You don't say why you don't want a copper plant -- but it seems like you're giving network wiring a bad rap. Do you intend to have laptops assigned to everyone, and intend for them to roam around the office all day? (I'm picturing a scene of dogs wandering around at a dog park as I write this!) If the users are primarily sitting at their desks and are using "desktop" machine, there doesn't seem to be much of an advantage to go wireless -- in fact, I'd say that you'd have more headaches.
I'm assuming that you want to do this because the userbase is mostly laptop-based.
You definitely will spend a lot of money on getting real wifi equipment to do this roll-out. At the very least, you will want to have access points that will handle WDS correctly so that people can roam around from AP to AP. You will want to have central configuration management, performance/usage monitoring, and security management. (One product off the top of my head that might be useful: WiFi WorkPlace.)
Note that with wifi, each access point acts essentially like a shared hub -- and the throughput is less than half ot the signaling speed -- so your 10 users on the same 54-Mbps AP will be on an effetive "20 Mbps" hub... Latency is higher, too. Yuck.
In order to keep the footprint of each "hub" (AP) small to ensure reasonable performance, you will need a lots of low-powered access points. And hope that your client machines are running bug free drivers --- back when I used to play with linux wlan drivers, we sometimes had a client go crazy and pump up the transmitter to max power in order to associate with the AP on the other side of the building -- and stepping on a lot of traffic in the process.
Sawmill is an awesome slicer-and-dicer of your web logs. I haven't done web stuff in several years, but the package was awesome five years ago, and it looks like they've been refining the product over the years.
I would wager that Microsoft will force third party software to support their new filetype
Since it's a MS format, presumably the codec will be embedded within the OS and will have an easy hook to read/write the format from any program... Make it easily accessible from the various MS Visual Studio IDE's, and then it becomes a new widely supported de facto standard.
Re:Any Fanless/diskless/ventless system with nx-bi
on
Portables as Servers?
·
· Score: 1
Cappuccinopc seems to have a few others that might do the job... (http://www.cappuccinopc.com/slimpro-sp625f-fanles s.asp for example)
If you're primarily serving DNS and mostly serving up static web content (and not doing a lot of writes to "disk"), and your primary concern is power consumption, you might be better off with an embedded linux SBC... (http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6449817972 .html)
Now, that said, why are you trying to keep your server up and running for a long time? Presumably, the client machiens are also down during these outages?
If the main reason is to have a basic PC with a built-in UPS, then, yes, laptops would probably be the most practical approach.
This will hopefully change in another year when (if???) Canon/Toshiba rolls out their large-screen SED television -- a display that has the viewing advantages of CRT, but in a flat-panel weight/form-factor. Let's hope that it'll be reasonably priced!
Dot matrix and daisywheel printers. Paddle wheels and joysticks (good lord they were so primitive!) Green phosphor and amber phosphor CRTs Cassette tape Acoustic coupler modem Mockingboard sound card External keyboard (with lowercase letters!) that attached via an umbilical. CP/M Card 80-column card
Oh, and a box of 5 1/4" floppy disks, and a flippy-notcher to use the back, and a Beagle Bros poster to complete the scene.
This make me nostalgic for the CP/M card and the Videx 80-column conversion that let me run WordStar on my Apple ][+. I knew one guy that even had an 8" floppy on his CP/M-enabled Apple...
Oh, and I'd love to see a collection of Apple clones, too... I actually owned such a bootleg... I had a friend with a Franklin, and there were others that I read about over the years.
This remind me of low-power reversible computing that I learned back in college from Prof. Jan van de Snepscheut at Caltech... The basic idea is to reduce wasted power by "sloshing" current within the chip, rather than to let the current spill to the ground... (this is a a gross simplification...)
Asking most programmers to appreciate mainframes must be like asking most drivers to appreciate 18-wheel big rigs -- you know they exist, and large companies rely on them, but you never really have a *need* to know what it's like to operate one.
I've always believed that mainframes have their place in the world, even when the world was announcing the era of the personal computers and the death of mainframes. But while I understood them to be highly specialized high-throughput high-reliability machines, I never had a personal experience with a mainframe operating environment. So I never truly understood what a mainframe is...
I've worked on (relatively) bigger Unix systems (8 processor SPARCservers, 4-rack Sequent NUMA-Q's, and others), but at the end of the day, they seemed no different from a single desktop Unix machine -- just faster and with more memory and storage. I've also used a VAX, briefly, during my freshman year in college. I've always imagined that VMS was closest to what a mainframe environment must be like.
So, to the folks that understand the mainframe -- what is it about them that makes them more than just faster versions of desktop machines, or even server systems that us non-mainframes are used to?
A well written document is an essential part of the engineer's responsibility. The engineer must write clear documents that effectively communicate important ideas to his audience.
During the writing process, the engineer must focus his writing to the target audience. An overly technical document will be frustrating to the reader that is not experienced in the subject matter. Similarly, writing for the "layperson" will be frustrating for readers with a lot of experience.
Have the students study and "reverse-engineer" writings from other authors. I learned much through a combination of traditional "grammar school" lessons and from reading a wide variety of documents, including articles from the Economist, manuals from Beagle Brothers Software, and the classic three-ring-binder IBM manuals.
You can provide some templates to your students as "training wheels". At a former company, we used a corporate writing guide which included templates for API documentation, end-user documentation, whitepapers, et cetra. While the writing guide did not necessarily improve every employee's writing tenfold, it provided a very good framework that helped even expereienced writers.
My wife and I ran are involved in a non-profit organization that ran a big event last weekend. After the event was over, we realized that we wanted to get some criticial feedback on the event, but had no survey mechanism...
The next morning, I looked around freshmeat and found phpSurveyor -- grabbing and exploding the tarball to the right directory took about three minutes. Then I spent about 15 minutes setting it up and making changes to the source code to get around quirks of my ISP. I had a survey ready to go in less than an hour.
The "free to grab", "free to change" situation of FOSS made it possible to run a successful survey while the respondents impressions were still fresh. (Granted, if we had planned for this ahead of time, this wouldn't have been necessary...)
It's bad enough that the Japanese have a drink called "Sweat," but at least they don't try to export it to the English-speaking world with that name. Am I supposed to be happy about having to go down to the game store to purchase the 'Nintendo Wee'?
If you thought Pocari Sweat was an awful name to export to US drinker, how about Calpis? Wikipedia mentions this.
A dedicated co-processor with enough registers to perform a complex calculation without having to constantly ferry register values between memory and the processor, combined with the ability to run several calculations simultaneously will blow the socks off a general purpose CPU for *very specifically designed algorithms*.
There's a market for GPU's on video cards running $1,200+... People that buy them won't be satisfied with standard GPU's no matter how fast their main processors run... The custom acceleration of graphics calculation makes it worthwhile.
Now, imagine doing massive calculations (think three blackboards filled with quantum physics equations) -- and you can see how some scientific/industrial applications would go ga-ga over this stuff...
Once you've got a design that you like, and want to do short runs, you'll want to have a low cost injection mold... These guys look really interesting: www.protomolds.com
Those "immersive 3D glasses" are limited in resolution - the previous generation had less than VGA-resolution, while the current ones are roughly SVGA. Pls, they are a bit bulky.
Digital cinema projection used in the theaters has much higher screen resolution. The glasses you wear are lightweight "sunglasses".
Movies and then sports are obvious first choices for mass-media 3D. But I'm sure plenty of other more specialized applications (gaming, education, architecture to name a few) will find their way into theaters...
I suspect the deadline is not focused on second-hand resale of used products; instead, it is aimed more toward first-time ("new") sales of products from inventory that was designed and manufactured before the current DENAN safety law.
While many consumer goods are "perishable" because new models/features/prices are obsoleting older ones, there are some mature products that might have been manufactured years ago, are stock piled in the warehouses, and just continue to trickle out (instead of being actively manufactured). (I'm thinking of $15 clock radio's that one picks up at RiteAid as an example of such a product...)
There is a similar issue going on in CE markets with RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substance) -- products manufactured and sold today can still contain lead and other hazardous substances, but come July 1 (this year), that will no longer be allowed. So any inventory in the factory or warehouses that do not conform will be banned, even though it might have been manufactured well before the RoHS deadline...
Perhaps what was originally claimed is that the power efficiency of the motor is improved by more than 100% over conventional motor designs. TFA doesn't claim that the output motor power exceeds the input electrical power - instead, it states that there is better containment of flux leading to more motive force:
Testing and Finite Element Analysis show that the Parallel Path system indeed manages to not only increase the magnetic flux in the core by a factor of four over conventional electric motors, but manipulate the flux to act in the direction of motion, generating considerably more motive power than conventional motors.
Is it reasonable to assume you can get more output power with better efficiency? Try this article titled Increase Efficiency 10 Percent and Double Output:
Improvements in motor efficiency also mean improvements (increases) in continuous torque ratings and reduction in dissipated power. Continuous torque ratings of any electric motor are limited by the internal losses (dissipated power) in a motor which produces heat. Any electric motor's performance is limited to its ability or inability to store and dissipate heat. Face mounting precision motors on recognized aluminum heat sinks have become an important procedure for specifying performance as described in NEMA's ICS16 (step and servo motor) standard. The table below illustrates this condition.
Power-Watts Efficiency In Out Dissipated 80% 100 80 20 90% 100 90 10 90% 200 180 20
By increasing power efficiency 10%, output power is more than doubled (180/80), while maintaining constant heat loss. This is a 125% improvement in output power and motor shaft speed at rated load. The power consumption does not increase because it is tied to the line-to-line input current squared and multiplied by the hot line-to-line resistance (I2R).
I think the original poster/editor misunderstood the original claim...
Wow, I didn't realize that my submission was getting accepted! Sorry for the late response.
MOSIS is exactly what I was trying to remember from my college days. I only had exposure to this back in college, so I didn't remember the prices being so high. Maybe it was subsidized a lot back when I was doing it for educational use...
What I have in mind is a chip that conmbines very simple finite state machines, some additional counters and logic gates on the digital side. Imagine a 8" x 8" breadboard full of 74-series DIPs, and you'd get the basic idea of the low complexity on the digital side.
On the analog side, I want to have some caps, opamps, and very beefy output drivers.
The whole thing is going to be "thumb sized", including the battery and the output device, so there's not a lot of room. And smaller the better -- so that's why I was thinking of bare dies.
It looks like I should first try to find a mixed-signal programmable device and hope that there is a chip-scale packaging.
I had dismissed ASIC because they seemed like overkill. A tiny uC might be okay in light of the high development costs of a chip.
Assuming that your panel isn't broken, I would suepct that you need to adjust your contrast setting. (And then adjust backlight brightness to suit it.)
I've seen many LCD's, especially lower-costing ones, have terrible linearity, and the problem is exacerbated when you dial in a contrast setting that does not map the full range of input values to your display panel's output full range.
Another thing you can do to test is to try run the monitor with the PC disconnected -- many monitors bring up a "the monitor is fine, but your computer is not" test pattern.
You can also try bring up the monitor's OnScreenDisplay and look at the colors. If those images looks fine, the panel itself is probably okay, and the problem is either in the input section of the monitor (where it converts VGA back into the digital signals that go to the panel), or with the VGA output from your PC. If you monitor has DVI in, running with DVI will also help you isolate where the problem is.
Finally, if your video card has enhanced utilities to control the gamma on separate color channels, you can play with that.
About 7 years ago, I moved back to Los Angeles for work. My brother was going to law school in downtown L.A., so we decided to share an apartment.
A week after he moved in, he complained that we only had one phone line and that I would be tying up the phone line to dial in to work. I tried to calm him down with the fact that I was going to get a cablemodem service and that we'd have a 24x7 fast connection... To which he sarcasticall said something like "oh, so that you can find a woman online... well, she's actually going to be some bald guy named Bob..."
When the cablemodem arrived, I reconfigured his laptop so that he could use his AOL account via broadband... Less than two weeks later, I barely saw him because he would march straight into his bedroom after getting home and start typing away...
About two months later, he says: "Uhm, there are some ladies visiting LA from San Francisco - can they crash at our place?" It turned out that he made friends with female law students in one of AOL's chatrooms. And from many late-night chat sessions (first about law, and then about "stuff", and then more and more personal interactions), they went on to phone calls, and then dating.
Anyway, long story short, they got engaged about 3 years later. Whenever anyone asked, they said that they met through a mutual friend. Only a few of us knew the real story behind their introduction. For the wedding reception, my sister-in-law-to-be demanded that I do NOT tell the audience on how they met... Being a good brother-in-law-to-be, I demurred.
But my brother's best friend had a few of us nearly rolling on the floor when he gave a long toast to the newlyweds. He declared that their marriage was possible because of an Abundance Of Love... And then went on for five minutes on many examples of AOL bringing them together!
The two of them are very well suited to each other. It's almost scary how well matched they are. If it wasn't for the online connection, they probably would never have met. It worked for them!
Slashdot Mirror
I second the recommendation for etags for Emacs users. It's a good way to dig down through code and then pop back up.
You don't say why you don't want a copper plant -- but it seems like you're giving network wiring a bad rap. Do you intend to have laptops assigned to everyone, and intend for them to roam around the office all day? (I'm picturing a scene of dogs wandering around at a dog park as I write this!) If the users are primarily sitting at their desks and are using "desktop" machine, there doesn't seem to be much of an advantage to go wireless -- in fact, I'd say that you'd have more headaches.
I'm assuming that you want to do this because the userbase is mostly laptop-based.
You definitely will spend a lot of money on getting real wifi equipment to do this roll-out. At the very least, you will want to have access points that will handle WDS correctly so that people can roam around from AP to AP. You will want to have central configuration management, performance/usage monitoring, and security management. (One product off the top of my head that might be useful: WiFi WorkPlace.)
Note that with wifi, each access point acts essentially like a shared hub -- and the throughput is less than half ot the signaling speed -- so your 10 users on the same 54-Mbps AP will be on an effetive "20 Mbps" hub... Latency is higher, too. Yuck.
In order to keep the footprint of each "hub" (AP) small to ensure reasonable performance, you will need a lots of low-powered access points. And hope that your client machines are running bug free drivers --- back when I used to play with linux wlan drivers, we sometimes had a client go crazy and pump up the transmitter to max power in order to associate with the AP on the other side of the building -- and stepping on a lot of traffic in the process.
Good luck!
BTW, they have an online demo. Play with it... I think it's pretty impressive.
Sawmill is an awesome slicer-and-dicer of your web logs. I haven't done web stuff in several years, but the package was awesome five years ago, and it looks like they've been refining the product over the years.
Since it's a MS format, presumably the codec will be embedded within the OS and will have an easy hook to read/write the format from any program... Make it easily accessible from the various MS Visual Studio IDE's, and then it becomes a new widely supported de facto standard.
Cappuccinopc seems to have a few others that might do the job... (http://www.cappuccinopc.com/slimpro-sp625f-fanles s.asp for example)
If you're primarily serving DNS and mostly serving up static web content (and not doing a lot of writes to "disk"), and your primary concern is power consumption, you might be better off with an embedded linux SBC... (http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT6449817972 .html)
Now, that said, why are you trying to keep your server up and running for a long time? Presumably, the client machiens are also down during these outages?
If the main reason is to have a basic PC with a built-in UPS, then, yes, laptops would probably be the most practical approach.
This will hopefully change in another year when (if???) Canon/Toshiba rolls out their large-screen SED television -- a display that has the viewing advantages of CRT, but in a flat-panel weight/form-factor. Let's hope that it'll be reasonably priced!
Dot matrix and daisywheel printers.
Paddle wheels and joysticks (good lord they were so primitive!)
Green phosphor and amber phosphor CRTs
Cassette tape
Acoustic coupler modem
Mockingboard sound card
External keyboard (with lowercase letters!) that attached via an umbilical.
CP/M Card
80-column card
Oh, and a box of 5 1/4" floppy disks, and a flippy-notcher to use the back, and a Beagle Bros poster to complete the scene.
This make me nostalgic for the CP/M card and the Videx 80-column conversion that let me run WordStar on my Apple ][+. I knew one guy that even had an 8" floppy on his CP/M-enabled Apple...
Oh, and I'd love to see a collection of Apple clones, too... I actually owned such a bootleg... I had a friend with a Franklin, and there were others that I read about over the years.
It's a good post and deserves +Interesting +Informative
This remind me of low-power reversible computing that I learned back in college from Prof. Jan van de Snepscheut at Caltech... The basic idea is to reduce wasted power by "sloshing" current within the chip, rather than to let the current spill to the ground... (this is a a gross simplification...)
l
This (highly technical) paper describes what I'm talking about:
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/electroTextOnly.htm
This article mentions a "helical logic" which sounds a bit like what this invention is...
Asking most programmers to appreciate mainframes must be like asking most drivers to appreciate 18-wheel big rigs -- you know they exist, and large companies rely on them, but you never really have a *need* to know what it's like to operate one.
I've always believed that mainframes have their place in the world, even when the world was announcing the era of the personal computers and the death of mainframes. But while I understood them to be highly specialized high-throughput high-reliability machines, I never had a personal experience with a mainframe operating environment. So I never truly understood what a mainframe is...
I've worked on (relatively) bigger Unix systems (8 processor SPARCservers, 4-rack Sequent NUMA-Q's, and others), but at the end of the day, they seemed no different from a single desktop Unix machine -- just faster and with more memory and storage. I've also used a VAX, briefly, during my freshman year in college. I've always imagined that VMS was closest to what a mainframe environment must be like.
So, to the folks that understand the mainframe -- what is it about them that makes them more than just faster versions of desktop machines, or even server systems that us non-mainframes are used to?
A well written document is an essential part of the engineer's responsibility. The engineer must write clear documents that effectively communicate important ideas to his audience.
During the writing process, the engineer must focus his writing to the target audience. An overly technical document will be frustrating to the reader that is not experienced in the subject matter. Similarly, writing for the "layperson" will be frustrating for readers with a lot of experience.
Have the students study and "reverse-engineer" writings from other authors. I learned much through a combination of traditional "grammar school" lessons and from reading a wide variety of documents, including articles from the Economist, manuals from Beagle Brothers Software, and the classic three-ring-binder IBM manuals.
You can provide some templates to your students as "training wheels". At a former company, we used a corporate writing guide which included templates for API documentation, end-user documentation, whitepapers, et cetra. While the writing guide did not necessarily improve every employee's writing tenfold, it provided a very good framework that helped even expereienced writers.
My wife and I ran are involved in a non-profit organization that ran a big event last weekend. After the event was over, we realized that we wanted to get some criticial feedback on the event, but had no survey mechanism...
The next morning, I looked around freshmeat and found phpSurveyor -- grabbing and exploding the tarball to the right directory took about three minutes. Then I spent about 15 minutes setting it up and making changes to the source code to get around quirks of my ISP. I had a survey ready to go in less than an hour.
The "free to grab", "free to change" situation of FOSS made it possible to run a successful survey while the respondents impressions were still fresh. (Granted, if we had planned for this ahead of time, this wouldn't have been necessary...)
If you thought Pocari Sweat was an awful name to export to US drinker, how about Calpis? Wikipedia mentions this.
A dedicated co-processor with enough registers to perform a complex calculation without having to constantly ferry register values between memory and the processor, combined with the ability to run several calculations simultaneously will blow the socks off a general purpose CPU for *very specifically designed algorithms*.
There's a market for GPU's on video cards running $1,200+... People that buy them won't be satisfied with standard GPU's no matter how fast their main processors run... The custom acceleration of graphics calculation makes it worthwhile.
Now, imagine doing massive calculations (think three blackboards filled with quantum physics equations) -- and you can see how some scientific/industrial applications would go ga-ga over this stuff...
arrgh - sorry, www.protomold.com (not protomolds, plural!)
Once you've got a design that you like, and want to do short runs, you'll want to have a low cost injection mold... These guys look really interesting: www.protomolds.com
Those "immersive 3D glasses" are limited in resolution - the previous generation had less than VGA-resolution, while the current ones are roughly SVGA. Pls, they are a bit bulky.
Digital cinema projection used in the theaters has much higher screen resolution. The glasses you wear are lightweight "sunglasses".
Movies and then sports are obvious first choices for mass-media 3D. But I'm sure plenty of other more specialized applications (gaming, education, architecture to name a few) will find their way into theaters...
Bose (usually known for their speakers and audio systems) has been developing similar technology for replacing suspensions in cars...
There are lots of articles about this, including here and here.
I suspect the deadline is not focused on second-hand resale of used products; instead, it is aimed more toward first-time ("new") sales of products from inventory that was designed and manufactured before the current DENAN safety law.
While many consumer goods are "perishable" because new models/features/prices are obsoleting older ones, there are some mature products that might have been manufactured years ago, are stock piled in the warehouses, and just continue to trickle out (instead of being actively manufactured). (I'm thinking of $15 clock radio's that one picks up at RiteAid as an example of such a product...)
There is a similar issue going on in CE markets with RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substance) -- products manufactured and sold today can still contain lead and other hazardous substances, but come July 1 (this year), that will no longer be allowed. So any inventory in the factory or warehouses that do not conform will be banned, even though it might have been manufactured well before the RoHS deadline...
Is it reasonable to assume you can get more output power with better efficiency? Try this article titled
Increase Efficiency 10 Percent and Double Output:
I think the original poster/editor misunderstood the original claim...
Wow, I didn't realize that my submission was getting accepted! Sorry for the late response.
MOSIS is exactly what I was trying to remember from my college days. I only had exposure to this back in college, so I didn't remember the prices being so high. Maybe it was subsidized a lot back when I was doing it for educational use...
What I have in mind is a chip that conmbines very simple finite state machines, some additional counters and logic gates on the digital side. Imagine a 8" x 8" breadboard full of 74-series DIPs, and you'd get the basic idea of the low complexity on the digital side.
On the analog side, I want to have some caps, opamps, and very beefy output drivers.
The whole thing is going to be "thumb sized", including the battery and the output device, so there's not a lot of room. And smaller the better -- so that's why I was thinking of bare dies.
It looks like I should first try to find a mixed-signal programmable device and hope that there is a chip-scale packaging.
I had dismissed ASIC because they seemed like overkill. A tiny uC might be okay in light of the high development costs of a chip.
Thanks guys. This has been great!
Assuming that your panel isn't broken, I would suepct that you need to adjust your contrast setting. (And then adjust backlight brightness to suit it.)
I've seen many LCD's, especially lower-costing ones, have terrible linearity, and the problem is exacerbated when you dial in a contrast setting that does not map the full range of input values to your display panel's output full range.
Another thing you can do to test is to try run the monitor with the PC disconnected -- many monitors bring up a "the monitor is fine, but your computer is not" test pattern.
You can also try bring up the monitor's OnScreenDisplay and look at the colors. If those images looks fine, the panel itself is probably okay, and the problem is either in the input section of the monitor (where it converts VGA back into the digital signals that go to the panel), or with the VGA output from your PC. If you monitor has DVI in, running with DVI will also help you isolate where the problem is.
Finally, if your video card has enhanced utilities to control the gamma on separate color channels, you can play with that.
Good luck.
About 7 years ago, I moved back to Los Angeles for work. My brother was going to law school in downtown L.A., so we decided to share an apartment.
A week after he moved in, he complained that we only had one phone line and that I would be tying up the phone line to dial in to work. I tried to calm him down with the fact that I was going to get a cablemodem service and that we'd have a 24x7 fast connection... To which he sarcasticall said something like "oh, so that you can find a woman online... well, she's actually going to be some bald guy named Bob..."
When the cablemodem arrived, I reconfigured his laptop so that he could use his AOL account via broadband... Less than two weeks later, I barely saw him because he would march straight into his bedroom after getting home and start typing away...
About two months later, he says: "Uhm, there are some ladies visiting LA from San Francisco - can they crash at our place?" It turned out that he made friends with female law students in one of AOL's chatrooms. And from many late-night chat sessions (first about law, and then about "stuff", and then more and more personal interactions), they went on to phone calls, and then dating.
Anyway, long story short, they got engaged about 3 years later. Whenever anyone asked, they said that they met through a mutual friend. Only a few of us knew the real story behind their introduction. For the wedding reception, my sister-in-law-to-be demanded that I do NOT tell the audience on how they met... Being a good brother-in-law-to-be, I demurred.
But my brother's best friend had a few of us nearly rolling on the floor when he gave a long toast to the newlyweds. He declared that their marriage was possible because of an Abundance Of Love... And then went on for five minutes on many examples of AOL bringing them together!
The two of them are very well suited to each other. It's almost scary how well matched they are. If it wasn't for the online connection, they probably would never have met. It worked for them!