Yes, it is a problem. The frequencies used by BPL are capable of propagating half-way around the world, so that Ham in the middle of nowhere may well not be able to hear/anybody/ by the time BPL is widespread.
They can reach the other side of the earth - because they can bounce back and forth between the ionosphere and earth. It's quite feasible to recieve a signal of a few watts from, say, Japan in the UK, especially around twilight.
Feet? I don't think so. Transmitting Coax that will take 2,500V RMS is only about 1/2" diameter. This is assuming the distribution isn't going to over anything but local 110/220V circuits, with fibre to the substations (which I assume is how it works).
14,400 (or whatever the US uses for the next step up) could probably be carried with a slightly larger diameter, say 1.5-2". I think the buried cables are already "sheathed" with steel wire for durability anyway. An extra wrap of Al or Cu would be easy.
The Alphas were blowing every Intel chip away in FPU and I/O performance even back in 2000. The only trouble was the price - motherboards were exorbitant (especially for dual processors) and you needed a 400W-600W PSU - now very affordable, but back then, PC PSUs were at the most 250-300W.
I got to play with a dual 21164 at about that time. The responsiveness was amazing - and XaoS (real time fractal zoomer) absolutely killed my PIII 500Mhz.
I thought Samsung now had the rights to the EV8 tech? Will they ever release it or just finish the hatchet-job C*ntpaq did?
Erm, that's not radiation causing the breakdown into ions. It's the local electric field - you can cause this just as well with DC, and no radiation takes place at DC - just a static e-field is present
The distinction is tricky, but look at it this way: you won't see any ionisation from microwaves travelling through an absorptive medium, such as air or flesh. However, if you take a beta particle or X-ray, you will certainly see electrons being knocked off the atoms as soon as such a photon impinges on one.
The breakdown of the dielectric (in the waveguide, air), is simply the breakdown of the medium's standoff capability caused by excessive voltage - and that can happen with DC, inside a flame, and so on.
No, it can't "dislodge atomic structures" - it's not ionising radiation. It might cause some heating if you shoved the antenna through your eyeball and directly into your brain though...
They could be weather balloons ignited by alien discharge-weapon fire after all.
Surely ball lightning is another candidate? Although it's never been/properly/ reproduced in the lab there are several anecdotal accounts of people being either killed or shocked by balls of what appears to be ionised and charged gas. My godmother even saw one float straight through a closed window, but luckily it turned and dissipated itself in the wall.
It's still a really contentious area, but not much research is being done on it (except for the wacko free-energy guys on Keelynet who wouldn't recognise peer review even if it hit them squarely in the bollocks). I have a tesla coil mind you - just need a few more Amps on my mains supply to try my hand!
The output of the average flyback is in the 10-25kV range. The capacitance of the tube (the metallised coatings and the glass of the tube form a poor and lossy cap) is in the order of a couple of nanofarads, so you're talking a few hundred millijoules of energy at best (worst?).
I've had a shock at around 2-3 Joules from a 0.06uF cap bank charged to about 7kV, which is a couple of Joules or so (can't be bothered to calculate it), across the chest. It hurt like hell and made me throw the bank across the room, and I was very jittery afterwards, but it's not enough to cause fibrillation. You need double figures for that.
Nevertheless, screwing around with HV can bite you hard, and once you start playing with the big stuff you want to keep one hand behind the back! And the output of my 2kW Tesla coil, I'd never consider a "safe hit";-)
Started with a 32K BBC "B" (6502 based, tape loading, disks were too pricey!)
Managed to teach myself assembly (after BASIC, the BBC had one of the best BASICs ever, IMHO). I couldn't believe it when my disassembler (written in ASM of course) actually worked. Never mind that I didn't have enough paper to print out the listing of the OS ROM!. One day I'll have to dig it out and see if I can find my proggy...
Hmm, not quite as far as the UK goes...
There is no need to qualify to "opt out" of NHS care. Hospitals can do this (ie become "trusts") but they need to show a good level of performance first and prove that commercial backing would provide at least some return).
Any person on a decent wage can now afford private health insurance through companies like BUPA for a moderate yearly fee. We're talking about around £200 a year to start. However, NHS care in some hospitals seems to prove better than private care in others (or even the same in the case of trusts). I know wy grandmother complained bitterly about the impersonal treatment she got for two strokes in a private hospital, but after having a pacemaker fitted at the local NHS joint couldn't praise the staff enough...
Just goes to show...
At work we have MSI Microstar systems. They aren't much bigger than a book PC, but they have 2 PCI slots and integrated network. i810 based, but you could slam a PCI card in instead.
Hmm, I think he was talking in the past tense, ie "needed to be gutted". They've done more than that, but an x86 release and more parts open-sourced would be nice.
I, for one, found the HOWTOs invaluable, and, yes, I'm self-taught (started about 5 or so years ago). I now have an admin job using (mostly) Linux. They may not always be straightforward, but in working through them you gain a lot more knowledge and excitement about that pile of chips under your desk than you ever would with your bog-standard pre-installed WinBox.
OK, I'm opening up to the troll crowd here, who will inevitably say "But you were'nt *producing* anything while reading HOWTOS, were you?", but hell, I feel the gain. Now, lets apply that to education programmes, such as those in Mexico, and the huge tide of acceptance of Linux in other countries such as Brazil and China (go to the former - every magazine stand will contain about 200 Linux CDs!). The educators suddenly realise that with a little initiative they can whack RH or MDK on some PCs that would die under Win*, get kids using them for the basics (WP, email, etc) and then have all the tools pre-installed to progress to much more advanced tasks, from web design and serving through to full on programming. What better way to increase the national skillset at minimum cost? I think it's great, and despite Gates's mighty charitable donations, nothing can compare to being able to truly 'own'* your own knowledge and software, while sharing it with others.
*By this, I mean not having your working platform and development subject to someone's arbitrary licensing whims, eg, if you write a proggy with our SDK, you can't do x.
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
Sigh,
I wish I had a point to mod the parent up; however if the previous poster did/really/ mean anarchy, as in the common interpretation of the word, as opposed to anarch*ism*, the political movement, he may have been nearly right.
I think that OSS is almost a blend of the populist meaning of 'anarchy', in that the fluff eventually gets weeded out, but in terms of its sharing mechanisms and its viewpoint, it's more the 'ism'. Shame we can't get the point across to policymakers, while Allchin gets his oar in and strikes a first (albeit stupid) blow for the establishment...
Sound like your typical anthropologist. They tend to devalue anything from the culture they are studying in this manner. They are always 'looking in' from their own cultural perspective, and their carefully considered opinions will naturally not allow an "un-biased" appreciation.
However, the flipside of this is that looking at an object as "art" is equally imposing our values on that object and the society that generated it. It's easy to see - look at an object in an anthropological museum, and the same in an art gallery - two very different contexts.
This is a problem we simply can't get around, and in some ways, it's arrogant of us to think that we can. It would be great if you could 'forget where you came from', but, sadly, it's impossible.
Hum, I think you've been taken in by the "myth of the artist" a little - the idea of the starving painter in his garret, the senitive poet, the tortured soul.
Art is as much a part of the social and economic matrix as anything else. It is a product both for and of the society around it. It's also big business - certainly in Europe - you only have to look at the the amount of hype and money surrounding such people as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the like. (Although I did love it when Emin appeared on a late night discussion programme horribly drunk!)
The attempt to separate art into a "nether-space" of pure thought or emotion is always doomed to backfire. Look at the way Abstract Expressionism (and its adulation by Greenberg) was usurped by politics, and made into a symbol of "Western Freedom", as opposed to the Social Realism of the USSR, and indeed of thirties US public art. (Much of which is rather good - check out Louis Lozowick, Orozco, Rivera and others).
Going back further, you only have to look to the renaissance - patrons would struggle to comission frescoes and paintings for their chapels and churches. You can see their figures in the works - they've paid for eternal prayer for their souls in mass. And salvation has got to be an enticing product at that time!
Are games much different to that? Just because something is commercial, doesn't deny it art status. Ideas and expressions are currency too...
Does the voltage increase due to the formation of an effective low-q resonant circuit with the self-inductance and the large capacitance of the cable? As far as I'm aware, applying a signal source to a capacitor through an impedance should not result in a voltage rise - but if you, say, send the signal through an inductor (line), which is terminated to ground by a capacitor (distributed cable-ground cap) you will see a substantial voltage rise at the centre.
This would probably be even worse in saltwater. And possibly there may be both eddy currents *and* straight capacitive coupling into a lossy medium, even worse.
Erm, but pure inductance (or a combination of inductance and capacitance, which any transmission line has) is lossless, isn't it?
I think that the main problem with the inductance of long lines is the I and V getting out of phase, which results in less true power being delivered to the load. In addition, heavy industrial machinery is largely inductive by nature, adding to the problem. The power company monitor changes in phase when connecting stuff up, and add power-factor correction capacitors where neccessary.
The problem with saltwater may be true, in that the AC flowing in the line induces eddy currents in the partially conductive saltwater, which then will heat up, ie contributes a loss. I would think that the higher the power and line length the worse the problem.
Buy a DXR2 card on ebay, plug it in, compile the drivers from Creative's site, and play it with the included app. You can (at the moment) play via the VGA loopback cable (quality's not so hot), or pipe the Video-out to your TV or back into a video capture card, and use XAWTV or KwinTV etc to view it (good quality).
You can use the LiViD project's stuff for software playback, but it's not optimised at all and is quite choppy on a single-processor box. Should get better soon.
It works a lot better if you up the "Tile Cache Size" in preferences (if you have 128M, make it 50-60M or so. 25-30M images are then no prob). You can also add/reduce swapfile usage, although swapping is fairly sluggish unless you're running RAID0 or the like.
Still, CMYK and Pantone would be nice. The latter we may never see (Licensing=$$$). I do believe the former's on the cards. Fingers crossed.
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. The wires will form huge antennas - and even a few watts can be heard on other continents in this frequency range.
Yes, it is a problem. The frequencies used by BPL are capable of propagating half-way around the world, so that Ham in the middle of nowhere may well not be able to hear /anybody/ by the time BPL is widespread.
They can reach the other side of the earth - because they can bounce back and forth between the ionosphere and earth. It's quite feasible to recieve a signal of a few watts from, say, Japan in the UK, especially around twilight.
Feet? I don't think so. Transmitting Coax that will take 2,500V RMS is only about 1/2" diameter. This is assuming the distribution isn't going to over anything but local 110/220V circuits, with fibre to the substations (which I assume is how it works).
14,400 (or whatever the US uses for the next step up) could probably be carried with a slightly larger diameter, say 1.5-2". I think the buried cables are already "sheathed" with steel wire for durability anyway. An extra wrap of Al or Cu would be easy.
Hear hear.
The Alphas were blowing every Intel chip away in FPU and I/O performance even back in 2000. The only trouble was the price - motherboards were exorbitant (especially for dual processors) and you needed a 400W-600W PSU - now very affordable, but back then, PC PSUs were at the most 250-300W.
I got to play with a dual 21164 at about that time. The responsiveness was amazing - and XaoS (real time fractal zoomer) absolutely killed my PIII 500Mhz.
I thought Samsung now had the rights to the EV8 tech? Will they ever release it or just finish the hatchet-job C*ntpaq did?
Sad, sad.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/where/your/lib/i s
ldconfig
extra text here for lameness filter!
Blonds them?
I can see it now - bottle blonde birds raining from the skies. Aren't there enough of them already?
Erm, that's not radiation causing the breakdown into ions. It's the local electric field - you can cause this just as well with DC, and no radiation takes place at DC - just a static e-field is present
The distinction is tricky, but look at it this way: you won't see any ionisation from microwaves travelling through an absorptive medium, such as air or flesh. However, if you take a beta particle or X-ray, you will certainly see electrons being knocked off the atoms as soon as such a photon impinges on one.
The breakdown of the dielectric (in the waveguide, air), is simply the breakdown of the medium's standoff capability caused by excessive voltage - and that can happen with DC, inside a flame, and so on.
Agreed on the nuclear stuff though.
The first line from that "study":
"Break down of the human life energy field or chi."
Sounds exactly like every other bit of quack paranoia on the net!
No, it can't "dislodge atomic structures" - it's not ionising radiation. It might cause some heating if you shoved the antenna through your eyeball and directly into your brain though...
Urm... how is that offtopic?
/properly/ reproduced in the lab there are several anecdotal accounts of people being either killed or shocked by balls of what appears to be ionised and charged gas. My godmother even saw one float straight through a closed window, but luckily it turned and dissipated itself in the wall.
They could be weather balloons ignited by alien discharge-weapon fire after all.
Surely ball lightning is another candidate? Although it's never been
It's still a really contentious area, but not much research is being done on it (except for the wacko free-energy guys on Keelynet who wouldn't recognise peer review even if it hit them squarely in the bollocks). I have a tesla coil mind you - just need a few more Amps on my mains supply to try my hand!
Pah!
;-)
The output of the average flyback is in the 10-25kV range. The capacitance of the tube (the metallised coatings and the glass of the tube form a poor and lossy cap) is in the order of a couple of nanofarads, so you're talking a few hundred millijoules of energy at best (worst?).
I've had a shock at around 2-3 Joules from a 0.06uF cap bank charged to about 7kV, which is a couple of Joules or so (can't be bothered to calculate it), across the chest. It hurt like hell and made me throw the bank across the room, and I was very jittery afterwards, but it's not enough to cause fibrillation. You need double figures for that.
Nevertheless, screwing around with HV can bite you hard, and once you start playing with the big stuff you want to keep one hand behind the back! And the output of my 2kW Tesla coil, I'd never consider a "safe hit"
Started with a 32K BBC "B" (6502 based, tape loading, disks were too pricey!)
Managed to teach myself assembly (after BASIC, the BBC had one of the best BASICs ever, IMHO). I couldn't believe it when my disassembler (written in ASM of course) actually worked. Never mind that I didn't have enough paper to print out the listing of the OS ROM!. One day I'll have to dig it out and see if I can find my proggy...
Hmm, not quite as far as the UK goes... There is no need to qualify to "opt out" of NHS care. Hospitals can do this (ie become "trusts") but they need to show a good level of performance first and prove that commercial backing would provide at least some return). Any person on a decent wage can now afford private health insurance through companies like BUPA for a moderate yearly fee. We're talking about around £200 a year to start. However, NHS care in some hospitals seems to prove better than private care in others (or even the same in the case of trusts). I know wy grandmother complained bitterly about the impersonal treatment she got for two strokes in a private hospital, but after having a pacemaker fitted at the local NHS joint couldn't praise the staff enough... Just goes to show...
Hmm,
At work we have MSI Microstar systems. They aren't much bigger than a book PC, but they have 2 PCI slots and integrated network. i810 based, but you could slam a PCI card in instead.
Hmm, I think he was talking in the past tense, ie "needed to be gutted". They've done more than that, but an x86 release and more parts open-sourced would be nice.
I, for one, found the HOWTOs invaluable, and, yes, I'm self-taught (started about 5 or so years ago). I now have an admin job using (mostly) Linux. They may not always be straightforward, but in working through them you gain a lot more knowledge and excitement about that pile of chips under your desk than you ever would with your bog-standard pre-installed WinBox.
OK, I'm opening up to the troll crowd here, who will inevitably say "But you were'nt *producing* anything while reading HOWTOS, were you?", but hell, I feel the gain. Now, lets apply that to education programmes, such as those in Mexico, and the huge tide of acceptance of Linux in other countries such as Brazil and China (go to the former - every magazine stand will contain about 200 Linux CDs!). The educators suddenly realise that with a little initiative they can whack RH or MDK on some PCs that would die under Win*, get kids using them for the basics (WP, email, etc) and then have all the tools pre-installed to progress to much more advanced tasks, from web design and serving through to full on programming. What better way to increase the national skillset at minimum cost? I think it's great, and despite Gates's mighty charitable donations, nothing can compare to being able to truly 'own'* your own knowledge and software, while sharing it with others.
*By this, I mean not having your working platform and development subject to someone's arbitrary licensing whims, eg, if you write a proggy with our SDK, you can't do x.
Sigh,
/really/ mean anarchy, as in the common interpretation of the word, as opposed to anarch*ism*, the political movement, he may have been nearly right.
I wish I had a point to mod the parent up; however if the previous poster did
I think that OSS is almost a blend of the populist meaning of 'anarchy', in that the fluff eventually gets weeded out, but in terms of its sharing mechanisms and its viewpoint, it's more the 'ism'. Shame we can't get the point across to policymakers, while Allchin gets his oar in and strikes a first (albeit stupid) blow for the establishment...
Sound like your typical anthropologist. They tend to devalue anything from the culture they are studying in this manner. They are always 'looking in' from their own cultural perspective, and their carefully considered opinions will naturally not allow an "un-biased" appreciation.
However, the flipside of this is that looking at an object as "art" is equally imposing our values on that object and the society that generated it. It's easy to see - look at an object in an anthropological museum, and the same in an art gallery - two very different contexts.
This is a problem we simply can't get around, and in some ways, it's arrogant of us to think that we can. It would be great if you could 'forget where you came from', but, sadly, it's impossible.
Hum, I think you've been taken in by the "myth of the artist" a little - the idea of the starving painter in his garret, the senitive poet, the tortured soul.
Art is as much a part of the social and economic matrix as anything else. It is a product both for and of the society around it. It's also big business - certainly in Europe - you only have to look at the the amount of hype and money surrounding such people as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the like. (Although I did love it when Emin appeared on a late night discussion programme horribly drunk!)
The attempt to separate art into a "nether-space" of pure thought or emotion is always doomed to backfire. Look at the way Abstract Expressionism (and its adulation by Greenberg) was usurped by politics, and made into a symbol of "Western Freedom", as opposed to the Social Realism of the USSR, and indeed of thirties US public art. (Much of which is rather good - check out Louis Lozowick, Orozco, Rivera and others).
Going back further, you only have to look to the renaissance - patrons would struggle to comission frescoes and paintings for their chapels and churches. You can see their figures in the works - they've paid for eternal prayer for their souls in mass. And salvation has got to be an enticing product at that time!
Are games much different to that? Just because something is commercial, doesn't deny it art status. Ideas and expressions are currency too...
Duh, forgot about the sheath, which made the SW thing irrelevant. Too much administrivia at work has killed my brain...
Hmm, sounds interesting...
Does the voltage increase due to the formation of an effective low-q resonant circuit with the self-inductance and the large capacitance of the cable? As far as I'm aware, applying a signal source to a capacitor through an impedance should not result in a voltage rise - but if you, say, send the signal through an inductor (line), which is terminated to ground by a capacitor (distributed cable-ground cap) you will see a substantial voltage rise at the centre.
This would probably be even worse in saltwater. And possibly there may be both eddy currents *and* straight capacitive coupling into a lossy medium, even worse.
Thanks for the thoughts...
Erm, but pure inductance (or a combination of inductance and capacitance, which any transmission line has) is lossless, isn't it?
I think that the main problem with the inductance of long lines is the I and V getting out of phase, which results in less true power being delivered to the load. In addition, heavy industrial machinery is largely inductive by nature, adding to the problem. The power company monitor changes in phase when connecting stuff up, and add power-factor correction capacitors where neccessary.
The problem with saltwater may be true, in that the AC flowing in the line induces eddy currents in the partially conductive saltwater, which then will heat up, ie contributes a loss. I would think that the higher the power and line length the worse the problem.
Buy a DXR2 card on ebay, plug it in, compile the drivers from Creative's site, and play it with the included app. You can (at the moment) play via the VGA loopback cable (quality's not so hot), or pipe the Video-out to your TV or back into a video capture card, and use XAWTV or KwinTV etc to view it (good quality).
You can use the LiViD project's stuff for software playback, but it's not optimised at all and is quite choppy on a single-processor box. Should get better soon.
It works a lot better if you up the "Tile Cache Size" in preferences (if you have 128M, make it 50-60M or so. 25-30M images are then no prob). You can also add/reduce swapfile usage, although swapping is fairly sluggish unless you're running RAID0 or the like.
Still, CMYK and Pantone would be nice. The latter we may never see (Licensing=$$$). I do believe the former's on the cards. Fingers crossed.