But you don't need to know what the units are demanding in order to flatten them out: You can just flatten them.
A dozen or 15 years ago (before I'd ever even heard the term) I saw my first "smart grid" installation: It was an automatic, radio-controlled shutoff on an electric water heater. During peak demand, the local utility had the ability to signal the water heater to turn off for a period. And he received a discount on his bill just for having the device installed.
This was done using a simple and well-understood 1-way paging network.
That said: Handwaving aside, 3 minutes per hour (5%) on AC loads alone isn't going to make a lick of difference, since much of that will be eaten up by the reduction of efficiency of the AC systems themselves from being cycled. 10% -might- help the grid a bit, and 20% certainly would, but by that point we're back into the realm of folks being very inconvenienced by the concept.
Telling people that on the hottest days when they need their AC to work at 100% in order to maintain a comfortable home that the very best they'll get is 80% doesn't sound like a very popular plan at all.
Simply charging them more for peak usage might work, as long as the customers themselves able to decide for themselves whether they'd rather sweat more or pay more.
But I'm old-fashioned: I think if the grid can't keep up, then that simply means that there's excess market demand for power. This can be profitably dealt with by raising prices accordingly, improving supply and distribution in order to meet the demand, or some combination of both. (I think this concept is called "capitalism.")
Not to rain on your efforts, which are similar what I'm doing at my own ancient house (though I also put in at least 1 run of good coax), but:
I thought the whole point of whole-house audio was to eliminate clutter in the form of extra boxes being scattered around, including speakers. With wall-mounted binding posts, you've still got passive speakers sitting around in boxes, with exposed wiring leading from them to the binding posts.
Which, as a practical matter, isn't much different in terms of clutter than a pair of powered speakers with baluns to send the line-level audio over your copious Cat6 cable. (It -might- be cheaper one way or the other depending on the price of copper and the gauge you use, but...)
So, if running speaker wire: Would it not be better to leave the cables coiled in a convenient spot in the ceiling (or wherever), ready for built-in speakers to be cut in at some point in the future?
And none of this says anything about the added resistance of the installed cable, which low impedance (ie: common 4-8 Ohm) speakers don't particularly like.
I'm sure you've thought this through, and again I'm not trying to dissuade you in any way. I'm just curious what your thoughts are.
You cannot make a reliable connection to plugs on another adjacent phase.
"Cannot" is a strong word which really seams inappropriate, considering that just capacitively coupling the phases together works nicely to permit data transfer between them.
At the home level in the US, this simply requires a couple of appropriate breakers and/or fuses, a bit of wire, a capacitor, and a grounded metal enclosure to house it in. Such a device could easily be manufactured and tested by UL or another safety agency, packed into a plug-sized device that could be installed in any available 220V outlet, and sell quite profitably at just a few dollars (if there were any market for it, which there isn't).
Meanwhile on conventional split-phase power (as common in the US) things are likely to be resistively coupled some or of the time by various unrelated 220V appliances, which is potentially even better.
But I think the point was not that it is difficult to get data between phases at a local level, but instead that it's difficult to get data to go across a transformer without physically modifying their installations: Transformers of the sort that you see hanging off of poles by the side of the road simply resist high frequencies very, very well -- by design.
But even once you've modified things so that data can sneak past, you still really piss off anyone who uses radio, since power lines are all kinds of leaky at frequencies of a few tens-of-kHz on up.
So, in summary: Yes, it can be done. But it's not being done on a grand scale for two reasons: It's expensive (non-free) to implement, and it's a liability hazard due to the interference that it inherently produces.
And whatever the case, getting data to flow passively between the 3-phases of power that generating stations produce is a stupid idea anyway: If successful in doing so (which again, is easy) you end up with one third of the potential bandwidth that you'd have if you'd not bothered.
At the local level, things don't actually work that way.
Worst case, on the very hottest days the AC will run at exactly 100% duty cycle if it is sized properly. (Helpful hint: "Sized properly" means having the thing run at 100% at least some of the time, because doing so is the most efficient way of doing things in terms of both electrical usage and equipment wear. HVAC systems are simply not designed with 33% duty cycles being a design goal.)
So either the local wiring stays the same (must supply 2000 amps, in your example) whether the grid is "smart" or not, or people get quite warm inside of their airconditioned dwellings as power is rationed away from the AC.
Clearly the machine had too much capability for the job at hand, and needed to be pared down to its real strengths. Limited by having too much functionality, the extraneous functions were (literally) snipped out for the greater good.
That those functions were never used is more an impetus for their removal than anything else. And while such functionality could potentially be useful to someone else, this is irrelevant because the Creator (Himself) does not need such functionality.
Therefore, using such functionality is heresy. And no good Engineer (let alone a Creator) wants to promote heresy.
(Said cable-wrecker has almost certainly taken a job at Apple in subsequent years.)
I think his experience predates both ALSA and KDE.
Way-back-then, the kernel's own OSS drivers generally just worked unless if you had something particularly strange or wanted to do unusual things with it, in which case 4front would be pleased to sell you inexpensive drivers (with human support).
My own experience was similar: Windows 95, for whatever reason, had a terrible time playing music -- FFS, it'd slow to a crawl just by copying a floppy disk. OS/2 did OK in that it at least multitasked properly, but had other limitations that I didn't like. Linux just worked: It played music reliably and predictably.
(Incidentally, I now use 7 on my desktop for exactly the same reasons.)
If I recall the feel and heft of the things correctly (it's been awhile), I believe that the old PB keyboards were made by NMB.
My own favorite keyboards are old NMB models: They're quiet, they feel nice, and they're reliable even after enough keypresses to wear the tits off of F and J, and I can type fast on them. (YMMV, obviously).
Compaq also used them with their own branding, back in the day.
I live in flat country. The terrain here is essentially non-existent.
We can sled down the side of an overpass next to a park, but the park closes at dusk (which makes it basically closed all winter for those who work during the day). Snowmen are fun to build, but they lose their edge after one has put together a couple of 10-foot-tall epic snowmen: The little ones just aren't very fun after that.
So, as far as money is concerned: Netflix is cheap, and most of the things you mention are expensive because they're non-local, or impractical. (Where am I supposed to go cross-country skiing, exactly: Dodging cars down a rural road consisting of patchy ice, asphalt, and packed snow...or across a seemingly-endless field of corn stubble? Seriously, a Nordic Trac sounds like more fun, and I'm in no hurry to procure one of those.)
Radio encryption is easy to get around: You don't need to crack it or break it or do anything particularly clever, you just have to get your hands on a radio capable of encryption that has the correct keys loaded into it.
Step two: There is no step two. The encryption game is over, at least for the duration of today's situation. Terrorists win!
How does a criminal get ahold of an appropriate radio? They can always do it the old-fashioned way and just steal one, or they can bribe/blackmail someone into getting one for them.
For example, I (personally) have access to such radios with keys appropriate for my locality, and the software and cabling to program such a radio in any manner I see fit, all very legitimately (it's part of my job). I can program a suitable radio from off-the-shelf state to being ready to use for all manner of mischief in less than 10 minutes, and much of that will be spend just waiting for the laptop to boot up and for the software to load.
And while I believe I would resist any attempt to get me to cooperate with a criminal in such matters very well, I cannot say with any great certainty that I would never cooperate -- even though it would (at least) be a career-changing decision on my part.
I think it was me that was keeping Radio Shack alive. I, until very recently, used to buy 1:1 audio isolation transformers exclusively from Radio Shack. They were about $4, which is very reasonable for quantities of 1, and were of consistent quality for decades. (They get used for projects at work, so I try to keep a few around.)
Why have I stopped buying them there? Because approximately 1 month ago, they stopped carrying that part and do not list a replacement.
I have subsequently noticed that the Radio Shack in the mall has closed. Coincidence?
No, actually: It doesn't make me question their overall commitment to quality. I understand that it takes multiple people working in multiple departments to design and sell such a device. The marketer's grasp of English says nothing about the engineer's grasp of circuitry.
And given the level of support you get from about company on almost any product in this price range, I don't really see how it could get much worse.
I've been burned more times on smoothly-marketed devices which turned out to be absolute crap, than on poorly-marketed devices which actually work.
YMMV, but I've been better off ever since I started completely disregarding everything that sounds like salesman-speak and paying attention to facts instead.
As long as "many" is greater than "few," but no more than 2, and "few" is equal to 1, then "many core" makes perfect sense: It means exactly 2.
It's just Chinglish.
To translate: "7 inch Android 2.3 tablet with capacitive TFT touch screen, multiple A10 cores (which are fantastic!) at 1.5GHz, 512MB of RAM, and 2160p decoding of 3D video. Also includes Flash 10.3 and Wifi."
Is it really so hard?
I've bought wire from Wonderful Cable before, and motherboards from Diamond Flower Inc, and all were fine products. If someone offered me a chance to get a great deal on widgets from Super Happy Flower Star in Shanghai, I'd give it a look.
I'd also be pleased to buy a tablet from a company offering "Allwinner Many Core" CPUs, if it makes any sense at all and the price were right.
*shrug*
Not everyone, believe it or not, is able to produce useful English marketing text.
well, not quite, as I'm seriously doubt they are putting speaker to microphone here, no more like a cable direct from headphone jack to microphone jack. Same concept but no accoustic coupling technically speaking and a lot less interference/things that could go wrong.
well, technically speaking, what would it be called?
I'm seriously doubt they'd just call it a "modem," no more like obvious.
Meanwhile, USB3 disk docks are faster than tape, cost about $100, and take $150 2TB "cartridges".
Ew.
The less opportunity a layperson has to handle a bare hard drive, the better.
I highly recommend any of the seemingly millions of dedicated USB2/3/eSATA enclosures, and 2.5" laptop (not "enterprise") drives instead, with 3.5" enclosures beyond a close second.
A 2.5" hard drive in an enclosure is something your boss can take home with him. He can leave it on the dashboard of his truck over the weekend in the extremes of winter or summer, and it won't care when his wife shoves it into the glovebox because she's sick of looking at it.
Bare drives, however, are just asking for trouble.
Even then, I'd trust a cheap aluminum box over a static bag, any day. The laptop drives themselves are generally awfully stout these days when they're not spinning and the heads are parked, but there's occasionally some componentry on the back side which is best left undisturbed.
Not to mention ESD when handling the thing at its destination. I try to be careful about such things, but I don't expect my boss or the receptionist to be that way....and the less hands-on I have to be with backups, the happier I am.
Once seated inside a cheap, rigid, conductive box, with a USB interface to buffer electrical abuse, they're up for about any sort of normal/somewhat rough handling. We use cheesy boxes that are just like the one I linked, and while we've had a drive begin to fail over the past few years, the enclosures have all survived fine. Which is really pretty remarkable, I think, for the amount of money they don't cost.
Also afaict linux raid can support raid1 sets with more than two drives. So you can mirror onto a drive for backup purposes while still having two drives in the live system at all times.
Oh, hogwash! Everyone knows that RAID is not a backup solution!!!
Actually, I have used the Linux md driver to duplicate disks before. It works very well on a live system, whereas most things simply don't. And it's perfectly happy to make a RAID 1 set with about as many devices as you feel like, including 1.
I have had 300GB-ish hard drives that were submerged in river water for a few days come back to life and work just fine, after a good drying. I had very little faith in them when I pulled the tops off, and even less when they dried out and silt was left on the platters, but they did work long enough to duplicate them without errors.
And nevermind the many thumb drives and SD cards that my wife has washed and dried for me over the years, which don't seem to mind the process at all.
So I guess if I have something to add, it's just that (in my experience) water isn't as damaging to (unpowered) electronics and digital media as it seems that it should be.
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But you don't need to know what the units are demanding in order to flatten them out: You can just flatten them.
A dozen or 15 years ago (before I'd ever even heard the term) I saw my first "smart grid" installation: It was an automatic, radio-controlled shutoff on an electric water heater. During peak demand, the local utility had the ability to signal the water heater to turn off for a period. And he received a discount on his bill just for having the device installed.
This was done using a simple and well-understood 1-way paging network.
That said: Handwaving aside, 3 minutes per hour (5%) on AC loads alone isn't going to make a lick of difference, since much of that will be eaten up by the reduction of efficiency of the AC systems themselves from being cycled. 10% -might- help the grid a bit, and 20% certainly would, but by that point we're back into the realm of folks being very inconvenienced by the concept.
Telling people that on the hottest days when they need their AC to work at 100% in order to maintain a comfortable home that the very best they'll get is 80% doesn't sound like a very popular plan at all.
Simply charging them more for peak usage might work, as long as the customers themselves able to decide for themselves whether they'd rather sweat more or pay more.
But I'm old-fashioned: I think if the grid can't keep up, then that simply means that there's excess market demand for power. This can be profitably dealt with by raising prices accordingly, improving supply and distribution in order to meet the demand, or some combination of both. (I think this concept is called "capitalism.")
Not to rain on your efforts, which are similar what I'm doing at my own ancient house (though I also put in at least 1 run of good coax), but:
I thought the whole point of whole-house audio was to eliminate clutter in the form of extra boxes being scattered around, including speakers. With wall-mounted binding posts, you've still got passive speakers sitting around in boxes, with exposed wiring leading from them to the binding posts.
Which, as a practical matter, isn't much different in terms of clutter than a pair of powered speakers with baluns to send the line-level audio over your copious Cat6 cable. (It -might- be cheaper one way or the other depending on the price of copper and the gauge you use, but...)
So, if running speaker wire: Would it not be better to leave the cables coiled in a convenient spot in the ceiling (or wherever), ready for built-in speakers to be cut in at some point in the future?
And none of this says anything about the added resistance of the installed cable, which low impedance (ie: common 4-8 Ohm) speakers don't particularly like.
I'm sure you've thought this through, and again I'm not trying to dissuade you in any way. I'm just curious what your thoughts are.
"Cannot" is a strong word which really seams inappropriate, considering that just capacitively coupling the phases together works nicely to permit data transfer between them.
At the home level in the US, this simply requires a couple of appropriate breakers and/or fuses, a bit of wire, a capacitor, and a grounded metal enclosure to house it in. Such a device could easily be manufactured and tested by UL or another safety agency, packed into a plug-sized device that could be installed in any available 220V outlet, and sell quite profitably at just a few dollars (if there were any market for it, which there isn't).
Meanwhile on conventional split-phase power (as common in the US) things are likely to be resistively coupled some or of the time by various unrelated 220V appliances, which is potentially even better.
But I think the point was not that it is difficult to get data between phases at a local level, but instead that it's difficult to get data to go across a transformer without physically modifying their installations: Transformers of the sort that you see hanging off of poles by the side of the road simply resist high frequencies very, very well -- by design.
But even once you've modified things so that data can sneak past, you still really piss off anyone who uses radio, since power lines are all kinds of leaky at frequencies of a few tens-of-kHz on up.
So, in summary: Yes, it can be done. But it's not being done on a grand scale for two reasons: It's expensive (non-free) to implement, and it's a liability hazard due to the interference that it inherently produces.
And whatever the case, getting data to flow passively between the 3-phases of power that generating stations produce is a stupid idea anyway: If successful in doing so (which again, is easy) you end up with one third of the potential bandwidth that you'd have if you'd not bothered.
At the local level, things don't actually work that way.
Worst case, on the very hottest days the AC will run at exactly 100% duty cycle if it is sized properly. (Helpful hint: "Sized properly" means having the thing run at 100% at least some of the time, because doing so is the most efficient way of doing things in terms of both electrical usage and equipment wear. HVAC systems are simply not designed with 33% duty cycles being a design goal.)
So either the local wiring stays the same (must supply 2000 amps, in your example) whether the grid is "smart" or not, or people get quite warm inside of their airconditioned dwellings as power is rationed away from the AC.
Clearly the machine had too much capability for the job at hand, and needed to be pared down to its real strengths. Limited by having too much functionality, the extraneous functions were (literally) snipped out for the greater good.
That those functions were never used is more an impetus for their removal than anything else. And while such functionality could potentially be useful to someone else, this is irrelevant because the Creator (Himself) does not need such functionality.
Therefore, using such functionality is heresy. And no good Engineer (let alone a Creator) wants to promote heresy.
(Said cable-wrecker has almost certainly taken a job at Apple in subsequent years.)
Er. Uh. HP was making laser printers well before the release of Windows 95.
The Laserjet III is a good example of a modern (as in: able to rasterize vectors with ease) laser printer. It dates to 1990.
HP actually started producing laser printers about a half-decade before even that.
I think his experience predates both ALSA and KDE.
Way-back-then, the kernel's own OSS drivers generally just worked unless if you had something particularly strange or wanted to do unusual things with it, in which case 4front would be pleased to sell you inexpensive drivers (with human support).
My own experience was similar: Windows 95, for whatever reason, had a terrible time playing music -- FFS, it'd slow to a crawl just by copying a floppy disk. OS/2 did OK in that it at least multitasked properly, but had other limitations that I didn't like. Linux just worked: It played music reliably and predictably.
(Incidentally, I now use 7 on my desktop for exactly the same reasons.)
Er. Wow.
And I thought the current stint amongst pre-fab gaming manufacturers of using RAID 0 was bad.
If I recall the feel and heft of the things correctly (it's been awhile), I believe that the old PB keyboards were made by NMB.
My own favorite keyboards are old NMB models: They're quiet, they feel nice, and they're reliable even after enough keypresses to wear the tits off of F and J, and I can type fast on them. (YMMV, obviously).
Compaq also used them with their own branding, back in the day.
I live in flat country. The terrain here is essentially non-existent.
We can sled down the side of an overpass next to a park, but the park closes at dusk (which makes it basically closed all winter for those who work during the day). Snowmen are fun to build, but they lose their edge after one has put together a couple of 10-foot-tall epic snowmen: The little ones just aren't very fun after that.
So, as far as money is concerned: Netflix is cheap, and most of the things you mention are expensive because they're non-local, or impractical. (Where am I supposed to go cross-country skiing, exactly: Dodging cars down a rural road consisting of patchy ice, asphalt, and packed snow...or across a seemingly-endless field of corn stubble? Seriously, a Nordic Trac sounds like more fun, and I'm in no hurry to procure one of those.)
Right. And some people look at Playboy just for the articles.
It doesn't matter.
Radio encryption is easy to get around: You don't need to crack it or break it or do anything particularly clever, you just have to get your hands on a radio capable of encryption that has the correct keys loaded into it.
Step two: There is no step two. The encryption game is over, at least for the duration of today's situation. Terrorists win!
How does a criminal get ahold of an appropriate radio? They can always do it the old-fashioned way and just steal one, or they can bribe/blackmail someone into getting one for them.
For example, I (personally) have access to such radios with keys appropriate for my locality, and the software and cabling to program such a radio in any manner I see fit, all very legitimately (it's part of my job). I can program a suitable radio from off-the-shelf state to being ready to use for all manner of mischief in less than 10 minutes, and much of that will be spend just waiting for the laptop to boot up and for the software to load.
And while I believe I would resist any attempt to get me to cooperate with a criminal in such matters very well, I cannot say with any great certainty that I would never cooperate -- even though it would (at least) be a career-changing decision on my part.
I'm still only human.
Just saying...
Hmm.
I think it was me that was keeping Radio Shack alive. I, until very recently, used to buy 1:1 audio isolation transformers exclusively from Radio Shack. They were about $4, which is very reasonable for quantities of 1, and were of consistent quality for decades. (They get used for projects at work, so I try to keep a few around.)
Why have I stopped buying them there? Because approximately 1 month ago, they stopped carrying that part and do not list a replacement.
I have subsequently noticed that the Radio Shack in the mall has closed. Coincidence?
It is?
No, actually: It doesn't make me question their overall commitment to quality. I understand that it takes multiple people working in multiple departments to design and sell such a device. The marketer's grasp of English says nothing about the engineer's grasp of circuitry.
And given the level of support you get from about company on almost any product in this price range, I don't really see how it could get much worse.
I've been burned more times on smoothly-marketed devices which turned out to be absolute crap, than on poorly-marketed devices which actually work.
YMMV, but I've been better off ever since I started completely disregarding everything that sounds like salesman-speak and paying attention to facts instead.
As long as "many" is greater than "few," but no more than 2, and "few" is equal to 1, then "many core" makes perfect sense: It means exactly 2.
It's just Chinglish.
To translate: "7 inch Android 2.3 tablet with capacitive TFT touch screen, multiple A10 cores (which are fantastic!) at 1.5GHz, 512MB of RAM, and 2160p decoding of 3D video. Also includes Flash 10.3 and Wifi."
Is it really so hard?
I've bought wire from Wonderful Cable before, and motherboards from Diamond Flower Inc, and all were fine products. If someone offered me a chance to get a great deal on widgets from Super Happy Flower Star in Shanghai, I'd give it a look.
I'd also be pleased to buy a tablet from a company offering "Allwinner Many Core" CPUs, if it makes any sense at all and the price were right.
*shrug*
Not everyone, believe it or not, is able to produce useful English marketing text.
Which differs from the definition of a modem...how, exactly?
well, technically speaking, what would it be called?
I'm seriously doubt they'd just call it a "modem," no more like obvious.
(also. How is babby formed?)
My A855 Droid does perfectly OK with less RAM than either of those figures.
Just saying.
wine: Something that appreciates in value as your willingness to say "Oh, now that's interesting!" increases.
Yes. That would be fair.
Life isn't fair, though. If it were, things would be very boring indeed.
Agree with everything you say, but:
Ew.
The less opportunity a layperson has to handle a bare hard drive, the better.
I highly recommend any of the seemingly millions of dedicated USB2/3/eSATA enclosures, and 2.5" laptop (not "enterprise") drives instead, with 3.5" enclosures beyond a close second.
A 2.5" hard drive in an enclosure is something your boss can take home with him. He can leave it on the dashboard of his truck over the weekend in the extremes of winter or summer, and it won't care when his wife shoves it into the glovebox because she's sick of looking at it.
Bare drives, however, are just asking for trouble.
Even then, I'd trust a cheap aluminum box over a static bag, any day. The laptop drives themselves are generally awfully stout these days when they're not spinning and the heads are parked, but there's occasionally some componentry on the back side which is best left undisturbed.
Not to mention ESD when handling the thing at its destination. I try to be careful about such things, but I don't expect my boss or the receptionist to be that way....and the less hands-on I have to be with backups, the happier I am.
Once seated inside a cheap, rigid, conductive box, with a USB interface to buffer electrical abuse, they're up for about any sort of normal/somewhat rough handling. We use cheesy boxes that are just like the one I linked, and while we've had a drive begin to fail over the past few years, the enclosures have all survived fine. Which is really pretty remarkable, I think, for the amount of money they don't cost.
Oh, hogwash! Everyone knows that RAID is not a backup solution!!!
Actually, I have used the Linux md driver to duplicate disks before. It works very well on a live system, whereas most things simply don't. And it's perfectly happy to make a RAID 1 set with about as many devices as you feel like, including 1.
I have had 300GB-ish hard drives that were submerged in river water for a few days come back to life and work just fine, after a good drying. I had very little faith in them when I pulled the tops off, and even less when they dried out and silt was left on the platters, but they did work long enough to duplicate them without errors.
And nevermind the many thumb drives and SD cards that my wife has washed and dried for me over the years, which don't seem to mind the process at all.
So I guess if I have something to add, it's just that (in my experience) water isn't as damaging to (unpowered) electronics and digital media as it seems that it should be.