Last I heard (and I used to get and own patents, which I no longer care about) the flaw is this.
You guys are missing it.
It's up to the entity applying for a patent to find and disclose prior art. Period. If the examiner happens to know some and get back to them fine, but that's not how the system is set up. And the patent office runs off fees they don't get if applications aren't granted.
Enough said?
Until someone gets tired of having to use another machine for the "real" net and hooks up a router between them.
Half an hour tops before some idiot breaks the separation model. Yes, people ARE that dumb.
Well, you might be correct, temporarily. As pointed out above, when things are right, Japan has done pretty well too -- and with a similar plan MITI used to strike fear into us here for example, but no more.
Could it be something more basic, like demographics? Japan is sinking as their population ages, similar to the USA. China, due to the one child policy will soon face the same thing themselves, not enough young to support the old. Japan is developing robots to help their older folks survive, and maybe we should be looking into that ourselves, as our demographic curves aren't all that different.
There are makers and takers (no, not the old saw, exactly). Only in the middle of life is one a net contribution to their society, if even then. The young are supported, as are the old. Our baby boomers are all hitting retirement, hence various effects on entitlement programs (gawd how I hate that word and what it implies), the investment markets, and it's as predictable as the earth's rotation, but no one wants to see the the light at the end of the tunnel is a train and think about what to do about it. GoodLuckWithThat, as we say here, it's not rocket science to predict the broad sweep of the future from this kind of information. Exactly when things hit a tipping point is hard to predict, but not IF they will. We are living in what's about to be really interesting times, and yes, I mean that in the Chinese sense.
A while back, I wrote a book, Digital Audio Processing (Doug Coulter). Recently, Amazon has it as ebook form, perhaps without even informing my publisher, and certainly without telling me. It would stink without the code I copy-lefted on the CD that came with the paperback anyway.
Though they sanitized the book of any way to contact me, my email address is all over that code which they didn't check. I've gotten emails from unique addresses in the ratio of about 20::1 over the sales my publisher claims. They are cheating, no question. Next time I will self publish and sell off my own forum or something, no point feeding those dishonest jerks any more. I now understand why Frank Zappa had such a hard-on about that whole business.
They have reported zero e-book sales, but it's up there cheap. Pretty worthless without the nice code though, and I don't see how you get that off an e-book reader and into compilation, so it's a joke all around. At any rate, they make the RIAA look honest....just my $.02 worth, which is more than they've paid me after the advance. My opinion of those guys is unprintable, so I'll quit now.
Oh, not to reply to myself, but the reason I quit working on this was it achieved its primary goals. I managed to get two counties (including Floyd VA where I live) to allow these on the public streets (if you get a sticker and pay taxes). No public figure wanted to go on TV with me and explain why the laws are set up so no one could do this with gas then at $4+ a gallon....political action, and it worked out fine. All I had to do was arrange to get myself arrested with some friendly local TV cameras on the scene....nice to have some friends.
Mine (which isn't as pretty) obviously would kill you in a head on collision with a deer or something similar -- which is why I didn't even bother to enter. And so will theirs. The rules.....which may have been bent since the original announcement, but which I didn't want to fight. Mine gets around 200 mpg, is fun as heck to drive -- and dangerous despite 4 wheel disc brakes, a full roll cage and all that. It's not the point -- pounds win in a wreck, the human body, no matter how well restrained, tears itself apart internally above some G force number, and a crumple zone isn't going to improve that too much if you weigh sub kilopound when you hit a truck head on -- or get t-boned.
Admire mine here:
http://www.coultersmithing.com/OldStuff/kart.html
I did this so long ago I'm two websites, a new business, and a forum since then. And yes, I still drive it every day, it's handy and did I say fun? Swaps ends with the best of them on a limited traction road....mini cooper claims go-kart handling, but this is far better....and it will climb almost straight up.
Other than the body work, does this look a little familiar? Sure does to me. Paid about $2k for this, yeah, they can make them for 10 times that, duh.
What's wrong with being drunk? You ask a glass of water that.
I love red meat -- kill it, cook it, eat it, turn it to, well you know.
My wife loves ice cream -- same issues.
We're better off when they are honest about hating us, that way they fool fewer people into their traps.
I happen to own a few table top fusors, and while yes, you can see some byproducts after a 20 min run at full power with one of the most sensitive mass spectrometers on this planet -- you gotta be kidding. Even we (and we think we are the current record holders or close) running at a kw input only get relatively tiny amounts of fusion using deuterium as the fusion gas -- the numbers go very close to zero for hydrogen input. The D fusion has two main pathways, one of which makes tritium, the other helium 3, which BTW is in far greater shortage since our DHS decided they need all that exists for He3 portal neutron detectors -- even CERN is hurting on supply for their dilution refrigerators that use it. Here....just try and buy some at any price.
But at a few million fusions/second/kilowatt -- good luck making a mole of He of any isotope in your lifetime.
For those who don't do chemistry a mole is 6.02 e 23 atoms, more or less, or 22.4 liters of gas at STP. Lessee, 23 - 6 is 17, so roughtly speaking, at current production rates you need say 6 e17 seconds of running to get a mole or so of output gas. call it 1.9 e-10 years per mole, running at a kw input with current tech at its best. As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat.
You can see more about fusors here:
My homepage (we also have a forum linked on the front page, but it's invite-only)
"Legal" and "authorized" are not synonyms, dummies. It can be legal to jailbreak a phone, but still unauthorized by the great master of hypercontrol-freakness....
I'm so glad I never got any apple products, now it's extremely un tempting and no problems or worries.
I did like the comment above -- if Apple gets this patent, maybe it keeps others from doing it somewhat...blessing in disguise?
They are not known to license their patents cheap...or, as in the antenna debacle, license others patents even if they are cheap.
Recently our fusion efforts have demanded similar things so we can data mine and look at fleeting events, sweep a multiparameter space and find "sweet spots" and so on. We are doing just what parent suggests -- putting into a MySQL database, using perl. It's going along swimmingly.
It works well, and we designed the database schema for extensibility, normalized and all that.
(and the thing is growing and adapting well to changes, but that DB design is all important to make that not so hard)
Looks like the best plan for stuffing a lot of data away and finding it later on.
www.coultersmithing.com will show you a bit of what we are up to here. Or our forum at
Science/Engineering/Tech forums
Enough to take a 3/8" thick book to show the pictures of. My Dad, who worked for NRL, did a lot of the early development work on vocoders. Not the crypto parts, just the parts that render speech into fewer bits for later encryption. So if you go there, look for the vocoders, and the EVA (electronic voice analog) which I myself had a part in developing -- long before there were IC computers things like this were a little tricky. It ran in the family, I wound up writing codecs and protocols that are now used in cel phones and online.
The EVA played from a chart we drew on with conductive ink -- a multichannel analog memory on velum we played back by rolling a wirewound power resistor over it. The traces had information on pitch, noise, formant frequencies and Q's and so on -- this thing played back speech that sounded like the original speaker and only needed a few hundred bits/second to work (making the crypto a lot easer for obvious reasons). If you needed to edit the chart, you'd just take an exacto knife, knock off the silver paint, re paint, and good to go. It was fun playing with chart speed and direction to make the speaker talk fast, slow or backwards without changing anything else about the sound. The analyzer that produced the bits in the first place took two large racks of boards based on Ge transistor my Dad designed and built -- and he was a good tech too, it's purty. We really didn't have opamps then, other than Philbrick tube types (not suitable for airplanes or tanks) so for making formant filters for speech generation, we used some special inductors that could be tuned with a current, made by UTC. By varying the current, you could change the inductance via a non linear u in the special core material, without changing Q too much, they were cool, and I still have a mini vocoder that runs off a joystick and switch/pot input we used on some of our early rock and roll recordings. (we didn't give NSA all the good stuff...)
Some of the other cool stuff is miniature radios, some things we found we don't even know what they are, some special navy comm system things, signal analyzers and so forth. Only a geek could love some of this. We had so much when Dad died (plenty to keep my busy for the rest of my own life if I only played with just that, which I don't) we gave it to NSA so other people could admire it.
Enjoy!
Now I do other things -- www.coultersmithing.com
I recently found myself needing to upgrade from my old faitful tek 465's and 475s, as parts were failing I couldn't find anymore.
I got a pair of GW Instek scopes, one 2 ch and one 4 ch, the latter going to > 1ghz and costing still under $2k.
They are pretty nice, actually, and also interface to computers (windows only unless you write code) a number of ways.
And will save on either SD cards or thumb drives.
I don't find them a step down from the tek stuff, which is way way overpriced for the same features (but probably better quality, dunno).
That's new, mind you, with a warranty. I think the cheaper one was under $400 IIRC. Both work,and both have survived things in my physics lab that fried the probes -- not so bad at all.
They have a ton of features that the older analog scopes lacked, similar to the tek stuff they are intended to compete with. FFT, no problem, go, no-go comparisons with stored waveforms, got that....autosetup to get stuff on the screen, of course, and a ton of other features I don't happen to use or need, but all the stuff you'd expect is there.
I both write software, and trade the markets. And I pay other people to write software when there is more to do than I can in a time-frame, so I have a perspective on this.
If these guys are that good, and their software is generating 100k/day, well -- why don't they rewrite it and trade their own account at home with it? And be set for life?
Ahh -- now we see the issues more clearly. They don't trade, they don't have the guts or the stake money -- so that other guy DID produce something of value -- his money at risk, and his discretion to ignore the software when it was wrong or "didn't feel right". Believe me, trading is a full time job or you're going to get clobbered, there's a lot of homework involved, and judgement that may take years to hone.
After all, if you really wanted to hear some whining from programmers, how about if their pay was cut when a software glitch [b]lost[/b] 100k a day?
I use a version of that screed whenever (frequently) some broker calls and wants to trade my account, with me taking all the risks, including paying him to do it.
They always have glowing commentary about how great they are. In which case, I ask -- they why aren't you so rich as not to need my couple millions to play with?
If you're that good -- you'd be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, right? Even starting with only a little bit of money.
That "click" I often get in response is quite gratifying.
Nothing hurts more than pointing out the simple and obvious facts.
While parent correctly points out that new and better electronics can and do reduce the need for antenna efficiency, I'm not aware that the internal antennas are (or can be) as good as an external, for a couple of reasons.
One is the no one ever held a phone by the external antenna, and very close (much less than a wavelength) proximity to human flesh -- a great absorber of radio waves, never helps. A properly tuned/loaded external antenna will always kick out better performance than a little thing on the PCB inside the case where it will often have more close proximity to the hand.
They are getting good, sure -- for a isotropic radiator, but don't match a for real full length quarter wave or dipole or 5/8 wave antenna either. There's just no beating a larger sized exposure to the wave-field for raw performance. That's why there's a dish involved in a satellite dish, for example -- you can't just point the little feed antenna and lna at the sky and have it work.
If you don't believe me, just go to someplace like www.digikey.com and put antenna into the search, and then look at the performance of chip antennas (.5dbi) vs other types -- see for yourself.
Apple was evidently attempting to get a bigger, better performing antenna (as well as skip some license fees) by making it discrete and outside the phone -- just that one little detail of proximity to the human absorber that they somehow missed utterly. Weird, because as someone who has designed and built and tested tons of antennas -- anyone who does this will know right off that you see the signal strength drop wildly when you just reach in close to try adjusting it. You have to do the adjustment, and then get back away before the reading means diddly. If you tune it to work when you're close in, it will be wrong when you aren't. And because human flesh is "lossy" it's never as good with you close as it is with you farther, no matter the tuning/loading.
I'll help with that marketing -- I'm no stranger to nuclear issues as my name here implies. I would gladly store and guard a few drums of really hot (the shorter half life stuff) waste here -- I'd put thermocouples or the moral equivalent into it and supplement my already existing off the grid alternative power system nicely. And have a nice source of things to calibrate my gamma ray spectrometer from. As has been pointed out -- it wouldn't take that many guys like me to handle all the hot stuff there is, and it will go dead fairly quickly anyway.
See http://www.coultersmithing.com/
I live in southwest VA, USA, and it's nowhere near 90% sunny here, not hardly. That's why you get more panels than for a desert situation, and get ones that like diffuse light -- poly crystalinne ones work best in that case. And good batteries.
Just like with a bank account -- some days you make more than you spend, and have the extra for those other days. For really long strings of bad solar weather, of course you burn some gasoline, which is pretty expensive power -- but by system design you keep that minimal, indeed.
Yes, there are fewer successful solar installations in Michigan than here, not a big surprise. If I lived there, I'd probably be looking into a more-diverse alternative power system that took advantage of what you do have in abundance -- perhaps wind off the lakes? Since I don't live there, I really have no idea what would work best.
Even here, when I go help with a solar system design/install, the first step is to check the situation out before any money gets spent. In suburbia it often happens that the sun is more or less blocked by something on some land the customer doesn't own, and there's not much that can be done about that one.
Even here there is a huge Oak tree I refuse to cut down that eats about 20% of my input in the winter. I just love that beautiful thing, so I added enough panels to still be fine.
To do the money analogy a bit more, as long as you're making a little more than you spend, you feel rich. A little less income than outgo - and you are in bad shape.
Apple may have been going for an improvement -- likely they were, but many simple tests done with a whole lot less skill and resources than they command say they didn't get one. It's pretty obvious they didn't to almost everyone (including me, and antennas are one of the things I've been known to design with success). I can tell by inspection that the antenna was a dumb idea, done by someone with little experience in the field.
It IS a good idea to TRY to innovate, but also a better idea to realize it when your innovation failed and to put something that does work well in there instead, in that case. Anything else is hubris. Their reaction to this indicates that this may be a good call on where they are coming from on the issue.
If the iPhone 4 has better reception -- what's all this about? Many say otherwise -- so many there may be just a germ of truth in that.
As someone who knows antennas (I designed and built my own cell phone repeater for use here where coverage is lousy -- and it works great), it seems obvious to me that at these wavelengths touching one is not usually going to help it work. Your AM radio, maybe....not up in the GHz range, though. And certainly not when you short yourself across a dipole.
Humans make one of the better electrically damping (resistive) loads there is.
Yeah, Apple and cheapness are rarely used together, because if you're a customer, they aren't cheap at all. However, if you build things for them, they are as cheap as it gets. Many Apple products have been torn down to see what they really cost to make, and they seem to have about the highest hardware profit margin there is in the business, and on just about everything they "make". Or more accurately, have made for them in places where the labor is cheaper.
Sure, the old NIH thing might have had a part too. Didn't stop them from using BSD as a base, though, in other products, did it?
But see above. I'm not dissing them for trying to cut costs -- I've run a business or two -- but there is a point where that becomes self-defeating, and I think they crossed that line.
Is what I heard. One of the other phone majors (I'd rather say I forgot who than name the wrong one) has a patent on an internal antenna design that works fairly well, and since it's inside, already has the "duct tape" or rubber band around it as is, and is put in a place where your hand and head don't mess it up as badly.
Dumb patents plus Apple cheapness -- that "innovation" of having the antenna on the outside is where it all started....bah.
I live in redneck land myself, by choice, having come from DC. Took awhile to become accepted, to be sure, but now it's great, I love it. Nearly all you say above is correct here too, but one thing -- pay IS less here, but so are costs, so it tends to work out not that differently. Of course the very cool thing to be is a computer consultant to some outfit on a coast or a big city and get paid rates that seem reasonable to them, but are rich indeed for here....heh, that's how I retired way early.
As you say, something that's "good for you" but is going to cost you money isn't going to fly real good. It might do better if it were some percent, rather than a fixed amount. But one thing people here are suspicious of is that statement. Here in Floyd, VA, we had a rash of hippies move in from CA when some spiritualist said this place wasn't gonna fall into the ocean.
They settled in and then started hassling the locals about "recycling, "sustainability" and "green" stuff.
That *really* didn't go over well at all, but in a humorous way. Not because of who said it either -- but because the locals can all *teach* this stuff to those idiots -- they have been sustainably farming these mountains since before the Revolutionary war, after all....and it's nicer now than it was then by all accounts. Rich fertile land, lots of game and all that.
I think you'd have to be an idiot to live in a big city, but that's me, sitting here on my PV solar electricity, a year or so worth of food and fuel stashed up, on a nice big piece of land I own outright -- and get off my lawn if you don't like what I'm doing -- because if you weren't trespassing, you'd never know about it anyway.
In a city, the ultimate unsustainable idea, you have to have a lot tighter laws and rules, because if I swing my arm there, it's likely to connect with someone's head. Here, there's little chance of that. The danger is applying the same laws to both places -- the shoe won't fit in one or the other.
Agree all the way. Helium is too cheap now, considering but then again, price fixing doesn't seem like a smart road to go down either (remember some past events in USA with trying to price-fix? Oil in the '70s etc? Nixon's price/wage freezes?) -- so how to fix that one and skip the unintended (but often obvious) consequences?
Helium is so cheap (right now) that I use it to prefill my fusion reactor up to STP before I open the door, as being very inert it makes the subsequent pumpdown time a lot quicker (because all the shop air doesn't get in if I work fast), and I get to purity and running conditions again faster. I could use Argon instead, but if I run the usual plasma during pumpdown to get tank-wall bakeouts, the heavier Ar does more damaging sputtering of metal the ions hit than He does. I have Ne, but at that price, forget it. If He cost the same, there would be no problems with taking care of the supply -- they'd be capturing it in the NG flares along with the gas they are now burning because it costs more to compress/liquify/transport than they'd get for the NG. In this case, the NG would just come along as a bonus to make the operation slightly more profitable than before, or that's how I'd design it.
Solar cells don't cost more in energy to make than they produce. I just ran a computer network, a machine shop, and welded all day long on the energy from my panels today. And it's the norm. In one day I probably used the energy needed to make at least one panel with the energy produced by 19 of them. Pretty short payoff, I'd say.
Don't replicate the astroturfing of the anti solar business -- they are running scared.
Off the grid since 1979 - using primarily the tech available then, and loving it-- and everything I bought then still works, except for some battery replacements. The "just wait, we're going from 14% efficiency to 20% soon and it will cost 5% less per watt is just another form of the same antisolar spin. The new thin film stuff is neither as good or as rugged in real live use.
Most of the cost is now in the other stuff. Like real glass, plastic that matches tempco to the cells, frames, batteries, inverters...and so forth.
www.coultersmithing.com
Most helium is released from nat gas flares in oil wells, as at current prices it's not worth recovering either if the well is far from concentrated "civilization". And as the parent mentions, that's it, it's lost.
Yes, you can make helium with fusion, and I even do it here, but in amounts that make a microgram look like large lots. Lemme know when a fusion reactor makes energy gain -- I'm working it, but....not yet.
www.coultersmithing.com has some info there.
Helium 3 is in far shorter supply (always, but now it's really critical) and it is because the DHS has taken it all for portal neutron detectors -- you can't buy it as a civilian (or the detectors new) for ANY price whatever. Sometimes can find it in a used detector, that's about it, and CERN is crying because they need that for their superfluid He dilution coolers. This is a separate but also important issue -- 3He is a decay product from Tritium mostly and we just don't do much of that anymore. There's only a tiny amount in natural He, which of course we're just letting whiz into space because we don't want to pay the rent to store the stuff.
In fact, our open source fusor forum, http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php?site=fusor doesn't even know this guy, or I don't recognize him, anyway -- we usually use our real names there. It's been around for quite awhile too -- if you go there look at the archives and see for yourself.
Not only does this represent a dupe, and not to take anything away from this guy, he's far from alone, and unless he is making over 2 million neutrons/second on less than 5w power input, he's not even caught up to the current hobby record, which as far as I know, I hold -- some of it shown at http://www.coultersmithing.com/ , my site (which can take a slashdotting much better than the forum can, which is "some guy" hosting from home -- the perfessor we call him and are grateful. If you go there you'll find many more than 38 folks with working fusors I think.
The pic in the BBC article looks in fact like one copied from one of our (main) forum members fusors, Richard Hull (see wikipedia on that).
Again, not taking anything away from the guy -- the more the merrier -- hope he catches up with the rest of us at some point, as we have refined the Farnsworth concept quite a bit over the years, and made much more progress than is normally reported, because what funding is done is either to ITER with their non working approach, or NIF, which is really a weapons stewardship test device.
Mod me up, damnit -- this is sick, we've been doing this for decades and are pretty good at it, and nearly all of us have done it *purely* with our own earned bucks, not taking contributions from people dumb enough to donate for no return. I guess we mostly care more about the science than being 15-minute famous.
And most of us (but not I) have done it for a lot less money than that. We have a few high school students who have made working fusors on high school student spare change kinds of money. I had the bucks, so I went whole hog and do a real science approach myself, but I am the exception, not the rule.
Strictly speaking it's against regulations to make a device that makes either X rays or Neutrons without some paperwork, so that's another incorrect statement, and many hobby fusors make amounts that would be dangerous if we weren't careful, and part of what we do on our forum is mention what we have "activated" eg made our own radioisotopes via neutrons from fusors.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard (and I used to get and own patents, which I no longer care about) the flaw is this. You guys are missing it. It's up to the entity applying for a patent to find and disclose prior art. Period. If the examiner happens to know some and get back to them fine, but that's not how the system is set up. And the patent office runs off fees they don't get if applications aren't granted. Enough said?
Until someone gets tired of having to use another machine for the "real" net and hooks up a router between them. Half an hour tops before some idiot breaks the separation model. Yes, people ARE that dumb.
Well, you might be correct, temporarily. As pointed out above, when things are right, Japan has done pretty well too -- and with a similar plan MITI used to strike fear into us here for example, but no more. Could it be something more basic, like demographics? Japan is sinking as their population ages, similar to the USA. China, due to the one child policy will soon face the same thing themselves, not enough young to support the old. Japan is developing robots to help their older folks survive, and maybe we should be looking into that ourselves, as our demographic curves aren't all that different. There are makers and takers (no, not the old saw, exactly). Only in the middle of life is one a net contribution to their society, if even then. The young are supported, as are the old. Our baby boomers are all hitting retirement, hence various effects on entitlement programs (gawd how I hate that word and what it implies), the investment markets, and it's as predictable as the earth's rotation, but no one wants to see the the light at the end of the tunnel is a train and think about what to do about it. GoodLuckWithThat, as we say here, it's not rocket science to predict the broad sweep of the future from this kind of information. Exactly when things hit a tipping point is hard to predict, but not IF they will. We are living in what's about to be really interesting times, and yes, I mean that in the Chinese sense.
A while back, I wrote a book, Digital Audio Processing (Doug Coulter). Recently, Amazon has it as ebook form, perhaps without even informing my publisher, and certainly without telling me. It would stink without the code I copy-lefted on the CD that came with the paperback anyway. Though they sanitized the book of any way to contact me, my email address is all over that code which they didn't check. I've gotten emails from unique addresses in the ratio of about 20::1 over the sales my publisher claims. They are cheating, no question. Next time I will self publish and sell off my own forum or something, no point feeding those dishonest jerks any more. I now understand why Frank Zappa had such a hard-on about that whole business. They have reported zero e-book sales, but it's up there cheap. Pretty worthless without the nice code though, and I don't see how you get that off an e-book reader and into compilation, so it's a joke all around. At any rate, they make the RIAA look honest....just my $.02 worth, which is more than they've paid me after the advance. My opinion of those guys is unprintable, so I'll quit now.
Oh, not to reply to myself, but the reason I quit working on this was it achieved its primary goals. I managed to get two counties (including Floyd VA where I live) to allow these on the public streets (if you get a sticker and pay taxes). No public figure wanted to go on TV with me and explain why the laws are set up so no one could do this with gas then at $4+ a gallon....political action, and it worked out fine. All I had to do was arrange to get myself arrested with some friendly local TV cameras on the scene....nice to have some friends.
Admire mine here: http://www.coultersmithing.com/OldStuff/kart.html I did this so long ago I'm two websites, a new business, and a forum since then. And yes, I still drive it every day, it's handy and did I say fun? Swaps ends with the best of them on a limited traction road....mini cooper claims go-kart handling, but this is far better....and it will climb almost straight up. Other than the body work, does this look a little familiar? Sure does to me. Paid about $2k for this, yeah, they can make them for 10 times that, duh.
What's wrong with being drunk? You ask a glass of water that. I love red meat -- kill it, cook it, eat it, turn it to, well you know. My wife loves ice cream -- same issues. We're better off when they are honest about hating us, that way they fool fewer people into their traps.
But at a few million fusions/second/kilowatt -- good luck making a mole of He of any isotope in your lifetime. For those who don't do chemistry a mole is 6.02 e 23 atoms, more or less, or 22.4 liters of gas at STP. Lessee, 23 - 6 is 17, so roughtly speaking, at current production rates you need say 6 e17 seconds of running to get a mole or so of output gas. call it 1.9 e-10 years per mole, running at a kw input with current tech at its best. As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat.
You can see more about fusors here:
My homepage (we also have a forum linked on the front page, but it's invite-only)
and
The open source fusor forum
I'm so glad I never got any apple products, now it's extremely un tempting and no problems or worries. I did like the comment above -- if Apple gets this patent, maybe it keeps others from doing it somewhat...blessing in disguise? They are not known to license their patents cheap...or, as in the antenna debacle, license others patents even if they are cheap.
It works well, and we designed the database schema for extensibility, normalized and all that. (and the thing is growing and adapting well to changes, but that DB design is all important to make that not so hard)
Looks like the best plan for stuffing a lot of data away and finding it later on. www.coultersmithing.com will show you a bit of what we are up to here. Or our forum at Science/Engineering/Tech forums
Enough to take a 3/8" thick book to show the pictures of. My Dad, who worked for NRL, did a lot of the early development work on vocoders. Not the crypto parts, just the parts that render speech into fewer bits for later encryption. So if you go there, look for the vocoders, and the EVA (electronic voice analog) which I myself had a part in developing -- long before there were IC computers things like this were a little tricky. It ran in the family, I wound up writing codecs and protocols that are now used in cel phones and online. The EVA played from a chart we drew on with conductive ink -- a multichannel analog memory on velum we played back by rolling a wirewound power resistor over it. The traces had information on pitch, noise, formant frequencies and Q's and so on -- this thing played back speech that sounded like the original speaker and only needed a few hundred bits/second to work (making the crypto a lot easer for obvious reasons). If you needed to edit the chart, you'd just take an exacto knife, knock off the silver paint, re paint, and good to go. It was fun playing with chart speed and direction to make the speaker talk fast, slow or backwards without changing anything else about the sound. The analyzer that produced the bits in the first place took two large racks of boards based on Ge transistor my Dad designed and built -- and he was a good tech too, it's purty. We really didn't have opamps then, other than Philbrick tube types (not suitable for airplanes or tanks) so for making formant filters for speech generation, we used some special inductors that could be tuned with a current, made by UTC. By varying the current, you could change the inductance via a non linear u in the special core material, without changing Q too much, they were cool, and I still have a mini vocoder that runs off a joystick and switch/pot input we used on some of our early rock and roll recordings. (we didn't give NSA all the good stuff...) Some of the other cool stuff is miniature radios, some things we found we don't even know what they are, some special navy comm system things, signal analyzers and so forth. Only a geek could love some of this. We had so much when Dad died (plenty to keep my busy for the rest of my own life if I only played with just that, which I don't) we gave it to NSA so other people could admire it. Enjoy! Now I do other things -- www.coultersmithing.com
I recently found myself needing to upgrade from my old faitful tek 465's and 475s, as parts were failing I couldn't find anymore. I got a pair of GW Instek scopes, one 2 ch and one 4 ch, the latter going to > 1ghz and costing still under $2k. They are pretty nice, actually, and also interface to computers (windows only unless you write code) a number of ways. And will save on either SD cards or thumb drives. I don't find them a step down from the tek stuff, which is way way overpriced for the same features (but probably better quality, dunno). That's new, mind you, with a warranty. I think the cheaper one was under $400 IIRC. Both work ,and both have survived things in my physics lab that fried the probes -- not so bad at all.
They have a ton of features that the older analog scopes lacked, similar to the tek stuff they are intended to compete with. FFT, no problem, go, no-go comparisons with stored waveforms, got that....autosetup to get stuff on the screen, of course, and a ton of other features I don't happen to use or need, but all the stuff you'd expect is there.
Ahh -- now we see the issues more clearly. They don't trade, they don't have the guts or the stake money -- so that other guy DID produce something of value -- his money at risk, and his discretion to ignore the software when it was wrong or "didn't feel right". Believe me, trading is a full time job or you're going to get clobbered, there's a lot of homework involved, and judgement that may take years to hone.
After all, if you really wanted to hear some whining from programmers, how about if their pay was cut when a software glitch [b]lost[/b] 100k a day?
I use a version of that screed whenever (frequently) some broker calls and wants to trade my account, with me taking all the risks, including paying him to do it. They always have glowing commentary about how great they are. In which case, I ask -- they why aren't you so rich as not to need my couple millions to play with? If you're that good -- you'd be rich beyond the dreams of avarice, right? Even starting with only a little bit of money. That "click" I often get in response is quite gratifying.
Nothing hurts more than pointing out the simple and obvious facts.
While parent correctly points out that new and better electronics can and do reduce the need for antenna efficiency, I'm not aware that the internal antennas are (or can be) as good as an external, for a couple of reasons. One is the no one ever held a phone by the external antenna, and very close (much less than a wavelength) proximity to human flesh -- a great absorber of radio waves, never helps. A properly tuned/loaded external antenna will always kick out better performance than a little thing on the PCB inside the case where it will often have more close proximity to the hand. They are getting good, sure -- for a isotropic radiator, but don't match a for real full length quarter wave or dipole or 5/8 wave antenna either. There's just no beating a larger sized exposure to the wave-field for raw performance. That's why there's a dish involved in a satellite dish, for example -- you can't just point the little feed antenna and lna at the sky and have it work. If you don't believe me, just go to someplace like www.digikey.com and put antenna into the search, and then look at the performance of chip antennas (.5dbi) vs other types -- see for yourself. Apple was evidently attempting to get a bigger, better performing antenna (as well as skip some license fees) by making it discrete and outside the phone -- just that one little detail of proximity to the human absorber that they somehow missed utterly. Weird, because as someone who has designed and built and tested tons of antennas -- anyone who does this will know right off that you see the signal strength drop wildly when you just reach in close to try adjusting it. You have to do the adjustment, and then get back away before the reading means diddly. If you tune it to work when you're close in, it will be wrong when you aren't. And because human flesh is "lossy" it's never as good with you close as it is with you farther, no matter the tuning/loading.
I'll help with that marketing -- I'm no stranger to nuclear issues as my name here implies. I would gladly store and guard a few drums of really hot (the shorter half life stuff) waste here -- I'd put thermocouples or the moral equivalent into it and supplement my already existing off the grid alternative power system nicely. And have a nice source of things to calibrate my gamma ray spectrometer from. As has been pointed out -- it wouldn't take that many guys like me to handle all the hot stuff there is, and it will go dead fairly quickly anyway. See http://www.coultersmithing.com/
Just like with a bank account -- some days you make more than you spend, and have the extra for those other days. For really long strings of bad solar weather, of course you burn some gasoline, which is pretty expensive power -- but by system design you keep that minimal, indeed.
Yes, there are fewer successful solar installations in Michigan than here, not a big surprise. If I lived there, I'd probably be looking into a more-diverse alternative power system that took advantage of what you do have in abundance -- perhaps wind off the lakes? Since I don't live there, I really have no idea what would work best.
Even here, when I go help with a solar system design/install, the first step is to check the situation out before any money gets spent. In suburbia it often happens that the sun is more or less blocked by something on some land the customer doesn't own, and there's not much that can be done about that one.
Even here there is a huge Oak tree I refuse to cut down that eats about 20% of my input in the winter. I just love that beautiful thing, so I added enough panels to still be fine.
To do the money analogy a bit more, as long as you're making a little more than you spend, you feel rich. A little less income than outgo - and you are in bad shape.
It IS a good idea to TRY to innovate, but also a better idea to realize it when your innovation failed and to put something that does work well in there instead, in that case. Anything else is hubris. Their reaction to this indicates that this may be a good call on where they are coming from on the issue.
If the iPhone 4 has better reception -- what's all this about? Many say otherwise -- so many there may be just a germ of truth in that. As someone who knows antennas (I designed and built my own cell phone repeater for use here where coverage is lousy -- and it works great), it seems obvious to me that at these wavelengths touching one is not usually going to help it work. Your AM radio, maybe....not up in the GHz range, though. And certainly not when you short yourself across a dipole. Humans make one of the better electrically damping (resistive) loads there is.
Yeah, Apple and cheapness are rarely used together, because if you're a customer, they aren't cheap at all. However, if you build things for them, they are as cheap as it gets.
Many Apple products have been torn down to see what they really cost to make, and they seem to have about the highest hardware profit margin there is in the business, and on just about everything they "make". Or more accurately, have made for them in places where the labor is cheaper.
Sure, the old NIH thing might have had a part too. Didn't stop them from using BSD as a base, though, in other products, did it?
But see above. I'm not dissing them for trying to cut costs -- I've run a business or two -- but there is a point where that becomes self-defeating, and I think they crossed that line.
Dumb patents plus Apple cheapness -- that "innovation" of having the antenna on the outside is where it all started....bah.
As you say, something that's "good for you" but is going to cost you money isn't going to fly real good. It might do better if it were some percent, rather than a fixed amount. But one thing people here are suspicious of is that statement. Here in Floyd, VA, we had a rash of hippies move in from CA when some spiritualist said this place wasn't gonna fall into the ocean. They settled in and then started hassling the locals about "recycling, "sustainability" and "green" stuff. That *really* didn't go over well at all, but in a humorous way. Not because of who said it either -- but because the locals can all *teach* this stuff to those idiots -- they have been sustainably farming these mountains since before the Revolutionary war, after all....and it's nicer now than it was then by all accounts. Rich fertile land, lots of game and all that. I think you'd have to be an idiot to live in a big city, but that's me, sitting here on my PV solar electricity, a year or so worth of food and fuel stashed up, on a nice big piece of land I own outright -- and get off my lawn if you don't like what I'm doing -- because if you weren't trespassing, you'd never know about it anyway. In a city, the ultimate unsustainable idea, you have to have a lot tighter laws and rules, because if I swing my arm there, it's likely to connect with someone's head. Here, there's little chance of that. The danger is applying the same laws to both places -- the shoe won't fit in one or the other.
Agree all the way. Helium is too cheap now, considering but then again, price fixing doesn't seem like a smart road to go down either (remember some past events in USA with trying to price-fix? Oil in the '70s etc? Nixon's price/wage freezes?) -- so how to fix that one and skip the unintended (but often obvious) consequences? Helium is so cheap (right now) that I use it to prefill my fusion reactor up to STP before I open the door, as being very inert it makes the subsequent pumpdown time a lot quicker (because all the shop air doesn't get in if I work fast), and I get to purity and running conditions again faster. I could use Argon instead, but if I run the usual plasma during pumpdown to get tank-wall bakeouts, the heavier Ar does more damaging sputtering of metal the ions hit than He does. I have Ne, but at that price, forget it. If He cost the same, there would be no problems with taking care of the supply -- they'd be capturing it in the NG flares along with the gas they are now burning because it costs more to compress/liquify/transport than they'd get for the NG. In this case, the NG would just come along as a bonus to make the operation slightly more profitable than before, or that's how I'd design it.
Don't replicate the astroturfing of the anti solar business -- they are running scared.
Off the grid since 1979 - using primarily the tech available then, and loving it-- and everything I bought then still works, except for some battery replacements. The "just wait, we're going from 14% efficiency to 20% soon and it will cost 5% less per watt is just another form of the same antisolar spin. The new thin film stuff is neither as good or as rugged in real live use. Most of the cost is now in the other stuff. Like real glass, plastic that matches tempco to the cells, frames, batteries, inverters...and so forth. www.coultersmithing.com
Most helium is released from nat gas flares in oil wells, as at current prices it's not worth recovering either if the well is far from concentrated "civilization". And as the parent mentions, that's it, it's lost. Yes, you can make helium with fusion, and I even do it here, but in amounts that make a microgram look like large lots. Lemme know when a fusion reactor makes energy gain -- I'm working it, but....not yet. www.coultersmithing.com has some info there. Helium 3 is in far shorter supply (always, but now it's really critical) and it is because the DHS has taken it all for portal neutron detectors -- you can't buy it as a civilian (or the detectors new) for ANY price whatever. Sometimes can find it in a used detector, that's about it, and CERN is crying because they need that for their superfluid He dilution coolers. This is a separate but also important issue -- 3He is a decay product from Tritium mostly and we just don't do much of that anymore. There's only a tiny amount in natural He, which of course we're just letting whiz into space because we don't want to pay the rent to store the stuff.
Perhaps a planet where they have a contract that has termination fees so you can't just get your money back?
In fact, our open source fusor forum, http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php?site=fusor doesn't even know this guy, or I don't recognize him, anyway -- we usually use our real names there. It's been around for quite awhile too -- if you go there look at the archives and see for yourself. Not only does this represent a dupe, and not to take anything away from this guy, he's far from alone, and unless he is making over 2 million neutrons/second on less than 5w power input, he's not even caught up to the current hobby record, which as far as I know, I hold -- some of it shown at http://www.coultersmithing.com/ , my site (which can take a slashdotting much better than the forum can, which is "some guy" hosting from home -- the perfessor we call him and are grateful. If you go there you'll find many more than 38 folks with working fusors I think. The pic in the BBC article looks in fact like one copied from one of our (main) forum members fusors, Richard Hull (see wikipedia on that). Again, not taking anything away from the guy -- the more the merrier -- hope he catches up with the rest of us at some point, as we have refined the Farnsworth concept quite a bit over the years, and made much more progress than is normally reported, because what funding is done is either to ITER with their non working approach, or NIF, which is really a weapons stewardship test device. Mod me up, damnit -- this is sick, we've been doing this for decades and are pretty good at it, and nearly all of us have done it *purely* with our own earned bucks, not taking contributions from people dumb enough to donate for no return. I guess we mostly care more about the science than being 15-minute famous. And most of us (but not I) have done it for a lot less money than that. We have a few high school students who have made working fusors on high school student spare change kinds of money. I had the bucks, so I went whole hog and do a real science approach myself, but I am the exception, not the rule. Strictly speaking it's against regulations to make a device that makes either X rays or Neutrons without some paperwork, so that's another incorrect statement, and many hobby fusors make amounts that would be dangerous if we weren't careful, and part of what we do on our forum is mention what we have "activated" eg made our own radioisotopes via neutrons from fusors.
Been looking at that sig a lot. I don't think you are getting your money's worth at all. GoodLuckWithThat.