I think it's partially BS. An induction loop that provides useful power (enough to run a house) at a distance of 100 yards to the AC transmission line must be coupling to a big-scale high voltage line -- I'd presume something above 100kV. AFAIK, in those lines, change in losses due to changes in something as trivial as air humidity beats whatever consumption a house would have, by orders of magnitude. I doubt they would be able to measure whatever this man did. Now it's true that he did increase the load on their line, but the instantaneous power transmitted by such lines is such that one house's worth of load is below the capability of typical industrial measurement systems. So it's true that he was stealing power, but I doubt they came to him due to "extra load in their circuit". Besides, such lines are costly to maintain, so I presume it's rare that you would run such a line without normal loads attached to it. I'd think that leakage measurements with disconnected loads are rare: idling a big transmission line wastes lots of money.
Remember that induction reciprocates. If you have a transformer without a secondary winding, or with a mild bulk resistor in the EM field -- like happens around high voltage AC transmission lines, then the transformer runs at some nominal loss that you can't do much about. As soon as you add a secondary winding and load it, the primary winding current increases! So the "leakage" by itself doesn't mean that they are losing as much power as they would if you had an actual secondary winding there, with a load. Ground, even wet ground, and buildings, even with metal in them, are very poor transformer secondaries. Something purpose-designed -- doesn't have to be.
The shuttle engines turned out to be brittle things, and the initial overhaul/life design goals were missed by a lot. They are removed for inspection (partial disassembly!) after each mission. I don't know about other parts, but I know that the block II (redesigned) turbopumps had a 10 mission design overhaul period, I don't know how it turned out in practice.
I think it's useful, in a way, for inspiration when writing poetry. When you get stuck, you can look at what Nell has found that relates to your subject. Say, you need help with gentle breeze. You come up with things like "flowers dancing on", or "whispering through". It's like getting all the short-range literary tricks without doing any reading. By short-range I mean it cannot pick up yet on any sort of a longer story built on your topic, but can see interesting word-strings in the short neighborhood of your topic. It seems to pick on word plays, parallels, and such.
Technically impressive?? Well yes, but not that much. You need a bunch of microphones, preamps and audio A/D converters -- that's not terribly expensive, maybe $3k for a populated PC board with 300 microphones, preamps and A/Ds. If you know what you're doing, then even the complete PCB design software can be had for free (PCB123). You get almost any embedded controller with a hard drive and 100Mbit/s ethernet output, and you are one FPGA away from being able to capture all that data. For simplicity, you can treat 300 channels of A/D data as a 300-bit wide parallel bus that you sample at the rate of the A/D output serial clock. The controller can then reshuffle the data. I'd say that a prototype can be done from scratch for about $5k. You can probably sample the microphones at 16 kHz; the resulting raw data rate is about 10.5 Mbytes/s for 300 mikes (300*16kHz*18/8/1e6). This can cut down to fit the ethernet bandwidth by losslessly recoding using ADPCM.
You're right, but that problem is solved by having a camera: you just move the cursor on the screen, following the person. This could even be, gasp, automated.
Custom OS + software suite for $100M-$300M USD on a US Gov't contract? What are you smoking??
To give you a sense of scale: the City of New York has had a bunch of contractors working on implementing a city employee timekeeping system. It was around 10-15 contractors from what I recall, working for a decade, each paid $500k+ gross yearly. We're talking $50M-$75M USD for a project where nothing got accomplished at all.
On a big government contract, ten times that will maybe buy you solid paperwork: specs, design documents, validation plans, whatnot. Probably not a single line of code, though.
I agree. But there's no way you'll get it to run anything but toy Windows applications when you're done. The native interfaces may be quite productive and well-developed, but implementing winapi is just very, very hard. If you wish to implement against MSDN -- pretty much no windows apps will work.
Unless their stated goal of running windows applications isn't.
There's a saying in Polish that quite fits here: Taking on the Sun with a hoe.
What they're saying is, I presume, that they'll get 50 people and somehow get wine and reactos code bases together, to work well enough to be usable in a wide-scale deployment. I wish them good luck. If they, OTOH, think that they can reimplement what reactos and wine did so far from scratch: LOL. They'd need a top-notch team, used to working together and having a significant project or two under their belt to tackle it and have anything to show after 12 months. It'll take them a month or two just to figure out what code is out there in reactos/wine to use, never mind making any design decisions, or heck, actually coding anything.
For starters, a project like that would basically need to hire all wine/reactos/codeweavers/transgaming talent out there. Plus a few key Windows people, too -- and pray they aren't under non-compete contracts that can be enforced in India.
I've had success using Nokia's Qt for cross-platform development, where I develop using Qt Creator under OS X, and then compile same code under VS 2008 running in VMware Fusion. If you're careful, your apps can be hard to distinguish from native ones on both platforms.
Agree. I've done that, without PhotoShop, but with a 1G vmware Fusion instance of XP running at the same time as well. I reboot when the system updater wants me to, and that's it.
DSL bridges and Cable Internet "routers" are modems. What made you think otherwise? Do you think you have a digital bitstream in the raw on a DSL wire pair, or on the coax? A DSL or Cable modem has everything a phone modem has and then some -- heck, they are far more complex modems than phone line modems, typically. Even gigabit ethernet cards are almost-modems -- they do a fair bit of signal processing to compensate for the propagation characteristics of the medium; while they don't use a single-frequency carrier of any sort they still digitize and process the voltages in each pair. In the baseband, a gigabit ethernet card's signal chain has quite a few elements you'd find in a modem: digitizer, equalizer, (de)scrambler, (de)coder.
I agree about suspend/resume -- I also love this feature on our desktop iMac. Losing power when the computer is asleep is no more a problem -- it just restarts from hibernation (this had to be enabled as it wasn't on by default on the desktop). It's also great to have a desktop computer that's ready to use in a couple of seconds after you tap a key on the keyboard.
First of all, it's not Dragon 1 nor Dragon 9, but Falcon 1 and Falcon 9.
Falcon 1 doesn't have more launches right now simply because there's no need for them. They are working on Falcon 1e, an upgraded version, that has more marketable potential (better specs).
Besides, Falcon 1 was really a testbed for technology used for Falcon 9. Yes, it's a nice rocket for microsats and such, but there isn't much commercial demand for launches on Falcon 1e's scale, even though SpaceX provides them at the lowest price on this planet.
Also, Space X has nothing to do with "space operations". They are in launch business, they currently don't give shit about "operations" at large, thankfully -- better to stay focused on what pays the bills. Their Dragon capsule is just a means of getting people into and out of the orbit, nothing permanent about it. It's supposed to be docked to ISS or whatever while up there, and then the ball is in someone else's court.
It just gets better and better. Like reading a TDWTF thread. FYI: Wireshark runs on Windows. IIRC it has been running on Windows back when it wasn't even called Wireshark...
I have no clue why would anyone consider this a troll post. Outrageous, unbounded incompetency -- yes, it deserves a LOL at best. Some "IT" department that was. Gimme a break.
In mass production, all of the testing is going to be 100% automated. All the cost will be in developing a test/calibration jig. The testing/calibration will probably take a couple minutes, and be done wholly by an automated system. The engineering will be NRE cost to develop the jig, to run it you shouldn't need anything more than an industrial technician.
"90% of all health care money is spent in the last 12 months of people's lives" -- be careful. Suppose you're in a car accident and die in a hospital 2 or 3 days later. That's the spending you're talking of -- bundled into the same category as the spending you really want to get rid of, namely the prolong-life-at-all-costs-in-spite-of-disease type of thing. I don't think that trauma spending is anything unworthy of doing. Life-support in spite of well understood, no-cure-for-it chronic conditions -- sure, that's somewhat egregious, I agree.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's partially BS. An induction loop that provides useful power (enough to run a house) at a distance of 100 yards to the AC transmission line must be coupling to a big-scale high voltage line -- I'd presume something above 100kV. AFAIK, in those lines, change in losses due to changes in something as trivial as air humidity beats whatever consumption a house would have, by orders of magnitude. I doubt they would be able to measure whatever this man did. Now it's true that he did increase the load on their line, but the instantaneous power transmitted by such lines is such that one house's worth of load is below the capability of typical industrial measurement systems. So it's true that he was stealing power, but I doubt they came to him due to "extra load in their circuit". Besides, such lines are costly to maintain, so I presume it's rare that you would run such a line without normal loads attached to it. I'd think that leakage measurements with disconnected loads are rare: idling a big transmission line wastes lots of money.
Remember that induction reciprocates. If you have a transformer without a secondary winding, or with a mild bulk resistor in the EM field -- like happens around high voltage AC transmission lines, then the transformer runs at some nominal loss that you can't do much about. As soon as you add a secondary winding and load it, the primary winding current increases! So the "leakage" by itself doesn't mean that they are losing as much power as they would if you had an actual secondary winding there, with a load. Ground, even wet ground, and buildings, even with metal in them, are very poor transformer secondaries. Something purpose-designed -- doesn't have to be.
The shuttle engines turned out to be brittle things, and the initial overhaul/life design goals were missed by a lot. They are removed for inspection (partial disassembly!) after each mission. I don't know about other parts, but I know that the block II (redesigned) turbopumps had a 10 mission design overhaul period, I don't know how it turned out in practice.
Among others, yes.
What I meant was that you're seem to be rational, collected, insightful, umm, I ran out of adjectives. Hey, lucid sounds about right, too.
This is rare here to the point of seeming out of place ;)
You don't belong on Slashdot ;)
I think it's useful, in a way, for inspiration when writing poetry. When you get stuck, you can look at what Nell has found that relates to your subject. Say, you need help with gentle breeze. You come up with things like "flowers dancing on", or "whispering through". It's like getting all the short-range literary tricks without doing any reading. By short-range I mean it cannot pick up yet on any sort of a longer story built on your topic, but can see interesting word-strings in the short neighborhood of your topic. It seems to pick on word plays, parallels, and such.
Technically impressive?? Well yes, but not that much. You need a bunch of microphones, preamps and audio A/D converters -- that's not terribly expensive, maybe $3k for a populated PC board with 300 microphones, preamps and A/Ds. If you know what you're doing, then even the complete PCB design software can be had for free (PCB123). You get almost any embedded controller with a hard drive and 100Mbit/s ethernet output, and you are one FPGA away from being able to capture all that data. For simplicity, you can treat 300 channels of A/D data as a 300-bit wide parallel bus that you sample at the rate of the A/D output serial clock. The controller can then reshuffle the data. I'd say that a prototype can be done from scratch for about $5k. You can probably sample the microphones at 16 kHz; the resulting raw data rate is about 10.5 Mbytes/s for 300 mikes (300*16kHz*18/8/1e6). This can cut down to fit the ethernet bandwidth by losslessly recoding using ADPCM.
You're right, but that problem is solved by having a camera: you just move the cursor on the screen, following the person. This could even be, gasp, automated.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we define insight. Well done.
Custom OS + software suite for $100M-$300M USD on a US Gov't contract? What are you smoking??
To give you a sense of scale: the City of New York has had a bunch of contractors working on implementing a city employee timekeeping system. It was around 10-15 contractors from what I recall, working for a decade, each paid $500k+ gross yearly. We're talking $50M-$75M USD for a project where nothing got accomplished at all.
On a big government contract, ten times that will maybe buy you solid paperwork: specs, design documents, validation plans, whatnot. Probably not a single line of code, though.
I agree. But there's no way you'll get it to run anything but toy Windows applications when you're done. The native interfaces may be quite productive and well-developed, but implementing winapi is just very, very hard. If you wish to implement against MSDN -- pretty much no windows apps will work.
Unless their stated goal of running windows applications isn't.
There's a saying in Polish that quite fits here: Taking on the Sun with a hoe.
What they're saying is, I presume, that they'll get 50 people and somehow get wine and reactos code bases together, to work well enough to be usable in a wide-scale deployment. I wish them good luck. If they, OTOH, think that they can reimplement what reactos and wine did so far from scratch: LOL. They'd need a top-notch team, used to working together and having a significant project or two under their belt to tackle it and have anything to show after 12 months. It'll take them a month or two just to figure out what code is out there in reactos/wine to use, never mind making any design decisions, or heck, actually coding anything.
For starters, a project like that would basically need to hire all wine/reactos/codeweavers/transgaming talent out there. Plus a few key Windows people, too -- and pray they aren't under non-compete contracts that can be enforced in India.
I've had success using Nokia's Qt for cross-platform development, where I develop using Qt Creator under OS X, and then compile same code under VS 2008 running in VMware Fusion. If you're careful, your apps can be hard to distinguish from native ones on both platforms.
Agree. I've done that, without PhotoShop, but with a 1G vmware Fusion instance of XP running at the same time as well. I reboot when the system updater wants me to, and that's it.
DSL bridges and Cable Internet "routers" are modems. What made you think otherwise? Do you think you have a digital bitstream in the raw on a DSL wire pair, or on the coax? A DSL or Cable modem has everything a phone modem has and then some -- heck, they are far more complex modems than phone line modems, typically. Even gigabit ethernet cards are almost-modems -- they do a fair bit of signal processing to compensate for the propagation characteristics of the medium; while they don't use a single-frequency carrier of any sort they still digitize and process the voltages in each pair. In the baseband, a gigabit ethernet card's signal chain has quite a few elements you'd find in a modem: digitizer, equalizer, (de)scrambler, (de)coder.
I agree about suspend/resume -- I also love this feature on our desktop iMac. Losing power when the computer is asleep is no more a problem -- it just restarts from hibernation (this had to be enabled as it wasn't on by default on the desktop). It's also great to have a desktop computer that's ready to use in a couple of seconds after you tap a key on the keyboard.
First of all, it's not Dragon 1 nor Dragon 9, but Falcon 1 and Falcon 9.
Falcon 1 doesn't have more launches right now simply because there's no need for them. They are working on Falcon 1e, an upgraded version, that has more marketable potential (better specs).
Besides, Falcon 1 was really a testbed for technology used for Falcon 9. Yes, it's a nice rocket for microsats and such, but there isn't much commercial demand for launches on Falcon 1e's scale, even though SpaceX provides them at the lowest price on this planet.
Also, Space X has nothing to do with "space operations". They are in launch business, they currently don't give shit about "operations" at large, thankfully -- better to stay focused on what pays the bills. Their Dragon capsule is just a means of getting people into and out of the orbit, nothing permanent about it. It's supposed to be docked to ISS or whatever while up there, and then the ball is in someone else's court.
It just gets better and better. Like reading a TDWTF thread. FYI: Wireshark runs on Windows. IIRC it has been running on Windows back when it wasn't even called Wireshark...
I have no clue why would anyone consider this a troll post. Outrageous, unbounded incompetency -- yes, it deserves a LOL at best. Some "IT" department that was. Gimme a break.
Two days to run wireshark? LOL.
In mass production, all of the testing is going to be 100% automated. All the cost will be in developing a test/calibration jig. The testing/calibration will probably take a couple minutes, and be done wholly by an automated system. The engineering will be NRE cost to develop the jig, to run it you shouldn't need anything more than an industrial technician.
That's the difference engine, and scaled down at that. Very different from analytical engine :)
I'm sure that if someone was going to order 10k of those sensors, they could get them made for $5k.
"90% of all health care money is spent in the last 12 months of people's lives" -- be careful. Suppose you're in a car accident and die in a hospital 2 or 3 days later. That's the spending you're talking of -- bundled into the same category as the spending you really want to get rid of, namely the prolong-life-at-all-costs-in-spite-of-disease type of thing. I don't think that trauma spending is anything unworthy of doing. Life-support in spite of well understood, no-cure-for-it chronic conditions -- sure, that's somewhat egregious, I agree.
Dunno about others, but I do often learn from Slashdot. Never from the original submission, though.