That said, one of the reasons diamonds have a higher value now than they used to is partially due to new cutting techniques.
You're absolutely right about that. My very gifted nephew-in-law jeweler has invented a new diamond cut inspired by the shape of cobblestones (so the marketing says). Check the Qui-Shape out at his flash-heavy site..
That said, I have warned him, and my other jeweler family member, two years ago to cut down on their inventory of diamonds as I told them natural stones would soon devalue. One heeded the advice, the other didn't. Guess those De Beers relations are too valuable to discard.
5-7 discrete frequencies in a CFL is extremely sparse. I thought they're doing way better than that.
I'm curious how white leds can be full-spectrum, as they either work by combining trichromatic rbg or by exciting a phosphor with blue light just like a fluo does with UV.
Time for some googling on both topics, I guess.
As to the new age crap, I don't believe in it but seeing dull colours throughout the day certainly isn't improving my optimism. It would be interesting to do a double blind test with a large group. But then, that has probably been done already and it may be that the larger population just doesn't care and isn't affected.
Correct, I am. If I directly look at the HF fluorescents in my office, the color of the lamps closely matches daylight. Yet the paint on the wall looks much, much duller under fluorescents. My guess is that people living in FL all the time get depressed, because everything looks less lively. YMMV of course.
To come back to 50/60Hz: because a lamp doesn't care about the polarity of the signal, they flicker at 100/120Hz, unless you're using rectified and stabilized DC or high freqency AC ballasts or power supplies.
And you may assume that the spectrum of the LED+phosphor will be discrete, not continuous, so a lot of frequencies will be missing. The graph doesn't show that.
Paints under fluorescent lighting will be muchg duller than under daylight. Most people don't care though. They only get depressed after a while, and don't know why.
I have a lot of 12V halogens in the house powered by compact (12cm3) electronic high-frequency switched power supplies. The advantage is that the halogens, powered at a stabilized 11.3V, do not flicker when a high-power consumer like an oven is turned on or off and last almost forever due to the ^10 inverse power law between voltage and life expectancy for incandescents (see wikipedia).
I have 50W halogens in my living room (lots of hours, lots of switching on/off) that are more than 10 years old. CFs or plain TL do not last that long under these conditions, and aren't close in offering the light quality. Lights are on mostly during the dark and cold winter, so the excess energy they consume isn't entirely lost as the heat is welcome.
Any discrete spectrum (as emitted by LEDS or fluorescents) is ANDed by the discrete absorbtion and reflection spectra of most paints to obtain the color you perceive.
As an example: assume a FL emits peaks at 550nm and 540nm, while the paint may have a reflection peak at 545nm. Because this peak is not in the emission sprectrum, you simply will not perceive it. In real life the emission, absorbtion and reflection spectra are more complicated; but the end result is that colors are dull when illuminated by any non-continuous sprectrum emitter. The extreme is the single line emission from sodium lamps.
That's the reason why there is an ungodly amount of difference between fluorescent lighting and daylight. While the white point of FL may match DL, anything illuminated by FL will be dull in comparison. There really is no substitute for a continuous spectrum emitter like the thermal emission from a black body.
It's a bit like listening to a 64kbps MP3 compared to an uncompressed original. Sure, the melody will be recognizable, but there the MP3 will sound dirty.
As more and more phosphors with different emission peaks are added to a FL or an LED to try to achieve the continuous daylight or incandescent light quality, the efficiency will fall. Still, it may end up more efficient than a tungsten lamp, whose emissions in the infrared are useless (except during the dark winters above 45 north or below 45 south latitude) absolute).
The supply side: over time a lot of music has entered the market. Music never dies; unlike software it doesn't need to evolve, nor is it custom made. So more supply should mean lower prices, were it not for the *AA cartels.
The demand side: did you see the Hitachi flash for their perpendicular recording promoting an MP3 player with room for 30000 tracks ? At current iTune prices this would mean 30000$ of music on that device. Nobody is going to pay that to fill his player; current prices simply don't make any sense.
Clearly something has to give. So the price of a CD (or equivalent) is destined to fall; it's simply unavoidable. Any market manipulation to keep the price up artificially will ultimately fail, and those counting on keeping prices up are in for a nasty surprise. I wouldn't be amazed to see 1 hour of undrmmed music selling for $0.10 in the next decennium.
What I want ? A great, fully personalized service that allows me to supereasily find the music I like from a humongous collection, and let me download anything, and as much as I want. I'd pay a yearly subscription of $100 for that.
500M people subscribing to such a service would mean a revenue of 50B. That's enough to pay a million artists a $50K yearly income each.
</utopia>
They why are you waiting for the full charge ? I take the LiPo out of the charger after half an hour, and charge a second pack ($40) while I'm using the first.
This way I get 12 mins hovering time out of a 30 mins cycle time using 2 packs (40%). The actual busy time is more like 20-25 minutes though; so I barely have to wait in practice. Another advantage is that neither the motor nor the pack get as hot in this cycle. The motor runs for 12 minutes instead of 20, and the used pack can cool down for 10 minutes while I'm waiting on the second to finish charging.
Waiting the 70 mins for a full charge I would get 20 mins hovering time in a 70 mins cycle (28%).
Using one pack this worsens to flying 12 mins, cycle 42 mins (28%) or 20 mins out of 90 mins (22%).
The really funny thing is that "lol" is actually a Dutch word, signifying "fun" (use the fish to verify, it speaks Dutch now too). That's real close to the meaning of LOL.
I don't know what its etymology is, but I've used the word way back in the dark ages.
You beat me to it. I posted nearly the same thing; I was probably typing while you posted yours.
In short: to buy: DRR not acceptable, no way. to rent: DRR acceptable (but not preferred) to stream: DRR acceptable, if the restrictions don't conflict with my needs.
I'm never going to buy anything (again)* that has DRR in place, without a well dispersed crack out in the open.
Renting is something else. I could agree to DRR on rented material. After all, if I rent it it isn't mine to begin with, and the timescale of the ret is fixed, so I don't care.
For streaming you could look at this as being the same as renting. DRR would be ok, were it not that I absolutely hate being forced to watch content without being able to skip parts or timeshift. So there DRR is a mixed issue. It would take a heck of quality material to make me spend my strong Euros on DRRed streaming material.
(*) I once bought a DRRed WM HD disk just to test out 1080p resolution. The box also contained a standard DVD, so I can forgive myself:P
My 4th grade schoolteacher asked me personally (he was the father of one of my friends, so we talked often outside school): "Do you really believe that we, humans, descend from such an ugly animal, an ape ?"
I explained him (a 10 year old, to a schoolteacher, no less) that no, we humans do not directly descend from the apes that are currently living, but that, according to current and widely accepted current scientific theories, humans and apes do share a common ancestor.
The repercussions made me lose all respect for authority.
The problem is that in such a democracy you wouldn't be able to stand out of the crowd as a beacon of wisdom, and you'd lose your advantage and/or high self-esteem. It's all relative.
Then again, there are times where I wish I were just plain stupid myself. It must be an easy life, especially in the "Land of the Herd, Home of the Weak" socialist utopia where I live.
Typical TV sets whine at 15kHz. That's not a very high frequency; most of us _should_ be able to hear that. CRT monitors are a different beast; the >60kHz line refresh should be unhearable, were it not for subharmonics. Try filling your screen with 5 lines of white alternated with 5 lines of black. Chances are you'll hear something. (for the clueless: don't bother to try that on your LCD).
Some other loosely related stuff:
- More than twenty years ago remote controls used ultrasound. I could hear them from across the room, even though they were 40kHz or so. Subharmonics at play again ?
- I used to be bothered by an irritating feeling while studying in the evening in late spring (in addition to have to study during spring evenings). I quickly found out that the cause were bats. My desk was facing a window, which was opened 45 degrees to the inside. The pings from the bats reflected on the glass pane, right into my ear.
- As to flicker: anything less than 100Hz bothers me. I find (compact) fluorescents with a non-electronic ballast intolerable. Things may be better in the US (120Hz instead of 100Hz here).
No, Apple hasn't fount out what its users want. Though I have an iPod, it fails horribly in a number of ways that could have been solved through better design and/or firmware:
- when you dock it (to a PC, dunno about a Mac), it loses track of what song was playing, and de facto the position in that song. - while it's docked it can't play without firing up iTunes. - when you want to take it from the dock you have to stop it from your PC first, or it hangs. - cannot put it into your pocket/purse/whatever without protection in the form of a sleeve/iSkin/whatever. - when in the pocket/purse/whatever you need to put it on hold to guard against accidental operation. - when it's on hold, you cannot control it. The remote control is only marginally useable, since functions to navigate artist/albums/playlists are simply not available. - when a playlist is done, pressing play again starts playing the whole contents, not just the playlist.
In short, daily using your iPod makes you walk through all sorts of compulsary behaviour just to make it tolerable.
1. Get iPod out of sleeve. 2. Unslide hold switch. Press play. 3. Slide hold switch. Put in earphones and listen. 4. Battery runs down. Before it's fully down, look at the display to remember what track was playing and the position in the track. 5. Put in dock to recharge. 6. Stop device in Windows 7. Get out of dock. Restore the current track and position as remembered in 4. 8. Press play. 9. Goto 3.
Don't even get me started about the widely documented flaws (no gapless playback, EQ) that Apple has chosen to DO ABSOF*CKINGLY nothing about, despite years of user demand and several iterations.
In all, Apple hasn't convinced me of switching to a Mac. I like style, but not without substance.
A company responsible for managing author's rights in Belgium is under judicial scrutiny, and searches have been performed in their offices this morning.
The accusation is that they've been stealing (yes, really stealing, not just infringing) money that was to be distributed to the authors.
While they're innocent until proven guilty, I wouldn't be surprised if they are guilty. A customer, who was playing an original work of mine, was harassed by them. One of their official representatives stated under oath that they managed the rights of my work. Not so.
The issue was cleared up quickly, but I should have filed charges for perjury.
And extreme crap that DRM on T2EE is. The license is validated online. I had to set up a proxy because the license validator rejected my IP address.
When the license validator will be gone (bankrupt, or somewhere else) - and that's a when, not an if - my HD movie won't play anymore. (Luckily there is a standard DVD left in the box and the price wasn't more than a normal DVD, so...)
The visual quality of the movie itself was worth going thru the trouble though - once! - and a showcase for my hp2335, but that stinkin' DRM has convinced me not to touch anything that has uncracked DRM on it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right about that. My very gifted nephew-in-law jeweler has invented a new diamond cut inspired by the shape of cobblestones (so the marketing says). Check the Qui-Shape out at his flash-heavy site..
That said, I have warned him, and my other jeweler family member, two years ago to cut down on their inventory of diamonds as I told them natural stones would soon devalue. One heeded the advice, the other didn't. Guess those De Beers relations are too valuable to discard.
Don't know if your still monitoring this thread, but I use this:i d=LASSO%2070K
http://www.erea.be/asp/product.asp?lng=E&tid=59&a
5-7 discrete frequencies in a CFL is extremely sparse. I thought they're doing way better than that.
I'm curious how white leds can be full-spectrum, as they either work by combining trichromatic rbg or by exciting a phosphor with blue light just like a fluo does with UV.
Time for some googling on both topics, I guess.
As to the new age crap, I don't believe in it but seeing dull colours throughout the day certainly isn't improving my optimism. It would be interesting to do a double blind test with a large group. But then, that has probably been done already and it may be that the larger population just doesn't care and isn't affected.
Correct, I am. If I directly look at the HF fluorescents in my office, the color of the lamps closely matches daylight. Yet the paint on the wall looks much, much duller under fluorescents. My guess is that people living in FL all the time get depressed, because everything looks less lively. YMMV of course.
To come back to 50/60Hz: because a lamp doesn't care about the polarity of the signal, they flicker at 100/120Hz, unless you're using rectified and stabilized DC or high freqency AC ballasts or power supplies.
And you may assume that the spectrum of the LED+phosphor will be discrete, not continuous, so a lot of frequencies will be missing. The graph doesn't show that.
Paints under fluorescent lighting will be muchg duller than under daylight. Most people don't care though. They only get depressed after a while, and don't know why.
I have a lot of 12V halogens in the house powered by compact (12cm3) electronic high-frequency switched power supplies. The advantage is that the halogens, powered at a stabilized 11.3V, do not flicker when a high-power consumer like an oven is turned on or off and last almost forever due to the ^10 inverse power law between voltage and life expectancy for incandescents (see wikipedia).
I have 50W halogens in my living room (lots of hours, lots of switching on/off) that are more than 10 years old. CFs or plain TL do not last that long under these conditions, and aren't close in offering the light quality. Lights are on mostly during the dark and cold winter, so the excess energy they consume isn't entirely lost as the heat is welcome.
Any discrete spectrum (as emitted by LEDS or fluorescents) is ANDed by the discrete absorbtion and reflection spectra of most paints to obtain the color you perceive.
As an example: assume a FL emits peaks at 550nm and 540nm, while the paint may have a reflection peak at 545nm. Because this peak is not in the emission sprectrum, you simply will not perceive it. In real life the emission, absorbtion and reflection spectra are more complicated; but the end result is that colors are dull when illuminated by any non-continuous sprectrum emitter. The extreme is the single line emission from sodium lamps.
That's the reason why there is an ungodly amount of difference between fluorescent lighting and daylight. While the white point of FL may match DL, anything illuminated by FL will be dull in comparison. There really is no substitute for a continuous spectrum emitter like the thermal emission from a black body.
It's a bit like listening to a 64kbps MP3 compared to an uncompressed original. Sure, the melody will be recognizable, but there the MP3 will sound dirty.
As more and more phosphors with different emission peaks are added to a FL or an LED to try to achieve the continuous daylight or incandescent light quality, the efficiency will fall. Still, it may end up more efficient than a tungsten lamp, whose emissions in the infrared are useless (except during the dark winters above 45 north or below 45 south latitude) absolute).
The supply side: over time a lot of music has entered the market. Music never dies; unlike software it doesn't need to evolve, nor is it custom made. So more supply should mean lower prices, were it not for the *AA cartels.
The demand side: did you see the Hitachi flash for their perpendicular recording promoting an MP3 player with room for 30000 tracks ? At current iTune prices this would mean 30000$ of music on that device. Nobody is going to pay that to fill his player; current prices simply don't make any sense.
Clearly something has to give. So the price of a CD (or equivalent) is destined to fall; it's simply unavoidable. Any market manipulation to keep the price up artificially will ultimately fail, and those counting on keeping prices up are in for a nasty surprise. I wouldn't be amazed to see 1 hour of undrmmed music selling for $0.10 in the next decennium.
I once changed the mouse pointer to a realistic image of a fly.
Nice.
The crash will come after the '08 Olympics. They're on their toes now to make a good impression then. Wait and see.
Of course, the ramifications of that crash for the global economy we're living in now are going to be absolutely disastrous.
What I want ? A great, fully personalized service that allows me to supereasily find the music I like from a humongous collection, and let me download anything, and as much as I want. I'd pay a yearly subscription of $100 for that.
500M people subscribing to such a service would mean a revenue of 50B. That's enough to pay a million artists a $50K yearly income each.
</utopia>
this B2 ?</teasing>
They why are you waiting for the full charge ? I take the LiPo out of the charger after half an hour, and charge a second pack ($40) while I'm using the first.
This way I get 12 mins hovering time out of a 30 mins cycle time using 2 packs (40%). The actual busy time is more like 20-25 minutes though; so I barely have to wait in practice. Another advantage is that neither the motor nor the pack get as hot in this cycle. The motor runs for 12 minutes instead of 20, and the used pack can cool down for 10 minutes while I'm waiting on the second to finish charging.
Waiting the 70 mins for a full charge I would get 20 mins hovering time in a 70 mins cycle (28%).
Using one pack this worsens to flying 12 mins, cycle 42 mins (28%) or 20 mins out of 90 mins (22%).
The really funny thing is that "lol" is actually a Dutch word, signifying "fun" (use the fish to verify, it speaks Dutch now too). That's real close to the meaning of LOL.
I don't know what its etymology is, but I've used the word way back in the dark ages.
You beat me to it. I posted nearly the same thing; I was probably typing while you posted yours.
In short:
to buy: DRR not acceptable, no way.
to rent: DRR acceptable (but not preferred)
to stream: DRR acceptable, if the restrictions don't conflict with my needs.
I'm never going to buy anything (again)* that has DRR in place, without a well dispersed crack out in the open.
:P
Renting is something else. I could agree to DRR on rented material. After all, if I rent it it isn't mine to begin with, and the timescale of the ret is fixed, so I don't care.
For streaming you could look at this as being the same as renting. DRR would be ok, were it not that I absolutely hate being forced to watch content without being able to skip parts or timeshift. So there DRR is a mixed issue. It would take a heck of quality material to make me spend my strong Euros on DRRed streaming material.
(*) I once bought a DRRed WM HD disk just to test out 1080p resolution. The box also contained a standard DVD, so I can forgive myself
My 4th grade schoolteacher asked me personally (he was the father of one of my friends, so we talked often outside school): "Do you really believe that we, humans, descend from such an ugly animal, an ape ?"
I explained him (a 10 year old, to a schoolteacher, no less) that no, we humans do not directly descend from the apes that are currently living, but that, according to current and widely accepted current scientific theories, humans and apes do share a common ancestor.
The repercussions made me lose all respect for authority.
The problem is that in such a democracy you wouldn't be able to stand out of the crowd as a beacon of wisdom, and you'd lose your advantage and/or high self-esteem. It's all relative.
Then again, there are times where I wish I were just plain stupid myself. It must be an easy life, especially in the "Land of the Herd, Home of the Weak" socialist utopia where I live.
Typical TV sets whine at 15kHz. That's not a very high frequency; most of us _should_ be able to hear that. CRT monitors are a different beast; the >60kHz line refresh should be unhearable, were it not for subharmonics. Try filling your screen with 5 lines of white alternated with 5 lines of black. Chances are you'll hear something. (for the clueless: don't bother to try that on your LCD).
Some other loosely related stuff:
- More than twenty years ago remote controls used ultrasound. I could hear them from across the room, even though they were 40kHz or so. Subharmonics at play again ?
- I used to be bothered by an irritating feeling while studying in the evening in late spring (in addition to have to study during spring evenings). I quickly found out that the cause were bats. My desk was facing a window, which was opened 45 degrees to the inside. The pings from the bats reflected on the glass pane, right into my ear.
- As to flicker: anything less than 100Hz bothers me. I find (compact) fluorescents with a non-electronic ballast intolerable. Things may be better in the US (120Hz instead of 100Hz here).
Is the final -e missing ?
No, Apple hasn't fount out what its users want. Though I have an iPod, it fails horribly in a number of ways that could have been solved through better design and/or firmware:
- when you dock it (to a PC, dunno about a Mac), it loses track of what song was playing, and de facto the position in that song.
- while it's docked it can't play without firing up iTunes.
- when you want to take it from the dock you have to stop it from your PC first, or it hangs.
- cannot put it into your pocket/purse/whatever without protection in the form of a sleeve/iSkin/whatever.
- when in the pocket/purse/whatever you need to put it on hold to guard against accidental operation.
- when it's on hold, you cannot control it. The remote control is only marginally useable, since functions to navigate artist/albums/playlists are simply not available.
- when a playlist is done, pressing play again starts playing the whole contents, not just the playlist.
In short, daily using your iPod makes you walk through all sorts of compulsary behaviour just to make it tolerable.
1. Get iPod out of sleeve.
2. Unslide hold switch. Press play.
3. Slide hold switch. Put in earphones and listen.
4. Battery runs down. Before it's fully down, look at the display to remember what track was playing and the position in the track.
5. Put in dock to recharge.
6. Stop device in Windows
7. Get out of dock. Restore the current track and position as remembered in 4.
8. Press play.
9. Goto 3.
Don't even get me started about the widely documented flaws (no gapless playback, EQ) that Apple has chosen to DO ABSOF*CKINGLY nothing about, despite years of user demand and several iterations.
In all, Apple hasn't convinced me of switching to a Mac. I like style, but not without substance.
A company responsible for managing author's rights in Belgium is under judicial scrutiny, and searches have been performed in their offices this morning.
The accusation is that they've been stealing (yes, really stealing, not just infringing) money that was to be distributed to the authors.
While they're innocent until proven guilty, I wouldn't be surprised if they are guilty. A customer, who was playing an original work of mine, was harassed by them. One of their official representatives stated under oath that they managed the rights of my work. Not so.
The issue was cleared up quickly, but I should have filed charges for perjury.
And extreme crap that DRM on T2EE is. The license is validated online. I had to set up a proxy because the license validator rejected my IP address.
When the license validator will be gone (bankrupt, or somewhere else) - and that's a when, not an if - my HD movie won't play anymore. (Luckily there is a standard DVD left in the box and the price wasn't more than a normal DVD, so...)
The visual quality of the movie itself was worth going thru the trouble though - once! - and a showcase for my hp2335, but that stinkin' DRM has convinced me not to touch anything that has uncracked DRM on it.
I've never seen so much humourously dry (or drily humourous) comments... Thanks, lads.