See this or this. RMS and many others are all over it.
From my alma mater:
The Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, the one faculty which should know better is the only faculty at the school where I've seen course notes in Word and PowerPoint. Everyone else does HTML and PDF. Assignments have to be submitted with a Windows binary called "submit.exe". And, most ironically, for a Java programming class, at that. What fscking idiots.
I have an electric toothbrush that charges wirelessly, I assume by using coils. Try dismantling one of those?
I'd imagine so. This technique is also used to recharge the batteries in some pacemakers. It's just a non-conventional transformer.
But the problem he has is the distance. The charger for the pacemaker, toothbrush, electric shaver, etc. can be brought very close to the device being recharged: he wishes to charge something at a distance. The holder will also be aligning the coils very closely.
Here's the problem: magnetism follows the law of inverse squares. You double the distance, you get 1/4 the power. Roughly:
B = (a*Bo) / (d^2)
where a is alpha, a constant of proportionality;
d is distance;
B is the strength of the magnetic field at the receiver;
Bo is B naught, the strength of the magnetic field at the transmitter
Noting that the distance is a square term in the denominator, ain't much gonna happen.
Now, the magnetic field generated by the transmitter can be roughly approximated by:
B = muo*i*n
where B is the resultant magnetic field;
muo is mu naught, the permeability constant, approximately 1.26x10^-6 H/m;
i is the current in amperes through the coil;
n is the number of turns of wire in the coil
On the receiver side:
E = N * (dPhi/dt)
where E is the output electromotive force in volts;
N is the number of turns in the coil;
dPhi/dt is the rate of change of the magnetic field experienced by the coil, with respect to time.
Note that the magnetic field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, as given in the very first expression. Note also that this assumes the coils are in perfect alignment so that 100% of the magnetic field (at whatever strength) is coupled into the secondary coil. In his application, good alignment is going to be virtually impossible. This coil-coil coupling will not work for his use.
Now, alternatives. Build a transmitter and transmit as RF (electromagnetic waves) rather than magnetic fields - not practical, since this would require a fairly large transmitter and would be extremely inefficient. The RF energy will not all be coupled to the toy, and the FCC is likely to get angry about your inefficiencies. Note that this is how Tesla was transmitting power wirelessly - I don't think the FCC even existed back then!
Microwave oven magnetrons? Same thing as above, it's just a transmitter, but >500W of microwave energy is not suitable for any toy.
Solar coupling? Hugely inefficient. Shining a bright light onto a solar cell will waste massive amounts of energy, but so far I think it's the most practical solution.
You'll need to get the magnetron out of a microwave (higher wattage is better, but danger increases with power) and build a wave guide horn for it, then simply point it at what you want to power, of course you might want to do something like build a faraday cage around the whole damn unit...
You're insane. Microwave oven innards are extremely dangerous. Best case scenario is cataracts; worst case scenario is cooked liver or electrocution.
Besides, unless you got the impedance of the waveguide just right, you'd blow the magnetron in a matter of seconds.
Throw away computers - bring back times-tables and logs - make people *think* again. Nick
On one hand, I agree with that, but there's a whole question of "marketing" math to kids.
Computers break the monotony of math classes, and that's essential as kids become more and more accustomed to high-stimulus activities like TV and video games.
The problem with math is that, before you get to anything interesting (like Calculus), you've already got to have a huge background knowledge. And, take it from me (6 university-level math courses later), the only way to do that is practice. Doing homework problems. Boring as sin, but essential - if you do all your homework, you should expect an A+ in the course.
So, what's needed is a way to make simple homework problems interesting, so that the student sticks with it.
That's a nearly impossible task.
I think math is one of those courses which requires a hugely good teacher or professor. A bad one will turn you right off the subject and make you dread doing the homework. A good teacher or professor will make the class interesting and be fun and friendly enough that you'll feel guilty if you don't do all your homework.
That was always the best motivator for me to get good math marks - liking the teacher enough that I wanted to do well for him.
Which is shit, because you're dependent on the quality of the teacher rather than internal motivation.
Pure water is actually not a good insulator. Water, when liquid, is always in a state of equlibrium: H2O h(+) + OH(-). As such, even pure water contains ions which can carry a charge.
I think you need to balance that equation!
Actually, it is. It's on the order of 18M ohms per centimeter. Whether or not that's good enough is still undecided, given a pin spacing of (estimated) 0.5mm and therefore an adjacent resistance of 900k - in CMOS, it would depend on whether or not the output stage is low enough in impedance.
Ok. You first. Just make sure you take pictures to show everyone. Then use the submerged machine to host the pictures, and post the link on/. Then we can _really_ see how well it cools.:-)
Heheh... First, to find a Linux distro that actually still installs on a 486!
(Actually, I'll probably use FreeBSD because it seems to be happier on old machines, but I'm not going to commit my collection of might-come-in-handy-someday 4 meg 30 pin SIMMs, so it'll be 4 banks @ 1 meg per bank = 4 megs of RAM. Now, is it possible to survive a Slashdotting with Apache on 4 megs of RAM? Maybe if my network connection is PPP/SLIP over a 110 baud serial line...)
how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas?
Potentially very useful depending on the properties of that gas.
Of course!
More importantly, though, if the "water" is boiling because of the heat of your motherboard, it's undergoing a phase change - while it does that, it will consume all available heat to continue the phase change rather than elevate the temperature.
A pot of boiling water will never get over 100C until after all the water has boiled off (or if you increase the pressure, ie. a pressure cooker or a steam engine - PV = nRT!). Likewise, this will never let the processor get above 50C until all the coolant has boiled off. But if you capture the vapor, condense it, and drip it back into the computer's enclosure, you've got a closed system which is good indefinitely. I would worry, however, that if this stuff doesn't "wet", it probably has a lot of surface tension - so the "water" to processor interface won't be as tight as it would be with water, and therefore there might be a little more localized heating effects, similar to water droplets flying across a hot skillet. On the other hand, I'm sure the liquid, being capable of convective flow and in direct contact with the processor, will probably couple heat at least as well as a conventional heat sink. We should also look up the specific heat of this stuff. (Too lazy, didn't check to see whether it was in any of the cited links.)
Personally, I doubt you'd actually maintain the entire vessel at the temperature of the hottest component (the processor) - convective flow within the enclosure will move the hot "water" to the outsides of the container, where the surface area (thousands of times greater than the surface area of the processor) will couple away the heat to the atmosphere.
But why can't you do this with regular water? Submerge the motherboard and cards only - not the drives or the power supply. The thermal transfer grease isn't water soluble, so I don't think you'll make it into a conductive ionic solution. Voltages from pin to pin are pretty low, and pure water is a good insulator - the only problem is getting pure enough water, and keeping it pure enough. Corrosion will also not be a problem, again if the water is pure, the motherboard is continually submerged (preferably with a small surface area to the air so that less oxygen dissolves in it), and connectors are tin/nickel/gold plated - as most of them are. Wash the motherboard/cards/cables in distilled water before putting them into the bath, to make sure that you don't take any ionic contaminants (salts, etc. in dust, fuzzies around old CMOS batteries, manufacturing chemical remnants, little bits of leakage from electrolytic capacitors) in with you.
Components? Modern components are usually sealed anyway - the last step of manufacturing is removing the soldering flux, and that's usually done in what is, essentially, a dishwasher. They're not actually rated for immersion, but most of them do take a good spraying. I'd take out PC-board mounted piezo speakers, but offhand, I think that's the only part that would really have a problem with it.
I think I'd try this with an old computer before doing it with my real one. I seem to have an old 486DX-33 with 30-pin SIMMs and 16-bit ISA slots only... it's been begging for a job. I'll check out retail distilled water on my megaohm meter first.
Why, oh why, THG, do you make me choose the server to download videos? It's annoying to have to click, wait, cancel, ad nauseum, until you find one that's fast. Implement load balancing. Really, it's not that hard.
And what's with the ZIP files? This is like an article on migrating to Linux being available only as a Word document - albeit less proprietary. How about making gzipped tarballs available too?
Or, even better, how about figuring out how to use audio and video codecs so that the files are already compressed?
What you don't realize is that flashy do nothing lights do something...get you sluty girls. Chris Rock said it best, "Guys don't get flashy cars because guys like flashy cars. They get flashy cars because girls like flashy cars."
By the time you need a car with silly little lights on it to get laid, you're too pathetic to be allowed to procreate.
I used to enjoy taking those guys out at traffic lights. They'd be sitting there at the traffic light, girlfriend in the passenger seat, and I'd pull up in a 1980 Chevette with a hood scoop on it. The hood scoop got them really riled up, they'd think I was a poseur (like they are) with a "tuned" Chevette that they could easily blow away. What they didn't know was that there was a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood and that the Chevette was pulling 12.8s on the 1/4 mile.
Heheheh...
Silly Blue LEDs on Rusted Out Honda Accords
on
The Blues for LEDs
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· Score: 4, Funny
If he doesn't like blue LEDs, then he didn't really need to buy a new monitor, handheld scanner, webcam, USB hub, Bluetooth access point, WiFi adapter, desktop volume control for his speakers, external hard drive, video editing peripheral, keyboard, home theatre, wireless music gateway, USB keychain drive, and portable MP3 player, all apparently in the "recent months".
Ignoring the quantity of his purchases, it *is* really annoying that so many different devices, presumably from different manufacturers, would all be so-festooned.
But what really irks me is the idiots who put blue lights all over their cars - usually silly little Honda cars with 3" diameter coffee can exhaust tips (despite the 1" diameter pipe coming from the puny little 1.6L engine).
Blue side markers, taillights, parking lights? Non-conformant with SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers, look closely at your taillight lenses) standardized coloring and therefore dangerous. Illegal. Police should be cracking down on these the way they used to crack down on 50's hot-rodders who were putting the blue dots into their red taillights.
LEDs (especially blue) on calipers, brake rotors, rims, windshield washer nozzles - what are you, stupid? It might have looked a little neat the first time someone did it, but now it's every home-boy who doesn't know how to put on a baseball cap who is doing it. Why would you spend your money being a brainless clone, when instead you could save it to put a real motor into your Civic? (Now, if you've got a Civic with a 4-bolt mains Chevy 350 under the hood, *then* I'll be impressed - takes a little more skill to do that than to put silly lights on the car.)
I dunno. Ask California. California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico really aren't fit for human consumption, nevertheless, the gov't dammed up most of the rivers out west to make it hospitible.
I read somewhere that 80% of the water use in California was for agricultural irrigation - so it seems to me that if environmentalists wish to preach about conservation, they've got bigger priorities than the average consumer.
Quoted from article: They argue that many water shortages could simply be solved by better conservation of existing supplies.
I agree. Couple of things - in coastal areas, do you really need to shower in fresh water? With most new construction around here using plastic hoses instead of copper piping, the biggest residential cost would be an incremental one to install a second (stainless steel) hot water heater. Besides, salt water showers and baths are really nice - or maybe salt water is just a novelty to me because I live inland. Installing the head-end pumping stations, water mains, etc would be a horrendous task, but many cities are already faced with the task of digging up their streets and replacing century-old water mains.
I see the primary uses of this water being the shower/tub and refilling the toilet.
Of course, if you're handy and want to save a few bucks, *anyone* can install a gray-water system like mine. Reusing the washing machine's water saves me $200/year and gives satisfying soapsuds when I'm doing Number One.
I can put a laminate on anything for less than $30 and the case you give as an "example" is ugly as all get out and NOTHING I would EVER want in my life. What the heck is that for style or craftsmanship???! Give me a break. If you think THAT piece of $10 junk laminate plastered on a metal case is worth the ridiculous price tag, you need to get a real world clue.
The craftsmanship of their webpage is also really horrible... come on, this is a high-end product, the sort of thing being sold to lawyers and CEOs. Funny thing is that most of them are capable of writing professionally. For the same reason that your resume and cover letter have to be perfect, so does your sales pitch!
This guy is almost as illiterate as a spammer.
If the guy is dyslexic or something, he should have someone else proofread his site (and all his other business correspondence), because:
Please go the NEWS, page for all the updates.
Why a comma?
A NEW LINE OF MADRONE BURL WOOD LIAN-LI PC6070, Silent Aluminum Mid Tower Case.
I think sentences are supposed to have verbs and their requisite support words. My personal choice here would be "based on the", stuck between WOOD and LIAN-LI.
SHOW IN MADRONE BURL WOOD, THIS IS ON A ANTEC (P160) PLATFORM.
Antec begins with the letter A. Therefore, AN Antec. It gets tricky with acronyms, but to my knowledge Antec isn't an acronym, so this is simply wrong.
Click on a CASE to see more photo's and information.
apostrophe S - POSSESSIVE
S - PLURAL
NEW COMPUTER CASE COVERS All or custom build computer case have a 2-3 week time frame.
What? I think the "or" is supposed to be an "our". But it still doesn't make sense, it's a run-on sentence.
IF YOU HAVE SEEN YOUR FILL OF, OFF-WHITE COMPUTER ITEMS.
Why would you put a comma in this sentence?
YOUR READY FOR A THE NEXT STEP IN ERGONOMIC COMPUTER FURNITURE.
Your = possessive.
You're = contraction of "you are".
EXOTIC WOOD CRAFTS HAS A KEEPER FOR YOU.
A keeper? The market is high-end, you can't use colloquialisms!
NOW YOU CAN HAVE THE SAME BURL WOOD ON YOUR COMPUTER CASE AND LCD MONITOR.THE COMPUTER CASE
Computer Cases_used to be the last thing on everyone's shopping list, now something has changed._Case_modding has brought a resurgence in design and_case style. Now, it is possible to buy pre-modded cases_ and even all-aluminum casesfilled with blinking lights. In this situation, the_case_is designed to look professional, and be fully functional.
Why is this festooned with underscores? And there's a missing space.
But more horribly, he's changing the subject from the aluminum cases full of blinking lights to his own cases - without warning you! A casual reader will read that "all aluminum cases filled with blinking lights are designed to look professional"!
You still have the same old looking computer case. Here is your opportunity for change. Look at the Productspage to find what we have been looking for, a computer that maintains its beauty and represents personality and professionalism.
Professionalism from someone who uses the possessive to indicate pluralism? I think not.
Most computers go by the way side in 3to 5years.
How 'bout you add some spaces here, champ? I think wayside is actually one word, BTW.
Fortunately, these can be upgraded to use new computer parts in the ATX format. Exotic Wood Crafts_has a keeper for you!
Oh! That's what you mean by "keeper". Now I understand! Wait until after the description of why it's a keeper before you call it that - if you absolutely *must* call it that; otherwise your readers are left dangling.
TOP 5 REASONS TO UPDATE YOUR COMPUTER WITH A EXOTIC WOOD CRAFTS COMPUTER CASE.
(1) EVERY COMPUTER CASE HAS IT OWN PERSONALLY.
Has IT OWN PERSONALLY? I think you mean "its own personality".
Note that its/it's is the exception to the apostrophe rule.
Or you could replace the fan in that power supply to prevent its death... or replace the power supply entirely, or even the hard drive (if you're really cheap, ebay should provide plenty of old parts). Why replace the entire box for the failure of a single part?
Yup... But the supply of so many other derelict older machines is such that you wouldn't go to that trouble. I've got over a dozen Pentium I machines kicking around the house unused; if the power supply blows in one of them, I'll just grab useful things (memory, CD-ROM drives that actually read CD-RW discs, etc) and pitch the carcass. I think most people wouldn't even go to that trouble.
The longer we can make a product's life cycle last, the longer people hold onto it, the less of a throwaway item a computer becomes. I'd love to see computers become more of a "durable good."
I agree completely, but the trend (sad as it is) is in the opposite direction.
My washing machine is a 1954 Maytag - you can see a corner of it at my gray water toilet's page. It had been in storage for a little while, and during that time mice damaged the motor and a few other parts. I pulled the washer apart to clean out mouse feces and found that there was no appreciable wear to the gears in the transmission or any other part of it - and that's after 49 years of cleaning dirty underwear! So I spent about $250 on new gaskets, seals, bearings, hoses, transmission oil, etc. and rebuilt it. It's ready for another 50 years. Of course, for $250, I could have bought a new washing machine, but you can't convince me that a new washing machine would last 10 years let alone 50. Major appliances are now a disposable commodity.
Same thing with cars. My '76 Dodge Ram pickup truck is overbuilt - everything on it was designed to survive abuse and to last. It's also easy to fix - I pulled the engine out of an old Ram (not mine) in about 2 hours. In contrast, my sister has a new Silverado - I can flex the front fenders with moderate thumb pressure, and it would take hours to clear the hoses and wiring off that motor before yanking it! As a result, the Silverado's fenders will rust through faster when the paint gets scratched, dent easier, and since there's so much crap added to the truck (power windows, etc), it just becomes a nightmare to work on. When it fails, you junk it. Meantime, I'm rebuilding a Slant-6 (25MPG highway with my 4-speed overdrive manual transmission) to drop under the hood of my Ram - it may be a little heavier on gasoline and emissions than a modern truck, but if you do the math to calculate how much coal it takes for the steel mill to melt a shredded car, all of a sudden keeping that well-maintained old vehicle on the road is the best environmental course of action. (I'd daily-drive a car but I need a truck about once a week; it's cheaper to pay the gas to drive the truck all week than it is to insure and sticker a second vehicle - that's something environmentalists should address!)
Don't even get me started on Honda Civics; they're the automotive equivalent of a Bic lighter - absolutely perfectly reliable and perfectly disposable.
VCRs are the same. You can buy the $59 model, or you can buy the $200 model thinking that it will be better built and last longer. Nope... you're just paying for software which enables more features on the same flimsy mechanism.
I blame CAD, scientific calculators and finite element analysis for this. Used to be that you'd only be able to carry two or three significant figures when you were working with sliderules - so you'd round up forces and round down material strengths. The compound effect of this rounding was that things were a lot better built than they needed to be - hence, they survived real-world abuse better and lasted longer. The pair of jeans caught under the agitator didn't strip the gears out of the transmission, and sitting on the hood at the drive-in movie didn't dent it. Of course, CAD, FEA and scientific calculators allow yo
Also, I'll wager the uber-cheap router you just purchased doesn't have any IDS capability (like Snort), or a cacheing proxy, or eye-candy graphs, or remote management via SSH, or any of the other nifty features that smoothwall offers.
Yes, your hardware might not last... but the point is this: It still works. If you could keep it as a useful tool instead of turning it into a groundwater-polluting hazard, why wouldn't you?
I have nothing against SmoothWall - I think it's great; the features are wonderful, and it's good for geeks and small offices.
But say the average install of SmoothWall is on a Pentium 100 machine, and it lasts for 3 years before being replaced because of failed capacitors in the power supply or a dead CMOS battery or a blown hard drive. All you've done is divert the machine from the landfill for three years.
In those three years, it's been consuming electricity to keep that Pentium warm and keep the hard disk spinning. The processor alone consumes more energy than my entire D-Link router!
Now, that's not to say that keeping these old machines running isn't a laudable effort - it sure is. My way has been to set them up as small file servers for LANs - make the operating system boot from CD (so it's not writable or dependent on reinstalling the operating system when that old Connor hard drive finally dies), throw in some more RAM and a big hard drive. I've set up a few of these things on small office networks, and even with 50-60 users, a Pentium 100 offers a cheap and reliable little file server. On my biggest install (72 workstations), the only time there's a real slowdown is at 9:AM when everyone boots their workstations and retrieves the file they were working on at quitting time the day before... or when someone has to do a backup during office hours.
But this task will provide gainful employment for one or two of the old Pentium 100s liberated from an office-wide upgrade; that still leaves 59 of them heading for the landfill. It's the same thing with SmoothWall. The problem is not solved.
Computers as Electric Heaters
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Control-Alt-Recycle
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· Score: 3, Interesting
True for your house, yes. But not necessarily for the total amount of energy. If you heat your house with oil, almost all chemical energy in the oil is used to heat the house.
Yeah... if you have an efficient furnace.
I'm currently in Ottawa, Canada - either the coldest or second coldest world capital. I'm renting, 'cause there ain't no way in hell that I plan on living here permanently. And the house I'm renting has a 35-year-old oil furnace.
Estimating its efficiency at 70%, I did some calculations based on my best oil quote. I looked up the BTUs of heat per gallon of heating oil, and compared it to the BTUs of heat per kWh of electricity. Since electricity here was fixed at 4.3 cents/kWh (up to 4.7 cents/kWh as of April 1), it was cheaper to heat by electricity. The situation would have been different if I were using a newer oil or gas furnace.
Remember, all electricity consumed inside the house, in one way or another, heats the house - the exceptions being the small amounts of light, sound and RF energy which escape. My roommates loved it - "Go ahead, leave the lights on, but close the blinds first!"
Therefore, I heated my house with electricity. I'd been planning on running a stack of Pentium-I class machines doing SETI@Home work units - at least the energy gets used for something productive on its way to becoming heat - but didn't have time to build the rack to hold all these machines, nor to duct them into the cold air return on the furnace. So instead I picked up a few $20 ceramic heaters and threw them into a big steel box ducted to the furnace and controlled by the thermostat. My electric bill from January to March was $425 - and that includes heating, lighting, the dryer, etc. - very impressively low!
But if you use electricity (be it through the computer or whatever), it takes much more energy to produce the same amount of (electric) energy, if it's produced in a fossile fuel power plant. A coal plant that only produces electricity has, what, 50% efficiency maximum(?). The rest of the energy is wasted in the process. If the electricity is produced in, say, a hydro plant, that's another story
Very true. Most people who think electric cars are a good idea, simply don't understand anything about electrical generation and distribution systems (like, how many coal and nuclear plants are gonna have to be built when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters start plugging in their electric cars every night?). It was even rampant in my electrical engineering courses in university!
I have myldly ADHD, but I never watched TV when I was young (I still het my father for that:P ). So How annoying must those kids be that watched TV all their live:)
I have ADD (not ADHD, not hyperactive, just short attention span) and there's a lot of anectodal evidence that it may be genetic - ie. a child is diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, one of the parents reads the screening test and recognizes it in him/her self. Certainly ADD/ADHD might provide an evolutionary advantage which is mostly stifled in today's modern world - consider creativity.
People with ADD/ADHD-type behaviors tend to "collect" each other, snowballing, because we naturally keep each other from being bored. And most of the people I know with ADD/ADHD behaviors like to watch a lot of television for its constant effortless stimulation.
So let's go on the assumption, for the moment, that ADD/ADHD is genetic in nature: one or both of the parents may have it. And the other assumption that people with ADD/ADHD like to watch television. It's not a big leap for us to guess, then, that maybe these parents knew that they liked TV and so let the kids watch a lot of TV.
If this is the case, then lots of TV in childhood is more likely symptomatic of the parents' ADD/ADHD behaviors, and symptomatic of the child's greater chances of developing these behaviors.
This also explains people like me. I wasn't allowed to watch much TV at all as a child; neither one of my parents were big fans of TV, finding other forms of stimulation. But both of my parents show most of the symptoms of ADD.
with the following MAC address: 00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2 Also a mobile phone was stolen, with IMEI number 351083531088913 Next story will be "I tried ringing the stolen phone, did anyone hear a phone ringing?"
What I'm really worried about is the poor thief. After all, he's just unleashed an unemployed geek army, ready to do battle.
"Cornelius! Look! I saw that MAC address! Hit the gas! Rev up that little Honda Civic! Think of all the anime posters we can buy when we get the reward!"
"Eugene! I was playing with my scanner and I found that IMEI, so I triangulated its location! We can buy t-shirts on Thinkgeek with the reward money! Go Away Or I Will Replace You With A Very Small Shell Script!" [snorting laughter]
And pretty soon, there are 2,500 unemployed virgins with masking tape holding together their glasses converging on the thief's doorstep.
Dude, wherever you are, turn yourself in before it's too late.
Dome Productions, I'm guessing. I used to provide tech support for the JumboTron production crew at the SkyDome.
Heheh... Dome Productions and Adcom, then a lot of freelance work for the networks. (Pay was better, hours were less hellish, though I lost out on my ability to park my truck on the field when the green was out and the 'Dome was empty... and my ability to have midnight picnics on the pitcher's mound.)
Actually, the problem is that the frame rate is not an exact integer multiple of the 60Hz AC power frequency, which is usually the largest source of electrical noise. It's off by a fraction of a percent; that's why you often see a distortion slowly creeping up the screen about once per minute as the frame rate beats against the power line sine wave. If the frame rate were exactly locked to the power line frequency, the distortion wouldn't move, so you wouldn't notice it.
In the 1950s, AC power was not universal, especially in rural areas (note the sustained popularity of the "All American Five" AC/DC table radio at that time). Lots of places had DC, and lots of cities had 25Hz power well into the late 1950s. Nor was it necessarily going to be in sync from one town to the next, so you couldn't guarantee that the 60Hz powerline hum could be synchronized with the TV station's 60Hz vertical signal. In other words, you couldn't be guaranteed that the hum was going to happen in the vertical blanking interval (that black bar you see rolling when the vertical hold control is set wrong).
I suspect that the vertical was chosen to be at 60Hz more because the large current draw of the vertical output tube driving the deflection yoke would then be more likely to occur during the charge cycle of the set's filter capacitors, allowing smaller capacitors to be used (cheaper). This of course being a time when electrolytic filter capacitors (in fact, all small parts) were still hand made.
Even more importantly, you should remember that most early TV sets (until the advent of selenium rectifiers in about 1955) had full-wave rectifiers, generally using a 5U4 or similar tube. A full-wave rectifier folds the negative half of the sinewave up to the positive side, which effectively doubles the frequency to 120Hz.
Either way, if the set is operating correctly, regardless of color standard, you will not see any powerline artifacts or ripple. It's when the horizontal system starts to come out of resonance that the biggest current draw happens in the set. Your horizontal output tube (transistor) consumes the most power of any part of the set; if a typical 1950s DuMont or Admiral has a cathode current of 120mA (at ~300V) and you misadjust the horizontal hold, that current will spike to over double that. That will load down the set's power supply, discharge the filter capacitors more, and you might start to hear 120Hz (full wave rectifier at 60Hz) hum in the set's speaker.
IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier.
Yup. The original NTSC standard was 30FPS; when the 3.58MHz sinewave which carries color was added, the bandwidth of the signal had to be increased. (The original was 3.5MHz bandwidth for the image; reducing the frame rate slightly was sufficient to keep the bandwidth inside the original spectrum and didn't screw up many of the existing TV sets.)
Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.
Note that the NTSC color TV standard was adopted in 1953, though not implemented until 50 years ago today. Every TV set built since then has known about the new frame rate the sets would have to handle. I actively collect and restore early TV sets, and I only have a few which predate this - they're rate.
Again, you don't get powerline beat in the picture unless something is wrong with the set's filter capacitors.
If you're getting a beat in the picture which, on a blank raster, moves in time with the vertical hold control, then you've got a problem where the vertical is either consuming too much current, or a
If I had to bet on it, I would wager that 90% of the devoted Microsoft bashers that infest Slashdot are either devout liberals or aspiring socialists.
Not this particular M$ basher.
Actually, I'm mostly a Libertarian. I am a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. I wish to see as little government meddling in free enterprise as possible, because it almost always backfires. As an example, I'm quite convinced that the government Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations which killed the full-size station wagon are, in fact, the very reason why we now have full-size station wagons built on even thirstier (CAFE-exempt) 4x4 pickup truck chassis choking our streets.
But I make an exception for Microsoft. Without government intervention, there'd be nothing to stop monopolistic behaviors. Linux is an aberration unique to computers: if one car company had more than 97% of the market and was abusing its monopoly, there wouldn't be open-source cars because the product is not intangible and easily duplicated. Normally, the free market will work things out on its own. But Microsoft lucked its way into a position of power initially, and has ruthlessly used that power to squash anything which could become a threat.
Micrsoft, it seems, has become a symbol for "corporate greed", "bullying", etc, etc and bashing it serves as a substitute for bashing capitalism - the real target of their enmity.
Microsoft is a symbol for corporate greed and bullying. If they're not, I can't imagine what they'd have to do to get that name. Maybe Bill and Paul would be abducting competitors' children in a non-descript white van.
As for capitalism, yeah, it sucks. Some people starve while others get rich. But it's also a lot better than anything else anyone has come up with. I do hate capitalism. But I hate socialism and communism even more.
Indeed, bashing capitalism is considerably less "fashionable" than bashing MS (or Wal-Mart, or any other large and successful company), so why not use MS as a proxy?
I love Wal*Mart. Usually, after I've been shopping there, I compare prices with their competition (key point, that) and determine that I've saved a couple of bucks with each shopping trip. Case in point: was going to buy a small level, checked out Home Depot. Found a level that I liked for $19.95, which seemed a little steep. Went to Wal*Mart, found exactly the same make and model of level for $4.99. I do not begrudge Wal*Mart their success, because unlike Microsoft, it seems they've actually done something to achieve it. The very first thing Wal*Mart has done is somehow create a discount department store that I'm not embarrassed to go into. The next thing is almost always having what you want in stock, and usually at the same price or a little better than the competition.
So, all you MS bashers out there, why not just admit that you are, at the very least, liberal Democrats and voting for Bush would be as inimical to your creed as using Windows?
A vote for Bush is evil, pure and simple.
He appealed to me because he was allegedly a fiscal conservative. But even through the bad times of the past few years, he's proven that he's not.
His social platform was repellent, even from day one. After all, if I wanted to live in a religious state, I'd move to Iran.
Al Gore was no better. His liberal fiscal policies would have punished me for my financial success rather than enticing me to expand my business and hire more employees. His pro-union stance drives up the cost of labor artificially to a point where a person who makes brake pistons all day gets $25/hr while a McDonalds employee whose job requires far more intelligence and skill gets minimum wage. But, on the other hand, at least Gore was intelligent and secure enough with his masculinity to know that gay people aren't going to hurt him.
Personally, I'm strictly stereo (I go by the Jolida adage, "Why use 6 speakers when you can't get 2 right?").
Completely agree. My computer speakers (for MP3s, DVDs, and normal computer noises) are a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x connected to a Sound A-5000 amplifier and a hacked SoundBlaster 16 ISA (replaced the noisy LM741 buffer amps with low-noise replacements a long time ago). A good Ogg Vorbis or high bitrate MP3 is breathtakingly clean.
My other system is a pair of Celestion Ditton 44 speakers powered by a 200W (real watts) per channel amplifier that I designed and built. Output stages are paralleled IRF340 MOSFETs driven directly off the plate circuits of the vacuum-tube based pre/driver stages - 12AX7, 12AT7. Both channels are matched by nulling.
Besides, there are a lot of bassheads who can't distinguish between realistic sound stage and a bunch of poorly positioned speakers and a bone-shaking thumpbox. If what you look for in sound is measured in Watts...
Hey, can someone come up with a mathematic definition for PMPO for me, please? Until then, I have a hard time believing the Made-in-Taiwan computer speakers powered off the 9V 300mA AC adapter are capable of anything approaching the 100W PMPO they claim. In all my electrical engineering classes, I don't think we covered PMPO even once... [grin]
I find a lot of musicians will go overboard with the whacky panning tricks but in 10 years time this will seem really dated.
Yeah... Heh... Hendrix did a lot of panning back and forth in one of his songs, apparently enjoying the novelty of stereo. (Note that I differentiate this from the *many* effects using in Third Stone From The Sun, Are You Experienced, EXP, and many others). This song even has a crackle during the pan; it seems like the potentiometer in the mixer was dirty.
And I can't remember the damned name of the song or even find it right now... Earlier stuff, before Band of Gypsies. I think it's off Smash Hits.
Slashdot Mirror
See this or this. RMS and many others are all over it.
From my alma mater:
The Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, the one faculty which should know better is the only faculty at the school where I've seen course notes in Word and PowerPoint. Everyone else does HTML and PDF. Assignments have to be submitted with a Windows binary called "submit.exe". And, most ironically, for a Java programming class, at that. What fscking idiots.
Makes me so proud.
I have an electric toothbrush that charges wirelessly, I assume by using coils. Try dismantling one of those?
I'd imagine so. This technique is also used to recharge the batteries in some pacemakers. It's just a non-conventional transformer.
But the problem he has is the distance. The charger for the pacemaker, toothbrush, electric shaver, etc. can be brought very close to the device being recharged: he wishes to charge something at a distance. The holder will also be aligning the coils very closely.
Here's the problem: magnetism follows the law of inverse squares. You double the distance, you get 1/4 the power. Roughly:
B = (a*Bo) / (d^2)
where a is alpha, a constant of proportionality;
d is distance;
B is the strength of the magnetic field at the receiver;
Bo is B naught, the strength of the magnetic field at the transmitter
Noting that the distance is a square term in the denominator, ain't much gonna happen.
Now, the magnetic field generated by the transmitter can be roughly approximated by:
B = muo*i*n
where B is the resultant magnetic field;
muo is mu naught, the permeability constant, approximately 1.26x10^-6 H/m;
i is the current in amperes through the coil;
n is the number of turns of wire in the coil
On the receiver side:
E = N * (dPhi/dt)
where E is the output electromotive force in volts;
N is the number of turns in the coil;
dPhi/dt is the rate of change of the magnetic field experienced by the coil, with respect to time.
Note that the magnetic field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, as given in the very first expression. Note also that this assumes the coils are in perfect alignment so that 100% of the magnetic field (at whatever strength) is coupled into the secondary coil. In his application, good alignment is going to be virtually impossible. This coil-coil coupling will not work for his use.
Now, alternatives. Build a transmitter and transmit as RF (electromagnetic waves) rather than magnetic fields - not practical, since this would require a fairly large transmitter and would be extremely inefficient. The RF energy will not all be coupled to the toy, and the FCC is likely to get angry about your inefficiencies. Note that this is how Tesla was transmitting power wirelessly - I don't think the FCC even existed back then!
Microwave oven magnetrons? Same thing as above, it's just a transmitter, but >500W of microwave energy is not suitable for any toy.
Solar coupling? Hugely inefficient. Shining a bright light onto a solar cell will waste massive amounts of energy, but so far I think it's the most practical solution.
You'll need to get the magnetron out of a microwave (higher wattage is better, but danger increases with power) and build a wave guide horn for it, then simply point it at what you want to power, of course you might want to do something like build a faraday cage around the whole damn unit...
You're insane. Microwave oven innards are extremely dangerous. Best case scenario is cataracts; worst case scenario is cooked liver or electrocution.
Besides, unless you got the impedance of the waveguide just right, you'd blow the magnetron in a matter of seconds.
Throw away computers - bring back times-tables and logs - make people *think* again. Nick
On one hand, I agree with that, but there's a whole question of "marketing" math to kids.
Computers break the monotony of math classes, and that's essential as kids become more and more accustomed to high-stimulus activities like TV and video games.
The problem with math is that, before you get to anything interesting (like Calculus), you've already got to have a huge background knowledge. And, take it from me (6 university-level math courses later), the only way to do that is practice. Doing homework problems. Boring as sin, but essential - if you do all your homework, you should expect an A+ in the course.
So, what's needed is a way to make simple homework problems interesting, so that the student sticks with it.
That's a nearly impossible task.
I think math is one of those courses which requires a hugely good teacher or professor. A bad one will turn you right off the subject and make you dread doing the homework. A good teacher or professor will make the class interesting and be fun and friendly enough that you'll feel guilty if you don't do all your homework.
That was always the best motivator for me to get good math marks - liking the teacher enough that I wanted to do well for him.
Which is shit, because you're dependent on the quality of the teacher rather than internal motivation.
Pure water is actually not a good insulator. Water, when liquid, is always in a state of equlibrium: H2O h(+) + OH(-). As such, even pure water contains ions which can carry a charge.
I think you need to balance that equation!
Actually, it is. It's on the order of 18M ohms per centimeter. Whether or not that's good enough is still undecided, given a pin spacing of (estimated) 0.5mm and therefore an adjacent resistance of 900k - in CMOS, it would depend on whether or not the output stage is low enough in impedance.
Ok. You first. Just make sure you take pictures to show everyone. Then use the submerged machine to host the pictures, and post the link on
Heheh... First, to find a Linux distro that actually still installs on a 486!
(Actually, I'll probably use FreeBSD because it seems to be happier on old machines, but I'm not going to commit my collection of might-come-in-handy-someday 4 meg 30 pin SIMMs, so it'll be 4 banks @ 1 meg per bank = 4 megs of RAM. Now, is it possible to survive a Slashdotting with Apache on 4 megs of RAM? Maybe if my network connection is PPP/SLIP over a 110 baud serial line...)
how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas? Potentially very useful depending on the properties of that gas.
Of course!
More importantly, though, if the "water" is boiling because of the heat of your motherboard, it's undergoing a phase change - while it does that, it will consume all available heat to continue the phase change rather than elevate the temperature.
A pot of boiling water will never get over 100C until after all the water has boiled off (or if you increase the pressure, ie. a pressure cooker or a steam engine - PV = nRT!). Likewise, this will never let the processor get above 50C until all the coolant has boiled off. But if you capture the vapor, condense it, and drip it back into the computer's enclosure, you've got a closed system which is good indefinitely. I would worry, however, that if this stuff doesn't "wet", it probably has a lot of surface tension - so the "water" to processor interface won't be as tight as it would be with water, and therefore there might be a little more localized heating effects, similar to water droplets flying across a hot skillet. On the other hand, I'm sure the liquid, being capable of convective flow and in direct contact with the processor, will probably couple heat at least as well as a conventional heat sink. We should also look up the specific heat of this stuff. (Too lazy, didn't check to see whether it was in any of the cited links.)
Personally, I doubt you'd actually maintain the entire vessel at the temperature of the hottest component (the processor) - convective flow within the enclosure will move the hot "water" to the outsides of the container, where the surface area (thousands of times greater than the surface area of the processor) will couple away the heat to the atmosphere.
But why can't you do this with regular water? Submerge the motherboard and cards only - not the drives or the power supply. The thermal transfer grease isn't water soluble, so I don't think you'll make it into a conductive ionic solution. Voltages from pin to pin are pretty low, and pure water is a good insulator - the only problem is getting pure enough water, and keeping it pure enough. Corrosion will also not be a problem, again if the water is pure, the motherboard is continually submerged (preferably with a small surface area to the air so that less oxygen dissolves in it), and connectors are tin/nickel/gold plated - as most of them are. Wash the motherboard/cards/cables in distilled water before putting them into the bath, to make sure that you don't take any ionic contaminants (salts, etc. in dust, fuzzies around old CMOS batteries, manufacturing chemical remnants, little bits of leakage from electrolytic capacitors) in with you.
Components? Modern components are usually sealed anyway - the last step of manufacturing is removing the soldering flux, and that's usually done in what is, essentially, a dishwasher. They're not actually rated for immersion, but most of them do take a good spraying. I'd take out PC-board mounted piezo speakers, but offhand, I think that's the only part that would really have a problem with it.
I think I'd try this with an old computer before doing it with my real one. I seem to have an old 486DX-33 with 30-pin SIMMs and 16-bit ISA slots only... it's been begging for a job. I'll check out retail distilled water on my megaohm meter first.
Why, oh why, THG, do you make me choose the server to download videos? It's annoying to have to click, wait, cancel, ad nauseum, until you find one that's fast. Implement load balancing. Really, it's not that hard.
And what's with the ZIP files? This is like an article on migrating to Linux being available only as a Word document - albeit less proprietary. How about making gzipped tarballs available too?
Or, even better, how about figuring out how to use audio and video codecs so that the files are already compressed?
What you don't realize is that flashy do nothing lights do something...get you sluty girls.
Chris Rock said it best, "Guys don't get flashy cars because guys like flashy cars. They get flashy cars because girls like flashy cars."
By the time you need a car with silly little lights on it to get laid, you're too pathetic to be allowed to procreate.
I used to enjoy taking those guys out at traffic lights. They'd be sitting there at the traffic light, girlfriend in the passenger seat, and I'd pull up in a 1980 Chevette with a hood scoop on it. The hood scoop got them really riled up, they'd think I was a poseur (like they are) with a "tuned" Chevette that they could easily blow away. What they didn't know was that there was a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood and that the Chevette was pulling 12.8s on the 1/4 mile.
Heheheh...
If he doesn't like blue LEDs, then he didn't really need to buy a new monitor, handheld scanner, webcam, USB hub, Bluetooth access point, WiFi adapter, desktop volume control for his speakers, external hard drive, video editing peripheral, keyboard, home theatre, wireless music gateway, USB keychain drive, and portable MP3 player, all apparently in the "recent months".
Ignoring the quantity of his purchases, it *is* really annoying that so many different devices, presumably from different manufacturers, would all be so-festooned.
But what really irks me is the idiots who put blue lights all over their cars - usually silly little Honda cars with 3" diameter coffee can exhaust tips (despite the 1" diameter pipe coming from the puny little 1.6L engine).
Blue side markers, taillights, parking lights? Non-conformant with SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers, look closely at your taillight lenses) standardized coloring and therefore dangerous. Illegal. Police should be cracking down on these the way they used to crack down on 50's hot-rodders who were putting the blue dots into their red taillights.
LEDs (especially blue) on calipers, brake rotors, rims, windshield washer nozzles - what are you, stupid? It might have looked a little neat the first time someone did it, but now it's every home-boy who doesn't know how to put on a baseball cap who is doing it. Why would you spend your money being a brainless clone, when instead you could save it to put a real motor into your Civic? (Now, if you've got a Civic with a 4-bolt mains Chevy 350 under the hood, *then* I'll be impressed - takes a little more skill to do that than to put silly lights on the car.)
I dunno. Ask California. California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico really aren't fit for human consumption, nevertheless, the gov't dammed up most of the rivers out west to make it hospitible.
I read somewhere that 80% of the water use in California was for agricultural irrigation - so it seems to me that if environmentalists wish to preach about conservation, they've got bigger priorities than the average consumer.
Quoted from article: They argue that many water shortages could simply be solved by better conservation of existing supplies.
I agree. Couple of things - in coastal areas, do you really need to shower in fresh water? With most new construction around here using plastic hoses instead of copper piping, the biggest residential cost would be an incremental one to install a second (stainless steel) hot water heater. Besides, salt water showers and baths are really nice - or maybe salt water is just a novelty to me because I live inland. Installing the head-end pumping stations, water mains, etc would be a horrendous task, but many cities are already faced with the task of digging up their streets and replacing century-old water mains.
I see the primary uses of this water being the shower/tub and refilling the toilet.
Of course, if you're handy and want to save a few bucks, *anyone* can install a gray-water system like mine. Reusing the washing machine's water saves me $200/year and gives satisfying soapsuds when I'm doing Number One.
I can put a laminate on anything for less than $30 and the case you give as an "example" is ugly as all get out and NOTHING I would EVER want in my life. What the heck is that for style or craftsmanship???! Give me a break. If you think THAT piece of $10 junk laminate plastered on a metal case is worth the ridiculous price tag, you need to get a real world clue.
The craftsmanship of their webpage is also really horrible... come on, this is a high-end product, the sort of thing being sold to lawyers and CEOs. Funny thing is that most of them are capable of writing professionally. For the same reason that your resume and cover letter have to be perfect, so does your sales pitch!
This guy is almost as illiterate as a spammer.
If the guy is dyslexic or something, he should have someone else proofread his site (and all his other business correspondence), because:
Please go the NEWS, page for all the updates.
Why a comma?
A NEW LINE OF MADRONE BURL WOOD LIAN-LI PC6070, Silent Aluminum Mid Tower Case.
I think sentences are supposed to have verbs and their requisite support words. My personal choice here would be "based on the", stuck between WOOD and LIAN-LI.
SHOW IN MADRONE BURL WOOD, THIS IS ON A ANTEC (P160) PLATFORM.
Antec begins with the letter A. Therefore, AN Antec. It gets tricky with acronyms, but to my knowledge Antec isn't an acronym, so this is simply wrong.
Click on a CASE to see more photo's and information.
apostrophe S - POSSESSIVE
S - PLURAL
NEW COMPUTER CASE COVERS All or custom build computer case have a 2-3 week time frame.
What? I think the "or" is supposed to be an "our". But it still doesn't make sense, it's a run-on sentence.
IF YOU HAVE SEEN YOUR FILL OF, OFF-WHITE COMPUTER ITEMS.
Why would you put a comma in this sentence?
YOUR READY FOR A THE NEXT STEP IN ERGONOMIC COMPUTER FURNITURE.
Your = possessive.
You're = contraction of "you are".
EXOTIC WOOD CRAFTS HAS A KEEPER FOR YOU.
A keeper? The market is high-end, you can't use colloquialisms!
NOW YOU CAN HAVE THE SAME BURL WOOD ON YOUR COMPUTER CASE AND LCD MONITOR. THE COMPUTER CASE Computer Cases_used to be the last thing on everyone's shopping list, now something has changed._Case_modding has brought a resurgence in design and_case style. Now, it is possible to buy pre-modded cases_ and even all-aluminum casesfilled with blinking lights. In this situation, the_case_is designed to look professional, and be fully functional.
Why is this festooned with underscores? And there's a missing space.
But more horribly, he's changing the subject from the aluminum cases full of blinking lights to his own cases - without warning you! A casual reader will read that "all aluminum cases filled with blinking lights are designed to look professional"!
You still have the same old looking computer case. Here is your opportunity for change. Look at the Productspage to find what we have been looking for, a computer that maintains its beauty and represents personality and professionalism.
Professionalism from someone who uses the possessive to indicate pluralism? I think not.
Most computers go by the way side in 3to 5years.
How 'bout you add some spaces here, champ? I think wayside is actually one word, BTW.
Fortunately, these can be upgraded to use new computer parts in the ATX format. Exotic Wood Crafts_has a keeper for you!
Oh! That's what you mean by "keeper". Now I understand! Wait until after the description of why it's a keeper before you call it that - if you absolutely *must* call it that; otherwise your readers are left dangling.
TOP 5 REASONS TO UPDATE YOUR COMPUTER WITH A EXOTIC WOOD CRAFTS COMPUTER CASE. (1) EVERY COMPUTER CASE HAS IT OWN PERSONALLY.
Has IT OWN PERSONALLY? I think you mean "its own personality".
Note that its/it's is the exception to the apostrophe rule.
it's - contraction of "it is"
its
Or you could replace the fan in that power supply to prevent its death... or replace the power supply entirely, or even the hard drive (if you're really cheap, ebay should provide plenty of old parts). Why replace the entire box for the failure of a single part?
Yup... But the supply of so many other derelict older machines is such that you wouldn't go to that trouble. I've got over a dozen Pentium I machines kicking around the house unused; if the power supply blows in one of them, I'll just grab useful things (memory, CD-ROM drives that actually read CD-RW discs, etc) and pitch the carcass. I think most people wouldn't even go to that trouble.
The longer we can make a product's life cycle last, the longer people hold onto it, the less of a throwaway item a computer becomes. I'd love to see computers become more of a "durable good."
I agree completely, but the trend (sad as it is) is in the opposite direction.
My washing machine is a 1954 Maytag - you can see a corner of it at my gray water toilet's page. It had been in storage for a little while, and during that time mice damaged the motor and a few other parts. I pulled the washer apart to clean out mouse feces and found that there was no appreciable wear to the gears in the transmission or any other part of it - and that's after 49 years of cleaning dirty underwear! So I spent about $250 on new gaskets, seals, bearings, hoses, transmission oil, etc. and rebuilt it. It's ready for another 50 years. Of course, for $250, I could have bought a new washing machine, but you can't convince me that a new washing machine would last 10 years let alone 50. Major appliances are now a disposable commodity.
Same thing with cars. My '76 Dodge Ram pickup truck is overbuilt - everything on it was designed to survive abuse and to last. It's also easy to fix - I pulled the engine out of an old Ram (not mine) in about 2 hours. In contrast, my sister has a new Silverado - I can flex the front fenders with moderate thumb pressure, and it would take hours to clear the hoses and wiring off that motor before yanking it! As a result, the Silverado's fenders will rust through faster when the paint gets scratched, dent easier, and since there's so much crap added to the truck (power windows, etc), it just becomes a nightmare to work on. When it fails, you junk it. Meantime, I'm rebuilding a Slant-6 (25MPG highway with my 4-speed overdrive manual transmission) to drop under the hood of my Ram - it may be a little heavier on gasoline and emissions than a modern truck, but if you do the math to calculate how much coal it takes for the steel mill to melt a shredded car, all of a sudden keeping that well-maintained old vehicle on the road is the best environmental course of action. (I'd daily-drive a car but I need a truck about once a week; it's cheaper to pay the gas to drive the truck all week than it is to insure and sticker a second vehicle - that's something environmentalists should address!)
Don't even get me started on Honda Civics; they're the automotive equivalent of a Bic lighter - absolutely perfectly reliable and perfectly disposable.
VCRs are the same. You can buy the $59 model, or you can buy the $200 model thinking that it will be better built and last longer. Nope... you're just paying for software which enables more features on the same flimsy mechanism.
I blame CAD, scientific calculators and finite element analysis for this. Used to be that you'd only be able to carry two or three significant figures when you were working with sliderules - so you'd round up forces and round down material strengths. The compound effect of this rounding was that things were a lot better built than they needed to be - hence, they survived real-world abuse better and lasted longer. The pair of jeans caught under the agitator didn't strip the gears out of the transmission, and sitting on the hood at the drive-in movie didn't dent it. Of course, CAD, FEA and scientific calculators allow yo
Also, I'll wager the uber-cheap router you just purchased doesn't have any IDS capability (like Snort), or a cacheing proxy, or eye-candy graphs, or remote management via SSH, or any of the other nifty features that smoothwall offers.
Yes, your hardware might not last... but the point is this: It still works. If you could keep it as a useful tool instead of turning it into a groundwater-polluting hazard, why wouldn't you?
I have nothing against SmoothWall - I think it's great; the features are wonderful, and it's good for geeks and small offices.
But say the average install of SmoothWall is on a Pentium 100 machine, and it lasts for 3 years before being replaced because of failed capacitors in the power supply or a dead CMOS battery or a blown hard drive. All you've done is divert the machine from the landfill for three years.
In those three years, it's been consuming electricity to keep that Pentium warm and keep the hard disk spinning. The processor alone consumes more energy than my entire D-Link router!
Now, that's not to say that keeping these old machines running isn't a laudable effort - it sure is. My way has been to set them up as small file servers for LANs - make the operating system boot from CD (so it's not writable or dependent on reinstalling the operating system when that old Connor hard drive finally dies), throw in some more RAM and a big hard drive. I've set up a few of these things on small office networks, and even with 50-60 users, a Pentium 100 offers a cheap and reliable little file server. On my biggest install (72 workstations), the only time there's a real slowdown is at 9:AM when everyone boots their workstations and retrieves the file they were working on at quitting time the day before... or when someone has to do a backup during office hours.
But this task will provide gainful employment for one or two of the old Pentium 100s liberated from an office-wide upgrade; that still leaves 59 of them heading for the landfill. It's the same thing with SmoothWall. The problem is not solved.
True for your house, yes. But not necessarily for the total amount of energy. If you heat your house with oil, almost all chemical energy in the oil is used to heat the house.
Yeah... if you have an efficient furnace.
I'm currently in Ottawa, Canada - either the coldest or second coldest world capital. I'm renting, 'cause there ain't no way in hell that I plan on living here permanently. And the house I'm renting has a 35-year-old oil furnace.
Estimating its efficiency at 70%, I did some calculations based on my best oil quote. I looked up the BTUs of heat per gallon of heating oil, and compared it to the BTUs of heat per kWh of electricity. Since electricity here was fixed at 4.3 cents/kWh (up to 4.7 cents/kWh as of April 1), it was cheaper to heat by electricity. The situation would have been different if I were using a newer oil or gas furnace.
Remember, all electricity consumed inside the house, in one way or another, heats the house - the exceptions being the small amounts of light, sound and RF energy which escape. My roommates loved it - "Go ahead, leave the lights on, but close the blinds first!"
Therefore, I heated my house with electricity. I'd been planning on running a stack of Pentium-I class machines doing SETI@Home work units - at least the energy gets used for something productive on its way to becoming heat - but didn't have time to build the rack to hold all these machines, nor to duct them into the cold air return on the furnace. So instead I picked up a few $20 ceramic heaters and threw them into a big steel box ducted to the furnace and controlled by the thermostat. My electric bill from January to March was $425 - and that includes heating, lighting, the dryer, etc. - very impressively low!
But if you use electricity (be it through the computer or whatever), it takes much more energy to produce the same amount of (electric) energy, if it's produced in a fossile fuel power plant. A coal plant that only produces electricity has, what, 50% efficiency maximum(?). The rest of the energy is wasted in the process. If the electricity is produced in, say, a hydro plant, that's another storyVery true. Most people who think electric cars are a good idea, simply don't understand anything about electrical generation and distribution systems (like, how many coal and nuclear plants are gonna have to be built when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters start plugging in their electric cars every night?). It was even rampant in my electrical engineering courses in university!
In Eastern Ontario, given our proximity to Quebec, I'd assume that most of our energy is imported from their hydroelectric dams. But either way, my rationale is cost. Generally, saving money is the most powerful incentive to cut use of resources.
I have myldly ADHD, but I never watched TV when I was young (I still het my father for that
I have ADD (not ADHD, not hyperactive, just short attention span) and there's a lot of anectodal evidence that it may be genetic - ie. a child is diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, one of the parents reads the screening test and recognizes it in him/her self. Certainly ADD/ADHD might provide an evolutionary advantage which is mostly stifled in today's modern world - consider creativity.
People with ADD/ADHD-type behaviors tend to "collect" each other, snowballing, because we naturally keep each other from being bored. And most of the people I know with ADD/ADHD behaviors like to watch a lot of television for its constant effortless stimulation.
So let's go on the assumption, for the moment, that ADD/ADHD is genetic in nature: one or both of the parents may have it. And the other assumption that people with ADD/ADHD like to watch television. It's not a big leap for us to guess, then, that maybe these parents knew that they liked TV and so let the kids watch a lot of TV.
If this is the case, then lots of TV in childhood is more likely symptomatic of the parents' ADD/ADHD behaviors, and symptomatic of the child's greater chances of developing these behaviors.
This also explains people like me. I wasn't allowed to watch much TV at all as a child; neither one of my parents were big fans of TV, finding other forms of stimulation. But both of my parents show most of the symptoms of ADD.
Sounds rather 'April Foolish' to me...
I wouldn't put it past him, though. He's not exactly above the draconian.
As much as I am fundamentally a conservative (note the small C), I really hope he doesn't get re-elected.
The only thing more terrifying than religious fundamentalists in the cockpit?
Religious fundamentalists in the White House.
with the following MAC address: 00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2 Also a mobile phone was stolen, with IMEI number 351083531088913
Next story will be "I tried ringing the stolen phone, did anyone hear a phone ringing?"
What I'm really worried about is the poor thief. After all, he's just unleashed an unemployed geek army, ready to do battle.
"Cornelius! Look! I saw that MAC address! Hit the gas! Rev up that little Honda Civic! Think of all the anime posters we can buy when we get the reward!"
"Eugene! I was playing with my scanner and I found that IMEI, so I triangulated its location! We can buy t-shirts on Thinkgeek with the reward money! Go Away Or I Will Replace You With A Very Small Shell Script!" [snorting laughter]
And pretty soon, there are 2,500 unemployed virgins with masking tape holding together their glasses converging on the thief's doorstep.
Dude, wherever you are, turn yourself in before it's too late.
That means that making it easy to copy isn't the same as copying, and is not copyright violation.
All across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John's, Kazaa Lite's hash routine is consuming millions of CPU cycles...
Use this this cute little script to kill the dupes, though you'll still have to audition to find the best bitrate and sound quality.
Dome Productions, I'm guessing. I used to provide tech support for the JumboTron production crew at the SkyDome.
Heheh... Dome Productions and Adcom, then a lot of freelance work for the networks. (Pay was better, hours were less hellish, though I lost out on my ability to park my truck on the field when the green was out and the 'Dome was empty... and my ability to have midnight picnics on the pitcher's mound.)
Small world.Scary! :) Were you in IT?
Actually, the problem is that the frame rate is not an exact integer multiple of the 60Hz AC power frequency, which is usually the largest source of electrical noise. It's off by a fraction of a percent; that's why you often see a distortion slowly creeping up the screen about once per minute as the frame rate beats against the power line sine wave. If the frame rate were exactly locked to the power line frequency, the distortion wouldn't move, so you wouldn't notice it.
Uhhh... Okay. Credentials: Former professional video technician (at the SkyDome in Toronto) before being hired to design radar video systems for Litton. Also an avid collector and restorer of early television sets.
In the 1950s, AC power was not universal, especially in rural areas (note the sustained popularity of the "All American Five" AC/DC table radio at that time). Lots of places had DC, and lots of cities had 25Hz power well into the late 1950s. Nor was it necessarily going to be in sync from one town to the next, so you couldn't guarantee that the 60Hz powerline hum could be synchronized with the TV station's 60Hz vertical signal. In other words, you couldn't be guaranteed that the hum was going to happen in the vertical blanking interval (that black bar you see rolling when the vertical hold control is set wrong).
I suspect that the vertical was chosen to be at 60Hz more because the large current draw of the vertical output tube driving the deflection yoke would then be more likely to occur during the charge cycle of the set's filter capacitors, allowing smaller capacitors to be used (cheaper). This of course being a time when electrolytic filter capacitors (in fact, all small parts) were still hand made.
Even more importantly, you should remember that most early TV sets (until the advent of selenium rectifiers in about 1955) had full-wave rectifiers, generally using a 5U4 or similar tube. A full-wave rectifier folds the negative half of the sinewave up to the positive side, which effectively doubles the frequency to 120Hz.
Either way, if the set is operating correctly, regardless of color standard, you will not see any powerline artifacts or ripple. It's when the horizontal system starts to come out of resonance that the biggest current draw happens in the set. Your horizontal output tube (transistor) consumes the most power of any part of the set; if a typical 1950s DuMont or Admiral has a cathode current of 120mA (at ~300V) and you misadjust the horizontal hold, that current will spike to over double that. That will load down the set's power supply, discharge the filter capacitors more, and you might start to hear 120Hz (full wave rectifier at 60Hz) hum in the set's speaker.
IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier.
Yup. The original NTSC standard was 30FPS; when the 3.58MHz sinewave which carries color was added, the bandwidth of the signal had to be increased. (The original was 3.5MHz bandwidth for the image; reducing the frame rate slightly was sufficient to keep the bandwidth inside the original spectrum and didn't screw up many of the existing TV sets.)
Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.
Note that the NTSC color TV standard was adopted in 1953, though not implemented until 50 years ago today. Every TV set built since then has known about the new frame rate the sets would have to handle. I actively collect and restore early TV sets, and I only have a few which predate this - they're rate.
Again, you don't get powerline beat in the picture unless something is wrong with the set's filter capacitors.
If you're getting a beat in the picture which, on a blank raster, moves in time with the vertical hold control, then you've got a problem where the vertical is either consuming too much current, or a
Why did I stop moderating? Why did I do that?
Because I *simply* had to respond to this.
If I had to bet on it, I would wager that 90% of the devoted Microsoft bashers that infest Slashdot are either devout liberals or aspiring socialists.
Not this particular M$ basher.
Actually, I'm mostly a Libertarian. I am a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. I wish to see as little government meddling in free enterprise as possible, because it almost always backfires. As an example, I'm quite convinced that the government Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations which killed the full-size station wagon are, in fact, the very reason why we now have full-size station wagons built on even thirstier (CAFE-exempt) 4x4 pickup truck chassis choking our streets.
But I make an exception for Microsoft. Without government intervention, there'd be nothing to stop monopolistic behaviors. Linux is an aberration unique to computers: if one car company had more than 97% of the market and was abusing its monopoly, there wouldn't be open-source cars because the product is not intangible and easily duplicated. Normally, the free market will work things out on its own. But Microsoft lucked its way into a position of power initially, and has ruthlessly used that power to squash anything which could become a threat.
Micrsoft, it seems, has become a symbol for "corporate greed", "bullying", etc, etc and bashing it serves as a substitute for bashing capitalism - the real target of their enmity.
Microsoft is a symbol for corporate greed and bullying. If they're not, I can't imagine what they'd have to do to get that name. Maybe Bill and Paul would be abducting competitors' children in a non-descript white van.
As for capitalism, yeah, it sucks. Some people starve while others get rich. But it's also a lot better than anything else anyone has come up with. I do hate capitalism. But I hate socialism and communism even more.
Indeed, bashing capitalism is considerably less "fashionable" than bashing MS (or Wal-Mart, or any other large and successful company), so why not use MS as a proxy?
I love Wal*Mart. Usually, after I've been shopping there, I compare prices with their competition (key point, that) and determine that I've saved a couple of bucks with each shopping trip. Case in point: was going to buy a small level, checked out Home Depot. Found a level that I liked for $19.95, which seemed a little steep. Went to Wal*Mart, found exactly the same make and model of level for $4.99. I do not begrudge Wal*Mart their success, because unlike Microsoft, it seems they've actually done something to achieve it. The very first thing Wal*Mart has done is somehow create a discount department store that I'm not embarrassed to go into. The next thing is almost always having what you want in stock, and usually at the same price or a little better than the competition.
So, all you MS bashers out there, why not just admit that you are, at the very least, liberal Democrats and voting for Bush would be as inimical to your creed as using Windows?
A vote for Bush is evil, pure and simple.
Al Gore was no better. His liberal fiscal policies would have punished me for my financial success rather than enticing me to expand my business and hire more employees. His pro-union stance drives up the cost of labor artificially to a point where a person who makes brake pistons all day gets $25/hr while a McDonalds employee whose job requires far more intelligence and skill gets minimum wage. But, on the other hand, at least Gore was intelligent and secure enough with his masculinity to know that gay people aren't going to hurt him.
Furthermore, why not just say that capitali
Personally, I'm strictly stereo (I go by the Jolida adage, "Why use 6 speakers when you can't get 2 right?").
Completely agree. My computer speakers (for MP3s, DVDs, and normal computer noises) are a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x connected to a Sound A-5000 amplifier and a hacked SoundBlaster 16 ISA (replaced the noisy LM741 buffer amps with low-noise replacements a long time ago). A good Ogg Vorbis or high bitrate MP3 is breathtakingly clean.
My other system is a pair of Celestion Ditton 44 speakers powered by a 200W (real watts) per channel amplifier that I designed and built. Output stages are paralleled IRF340 MOSFETs driven directly off the plate circuits of the vacuum-tube based pre/driver stages - 12AX7, 12AT7. Both channels are matched by nulling.
Besides, there are a lot of bassheads who can't distinguish between realistic sound stage and a bunch of poorly positioned speakers and a bone-shaking thumpbox. If what you look for in sound is measured in Watts...Hey, can someone come up with a mathematic definition for PMPO for me, please? Until then, I have a hard time believing the Made-in-Taiwan computer speakers powered off the 9V 300mA AC adapter are capable of anything approaching the 100W PMPO they claim. In all my electrical engineering classes, I don't think we covered PMPO even once... [grin]
I find a lot of musicians will go overboard with the whacky panning tricks but in 10 years time this will seem really dated.
Yeah... Heh... Hendrix did a lot of panning back and forth in one of his songs, apparently enjoying the novelty of stereo. (Note that I differentiate this from the *many* effects using in Third Stone From The Sun, Are You Experienced, EXP, and many others). This song even has a crackle during the pan; it seems like the potentiometer in the mixer was dirty.
And I can't remember the damned name of the song or even find it right now... Earlier stuff, before Band of Gypsies. I think it's off Smash Hits.
I'll mail you a laptop , Please sir to be sending me a money order for $400.
Heheheh...
Yeah... Along those lines, avoid 42nd Street! :)