All the cheap ones I've had apart are. (We used to buy cheap Chinese charging adapters for less than $2, and mark them up to $30 with a "lifetime warranty." Surprisingly few ever came back, and most of those were issues related to cables or connectors.)
You might want to remember that you're the one that pulled that number out of your backside, not me.
Nope, I'm pretty sure that was you: You're the one who said a car charger draws 2 amps. 2A @ 12V = 24 Watts.
Meanwhile, it is reasonably common for mobile cell phone chargers these days to be able to deliver 1A at 5V, or 5 Watts.
24-5=19, last I checked.
And mind you: I was being conservative with your number. A car that is running might be somewhere between 13.8 and 14.4V, it takes some non-zero amount of time for a lead-acid battery to come back to resting voltage, and there are a great number of car chargers out there that can only do 500mA at 5V.....
But if you want me to be as hysteric and flippant about it as you seem prone to doing, we can run the numbers in their worst-case scenario based on your bad assumption of a 2A draw.
Heh. Yeah, because night lights are just like car chargers, AND one or more of them are able to violate the law of conservation. Right?
Tell you what, since you're clearly the superior one: Go find thyself a 20 Watt resistor. It will be a large thing. Feed sufficient current through it that it is dissipating 19 Watts.
Wait a few minutes, and check again: Make sure it's still dissipating 19 Watts now that it is warmed up.
Touch it. It will be hot.
Now wrap it in non-ventilated plastic with poor thermal conductivity (such as is the ABS plastic that is common on cheap Chinese goods) and leave it in your car, such as is the housing for a car charger.
Good luck!
If cheap $2 Chinese car chargers were this bad (which is to say, as bad as you say that they are), indeed: Nobody would buy them. They'd get sick of putting out the fires.
Fortunately for everyone, and as proven daily by millions of users of cheap Chinese car chargers, it's very cheap to make a switching power supply of reasonable efficiency.
But even if they were using a simple and somewhat cheaper linear regulator they'd STILL not be as inefficient as you claim (about 7 Watts of waste heat, instead of the 19 Watts you claim).
BMW, too. My old BMW doesn't have a magnesium block, but does have a magnesium valve cover.
And the front grill supports of a Ford Excursion that I worked on a few years ago: I didn't burn any chunks of it to verify, but that stuff acted very, very strange when drilling.
There's lots of different metals used in cars. Believe it or not, firefighters already know this.
I don't know what to tell you, then, especially if you think a cell phone charger draws "a couple amps." That's 24 Watts in, for a maximum of 5 Watts out. The remaining 19 Watts must be dissipated as heat within the charger itself: What you describe is a fire hazard, not a cell phone charger.
My compact car has a 140A alternator and a rather large battery.
It's not my fault that people buy cars that barely work.
One of the first things that happened in the June 2012 power outage here, which lasted a week, was that the corner gas station brought in a huge portable genset and had it wired to their building. It didn't go off-line again, and operated more-or-less normally (one of the refrigeration compressors died, but the beer was still cold, so they moved the milk and cheese and other perishables over to the beer cave and everyone was happy).
Meanwhile, headline topic is "charge your mobile device with fire." I don't know about your car, but mine will keep a mobile device running for a very long time (at least a week, in my testing) and still be able to start, with the car battery recovering fully in 30 minutes of idling (faster if driving).
How much gas does that use? Unless you tend to run on empty, I might hasten to say: In a developed country, not enough to care about. Even with a temporary gasoline shortage, chances are good that you'll be using the car periodically anyway to go get more food from the grocery store that is has their own generator, or from the Red Cross encampment, or whatever, and the battery can be recharged at that time.
In a longer-term outage (weeks/months), it still doesn't matter much, as long as you've still got enough gas to go "acquire" more ammunition and gasoline.
YMMV, but I've got a very conservative month worth of mobile-device charging sitting in the driveway at all times without doing anything special.
Hmm... an array of BioLites... & Tesla car... sticks & twigs propulsion!
Isn't steam power easier?
That said:
Folks in Germany were using sticks & twigs propulsion on their cars during the war, when petroleum was unavailable to them, using the same internal combustion engines that they had run on gasoline previously. Google "Wood Gas" for more.
It goes something like this:
1. Make a vehicle-mounted anaerobic wood burner to smoulder wood in. 2. Feed the resultant oxygen-deprived flammable gas to the carburetor, where it mixes with air and becomes even more volatile. 3. Spark happens, ignition occurs, pistons move, crank turns. 4. Run errands, deliver sheep to market, etc.
I suppose that, depending on construction, you could also get charcoal as a by-product. This can be used in a primary chamber to heat the wood gas-generating secondary, or maybe cook a meal once you get back home. Or, you know: Sell it.
The camp stoves are cool: A buddy of mine has one. Probably is a useful thing for camping, but I don't think I'd care to have one around the house or office.
My own emergency charging rig is simpler, in that it does not require fire: A small, cheap solar panel, and a cheap OEM microusb car charger that is happy with up to 24V.
For night-time use, I also keep an inexpensive jump-start pack charged and ready. It can keep phones charging for a long, long time, or can run small power tools from an inverter in a pinch. I have a 12V CFL light with a long cord that I keep in the car for emergencies, and it will keep that thing going strong for hours.
I can also recharge its SLA battery from the solar panel.
We were without power for a week in June 2012, as was much of the region. It was an interesting time finding/wrangling fuel, dealing with a heat wave, trying to minimize use of a generator, and trying to keep the food (and the beer) cold....but charging phones, day or night, was never a problem with the above kit.
More recently, I've picked up an inexpensive USB backup battery. It's a cute little gizmo, and there are many others like it. This one is special because it has a solar panel of its own (which is nearly-worthless except to prevent self-discharge), and has an adjustable voltage output: I can set it to 12V and power a home router-box or a switch or some other small thing.
And each part of the kit is also useful by itself, for other things (the USB battery lives in the car, and it's been very useful to save a dying Droid more than once: I can charge my Droid 4 from near-flat to full at least twice from it).
A camp stove with a 5V USB socket really only seems useful for camping, since fire is required. And without tallying it all up, I'm inclined to say that my kit (solar panel, one big battery, one small battery, and an adapter) is cheaper and more versatile.
Guess what? You set the bar pretty low: at only 10 miles a day, you must've had lots of spare time. (I've done my share of backpacking, myself.)
Meanwhile, the road IS marked. It is named, has signs at intersections, and it is on the map (though not the particular viewpoint I linked). It is maintained with public money. It does not have paint on the shoulder, but I do not understand how a couple of white lines makes any difference to its function as a roadway.
It's not my fault that you can't read a map and glean from it the purpose of the roads there.
From the headline alone, before I even read the first sentence, I knew this had to be about England.
Only in England, it seems, do stories about people actually driving down cowpaths, fording rivers, and (apparently) crossing runways "because the GPS said so" originate.
(That said, I know of one airport in the US where the end of the runway intersects with the main road. There are signs in each direction advising drivers to yield to aircraft.)
When I'm waiting for an application to do whatever that application is doing, and that application is only using one core, then yes, I really do need it to use more than one core.
To suggest otherwise is also to suggest that computers are fast enough, and that general-purpose computing is a solved problem.
I don't think we're anywhere near that point just yet.
I remember being around that age. I'd stay up playing one of the Dooms or Quake or somesuch other Carmack thing, single-player.
I got a mod called Kujo. It was a companion dog who would fiercely attack enemies upon command.
After a few nights of rather terrifying dreams revolving around a huge, horribly pixelated, bloody hound shaped from too-few polygons running around and killing actual people, I decided to stop playing that game in that way.
That said, I've never once had a problem with dreams about running over prostitutes or clubbing a squad of police officers to death after a late-night session of GTA.
If the foot slips off the brake for any reason, the car will propel itself forward while the driver likely has no hands on the steering wheel, and is distracted by their phone. You might think that scenario unlikely, but if someone even bumps the back of your car gently, your foot is going to come off the brake and you are now going into the car in front of you
My (manual) car got rear-ended recently at a red light.
What happened: The bitchy old lady behind me took her foot off of the brake and rolled her car gently into the back of my car. Very light damage.
What did not happen: My own foot coming off of the brake. Indeed, my car did not budge.
I was also rear-ended many years ago, at somewhat higher speed, also while stopped at a red light. Fast car hit stopped car which hit my car.
Middle car got badly crushed on both ends: It wouldn't have matter much how much pressure they were applying to the brake pedal; it was going to be moved. My (automatic) car didn't budge. Foot stayed on brake.
(Yeah, I know. Anecdotes. But anecdotes always trump blind conjecture.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you sure are the same evilviper that I had discourse with awhile back.
Do you have friends?
Also, where do you live, crazy Internet person?
All the cheap ones I've had apart are. (We used to buy cheap Chinese charging adapters for less than $2, and mark them up to $30 with a "lifetime warranty." Surprisingly few ever came back, and most of those were issues related to cables or connectors.)
Nope, I'm pretty sure that was you: You're the one who said a car charger draws 2 amps. 2A @ 12V = 24 Watts.
Meanwhile, it is reasonably common for mobile cell phone chargers these days to be able to deliver 1A at 5V, or 5 Watts.
24-5=19, last I checked.
And mind you: I was being conservative with your number. A car that is running might be somewhere between 13.8 and 14.4V, it takes some non-zero amount of time for a lead-acid battery to come back to resting voltage, and there are a great number of car chargers out there that can only do 500mA at 5V.....
But if you want me to be as hysteric and flippant about it as you seem prone to doing, we can run the numbers in their worst-case scenario based on your bad assumption of a 2A draw.
*shrug*
Heh. Yeah, because night lights are just like car chargers, AND one or more of them are able to violate the law of conservation. Right?
Tell you what, since you're clearly the superior one: Go find thyself a 20 Watt resistor. It will be a large thing. Feed sufficient current through it that it is dissipating 19 Watts.
Wait a few minutes, and check again: Make sure it's still dissipating 19 Watts now that it is warmed up.
Touch it. It will be hot.
Now wrap it in non-ventilated plastic with poor thermal conductivity (such as is the ABS plastic that is common on cheap Chinese goods) and leave it in your car, such as is the housing for a car charger.
Good luck!
If cheap $2 Chinese car chargers were this bad (which is to say, as bad as you say that they are), indeed: Nobody would buy them. They'd get sick of putting out the fires.
Fortunately for everyone, and as proven daily by millions of users of cheap Chinese car chargers, it's very cheap to make a switching power supply of reasonable efficiency.
But even if they were using a simple and somewhat cheaper linear regulator they'd STILL not be as inefficient as you claim (about 7 Watts of waste heat, instead of the 19 Watts you claim).
It does if you want to give yourself a raise without having anyone be able to say "No, stop that."
BMW, too. My old BMW doesn't have a magnesium block, but does have a magnesium valve cover.
And the front grill supports of a Ford Excursion that I worked on a few years ago: I didn't burn any chunks of it to verify, but that stuff acted very, very strange when drilling.
There's lots of different metals used in cars. Believe it or not, firefighters already know this.
TSIA.
I don't know what to tell you, then, especially if you think a cell phone charger draws "a couple amps." That's 24 Watts in, for a maximum of 5 Watts out. The remaining 19 Watts must be dissipated as heat within the charger itself: What you describe is a fire hazard, not a cell phone charger.
My compact car has a 140A alternator and a rather large battery.
It's not my fault that people buy cars that barely work.
One of the first things that happened in the June 2012 power outage here, which lasted a week, was that the corner gas station brought in a huge portable genset and had it wired to their building. It didn't go off-line again, and operated more-or-less normally (one of the refrigeration compressors died, but the beer was still cold, so they moved the milk and cheese and other perishables over to the beer cave and everyone was happy).
Meanwhile, headline topic is "charge your mobile device with fire." I don't know about your car, but mine will keep a mobile device running for a very long time (at least a week, in my testing) and still be able to start, with the car battery recovering fully in 30 minutes of idling (faster if driving).
How much gas does that use? Unless you tend to run on empty, I might hasten to say: In a developed country, not enough to care about. Even with a temporary gasoline shortage, chances are good that you'll be using the car periodically anyway to go get more food from the grocery store that is has their own generator, or from the Red Cross encampment, or whatever, and the battery can be recharged at that time.
In a longer-term outage (weeks/months), it still doesn't matter much, as long as you've still got enough gas to go "acquire" more ammunition and gasoline.
YMMV, but I've got a very conservative month worth of mobile-device charging sitting in the driveway at all times without doing anything special.
Isn't steam power easier?
That said:
Folks in Germany were using sticks & twigs propulsion on their cars during the war, when petroleum was unavailable to them, using the same internal combustion engines that they had run on gasoline previously. Google "Wood Gas" for more.
It goes something like this:
1. Make a vehicle-mounted anaerobic wood burner to smoulder wood in.
2. Feed the resultant oxygen-deprived flammable gas to the carburetor, where it mixes with air and becomes even more volatile.
3. Spark happens, ignition occurs, pistons move, crank turns.
4. Run errands, deliver sheep to market, etc.
I suppose that, depending on construction, you could also get charcoal as a by-product. This can be used in a primary chamber to heat the wood gas-generating secondary, or maybe cook a meal once you get back home. Or, you know: Sell it.
The camp stoves are cool: A buddy of mine has one. Probably is a useful thing for camping, but I don't think I'd care to have one around the house or office.
My own emergency charging rig is simpler, in that it does not require fire: A small, cheap solar panel, and a cheap OEM microusb car charger that is happy with up to 24V.
For night-time use, I also keep an inexpensive jump-start pack charged and ready. It can keep phones charging for a long, long time, or can run small power tools from an inverter in a pinch. I have a 12V CFL light with a long cord that I keep in the car for emergencies, and it will keep that thing going strong for hours.
I can also recharge its SLA battery from the solar panel.
We were without power for a week in June 2012, as was much of the region. It was an interesting time finding/wrangling fuel, dealing with a heat wave, trying to minimize use of a generator, and trying to keep the food (and the beer) cold....but charging phones, day or night, was never a problem with the above kit.
More recently, I've picked up an inexpensive USB backup battery. It's a cute little gizmo, and there are many others like it. This one is special because it has a solar panel of its own (which is nearly-worthless except to prevent self-discharge), and has an adjustable voltage output: I can set it to 12V and power a home router-box or a switch or some other small thing.
And each part of the kit is also useful by itself, for other things (the USB battery lives in the car, and it's been very useful to save a dying Droid more than once: I can charge my Droid 4 from near-flat to full at least twice from it).
A camp stove with a 5V USB socket really only seems useful for camping, since fire is required. And without tallying it all up, I'm inclined to say that my kit (solar panel, one big battery, one small battery, and an adapter) is cheaper and more versatile.
"ubuntu"
Because your common sense is worth more than my common sense.
Because you said so.
Guess what? You set the bar pretty low: at only 10 miles a day, you must've had lots of spare time. (I've done my share of backpacking, myself.)
Meanwhile, the road IS marked. It is named, has signs at intersections, and it is on the map (though not the particular viewpoint I linked). It is maintained with public money. It does not have paint on the shoulder, but I do not understand how a couple of white lines makes any difference to its function as a roadway.
It's not my fault that you can't read a map and glean from it the purpose of the roads there.
You need to get out of the city sometime, kid. There's lots about the world that you're sure you know all about, but really don't have any clue about.
It is compared to the other roads on the island. Remember, everything is relative. It sure isn't Lakeshore Drive, but then it's not Chicago, either.
It is also the Eastern-most north-south thoroughfare; every other north-south road on that side of the island is bifurcated by the runway.
Thus, whether you like it or not, it is a main road. If it were to somehow disappear one day, many (more minor) other roads would become isolated.
To use a tree analogy: Even a very small tree tends to have a few main branches.
Stop trying to confuse the issue with your facts. I already said I KNOW this story is from England and I didn't even read the first sentence!
What do you expect from me? That I'd actually read TFS?
You must be new here.
You think that was pain? Try it with a Gravis UltraSound.
From the headline alone, before I even read the first sentence, I knew this had to be about England.
Only in England, it seems, do stories about people actually driving down cowpaths, fording rivers, and (apparently) crossing runways "because the GPS said so" originate.
(That said, I know of one airport in the US where the end of the runway intersects with the main road. There are signs in each direction advising drivers to yield to aircraft.)
When I'm waiting for an application to do whatever that application is doing, and that application is only using one core, then yes, I really do need it to use more than one core.
To suggest otherwise is also to suggest that computers are fast enough, and that general-purpose computing is a solved problem.
I don't think we're anywhere near that point just yet.
I remember being around that age. I'd stay up playing one of the Dooms or Quake or somesuch other Carmack thing, single-player.
I got a mod called Kujo. It was a companion dog who would fiercely attack enemies upon command.
After a few nights of rather terrifying dreams revolving around a huge, horribly pixelated, bloody hound shaped from too-few polygons running around and killing actual people, I decided to stop playing that game in that way.
That said, I've never once had a problem with dreams about running over prostitutes or clubbing a squad of police officers to death after a late-night session of GTA.
My (manual) car got rear-ended recently at a red light.
What happened: The bitchy old lady behind me took her foot off of the brake and rolled her car gently into the back of my car. Very light damage.
What did not happen: My own foot coming off of the brake. Indeed, my car did not budge.
I was also rear-ended many years ago, at somewhat higher speed, also while stopped at a red light. Fast car hit stopped car which hit my car.
Middle car got badly crushed on both ends: It wouldn't have matter much how much pressure they were applying to the brake pedal; it was going to be moved. My (automatic) car didn't budge. Foot stayed on brake.
(Yeah, I know. Anecdotes. But anecdotes always trump blind conjecture.)
Well, it could be funny-queer as in homosexual, or funny-queer as in strange.
Funnily enough, queer is also a funny word.
Despite what you think, all of what you say is funny.
Some of it is funny ha-ha, and the rest is funny-queer.
Funny's a funny word.
Which MSFT hardware has "more ports than anyone else"?
Certainly not current-gen hardware, nor the generation before that. So what, then? Please be specific.