And I'll continue to not own a TiVo and download the shows I want to watch.
So instead of a one size fits all solution, how about providing a choice? Instead of a TIVO that deletes stuff automaticaly, how about simply prevent it from recording in the first place? TIVO's implementation of this will open the door for serious copmetition. AGC screwing up on VCR's with the Macrovision signal is only there because of the passing of a law. Without a DRM law on TIVO's, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
If on cable (not over the air) if they want to use macrovision, fine.. TIVO sould behave just like any VCR and get a distorted picture. What gives with the auto delete stuff? This was never mandated with any other VCR. This is the narrow edge of the wedge.
Fortunately the wide end of another wedge going the other way is the Internet and non-DRM open source hard disk recorders.
And I'll continue to not own a TiVo and download the shows I want to watch.
The poor selection on the limited number of channels and the high cost of migrating to digital television, is the reason over the air TV is becomming a has been. Some viewere have taken steps to improve the pickings in the trash heap of broadcast TV. Now high value programming is being tied down with DRM.. This is going to increase viewership how??
I'm with you. I use the Internet instead. It has better selection, choices on demand, and so forth. I have no reason to get a TIVO simply because I don't watch TV anymore. I have more productive and informative sources of information at my fingertips. It doesn't need a $50/month and up subscription.
Once Dell's printers become popular, expect the cartridge prices to increase.
With very low yeild, high prices, no local retail, etc., they won't become popular. Who wants a printer you can't run out to WalMart and get ink for a deadline?
Dells printers are rebranded lexmarks.
This makes it a low volume specialty ink printer. This results in an even higher supplies cost. This is another reason they will be replaced at the first chance. I don't see them becomming popular. There is simply too much competition for them to make a sizable market dent. In a nutshell, Dell has already strained the profit margin.
My conclusion is either they have enough mark-up to be slightly profitable on the small volume of custom Dell cartridges, or they die and become orphaned by dell for not enough ink volume to support manufacturing.
Why? I work for the HP Inkjet division and I'll tell you why HP cartridges are expensive - because they lose money on the printers, the rest of the company is in the red, the devices are becoming a commodity, the competition is driving margins down, and the upper management is greedy, so they compensate by charging outrageous prices for the cartridges
In a nutshell that's why I use the older printers, not the new one. The old cartridge is the 23 which holds 30 mL of ink. The new printer uses the 78 cart. It has 2 flavors. High yeild and economy. they have 38mL and 19mL. I get the 30 mL carts in a twin pack for about $45. I get the 38 mL cart for about $52. The economy cart is about $35. It's hardly economical. The new printer uses chipped cartridges to discourage refills. The old printer does not.
I just visited the HP website to check the page yeild claims. It used to be listed. Now I can't find it. The old cartridge had a claim of about 500 pages at 15% coverage. The new one (not the economy one) claimed a higher page count but at only 5% page coverage. I am wondering if they thought we wouldn't notice the apple/orange comparison. When they did have the specifications, the old cartridge was listed at about 500 pages at 15% coverage and the new high yeild was about 900 pages at 5% page coverage. Wow. More pages.... If you print with 1/3rd the ink on a page.
Getting data is getting harder to find. HP has repackaged the new cartriges into a twin pack.
The old cartrige has some information.
Clip; Save $15.99 over purchasing two single cartridges!
The HP No. 23 regular color inkjet print cartridge is the right choice for frequent printer users who expect clear, sharp photo-quality results at a competitive cost per page.
Features
Produce sharp text and bright, vivid graphics
Specially designed to work with HP inkjet specialty papers and transparency films or plain papers, delivering superior, photo-quality printouts
Specifications IInk volume: 60 ml (30 ml per cartridge)
The new cartrige which is now sold in a twin pack is much less informative. They don't list if it's the economy cartrige of 19 mL or the high capacity one of 38 mL. They also no longer make any page yeild claims. Grrr...
Clipped from the www.shopping.HP.com site regarding the 78 twinpack.
Double the ink, drop the price.
Save $6.99 over the cost of two cartridges sold individually
Get photo-quality images and brilliant color
Depend on HP genuine, photo-quality ink for long-lasting results
Get outstanding photo quality -- up 2400 x 1200 dpi
The price at 53.99 indicates this is the economy 19 mL cartridge, not the high capacity 38 mL cartridge that retails localy for $51.99 each.
Due to the price of supplies, I take my digital photos to Costco for printing. The 4X6 prints are 0.19 each and I don't have to eat the cost of printing errors such as running out of a color mid-print or a PC BSOD mid-print.
That leaves my color printing to just a few web pages and such. That hardly justifies buying the best (most expensive) high resolution photo printer inks. Most of my other stuff gets done on a HP laserjet III. I buy it a cartridge about once every 2-3 years. (I finaly killed the cart that came in it, so I'm on my first replacement) I bought the laserprinter used for less than one color cartrige for the new printer.
Dell sells a cheap all in one multi-function printer. My wife got one with her new PC. The cartriges are about 1/4 the size of the HP ones. Nowhere in the Dell site are there any claims to page yeild or ink volume. Information is missing completely except the price. It's about the same price as the economy HP cartriges. Since the HP economy cartriges are the half full ones, I guess you get about half that ink for the same price. Needless to say, I put the HP printers on the lan. Nobody uses the Dell printer except a
Replying to my own post, I just found this gem that describes the system well including present day.
http://www.dean-boys.com/extras/iff/iffqa.html A snip from the article mentions the first system that simply delayed and returned the original radar signal. This produced 2 blips. One of the plane and one behind it from the delayed reflection.
Snip... That first German maneuver, which was soon superseded by others, was a passive system in that the returned signal was still just a reflection of the radar energy sent from the ground.
could an "eraser" pulse be sent out from some unscrupulous individual?
There are some spec's on the standards. Google search for ISO15693. That covers near field tags operating on 13.56 MHZ.
Search for EPC-96 standard for the far field 915 MHZ tags.
Most tags are either read only with a unique ID number, or read/write, also with a non-alterable unique ID number. Some, but not all tags can be told to become de-activated. So yes, an eraser signal could be used against some tags. A huge surge of RF could simply fry them also. Tossing them in a microwave oven comes to mind..
Since the tags have collision avoidance, an unscrupulous individual could make an emitter that chattered garbage. With that, items with active tags could be taken past readers without being read as they wouldn't be heard in the chatter.
There is mention of RFID jammers. Do a Google search again. Google is your friend.
In fact, various forms of crude RFID have been used since World War II.
What I think he is refering to but failing to mention by name is the aircraft friend or foe reflector. A tuned cavity was placed on an air craft that would reflect a radar signal many times inside the cavity then emit it back. This delay produced a second reflection to a radar scan. If the shadow image of the plane was on the display, it was a Friend. If it was absent, it was a Foe. It was known as a FOF transponder. (Friend Or Foe)
It has been upgraded to return the plane identification.
For example, P=I*V is only true for instantaneous quantities in general.
For power use P=I*V*PF
PF is power factor. It varies from 1 to 0. Values less than 1 are either capacitive or inductive. A value of 1 is resistive. Capacitive is when the current leads the voltage and inductive is when current lags voltage.
I forgot about the inductance of the coil greatly decreasing the current flow.
You are welcome. The only place I've seen valves marked with AC and DC voltages are in RV's. The valve gets 24 VAC when connected to AC power or runs on 12 VDC battery power. That's what got me thinking why the voltages are diffrent for AC or DC operation on these valves.
What's wrong with AC. R is resistance, not impedance or reactance. If you add reactance to the equasion, then you need a new formula, but that equasion has current, voltage and resistance. The formula holds true. Don't read in inductance and capacatance where there isn't any.
This is Ohm's law, not Kirkoff's law.
For formulas that include reactive components, they are listed here;
I think it succeeded over there, but I don't see it being a big enough market on this side of the ocean.
Where copyright is disregarded openly, offering access to content can be profitable.
On the other side of the ocean where royalties have to be paid on content, the resulting price either sucks off all the profit or raises the price to the point you don't have enough volume to make a profit.
This is what is preventing $0.25 cent downloads of music from legal sites.
It's the cost of the content. Otherwise competition for marketshare would have forced the prices down long ago.
Re:Interesting idea but financially inviable
on
MP3s From The Phone Box
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, I suspect this project is doomed already.
Nobody mentioned the music industry thinks their product is gold plated.. The phone company isn't going to get the content for free.. Far from it. By the time the phone company tries to make a profit, it'll be ignored on the street the same way CD's are now for being so overpriced.
If the phone company were smart, they would offer a product that didn't take all the income so they could earn some. Getting a big markup on songs isn't a good idea if the resulting price kills all traffic. They need a margin and traffic. I can't see them doing it with the royalties they would have to pay for songs and ringtones.
They should just offer net access so travelers can check e-mail on the road, re-schedule flights, etc. There are enough sites online that already offer ringtones and music downloads. Adding phone booth costs to these would not be a high volume sales plan.
It still happens upstream whether you like it or not.
Walking cross the street involves risk. I try to not spend all day playing in the street.
The same for my finances. I do use banking services now and then, but most of the time it's cash and carry. The fewer debit registers I use, the fewer of them that have my information. If one is compromised (Open Wireless registers at Home Depot for example) the fewer chances my data will be compromised.
It's about reducing risk, not elimination of risk for the truly paranoid.
In most places you can't rent a car or hotel room without a credit card. For most everyting else, cash works.
Technicaly you are correct. But in street language someting Bad can be good, some in the power industry refer to to the reactive component as powerless watts. IE using Volta times amps = watts incorrectly in the above example gives 1KW. The real power (work) is only 800 Watts. The diffrence is sometimes refered to as reactive Watts, Watless power, Powerless Watts, or other variance. In all cases they are mentioning the 200 VAR's which is the diffrence between VA and VAR.
Because the Current is very real, It will blow fuses, overheat wireing, etc, it gets called reactive watts and should be corrected with a reactive load of oposite polarity of the same "Reactive Wattage".
Actually, you don't even need to change your gas valve. Find out the control voltage for your gas valve (its printed on the valve - likely 24 volts), and then build yourself a small battery back to make roughly the same voltage. A few 9-volt batteries should do.
Don't follow the above advice. It's a way to overheat the valve.
The operation of a coil is directly related to it's current.
A coil has inductive reactance. (Duh, it's a coil of wire)
The reactive resistance is higher than DC resistance. This means the coil with the same DC voltage applied as AC would draw more current. All resistance losses in the coil generate heat. More current, more heat.
To get the same DC current in the coil which was there for AC, use lower voltage. DC operation for most gas valves is about half the AC voltage.
Try starting with 12 volts DC not 24.
If you want to do the math, most AC valves list the power draw in Watts. Using an Ohm Meter, find the DC resistance of the coil. Solve for voltage to provide the same wattage DC that it would use with AC. Doubling the voltage into a resistance increases the wattage 4X because power in a DC circuit is voltage times current. When you double the voltage to a resistance, current also doubles. That's why the power goes up 4 times. If the valve should be run on 24 VAC or 12 VDC for example, running it at 24 VDC would be 4 times too much power and you risk damage to the valve.
A few valves save you the work and list the DC and AC operating voltages, but these are rare.
Apparently you can plug right into one of them, and they'll give you 120 VAC @20 amps
I have a Prius. I added an inverter to mine. I used it last winter during an ice storm.
When figuring out how much I could draw without hurting it, I used a power dirversion idea. If the car normaly supplies power to a load that can be shed, then that could be used elsewhere without overload.
The car has AC. Ditch the heater fan and compressor clutch.
Ditch the lights, wiper, electric power steering, rear window defroster, stereo, compessor for the brakes (brakes are not engine vacuum assist) etc..
Just with those normal loads not needed, that gave me about 600-800 watts. I tossed in a 1KW inverter to give me some surge capacity to start the fridg and freezer. It ran my normal lighting, refrigeration and furnace blower load just fine.
Because the electric end of the car is sized at about 20 KW, even with a good load, the car was shut off most of the time. It would start up every 15 minutes or so, run a couple minutes to recharge the traction high voltage battery and then shut down again. Overnight I used about 2 gallons of gas. I locked a key in the car and left it on to do the generator mode. I plugged it into the generator transfer panel instead of the portable noisy generator.
You're talking about 4 amps at 250 V, over a period of 8 hours. That's 1000 watts for eight hours, or 8 kilowatt hours. However, this doesn't cater for the power factor -- if your house has a power factor of 0.8, for example, batteries capable of providing that current for that period of time will run your house for about six and a half hours. So you'll need to bring up the batteries to 10 kilowatt hours to compensate -- either that, or (if it's an inductive load) buy a whopping great big bank of capacitors to bring the power factor back up to a reasonable level.
Umm you got it backwards.. Lets go to the facts..
Starting with some glossary terms..
Volts = Electrical pressure Amps = Electrical current Watts = Power VoltAmps = Volts * Amps Vars = Volts Amps Reactive. Power Factor = Percent of Volt Amps that are Power scaled 0-1.
What's it mean? If you drop a Capacitor on an AC line, it will draw current but not get hot unless it's not designed for the voltage, current, or polarity.
The current is said to be reactive. All of the current measured in VA is not Watts. The power Factor is zero. Volts * amps * power factor = watts. Most inverters don't like a highly reactive load. This may dammage it.
A light bulb gets hot. It is not an inductor or capacitor.. It has a power factor of 1. Volts * amps * power factor = Watts.
A furnace motor may have a power factor of 0.8. If it drew 4 amps at 250 volts it's VA = 4*250 or 1000VA. The actual power draw in watts is 80% of tthe VA. Remember power = Volts * Amps * Power Factor or 250 * 4 * 0.8 = 800 Watts.
So in the above example in the parant, the load draws 800 watts. If it draws it for 8 hours, that's 6.4 KWH not 10 KWH.
Remember that inverters don't like reactive loads. The inverter may take the reactive power and dump it as heat depending on the design. That's 200 watts of reactive power. You also need to scale for conversion consumption. The inverter uses power. It is not a lossless process.
If you run large reactive loads, save your inverter by looking into doing some power factor correction.
With a reactive load such as a transformer or motor, the current lags the voltage. In a capacitive load such as a noise filter, current leads the voltage. It is possible to correct reactive load problems with lamp ballasts, motors and transformers by adding capacitors to the line. You want a capacitor that has the same VAR rating as the load you are trying to correct. In the above example, we have a reactive component of 200 watts. (800 true watts subtracted from the 1000 VA leaves the reactive component of 200 watts reactive) Adding 200 watts capacitive reactance will cancel out the inductive reactance load. This will reduce the load on the inverter. Now it sees a 800 VA load, not a 1000 VA load. Now the inverter sees a power factor corrected to 1. The motor still draws 1000 VA but now gets the 200 VA reactive component from the capacitor, not the inverter.
I hope I didn't loose too many in the dry discussion of what a VAR is.
Anyway, this is the reason on some power poles, you may see a bank of capacitors. It is used to correct power factor and reduce the amprage load on a substation.
I saw one in Zilla, WA back in 1986 and it was an old design then.
I would have to dig through my old copies of RCM (Radio Control Modeler), but I have the plans for it in one of the issues. I remember still being in the service at the time that issue came out so the plans are in an issue between 1976 and 1982. Along with the lawn mower, are the plans for a flying flat iron.
Unless it's contaminated with organic solvents or pesticides.
Some contaminates are not compatible with Reverse Osmosis. Check with a reputable dealer of Reverse Osmosis equipment. Find out if your source water is compatible. Reverse Osmosis is very good, but not perfect. I've been in places where Reverse Osmosis was used and had to monitor the incomming supply for possible shutdown due to contaminates.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn;t web-page-surfing file-swapping?
Not unless you are uploading something.
Oh, with spyware and cookies, I stand corrected.
How not to test a magnetron...
I agree. The thermal switch isn't connected and there is no fan on that magnitron. You wouldn't want to melt down a perfectly good magnitron!
PS Don't try this anywhere, ever.
I've really been tempted to try it after I got tagged with a photo radar ticket...
A van with a photo flash hanging out the back would make a great target.
The other tempting target is the kid on that leafblower powered scooter that makes so much noise. I wonder if I can kill it's CDI ignition.
Where to plug in the magnitron along the highway is the problem.
And I'll continue to not own a TiVo and download the shows I want to watch.
So instead of a one size fits all solution, how about providing a choice? Instead of a TIVO that deletes stuff automaticaly, how about simply prevent it from recording in the first place? TIVO's implementation of this will open the door for serious copmetition. AGC screwing up on VCR's with the Macrovision signal is only there because of the passing of a law. Without a DRM law on TIVO's, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
If on cable (not over the air) if they want to use macrovision, fine.. TIVO sould behave just like any VCR and get a distorted picture. What gives with the auto delete stuff? This was never mandated with any other VCR. This is the narrow edge of the wedge.
Fortunately the wide end of another wedge going the other way is the Internet and non-DRM open source hard disk recorders.
And I'll continue to not own a TiVo and download the shows I want to watch.
The poor selection on the limited number of channels and the high cost of migrating to digital television, is the reason over the air TV is becomming a has been. Some viewere have taken steps to improve the pickings in the trash heap of broadcast TV. Now high value programming is being tied down with DRM.. This is going to increase viewership how??
I'm with you. I use the Internet instead. It has better selection, choices on demand, and so forth. I have no reason to get a TIVO simply because I don't watch TV anymore. I have more productive and informative sources of information at my fingertips. It doesn't need a $50/month and up subscription.
slashdot has been bought out by doubleclick.
I didn't notice. Doubleclick is in my ipchains...
Once Dell's printers become popular, expect the cartridge prices to increase.
With very low yeild, high prices, no local retail, etc., they won't become popular. Who wants a printer you can't run out to WalMart and get ink for a deadline?
Dells printers are rebranded lexmarks.
This makes it a low volume specialty ink printer. This results in an even higher supplies cost. This is another reason they will be replaced at the first chance. I don't see them becomming popular. There is simply too much competition for them to make a sizable market dent. In a nutshell, Dell has already strained the profit margin.
My conclusion is either they have enough mark-up to be slightly profitable on the small volume of custom Dell cartridges, or they die and become orphaned by dell for not enough ink volume to support manufacturing.
Why? I work for the HP Inkjet division and I'll tell you why HP cartridges are expensive - because they lose money on the printers, the rest of the company is in the red, the devices are becoming a commodity, the competition is driving margins down, and the upper management is greedy, so they compensate by charging outrageous prices for the cartridges
In a nutshell that's why I use the older printers, not the new one. The old cartridge is the 23 which holds 30 mL of ink. The new printer uses the 78 cart. It has 2 flavors. High yeild and economy. they have 38mL and 19mL. I get the 30 mL carts in a twin pack for about $45. I get the 38 mL cart for about $52. The economy cart is about $35. It's hardly economical. The new printer uses chipped cartridges to discourage refills. The old printer does not.
I just visited the HP website to check the page yeild claims. It used to be listed. Now I can't find it. The old cartridge had a claim of about 500 pages at 15% coverage. The new one (not the economy one) claimed a higher page count but at only 5% page coverage. I am wondering if they thought we wouldn't notice the apple/orange comparison. When they did have the specifications, the old cartridge was listed at about 500 pages at 15% coverage and the new high yeild was about 900 pages at 5% page coverage. Wow. More pages.... If you print with 1/3rd the ink on a page.
Getting data is getting harder to find. HP has repackaged the new cartriges into a twin pack.
The old cartrige has some information.
Clip;
Save $15.99 over purchasing two single cartridges!
The HP No. 23 regular color inkjet print cartridge is the right choice for frequent printer users who expect clear, sharp photo-quality results at a competitive cost per page.
Features
Produce sharp text and bright, vivid graphics
Specially designed to work with HP inkjet specialty papers and transparency films or plain papers, delivering superior, photo-quality printouts
Specifications
IInk volume: 60 ml (30 ml per cartridge)
The new cartrige which is now sold in a twin pack is much less informative.
They don't list if it's the economy cartrige of 19 mL or the high capacity one of 38 mL. They also no longer make any page yeild claims. Grrr...
Clipped from the www.shopping.HP.com site regarding the 78 twinpack.
Double the ink, drop the price.
Save $6.99 over the cost of two cartridges sold individually
Get photo-quality images and brilliant color
Depend on HP genuine, photo-quality ink for long-lasting results
Get outstanding photo quality -- up 2400 x 1200 dpi
The price at 53.99 indicates this is the economy 19 mL cartridge, not the high capacity 38 mL cartridge that retails localy for $51.99 each.
Due to the price of supplies, I take my digital photos to Costco for printing. The 4X6 prints are 0.19 each and I don't have to eat the cost of printing errors such as running out of a color mid-print or a PC BSOD mid-print.
That leaves my color printing to just a few web pages and such. That hardly justifies buying the best (most expensive) high resolution photo printer inks. Most of my other stuff gets done on a HP laserjet III. I buy it a cartridge about once every 2-3 years. (I finaly killed the cart that came in it, so I'm on my first replacement) I bought the laserprinter used for less than one color cartrige for the new printer.
Dell sells a cheap all in one multi-function printer. My wife got one with her new PC. The cartriges are about 1/4 the size of the HP ones. Nowhere in the Dell site are there any claims to page yeild or ink volume. Information is missing completely except the price. It's about the same price as the economy HP cartriges. Since the HP economy cartriges are the half full ones, I guess you get about half that ink for the same price. Needless to say, I put the HP printers on the lan. Nobody uses the Dell printer except a
Replying to my own post, I just found this gem that describes the system well including present day.
... That first German maneuver, which was soon superseded by others, was a passive system in that the returned signal was still just a reflection of the radar energy sent from the ground.
http://www.dean-boys.com/extras/iff/iffqa.html
A snip from the article mentions the first system that simply delayed and returned the original radar signal. This produced 2 blips. One of the plane and one behind it from the delayed reflection.
Snip
could an "eraser" pulse be sent out from some unscrupulous individual?
There are some spec's on the standards. Google search for ISO15693. That covers near field tags operating on 13.56 MHZ.
Search for EPC-96 standard for the far field 915 MHZ tags.
Most tags are either read only with a unique ID number, or read/write, also with a non-alterable unique ID number. Some, but not all tags can be told to become de-activated. So yes, an eraser signal could be used against some tags. A huge surge of RF could simply fry them also. Tossing them in a microwave oven comes to mind..
Since the tags have collision avoidance, an unscrupulous individual could make an emitter that chattered garbage. With that, items with active tags could be taken past readers without being read as they wouldn't be heard in the chatter.
There is mention of RFID jammers. Do a Google search again. Google is your friend.
From the article,
In fact, various forms of crude RFID have been used since World War II.
What I think he is refering to but failing to mention by name is the aircraft friend or foe reflector. A tuned cavity was placed on an air craft that would reflect a radar signal many times inside the cavity then emit it back. This delay produced a second reflection to a radar scan. If the shadow image of the plane was on the display, it was a Friend. If it was absent, it was a Foe. It was known as a FOF transponder. (Friend Or Foe)
It has been upgraded to return the plane identification.
For example, P=I*V is only true for instantaneous quantities in general.
For power use P=I*V*PF
PF is power factor. It varies from 1 to 0. Values less than 1 are either capacitive or inductive. A value of 1 is resistive. Capacitive is when the current leads the voltage and inductive is when current lags voltage.
I forgot about the inductance of the coil greatly decreasing the current flow.
You are welcome. The only place I've seen valves marked with AC and DC voltages are in RV's. The valve gets 24 VAC when connected to AC power or runs on 12 VDC battery power. That's what got me thinking why the voltages are diffrent for AC or DC operation on these valves.
Obviously another person who never uses AC.
What's wrong with AC. R is resistance, not impedance or reactance. If you add reactance to the equasion, then you need a new formula, but that equasion has current, voltage and resistance. The formula holds true. Don't read in inductance and capacatance where there isn't any.
This is Ohm's law, not Kirkoff's law.
For formulas that include reactive components, they are listed here;
http://www.tpub.com/neets/book2/6.htm
Ask someone to get them from the newstand. I'm going to see if I can snag a copy in the morning.
I don't see any CD. Are we talking about the October or November issue?
RTFA
Clip magazine, November issue (get the CD free with your copy, on newsstands now!) end clip
I think it succeeded over there, but I don't see it being a big enough market on this side of the ocean.
Where copyright is disregarded openly, offering access to content can be profitable.
On the other side of the ocean where royalties have to be paid on content, the resulting price either sucks off all the profit or raises the price to the point you don't have enough volume to make a profit.
This is what is preventing $0.25 cent downloads of music from legal sites.
It's the cost of the content. Otherwise competition for marketshare would have forced the prices down long ago.
No, I suspect this project is doomed already.
Nobody mentioned the music industry thinks their product is gold plated.. The phone company isn't going to get the content for free.. Far from it. By the time the phone company tries to make a profit, it'll be ignored on the street the same way CD's are now for being so overpriced.
If the phone company were smart, they would offer a product that didn't take all the income so they could earn some. Getting a big markup on songs isn't a good idea if the resulting price kills all traffic. They need a margin and traffic. I can't see them doing it with the royalties they would have to pay for songs and ringtones.
They should just offer net access so travelers can check e-mail on the road, re-schedule flights, etc. There are enough sites online that already offer ringtones and music downloads. Adding phone booth costs to these would not be a high volume sales plan.
It still happens upstream whether you like it or not.
Walking cross the street involves risk. I try to not spend all day playing in the street.
The same for my finances. I do use banking services now and then, but most of the time it's cash and carry. The fewer debit registers I use, the fewer of them that have my information. If one is compromised (Open Wireless registers at Home Depot for example) the fewer chances my data will be compromised.
It's about reducing risk, not elimination of risk for the truly paranoid.
In most places you can't rent a car or hotel room without a credit card. For most everyting else, cash works.
No, that's 200 volt-amps reactive, or VARs
Technicaly you are correct. But in street language someting Bad can be good, some in the power industry refer to to the reactive component as powerless watts. IE using Volta times amps = watts incorrectly in the above example gives 1KW. The real power (work) is only 800 Watts. The diffrence is sometimes refered to as reactive Watts, Watless power, Powerless Watts, or other variance. In all cases they are mentioning the 200 VAR's which is the diffrence between VA and VAR.
Because the Current is very real, It will blow fuses, overheat wireing, etc, it gets called reactive watts and should be corrected with a reactive load of oposite polarity of the same "Reactive Wattage".
Sorry I was technically wrong.
Thanks for the clarification.
Actually, you don't even need to change your gas valve. Find out the control voltage for your gas valve (its printed on the valve - likely 24 volts), and then build yourself a small battery back to make roughly the same voltage. A few 9-volt batteries should do.
Don't follow the above advice. It's a way to overheat the valve.
The operation of a coil is directly related to it's current.
A coil has inductive reactance. (Duh, it's a coil of wire)
The reactive resistance is higher than DC resistance. This means the coil with the same DC voltage applied as AC would draw more current. All resistance losses in the coil generate heat. More current, more heat.
To get the same DC current in the coil which was there for AC, use lower voltage. DC operation for most gas valves is about half the AC voltage.
Try starting with 12 volts DC not 24.
If you want to do the math, most AC valves list the power draw in Watts. Using an Ohm Meter, find the DC resistance of the coil. Solve for voltage to provide the same wattage DC that it would use with AC. Doubling the voltage into a resistance increases the wattage 4X because power in a DC circuit is voltage times current. When you double the voltage to a resistance, current also doubles. That's why the power goes up 4 times. If the valve should be run on 24 VAC or 12 VDC for example, running it at 24 VDC would be 4 times too much power and you risk damage to the valve.
A few valves save you the work and list the DC and AC operating voltages, but these are rare.
Apparently you can plug right into one of them, and they'll give you 120 VAC @20 amps
I have a Prius. I added an inverter to mine. I used it last winter during an ice storm.
When figuring out how much I could draw without hurting it, I used a power dirversion idea. If the car normaly supplies power to a load that can be shed, then that could be used elsewhere without overload.
The car has AC. Ditch the heater fan and compressor clutch.
Ditch the lights, wiper, electric power steering, rear window defroster, stereo, compessor for the brakes (brakes are not engine vacuum assist) etc..
Just with those normal loads not needed, that gave me about 600-800 watts. I tossed in a 1KW inverter to give me some surge capacity to start the fridg and freezer. It ran my normal lighting, refrigeration and furnace blower load just fine.
Because the electric end of the car is sized at about 20 KW, even with a good load, the car was shut off most of the time. It would start up every 15 minutes or so, run a couple minutes to recharge the traction high voltage battery and then shut down again. Overnight I used about 2 gallons of gas. I locked a key in the car and left it on to do the generator mode. I plugged it into the generator transfer panel instead of the portable noisy generator.
You're talking about 4 amps at 250 V, over a period of 8 hours. That's 1000 watts for eight hours, or 8 kilowatt hours. However, this doesn't cater for the power factor -- if your house has a power factor of 0.8, for example, batteries capable of providing that current for that period of time will run your house for about six and a half hours. So you'll need to bring up the batteries to 10 kilowatt hours to compensate -- either that, or (if it's an inductive load) buy a whopping great big bank of capacitors to bring the power factor back up to a reasonable level.
Umm you got it backwards.. Lets go to the facts..
Starting with some glossary terms..
Volts = Electrical pressure
Amps = Electrical current
Watts = Power
VoltAmps = Volts * Amps
Vars = Volts Amps Reactive.
Power Factor = Percent of Volt Amps that are Power scaled 0-1.
What's it mean?
If you drop a Capacitor on an AC line, it will draw current but not get hot unless it's not designed for the voltage, current, or polarity.
The current is said to be reactive. All of the current measured in VA is not Watts. The power Factor is zero. Volts * amps * power factor = watts. Most inverters don't like a highly reactive load. This may dammage it.
A light bulb gets hot. It is not an inductor or capacitor.. It has a power factor of 1. Volts * amps * power factor = Watts.
A furnace motor may have a power factor of 0.8. If it drew 4 amps at 250 volts it's VA = 4*250 or 1000VA. The actual power draw in watts is 80% of tthe VA. Remember power = Volts * Amps * Power Factor or 250 * 4 * 0.8 = 800 Watts.
So in the above example in the parant, the load draws 800 watts. If it draws it for 8 hours, that's 6.4 KWH not 10 KWH.
Remember that inverters don't like reactive loads. The inverter may take the reactive power and dump it as heat depending on the design. That's 200 watts of reactive power. You also need to scale for conversion consumption. The inverter uses power. It is not a lossless process.
If you run large reactive loads, save your inverter by looking into doing some power factor correction.
With a reactive load such as a transformer or motor, the current lags the voltage. In a capacitive load such as a noise filter, current leads the voltage. It is possible to correct reactive load problems with lamp ballasts, motors and transformers by adding capacitors to the line. You want a capacitor that has the same VAR rating as the load you are trying to correct. In the above example, we have a reactive component of 200 watts. (800 true watts subtracted from the 1000 VA leaves the reactive component of 200 watts reactive) Adding 200 watts capacitive reactance will cancel out the inductive reactance load. This will reduce the load on the inverter. Now it sees a 800 VA load, not a 1000 VA load. Now the inverter sees a power factor corrected to 1. The motor still draws 1000 VA but now gets the 200 VA reactive component from the capacitor, not the inverter.
I hope I didn't loose too many in the dry discussion of what a VAR is.
Anyway, this is the reason on some power poles, you may see a bank of capacitors. It is used to correct power factor and reduce the amprage load on a substation.
I saw one in Zilla, WA back in 1986 and it was an old design then.
I would have to dig through my old copies of RCM (Radio Control Modeler), but I have the plans for it in one of the issues. I remember still being in the service at the time that issue came out so the plans are in an issue between 1976 and 1982. Along with the lawn mower, are the plans for a flying flat iron.
I don't think it's content is much of a problem.
Unless it's contaminated with organic solvents or pesticides.
Some contaminates are not compatible with Reverse Osmosis. Check with a reputable dealer of Reverse Osmosis equipment. Find out if your source water is compatible. Reverse Osmosis is very good, but not perfect. I've been in places where Reverse Osmosis was used and had to monitor the incomming supply for possible shutdown due to contaminates.