What with dealing with them on a daily basis (Freescale, I mean) I am fairly aware of this. But you and I are about the only ones. It'll be a year or so before I get used to it; I still complai^H^H^H^H^H^Hall them SPS all the time.
I would have liked it if they had made a 'pizza box' with a flat metal front faceplate with a socket right in the middle that carried the power and video connectors for directly mounting a seperate LCD screen. It'd make it easier to replace/upgradeable, without completely ruining the all-in-one visual design (you'd wind up with a seam around the edge, but not bad). Essentially, make the system into an LCD dock.
So you have piece A ('pizza box', the system, with a front-facing socket) and piece B (LCD with connector specially designed to jack into the socket on the pizza box). Allow people to buy them seperately and I can envision scenarios like many pizzas, one monitor which you move from place to place as you move, or many monitors and one pizza, which you can carry from work to home almost like a laptop minus the battery.
-25 to 70 is commercial spec. -40 to 125 is industrial spec. -50 to 150 is military spec.
Some companies/products differ from these (i.e. a lot of power ICs are designed for the 150 max in their industrial version), but those are the general guidelines.
IBM didn't do the G4. That's a Motorola chip. G3 and G5 are IBM, although Motorola still makes a bunch of G3-class PPCs, but mostly for embedded stuff. But the G4 was all Motorola - IBM never sold any G4s to Apple.
Not to whip out my nerd dick, but the Nintendo's CPU wasn't an ASIC, it was just a general purpose micro (6502 to be specific).
ASICs are exactly what the acronym implies - application specific integrated circuits. Your car uses a metric ton of them (VR sensor processors, airbag sensor, Hall effect sensor processor, knock detection, misfire detection, etc.) just in the engine compartment. MP3 decoding chips are ASICs. CPUs are not.
Well, the thing is, those definitions would have been a lot more useful than the original post. When I do explanatory posts related to electrical engineering (side-note: EEs at my school *were* required to take chemistry and o-chem both) I try not to use specific jargon and to define jargon I need to use.
Your original post, plus definitions, is useful to most reasonably intelligent people. Minus the definitions, totally useless to anyone who hasn't studied more chemistry than 99% of the population, including a fair portion of people who have, in fact, taken (and aced, in my case - steric wasn't a word I recall being used at all though) a reasonable introduction to the field of chemistry.
It sounds like a lot, but its not atypical. A power-steering module I worked with once drew about 90 amps peak. Our power distribution boxes regularly handle hundreds of amps of current.
Motors like to suck current. Its just one of those things. Auto world has been dealing with it for years now, and we've pretty much figured out how to handle high current loads (hell, we switch those 90 amp currents on and off in a box the size of a small hardcover book.)
Orbiter. Orbits the planet. The orbiter mapped all over Mars.
Let me break it down further. Odyssey is an orbiter. Spirit and Discovery are rovers. Did you read the story? Did it even MENTION the rovers, or did it talk about Odyssey, the orbiter?
And you have the nerve to call them exaggerators, when you're flat out WRONG.
Much like their parents, baby cars eat money. Lots and lots of money. Occasionally you can substitute engineering hunks of metal and plastic for the money, but pretty much they eat money.
There are all kinds of schemes to do this that are far more efficient than simple repetition/majority vote setups (lets say your two halves of the disc don't agree - which one is right? you need at least 3 copies in order to maintain integrity in a situation where you don't necessarily know which one is trustworthy).
Reed-Solomon is one of them. Hell, a simple 8-bit plus parity with the bits spread across the disc so that a localized scratch could only catch one bit of 9 would do better than simple redundancy.
It isn't more radical; coding theory has lots of good ideas, and a lot of them deal with bursty errors like CDs tend to suffer.
You still have to carry around a power supply. Granted, your supply might be a simple power cord to the wall, but the iPod's power supply is internal - it doesn't need any cords at all. Sometimes (industrial labs where power is hard to come by, middle of nowhere) this is convenient, and sometimes it doesn't matter.
But I've yet to see a USB enclosure with a battery built in.
You think a whole lot more people buy ethics books than comms theory books? I don't. I suspect, in fact, that less are sold. And it isn't like everyone buys the same ethics book - excepting certain very popular texts, how many copies do you think the average textbook sells?
Price of a book should be set on very few things - economy of scale and effort to write. An introductory sociology text probably requires roughly as much effort to write as an introductory communications theory text, and might sell to at most 20% more people. Thus, prices on the texts should be roughly equal. A printing of a textbook ain't going to sell very many copies. Not even a sociology book.
I have a P3 laptop from Dell. Hibernate works fine... usually. Except when it doesn't and it just fails to hibernate, instead simply restarting when I bring it back up. That's what I meant. It isn't an ancient laptop, maybe 1.5-2 years old max.
But yeah, having it work screenless would be great for MP3s; the screen sucks up a large proportion of the power in a modern laptop IIRC, so that might make your average laptop battery capable of delivering better-than-ipod battery life.
A hardwired DVD player is going to consume less CPU time than a DVD player on full OS. If it gets 10% more time out of the battery, it might be a wash, but if it gets 25% time that's a pretty decent feature for a couple extra bucks (extra firmware chip, pay for the license, probably $5 max extra cost).
(And no, Windows really doesn't have a very good sleep mode - standby is fine, but the true low-power sleeps are not exactly stable, I've more than a few times had my Windows machine fail to come back up. No such problems on my Powerbook.)
Interesting. I'm unlikely to shift to it any time soon for our embedded stuff, but its good to know its out there. That said, its useless until the VMs start showing up for the processors we work with (mainly HC12s, Motorola 56xxx DSP, and the lower end PPCs - little bit with TriCore and some other funky ones). But interesting to know about. Thanks.
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What with dealing with them on a daily basis (Freescale, I mean) I am fairly aware of this. But you and I are about the only ones. It'll be a year or so before I get used to it; I still complai^H^H^H^H^H^Hall them SPS all the time.
I would have liked it if they had made a 'pizza box' with a flat metal front faceplate with a socket right in the middle that carried the power and video connectors for directly mounting a seperate LCD screen. It'd make it easier to replace/upgradeable, without completely ruining the all-in-one visual design (you'd wind up with a seam around the edge, but not bad). Essentially, make the system into an LCD dock.
So you have piece A ('pizza box', the system, with a front-facing socket) and piece B (LCD with connector specially designed to jack into the socket on the pizza box). Allow people to buy them seperately and I can envision scenarios like many pizzas, one monitor which you move from place to place as you move, or many monitors and one pizza, which you can carry from work to home almost like a laptop minus the battery.
I don't know. I'm just rambling.
-25 to 70 is commercial spec.
-40 to 125 is industrial spec.
-50 to 150 is military spec.
Some companies/products differ from these (i.e. a lot of power ICs are designed for the 150 max in their industrial version), but those are the general guidelines.
IBM didn't do the G4. That's a Motorola chip. G3 and G5 are IBM, although Motorola still makes a bunch of G3-class PPCs, but mostly for embedded stuff. But the G4 was all Motorola - IBM never sold any G4s to Apple.
Not to whip out my nerd dick, but the Nintendo's CPU wasn't an ASIC, it was just a general purpose micro (6502 to be specific).
ASICs are exactly what the acronym implies - application specific integrated circuits. Your car uses a metric ton of them (VR sensor processors, airbag sensor, Hall effect sensor processor, knock detection, misfire detection, etc.) just in the engine compartment. MP3 decoding chips are ASICs. CPUs are not.
I'd actually guess iPod capable of streaming directly to an AirEx without needing a computer.
No. He meant an *Apple*.
IIe, I think.
Actually, it's $10,000 + $67,104.
SCO fee, you know.
Enjoy your memories.
All the fun of BBS textfiles without the modem.
.... in Japan.
Except that it's not even a joke, in this case.
Well, the thing is, those definitions would have been a lot more useful than the original post. When I do explanatory posts related to electrical engineering (side-note: EEs at my school *were* required to take chemistry and o-chem both) I try not to use specific jargon and to define jargon I need to use.
Your original post, plus definitions, is useful to most reasonably intelligent people. Minus the definitions, totally useless to anyone who hasn't studied more chemistry than 99% of the population, including a fair portion of people who have, in fact, taken (and aced, in my case - steric wasn't a word I recall being used at all though) a reasonable introduction to the field of chemistry.
I've never heard the term linear motor - they're usually called "variable force solenoids" where I work.
Uhm... if your car loses electrical power right now, your hydraulics will probably lose power assist, leaving you with...
Brakes, because there's a physical connection. Its harder to brake without hydraulic power assist, but you can still brake.
It sounds like a lot, but its not atypical. A power-steering module I worked with once drew about 90 amps peak. Our power distribution boxes regularly handle hundreds of amps of current.
Motors like to suck current. Its just one of those things. Auto world has been dealing with it for years now, and we've pretty much figured out how to handle high current loads (hell, we switch those 90 amp currents on and off in a box the size of a small hardcover book.)
Down the throats of British people. See, the extra 'i' gets stuck in there cross-wise and they choke to death.
They're not talking about the rovers, jackass.
Orbiter. Orbits the planet. The orbiter mapped all over Mars.
Let me break it down further. Odyssey is an orbiter. Spirit and Discovery are rovers. Did you read the story? Did it even MENTION the rovers, or did it talk about Odyssey, the orbiter?
And you have the nerve to call them exaggerators, when you're flat out WRONG.
Much like their parents, baby cars eat money. Lots and lots of money. Occasionally you can substitute engineering hunks of metal and plastic for the money, but pretty much they eat money.
Personally, I've found that people get jealous based on no evidence whatsoever, so 'evidence' is unlikely to change things much.
There are all kinds of schemes to do this that are far more efficient than simple repetition/majority vote setups (lets say your two halves of the disc don't agree - which one is right? you need at least 3 copies in order to maintain integrity in a situation where you don't necessarily know which one is trustworthy).
Reed-Solomon is one of them. Hell, a simple 8-bit plus parity with the bits spread across the disc so that a localized scratch could only catch one bit of 9 would do better than simple redundancy.
It isn't more radical; coding theory has lots of good ideas, and a lot of them deal with bursty errors like CDs tend to suffer.
I'm surprised you missed the multiple previous mentions, myself.
But yeah, it's what I would suggest too.
You still have to carry around a power supply. Granted, your supply might be a simple power cord to the wall, but the iPod's power supply is internal - it doesn't need any cords at all. Sometimes (industrial labs where power is hard to come by, middle of nowhere) this is convenient, and sometimes it doesn't matter.
But I've yet to see a USB enclosure with a battery built in.
You think a whole lot more people buy ethics books than comms theory books? I don't. I suspect, in fact, that less are sold. And it isn't like everyone buys the same ethics book - excepting certain very popular texts, how many copies do you think the average textbook sells?
Price of a book should be set on very few things - economy of scale and effort to write. An introductory sociology text probably requires roughly as much effort to write as an introductory communications theory text, and might sell to at most 20% more people. Thus, prices on the texts should be roughly equal. A printing of a textbook ain't going to sell very many copies. Not even a sociology book.
You might be interested in NACS study of where your textbook dollar goes.
I have a P3 laptop from Dell. Hibernate works fine... usually. Except when it doesn't and it just fails to hibernate, instead simply restarting when I bring it back up. That's what I meant. It isn't an ancient laptop, maybe 1.5-2 years old max.
But yeah, having it work screenless would be great for MP3s; the screen sucks up a large proportion of the power in a modern laptop IIRC, so that might make your average laptop battery capable of delivering better-than-ipod battery life.
Power usage.
A hardwired DVD player is going to consume less CPU time than a DVD player on full OS. If it gets 10% more time out of the battery, it might be a wash, but if it gets 25% time that's a pretty decent feature for a couple extra bucks (extra firmware chip, pay for the license, probably $5 max extra cost).
(And no, Windows really doesn't have a very good sleep mode - standby is fine, but the true low-power sleeps are not exactly stable, I've more than a few times had my Windows machine fail to come back up. No such problems on my Powerbook.)
Interesting. I'm unlikely to shift to it any time soon for our embedded stuff, but its good to know its out there. That said, its useless until the VMs start showing up for the processors we work with (mainly HC12s, Motorola 56xxx DSP, and the lower end PPCs - little bit with TriCore and some other funky ones). But interesting to know about. Thanks.