I was involved in pro video some years ago, and yes, Sony was the top pick when we chose gear for a project. So I bought Sony gear for my own use at home. As tech changed, and I needed to replace things, I bought Sony again, but this time, all that stuff pretty quickly died, long before needing replacement for format or tech changes. The one exception is my Trinitron set from 1995 that is still kicking, but about to be replaced with something I can play HD content on. It won't be a Sony set.
It is irritating that FX/NatGeo are being withheld because of some dust-up over sports programming. I couldn't care less about sports, but watch quite a bit on NatGeo and a few shows on FX. The answer that Dish presents is to call Fox Sports and complain, but I don't have any leverage with Fox Sports. I don't even know how to frame an argument with them.
The upside is, (as I stated in a letter to FX earlier today), that I am wasting less time watching TV, and especially wasting less time watching advertisements for the sponsors. I am also spending less money, at least on the products of those sponsors. I thanked them for their greed in that it removed my lack of self-determination as a cause for my time and money-wasting habit of watching their programming.
I remember reading a long time ago that contact with the back of a colour TV tube was "invariably fatal". Mind you from your experience and a bit of Googling maybe they were just being overly cautious -
I can tell you that is false. It could be fatal, I suppose, but having had my share of second-anode contact, I dispute the "invariability" of that consequence.:)
I have a good friend who has ditched his landline, since he and his wife each have cell phones. He cannot understand why I maintain my landline and pay the extra $25 a month. Like you, when we had no power for a week after Isabel, I still had communications and 911 access. If I relied on VOIP, I would have been sunk. If I relied on cell service I would also have been sunk, since the local tower ran out of power or was damaged or something and for whatever reason, my cell would not work from home (it is only marginal from home during normal conditions).
Another story - I was talking to my brother two days ago; he was using his cell phone (free weekend long distance). The call just dropped. Turns out his handset had comitted suicide or something. Luckily he had a landline to call the cell company to troubleshoot the problem.
There is just something re-assuring about having a backup that is pretty much always up and running. The traditional telephone system is very robust and they maintain operation in emergencies, because they always have been a critical communications path. I don't know that the cellular companies have that same mindset yet.
I see I am not alone in thinking the front page blurb for this story was written by someone whose primary language is not English, and then posted by an editor whose primary concern is not clarity of presentation.
The last few days have seen a load of the type of comments you replied to. "Why do people need Gas-Guzzling, overpowered SUV's and Hot Rods? I get along fine commuting to my job in the granola factory 3 miles from my earthen cabin by bicycle!"
Frankly, the mindset of those who think the US can, for the most part, convert to primarily public transportation without economic collapse, indicates they have simply been asleep for decades.
The entire country has developed into a society based on individual point-to-point transport at will, i.e. personal vehicles and truck freight. It would take a very long time to reverse that and re-concentrate the population into urban high-rises. Besides, people don't want to live that way. Well, most don't.
I use fuel for 2 reasons - one, because I have to in order to maintain my quality of life, and two, because I want to feed my hot rod for the same reason. If I could run my engine on some alternative fuel, fine, as long as I can get the same things done. But I don't see that alternative coming anytime soon.
I would think the hippies would be happier that we were using up the dino juice quickly, to get it over with, to force the world into cleaner energy or agrarian communal lifestyles, whichever.
"Comments are sought by March 1 with initial sign-ups slated for May 15, according to draft rules, though Murphy added that the comment period could be extended to 30 days."
Murphy always makes things take longer than you planned...
It was little more than a tech demonstrator for the chip, something with the number CDP1802 as I recall. I soldered all the parts onto the ~8"x10" mainboard. It had a Hex keypad and 2 digit 7 segment display. I added a video output to display on an old TV I had modified. I had a whopping 256 bytes of ram or something like that. I remember spending hours typing in machine code from a magazine (Popular Electronics?) to display a sillouette of the "enterprise" flying across the screen in glorious black and white. This would have been around 1975 or so?
Years later I actually learned basic when I got a "real" computer - ti-99!, but also got into gaming (yeah, parsec with the speech module rocked!) on that machine.
No. The native handwriting stayed till the end, but you could get grafitti for the newton. I have one of the last MP2k units, factory converted to a 2100. I love the thing, but almost never use it anymore, since my clie actually fits in a pocket. haha, yeah both my PDAs are orphans/dinosaurs, huh?
based on my failed adaptation to progressive lenses. (Guess I am not going to get rich inventing adaptive eyeglasses now!).
For those who can tolerate progressives, I salute you. It didn't sound too bad when they were describing how they would be, but I wore them for a week before giving up and asking for a single vision prescription and a reading prescription separately.
All during that week, I thought of alternatives, and naturally (this is/.) I thought that some sort of adaptive lenses would be the cool way to deal with the combination of astigmatism/myopia and my newfound presbyopia. Getting old has many drawbacks, but it is good to have survived 46 years...:)
The other thing I thought of was a replacement lens of some kind of material that would mimic the properties of the youthful human eye lens. This would be a surgical implant, but it should correct one's vision back to the point before they needed glasses, wouldn't it?
Anyway, this is exciting technology, if it progresses beyond the VC/Vapor stage.
I have to replace the card I have had for 15 years, thanks to this SNAFU, and update all services that automatically charge it, not to mention memorizing the new account number. I hope something good comes of this, like serious protection of user accounts in the future, but I doubt it.
Wow. I had WDs failing in droves a few years back, as did several of my friends. We all switched to Maxtors, and so far so good, until the other day. I had a Diamondmax 200 GB that started to develop errors after about 13 mos in service (yep 1 yr warranty).
May seems to be a bad month for these things. Replacement is a Seagate with 5 yr warranty...
Virginia (Hampton Roads) Suncom as well. I am hoping for good things, though. See, I recently switched to GSM and a cool tiny nokia 3100. Love the phone and battery life, but my signal strength went from decent to almost nil when I am inside my house. I can get better signal upstairs, or if I walk into the kitchen or a few other specific "hot zones". It is maddening. And Suncom customer service is something only Dante could identify with. Clueless and arbitrary, and highly random (based on who you chance to deal with), it is unbelievable.
Several people have already mentioned the dust accumulation on solar panels. There are certainly other factors -
Mars is a windy, sandy desert. Anybody who has taken a high-tech device (camera, cdplayer, vehicle. etc) to the beach knows that it is nearly impossible to keep sand out of the workings. So the motors and gear trains are susceptible to degrading over time from wind-blown dust/sand entering. Surely there are dust seals on the bearings, but some particles are likely fine enough to get past those. Even if the rotating joints don't totally bind up, the increased friction will cause more power drain when things are operating.
Even if that doesn't stop them, and some way to keep the solar panels clean were employed, there is still the battery issue. Any rechargable battery technology degrades over time. This laptop I am using will not run without the power adpater plugged in, because the li-ion battery won't charge anymore. I have had so many ni-cd, and ni-mH and li-ion batteries die that I can't count 'em.
The third issue is winter. The sun angle is getting lower as winter sets in on mars. That decreased angle of incidence on the solar panels and the increased amount of atmospheric loss associated with it reduces the ability of the panels to generate power.
The engineering trade-offs associated with extrememly low weight, (gotta keep everything light to even get it launched) and minimizing costs prevent making these little guys as robust as dune buggies. That they have outlasted their designed lifetime and continue to do good science in spite of all the obstacles is a testament to the design team for making the most out of what they had to work with.
After all, aren't ALL employees 'semiconductors'? My boss got across the 220VAC line once and didn't completely short it. The affect on *his* shorts was undesirable...
We got through college listening to these guys' albums (yeah, on vinyl) over and over again! To see them show up on/., well, it is quite a warm feeling , imagining a new generation of geeks trying them out. "Bozos" should really be required listening for anyone even remotely interested in computers. If you have never enjoyed the Firesign Theater, this is as good as any introduction to their work. Go get it, listen to it a few times, and then seek out the rest of the catalog. Certainly it is humor for the thinking person, and that is so rare.
" That, and the energy is already lost -- it's not like the bulbs (or wire) are sucking energy from the wire -- the energy has already been radiated."
There is a certain amount of energy radiated to the surroundings, and this is accounted for in the design of the power lines (height, separation, etc.). But if you place a coil nearby, and start drawing current from it, there will be additional power loss from the transmission line. If this were not true, then it would be simple to get free power - just put in a transformer! After all, the primary has already radiated the energy, so you could just place any number of secondary coils near it and get free power from all of them.
But no, this is not the case. Induction between two conductors enables power transfer, and the secondary circuit certainly does load the primary.
Not sure how practical this method of getting free power from the utility company would be, though. Generally the lines are a long way from the ground compared to the distance between phases, and so the fields would be pretty much cancelled at the parasitic coil.
Hope this makes sense, I'm running on sudephed and a slight fever right now....
Slashdot Mirror
I was involved in pro video some years ago, and yes, Sony was the top pick when we chose gear for a project. So I bought Sony gear for my own use at home. As tech changed, and I needed to replace things, I bought Sony again, but this time, all that stuff pretty quickly died, long before needing replacement for format or tech changes. The one exception is my Trinitron set from 1995 that is still kicking, but about to be replaced with something I can play HD content on. It won't be a Sony set.
It is irritating that FX/NatGeo are being withheld because of some dust-up over sports programming. I couldn't care less about sports, but watch quite a bit on NatGeo and a few shows on FX. The answer that Dish presents is to call Fox Sports and complain, but I don't have any leverage with Fox Sports. I don't even know how to frame an argument with them.
The upside is, (as I stated in a letter to FX earlier today), that I am wasting less time watching TV, and especially wasting less time watching advertisements for the sponsors. I am also spending less money, at least on the products of those sponsors. I thanked them for their greed in that it removed my lack of self-determination as a cause for my time and money-wasting habit of watching their programming.
I hope you guys get serious about making some lungs. I need a new pair thanks to some chemo/rad therapy I received. Thanks!
Only a small fraction of email I get is legit, so if it dumps all messages into the spam folder, it is pretty much doing the right thing
I can tell you that is false. It could be fatal, I suppose, but having had my share of second-anode contact, I dispute the "invariability" of that consequence.
It invariably isn't much fun, most certainly!
I mean she looked pretty good before she hired someone to cut her up.
Also, she probably should have done the malpractice research BEFORE the appointment.
Wow. Just wow.
You can, but it smells like farts.
I guess Heinz is gonna have to print new labels:
"58" varieties
I have a good friend who has ditched his landline, since he and his wife each have cell phones. He cannot understand why I maintain my landline and pay the extra $25 a month. Like you, when we had no power for a week after Isabel, I still had communications and 911 access. If I relied on VOIP, I would have been sunk. If I relied on cell service I would also have been sunk, since the local tower ran out of power or was damaged or something and for whatever reason, my cell would not work from home (it is only marginal from home during normal conditions).
Another story - I was talking to my brother two days ago; he was using his cell phone (free weekend long distance). The call just dropped. Turns out his handset had comitted suicide or something. Luckily he had a landline to call the cell company to troubleshoot the problem.
There is just something re-assuring about having a backup that is pretty much always up and running. The traditional telephone system is very robust and they maintain operation in emergencies, because they always have been a critical communications path. I don't know that the cellular companies have that same mindset yet.
I see I am not alone in thinking the front page blurb for this story was written by someone whose primary language is not English, and then posted by an editor whose primary concern is not clarity of presentation.
Go Robot!
The last few days have seen a load of the type of comments you replied to. "Why do people need Gas-Guzzling, overpowered SUV's and Hot Rods? I get along fine commuting to my job in the granola factory 3 miles from my earthen cabin by bicycle!"
Frankly, the mindset of those who think the US can, for the most part, convert to primarily public transportation without economic collapse, indicates they have simply been asleep for decades.
The entire country has developed into a society based on individual point-to-point transport at will, i.e. personal vehicles and truck freight. It would take a very long time to reverse that and re-concentrate the population into urban high-rises. Besides, people don't want to live that way. Well, most don't.
I use fuel for 2 reasons - one, because I have to in order to maintain my quality of life, and two, because I want to feed my hot rod for the same reason. If I could run my engine on some alternative fuel, fine, as long as I can get the same things done. But I don't see that alternative coming anytime soon.
I would think the hippies would be happier that we were using up the dino juice quickly, to get it over with, to force the world into cleaner energy or agrarian communal lifestyles, whichever.
"Comments are sought by March 1 with initial sign-ups slated for May 15, according to draft rules, though Murphy added that the comment period could be extended to 30 days."
Murphy always makes things take longer than you planned...
Keep up the good work, soldier!
It was little more than a tech demonstrator for the chip, something with the number CDP1802 as I recall. I soldered all the parts onto the ~8"x10" mainboard. It had a Hex keypad and 2 digit 7 segment display. I added a video output to display on an old TV I had modified. I had a whopping 256 bytes of ram or something like that. I remember spending hours typing in machine code from a magazine (Popular Electronics?) to display a sillouette of the "enterprise" flying across the screen in glorious black and white. This would have been around 1975 or so?
:)
Years later I actually learned basic when I got a "real" computer - ti-99!, but also got into gaming (yeah, parsec with the speech module rocked!) on that machine.
Yeah, I predate dirt.
No. The native handwriting stayed till the end, but you could get grafitti for the newton. I have one of the last MP2k units, factory converted to a 2100. I love the thing, but almost never use it anymore, since my clie actually fits in a pocket. haha, yeah both my PDAs are orphans/dinosaurs, huh?
based on my failed adaptation to progressive lenses. (Guess I am not going to get rich inventing adaptive eyeglasses now!).
/.) I thought that some sort of adaptive lenses would be the cool way to deal with the combination of astigmatism/myopia and my newfound presbyopia. Getting old has many drawbacks, but it is good to have survived 46 years... :)
For those who can tolerate progressives, I salute you. It didn't sound too bad when they were describing how they would be, but I wore them for a week before giving up and asking for a single vision prescription and a reading prescription separately.
All during that week, I thought of alternatives, and naturally (this is
The other thing I thought of was a replacement lens of some kind of material that would mimic the properties of the youthful human eye lens. This would be a surgical implant, but it should correct one's vision back to the point before they needed glasses, wouldn't it?
Anyway, this is exciting technology, if it progresses beyond the VC/Vapor stage.
I have to replace the card I have had for 15 years, thanks to this SNAFU, and update all services that automatically charge it, not to mention memorizing the new account number. I hope something good comes of this, like serious protection of user accounts in the future, but I doubt it.
Wow. I had WDs failing in droves a few years back, as did several of my friends. We all switched to Maxtors, and so far so good, until the other day. I had a Diamondmax 200 GB that started to develop errors after about 13 mos in service (yep 1 yr warranty).
May seems to be a bad month for these things. Replacement is a Seagate with 5 yr warranty...
Virginia (Hampton Roads) Suncom as well. I am hoping for good things, though. See, I recently switched to GSM and a cool tiny nokia 3100. Love the phone and battery life, but my signal strength went from decent to almost nil when I am inside my house. I can get better signal upstairs, or if I walk into the kitchen or a few other specific "hot zones". It is maddening. And Suncom customer service is something only Dante could identify with. Clueless and arbitrary, and highly random (based on who you chance to deal with), it is unbelievable.
I hope Cingular is a drastic improvement for us.
Several people have already mentioned the dust accumulation on solar panels. There are certainly other factors -
Mars is a windy, sandy desert. Anybody who has taken a high-tech device (camera, cdplayer, vehicle. etc) to the beach knows that it is nearly impossible to keep sand out of the workings. So the motors and gear trains are susceptible to degrading over time from wind-blown dust/sand entering. Surely there are dust seals on the bearings, but some particles are likely fine enough to get past those. Even if the rotating joints don't totally bind up, the increased friction will cause more power drain when things are operating.
Even if that doesn't stop them, and some way to keep the solar panels clean were employed, there is still the battery issue. Any rechargable battery technology degrades over time. This laptop I am using will not run without the power adpater plugged in, because the li-ion battery won't charge anymore. I have had so many ni-cd, and ni-mH and li-ion batteries die that I can't count 'em.
The third issue is winter. The sun angle is getting lower as winter sets in on mars. That decreased angle of incidence on the solar panels and the increased amount of atmospheric loss associated with it reduces the ability of the panels to generate power.
The engineering trade-offs associated with extrememly low weight, (gotta keep everything light to even get it launched) and minimizing costs prevent making these little guys as robust as dune buggies. That they have outlasted their designed lifetime and continue to do good science in spite of all the obstacles is a testament to the design team for making the most out of what they had to work with.
Bravo to them!
The phrases in the "interview" on newsforge are eerily similar to, in fact exactly copied from earlier story dated 1999 in Sci Am.
After all, aren't ALL employees 'semiconductors'? My boss got across the 220VAC line once and didn't completely short it. The affect on *his* shorts was undesirable...
Damn!
/., well, it is quite a warm feeling , imagining a new generation of geeks trying them out. "Bozos" should really be required listening for anyone even remotely interested in computers. If you have never enjoyed the Firesign Theater, this is as good as any introduction to their work. Go get it, listen to it a few times, and then seek out the rest of the catalog. Certainly it is humor for the thinking person, and that is so rare.
We got through college listening to these guys' albums (yeah, on vinyl) over and over again! To see them show up on
There is a certain amount of energy radiated to the surroundings, and this is accounted for in the design of the power lines (height, separation, etc.). But if you place a coil nearby, and start drawing current from it, there will be additional power loss from the transmission line. If this were not true, then it would be simple to get free power - just put in a transformer! After all, the primary has already radiated the energy, so you could just place any number of secondary coils near it and get free power from all of them.
But no, this is not the case. Induction between two conductors enables power transfer, and the secondary circuit certainly does load the primary.
Not sure how practical this method of getting free power from the utility company would be, though. Generally the lines are a long way from the ground compared to the distance between phases, and so the fields would be pretty much cancelled at the parasitic coil.
Hope this makes sense, I'm running on sudephed and a slight fever right now....
Uh, Radiation?
You don't need air to "carry heat away"
Radiative transfer is proportional to delta T ^4