than paying for what I can get for free.
Many engineers actually do use FORTRAN, or one of many company-specific offshoots. I learned it in college for my numeric methods class. My father does process control in a FORTRAN-derivative, and I recently performed a rewrite of a FORTRAN procedure that is still used for production.
Of course, my replacement for the FORTRAN analysis is in Matlab. For modern analysis, I would use Matlab first as it's usually fast enough, and saves a considerable amount of development time by having lots of library functions and quality plotting tools. For a controls environment, though, I would use FORTRAN.
So should you be taught FORTRAN? Possibly, but I don't think it's required. More important is being able to learn FORTRAN. If you know Matlab and C or Java, you should have little problem maintaining or modifying FORTRAN with little more than a reference manual.
It's not knowing the specific languages that's important, but being able to learn the language when the need arises. Otherwise, in 40 years, we get a similar problem where today's boutique-language programmers never learned a new language and are still writing in Python/C#/whatever language is 'dead' in 40 years.
Wrong. It will play even if he's not logged in. You can only redownload content to a console with the account you bought it from.
If you want to play them, you can do so on that same console with any account on that console. No problem.
To clarify, when you download on XBL you can download play it:
1) On any Xbox 360 where the purchasing account is logged in.
2) With any account on the Xbox where the game was purchased.
So, any console you log into, or anyone on your home console. You can't download it to your friends to play on their consoles, unless you purchase it on their console or are logged in at the same time.
As for why we don't have DC in the house, it's only a few points more efficient until you're looking at really long runs, and until very recently the power losses from converting 7200VDC->240VDC would be enough higher to make it less efficient, on average, than 7200VAC->240VAC.
Basically, the gain is outweighed by the costs of upgrading our legacy systems.
Actually, 3-phase power is also taken advantage of for its efficiency running motors. Your washing machine probably uses a 3-phase motor. Hence why it's not so easy to just pop them onto DC.
However, on devices that do run on DC after being rectified from AC, directly running on DC would be more efficient. Still not an easy upgrade, but it could end up being worth it.
Read the rest of my post. I agree that many applications require AC, and here the lions share of the cost will be inverters and batteries. However, there are also many that do not require AC. Again, a Laptop case that charges the laptop, while still remaining cheap and flexible is an ideal usage.
He did say "historically". Switchers weren't always so easy to make. There is probably still infrastructure around that predates transistors.
In this case, history doesn't matter. There is no need for an inverter if you only plan to use the DC component, for example to charge a laptop. I guess the real question is if you want the solar to pump into your normal AC wall outlets, or if you can stick with special use, such as a solar backpack, laptop case, etc.
To change the voltage. Historically, it's been hard to change DC voltages in a small, efficient, compact device.
Bullshit. It's easy to get >80% efficiency with a small Buck Converter circuit, and well designed circuits can get upwards of 95% for some conversions. You know that power supply in your computer? Only about half of it turns the AC into DC. All those voltages you use (12V, 3.3V, 5V, etc) are generated from small, efficient DC/DC converters. It's just a controller, inductor, capacitor, and transistor.
Don't believe me? How's this for small? And yes, I am an Electrical Engineer, and spent a summer designing a power supply with two DC/DC converters.
And, if they can get more time between stops than on the gas engines (quite possible with regenerative braking) or some form of weight advantage (not sure about weight rules at Le Mans), this car could scream.
A few years ago I had four hard drives fail within two weeks of each other resulting in near complete data loss. Luckily I went and bought a big HDD right after the first died so I saved something like 30% of the data because I had somewhere to put it... but anyway
The thing is, those drives were never abused, never hurt in any way, they just simply died because they were about 5 years old. Clicking noises. Crashy computer. Bad sectors. Death.
That, to me, sounds like they were killed by an environmental factor, just not one you were aware of. It could be anything, but I'll name a few:
Humidity, excessive vibration, excessive read/write cycling, excessive power up/down of motor, poor power supply, excessive heat, static electricity, or a physical abuse by somebody else. Assuming these were your only 4 drives (based on your claim of 'near complete data loss'), it's highly unlikely that all 4 drives would die at the same time due to regular wear-and-tear.
I doubt I'm alone in being disappointed by Hulu and the other network TV streaming sites. NBC has awfully annoying commercial pop-ups, and most shows have only the 4 most-recent episodes available, if at all. I would watch full length commercial breaks in order to catch up on old episodes of any show that I had missed. At that point, they would have to be making more money from me than they do by my watching the same shows on Netflix, right? Heck, if the service was good enough and prices lower than cable, I might even pay a monthly rate for the convenience.
I don't need to own it, just give me the option to watch what I want, when I want it. It's not hard to be more convenient than the alternatives, just find a mildly non-invasive way to monetize.
In essence we don't know what superconductors can do, but if we try different stuff eventually we will find something useful. That's why it's worth doing.
Not quite. We know what superconductors are, what they do, and how they can be used. We have many incredible uses for a superconductor, with the most obvious being levitating magnets and zero-loss power transmission. What we don't know is why certain metals under certain conditions become superconductors. Once we know that, we can start to design usable (higher temperature, lower pressure) superconductors, rather than simply stumbling across them ocassionally at
Basically, we need to do all this research on the totally impractical superconductors so that we can learn how to engineer practical superconductors.
This is a possible application of all the anti-satellite and anti-anti-satellite technology coming out of the U.S. and China as of late. Blow them up. Hell, why not?
Because then, instead of being a little congested with big debris that you can track and moves in a known path, you get a bunch of small debris, in erratic orbits, that you might not be able to track. Steering them into a higher orbit, or back into the atmosphere is much better.
I hope they don't get around to trying this in the US....I for one will be out with soldering iron and wire cutters very quickly.
Posh, just put a faraday cage around your antenna. Diagnostics will still run fine, it will think you're never moving, and you can remove the cage to convince the cops you weren't doing anything wrong.
Don't see what the big deal is, here. Since Google doesn't host any of the actual information, you don't need to cite them as a source. You do need to cite the page you get to from Google, though. Think of W|A like a procedurally generated encyclopedia/textbook/almanac. Just like any of those other sources, you should cite it as a reference.
The sooner people stop associating Google and Alpha in their heads, the better.
Bluetooth is on the list because it's been around for years and you still can't get decent support for stereo headsets or other simple connections to work. It's been underwhelming.
The real problem is standards compliance. There are about 3 commonly used BlueTooth Stacks, yet there are big interoperability issues for what should have been common features. Because of that, it was too much of a hassle for some companies to bother with, and too much of a hassle for even many early adopters. This killed the momentum of the tech, and it's not nealy as ubiquitous as it was supposed to be. It works fine for audio now, but it should have been more. This is a technology that was aiming to be used for basically everything we use USB for now. Instead, we have BlueTooth headsets and phones, but nothing else of widespread use.
Photovolatic power: Why hasn't this followed 'Moores law(sic)' like trends of other silicon based technology? (yeah there's a slashjoke somewhere in that sentence)
Moore's Law is based on the fact that if you can reduce a transistor's size, you can run it faster on less power, and stuff more of them into a given surface area.
Energy production, on the other hand, does not benefit from miniaturization in this way (AFAIK). Solar panel prices have benefitted (and will continue to benefit) from economies of scale due in part to crossover from the computer industry, but not directly from Moore's Law.
Moore's Law applies specifically to digital transistor systems. Photovoltaics are analog systems. Really, the things that have allowed Moore's Law to continue for so long are the exact opposite of traits that are desirable in analog systems. In the course of making transistors smaller and faster, they also become less power efficient per surface area due to increased leakage currents. Total power consumption is controlled by reducing die size.
The technologies that need to be developed for photovoltaics to take off involve better collecting light, absorbing a greater spectrum of energies, and more efficiently turning this energy into usable electricity, rather than heat or leakage current. Unfortunately, the physics and chemistry here does not follow Moore's Law.
Any clean, dry, vibration-free storage is good for removed internal drives.
Yeah, they come in a nice box with antistatic bag and desiccant... what's wrong with that? Certainly the manufacturer likes this setup.
Yeah, that should be good enough. The three things that are going to kill a drive are:
1) Physical damage. Keep them in a box in a safe place where they won't be dropped or crushed.
2) Static electricity. Especially with exposed components, and the possibility of hundreds of volts of static between two points in a room, keep it in a anti-static bag.
3) Humidity. No brainer, just keep a dessicant in there for long periods of storage.
As others have stated, simply running the drives occasionally will prevent the internals from having issues. As far as environmental issues, though, these should be the only three things you need to watch for in storage.
So 17,000mph may sound fast, but given that the satellite itself is traveling the same speed, the astronauts don't really have to think about that.
Of course, there could be debris also moving at 17,000mph... in the opposite direction. Traveling at 34,000mph (relative), even a paint chip can do some serious damage to delicate electronics or the relatively soft astronaut.
Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.
People might use Wikipedia for the same purpose as Google, that doesn't mean we should compare them. The people who expect every Google search to work in Alpha are wrong. Those who expect genetic, scientific, or mathematical comparisons to work in Google as it is now are equally wrong. Hell, Alpha doesn't even search the internet, it has its own information database.
Slashdot Mirror
Michigan hasn't had a good governor in ages. I got my subsidized state engineering education, then had to leave the state to find a worthwhile job.
It's beautiful country, and there's certainly the potential to create some high-tech centers, but it's going to take a good hard push and lots of support.
The wire hanger antenna is supposed to be better than most of the commercial versions --- it's basically free so I'd suggest making one and trying it before dismissing it.
William
I may be an electrical engineer, but I don't have a 75 to 300 ohm matching transformer just lying around, hence it's not free.
Really, it's a principle thing. I was getting the digital signal fine until they used the DTV transition date as a convenient time to drop their power. Why should I have to do work and spend money to increase their ratings? Until then, I can deal without it, but it doesn't make me any less angry that it happened, and that they didn't feel the need to tell anyone their power would drop.
Yeah, I'm already using a UHF/VHF antenna intended for digital TV. I've also tried orienting the antenna higher (other apartments are in the way) and rotating for any directionality, but nothing. I can get the other stations transmitted from the same tower, but not NBC. In my circumstances, I'm pretty sure the only way I will get the station again is if they increase their transmit power.
Of course, that doesn't help those in apartments. I think the FCC screwed the pooch in letting so many stations drop their power so far.
My NBC decided to disappear before the hockey game. Apparently they dropped their transmit power to avoid a collision with another station, yet didn't feel the need to tell anybody in advance. So even though I was perfectly able to watch their digital station before, now I get nothing.
REACH, but I certainly hope "are not used by".
I believe the "nightlights" are meant to carry only a "You have no TV because you ignored the PSAs, maybe you'll listen now" PSA, as well as emergency broadcasts. They won't let the straggers watch Lost for a few more weeks.
I'm tempted to think that anyone who doesn't have cable, satellite, and/or use Internet-based downloads just plain doesn't care all that much about television anyway.
I live in suburban Baltimore and have both FiOS and DTV over-the-air. I want to watch the occasional sporting event or network TV show, and it's not worth paying monthly for cable what I paid once for my antenna. I figure that money will be better spent on something fun (or savings), rather than paying for what I can get for free.
Many engineers actually do use FORTRAN, or one of many company-specific offshoots. I learned it in college for my numeric methods class. My father does process control in a FORTRAN-derivative, and I recently performed a rewrite of a FORTRAN procedure that is still used for production.
Of course, my replacement for the FORTRAN analysis is in Matlab. For modern analysis, I would use Matlab first as it's usually fast enough, and saves a considerable amount of development time by having lots of library functions and quality plotting tools. For a controls environment, though, I would use FORTRAN.
So should you be taught FORTRAN? Possibly, but I don't think it's required. More important is being able to learn FORTRAN. If you know Matlab and C or Java, you should have little problem maintaining or modifying FORTRAN with little more than a reference manual.
It's not knowing the specific languages that's important, but being able to learn the language when the need arises. Otherwise, in 40 years, we get a similar problem where today's boutique-language programmers never learned a new language and are still writing in Python/C#/whatever language is 'dead' in 40 years.
Wrong. It will play even if he's not logged in. You can only redownload content to a console with the account you bought it from.
If you want to play them, you can do so on that same console with any account on that console. No problem.
To clarify, when you download on XBL you can download play it:
1) On any Xbox 360 where the purchasing account is logged in.
2) With any account on the Xbox where the game was purchased.
So, any console you log into, or anyone on your home console. You can't download it to your friends to play on their consoles, unless you purchase it on their console or are logged in at the same time.
As for why we don't have DC in the house, it's only a few points more efficient until you're looking at really long runs, and until very recently the power losses from converting 7200VDC->240VDC would be enough higher to make it less efficient, on average, than 7200VAC->240VAC.
Basically, the gain is outweighed by the costs of upgrading our legacy systems.
Actually, 3-phase power is also taken advantage of for its efficiency running motors. Your washing machine probably uses a 3-phase motor. Hence why it's not so easy to just pop them onto DC.
However, on devices that do run on DC after being rectified from AC, directly running on DC would be more efficient. Still not an easy upgrade, but it could end up being worth it.
Read the rest of my post. I agree that many applications require AC, and here the lions share of the cost will be inverters and batteries. However, there are also many that do not require AC. Again, a Laptop case that charges the laptop, while still remaining cheap and flexible is an ideal usage.
He did say "historically". Switchers weren't always so easy to make. There is probably still infrastructure around that predates transistors.
In this case, history doesn't matter. There is no need for an inverter if you only plan to use the DC component, for example to charge a laptop. I guess the real question is if you want the solar to pump into your normal AC wall outlets, or if you can stick with special use, such as a solar backpack, laptop case, etc.
To change the voltage. Historically, it's been hard to change DC voltages in a small, efficient, compact device.
Bullshit. It's easy to get >80% efficiency with a small Buck Converter circuit, and well designed circuits can get upwards of 95% for some conversions. You know that power supply in your computer? Only about half of it turns the AC into DC. All those voltages you use (12V, 3.3V, 5V, etc) are generated from small, efficient DC/DC converters. It's just a controller, inductor, capacitor, and transistor.
Don't believe me? How's this for small? And yes, I am an Electrical Engineer, and spent a summer designing a power supply with two DC/DC converters.
Methinks you don't understand the term "regular wear and tear" or that "environmental factors" count as such.
In that case, regular environmental factors count as regular wear and tear. I'm referring to those outside the manufacturers recommendations.
And, if they can get more time between stops than on the gas engines (quite possible with regenerative braking) or some form of weight advantage (not sure about weight rules at Le Mans), this car could scream.
A few years ago I had four hard drives fail within two weeks of each other resulting in near complete data loss. Luckily I went and bought a big HDD right after the first died so I saved something like 30% of the data because I had somewhere to put it ... but anyway
The thing is, those drives were never abused, never hurt in any way, they just simply died because they were about 5 years old. Clicking noises. Crashy computer. Bad sectors. Death.
That, to me, sounds like they were killed by an environmental factor, just not one you were aware of. It could be anything, but I'll name a few: Humidity, excessive vibration, excessive read/write cycling, excessive power up/down of motor, poor power supply, excessive heat, static electricity, or a physical abuse by somebody else. Assuming these were your only 4 drives (based on your claim of 'near complete data loss'), it's highly unlikely that all 4 drives would die at the same time due to regular wear-and-tear.
I doubt I'm alone in being disappointed by Hulu and the other network TV streaming sites. NBC has awfully annoying commercial pop-ups, and most shows have only the 4 most-recent episodes available, if at all. I would watch full length commercial breaks in order to catch up on old episodes of any show that I had missed. At that point, they would have to be making more money from me than they do by my watching the same shows on Netflix, right? Heck, if the service was good enough and prices lower than cable, I might even pay a monthly rate for the convenience.
I don't need to own it, just give me the option to watch what I want, when I want it. It's not hard to be more convenient than the alternatives, just find a mildly non-invasive way to monetize.
In essence we don't know what superconductors can do, but if we try different stuff eventually we will find something useful. That's why it's worth doing.
Not quite. We know what superconductors are, what they do, and how they can be used. We have many incredible uses for a superconductor, with the most obvious being levitating magnets and zero-loss power transmission. What we don't know is why certain metals under certain conditions become superconductors. Once we know that, we can start to design usable (higher temperature, lower pressure) superconductors, rather than simply stumbling across them ocassionally at
Basically, we need to do all this research on the totally impractical superconductors so that we can learn how to engineer practical superconductors.
This is a possible application of all the anti-satellite and anti-anti-satellite technology coming out of the U.S. and China as of late. Blow them up. Hell, why not?
Because then, instead of being a little congested with big debris that you can track and moves in a known path, you get a bunch of small debris, in erratic orbits, that you might not be able to track. Steering them into a higher orbit, or back into the atmosphere is much better.
I hope they don't get around to trying this in the US....I for one will be out with soldering iron and wire cutters very quickly.
Posh, just put a faraday cage around your antenna. Diagnostics will still run fine, it will think you're never moving, and you can remove the cage to convince the cops you weren't doing anything wrong.
Don't see what the big deal is, here. Since Google doesn't host any of the actual information, you don't need to cite them as a source. You do need to cite the page you get to from Google, though. Think of W|A like a procedurally generated encyclopedia/textbook/almanac. Just like any of those other sources, you should cite it as a reference.
The sooner people stop associating Google and Alpha in their heads, the better.
The real problem is standards compliance. There are about 3 commonly used BlueTooth Stacks, yet there are big interoperability issues for what should have been common features. Because of that, it was too much of a hassle for some companies to bother with, and too much of a hassle for even many early adopters. This killed the momentum of the tech, and it's not nealy as ubiquitous as it was supposed to be. It works fine for audio now, but it should have been more. This is a technology that was aiming to be used for basically everything we use USB for now. Instead, we have BlueTooth headsets and phones, but nothing else of widespread use.
Moore's Law applies specifically to digital transistor systems. Photovoltaics are analog systems. Really, the things that have allowed Moore's Law to continue for so long are the exact opposite of traits that are desirable in analog systems. In the course of making transistors smaller and faster, they also become less power efficient per surface area due to increased leakage currents. Total power consumption is controlled by reducing die size.
The technologies that need to be developed for photovoltaics to take off involve better collecting light, absorbing a greater spectrum of energies, and more efficiently turning this energy into usable electricity, rather than heat or leakage current. Unfortunately, the physics and chemistry here does not follow Moore's Law.
Any clean, dry, vibration-free storage is good for removed internal drives.
Yeah, they come in a nice box with antistatic bag and desiccant... what's wrong with that? Certainly the manufacturer likes this setup.
Yeah, that should be good enough. The three things that are going to kill a drive are:
1) Physical damage. Keep them in a box in a safe place where they won't be dropped or crushed.
2) Static electricity. Especially with exposed components, and the possibility of hundreds of volts of static between two points in a room, keep it in a anti-static bag.
3) Humidity. No brainer, just keep a dessicant in there for long periods of storage.
As others have stated, simply running the drives occasionally will prevent the internals from having issues. As far as environmental issues, though, these should be the only three things you need to watch for in storage.
So 17,000mph may sound fast, but given that the satellite itself is traveling the same speed, the astronauts don't really have to think about that.
Of course, there could be debris also moving at 17,000mph... in the opposite direction. Traveling at 34,000mph (relative), even a paint chip can do some serious damage to delicate electronics or the relatively soft astronaut.
Here's hoping everyone stays safe up there.
Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.
People might use Wikipedia for the same purpose as Google, that doesn't mean we should compare them. The people who expect every Google search to work in Alpha are wrong. Those who expect genetic, scientific, or mathematical comparisons to work in Google as it is now are equally wrong. Hell, Alpha doesn't even search the internet, it has its own information database.
How are the two comparable again?