the decision to use AC over DC was not random nor taken lightly, there are many factors involved (heck, it was a major engineering, corporate, and PR war between Edison and Westinghouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ), but the right decision was made
The right decision was made for the time. At that time, no one could have envisioned modern electronics. The advent of the transistor marked the turning point at which DC power would eventually become the better option. It was just a matter of time after that until control electronics got good enough and efficient enough to make DC a better option. We are almost at that point now. DC power line transmission is a better alternative if one assumes that the technology exists to do voltage conversion at high voltages (its not currently there yet, but at the current rate of technological improvement, we will be there in 20 or so years). The conversion to DC is not even something that will need to be done all at once. Individual long haul lines can be converted one at a time until the power form the power company is HVDC all the way to you local transformer. At that point, it will make sense for the power company to offer a HVDC feed for those that want it. This would be advantageous for solar and wind installations because interfacing with these power system would not require complex and expensive phase matching equipment. It would be advantageous for those that have mostly DC appliances because they would save 10% on their electricity costs because they would no longer have to pay the 5% efficiency loss to convert to AC power at the pole, and they would save an additional 5% by not having to convert from AC back to DC inside the appliance. For power utilities it would be cheaper because of less transmission losses as well as less risk of power line phase issues causing transmission line faults and unexpected drop outs. We are still many decades away from HVDC power becoming a reality, but it will come. It will happen because it can happen and the advantages will eventually outweigh the cost of retrofit.
an ac synchronous motor is much more efficient than DC alternatives.
Not any more. 30 years ago that was true, but DC brushless motors have seen a great deal of improvement in the last three decades. High power and high efficiency are pretty normal in DC induction and DC PM motors these days. The biggest contributing factor has been orders of magnitude improvements in power electronics (where most of the efficiency losses used to be). It is not uncommon to find motor / control electronics packages now that are pushing 95% efficient up to tens (or even hundreds) of horsepower. (Thats tens to hundreds of kilowatts for those of you who are so inclined).
HVAC uses 3-phase AC power which is actually pretty efficient for motors, especially if you want motors that are going to last a long time.
No, no it doesnt. Commerical and residential HVAC is almost all 240VAC (two phases 180 degrees out of phase). Only industrial HVAC is 3 phase, as 3 phase is generally only needed / installed in an industrial setting.
Pretty much all brushless motors are driven by AC
Again, no they aren't. A very large portion of brushless motors including those used in large appliances, automotive (drivetrain and otherwise), computers, etc... are AC/DC brushless motors that will function on any power source. There are plenty of DC brushless motors and AC/DC brushless motors available that are equal in efficiency, longevity and power to their AC only cousins.
3-phase is great for motors that run at a single RPM, such as what is used in compressors and pumps for HVAC.
This is probably the closest to correct you have been. For commercial and residential power, 2 phase AC motors have traditionally been used, but they are largely inefficient in their use of power compared to modern options because it is difficult to operate a fixed speed heat pump efficiently under a varying load. More recently, we are beginning to see modulating heat pumps that offer a variable power setting. These require the use of PWM drive DC motors, or expensive / inefficient AC inverters to drive the pump motors. These modulating systems are almost ideal for operation from DC sources like solar and wind drive because they can be designed to function directly from the DC feed without the need for DC to AC conversion, visa-versa, or both. They consequently have the lowest operating losses, transmission losses and conversion losses of any available options.
And the fact that "total wages and salaries last year amounted to $7.1 trillion, or 42.5 percent of the entire economy [...] lower than in any year previously measured" is also hardly surprising: given that the US government keeps on piling mandates on employers, employers are satisfying those mandates in lieu of raises.
Thats just plain crap. Regulation does not help wages nor hurt it. If that were the case, then deregulation of the airline industry would have increased wages for pilots and air crews. In reality wages for these groups have been declining just like everyone else. Deregulation of the utilities? Same effect, declining wages just like everything else. The reality is that regulation is the bogeyman that the wealthy have pushed to try to give the bottom 20% something other than corporate greed vis-a-vis capitalism to rail against. In effect, its a giant con. They dont actually expect to eliminate regulation, but on the off chance that they do succeed and regulation is reduced, it simply allows corporations to gain greater profits by sacrificing health and safety for employees and the general public: a double win for the rich and powerful.
That would be wonderful: all basic human needs met without any backbreaking work. You really have to be quite misanthropic to think that that is a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing. The bad comes from what humanity will do when it reaches that stage. Instead of sharing the freedom and wealth that this state of affairs will bring, a small percentage of the population will benefit from it and capitalism will work to effectively exclude the vast majority of the population. These excluded souls will be pushed to extinction and will either fight back or die.
Overall, people today have more job security than in the past, not less.
75% of American jobs are in the service sector. The vast majority of these job are jobs that no one wants, even the people filling them currently. Surety of keeping a crappy job is not job security, its indentured servitude. It may not carry the same contract, but in point of fact it is the same thing.
Flying through the air above your property is not criminal trespass. What's your next guess?
If youd had read the link, you would have noticed that there is precedent for trespass to include a certain amount of the airspace above the property. Where the line is drawn is usually a function of what the trespasser was doing there in the first place.
lets play spot the shill. You scored the first point. Good job!
there seems to be a lot of them out right now. Even NPR had a piece that was so bafflingly one sided that if it wasn't paid for by Microsoft, then NPR got ripped off bad...
As an old tyme Windows hater, I'm not getting some of this. On the 29th I reserved my upgrade.
Huh? I find it unlikely that anyone who described themselves as a windows hater would upgrade to the latest version of the OS, much less on release day. You can turn in your card at the main office...
I was under the impression that SystemD wasn't yet in the stable releases, and was still just in the advanced releases. I'm 100% certain this is true for Ubuntu, as the 14.04 LTS still uses upstart.
If it is in the stable releases, then some of the maintainers need to be shot for letting unstable components into the stable releases. If it is still just in the advance releases, then why are people complaining when all the bugs haven't been worked out? Thats the whole point of advanced releases... If you insist on being on the bleeding edge, then you're going to bleed.
All I know for certain at this point is that when SystemD has some maturity behind it, I *will* switch to it; probably when the next Ubuntu LTS is released with it turned on.
Then you should let Windows know that a particular SSID is "a low connectivity area
Having to jump through hoops to try to trick the OS into not running updates when you dont want them to run is asinine. The OS should simply allow you to disable automatic updates. It can even be an opt out thing, but the option should be there. Taking control away from the owners of the hardware is garaunteed to piss off said owners, and at the end of the day, they have the ultimate veto power...
How many bugs did you actually find? How many did you report? That part is not so "fun".
Which is exactly why Microsofts million-person testing scheme did them almost exactly no good. Most of their "testers" played with it until it failed and then silently stopped using it, giving MS no value at all for the exercise. Worse, it may have given them a false sense of security. They desperately need people with obscure hardware to test the new OS, but this is the last kind of system that anyone is likely to use to test a new OS from Microsoft unless they are explicitly being paid to do so.
Post scarcity is a fictitious concept. The wants, needs and desires of the human race will expand to use up all available resources until scarcity is achieved. There will always be some material wealth that will be scarce relative to demand. This will be the limiting factor on human expansion. When the scarce resources are necessary to our survival, then people die off and growth is limited. When the scarce resources are not necessary to survival, then the poverty level rises. Simple as that.
Going with Windows Phone turned out to be a bad choice, but the other choices they could have gone with may have also turned out to be bad.
True, but the other choices didn't come with a small army of bloggers, analysts and pimply faced teenagers all telling Nokia that the other choices were doomed to failure. There are lots of examples of brilliant thinkers going against the conventional wisdom and being successful, but there are orders of magnitude more examples of that same process ending in failure.
The profligate wastes of government are nothing new, but - especially in the US - citizens in general seem to feel almost completely disenfranchised. They can vote, but almost every single conversation I see indicates that they feel that their vote is worthless and that it won't change anything.
They are absolutely right, their vote doesn't matter The reality that has to be faced it that democracy has been owned as wholly as socialism was. It just took the powerful a little longer to rig the system is all. I forget who originally stated: "You may cast as many votes as you like as long as I get to choose the candidates". The candidates in *every* democracy are effectively chosen by the wealthy and powerful. They can guarantee that only candidates that support their policies ever get enough money to reach a larger audience than the candidates living room. As long as there exists the possibility of money in politics, there exists the ability of the rich and powerful gaming the system to perform their bidding.
Greece is a prime example of this process taken to its logical conclusion. The rich and powerful have stolen 300 Billion Euros from the greek people, and there is no easy way to even figure out who took the money, never mind getting any of it back. To be certain the Greek people deserve a little of the blame, as they voted for those in power, but to even suggest that the other parties would have been any different in the ways that matter is flying in the face of reason. After all, even a fringe party like Syriza has not lifted a finger to address the corruption and graft that is at the root of the Greek problem. At the end of the day, *ALL* of the candidates support the status quo of robbing the Greek treasury. If they didn't, they would never have accumulated enough money for you to have ever heard of them.
You *must* be taking the piss, right? You can't honestly be saying with a straight face that the Syriza government, which has been in power for all of six months, was responsible for the wholesale destruction of the Greek economy, can you?
No, I am saying that the Greek People, who have consistently elected bad governments, most recently with Syriza, are responsible for the failure. They have consistently made bad choices, and its time for them to reap the consequences of those bad judgements. To do anything else simply absolves the Greek people of the responsibilities that comes with Democracy, and would encourage future problems in every other democracy on earth. Greece cannot be allowed to come out of this without an extreme amount of pain for the same reasons that a government can never be seen to negotiate with terrorists. The moment you ignore that rule, you're up to your ass in terrorists...
We, as humans, will have a moral obligation to do something about what will happen to the people of Greece.
Our moral responsibility to Greece ended the moment they voted No on the referendum. They collectively stated in no uncertain terms, they don’t want anyone’s help.
Not really. Excluding someone from a restaurant they go by every day because of that person's race is a significant inconvenience for that person, yet serving black people isn't against anyone's reasonable interpretation of religious commandments. On the other hand, a baker who refuses to make a cake especially for a gay marriage causes a once-in-a-lifetime minor inconvenience for two people, yet participating in a gay wedding ceremony is very much against many people's reasonable interpretation of religious commandments.
The problem is that bigotry is enshrined in the religious belief. If ever there was an indication that religion is evil, that's it. A persons religious belief does not entitle them to engage in discrimination as part of their interactions with the world. Those that believe this to be acceptable behaviour need to be corrected. Failure to do so leads to two mutually incompatible religions squaring off and killing millions (That should sound familiar). One of the most fundamental tenets of many religions is exclusion and persecution. This is not always a direct facet of the religion itself, but is a fundamental aspect of human nature, and so many religious leaders use it to keep their flocks in line. The necessary consequence of this is bigotry, exclusion and ultimately war. Religion, as practiced, by the majority of the worlds population is an unconscionable excuse to exclude and discriminate, and should not be tolerated. I don’t give a damn what is written in any book or preached in any school, it doesn't give anyone the authority to deny me my rights.
Slashdot Mirror
the decision to use AC over DC was not random nor taken lightly, there are many factors involved (heck, it was a major engineering, corporate, and PR war between Edison and Westinghouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ), but the right decision was made
The right decision was made for the time. At that time, no one could have envisioned modern electronics. The advent of the transistor marked the turning point at which DC power would eventually become the better option. It was just a matter of time after that until control electronics got good enough and efficient enough to make DC a better option. We are almost at that point now. DC power line transmission is a better alternative if one assumes that the technology exists to do voltage conversion at high voltages (its not currently there yet, but at the current rate of technological improvement, we will be there in 20 or so years). The conversion to DC is not even something that will need to be done all at once. Individual long haul lines can be converted one at a time until the power form the power company is HVDC all the way to you local transformer. At that point, it will make sense for the power company to offer a HVDC feed for those that want it. This would be advantageous for solar and wind installations because interfacing with these power system would not require complex and expensive phase matching equipment. It would be advantageous for those that have mostly DC appliances because they would save 10% on their electricity costs because they would no longer have to pay the 5% efficiency loss to convert to AC power at the pole, and they would save an additional 5% by not having to convert from AC back to DC inside the appliance. For power utilities it would be cheaper because of less transmission losses as well as less risk of power line phase issues causing transmission line faults and unexpected drop outs. We are still many decades away from HVDC power becoming a reality, but it will come. It will happen because it can happen and the advantages will eventually outweigh the cost of retrofit.
an ac synchronous motor is much more efficient than DC alternatives.
Not any more. 30 years ago that was true, but DC brushless motors have seen a great deal of improvement in the last three decades. High power and high efficiency are pretty normal in DC induction and DC PM motors these days. The biggest contributing factor has been orders of magnitude improvements in power electronics (where most of the efficiency losses used to be). It is not uncommon to find motor / control electronics packages now that are pushing 95% efficient up to tens (or even hundreds) of horsepower. (Thats tens to hundreds of kilowatts for those of you who are so inclined).
HVAC uses 3-phase AC power which is actually pretty efficient for motors, especially if you want motors that are going to last a long time.
No, no it doesnt. Commerical and residential HVAC is almost all 240VAC (two phases 180 degrees out of phase). Only industrial HVAC is 3 phase, as 3 phase is generally only needed / installed in an industrial setting.
Pretty much all brushless motors are driven by AC
Again, no they aren't. A very large portion of brushless motors including those used in large appliances, automotive (drivetrain and otherwise), computers, etc... are AC/DC brushless motors that will function on any power source. There are plenty of DC brushless motors and AC/DC brushless motors available that are equal in efficiency, longevity and power to their AC only cousins.
3-phase is great for motors that run at a single RPM, such as what is used in compressors and pumps for HVAC.
This is probably the closest to correct you have been. For commercial and residential power, 2 phase AC motors have traditionally been used, but they are largely inefficient in their use of power compared to modern options because it is difficult to operate a fixed speed heat pump efficiently under a varying load. More recently, we are beginning to see modulating heat pumps that offer a variable power setting. These require the use of PWM drive DC motors, or expensive / inefficient AC inverters to drive the pump motors. These modulating systems are almost ideal for operation from DC sources like solar and wind drive because they can be designed to function directly from the DC feed without the need for DC to AC conversion, visa-versa, or both. They consequently have the lowest operating losses, transmission losses and conversion losses of any available options.
disclaimer: I work for an HVAC controls company
And the fact that "total wages and salaries last year amounted to $7.1 trillion, or 42.5 percent of the entire economy [...] lower than in any year previously measured" is also hardly surprising: given that the US government keeps on piling mandates on employers, employers are satisfying those mandates in lieu of raises.
Thats just plain crap. Regulation does not help wages nor hurt it. If that were the case, then deregulation of the airline industry would have increased wages for pilots and air crews. In reality wages for these groups have been declining just like everyone else. Deregulation of the utilities? Same effect, declining wages just like everything else. The reality is that regulation is the bogeyman that the wealthy have pushed to try to give the bottom 20% something other than corporate greed vis-a-vis capitalism to rail against. In effect, its a giant con. They dont actually expect to eliminate regulation, but on the off chance that they do succeed and regulation is reduced, it simply allows corporations to gain greater profits by sacrificing health and safety for employees and the general public: a double win for the rich and powerful.
That would be wonderful: all basic human needs met without any backbreaking work. You really have to be quite misanthropic to think that that is a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing. The bad comes from what humanity will do when it reaches that stage. Instead of sharing the freedom and wealth that this state of affairs will bring, a small percentage of the population will benefit from it and capitalism will work to effectively exclude the vast majority of the population. These excluded souls will be pushed to extinction and will either fight back or die.
Overall, people today have more job security than in the past, not less.
75% of American jobs are in the service sector. The vast majority of these job are jobs that no one wants, even the people filling them currently. Surety of keeping a crappy job is not job security, its indentured servitude. It may not carry the same contract, but in point of fact it is the same thing.
Flying through the air above your property is not criminal trespass. What's your next guess?
If youd had read the link, you would have noticed that there is precedent for trespass to include a certain amount of the airspace above the property. Where the line is drawn is usually a function of what the trespasser was doing there in the first place.
Which crimes, specifically, did you have in mind?
That would be criminal trespass
lets play spot the shill. You scored the first point. Good job!
there seems to be a lot of them out right now. Even NPR had a piece that was so bafflingly one sided that if it wasn't paid for by Microsoft, then NPR got ripped off bad...
As an old tyme Windows hater, I'm not getting some of this. On the 29th I reserved my upgrade.
Huh? I find it unlikely that anyone who described themselves as a windows hater would upgrade to the latest version of the OS, much less on release day. You can turn in your card at the main office...
2 - The drivers were written by drunken morons.
That is demeaning to both drunks and morons. I expect an apology is in order.
"Victim" is the right word.
I was under the impression that SystemD wasn't yet in the stable releases, and was still just in the advanced releases. I'm 100% certain this is true for Ubuntu, as the 14.04 LTS still uses upstart.
If it is in the stable releases, then some of the maintainers need to be shot for letting unstable components into the stable releases. If it is still just in the advance releases, then why are people complaining when all the bugs haven't been worked out? Thats the whole point of advanced releases... If you insist on being on the bleeding edge, then you're going to bleed.
All I know for certain at this point is that when SystemD has some maturity behind it, I *will* switch to it; probably when the next Ubuntu LTS is released with it turned on.
Then you should let Windows know that a particular SSID is "a low connectivity area
Having to jump through hoops to try to trick the OS into not running updates when you dont want them to run is asinine. The OS should simply allow you to disable automatic updates. It can even be an opt out thing, but the option should be there. Taking control away from the owners of the hardware is garaunteed to piss off said owners, and at the end of the day, they have the ultimate veto power...
and the other one hasn't.
Correction: The other one would like to, but can't figure out why no one wants to give them the data?
How many bugs did you actually find? How many did you report? That part is not so "fun".
Which is exactly why Microsofts million-person testing scheme did them almost exactly no good. Most of their "testers" played with it until it failed and then silently stopped using it, giving MS no value at all for the exercise. Worse, it may have given them a false sense of security. They desperately need people with obscure hardware to test the new OS, but this is the last kind of system that anyone is likely to use to test a new OS from Microsoft unless they are explicitly being paid to do so.
I think you mean 16-bit. DOS was never 8-bit.
MS-DOS was never 8-bit...
Your link is a robot takeover. Nice try.
Read the story instead of just skimming the title and assuming
moron.
Why don't you say what this new situation is that will destroy society before we can do anything.
Here's one. When you can see it coming and you do nothing, that is the mark of incompetence.
Post scarcity is a fictitious concept. The wants, needs and desires of the human race will expand to use up all available resources until scarcity is achieved. There will always be some material wealth that will be scarce relative to demand. This will be the limiting factor on human expansion. When the scarce resources are necessary to our survival, then people die off and growth is limited. When the scarce resources are not necessary to survival, then the poverty level rises. Simple as that.
Given the current state of the world, I think they need a new name. At the very least a new acronym is appropriate...
Going with Windows Phone turned out to be a bad choice, but the other choices they could have gone with may have also turned out to be bad.
True, but the other choices didn't come with a small army of bloggers, analysts and pimply faced teenagers all telling Nokia that the other choices were doomed to failure. There are lots of examples of brilliant thinkers going against the conventional wisdom and being successful, but there are orders of magnitude more examples of that same process ending in failure.
The profligate wastes of government are nothing new, but - especially in the US - citizens in general seem to feel almost completely disenfranchised. They can vote, but almost every single conversation I see indicates that they feel that their vote is worthless and that it won't change anything.
They are absolutely right, their vote doesn't matter The reality that has to be faced it that democracy has been owned as wholly as socialism was. It just took the powerful a little longer to rig the system is all. I forget who originally stated: "You may cast as many votes as you like as long as I get to choose the candidates". The candidates in *every* democracy are effectively chosen by the wealthy and powerful. They can guarantee that only candidates that support their policies ever get enough money to reach a larger audience than the candidates living room. As long as there exists the possibility of money in politics, there exists the ability of the rich and powerful gaming the system to perform their bidding.
Greece is a prime example of this process taken to its logical conclusion. The rich and powerful have stolen 300 Billion Euros from the greek people, and there is no easy way to even figure out who took the money, never mind getting any of it back. To be certain the Greek people deserve a little of the blame, as they voted for those in power, but to even suggest that the other parties would have been any different in the ways that matter is flying in the face of reason. After all, even a fringe party like Syriza has not lifted a finger to address the corruption and graft that is at the root of the Greek problem. At the end of the day, *ALL* of the candidates support the status quo of robbing the Greek treasury. If they didn't, they would never have accumulated enough money for you to have ever heard of them.
You *must* be taking the piss, right? You can't honestly be saying with a straight face that the Syriza government, which has been in power for all of six months, was responsible for the wholesale destruction of the Greek economy, can you?
No, I am saying that the Greek People, who have consistently elected bad governments, most recently with Syriza, are responsible for the failure. They have consistently made bad choices, and its time for them to reap the consequences of those bad judgements. To do anything else simply absolves the Greek people of the responsibilities that comes with Democracy, and would encourage future problems in every other democracy on earth. Greece cannot be allowed to come out of this without an extreme amount of pain for the same reasons that a government can never be seen to negotiate with terrorists. The moment you ignore that rule, you're up to your ass in terrorists...
We, as humans, will have a moral obligation to do something about what will happen to the people of Greece.
Our moral responsibility to Greece ended the moment they voted No on the referendum. They collectively stated in no uncertain terms, they don’t want anyone’s help.
Not really. Excluding someone from a restaurant they go by every day because of that person's race is a significant inconvenience for that person, yet serving black people isn't against anyone's reasonable interpretation of religious commandments. On the other hand, a baker who refuses to make a cake especially for a gay marriage causes a once-in-a-lifetime minor inconvenience for two people, yet participating in a gay wedding ceremony is very much against many people's reasonable interpretation of religious commandments.
The problem is that bigotry is enshrined in the religious belief. If ever there was an indication that religion is evil, that's it. A persons religious belief does not entitle them to engage in discrimination as part of their interactions with the world. Those that believe this to be acceptable behaviour need to be corrected. Failure to do so leads to two mutually incompatible religions squaring off and killing millions (That should sound familiar). One of the most fundamental tenets of many religions is exclusion and persecution. This is not always a direct facet of the religion itself, but is a fundamental aspect of human nature, and so many religious leaders use it to keep their flocks in line. The necessary consequence of this is bigotry, exclusion and ultimately war. Religion, as practiced, by the majority of the worlds population is an unconscionable excuse to exclude and discriminate, and should not be tolerated. I don’t give a damn what is written in any book or preached in any school, it doesn't give anyone the authority to deny me my rights.