While your at it consider running more energy efficient lighting, as well as redoing all your door and window seals so you have less influx of hot or cold air straining your HVAC system. And some one mod this guy up.
You are whining about blowing circuits with your computer? I have to turn off everything in my house every time I plug in my welder to a dedicated 220 in the garage. If I don't i blow the main for the house every time. If I turn the welder up I can draw 220v at 70 amps. It doesn't help that its an 80 year old house. But on a more realistic note, I would hate to have you peoples power bills. Has it occurred to you that maybe you should think about using a little less power? Out here in CA we have had rolling blackouts because of idiots who can't turn off the 45 appliances in their house they aren't using, and still have a 30 year old electric hot water heater. Maybe you should go check out Energystar.gov
As some one who has worked in the film processing industry for a while, I have to say, good quality film will continue to hold significantly higher resolutions than digital for a long time. I have scanned film at 3000+ dpi on a drum scanner and it still misses information i can get off a nice simple analog print. In the last 5 years the resolution of film has doubled. I find it funny that they keep saying film is dead, yet, its advancing at roughly the same rate as digital technology. One bias of mine, i shoot medium format film... so I still think movies are low res using only half a 35mm frame . A when we have TV's that can reproduce the information of a 70mm camera with almost 10x the data of 35mm panavision.
The internet impresses me every day. Its the ridiculous expectations of people that blow my mind.
When the world trade center went down, I worked at a major ISP. Verizon is right next door to the WTC, not surprisingly all the main trunks were destroyed. Connectivity for much of the Atlantic including Europe was disrupted. Many carriers had cell towers on top of the building as well. Even from California I didn't need to be told the internet was going to be f#@*ed up on the east. Yet some how people in NYC who had to travel to NJ to find a working phone would call me and ask why their DSL was down.
The fact that the whole north east had no power, and the majority of the internet worked shows the internet has done a very good job of doing just what its designed for. It could do a better job. So lets work on that instead of just talking about it.
I would build it in the style of a CNC machine. There is plenty of documentation available, I actually know some one who built his own little cnc out of mdf a dremel some stepper motors and a lot of hacking. The beautiful part is the parts were cut on another CNC machine. In addition the controller software is freely available. The suggestion to use airbrush is actually a good one. I have heard of a CNC spray painter that uses standard spray cans to do computerized grafiti. Using the CNC type model you can have it draw either raster or vector graphics and with some work do continuos tone work. Hell you do it well you have a new job. Also, for convenience i would think of working with 4x8' panels and doing it table top style and tiling if you need larger.
This year I plan on working on a solution that just meets those requirements as a design school project. The electronics are the easy part, as you mentioned the C3 processor is perfect.
My challenge is i want some thing that looks good in a living room and fits in with stereo components. It will have to be 19" wide so it fits in a rack or stereo stack, can run fanless or at least very quitly and some thing my mom can setup with out a manual.
Right now I think i am going to go with a clean simple aluminum case, and massive heat sinks similar to what many power amps use (think McIntosh MC602), and probably rack mountable with removeable brackets. I am not sure what os it will run yet. Probably some thing embeded or BSD, just to piss of the linux crowd, but with standard hardware it wont be to complicated.
If it turns out well, ill probably make a few for sale at just above cost.
I assume you never owned one. Your vent argument holds true for every monitor on the market but no one mentions that. The Cube however had its touch sensitive power button and drive access on top so, no one who owns one would think about setting a drink or some thing with crumbs on top, just as no one would think of setting a drink or some thing with crumbs on top of their monitor (well no one smart enough to consider the consequences). To this day the only thing ever set on top of my cube was the clipboard of an idiot the cable man, and he got yelled at with in 3 seconds.
The Cube was also much more than a headless iMac. It was the test bed for Apple to develop the G4 Powerbook. It has all the complex problems of designing a laptop solved. Small space, heat dissipation with little/no ventilation, and running with low power consumption.
As far as expandability a large percentage of consumers will never even consider upgrading. If they do they will upgrade maybe RAM and maybe the harddrive, Both those are easily upgraded the cube. That is why the iMac is popular, that is why laptops are popular (no one whines about their lack of expandability) thats why the Cube still has its cult following.
I am a parking valet. All I have to say is I hope this puts me out of work. I cannot believe how few people can't park their own car. I have seen more $100,000 cars rammed in to cement pillars than I can count. I hope one day I have the disposable income to destroy a car thats worth 8 times my current yearly income (yes I do make about $12,000 a year, shut up and tip a little better you arrogant middle class BMW drivers and yes I am bitter)
And to clarify. I fully support you going to the effort of using rechargeable batteries. Every little thing adds up. You buy those rechargeable once, and they don't have to make 50 alkalizes.
I wish more people put a little thought in to their purchases like you.
I have a great idea. 1. Don't drive. 2. Why recycle when you can not buy it in the first place. 3. Learn to conserve power. One of the largest unseen polluters out there is people using power. That power plant probably uses fossil fuels just like your neighbors SUV. 4. Move to a city. Ever new McMansion built out in former farmland is less open space. That sweet townhouse downtown were you can walk to the bar, the store, and work will save more of the environment than any thing else you can do.
I know I sound like some psycho environmentalist here... but really the fix for the environment isn't recycling, its not giving in to consumerism.
ps. Before you say "It's expensive in a city." I live in SF, the city with the highest cost of living in the US, and by not having my car I decreases my cost of living below what it was when I lived in the suburbs of Sacramento (one of the lowest costs of living in CA).
Panasonic is (as far as i know) the largest maker of battery cells in the market. They make excellent LiO and NiMH cells. NiMH are probably the best bang for the buck, as they are a direct replacement for regular alkaline batteries. Lithium are great if they will work in our device as they are lighter, and wont be destroyed if you accidentally let them heat up or get too cold. Down side is LiO cost a lot more.
There is one major drawback every one is neglecting when they suggest a color laser. The quality sucks. Laser is great for black and white text, but color laser prints are flat and have a much smaller color gamut than inkjet. A good quality inkjet will last a long time, and should offer ethernet. I have always been partial to Epson as they offer lightfast inks, and cater to people looking for photo quality output. I have used a Epson 1280 for a while and had no issues. I don't have any experience using it under linux, but under mac OSX it works beautifully, esp. with colorsync. The major down side that has been mentioned is many inkjets do not have individual ink carts, this is changing, most of Epson's printers now have separate carts. HP's nicer printers do as well.
one flaw, you say dense developments cause those problems. The problem is cause by not using dense developments. If you build denser you put more people in to a smaller space. This leaves more space for use by nature. The problem of pollution is not cause by density but by people not properly disposing of waste.
Transportation will not work in the US because ...
on
Creating Car Free Cities
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The major problem with having a car free city in the US is lack of transportation. The reason we don't have transportation is the way the cities we live in are built. The cities we live in are built the way they are cause every one has a car. Here lies the problem.
The root of the problem is we build our housing in too low a density in the US. For transit to work there has to be a minimum number of riders for the system to work economically. To get enough riders to do that transit need a certain density of population. Also transit will normally only get riders to walk 1/4 mile to a transit top.
The problem is most Americans want conflicting things in housing. They want a big house, and they want open space. These don't sound like the conflict but they do.
Say you have 10 acres of land. If on that land you you build like most modern subdivisions do, you will build 1/4 of the land in to streets, and then 3-5 houses per acre. Most people see this and think it is great. they have a big yard and a big house and a street. But, what they don't see is that 1/4 of all our property is covered in streets. Now on top of that land getting used for streets tons of other land gets used for parking lots and freeways. Leaving nearly as much land in the US tied up in places for cars to go as places for people to go. Also, because of the low density of this housing to driver from that house to another house (or school or store) you have to drive a lot farther. The result is more cars on the streets making longer trips. People who design networks will see the problem here. In addition this method of building houses results in a very low density of people. For transit to move these people it has to make long trips and people have to walk a long way to get to it. Also because it is making long trips it takes a long time to get anywhere making transit inconvenient. Because its inconvenient no one takes it anywhere, they have to raise prices, less people take it, etc...
Now, if you look at cities where transit works, NYC, SF and most European cities houses are built differently. In all of these places houses are built much denser. Most Americans will bitch that they would feel crowded. But the result is less crowding. The reason for this is by building denser, say 15 - 20 unit per acre you now can house all those people in less space. Also because people are closer together there is less street getting built and less land dedicated to cars. You can now use that extra space for some thing like a park. Because most people are not home most of the time, building public areas results in more efficient use of that space. Some one will be using it all the time. Now that people are closer to each other, they are also able to walk from place to place. you no longer have to walk past those huge lots, you walk past a nice small lot. Most importantly now you have the critical mass of people required to make transit work
Now for all those people in Dallas, San Jose, and Los Angeles who say they cant survive with out cars, try traveling to another country and you will quickly learn it happen every day. All we need is to express interest in living that way and we can start building that way. Many cities are pushing very hard to get more people living in the urban core of the city. They are offering tax breaks, low interest loans and other incentives. Developers build houses the market demands. If people demand better housing that works with transit, they will get it. If a city doesn't zone in such a way to build affordable housing near jobs go down to the city planning department and tell them, they can (and will) change the zoning. Cities want to build smarter. It saves them money by decreasing the infrastructure they have to build and the area in which they have to supply services.
Oh yeah, and he is refering to a problem in system 7 and below where you could not have more than (if I remember) 1000 files in a fold, nor could you have over 99 nested folders with out crashing finder. Mind you finder has been rewriten more times than I can count since then.
Few hundred? Try opening a folder with a few thousand (your mozilla cache is a good example)... still works fine. Try opening that folder on windows system, or even doing a dir, it will take days.
My prediction is that people will start demanding silent PCs that are power efficient, don't take up much space, and have a chasis, moniter, speakers, keyboard, and mouse that fit the fashion of the day.
The japanese have already started on this route. Look at the tiny, stylish laptops and mobile phones (computer in a stylized case) they use.
This may seem silly but have you considered an older iMac or a G4 cube? Neither have fans and both are about the speed you just mentioned. Not to mention they are dirt cheap on ebay. I currently own a cube and i didn't realize how loud my refrigerator was till I owned it.
On that subject, I really don't get why some one doesn't build a nice PC that can be as quite as a mac. I have considered trying to make one my self by under clocking a processor and running a huge (1 lb or more) heat sink and then dynamating the case so I don't hear the hard drives. Any one out there tried some thing like that?
I am quite fond of chro-molybdenum alloys my self. A bit of chrome and molybdenum makes a world of difference in corrosion resistance and a nice balanceof strength to fatigue resistance.
I have a room with a view of a garage, I was going to install a light box with a transparency of some thing interesting. I haven't decided what yet. But this is really a cool idea I wish I had clearance behind the window for some thing like it.. It would also be cool if some how the lights changed, like some turning on and off at random to simulate people. Over all, very cool!
The real difference between vinyl and CD comes in the frequency response. Vinyl has can reproduce the subsonics and ultrasonics a CD can not. Most CD's are filtered to cut out any thing below 20hz and any thing grater than 20khz. That is one of the major differences between the 2. Now my hearing is too shot to hear those tones, not to mention i don't have the speakers to play them. But the sound is still there and some people can hear them.
There is some good documentation out there, that cover a lot of the issues you will run in to. My favorite is Designing Airport Networks from Apple [PDF], it goes on the assumption WEP works, but other than that it covers things such as how to get multiple devices to play nice and some network topologies. Good Luck.
I have had sucsess useing both Mac OSX and an Apple Airport on their DHCP server using cable.
I have also been unsucsessful with every OS (includding Linux, BSD and Windows) except Mac OS 9.0 (no other versions of the Mac OS worked) on an ATT SDSL connection.
My biggest issue has been ATT has been running misconfigured DNS for the last month, and no one can do RNS on my IP, so keep getting blocked from FTP and other services. All i have leared from this is ATT's network is run by monkeys.
My suggestion is try a router, and call ATT and bitch. If the tech doesn't help, ask for his sup. If he doesnt help, ask for his. Keep asking for suppervisers till some one who know some thing answers the phone. Just make sure you know what your talking about or your going to come off as an asshole and idiot.
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While your at it consider running more energy efficient lighting, as well as redoing all your door and window seals so you have less influx of hot or cold air straining your HVAC system.
And some one mod this guy up.
You are whining about blowing circuits with your computer? I have to turn off everything in my house every time I plug in my welder to a dedicated 220 in the garage. If I don't i blow the main for the house every time. If I turn the welder up I can draw 220v at 70 amps. It doesn't help that its an 80 year old house.
But on a more realistic note, I would hate to have you peoples power bills. Has it occurred to you that maybe you should think about using a little less power? Out here in CA we have had rolling blackouts because of idiots who can't turn off the 45 appliances in their house they aren't using, and still have a 30 year old electric hot water heater. Maybe you should go check out Energystar.gov
As some one who has worked in the film processing industry for a while, I have to say, good quality film will continue to hold significantly higher resolutions than digital for a long time. I have scanned film at 3000+ dpi on a drum scanner and it still misses information i can get off a nice simple analog print. In the last 5 years the resolution of film has doubled. I find it funny that they keep saying film is dead, yet, its advancing at roughly the same rate as digital technology. ... so I still think movies are low res using only half a 35mm frame . A when we have TV's that can reproduce the information of a 70mm camera with almost 10x the data of 35mm panavision.
One bias of mine, i shoot medium format film
The internet impresses me every day. Its the ridiculous expectations of people that blow my mind.
When the world trade center went down, I worked at a major ISP. Verizon is right next door to the WTC, not surprisingly all the main trunks were destroyed. Connectivity for much of the Atlantic including Europe was disrupted. Many carriers had cell towers on top of the building as well. Even from California I didn't need to be told the internet was going to be f#@*ed up on the east. Yet some how people in NYC who had to travel to NJ to find a working phone would call me and ask why their DSL was down.
The fact that the whole north east had no power, and the majority of the internet worked shows the internet has done a very good job of doing just what its designed for. It could do a better job. So lets work on that instead of just talking about it.
I would build it in the style of a CNC machine. There is plenty of documentation available, I actually know some one who built his own little cnc out of mdf a dremel some stepper motors and a lot of hacking. The beautiful part is the parts were cut on another CNC machine. In addition the controller software is freely available. The suggestion to use airbrush is actually a good one. I have heard of a CNC spray painter that uses standard spray cans to do computerized grafiti. Using the CNC type model you can have it draw either raster or vector graphics and with some work do continuos tone work. Hell you do it well you have a new job.
Also, for convenience i would think of working with 4x8' panels and doing it table top style and tiling if you need larger.
This year I plan on working on a solution that just meets those requirements as a design school project. The electronics are the easy part, as you mentioned the C3 processor is perfect.
My challenge is i want some thing that looks good in a living room and fits in with stereo components. It will have to be 19" wide so it fits in a rack or stereo stack, can run fanless or at least very quitly and some thing my mom can setup with out a manual.
Right now I think i am going to go with a clean simple aluminum case, and massive heat sinks similar to what many power amps use (think McIntosh MC602), and probably rack mountable with removeable brackets.
I am not sure what os it will run yet. Probably some thing embeded or BSD, just to piss of the linux crowd, but with standard hardware it wont be to complicated.
If it turns out well, ill probably make a few for sale at just above cost.
I assume you never owned one. Your vent argument holds true for every monitor on the market but no one mentions that. The Cube however had its touch sensitive power button and drive access on top so, no one who owns one would think about setting a drink or some thing with crumbs on top, just as no one would think of setting a drink or some thing with crumbs on top of their monitor (well no one smart enough to consider the consequences). To this day the only thing ever set on top of my cube was the clipboard of an idiot the cable man, and he got yelled at with in 3 seconds.
The Cube was also much more than a headless iMac. It was the test bed for Apple to develop the G4 Powerbook. It has all the complex problems of designing a laptop solved. Small space, heat dissipation with little/no ventilation, and running with low power consumption.
As far as expandability a large percentage of consumers will never even consider upgrading. If they do they will upgrade maybe RAM and maybe the harddrive, Both those are easily upgraded the cube. That is why the iMac is popular, that is why laptops are popular (no one whines about their lack of expandability) thats why the Cube still has its cult following.
I am a parking valet. All I have to say is I hope this puts me out of work. I cannot believe how few people can't park their own car. I have seen more $100,000 cars rammed in to cement pillars than I can count. I hope one day I have the disposable income to destroy a car thats worth 8 times my current yearly income (yes I do make about $12,000 a year, shut up and tip a little better you arrogant middle class BMW drivers and yes I am bitter)
And to clarify. I fully support you going to the effort of using rechargeable batteries. Every little thing adds up. You buy those rechargeable once, and they don't have to make 50 alkalizes.
I wish more people put a little thought in to their purchases like you.
I have a great idea.
... but really the fix for the environment isn't recycling, its not giving in to consumerism.
1. Don't drive.
2. Why recycle when you can not buy it in the first place.
3. Learn to conserve power. One of the largest unseen polluters out there is people using power. That power plant probably uses fossil fuels just like your neighbors SUV.
4. Move to a city. Ever new McMansion built out in former farmland is less open space. That sweet townhouse downtown were you can walk to the bar, the store, and work will save more of the environment than any thing else you can do.
I know I sound like some psycho environmentalist here
ps. Before you say "It's expensive in a city." I live in SF, the city with the highest cost of living in the US, and by not having my car I decreases my cost of living below what it was when I lived in the suburbs of Sacramento (one of the lowest costs of living in CA).
Panasonic is (as far as i know) the largest maker of battery cells in the market. They make excellent LiO and NiMH cells. NiMH are probably the best bang for the buck, as they are a direct replacement for regular alkaline batteries. Lithium are great if they will work in our device as they are lighter, and wont be destroyed if you accidentally let them heat up or get too cold. Down side is LiO cost a lot more.
There is one major drawback every one is neglecting when they suggest a color laser. The quality sucks. Laser is great for black and white text, but color laser prints are flat and have a much smaller color gamut than inkjet. A good quality inkjet will last a long time, and should offer ethernet.
I have always been partial to Epson as they offer lightfast inks, and cater to people looking for photo quality output. I have used a Epson 1280 for a while and had no issues. I don't have any experience using it under linux, but under mac OSX it works beautifully, esp. with colorsync. The major down side that has been mentioned is many inkjets do not have individual ink carts, this is changing, most of Epson's printers now have separate carts. HP's nicer printers do as well.
Good luck on deciding.
one flaw, you say dense developments cause those problems. The problem is cause by not using dense developments. If you build denser you put more people in to a smaller space. This leaves more space for use by nature. The problem of pollution is not cause by density but by people not properly disposing of waste.
The major problem with having a car free city in the US is lack of transportation. The reason we don't have transportation is the way the cities we live in are built. The cities we live in are built the way they are cause every one has a car. Here lies the problem.
The root of the problem is we build our housing in too low a density in the US.
For transit to work there has to be a minimum number of riders for the system to work economically. To get enough riders to do that transit need a certain density of population. Also transit will normally only get riders to walk 1/4 mile to a transit top.
The problem is most Americans want conflicting things in housing. They want a big house, and they want open space. These don't sound like the conflict but they do.
Say you have 10 acres of land. If on that land you you build like most modern subdivisions do, you will build 1/4 of the land in to streets, and then 3-5 houses per acre. Most people see this and think it is great. they have a big yard and a big house and a street. But, what they don't see is that 1/4 of all our property is covered in streets. Now on top of that land getting used for streets tons of other land gets used for parking lots and freeways. Leaving nearly as much land in the US tied up in places for cars to go as places for people to go. Also, because of the low density of this housing to driver from that house to another house (or school or store) you have to drive a lot farther. The result is more cars on the streets making longer trips. People who design networks will see the problem here. In addition this method of building houses results in a very low density of people. For transit to move these people it has to make long trips and people have to walk a long way to get to it. Also because it is making long trips it takes a long time to get anywhere making transit inconvenient. Because its inconvenient no one takes it anywhere, they have to raise prices, less people take it, etc...
Now, if you look at cities where transit works, NYC, SF and most European cities houses are built differently. In all of these places houses are built much denser. Most Americans will bitch that they would feel crowded. But the result is less crowding. The reason for this is by building denser, say 15 - 20 unit per acre you now can house all those people in less space. Also because people are closer together there is less street getting built and less land dedicated to cars. You can now use that extra space for some thing like a park. Because most people are not home most of the time, building public areas results in more efficient use of that space. Some one will be using it all the time.
Now that people are closer to each other, they are also able to walk from place to place. you no longer have to walk past those huge lots, you walk past a nice small lot.
Most importantly now you have the critical mass of people required to make transit work
Now for all those people in Dallas, San Jose, and Los Angeles who say they cant survive with out cars, try traveling to another country and you will quickly learn it happen every day. All we need is to express interest in living that way and we can start building that way. Many cities are pushing very hard to get more people living in the urban core of the city. They are offering tax breaks, low interest loans and other incentives. Developers build houses the market demands. If people demand better housing that works with transit, they will get it. If a city doesn't zone in such a way to build affordable housing near jobs go down to the city planning department and tell them, they can (and will) change the zoning. Cities want to build smarter. It saves them money by decreasing the infrastructure they have to build and the area in which they have to supply services.
Oh yeah, and he is refering to a problem in system 7 and below where you could not have more than (if I remember) 1000 files in a fold, nor could you have over 99 nested folders with out crashing finder. Mind you finder has been rewriten more times than I can count since then.
Few hundred? Try opening a folder with a few thousand (your mozilla cache is a good example)... still works fine. Try opening that folder on windows system, or even doing a dir, it will take days.
This may seem silly but have you considered an older iMac or a G4 cube? Neither have fans and both are about the speed you just mentioned. Not to mention they are dirt cheap on ebay. I currently own a cube and i didn't realize how loud my refrigerator was till I owned it.
On that subject, I really don't get why some one doesn't build a nice PC that can be as quite as a mac. I have considered trying to make one my self by under clocking a processor and running a huge (1 lb or more) heat sink and then dynamating the case so I don't hear the hard drives. Any one out there tried some thing like that?
I am quite fond of chro-molybdenum alloys my self. A bit of chrome and molybdenum makes a world of difference in corrosion resistance and a nice balanceof strength to fatigue resistance.
I have a room with a view of a garage, I was going to install a light box with a transparency of some thing interesting. I haven't decided what yet. But this is really a cool idea I wish I had clearance behind the window for some thing like it.. It would also be cool if some how the lights changed, like some turning on and off at random to simulate people.
Over all, very cool!
The real difference between vinyl and CD comes in the frequency response. Vinyl has can reproduce the subsonics and ultrasonics a CD can not. Most CD's are filtered to cut out any thing below 20hz and any thing grater than 20khz. That is one of the major differences between the 2. Now my hearing is too shot to hear those tones, not to mention i don't have the speakers to play them. But the sound is still there and some people can hear them.
There is some good documentation out there, that cover a lot of the issues you will run in to. My favorite is Designing Airport Networks from Apple [PDF], it goes on the assumption WEP works, but other than that it covers things such as how to get multiple devices to play nice and some network topologies.
Good Luck.
Whats that? I cam in your moms eye?
I swear it.
I have had sucsess useing both Mac OSX and an Apple Airport on their DHCP server using cable.
I have also been unsucsessful with every OS (includding Linux, BSD and Windows) except Mac OS 9.0 (no other versions of the Mac OS worked) on an ATT SDSL connection.
My biggest issue has been ATT has been running misconfigured DNS for the last month, and no one can do RNS on my IP, so keep getting blocked from FTP and other services. All i have leared from this is ATT's network is run by monkeys.
My suggestion is try a router, and call ATT and bitch. If the tech doesn't help, ask for his sup. If he doesnt help, ask for his. Keep asking for suppervisers till some one who know some thing answers the phone. Just make sure you know what your talking about or your going to come off as an asshole and idiot.