When you do that the white side absorbs only a little of incoming heat, and then it is transferred by contact to the black side, which transmits the heat away pretty well.
Hmmm... maybe phase-change solid-state heatpipes would help this even more; integrate them directly with the material of the ship...
As a matter of fact that may be a good technique for any space ship, to guarantee that no part of the ship gets too hot or too cold.
There are two ways that an object can stay cool - either by bleeding heat into surrounding medium (none or very very little in space) or radiate it away
That's what the heat powered laser is for. If you have some high efficiency way to turn that heat energy into light, you can then transmit it away at high speed.
I briefly considered the steam plant idea (actually I was thinking about the solid state version of same)... but there are too many inefficiencies in that process, you would be putting out only a small fraction of the heat you are bringing in.
The key is to make the laser some factor hotter than the ship... for instance, if the laser is 50% efficient, then it would have to be twice as hot as the mean temperature of the ship in order for its radiance to carry away enough heat to cool the ship.
Actually it's quite a bit more complicated than that; in reality, you have to bleed out every watt that's coming in, somewhere.
Can someone explain why such a convoluted and time consuming route is required?
It's all about delta-v... how much can you change your velocity?
Earth orbits the sun at a specific velocity.
Mercury orbits the sun at a much smaller velocity.
But in order to fly straight there, you have to counteract all of the orbital velocity you have at earth, then either free fall or thrust to the new location, and then build up the orbital velocity of Mercury to make orbit. That's a lot of delta v, and a lot of working fluid to put into your thrusters. In fact, even if we felt like paying that fuel bill, we don't really have the technology to build a probe large enough to carry all that fuel, or to get that fuel out of Earth's gravity well in the first place.
So instead what we do is figure out a low-delta v way to launch it, bringing it into the inner solar system and slowing it down on the way. The key to this is slingshot maneuvers - using the gravity wells peppered throughout the solar system to change the direction of velocity without having to spend delta-v on it.
That and the craft makes use of a little-known feature of relativity; the more energy in your fuel, the heavier it is; if you burn the fuel you have deep in a gravity well, it is quite a bit more effective than it would be in space. This is related to the law that predicts you cannot travel at the speed of light; as you go faster, your intertial mass rises, in such a way that it would take an infinite amount of thrust to reach the speed of light.
Sure your craft has more inertial mass, too, but you'll be slowing down as you exit the gravity well, leaving your fuel behind you, and that's where the mathematical magic happens.
I like their cooling solution much better; high temperature superconductors and peltiers to move the heat to a central location, where the kinetic energy is used to power a communications laser.
Too bad our current superconducting technology is scaling more slowly the higher temperature it gets. What we're currently calling "high temperature" means room temp. We'll make it there eventually. But without a whole new technology (nanotech anyone?) we'll never make superconductors that remain super conducting at temperatures much higher than that.
But what about a laser powered by heat? Can it happen without having to reach the ionization temperature of the lasing medium? Anyone have any insight?
No one is bashing the democrats, I don't know how you got that idea.
They publish an article decrying that the democratic convention is insecure. Nowhere do they mention that this is a prevalent concern for many organizations. Therefore, to some types (PHBs) it looks like the democratic convention is at fault for this...
Don't bash on the democrats. This has been a problem ever since wireless networking has become ubiquitous in every convention, company, and private network. The democrats are no more or less susceptible than anyone else...
Bullshit. The problem is that almost every program does have bugs. That is, am I liable if my program has a bug that can be exploited by giving it some carefully crafted data?
Maybe I just purposefully left such an exploit in the code, or maybe it was honest accident. You cannot prove either way.
It doesn't matter what I can prove. What matters is that, if I'm the Certificate Authority, you signed a contract saying that you would take certain steps to ensure that you do not falsely represent the nature of your code. If you don't show due dilligence in making sure that's the case, I don't care if its poor testing procedures, maliciousness, or just laziness; in any case my actions are exactly the same.
I revoke your certificate if you don't fix the problem post haste. If the problem is obviously malicious I don't give you a chance before revoking your certificate.
What are these "informational popups" that people keep referring to?
Duke Power, which distributes power from the Blews' Creek Nuclear Power Plant in NC to the Carolinas and beyond, when you sign into their e-bill/e-pay application, the application itself launches in a popup window with all the controls other than exit removed. This happens on a lot of banking sites as well.
And a lot of sites will launch counters or worker threads in a seperate popup window.
As for IE being faster, I have not noticed IE being any faster than FireFox, but if it is it's probably because bits of it run in ring zero, whcih is an enormous security risk (one you will never see any Linux developers taking).
Actually, IE does run faster, but not for any good reason.
They broke TCP/IP compatibility in implementing HTTP in IE in certain circumstances; basically, if you are using IE and the web server returns an HTTP response that indicates it is IIS, then IE does not close the session when it is done; it leaves it open and uses the same session for the next request.
This is against the HTTP RFC (SHOULD and SHOULD NOT), but what it means is that IE only has to do a TCP/IP handshake once for a server. The TCP/IP handshake for HTTP is either 2 or 3 roundtrips, I forget, but if you're on a typical broadband connection, you'll probably have latency from 50 - 100 ms; meaning you can see delays of half a second just from opening the connection.
So that's where the mysterious IE is faster comes from; not that their client rendering is any better than anyone else, but that they chose to ignore parts of the RFC in certain special cases...
Actually SP2 will be hell on my company's web interface. We supply order data for some 400+ trading partners, many use our web front end to pickup and send data.
I write B2B and B2C e-commerce, provisioning, planning, data mining, and portal websites for a living. We were very concerned about this very issue. Once I looked into it in greater detail I found it wasn't that bad...
At the end of the day only our B2B sites seem to be vastly affected; true, some of our B2C sites use popups and whatnot, but they are designed such that the sites are still fully usable without them. We do have a few B2B portal type sites that will not pass muster in SP2. The answer though is easy; add me to your trusted sites list.
No word yet on whether or not some additional configuration will be necessary; in some very early betas the Trusted Sites permission set worked like today. However, I've seen several MS releases in the past year where the release bits had more restrictive security permissions than the betas, so that might be the case here.
But you can always help your B2B customers implement a policy that sets the Trusted Sites permission set where it needs to be for your site to work...
Granted, it'll be easy for a spyware developer to insert falsehoods in that description, but if the program does not perform as advertised, then it creates some leverage for lawsuits against the spyware developer.
With the default security settings (even currently) unsigned ActiveX controls are not run. You are prompted to download signed ActiveX controls. The only difference now is that IE presents more granular information from the dialog... they're basically backfitting the.NET code security permissions meme into ActiveX.
And if your code doesn't do what the certificate says it does, the CA can revoke your signing certificate. I just hope IE actually checks for a revoked certificate...
It also means that non-power users will freak out when their banking websites or whatever that use valid popups stop working.
I would add to that prediction that help line call for institutions that use popups as part of their interface will skyrocket.
Personally, I think that Microsoft should implement a certificate-based atomic permissions structure.
If you want to do things that are potentially harmful to the user, that's fine, but you gotta be SSL. And your CA specifies what you can and can't do atomically. Banking website requires popups? Fine. Go SSL before you popup, and the javascript engine only allows it if you're in the Trusted Sites list (as current), or if your SSL certificate indicates that the CA has granted that authority to you. And if your SSL specifies you can launch a popup, that DOESN'T mean you can force Gator in.
You abuse your permission? The CA revokes your cert (there are mechanisms to revoke SSL certs right now, they're just going unused)... The CA allows you to abuse your permission? Microsoft revokes their javascript cert.
Microsoft, are you listening? You can implement this in the current cert standard... just put it in the miscellaneous data portion of the certificate, and implement it as an optional extension.
When you're done, make a content rating body like we have for movies and tv. Make membership optional, and turn censorship off by default. Just add the rating as part of the cert. Then concerned parents/employers/whatever can choose what level of censorship to employ at an atomic level. And I can, for instance, choose to allow informational popups but not porn popups...
BTW, the correct answer to this problem is to drill out the center of the screw. Start small, watch your alignment carefully, and gradually step up the size of the drill until you can remove the screw.
You will have to clean out a ton of metal filings. You might also have to re-tap the screw hole...
Always respond to unexpected after-hours calls with, "I have been drinking, and I can't drive."
Next HR performance review:
"Employee AxemRed is very capable but seems to have a drinking problem. I recommend we let him go before the problem scales any further".
In today's legal atmosphere they better bring some proof that this is affecting my job performance. Otherwise they'd be open to a wrongful termination suit. Drinking on my own time is not any of the company's business. If I'm specifically on call that's one thing, but I better not be on call often enough that I have to make lifestyle changes if that's the case...
Then they decide to stop paying for cell phones. I bitch about it being a short sighted penny-wise pound-foolish policy. Said bitching falls on deaf ears and they cut funding anyways.
Fine. My out of office message now specifies contacting my boss, not calling my cell phone. If work calls outside of my "free" hours timeslots, they pay for that portion of my monthly bill. If I use 300 minutes of the 500 plan minutes in a month, and 30 of those are for work use, then work pays for 1/10th of my bill.
If its the weekend and work calls my cell phone I do not feel an urgent need to pick up. If they leave a voice mail I feel just fine not responding until I'm in the office on Monday.
To put it short, if my employer feels that it is not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building, then I'm going to act like it's not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building.
And you can take your team-player should-be-willing-to-pitch-in speech and stick it where the sun don't shine. You're taking advantage of an expensive resource that I'm paying for out of pocket, if you're not willing to help mitigate that cost then I'm not willing to let you use that resource.
Saying that I should be willing to use my broadband, which incurs a usage fee, for work just because I already pay for it is like saying I should be willing to drive people around in my car just because I already pay for it.
There's a law against forcing someone to use their private vehicle for work related tasks without compensating for fuel and wear and tear... I see no reason that same principle shouldn't apply to any resource.
you're lying by omission by only giving customer statistics.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Believe me, you can take any set of numbers and put whatever spin on them you want; one small fact can not paint a picture by itself. The real question is how accountable are you to the people you're quoting statistics to... in this case, the audience of the message is their current customerbase, in hopes of retaining them, and potential customers, in hopes of not scaring them away.
In both cases you have an ethical responsibility to represent the facts as fully as possible... the proper, ethical way, to represent this kind of statistic is to provide several different views of the data. Oh and no charts. It is surprisingly easy to lie with charts... there are several how-to style books on the subject, both from the point of view of creating and recognizing such. I'm sure amazon search would be happy to help you find it.
Could you imagine having a game engine advanced enough where depending on what kind of shoes your wearing--and how fast your walking/running--the sound would change automatically from click-click on tile to the soft pad on carpet? All without any programming?
EAX does exactly that; simulates those kinds of environmental audio effects... it doesn't really simulate mesh-mesh interactions, but you DO load in a 3D model of the space and it even accounts for reverb and echo off of the various surfaces, as well as positioning the mixer channel properly.
The demo is pretty fun; footsteps walking down a hall behind your head, with a door to your left, then proceeding through the room. Even when the footsteps are to your right in the hallway, you still hear them as they echo down the hall and come through the open doorway.
As for the muffling effect you are speaking of, I'm not sure if they model that accurately or not... but EAX devices have a DSP in them, you could create a piece of code that runs on the DSP to do that level of simulation... basically each surface would have a particular filter applied to any sounds that emanate from interactions with that surface...
Bandwidth it supposed to be roughly 1900 kbps. And that's b, not B.
That's actually quite a lot... that's 1.9 Mbps.
Some examples of bandwidth needs:
MPEG2 encoded for standard play on DVD - 2Mbps Typical DivX encoding - 1Mbps High res MP3 - 300 Kbps
Compare it to ADSL, which in my area tops out at 1.5 Mbps on the downlink, and Road Runner, which until May was only guaranteeing 2Mbps on the downlink. And those companies have a copper wire that goes into my home; that 1.9Mbps is being broadcast over huge distances with two puny little radio dishes on each end...
Your best bet is fully adjustable projectors that can manage their own keystoning and whatnot...
Of course the coolest thing would be to take two of the projectors with auto-keystone adjustment, and modify their auto-adjustment circuits to do auto image registration:D
Oh and keep in mind that most LCDs output polarized light; you need sources that do unpolarized light so you can pass it through a polarizing filter (or an LCD manufacturer willing to build two different versions of the same LCD with two different polarizations...
If you coupled that with an accelerometer on a chip (analog devices makes a couple of different models) you could detect launch, free fall, terminal velocity, and make sure that the fireworks are over a certain altitude before firing.
Only problem is that you want ground air distance, not height above sea level, which you can't do with a cheap altimeter...
Besides the accelerometer will take care of it. You'll definitely see the launch. BTW, after launch an accelerometer is worthless; it'll report 9.8 m/s*s in the direction of the ground (minus a little for wind buffeting)...
actually now that I think of it, you can use the altimeter for THAT. that's it! Use the instruments BACKWARDS! The accelerometer tells you how high you'll go, while the altimeter tells you when you've hit your peak!!!
Slashdot Mirror
When you do that the white side absorbs only a little of incoming heat, and then it is transferred by contact to the black side, which transmits the heat away pretty well.
Hmmm... maybe phase-change solid-state heatpipes would help this even more; integrate them directly with the material of the ship...
As a matter of fact that may be a good technique for any space ship, to guarantee that no part of the ship gets too hot or too cold.
There are two ways that an object can stay cool - either by bleeding heat into surrounding medium (none or very very little in space) or radiate it away
That's what the heat powered laser is for. If you have some high efficiency way to turn that heat energy into light, you can then transmit it away at high speed.
I briefly considered the steam plant idea (actually I was thinking about the solid state version of same)... but there are too many inefficiencies in that process, you would be putting out only a small fraction of the heat you are bringing in.
The key is to make the laser some factor hotter than the ship... for instance, if the laser is 50% efficient, then it would have to be twice as hot as the mean temperature of the ship in order for its radiance to carry away enough heat to cool the ship.
Actually it's quite a bit more complicated than that; in reality, you have to bleed out every watt that's coming in, somewhere.
Can someone explain why such a convoluted and time consuming route is required?
It's all about delta-v... how much can you change your velocity?
Earth orbits the sun at a specific velocity.
Mercury orbits the sun at a much smaller velocity.
But in order to fly straight there, you have to counteract all of the orbital velocity you have at earth, then either free fall or thrust to the new location, and then build up the orbital velocity of Mercury to make orbit. That's a lot of delta v, and a lot of working fluid to put into your thrusters. In fact, even if we felt like paying that fuel bill, we don't really have the technology to build a probe large enough to carry all that fuel, or to get that fuel out of Earth's gravity well in the first place.
So instead what we do is figure out a low-delta v way to launch it, bringing it into the inner solar system and slowing it down on the way. The key to this is slingshot maneuvers - using the gravity wells peppered throughout the solar system to change the direction of velocity without having to spend delta-v on it.
That and the craft makes use of a little-known feature of relativity; the more energy in your fuel, the heavier it is; if you burn the fuel you have deep in a gravity well, it is quite a bit more effective than it would be in space. This is related to the law that predicts you cannot travel at the speed of light; as you go faster, your intertial mass rises, in such a way that it would take an infinite amount of thrust to reach the speed of light.
Sure your craft has more inertial mass, too, but you'll be slowing down as you exit the gravity well, leaving your fuel behind you, and that's where the mathematical magic happens.
I like their cooling solution much better; high temperature superconductors and peltiers to move the heat to a central location, where the kinetic energy is used to power a communications laser.
Too bad our current superconducting technology is scaling more slowly the higher temperature it gets. What we're currently calling "high temperature" means room temp. We'll make it there eventually. But without a whole new technology (nanotech anyone?) we'll never make superconductors that remain super conducting at temperatures much higher than that.
But what about a laser powered by heat? Can it happen without having to reach the ionization temperature of the lasing medium? Anyone have any insight?
No one is bashing the democrats, I don't know how you got that idea.
They publish an article decrying that the democratic convention is insecure. Nowhere do they mention that this is a prevalent concern for many organizations. Therefore, to some types (PHBs) it looks like the democratic convention is at fault for this...
Don't bash on the democrats. This has been a problem ever since wireless networking has become ubiquitous in every convention, company, and private network. The democrats are no more or less susceptible than anyone else...
Bullshit. The problem is that almost every program does have bugs. That is, am I liable if my program has a bug that can be exploited by giving it some carefully crafted data?
Maybe I just purposefully left such an exploit in the code, or maybe it was honest accident. You cannot prove either way.
It doesn't matter what I can prove. What matters is that, if I'm the Certificate Authority, you signed a contract saying that you would take certain steps to ensure that you do not falsely represent the nature of your code. If you don't show due dilligence in making sure that's the case, I don't care if its poor testing procedures, maliciousness, or just laziness; in any case my actions are exactly the same.
I revoke your certificate if you don't fix the problem post haste. If the problem is obviously malicious I don't give you a chance before revoking your certificate.
What are these "informational popups" that people keep referring to?
Duke Power, which distributes power from the Blews' Creek Nuclear Power Plant in NC to the Carolinas and beyond, when you sign into their e-bill/e-pay application, the application itself launches in a popup window with all the controls other than exit removed. This happens on a lot of banking sites as well.
And a lot of sites will launch counters or worker threads in a seperate popup window.
As for IE being faster, I have not noticed IE being any faster than FireFox, but if it is it's probably because bits of it run in ring zero, whcih is an enormous security risk (one you will never see any Linux developers taking).
Actually, IE does run faster, but not for any good reason.
They broke TCP/IP compatibility in implementing HTTP in IE in certain circumstances; basically, if you are using IE and the web server returns an HTTP response that indicates it is IIS, then IE does not close the session when it is done; it leaves it open and uses the same session for the next request.
This is against the HTTP RFC (SHOULD and SHOULD NOT), but what it means is that IE only has to do a TCP/IP handshake once for a server. The TCP/IP handshake for HTTP is either 2 or 3 roundtrips, I forget, but if you're on a typical broadband connection, you'll probably have latency from 50 - 100 ms; meaning you can see delays of half a second just from opening the connection.
So that's where the mysterious IE is faster comes from; not that their client rendering is any better than anyone else, but that they chose to ignore parts of the RFC in certain special cases...
Actually SP2 will be hell on my company's web interface. We supply order data for some 400+ trading partners, many use our web front end to pickup and send data.
I write B2B and B2C e-commerce, provisioning, planning, data mining, and portal websites for a living. We were very concerned about this very issue. Once I looked into it in greater detail I found it wasn't that bad...
At the end of the day only our B2B sites seem to be vastly affected; true, some of our B2C sites use popups and whatnot, but they are designed such that the sites are still fully usable without them. We do have a few B2B portal type sites that will not pass muster in SP2. The answer though is easy; add me to your trusted sites list.
No word yet on whether or not some additional configuration will be necessary; in some very early betas the Trusted Sites permission set worked like today. However, I've seen several MS releases in the past year where the release bits had more restrictive security permissions than the betas, so that might be the case here.
But you can always help your B2B customers implement a policy that sets the Trusted Sites permission set where it needs to be for your site to work...
Granted, it'll be easy for a spyware developer to insert falsehoods in that description, but if the program does not perform as advertised, then it creates some leverage for lawsuits against the spyware developer.
.NET code security permissions meme into ActiveX.
With the default security settings (even currently) unsigned ActiveX controls are not run. You are prompted to download signed ActiveX controls. The only difference now is that IE presents more granular information from the dialog... they're basically backfitting the
And if your code doesn't do what the certificate says it does, the CA can revoke your signing certificate. I just hope IE actually checks for a revoked certificate...
It also means that non-power users will freak out when their banking websites or whatever that use valid popups stop working.
I would add to that prediction that help line call for institutions that use popups as part of their interface will skyrocket.
Personally, I think that Microsoft should implement a certificate-based atomic permissions structure.
If you want to do things that are potentially harmful to the user, that's fine, but you gotta be SSL. And your CA specifies what you can and can't do atomically. Banking website requires popups? Fine. Go SSL before you popup, and the javascript engine only allows it if you're in the Trusted Sites list (as current), or if your SSL certificate indicates that the CA has granted that authority to you. And if your SSL specifies you can launch a popup, that DOESN'T mean you can force Gator in.
You abuse your permission? The CA revokes your cert (there are mechanisms to revoke SSL certs right now, they're just going unused)... The CA allows you to abuse your permission? Microsoft revokes their javascript cert.
Microsoft, are you listening? You can implement this in the current cert standard... just put it in the miscellaneous data portion of the certificate, and implement it as an optional extension.
When you're done, make a content rating body like we have for movies and tv. Make membership optional, and turn censorship off by default. Just add the rating as part of the cert. Then concerned parents/employers/whatever can choose what level of censorship to employ at an atomic level. And I can, for instance, choose to allow informational popups but not porn popups...
And now we're posting stories on giant penis flowers on Slashdot?
I for one welcome our new giant penis flower overlords.
By law the apartment complex has to assist in mounting any satellite dishes... why don't you just ask your maintenance folks?
BTW, the correct answer to this problem is to drill out the center of the screw. Start small, watch your alignment carefully, and gradually step up the size of the drill until you can remove the screw.
You will have to clean out a ton of metal filings. You might also have to re-tap the screw hole...
Always respond to unexpected after-hours calls with, "I have been drinking, and I can't drive."
Next HR performance review:
"Employee AxemRed is very capable but seems to have a drinking problem. I recommend we let him go before the problem scales any further".
In today's legal atmosphere they better bring some proof that this is affecting my job performance. Otherwise they'd be open to a wrongful termination suit. Drinking on my own time is not any of the company's business. If I'm specifically on call that's one thing, but I better not be on call often enough that I have to make lifestyle changes if that's the case...
Work paid for my cell phone for years.
Then they decide to stop paying for cell phones. I bitch about it being a short sighted penny-wise pound-foolish policy. Said bitching falls on deaf ears and they cut funding anyways.
Fine. My out of office message now specifies contacting my boss, not calling my cell phone. If work calls outside of my "free" hours timeslots, they pay for that portion of my monthly bill. If I use 300 minutes of the 500 plan minutes in a month, and 30 of those are for work use, then work pays for 1/10th of my bill.
If its the weekend and work calls my cell phone I do not feel an urgent need to pick up. If they leave a voice mail I feel just fine not responding until I'm in the office on Monday.
To put it short, if my employer feels that it is not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building, then I'm going to act like it's not important for them to be able to reach me when I am not in the building.
And you can take your team-player should-be-willing-to-pitch-in speech and stick it where the sun don't shine. You're taking advantage of an expensive resource that I'm paying for out of pocket, if you're not willing to help mitigate that cost then I'm not willing to let you use that resource.
Saying that I should be willing to use my broadband, which incurs a usage fee, for work just because I already pay for it is like saying I should be willing to drive people around in my car just because I already pay for it.
There's a law against forcing someone to use their private vehicle for work related tasks without compensating for fuel and wear and tear... I see no reason that same principle shouldn't apply to any resource.
you're lying by omission by only giving customer statistics.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Believe me, you can take any set of numbers and put whatever spin on them you want; one small fact can not paint a picture by itself. The real question is how accountable are you to the people you're quoting statistics to... in this case, the audience of the message is their current customerbase, in hopes of retaining them, and potential customers, in hopes of not scaring them away.
In both cases you have an ethical responsibility to represent the facts as fully as possible... the proper, ethical way, to represent this kind of statistic is to provide several different views of the data. Oh and no charts. It is surprisingly easy to lie with charts... there are several how-to style books on the subject, both from the point of view of creating and recognizing such. I'm sure amazon search would be happy to help you find it.
Could you imagine having a game engine advanced enough where depending on what kind of shoes your wearing--and how fast your walking/running--the sound would change automatically from click-click on tile to the soft pad on carpet? All without any programming?
EAX does exactly that; simulates those kinds of environmental audio effects... it doesn't really simulate mesh-mesh interactions, but you DO load in a 3D model of the space and it even accounts for reverb and echo off of the various surfaces, as well as positioning the mixer channel properly.
The demo is pretty fun; footsteps walking down a hall behind your head, with a door to your left, then proceeding through the room. Even when the footsteps are to your right in the hallway, you still hear them as they echo down the hall and come through the open doorway.
As for the muffling effect you are speaking of, I'm not sure if they model that accurately or not... but EAX devices have a DSP in them, you could create a piece of code that runs on the DSP to do that level of simulation... basically each surface would have a particular filter applied to any sounds that emanate from interactions with that surface...
star - may refer to an actor of prime importance to a production, t perform the duties thereof
stare - to gaze intently
staring = to stare in the present perfect tense
starring = to star in the present perfect tense
Bandwidth it supposed to be roughly 1900 kbps. And that's b, not B.
That's actually quite a lot... that's 1.9 Mbps.
Some examples of bandwidth needs:
MPEG2 encoded for standard play on DVD - 2Mbps
Typical DivX encoding - 1Mbps
High res MP3 - 300 Kbps
Compare it to ADSL, which in my area tops out at 1.5 Mbps on the downlink, and Road Runner, which until May was only guaranteeing 2Mbps on the downlink. And those companies have a copper wire that goes into my home; that 1.9Mbps is being broadcast over huge distances with two puny little radio dishes on each end...
CCDs read out a row of pixels at a time; any interference upstage from the sampling elements shows up as horizontal banding...
Using an accelerometer, it is trivial to integrate the acceleration over time to get velocity, and you can then integrate that to get distance.
If you think that requires some sophisticated hardware - think again. You can integrate an analog signal with a something as simple as a capacitor.
I realize that... but I was thinking with all the safety issues involved, getting submeter accuracy may be difficult with a cheap accelerometer...
Your best bet is fully adjustable projectors that can manage their own keystoning and whatnot...
:D
Of course the coolest thing would be to take two of the projectors with auto-keystone adjustment, and modify their auto-adjustment circuits to do auto image registration
Oh and keep in mind that most LCDs output polarized light; you need sources that do unpolarized light so you can pass it through a polarizing filter (or an LCD manufacturer willing to build two different versions of the same LCD with two different polarizations...
If you coupled that with an accelerometer on a chip (analog devices makes a couple of different models) you could detect launch, free fall, terminal velocity, and make sure that the fireworks are over a certain altitude before firing.
Only problem is that you want ground air distance, not height above sea level, which you can't do with a cheap altimeter...
Besides the accelerometer will take care of it. You'll definitely see the launch. BTW, after launch an accelerometer is worthless; it'll report 9.8 m/s*s in the direction of the ground (minus a little for wind buffeting)...
actually now that I think of it, you can use the altimeter for THAT. that's it! Use the instruments BACKWARDS! The accelerometer tells you how high you'll go, while the altimeter tells you when you've hit your peak!!!
*Guiness voice* BRILLIANT!