Like the subject says, in most cases, you can't even tell. It's not that an MP3 is as good as the original, it's that so many people have such crap speakers (and perhaps other gear) that the difference is negligible anyway.
On a good setup, the difference is pretty clear (even w/ 256 kbit MP3s), but on things that most people listen to, you're just splitting hairs.
In one data center I am aware of, half of the customers lost power when a customer's child switched off breakers on the UPS system. Their solution? They taped cardboard over the breaker switches.
Well, then, Einstein, tell us how to run traction control, fuel injection, ABS, adaptive shifting, real-time diagnostics, etc., *without* an OS.
I suppose that you *could* hack it all together with discrete logic chips and the passives that accompany them, but your part count would be in the tens of thousands, which alone would cut your reliability. And you'd be accomplishing the same thing, you'd just do your "programming" in traces instead of C or assembly.
I dunno about you, but I'd rather debug C or assembly, then re-flash a new firmware than sit around with a scope and logic probe trying to figure out why things are bad, then produce an entirely new board. Maybe I'm crazy. Or, maybe that's the reason that virtually the entire electronics world has replaced discretes with microcontrollers any place that they can.
Actually, your motherboard *is* a power supply. It has switching DC-DC converters that take 12V and drop it down to the various voltages used by your CPU, chipset, DIMMs, etc.. The caps (and inductors) are there to smooth the resultant chopped-up supply, and that's a task where your ripple current is very large - leading to a lot of heat, and hence, short lifetimes for aluminum capacitors.
Not only do the solid caps not have a liquid electrolyte to boil off, they very well may have lower ESR to boot - producing less heat, producing higher efficiency, and doing an even better job of smoothing. The only downside is cost.
Regular aluminum electrolytic capacitors are filled with liquid. When driven hard and hot, that liquid evaporates or boils. There are various other types of caps that have no liquid, including solid tantalum and ceramic. They generally have lower ESR (good), and last (for all intents and purposes) forever, but are definitely more expensive.
About the only advantage of an aluminum electrolytic is that it's cheap.
We live in an age when brand-new, undocumented, *encrypted* file formats are deciphered within days or weeks. You're telling me that in a few decades, NOBODY will be able to figure out a spreadsheet or word-processing document?
Even in my "Intro to EE for mech E students" class, on the first day we were told to march ourselves down to the bookstore and buy a breadboard and various other materials. We covered circuit analysis, filters, all kinds of fun stuff - and built/examined everything we studied.
"Back in the day", in high school electronics, there were a few folks in the class who took it just because they thought it would be easy. They would do no work, and a day before projects were due, would pester those of us who were already finished to do their work for them. I got tired of "Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.", so I grabbed some high-voltage caps out of the back room, and (thanks to a diode and resistor) would charge it from the AC socket. Since you're dealing with rectified AC, peak-to-peak is about 170 volts, and the energy in a cap goes up with the square of the voltage. Even with a "measly" couple of hundreds microfarads, at 170 volts, there's a good bit of energy stored up.
Back to the story, I only had to use the caps to blow holes in metal objects a few times before all of them knew what they would do, and when they'd bug me to do their work, I'd pick up one of the charged caps and take stabs at them with it. I don't think I ever got bothered again.
It's not just about starving. I spent a couple years south of the border, and met a lot of people who had been to the US both legally and illegally. The US dollar is worth so much down there that they can come up and bust their butts working in the fields for 5-8 months, then go back home and take the rest of the year off. All the while, their family is living what is - for down there - a fairly good lifestyle.
Even if you're not starving, it's hard to turn down a job where you get 4 months off every year....
It wasn't quite that bad, but I had a teacher who would give you 1 point for a right answer, no points for no answer, and take away two points for a wrong answer.
I had a physics professor for two entire physics series. This man was... a machine. He was VERY intelligent, and was a VERY good teacher. He was, however, quite anal. He would not expect you to know things he hadn't taught, but he expected you to know what he had taught with *perfect* mastery.
He provided copies of all former tests, along with answers and how to solve them, to the local copy store for students to buy (amazingly, this prof DIDN'T try to take you on them, the only cost was of the copies). The tests changed VERY little over the years. Two nights before the exam, you were welcome to go to a study session, where he would take problems VERY similar to what would be on the test, and walk you through solving them. And he would let you take a 4x5 card into the test with you, with anything you wanted.
His tests consisted of three questions. Just three. At the end of the alotted hour for the exams, the majority of the class would NOT have finished. Those tests were *tough*. I also had a calculus professor who would give exams that consisted of just two problems, and few people finished them completely. That wasn't so much that he gave hard problems, just problems that took a lot of work to solve. That almost seems backwards, since the point of calculus is to make difficult problems easier... or at least possible, anyway. But he was VERY generous with partial credit.
Just cleaning the keyboard? My first experience cleaning electronics was when I was 10 years old, and spilled Coke into my C-64. It didn't just get the keyboard, but the whole motherboard. The screen just went black. I shut the whole thing off, pulled everything apart, washed it in the bathtub, and put it back together. The computer worked, but the keyboard didn't work well. I pulled the keyboard *completely* apart, washed everything in soap and water, dried it with a hair dryer, and put it back together... just before my parents got home.
I've fixed a lot of "watered" electronics over the years, including things dropped into saltwater fish tanks - you have to get those apart, rinsed, and cleaned RIGHT away. But the worst I've found yet was a cell phone that a baby sucked on... I had no idea that saliva was that corrosive. Every bit of copper on the board was GREEEEEEEN. I cleaned it all off, rinsed everything, dried out the microphone... and it worked. That one even surprised me.
Back to the topic of keyboards.... they're usually not worth the trouble. I don't think that putting them in the dishwasher is going to clean under the membrane very well, and that's where your problems come from. Don't buy into the hype about huge numbers of bacteria... unless they're certain strains of bacteria, you have nothing to worry about. If you knew how many bacteria are living on and inside of you right now without any ill effects (and sometimes GOOD effects), you'd turn into an OCD-handwasher immediately. And that's just bacteria... there are lots of other things, too.
My initial thought was "Terrific. This really has the potential to eliminate spam." Then I got to looking into the RFC... standard private/public key exchange. But, it allows for individual MUAs to posess the private key, such that they can perform the signature.
This puts the entire burden of security in the scheme upon the MUA. So any time a machine is infected with the spam-virus of the day, that private key will be sent off to the spammers, who will send out floods of seemingly legitimately-signed email. Instead of just selling valid email addresses to other spammers, they'll sell addresses and domain keys.
Furthermore, from an administrative perspective, that means that each time one of your user's machines is hacked and the private key compromised, you have to change your public/private keypair, including updating the MUA on *all* of your sender's machines.
Forcing signing upon the MTAs eliminates much of that work (and hopefully the security exposure), but forces inconvenience on a good number of users. It's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make, but the RFC doesn't seem willing to do so.
The chips that you mention don't go in the battery, they go in the charger. Some applications (like a cell phone) have them in the same unit, but I'm thinking more along the lines of the lithium batteries used in digital cameras - the batteries have short-circuit protection, but the charge control and protection is built into the charger.
Here's more of what I'm thinking. Take a look at my digital camera, a Canon, which uses a Canon NB-2LH. It does have a short-circuit protection. Canon charges a ton for the batteries. Other companies charge much less for equivalents. Some are really bad, and you risk damage to your camera (or worse). In between what Canon charges and the rock-bottom (and dangerous) substitutes are companies like Sterlingtek, a LOT of photographers use their batteries with no problem at all. No explosions, no fires, no bulging, no damage to their camera, etc., and the Canon chargers will charge them quite well and safely. Their equivalents are about $19, and actually have a slightly higher capacity.
The price for things like that is higher because there are so many types. Let's say that the industry decided to standardize on just a few sizes. The cost per unit could only go down, and you'd have the same protection that you already have in many devices - the only difference would be that the economies of scale would have an even greater effect.
Like you said, it's already put inside of every lithium battery made, that's not the problem - the only problem is price. I don't think that's a big problem... because of the non-standard nature of lithium batteries, people pay MORE for them now than they would under what I propose, and they buy them in large number. They just pay more to support thousands of different, custom-made battery sizes, and custom charging for all of them.
And lithium doesn't have a very big advantage in energy density in terms of volume, but rather a HUGE one in terms of weight.
I'd rather see *standard* lithium-ion rechargeable battery sizes, so that manufacturers could just quit designing things for alkalines. They wouldn't even have to handle recharging (if they didn't want to), just let the user pop the batteries out and into a charger.
My baby monitor uses AAs, and I *can* put nicads or nimhs in, but they go dead just from self-discharge as fast as they do from use, so I stick to cheap Kirkland alkalines. I keep daydreaming of putting a single litium-ion cell in it, and adding a charging circuit tied into the power socket, I don't think I'll have enough room in it.
Naw. People blame being wrong (or STUPID) on *anything*. Technology is just handy. Take it away, and they'll blame it on something else.
Take one dude I know. He started accusing people of hiding his smokes because he couldn't find them. When everyone told him "Nobody hid your smokes, man.", he got pissed, through a tantrum, and said "Well, I guess that God must not want me to smoke, because HE must have hid my cigarettes!"
That was while he was sober. You should have seen him on the sauce.
"A developer who has the option of blaming the admin for the failure ( while just finding a way to get it done ) can be endlessly frustrating."
Here's what I, as an admin, find frustrating: Most programmers aren't just clueless enough to hork up the system, they're usually so clueless that they don't even know it was *them* who horked it up, or how. I usually get the job of going to the programmers and saying "Hey... guess what. Your code sucks."
And, to make it better, not a few times, I've had the IT manager come to me and say "Programmer X is having a problem with his program, and he just can't figure out where it's coming from. We know it's not your job, but nobody else is available. Can you help him debug it?
Then again, there are times when the clueless developer claims that his errors are because of the OS (or hardware), and I have to go to lengths to prove that the OS/hardware are, in fact, stable, just because everyone is instantly suspicious of the system.
Some days, you wonder just how many times you will have to tell the programmers "Hey, guys, when you fork off worker processes, those processes need to EXIT when the work is done... not simply exiting the loop and then acting as a master, forking of MORE worker processes in an exponential loop."
I have a lot of accounts in different places where it really would not matter if someone were to find out my password. All of those have the same password. Things that are actually important in any way can get their own passwords (well over three dozen for me), but right off of the bat, I've eliminated at least 50% of the passwords I need to remember.
One of the people in my neighborhood makes a living suing telephone-spammers. There are some tricks to actually getting a judge to rule in your favor - even when the company has clearly violated the law - but once you know them, it works well. And many don't even bother going to court, they simply send her a $500 check.
You're not joking, you're speculating. If I'm not mistaken, Japan has had mass-murders with similar death counts from people with... swords. If I recall, they've had low-double-digit death counts from a guy with just a knife.
Besides, you're forgetting that the worst school-killing in US history had nothing to do with guns at all. It's really convenient to believe that without guns, people won't be able to kill large numbers of other people, but it just isn't so. Rwanda managed to kill about a million people in a very short time, and only a very small percentage of those were committed with guns.
It's also very convenient to ignore the fact that most gun-related crime is done with illegally-acquired guns. For every Virginia Tech, there are a few thousand (probably a few HUNDREDS of thousands) of murders with stolen guns, by people who are ALREADY prohibitted from carrying guns. Pass all of the laws you want. They don't care now, and they won't care then. What? You want to get rid of guns entirely? Sure. Just ask England if their criminals suddenly came up short in the weaponry department after all of their efforts.
It's sad, but it's true: If someone wants to kill someone else, they're going to do it. A lot of people can't handle the fact that some people are killers, could kill THEM, and that you can't always pick out who they are. Projecting the blame onto instruments which could be regulated or removed gives them a sense of security or control, but it's like covering your head to keep the boogeyman away... unless the boogeyman is the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal, you're only fooling yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the subject says, in most cases, you can't even tell. It's not that an MP3 is as good as the original, it's that so many people have such crap speakers (and perhaps other gear) that the difference is negligible anyway.
On a good setup, the difference is pretty clear (even w/ 256 kbit MP3s), but on things that most people listen to, you're just splitting hairs.
In one data center I am aware of, half of the customers lost power when a customer's child switched off breakers on the UPS system. Their solution? They taped cardboard over the breaker switches.
*That* is engineering, I tell you.
Well, then, Einstein, tell us how to run traction control, fuel injection, ABS, adaptive shifting, real-time diagnostics, etc., *without* an OS.
I suppose that you *could* hack it all together with discrete logic chips and the passives that accompany them, but your part count would be in the tens of thousands, which alone would cut your reliability. And you'd be accomplishing the same thing, you'd just do your "programming" in traces instead of C or assembly.
I dunno about you, but I'd rather debug C or assembly, then re-flash a new firmware than sit around with a scope and logic probe trying to figure out why things are bad, then produce an entirely new board. Maybe I'm crazy. Or, maybe that's the reason that virtually the entire electronics world has replaced discretes with microcontrollers any place that they can.
... as a followup to the one-button mouse, they'll now make the no-button mouse!
Actually, your motherboard *is* a power supply. It has switching DC-DC converters that take 12V and drop it down to the various voltages used by your CPU, chipset, DIMMs, etc.. The caps (and inductors) are there to smooth the resultant chopped-up supply, and that's a task where your ripple current is very large - leading to a lot of heat, and hence, short lifetimes for aluminum capacitors.
Not only do the solid caps not have a liquid electrolyte to boil off, they very well may have lower ESR to boot - producing less heat, producing higher efficiency, and doing an even better job of smoothing. The only downside is cost.
Regular aluminum electrolytic capacitors are filled with liquid. When driven hard and hot, that liquid evaporates or boils. There are various other types of caps that have no liquid, including solid tantalum and ceramic. They generally have lower ESR (good), and last (for all intents and purposes) forever, but are definitely more expensive.
About the only advantage of an aluminum electrolytic is that it's cheap.
steve
We live in an age when brand-new, undocumented, *encrypted* file formats are deciphered within days or weeks. You're telling me that in a few decades, NOBODY will be able to figure out a spreadsheet or word-processing document?
Even in my "Intro to EE for mech E students" class, on the first day we were told to march ourselves down to the bookstore and buy a breadboard and various other materials. We covered circuit analysis, filters, all kinds of fun stuff - and built/examined everything we studied.
"Back in the day", in high school electronics, there were a few folks in the class who took it just because they thought it would be easy. They would do no work, and a day before projects were due, would pester those of us who were already finished to do their work for them. I got tired of "Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.", so I grabbed some high-voltage caps out of the back room, and (thanks to a diode and resistor) would charge it from the AC socket. Since you're dealing with rectified AC, peak-to-peak is about 170 volts, and the energy in a cap goes up with the square of the voltage. Even with a "measly" couple of hundreds microfarads, at 170 volts, there's a good bit of energy stored up.
Back to the story, I only had to use the caps to blow holes in metal objects a few times before all of them knew what they would do, and when they'd bug me to do their work, I'd pick up one of the charged caps and take stabs at them with it. I don't think I ever got bothered again.
It's not just about starving. I spent a couple years south of the border, and met a lot of people who had been to the US both legally and illegally. The US dollar is worth so much down there that they can come up and bust their butts working in the fields for 5-8 months, then go back home and take the rest of the year off. All the while, their family is living what is - for down there - a fairly good lifestyle.
Even if you're not starving, it's hard to turn down a job where you get 4 months off every year....
It wasn't quite that bad, but I had a teacher who would give you 1 point for a right answer, no points for no answer, and take away two points for a wrong answer.
I had a physics professor for two entire physics series. This man was... a machine. He was VERY intelligent, and was a VERY good teacher. He was, however, quite anal. He would not expect you to know things he hadn't taught, but he expected you to know what he had taught with *perfect* mastery.
He provided copies of all former tests, along with answers and how to solve them, to the local copy store for students to buy (amazingly, this prof DIDN'T try to take you on them, the only cost was of the copies). The tests changed VERY little over the years. Two nights before the exam, you were welcome to go to a study session, where he would take problems VERY similar to what would be on the test, and walk you through solving them. And he would let you take a 4x5 card into the test with you, with anything you wanted.
His tests consisted of three questions. Just three. At the end of the alotted hour for the exams, the majority of the class would NOT have finished. Those tests were *tough*. I also had a calculus professor who would give exams that consisted of just two problems, and few people finished them completely. That wasn't so much that he gave hard problems, just problems that took a lot of work to solve. That almost seems backwards, since the point of calculus is to make difficult problems easier... or at least possible, anyway. But he was VERY generous with partial credit.
Just cleaning the keyboard? My first experience cleaning electronics was when I was 10 years old, and spilled Coke into my C-64. It didn't just get the keyboard, but the whole motherboard. The screen just went black. I shut the whole thing off, pulled everything apart, washed it in the bathtub, and put it back together. The computer worked, but the keyboard didn't work well. I pulled the keyboard *completely* apart, washed everything in soap and water, dried it with a hair dryer, and put it back together... just before my parents got home.
I've fixed a lot of "watered" electronics over the years, including things dropped into saltwater fish tanks - you have to get those apart, rinsed, and cleaned RIGHT away. But the worst I've found yet was a cell phone that a baby sucked on... I had no idea that saliva was that corrosive. Every bit of copper on the board was GREEEEEEEN. I cleaned it all off, rinsed everything, dried out the microphone... and it worked. That one even surprised me.
Back to the topic of keyboards.... they're usually not worth the trouble. I don't think that putting them in the dishwasher is going to clean under the membrane very well, and that's where your problems come from. Don't buy into the hype about huge numbers of bacteria... unless they're certain strains of bacteria, you have nothing to worry about. If you knew how many bacteria are living on and inside of you right now without any ill effects (and sometimes GOOD effects), you'd turn into an OCD-handwasher immediately. And that's just bacteria... there are lots of other things, too.
Even better is the "We just sent out 200,000 flyers with (X) promised, we need you to make it happen."
My initial thought was "Terrific. This really has the potential to eliminate spam." Then I got to looking into the RFC... standard private/public key exchange. But, it allows for individual MUAs to posess the private key, such that they can perform the signature.
This puts the entire burden of security in the scheme upon the MUA. So any time a machine is infected with the spam-virus of the day, that private key will be sent off to the spammers, who will send out floods of seemingly legitimately-signed email. Instead of just selling valid email addresses to other spammers, they'll sell addresses and domain keys.
Furthermore, from an administrative perspective, that means that each time one of your user's machines is hacked and the private key compromised, you have to change your public/private keypair, including updating the MUA on *all* of your sender's machines.
Forcing signing upon the MTAs eliminates much of that work (and hopefully the security exposure), but forces inconvenience on a good number of users. It's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make, but the RFC doesn't seem willing to do so.
The chips that you mention don't go in the battery, they go in the charger. Some applications (like a cell phone) have them in the same unit, but I'm thinking more along the lines of the lithium batteries used in digital cameras - the batteries have short-circuit protection, but the charge control and protection is built into the charger.
Here's more of what I'm thinking. Take a look at my digital camera, a Canon, which uses a Canon NB-2LH. It does have a short-circuit protection. Canon charges a ton for the batteries. Other companies charge much less for equivalents. Some are really bad, and you risk damage to your camera (or worse). In between what Canon charges and the rock-bottom (and dangerous) substitutes are companies like Sterlingtek, a LOT of photographers use their batteries with no problem at all. No explosions, no fires, no bulging, no damage to their camera, etc., and the Canon chargers will charge them quite well and safely. Their equivalents are about $19, and actually have a slightly higher capacity.
The price for things like that is higher because there are so many types. Let's say that the industry decided to standardize on just a few sizes. The cost per unit could only go down, and you'd have the same protection that you already have in many devices - the only difference would be that the economies of scale would have an even greater effect.
Like you said, it's already put inside of every lithium battery made, that's not the problem - the only problem is price. I don't think that's a big problem... because of the non-standard nature of lithium batteries, people pay MORE for them now than they would under what I propose, and they buy them in large number. They just pay more to support thousands of different, custom-made battery sizes, and custom charging for all of them.
And lithium doesn't have a very big advantage in energy density in terms of volume, but rather a HUGE one in terms of weight.
I'd rather see *standard* lithium-ion rechargeable battery sizes, so that manufacturers could just quit designing things for alkalines. They wouldn't even have to handle recharging (if they didn't want to), just let the user pop the batteries out and into a charger.
My baby monitor uses AAs, and I *can* put nicads or nimhs in, but they go dead just from self-discharge as fast as they do from use, so I stick to cheap Kirkland alkalines. I keep daydreaming of putting a single litium-ion cell in it, and adding a charging circuit tied into the power socket, I don't think I'll have enough room in it.
Naw. People blame being wrong (or STUPID) on *anything*. Technology is just handy. Take it away, and they'll blame it on something else.
Take one dude I know. He started accusing people of hiding his smokes because he couldn't find them. When everyone told him "Nobody hid your smokes, man.", he got pissed, through a tantrum, and said "Well, I guess that God must not want me to smoke, because HE must have hid my cigarettes!"
That was while he was sober. You should have seen him on the sauce.
"A developer who has the option of blaming the admin for the failure ( while just finding a way to get it done ) can be endlessly frustrating."
Here's what I, as an admin, find frustrating: Most programmers aren't just clueless enough to hork up the system, they're usually so clueless that they don't even know it was *them* who horked it up, or how. I usually get the job of going to the programmers and saying "Hey... guess what. Your code sucks."
And, to make it better, not a few times, I've had the IT manager come to me and say "Programmer X is having a problem with his program, and he just can't figure out where it's coming from. We know it's not your job, but nobody else is available. Can you help him debug it?
Then again, there are times when the clueless developer claims that his errors are because of the OS (or hardware), and I have to go to lengths to prove that the OS/hardware are, in fact, stable, just because everyone is instantly suspicious of the system.
Some days, you wonder just how many times you will have to tell the programmers "Hey, guys, when you fork off worker processes, those processes need to EXIT when the work is done... not simply exiting the loop and then acting as a master, forking of MORE worker processes in an exponential loop."
I have a lot of accounts in different places where it really would not matter if someone were to find out my password. All of those have the same password. Things that are actually important in any way can get their own passwords (well over three dozen for me), but right off of the bat, I've eliminated at least 50% of the passwords I need to remember.
steve
One of the people in my neighborhood makes a living suing telephone-spammers. There are some tricks to actually getting a judge to rule in your favor - even when the company has clearly violated the law - but once you know them, it works well. And many don't even bother going to court, they simply send her a $500 check.
You're not joking, you're speculating. If I'm not mistaken, Japan has had mass-murders with similar death counts from people with... swords. If I recall, they've had low-double-digit death counts from a guy with just a knife.
Besides, you're forgetting that the worst school-killing in US history had nothing to do with guns at all. It's really convenient to believe that without guns, people won't be able to kill large numbers of other people, but it just isn't so. Rwanda managed to kill about a million people in a very short time, and only a very small percentage of those were committed with guns.
It's also very convenient to ignore the fact that most gun-related crime is done with illegally-acquired guns. For every Virginia Tech, there are a few thousand (probably a few HUNDREDS of thousands) of murders with stolen guns, by people who are ALREADY prohibitted from carrying guns. Pass all of the laws you want. They don't care now, and they won't care then. What? You want to get rid of guns entirely? Sure. Just ask England if their criminals suddenly came up short in the weaponry department after all of their efforts.
It's sad, but it's true: If someone wants to kill someone else, they're going to do it. A lot of people can't handle the fact that some people are killers, could kill THEM, and that you can't always pick out who they are. Projecting the blame onto instruments which could be regulated or removed gives them a sense of security or control, but it's like covering your head to keep the boogeyman away... unless the boogeyman is the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal, you're only fooling yourself.