new dvd releases on amazon.co.uk arent much less. If that price includes the shipping of the DVD, the price for that + the data delivery overhead is reasonable.
Turnover in these departments tends to be pretty high. It wouldn't be unusual that whoever approved the relisting has no idea about what happened previously (unless they were alerted, which it appears they now have been).
I suppose one could say they ought to have a blacklist to check or some such, but who knows how the actual department functions or what the internal policies are.
LiIon explosions can still happen, but usually the culprit is shoddy made knock-off batteries. Good batteries will contain overload prevention circuitry that will detect and prevent shorts.
Cheaply built batteries will either not have this at all, or will be made so poorly that they become damaged in ordinary use.
I've found most of these cheap batteries also have nowhere near the life that a good "authentic" version has, even if it has the supposedly same MaH rating on its label (like they wouldnt fake that too...)
CMOS and CCD arent much different in final image quality. DALSA (one of the two manufacturers in the world of large format sensor chips, the other being Kodak) has a white paper on this. They make both CMOS and CCD chips.
The choice of which to use is usually dictated by other concerns like which goes better with an existing manufacturing line, or other electrical engineering issues.
Currently, most chips larger than 35mm are CCD. All the medium format backs I know use CCD versus CMOS (interesting fact..though there are several back makers, the chips come from either dalsa or kodak..) One thing about CMOS is that it requires more noise processing because of the every-pixel-has-an-amp by it on chip, whereas CCDs have fewer amps because they read off the analog data before digitizing it in a serialized manner. uneven amplifiers are what cause the noise patterns.
opticians (you're better off speaking to an opthamologist..its like the difference between psychiatrist and psychologist) have known for some time that giving someone stronger than necessary prescriptions doesn't work. It just strains the eyes.
Its been studied to death in the past.
You are not smarter than someone who went to med school for years for it.
the camera on my sony ericsson t616 is pretty easy. (assuming keyguard is off), you press the button with the camera printed on it to switch to compose mode, then the same button again to take the picture.
the phone is a 3 year old model now though, so its quality is pretty poor.
the biggest design flaw with it is that the plastic lens is a dust magnet. in no time, its completely covered in pocket crud making the pictures even further unusable, and the lens is recessed so it requires a q-tip or some such to clean.
Re:I like working with Power Tools...
on
Makers
·
· Score: 1
except plumbers actually do things, often reliably for years with little afterthought - like make water come out of your faucets, working drains etc...
I have a sandisk Ultra II 1 gb that ive had for about a year. These cards are not especially noted for their ruggedness, and occasionally the card burps - the camera says its not in the camera, the total number of images on a freshly formatted card has decreased all of a sudden (by about 15 images) - i suspect that due to the daily usage and abusage the card has gone through may have damaged some internal structure. its been dropped, shaken, heated, chilled, inserted and pulled out of readers hundreds of times...
cards like the lexar professional series and the sandisk extremes are constructed to be more impact and temperature shock resistant, which also adds to their cost. they also ship with recovery software should something happen to them (which ive used before..sometimes it helps, sometimes not, depending on what you've done to the card)
actually nowadays houston has one of the most comprehensive traffic monitoring systems in the world. its pretty nice. great if you want to see where the problems are during rush hour, live.
on SLR's there is half silvered mirror that bounces some of the light to special sensors at the bottom of the mirror box that are wired directly to the AF motor. these are the hardware AF modules.
on non-slr cameras, a software routine must run that has to dump data off the entire sensor chip (basically just like the LCD lag) and analyze it to determine the focus. its speed is determined by the chip refresh rate, the main processor speed and the efficiency of the software routine.
naturally, the dedicated hardwired AF modules are much, much faster. The autofocus in a pro camera like the D2X is insanely quick and accurate.
its an air flow blockage issue, and the xbox is hardly the only piece of electronics with the problem. Lots of devices have their cooling intakes on the bottom of the device (usually for space reasons, you can keep the fans horizontal, though sometimes for aesthetics). If you place the device on something cushiony where the cushion gets pushed against the intake, it will overheat. Carpet, blankets, pillows etc..
most laptops are this way, and they warn against placing the device on a surface where the intakes gets blocked.
but yes i suspect they designed and tested the device on a bench or shelving. perhaps they're trying to force some non-trashy interior design into the world of geeks by making them replace the carpet or at least put the thing on some kind of shelf...
this stuff cannot be sold for kids if its not non-toxic. it is assumed that somewhere, some kid will guzzle the entire bottle.
regular soap bubbles leave a residue as well. in fact, detergents in high quantity are generally pretty bad for the environment. However, soap bubbles and their miniscule amount of highly diluted detergent, are fine. compared to washing your car on the driveway and the soap pouring into the sewer system, the effects are negligible.
rest assured, the compound breaks down easily over time.
yeah, so is going to the moon to pick up some rocks and kick the dirt.
absolutely nothing else good came from the research and development required to get there, right? absolutely nothing. Nope. no spin-offs, no other interesting applications of technology, nothing.
Compared to the horribly complicated and unreliable liquid fueled rockets in use now, its a pretty good idea. rockets require billions of dollars in manufacturing and maintenance infrastructure are yet are still pretty shaky platforms.
the key is to build a plant to build the material, probably would cost a billion or two (similar to plants that manufacture LCD panels...there are actually very few in the world)
Once you've got that, its a matter of engineering robots to put it together. Relatively simple, compared to the engineering titantic that is the space shuttle.
as for terrorists... if your material is strong enough to go that far into space, no terrorist will do anything but scratch it. a plane flying into it would destroy the plane, but merely strum the cable. even if the material somehow does get broken, because of its balanced nature, it doesnt fall or fly away - a repair robot patches the break in under a day.
the UT applied research lab has developed the basis technology behind pretty much every US military sonar system in use since WWII. Ditto with a number of satellite and other techs (mostly defense related, but all that trickles down into mainstream usage). ARL is a combination of CS, ME, EE and other engineering fields.
Numerous search engine technologies and the closely related 'recommendation' systems that places like amazon uses have been born and bred...
UT does mostly foundational software and research work, which is acquired and built upon by others.
There was a somewhat famous CS person named Djikstra who taught there for years. Perhaps you've heard of him.
He set the tone for UT's best known research for years - theory. They've also got a couple of well known robotics labs (not as well funded as CMU, but they're more focused on improving the software brains than building big flashy machines to crash around in a desert)
Beyond CS undergrad (which is UT's second largest major, behind Biology - and UT is the highest populated university in the USA), UT's got a good grad program.
I had a class with Doug Berger. Great guy. Brilliant, too.
Just because you havent heard of something doesnt mean it doesnt exist. Most work universities do doesn't get published on slashdot - it goes into research journals and conferences that I'm sure you don't read or attend.
there are links in various posts on this thread, or you can just google around for the current state of carbon nanotubes. im sure wikipedia has a nice writeup on it.
theres no need for an asteroid. that was a crackpot idea from several years ago that is totally impractical and based around more traditional materials for the cable, and required a cable that was some 30 feet thick in places. The nanotube cable is going to be very thin, and quite lightweight (relatively, for something 62,000 miles long), meaning its counterweight will be very modest - the equipment used to build the cable can be used as the top anchor and park themselves when they're done.
the material *is* down. The method for making it *is* ready. However, the actual plant to build it hasn't been constructed yet because the funding doesn't exist yet. Multi-billion dollar plants dont spring up overnight.
Look at it this way. LCD technology has existed for quite some time, but its only been in recent years we've been able to make them in large scale sizes suitable for monitors. This is because the plants that churn them out cost billions of dollars in capital to make it, and it took awhile to get that kind of investment going.
Sure enough though, as carbon nanotubes have countless applications in every possible industry, the plants will be constructed, and not too far in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
new dvd releases on amazon.co.uk arent much less. If that price includes the shipping of the DVD, the price for that + the data delivery overhead is reasonable.
Turnover in these departments tends to be pretty high. It wouldn't be unusual that whoever approved the relisting has no idea about what happened previously (unless they were alerted, which it appears they now have been).
I suppose one could say they ought to have a blacklist to check or some such, but who knows how the actual department functions or what the internal policies are.
LiIon explosions can still happen, but usually the culprit is shoddy made knock-off batteries. Good batteries will contain overload prevention circuitry that will detect and prevent shorts.
Cheaply built batteries will either not have this at all, or will be made so poorly that they become damaged in ordinary use.
I've found most of these cheap batteries also have nowhere near the life that a good "authentic" version has, even if it has the supposedly same MaH rating on its label (like they wouldnt fake that too...)
CMOS and CCD arent much different in final image quality. DALSA (one of the two manufacturers in the world of large format sensor chips, the other being Kodak) has a white paper on this. They make both CMOS and CCD chips.
The choice of which to use is usually dictated by other concerns like which goes better with an existing manufacturing line, or other electrical engineering issues.
Currently, most chips larger than 35mm are CCD. All the medium format backs I know use CCD versus CMOS (interesting fact..though there are several back makers, the chips come from either dalsa or kodak..) One thing about CMOS is that it requires more noise processing because of the every-pixel-has-an-amp by it on chip, whereas CCDs have fewer amps because they read off the analog data before digitizing it in a serialized manner. uneven amplifiers are what cause the noise patterns.
opticians (you're better off speaking to an opthamologist..its like the difference between psychiatrist and psychologist) have known for some time that giving someone stronger than necessary prescriptions doesn't work. It just strains the eyes.
Its been studied to death in the past.
You are not smarter than someone who went to med school for years for it.
the camera on my sony ericsson t616 is pretty easy. (assuming keyguard is off), you press the button with the camera printed on it to switch to compose mode, then the same button again to take the picture.
the phone is a 3 year old model now though, so its quality is pretty poor.
the biggest design flaw with it is that the plastic lens is a dust magnet. in no time, its completely covered in pocket crud making the pictures even further unusable, and the lens is recessed so it requires a q-tip or some such to clean.
except plumbers actually do things, often reliably for years with little afterthought - like make water come out of your faucets, working drains etc...
most consultants dont manage that trick.
(i am a pro photographer)
I have a sandisk Ultra II 1 gb that ive had for about a year. These cards are not especially noted for their ruggedness, and occasionally the card burps - the camera says its not in the camera, the total number of images on a freshly formatted card has decreased all of a sudden (by about 15 images) - i suspect that due to the daily usage and abusage the card has gone through may have damaged some internal structure. its been dropped, shaken, heated, chilled, inserted and pulled out of readers hundreds of times...
cards like the lexar professional series and the sandisk extremes are constructed to be more impact and temperature shock resistant, which also adds to their cost. they also ship with recovery software should something happen to them (which ive used before..sometimes it helps, sometimes not, depending on what you've done to the card)
actually nowadays houston has one of the most comprehensive traffic monitoring systems in the world. its pretty nice. great if you want to see where the problems are during rush hour, live.
transtar
on SLR's there is half silvered mirror that bounces some of the light to special sensors at the bottom of the mirror box that are wired directly to the AF motor. these are the hardware AF modules.
on non-slr cameras, a software routine must run that has to dump data off the entire sensor chip (basically just like the LCD lag) and analyze it to determine the focus. its speed is determined by the chip refresh rate, the main processor speed and the efficiency of the software routine.
naturally, the dedicated hardwired AF modules are much, much faster. The autofocus in a pro camera like the D2X is insanely quick and accurate.
its an air flow blockage issue, and the xbox is hardly the only piece of electronics with the problem. Lots of devices have their cooling intakes on the bottom of the device (usually for space reasons, you can keep the fans horizontal, though sometimes for aesthetics). If you place the device on something cushiony where the cushion gets pushed against the intake, it will overheat. Carpet, blankets, pillows etc..
most laptops are this way, and they warn against placing the device on a surface where the intakes gets blocked.
but yes i suspect they designed and tested the device on a bench or shelving. perhaps they're trying to force some non-trashy interior design into the world of geeks by making them replace the carpet or at least put the thing on some kind of shelf...
"Would you want someone to dump a whole bottle of bubblesoap on your carpet?"
I dont have carpet, but when i did..far worse things have been spilled on it... esp. if you have kids...
"Ya, soaps not bad, but do you really want people tracking soap around the house?"
This is just bizarre. So what? People track far worse things in by simply walking.
We know how soap interacts with a lot of other things. Can we say the same for this?
Have they really looked into this before releasing it to market?
I would assume a phd in dye chemistry knows the ins and outs of his invention well. Far better than YOU do, thats for sure.
this stuff cannot be sold for kids if its not non-toxic. it is assumed that somewhere, some kid will guzzle the entire bottle.
regular soap bubbles leave a residue as well. in fact, detergents in high quantity are generally pretty bad for the environment. However, soap bubbles and their miniscule amount of highly diluted detergent, are fine. compared to washing your car on the driveway and the soap pouring into the sewer system, the effects are negligible.
rest assured, the compound breaks down easily over time.
yeah, so is going to the moon to pick up some rocks and kick the dirt.
absolutely nothing else good came from the research and development required to get there, right? absolutely nothing. Nope. no spin-offs, no other interesting applications of technology, nothing.
complete waste of time. wow, you're insightful.
the dye guy needed 500k (he is a one of a handful of people in the world with a phd in his field), and for expenses incurred in the development.
500k to create a whole new class of immensely useful dyes is a STEAL!
im sure that the first guy did not spend 500k on his kitchen experimentation. he just needed proper funding sources.
many are of these have been in china and the only source for the statistics is chinese state news.
now call me cynical, but im not exactly sure i trust chinese state news for accurate reports on just how widespread a problem there might be.
the SSME's have undergone continual upgrades since that time to improve their efficiency and safety.
the SSME's are the most reliable rocket engines ever built by man.
you do realize that its *natural gas* where this hydrogen comes from. which is produced by the very same 'gas' companies you mention.
no, when hydrogen comes about, you will be getting it from shell, chevron etc...
Compared to the horribly complicated and unreliable liquid fueled rockets in use now, its a pretty good idea. rockets require billions of dollars in manufacturing and maintenance infrastructure are yet are still pretty shaky platforms.
the key is to build a plant to build the material, probably would cost a billion or two (similar to plants that manufacture LCD panels...there are actually very few in the world)
Once you've got that, its a matter of engineering robots to put it together. Relatively simple, compared to the engineering titantic that is the space shuttle.
as for terrorists... if your material is strong enough to go that far into space, no terrorist will do anything but scratch it. a plane flying into it would destroy the plane, but merely strum the cable. even if the material somehow does get broken, because of its balanced nature, it doesnt fall or fly away - a repair robot patches the break in under a day.
so i guess your birthday is the celebration of everytime you shat your pants as a child?
pretty weird and negative way to look at the world my friend. there are no innocents...
you just have a lack of knowledge about it.
the UT applied research lab has developed the basis technology behind pretty much every US military sonar system in use since WWII. Ditto with a number of satellite and other techs (mostly defense related, but all that trickles down into mainstream usage). ARL is a combination of CS, ME, EE and other engineering fields.
Numerous search engine technologies and the closely related 'recommendation' systems that places like amazon uses have been born and bred...
UT does mostly foundational software and research work, which is acquired and built upon by others.
There was a somewhat famous CS person named Djikstra who taught there for years. Perhaps you've heard of him.
He set the tone for UT's best known research for years - theory. They've also got a couple of well known robotics labs (not as well funded as CMU, but they're more focused on improving the software brains than building big flashy machines to crash around in a desert)
Beyond CS undergrad (which is UT's second largest major, behind Biology - and UT is the highest populated university in the USA), UT's got a good grad program.
I had a class with Doug Berger. Great guy. Brilliant, too.
Just because you havent heard of something doesnt mean it doesnt exist. Most work universities do doesn't get published on slashdot - it goes into research journals and conferences that I'm sure you don't read or attend.
a plane is nothing to the tether. wouldnt even scratch it.
the plane would be sliced up though.
there are links in various posts on this thread, or you can just google around for the current state of carbon nanotubes. im sure wikipedia has a nice writeup on it.
theres no need for an asteroid. that was a crackpot idea from several years ago that is totally impractical and based around more traditional materials for the cable, and required a cable that was some 30 feet thick in places. The nanotube cable is going to be very thin, and quite lightweight (relatively, for something 62,000 miles long), meaning its counterweight will be very modest - the equipment used to build the cable can be used as the top anchor and park themselves when they're done.
the material *is* down. The method for making it *is* ready. However, the actual plant to build it hasn't been constructed yet because the funding doesn't exist yet. Multi-billion dollar plants dont spring up overnight.
Look at it this way. LCD technology has existed for quite some time, but its only been in recent years we've been able to make them in large scale sizes suitable for monitors. This is because the plants that churn them out cost billions of dollars in capital to make it, and it took awhile to get that kind of investment going.
Sure enough though, as carbon nanotubes have countless applications in every possible industry, the plants will be constructed, and not too far in the future.