Somewhat off-topic: why not uncut LED panels?
on
How LEDs Are Made
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I suspect this story may draw comments from people who know something about LED manufacturing. If so, I hope someone can answer this question. I noticed that panels of LEDs, such as used for traffic lights or stage lights, are composed of 200 individual LEDs. So the process is:
Cut one LED panel apart, into hundreds of LED cores. Glue hundreds of leads to the hundreds of fresh cut cores. Align hundreds of cores into hundreds of little molds. Inject resin into hundreds of little modes. Assemble all of the hundreds of resin-covered LEDs back into a panel again.
Why not this?: Attach ONE set of leads to the LED silicon panel. Dip the whole dang panel in resin.
The trademark registration was transferred to the baby Bells upon divestiture. A short time later, the judge handling the divestiture ruled that AT&T had to stop using it because it was owned by the regional Bell operating companies (baby Bells).
It's actually EASIER to get an average for Venus than it is for earth - an average is just about all we can get from here, measuring the whole planet at once.
Also, the astronomers tend not to do things like take their measurements at the an active volcano and extrapolate that as representative of the whole planet. That's the kind of crap we get from the professional scaremongers on earth. THAT'S why there is "some doubt" about earth - people paid by political organizations come out with the stupidest "studies", then from there develop "scientific models" designed to be scary, but which don't pass the sniff test.
> if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your > invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.
I canmake a copy of the declaration of independence in about two seconds . The document was obviously revolutionary.:)
More seriously, though, it is not too uncommon to try a thousand different things before finding what works. Once you know what works, reproducing it is trivial. For example, the lightbulb. Thousands of different materials and approaches were attempted. Once you find the right design and materials, making another copy is trivial. The payoff for spending all that time and money trying different things in the HOPE of finding something that works is you get to temporarily profit by being the only seller for a while. Without that, it would be silly to spend years trying different designs and materials (or paying your employees to do so) - you'd be better off letting the guy down the street do all of the hard work, then just rip off his design.
Dyson literally built over a THOUSAND prototypes trying to come up with a better vacuum. It was probable that he was wasting his time and money - that he'd never perfect an effective, affordable, reliable design. The reward for taking that risk and putting in the work is a temporary patent, so he can sell his invention rather than having the pre-existing vacuum companies sell his design thorough their network of established retailers without him getting any reward for his work.
Of course two key components of the system are that it is supposed to be a TEMPORARY protection for a NEW INVENTION. The appropriate definition of "temporary" has changed in our fast-paced world. Also half a dozen patent trolls have been trying to assert patents on a lot ofthings that aren't new inventions, and trying to assert them against people who have not actually infringed the appropriately narrow scope that the patent should cover. So we do need to deal with these patent trolls. Fortunately, there are very few of them and a whole lot of us.
I think you would agree that Office 365 meets approximately none of the requirements. Consider Adobe recently decided to make all of their software subscription / cloud only. Microsoft _could_ therefore do the same with Office. Knowing that, reread this sentence:
> be independent of the goodwill of the city's computer system suppliers and the conditions imposed by these suppliers.
That model has worked very well with various universities and other agencies pitching in on Moodle, which is a framework that hosts online courses. It takes care of things like enrollments, grade reporting, etc. - everything that isn't course-specific. After a couple of years of open widespread contributions, Moodle is as good as any commercial competitor.
> If we were using Moodle, every other Moodle user would automatically benefit. Had we opted for Moodle, we'd also benefit from fixes made by other universities.
Moodle sure has worked well for us. Many of the custom modules we have wanted have been written by devsat other universities. When I write stuff, everyone benefits as you say. Two additional benefits with Moodle specifically are quality control and maintenance. Any patches I make to the core Moodle are QAed quite a bit through the Moodle process, so my employer (the taxpayers) have assurance that they are getting quality work for the money they pay me. The custom work on the previous LMS which ended up being unsustainable wouldn't have passed Moodle QA. Also, where we share modules with other schools, that means multiple developers at multiple organizations are able tomaintain the package over time. If I get hit by a bus and Moodle HQ gets hit by a meteor, someone at Binghamton University will still be maintaining the scantron module we use.
We know almost nothing about planets outside of our solar system, of course. We do know that the planets in the solar system have gotten warmer recently. We also know that earth has warmed slightly more than other nearby planets. We know that there are no humans on mars, so the warming throughout the solar system is not caused by humans. On the other hand, earth has warmed slightly MORE than neighboring planets have. That could be because a) human-caused greenhouse effect, b) earth's atmosphere is more affected by the increased output of the sun, c) some of each or d) some other cause.
> On balance, scientists aren't entirely sure what effect clouds will have on global warming. Most climate models predict that clouds will amplify global warming slightly.
That sentence lumps professional alarmists in with actual scientists. Never been outside on a cloudy day? Those "scientists" (alarmists) who say clouds make it hot are the same ones who you said San Francisco would be underwater by the year 2010. Don't let their silly pseudo-science make you doubt the obvious facts of your experience. You know that when it's cloudy, it's cooler.
What you may not know not know is that islands near San Francisco have recently re-appeared after having been underwater for the last 60 years, the exact opposite of what the alarmists claimed. There is some important science around climate change. Earth HAS warmed a bit more in the last 100 years than the other planets have. There's also a metric ton of snake oil being sold by alarmists whose pseudoscience is nothing more than patter for their act. Confusing one with the other ends up getting you confused and making you look silly. You end up believing things like "it gets hot when it's cloudy", which is of course ridiculous.
This is just another one of the many, many balancing mechanisms in nature. Another obvious one is that more heat causes more evaporation, which causes more clouds, which causes less heat. Mother nature I has thousands of such negative feedback cycles that tend to buffer against changes.
If anyone cares to take the time write up a comment that may assist the FCC in evaluating or deal or possible concessions to be demanded of Comcast, the link to file those comments is here: http://www.fcc.gov/mergers
Two types of comments can be productive. It can be helpful to file a well-written comment that includes.numbers, citations showing exactly how Comcast's position has been detrimental. It can also be very helpful to file a comment with a suggestion for a compromise that mitigates bad effects from allowing the deal to go through. For example, a comment posted three weeks ago suggesting that they be required to keep TWC's discount program could have been helpful. What doesn't do any good are "fuck Comcast" or "fuck the FCC" comments. Those only make it look like those opposing the acquisition don't have any articulable reason for doing so.
Yes, it's a bit like a homework assignment, to be effective you need to either cite your sources or present a new idea that the FCC hasn't already thought of. That involves more work than writing "fuck Comcast", but such is life in the real world, where grown-ups are making grown-up decisions.
You might find The Linux Documentation Project handy. You don't need to know anything about kernel internals to use/dev/input/mice or any of the other devices represented in the/dev filesystem, though. All of the hardware devices in the system can be read and written from/dev , which also includes some pseudo devices such as/dev/random and/dev/null . See:
In fact, I'm a full time programmer and sysadmin using Linux exclusively, and I've had exactly ONE case where I needed to look at kernel code. That's my one credit in the kernel changelog.
Aside from the hardware devices in/dev, most of the rest of the kernel is accessible from userspace via the/proc virtual filesystem. From there you can read or set all of the kernel parameters, get information about processes such as which fils they have open, etc. See: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...
My one credit in the kernel changelog and my one experience with kernel internals, was illustrative of something I've experienced before. I was having a problem with my storage crashing. I was using (abusing?) LVM snapshots, so after following doing what troubleshooting I could, I posted on the LVM mailing list. The LVM maintainer, who is the world's #1 expert on Linux LVM, has me check a couple of things and determined that the problem was likely in the raid module. He suggested I contact the raid devel list. The raid maintainer, who is the #1 expert on Linux raid, looked at it and came up with a fix to the code, which he asked me to try. That worked. I think it's so very cool that the two top experts in the world were so accessible to help me. It didn't cost me a dime. Try that with Windows - try getting the head of Microsoft's storage system programming team to personally assist you. I've found that after I read the documentation such as the appropriate page on tldp.org, the very best of the best Linux developers are always there to help me as long as I follow the advice ESR laid out in http://bettercgi.com/gpl/smart... . Some parts of that document are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or politically incorrect, but it sure does lay out exactly how to get help from very top people.
The GUI probably calls function in a library, if not command line binaries. You are normallybetter off using the library directly rather than emulating GUI input from the user.
To fake user input, see uinput. Also, you can capture the events using od tool from the/dev/input/mice and then replay them once you have decoded the sequence.
Yep, here on/. everyone knows all of the xkcd comics. Except of course for ArcadeMan, who has apparently forgotten "Ten Thousand", aka "Diet Coke and Mentos, the second one, not the dad one". http://xkcd.com/1053/
That's interesting. I see the D-21 had a lot in common with the SR-71, including its mach 3 speed. That was 50 years ago. I wonder what kind of aircraft we have today that we'll find out about in 20 years.
If missiles are called for, you'll need something to get the missiles within range. A B-52 can carry 20 cruise missiles 5,000 miles. Since the US has B-52s stationed around the world, they can put missiles anywhere on the planet.
You COULD use ICBMs, but maintaining appreviously purchased aircraft is a lot less expensive than building a bunch of ICBMs.
A former co-worker of mine worked on designing a drone that can be dropped from the B-52. The earlier comment was pretty accurate - the B-52 is the pickup truck of the air, very versatile and conservatively inexpensive.
Your autocorrect eyes aren't too far off. One common way to make small rockets is sugar as fuel. The sugar is mixed with your choice compound that provides the oxygen.
Let that organic material sit around for a while and airborne yeast will turn some of it into dragster fuel - ethanol.
My wife and I got some $99 tablets at Wal-Mart that have HDMI out, and SDHC. As I recall, the 8" one is $109 and the 7" one is $99 or $89, something like that. They are an off-brand, Nextbook I think.
She used hers for Netflix and Facebook mostly. I use mine as a media player exclusively. They do okay. The build quality isn't excellent. The HDMI works fine even over a long cable, though.
That's an interesting post. At first, I thought it was basically anti-Muslim, but then I got to parts such as:
> To them women are not for "new booty" fun when you got bored of the same old same old, but to have children with and raise a family, actually raising their own kids and instead of having baby daddy's and baby mommas.
AActually, that's kind of a balanced view - blunt and not politically correct, but not anti-anyone.
Of course, the question is, is it right that _NASA's_ #1 goal should be reaching out to a specific religious group? I happen to think not, but some disagree. The president says that should indeed be their primary mission.
NASA head Bolden told Al Jazeerathat when he became the NASA administrator, President Obama charged him with three things: "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good"
So yeah, according to the head of NASA, the foremost mission of NASA under Barak Obama is to make Muslims feel good.
Unfortunately, "they" IS NASA. See for example http://climate.nada.gov/ , where you'll tabloid-style headlines like "Unstoppable Decline". Unfortunately, since NASA is part of the executive branch, they ultimately answer to the president. If they want to keep their projects going , they have to keepthe boss happy. The boss like stories about global warming^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H climate change, and the boss, Barak "my Muslim faith" Obama likes stories of happy Muslims, so NASA gives him climate change and Muslim outreach.
That's the current political situation - to avoid being ordered to spend more money shutting things down than they cost to run, you've got to give the boss what he wants.
It's too bad their level-one tech support isn't trained in it yet. You can bet their higher level techs are working on deploying it right now. If they don't get it done soon, they'll be out of business. Globally speaking, we're out if IPv4 addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect this story may draw comments from people who know something about LED manufacturing. If so, I hope someone can answer this question. I noticed that panels of LEDs, such as used for traffic lights or stage lights, are composed of 200 individual LEDs. So the process is:
Cut one LED panel apart, into hundreds of LED cores.
Glue hundreds of leads to the hundreds of fresh cut cores.
Align hundreds of cores into hundreds of little molds.
Inject resin into hundreds of little modes.
Assemble all of the hundreds of resin-covered LEDs back into a panel again.
Why not this?:
Attach ONE set of leads to the LED silicon panel.
Dip the whole dang panel in resin.
The trademark registration was transferred to the baby Bells upon divestiture. A short time later, the judge handling the divestiture ruled that AT&T had to stop using it because it was owned by the regional Bell operating companies (baby Bells).
http://handsonaswegrow.com/wp-...
Not exactly, but I like the picture.
It's actually EASIER to get an average for Venus than it is for earth - an average is just about all we can get from here, measuring the whole planet at once.
Also, the astronomers tend not to do things like take their measurements at the an active volcano and extrapolate that as representative of the whole planet. That's the kind of crap we get from the professional scaremongers on earth. THAT'S why there is "some doubt" about earth - people paid by political organizations come out with the stupidest "studies", then from there develop "scientific models" designed to be scary, but which don't pass the sniff test.
> if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your > invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.
I canmake a copy of the declaration of independence in about two seconds . The document was obviously revolutionary. :)
More seriously, though, it is not too uncommon to try a thousand different things before finding what works. Once you know what works, reproducing it is trivial. For example, the lightbulb. Thousands of different materials and approaches were attempted. Once you find the right design and materials, making another copy is trivial. The payoff for spending all that time and money trying different things in the HOPE of finding something that works is you get to temporarily profit by being the only seller for a while. Without that, it would be silly to spend years trying different designs and materials (or paying your employees to do so) - you'd be better off letting the guy down the street do all of the hard work, then just rip off his design.
Dyson literally built over a THOUSAND prototypes trying to come up with a better vacuum. It was probable that he was wasting his time and money - that he'd never perfect an effective, affordable, reliable design. The reward for taking that risk and putting in the work is a temporary patent, so he can sell his invention rather than having the pre-existing vacuum companies sell his design thorough their network of established retailers without him getting any reward for his work.
Of course two key components of the system are that it is supposed to be a TEMPORARY protection for a NEW INVENTION. The appropriate definition of "temporary" has changed in our fast-paced world. Also half a dozen patent trolls have been trying to assert patents on a lot ofthings that aren't new inventions, and trying to assert them against people who have not actually infringed the appropriately narrow scope that the patent should cover. So we do need to deal with these patent trolls. Fortunately, there are very few of them and a whole lot of us.
I think you would agree that Office 365 meets approximately none of the requirements. Consider Adobe recently decided to make all of their software subscription / cloud only. Microsoft _could_ therefore do the same with Office. Knowing that, reread this sentence:
> be independent of the goodwill of the city's computer system suppliers and the conditions imposed by these suppliers.
That model has worked very well with various universities and other agencies pitching in on Moodle, which is a framework that hosts online courses. It takes care of things like enrollments, grade reporting, etc. - everything that isn't course-specific. After a couple of years of open widespread contributions, Moodle is as good as any commercial competitor.
> If we were using Moodle, every other Moodle user would automatically benefit. Had we opted for Moodle, we'd also benefit from fixes made by other universities.
Moodle sure has worked well for us. Many of the custom modules we have wanted have been written by devsat other universities. When I write stuff, everyone benefits as you say. Two additional benefits with Moodle specifically are quality control and maintenance. Any patches I make to the core Moodle are QAed quite a bit through the Moodle process, so my employer (the taxpayers) have assurance that they are getting quality work for the money they pay me. The custom work on the previous LMS which ended up being unsustainable wouldn't have passed Moodle QA. Also, where we share modules with other schools, that means multiple developers at multiple organizations are able tomaintain the package over time. If I get hit by a bus and Moodle HQ gets hit by a meteor, someone at Binghamton University will still be maintaining the scantron module we use.
We know almost nothing about planets outside of our solar system, of course. We do know that the planets in the solar system have gotten warmer recently. We also know that earth has warmed slightly more than other nearby planets. We know that there are no humans on mars, so the warming throughout the solar system is not caused by humans. On the other hand, earth has warmed slightly MORE than neighboring planets have. That could be because a) human-caused greenhouse effect, b) earth's atmosphere is more affected by the increased output of the sun, c) some of each or d) some other cause.
> On balance, scientists aren't entirely sure what effect clouds will have on global warming. Most climate models predict that clouds will amplify global warming slightly.
That sentence lumps professional alarmists in with actual scientists. Never been outside on a cloudy day? Those "scientists" (alarmists) who say clouds make it hot are the same ones who you said San Francisco would be underwater by the year 2010. Don't let their silly pseudo-science make you doubt the obvious facts of your experience. You know that when it's cloudy, it's cooler.
What you may not know not know is that islands near San Francisco have recently re-appeared after having been underwater for the last 60 years, the exact opposite of what the alarmists claimed. There is some important science around climate change. Earth HAS warmed a bit more in the last 100 years than the other planets have. There's also a metric ton of snake oil being sold by alarmists whose pseudoscience is nothing more than patter for their act. Confusing one with the other ends up getting you confused and making you look silly. You end up believing things like "it gets hot when it's cloudy", which is of course ridiculous.
This is just another one of the many, many balancing mechanisms in nature. Another obvious one is that more heat causes more evaporation, which causes more clouds, which causes less heat. Mother nature I has thousands of such negative feedback cycles that tend to buffer against changes.
If anyone cares to take the time write up a comment that may assist the FCC in evaluating or deal or possible concessions to be demanded of Comcast, the link to file those comments is here:
http://www.fcc.gov/mergers
Two types of comments can be productive. It can be helpful to file a well-written comment that includes.numbers, citations showing exactly how Comcast's position has been detrimental. It can also be very helpful to file a comment with a suggestion for a compromise that mitigates bad effects from allowing the deal to go through. For example, a comment posted three weeks ago suggesting that they be required to keep TWC's discount program could have been helpful. What doesn't do any good are "fuck Comcast" or "fuck the FCC" comments. Those only make it look like those opposing the acquisition don't have any articulable reason for doing so.
Yes, it's a bit like a homework assignment, to be effective you need to either cite your sources or present a new idea that the FCC hasn't already thought of. That involves more work than writing "fuck Comcast", but such is life in the real world, where grown-ups are making grown-up decisions.
You might find The Linux Documentation Project handy. You don't need to know anything about kernel internals to use /dev/input/mice or any of the other devices represented in the /dev filesystem, though. All of the hardware devices in the system can be read and written from /dev , which also includes some pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null . See:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...
In fact, I'm a full time programmer and sysadmin using Linux exclusively, and I've had exactly ONE case where I needed to look at kernel code. That's my one credit in the kernel changelog.
Aside from the hardware devices in /dev, most of the rest of the kernel is accessible from userspace via the /proc virtual filesystem. From there you can read or set all of the kernel parameters, get information about processes such as which fils they have open, etc. See:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...
If you ever did need to program for the kernel itself, you do so via a module:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/...
My one credit in the kernel changelog and my one experience with kernel internals, was illustrative of something I've experienced before. I was having a problem with my storage crashing. I was using (abusing?) LVM snapshots, so after following doing what troubleshooting I could, I posted on the LVM mailing list. The LVM maintainer, who is the world's #1 expert on Linux LVM, has me check a couple of things and determined that the problem was likely in the raid module. He suggested I contact the raid devel list. The raid maintainer, who is the #1 expert on Linux raid, looked at it and came up with a fix to the code, which he asked me to try. That worked. I think it's so very cool that the two top experts in the world were so accessible to help me. It didn't cost me a dime. Try that with Windows - try getting the head of Microsoft's storage system programming team to personally assist you. I've found that after I read the documentation such as the appropriate page on tldp.org, the very best of the best Linux developers are always there to help me as long as I follow the advice ESR laid out in http://bettercgi.com/gpl/smart... . Some parts of that document are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or politically incorrect, but it sure does lay out exactly how to get help from very top people.
> PS: Nothing criminal, just software automation.
The GUI probably calls function in a library, if not command line binaries. You are normallybetter off using the library directly rather than emulating GUI input from the user.
To fake user input, see uinput. Also, you can capture the events using od tool from the /dev/input/mice and then replay them once you have decoded the sequence.
# cat /dev/input/mice | od -t x1 -w3
0000000 08 02 00
0000003 08 08 00
0000006 08 09 00
0000011 08 07 00
0000014 08 04 00
0000017 08 01 01
0000022 08 00 02
0000025 08 02 02
Yep, here on /. everyone knows all of the xkcd comics. Except of course for ArcadeMan, who has apparently forgotten "Ten Thousand", aka "Diet Coke and Mentos, the second one, not the dad one".
http://xkcd.com/1053/
That's interesting. I see the D-21 had a lot in common with the SR-71, including its mach 3 speed. That was 50 years ago. I wonder what kind of aircraft we have today that we'll find out about in 20 years.
If missiles are called for, you'll need something to get the missiles within range. A B-52 can carry 20 cruise missiles 5,000 miles. Since the US has B-52s stationed around the world, they can put missiles anywhere on the planet.
You COULD use ICBMs, but maintaining appreviously purchased aircraft is a lot less expensive than building a bunch of ICBMs.
A former co-worker of mine worked on designing a drone that can be dropped from the B-52. The earlier comment was pretty accurate - the B-52 is the pickup truck of the air, very versatile and conservatively inexpensive.
Your autocorrect eyes aren't too far off. One common way to make small rockets is sugar as fuel. The sugar is mixed with your choice compound that provides the oxygen.
Let that organic material sit around for a while and airborne yeast will turn some of it into dragster fuel - ethanol.
My wife and I got some $99 tablets at Wal-Mart that have HDMI out, and SDHC. As I recall, the 8" one is $109 and the 7" one is $99 or $89, something like that. They are an off-brand, Nextbook I think.
She used hers for Netflix and Facebook mostly. I use mine as a media player exclusively. They do okay. The build quality isn't excellent. The HDMI works fine even over a long cable, though.
That's an interesting post. At first, I thought it was basically anti-Muslim, but then I got to parts such as:
> To them women are not for "new booty" fun when you got bored of the same old same old, but to have children with and raise a family, actually raising their own kids and instead of having baby daddy's and baby mommas.
AActually, that's kind of a balanced view - blunt and not politically correct, but not anti-anyone.
Of course, the question is, is it right that _NASA's_ #1 goal should be reaching out to a specific religious group? I happen to think not, but some disagree. The president says that should indeed be their primary mission.
NASA head Bolden told Al Jazeerathat when he became the NASA administrator, President Obama charged him with three things: "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good"
So yeah, according to the head of NASA, the foremost mission of NASA under Barak Obama is to make Muslims feel good.
Unfortunately, "they" IS NASA. See for example http://climate.nada.gov/ , where you'll tabloid-style headlines like "Unstoppable Decline". Unfortunately, since NASA is part of the executive branch, they ultimately answer to the president. If they want to keep their projects going , they have to keepthe boss happy. The boss like stories about global warming^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H climate change, and the boss, Barak "my Muslim faith" Obama likes stories of happy Muslims, so NASA gives him climate change and Muslim outreach.
That's the current political situation - to avoid being ordered to spend more money shutting things down than they cost to run, you've got to give the boss what he wants.
It's too bad their level-one tech support isn't trained in it yet. You can bet their higher level techs are working on deploying it right now. If they don't get it done soon, they'll be out of business. Globally speaking, we're out if IPv4 addresses.
POP3 (port 110) does not have a "send" command. See the protocol definition:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc193...
You MUA uses POP3 on port 110 to retrieve messages. It sends via smtp on port 25 or port 587, often using a completely different server.
> This thread is going to be mostly about white male suburbanites complaining that race is irrelevant.
Not bad for your first guess. Want to try again, or would you likea hint?