It would be nice. However, the reason we have high voltage AC running through our walls is because the resistance of the wires running through your home (and from the utility pole, and from the distribution lines, and from the power station), and AC makes it easy to use transformers to step down the voltage at every distribution stage. Here's a breakdown:
HV distribution vs. low voltage:
Ohm says that across a length of conductor with resistance R and current flowing through I, V=I*R and power (in this case dissipated) is defined by P=VI. Therefore P=R*I^2. Given that we can't effectively lower the resistance of our power lines much more (superconductors are really the only way to go) we realize that the voltage term does not affect the power dissipated by the power lines but the current does as a square. Given that the load at the end of the line expects to consume a certain amount of power P(1), we can halve the current needed to be passed over the power lines by doubling the voltage, and reduce the power loss thusly.
AC vs. DC:
There are quite a few 'stepdown' stages between the power station and your house. This is done so that the long runs of wire can benefit from the high voltage / low current advantage we mention above, and the shorter runs can be safer and run in neighborhoods, in your walls, etc. without arcing. This is accomplished with a device called a transformer. Without explaining too much, a transformer works by setting up a magnetic field on one set of coils which is transferred through some sort of magnetic coupling to an electrically isolated second set of coils. Devices like this only couple energy when the input is alternating, and the output alternates in sync with the input, so logically using AC power means not having to employ systems to switch power at every transformer stage.
The result of this is that while high voltage AC makes power distribution efficient, it is only effective when converted to DC at the last possible moment in the 'grid'. If 5V DC were run throughout your house over your existing large-gauge wiring, each outlet would show a significant droop over the power at the source.
From someone who has left college before graduating* and managed to get and hold down a job in a field of his interest, let me be the first to point out that there's nothing wrong with making that decision. I've found that a college degree is just your foot-in-the-door at the beginning of your career for some jobs. Many employers do know the value of experience and will overlook college if your skill set is strong enough.
However, make sure that you're not just fooling yourself out of fear or laziness into skipping college. If you're not the hot shit you claim to be, and you're missing your college mealticket degree, you'll be flipping burgers in no time flat. College is hard work, but so is a real job.
What worked for me? Go to college. Work part-time or between semesters / summers at an internship in your field of interest. One of those two, and hopefully both will give you the honest resume-filler you need to land a real job. And if you've spent a couple of years struggling in college, but you've learned how to do a particular job, then you can afford to leave school and pursue your career.
Don't waste a good opportunity, 'cause it only gets harder to find the time to pick up new skills when you're working full-time.
This is akin to Don Rumsfeld's claim that the media is at fault for the torture in U.S. run Iraqi prison camps. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there.
Many phones do all that too. My T616 supports file sharing, has a calendar and address book that sync with my desktop, can run J2ME apps, and even has a SMTP mail client. Oh, and it makes calls too.
Most bluetooth or IrDA cellphones support swapping business cards using the same standard (vCard) as PDAs and other IrDA compatible devices use. I've used my cellphone at conferences to beam business cards to and from all sorts of handheld gadgets.
(not speaking for Cirrus, but as an employee in the group that supports this part) It does rock. Unfortunately we were blindsided by the demand we got when we announced this board and pricing at ESC in April and are still recovering from the demand. Be patient, we're making all we can.
BTW, remember to register the board for access to our FTP site where the latest releases of our Linux environment live.
That's great, except for the unholy number of I/Os you would need to route all across your motherboard.
The real solution is to:
1) Use DMA and an increased number of memory channels to allow the DMA controller in the system to do some of the work for you. Remember that a CPU with cache will stay off of the memory bus for significant amounts of time, letting your graphics card grab textures out of main memory, etc.
2) Make smarter peripherals. I2O is a good start, but too cost prohibitive. Modern SCSI is an excellent example, where multiple large transfers can be preprogrammed (transaction queueing) to occur when the data is ready from or ready to go to the disk. These operations then happen through DMA, requiring no CPU overhead. Ethernet is another example where coprocessing can help.
3) Use a multichannel I/O infrastructure. PCI-express is supposed to fix this. SGI had this long ago with their Avalanche bus. The idea is akin to the difference between an ethernet hub and switch. If the CPU needs to write to the ethernet buffer, and the audio needs to fetch from memory bank 1, and video needs to read from memory bank 2, then a single channel bus will slow all of these down when none of these peripherals have conflicting interests.
Are you glowing in the visible spectrum, or are people regularly taking pictures of you with thermal imaging cameras? Personally I'm going to start suing owners of PIR sensors in buildings I walk through.
Looks like the guy in the article is using a sealed lead-acid cell. These are no more likely to leak than a standard NiMH cell, and NiMH usually uses a potassium hydroxide electrolyte which is somewhat more dangerous to get on your skin.
A few enterprising people have reverse-engineered the KWP-1281 and -2000 protocols that VW and friends (VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda) use on their cars. One of the most recognized is VAG-COM which pretends to behave just like the expensive VW shop scantool in almost every respect. The only potentially useful feature it doesn't replicate is the ability to update firmware to the various control modules in a car. It even adds the ability to graph various sensor values, and with a cut-and-paste to an Excel spreadsheet can calculate horsepower just from driving the car around for a while (the 'butt dyno').
Very cool, and cheap enough for a only slightly mechanically inclined geek to justify.
RTFA. The article's main point is that OLED manufacturing processes, once some of the technological hurdles are overcome, is far, far cheaper than TFT or plasma. The contender for assembly methodology is to use an inkjet-like system to print the OLED polymers onto the substrate and use common metal sputtering techniques for the interconnects. They even mentioned that a key price advantage is the ability to integrate driving circuitry onto the same substrate as the display, saving the cost of having to use off-screen drivers (this is also being used in newer CG-TFT displays).
Apparently on my couch in my apt. Consequently, this is also my G-spot, as that's where I'm using my new laptop to write this over 802.11g. (btw, wifi-box will rock your world if you've got a Linksys WRT54G router)
Indeed. Also, the taps that cut through the insulation and connect with each wire when crimped are different when using solid core (what plenum uses) vs. stranded core (most patch wire) wires.
I'd like to believe that if the package for the 'connectors' at Fry's says 'RJ45' and the box for the cable that they go on at Fry's says 'Plenum', the salesperson who has been dubbed by management as customer assistance for the networking section of the store would know what I'm talking about.
What you say is like expecting an employee at Home Depot to respond worse to asking where the 'schedule 40' is rather than the 'plastic water pipe'.
You see, Fry's goes one step further than just having a horde of ill-trained customer service people roaming the store. They assign a person to each section, and go as far as to post a picture of them at the end of the aisles they're in charge of.
One day, upon needing some cable ends for some ethernet I was running, I decided to go to Fry's. They do have a good selection of networking hardware, so I figured I should have no problem getting the connectors. While I'm trying to find the RJ45s for rounded solid cable amongst the RJ11s, MMJs, and cable boots I get accosted by the salesdude, wanting to know if I need help. This is the same guy whose picture is pasted to the shelf. So I says to him, I says, "Could you help me find some RJ45s for plenum cable?" Reasonable request, right? I mean, there were routers to the left of me and telco racks to the right, and big spools of CAT5 behind me, so somewhere in that vicinity should be cable ends. His response: "I'm sorry, sir, I'm not sure what you are talking about."
I eventually found them on my own.
The moral of this story? Don't ask a customer if they need any help if you don't even know what products you sell!
... welcome our new cybernetic education overlords.
As so many have mentioned, this should be easy to crack. Do the same thing as the spammers do to get around filters: get a copy of this program, get a bunch of random text from the web, get a Markov chainer to generate random text from the input of all the essays, feed the output to the test program. You can batch the whole thing such that after N iterations you replace the raw input text with essays that did well through the screening program. Keep repeating this outer loop until a good looking paper comes out. Voila!
As so many other posters point out, the inverse square law applied to E/M fields means that that 1.5W diminishes very quickly as you move away from that antenna. Since the inverse square law applied in this case assumes a perfect dipole antenna, and the antennas in cellphones are less-than-perfect, the odds that your spark-generating conductor is in a peak radiation lobe are pretty low. Even then, what conductor is going to be close enough to both that antenna and the high vapor concentration areas to ignite that fire? Not to mention the topologies of the conductor that would cause the majority of that induced energy to form a spark hot enough to ignite the gas.
I suggest you brush up on your basic physics before talking smack to others.
(you've been punk'd by someone who failed e-mag in college...)
Re:From the full title of the book...
on
SCO Caught Copying
·
· Score: 1
"I can no longer sit back and allow... open source infiltration... open source indoctrination... open source subversion... and the international open source conspiracy... to sap and impurify... all of our precious intellectual property." --obGeneral_Ripper
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice. However, the reason we have high voltage AC running through our walls is because the resistance of the wires running through your home (and from the utility pole, and from the distribution lines, and from the power station), and AC makes it easy to use transformers to step down the voltage at every distribution stage. Here's a breakdown:
HV distribution vs. low voltage:
Ohm says that across a length of conductor with resistance R and current flowing through I, V=I*R and power (in this case dissipated) is defined by P=VI. Therefore P=R*I^2. Given that we can't effectively lower the resistance of our power lines much more (superconductors are really the only way to go) we realize that the voltage term does not affect the power dissipated by the power lines but the current does as a square. Given that the load at the end of the line expects to consume a certain amount of power P(1), we can halve the current needed to be passed over the power lines by doubling the voltage, and reduce the power loss thusly.
AC vs. DC:
There are quite a few 'stepdown' stages between the power station and your house. This is done so that the long runs of wire can benefit from the high voltage / low current advantage we mention above, and the shorter runs can be safer and run in neighborhoods, in your walls, etc. without arcing. This is accomplished with a device called a transformer. Without explaining too much, a transformer works by setting up a magnetic field on one set of coils which is transferred through some sort of magnetic coupling to an electrically isolated second set of coils. Devices like this only couple energy when the input is alternating, and the output alternates in sync with the input, so logically using AC power means not having to employ systems to switch power at every transformer stage.
The result of this is that while high voltage AC makes power distribution efficient, it is only effective when converted to DC at the last possible moment in the 'grid'. If 5V DC were run throughout your house over your existing large-gauge wiring, each outlet would show a significant droop over the power at the source.
(*whew*)
From someone who has left college before graduating* and managed to get and hold down a job in a field of his interest, let me be the first to point out that there's nothing wrong with making that decision. I've found that a college degree is just your foot-in-the-door at the beginning of your career for some jobs. Many employers do know the value of experience and will overlook college if your skill set is strong enough.
However, make sure that you're not just fooling yourself out of fear or laziness into skipping college. If you're not the hot shit you claim to be, and you're missing your college mealticket degree, you'll be flipping burgers in no time flat. College is hard work, but so is a real job.
What worked for me? Go to college. Work part-time or between semesters / summers at an internship in your field of interest. One of those two, and hopefully both will give you the honest resume-filler you need to land a real job. And if you've spent a couple of years struggling in college, but you've learned how to do a particular job, then you can afford to leave school and pursue your career.
Don't waste a good opportunity, 'cause it only gets harder to find the time to pick up new skills when you're working full-time.
*(not for a lack of trying, btw)
I'm Novell, bitch!
This is akin to Don Rumsfeld's claim that the media is at fault for the torture in U.S. run Iraqi prison camps. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it's not there.
Many phones do all that too. My T616 supports file sharing, has a calendar and address book that sync with my desktop, can run J2ME apps, and even has a SMTP mail client. Oh, and it makes calls too.
My point is, it does everything that a PDA does.
Most bluetooth or IrDA cellphones support swapping business cards using the same standard (vCard) as PDAs and other IrDA compatible devices use. I've used my cellphone at conferences to beam business cards to and from all sorts of handheld gadgets.
(not speaking for Cirrus, but as an employee in the group that supports this part) It does rock. Unfortunately we were blindsided by the demand we got when we announced this board and pricing at ESC in April and are still recovering from the demand. Be patient, we're making all we can.
BTW, remember to register the board for access to our FTP site where the latest releases of our Linux environment live.
Cirrus Logic EP9301 eval kit.
That's great, except for the unholy number of I/Os you would need to route all across your motherboard.
The real solution is to:
1) Use DMA and an increased number of memory channels to allow the DMA controller in the system to do some of the work for you. Remember that a CPU with cache will stay off of the memory bus for significant amounts of time, letting your graphics card grab textures out of main memory, etc.
2) Make smarter peripherals. I2O is a good start, but too cost prohibitive. Modern SCSI is an excellent example, where multiple large transfers can be preprogrammed (transaction queueing) to occur when the data is ready from or ready to go to the disk. These operations then happen through DMA, requiring no CPU overhead. Ethernet is another example where coprocessing can help.
3) Use a multichannel I/O infrastructure. PCI-express is supposed to fix this. SGI had this long ago with their Avalanche bus. The idea is akin to the difference between an ethernet hub and switch. If the CPU needs to write to the ethernet buffer, and the audio needs to fetch from memory bank 1, and video needs to read from memory bank 2, then a single channel bus will slow all of these down when none of these peripherals have conflicting interests.
Are you glowing in the visible spectrum, or are people regularly taking pictures of you with thermal imaging cameras? Personally I'm going to start suing owners of PIR sensors in buildings I walk through.
Looks like the guy in the article is using a sealed lead-acid cell. These are no more likely to leak than a standard NiMH cell, and NiMH usually uses a potassium hydroxide electrolyte which is somewhat more dangerous to get on your skin.
A few enterprising people have reverse-engineered the KWP-1281 and -2000 protocols that VW and friends (VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda) use on their cars. One of the most recognized is VAG-COM which pretends to behave just like the expensive VW shop scantool in almost every respect. The only potentially useful feature it doesn't replicate is the ability to update firmware to the various control modules in a car. It even adds the ability to graph various sensor values, and with a cut-and-paste to an Excel spreadsheet can calculate horsepower just from driving the car around for a while (the 'butt dyno').
Very cool, and cheap enough for a only slightly mechanically inclined geek to justify.
Nah, it's this Cube.
RTFA. The article's main point is that OLED manufacturing processes, once some of the technological hurdles are overcome, is far, far cheaper than TFT or plasma. The contender for assembly methodology is to use an inkjet-like system to print the OLED polymers onto the substrate and use common metal sputtering techniques for the interconnects. They even mentioned that a key price advantage is the ability to integrate driving circuitry onto the same substrate as the display, saving the cost of having to use off-screen drivers (this is also being used in newer CG-TFT displays).
Apparently on my couch in my apt. Consequently, this is also my G-spot, as that's where I'm using my new laptop to write this over 802.11g. (btw, wifi-box will rock your world if you've got a Linksys WRT54G router)
Actually, it's 28% more amazing: According to my TiVo series 1 kernel log, the CPU is running at 54MHz.
Indeed. Also, the taps that cut through the insulation and connect with each wire when crimped are different when using solid core (what plenum uses) vs. stranded core (most patch wire) wires.
I'd like to believe that if the package for the 'connectors' at Fry's says 'RJ45' and the box for the cable that they go on at Fry's says 'Plenum', the salesperson who has been dubbed by management as customer assistance for the networking section of the store would know what I'm talking about.
What you say is like expecting an employee at Home Depot to respond worse to asking where the 'schedule 40' is rather than the 'plastic water pipe'.
You see, Fry's goes one step further than just having a horde of ill-trained customer service people roaming the store. They assign a person to each section, and go as far as to post a picture of them at the end of the aisles they're in charge of.
One day, upon needing some cable ends for some ethernet I was running, I decided to go to Fry's. They do have a good selection of networking hardware, so I figured I should have no problem getting the connectors. While I'm trying to find the RJ45s for rounded solid cable amongst the RJ11s, MMJs, and cable boots I get accosted by the salesdude, wanting to know if I need help. This is the same guy whose picture is pasted to the shelf. So I says to him, I says, "Could you help me find some RJ45s for plenum cable?" Reasonable request, right? I mean, there were routers to the left of me and telco racks to the right, and big spools of CAT5 behind me, so somewhere in that vicinity should be cable ends. His response: "I'm sorry, sir, I'm not sure what you are talking about."
I eventually found them on my own.
The moral of this story? Don't ask a customer if they need any help if you don't even know what products you sell!
... welcome our new cybernetic education overlords.
As so many have mentioned, this should be easy to crack. Do the same thing as the spammers do to get around filters: get a copy of this program, get a bunch of random text from the web, get a Markov chainer to generate random text from the input of all the essays, feed the output to the test program. You can batch the whole thing such that after N iterations you replace the raw input text with essays that did well through the screening program. Keep repeating this outer loop until a good looking paper comes out. Voila!
Right on, brother! South American light roast, freshly ground medium-coarse, in a decent coffee maker.
This is Slashdot. We call that a quad damage.
As so many other posters point out, the inverse square law applied to E/M fields means that that 1.5W diminishes very quickly as you move away from that antenna. Since the inverse square law applied in this case assumes a perfect dipole antenna, and the antennas in cellphones are less-than-perfect, the odds that your spark-generating conductor is in a peak radiation lobe are pretty low. Even then, what conductor is going to be close enough to both that antenna and the high vapor concentration areas to ignite that fire? Not to mention the topologies of the conductor that would cause the majority of that induced energy to form a spark hot enough to ignite the gas.
I suggest you brush up on your basic physics before talking smack to others.
(you've been punk'd by someone who failed e-mag in college...)
"I can no longer sit back and allow... open source infiltration... open source indoctrination... open source subversion... and the international open source conspiracy... to sap and impurify... all of our precious intellectual property." --obGeneral_Ripper
No, all we need is a giant foil pan full of popcorn.