I heard that in 2004, American colleges graduated but 40,000 engineers while Pacific Rim ones graduated 450,000. Not only that, when you consider that 1/3 to 1/2 of American students are actually forigners, the picture looks even bleaker!
Ok, this is the third time this month I have heard this statistic, but It's about time we cleared a little of the BullSh*t around this topic.
The US graduates just over 40,000 engineers / ~250 Million individuals. This is about 1 in every 6000 people.
The pacific Rim graduates about 450,000 engineers / 2.7 Billion individuals. This is about 1 in every 6000 people.
The long and the short is that we are about on par as education goes, we are simply outnumbered on this planet at almost 30 : 1
As for lego, Their main malfunction has been pretty much just as TFA described: Bad market analysis coupled with a changing market. Shame on them for not doing their homework and we can all move on.
A hot water heater's element - on demand or tanked - is submerged at all times. Therefore, almost 100% of the heat that it produces is coupled to the water - the only loss *NOT COUPLED* to the water is the heat which travels to the ends of the element where the terminals are. Electric heating of water by immersion heaters is close to 100% efficient. (We'll ignore the heat from the water which radiates through the heater; the energy loss from the hot water will occur with both conventional and microwave heaters.)
Initially I thought the same thing, but here's, the problem: In order to heat the water, the heating element has to heat up itself and transfer large amounts of heat to water passing around it. This means that the heating element has to get extremely hot compared to the initial water temp. It also has to heat up very quickly (water on demand isn't really "on demand" when you have to wait 5 minutes). So, when you are done heating, you have a very hot element which still has much of the energy of the process in it. I'm guessing that for most water uses (sinks, dishwashers, etc) the water usage is so short that your efficiency would be a lot lower than you would othewise guess.
with a microwave heater, the element itself doesn't get hot, so it does in fact transfer all of the energy to the target without thermal conduction. I'm guessing that you can get reasonably efficient components these days, so it doesn't strike me as unreasonable that the overall efficiency of this device could be better than pure electric. Maybe even a lot better. I'm going to reserve judgement until I can see one in action.
Perhaps you could share with us your incredibly accurate estimation technique? I'm sure many of us would love to know how you've solved a problem that no-one else in the business has managed to solve effectively for years.
Seriously, estimation is hard. I'm sure you know that really. The best development shops I've worked for deal with this problem by having plans that can adapt to unexpected delays, including putting back the shipping date if necessary. Perhaps we're lucky; for some projects, that simply isn't an option. But it's a lot better than pretending you can estimate a project that's going to take hundreds of man-years accurately ahead of time, and then betting your business on being able to make your predicted shipping date.
The magic bullet to project management and time estimation is simple. As someone who has worked as a manager of others, as a programmer, and in the construction business, I will sit here and tell you that projects can be estimated with tremendous accuracy. The secret is two fold: This first part is that the person doing the estimate has to be qualified and capable of doing the work him/her self. Second: The project needs to have already completed the first stages of design. While this seems like a lot just to get a project estimate, it is critical.
This is the reason that so many companies fail to estimate correctly. Either they have incompetent (read as nontechnical) people estimating the amount of time something will take, or else they are trying to estimate without having layed out the course of the overall design. People who know how to do this kind of estimation are in extreme demand, and unfortuately are extremely rare for the simple reason that most managers aren't qualified to do the work of those they manage. Those that are, have a tendency to start their own companies...
Ads don't target me, so why waste my time
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Most ads on TV, web pages, bullboards and anywhere else they put them just annoy me. If I am looking for a product of some kind, I look online, and do research on whats available. That is why I block ads in pop up windows, and immediately close all windows which do make it through. That is why I don't watch live TV anymore, but TIVO everything and watch it later. I appreciate that those same ads subsidize much of my entertainment experience (oh but wait, I *pay* for Cable TV access, and I *pay* for Network access, and I *pay* for music, and I *pay* for movies). Maybe the prices are less than what I would pay otherwise, but I am certain that many of the products I purchase would be cheaper if the manufacturers didn't waste so much money advertising to a market full of people like me. I am just surprised that they havn't figured out the hint by now.
The person giving the references in this article did not seem to be the long time UNIX user he claims to be.
first: He put his experience with Linux into a windows context, suggesting that he is in fact an experienced windows administrator.
second: he did not understand automatic updates. A feature which is and has been available on many linux distro's for quite some time, and a feature which is quite prevalent in UNIX especially from IBM
third: Red Hat Linux (even enterprise class) does not have a very restrictive hardware requirement, and the odds are pretty good that they would have needed to do the same hardware upgrades to run whatever windows system they eventually moved to.
fourth: Anyone who is an experienced administrator knows that the core operating systems are tremendously stable, be it windows or Linux, or UNIX, and that the instabilities in any system will be introduced by drivers needed for operation of application specific hardware (for example a custom cash register based peripheral or some such). This tells me that they had just such a piece of equipment in their systems, and that the vendor of this hardware did not supply working drivers. Further, I would conjecture that said supplier probably had a long standing windows driver, and had ported the drivers to the linux platform specifically at the request of this client. The result is what you would expect: a first generation driver which fails intermittently.
I've gone back and forth and back again on this...and right now I'm of the mind that if you can't learn math by sense of smell, well, na-na-na, hey-hey-hey goodbye. Nobody held my hand through Asian, Russian, German and Indian math and computer science profs and incompetent grad student assistants and a myriad of other difficulties (in getting a BA mathematics). Yeah, it's not a perfect world, but if this kid was half as smart as he thinks he is, he'd have made it despite any obstacles. I mean, he kept going on about being a "verbal" learner...and if you're out there, dude, math is not a "verbal" topic...just FYI.
I do beleive that the author has in fact discovered that standardized testing and class rank in america's high schools are a poor reflection of academic and professional potential. I can't say for certain what these in fact indicate about a person, but they sure don't correlate well with anything I have ever been able to measure, except, possibly, ego.
I don't understand what all the stir is about this topic. All the study says is that given the general population from which the sample was drawn, there is a measurable difference in IQ scoring. Maybe the test measures inteligence, maybe it doesn't, but everyone is treating this as though the researchers insulted them personally. Some women are downright nasty about how they portray these researchers, and some of the men are appologetic, while others are self righteous. Statistics say absolutely nothing about individuals, only the population as a whole. Why is it that everyone is so quick to forget that?
Third time in this article I've seen someone make this mistake. It's an epidemic.
The gasoline powered car is only 25% efficient so although you pay $2.15/gallon you only use a quarter of the energy. Electric motors are very efficient so you don't need 1:1 energy equivalent with gasoline. The "electrical equivalent for a gallon of gasoline" is actually closer to $1.50, using your figures.
umm, Electric motors are not terribly efficient. At best, they typically come in at around 50 - 60% efficient, but the real trouble is the control electronics. Even top of the line switching transistors typically are only 90% efficient, then you have the batteries which are only 90% efficient, and the wires which are maybe 98% efficient (depending on the size and the total system voltage). When you add it all up, electric systems are not much more efficient that ICE's. The big difference is that more than 100 years of intense research and evelopment have gone into making effective and efficient ICEs while almost no one has looked at improving electric motors until recently.
You are right however, doing the calculations based on the energy content of the gasoline is the wrong way to do it. You want to do the calculations based on the energy *output* of each type of motor, but even that is not quite accurate, since a well designed electric system does not require a transmission
It is no accident that the worlds faster RC (read as toy ) car is an electric car. With no transmission, this toy car was able to reach a top speed of 104 MPH and had sufficient low end acceleration to handle well on the race track as well. ICE's require a transmission because at low RPM they have almost no torque, and at high RPM they explode. This means that they have only a very narrow effective operational range. To extend this, transmissions are added to vehicles that use them. An electric motor however has a similar torque at almost all speeds of operation. like the ICE, electrics will fail at high RPM, but unlike the ICE that speed is much much higher for an electric motor. ICE's typically die at around 6500 RPM (10,000 RPM for race vehicles). Electric motors range anywhere from 20,000 RPM to 100,000 RPM before failure.
The work this fellow has done on his car does nothing to improve the fuel efficiency of his car. He is simply drawing more of the energy to drive the car from his houshold electrical supply. That electricity still had to be produced somewhere, and has its own set of inefficiencies associated with production. A typical 100 HP engine will consume 1 gallon of gas in 1/2 hour. 1 HP is roughly 800 watts. That means that one gallon of gas is roughly 40 killowatt hours. Todays electric prices ( here where I live ) are roughly $0.07 / killowatt hour. That means that for every gallon of gas he saves by using his house power, it would cost him $2.80 here in my town. Not much of a savings since gas costs about $2.60 / gallon...
The real advantage is that as the price of gas increases, the cost of electricity does not really change much. Also, in an oil crisis, countries that do not rely on oil for electricity (france) would still be able to operate their cars without interruption. So the real advantage this guy has is that when the next oil scare happens and you have to stand in line for three hours for each gallon of gas, he will be laughing as he spends his sundays relaxing instead of standing in line.
.it's not worth it. You can get a non hybrid Civic for $14k that gets 32/38 milage. The hybrid Civic runs $6k more but gets 10mpg more. How many years does it take you to break even on the gas costs?
at the rate gas prices are increasing, you should break even in about 3 months...
There are several key reasons software has no value. One of the most important is people like me. I have a degree in engineering plus significant experience in programming any language you care to stick in front of me. I, however, do not work in a field which has even the remotest relevance to my education, and vice versa. I write open source programs during my free time for no other reason than it amuses me. I continue to support them and fix bugs because I am obsesive compulsive, but if I managed to single handedly destroy the entire programming profession I wouldn't loose any sleep over it. One of the key rules of economics is that something that is being given away for free has *no value*. I and others like me are ensuring that it has no value. The unwritten rule is that you won't take my idea and make money from it because nobody in their right mind would pay you. I'll admit that you can sell "support". The reason is that as programming goes, support sucks. nobody wants to do it, so you have a market for it, and a limited supply. This is true for software which is no fun to write (i.e. financial systems, accounting, etc...) nobody will touch it, so you can still make money writting these programs, but operating systems are really cool to play with, as are mp3 players, video software, compilers, etc... That makes these areas of programming far less likely to be profitable. The only reason games haven't fallen to the oss jauggernaught as well is because it takes non-programmer resources to produce a fun and competitive game, and those resources are once again limited, but fun programming is something that will be harder and harder to get paid to do, because people like me will do it for free.
This seems like a highly debateable point as to causes of lower inventory levels. Traditionally, inventory levels have been an indirect measure of confidence in the economy. However, utilization of JIT methods aided by technology enables businesses to run at lower levels than previously thought acceptable. In fact, there really isn't any contradiction to the principles of economic order quantity because both ordering costs and turn around times are much lower. This is truly a new paradign.
Just in time delivery is a Huge contributor to improvements in profitability. If you look at the cost of storing a single CD in on-site inventory for 3 months, you'll find that it amounts to almost $5 per unit over that time period. That means that by only having the inventory on site an average of a week or less reduces the retailers costs dramitacally. Haven't you ever wondered why wallmart can beat the musc chains prices every time? its not because of a volume discount... The record labels don't give *anyone* discounts. Its because of Just in time delivery services. Walmart gets their JIT services from UPS. The typical CD or Movie arrives at a given walmart store less than one week before it is sold. This is worlds better than HMV, FYE, Strawberries who traditionally sat on inventory as much as a year before either returning or selling it. If you look at the result, walmart ends up hardly returning any inventory to the manufacturer, because they never have enough left over to justify paying the return shipment fee. Remember, as with almost any product based industry shipping and storing costs account for the largest chunk of the pie. You have to be talking something the size of a washing machine before that is no longer true. walmart stores all of their inventory *on the shelves* making it all active inventory, but they never seem to run out... Its because the JIT computer systems automatically reorder when the on shelf levels reach a threshold. Then every morning, the employees take whatever shows up on the UPS truck and stock it on the shelves. No more doing a daily inventory to find out what needs to be restocked. The basic result is that all the waste is gone from the system. That means that walmart (and many of the other large retailers) are no longer ordering stock simply to throw it away in 6 months. It allows them to save money by not buying stuff from the labels that they can't sell. That is the real reason that the labels aren't selling as much: The retailers aren't buying and wasting as much of the material.
The economy most certainly does not suck. These are not the dot com days, but that was fantasy land anyway and best not returned to (it will only cause another crash). Non-farm payrolls today were excellent, the unemployment remains at 5.7% (low), interest rates are low and rises over the next two years will be gradual and low in historical terms. The household balance sheet is robust, consumer spending reasonable and corporate investment good. Successful global trade has the benefit of keeping prices of goods and services down allowing income to be spent on even more.
The Economy most certainly does suck. The
unemployment statistic is badly skewed because it does not, and never has counted people like myself who graduated and either could not find work in our field, or found work and were promplty laid off before they qualified for unemployment benefits. Furthermore, someone who was making 55K per year who is now working at Mcdonalds, is no longer considered by any government statistics. The vast majority of those seeking work, are the recent grads. 75% of my graduating class of almost 2000 students is still looking for work, and of the remainder, many would consider themselves under-employed. The year after mine was worse, and this year is looking to be just as bad. We are graduating hundreds of thousands of people every year who will remain under employed or just plain un-employed and not show up on any statistic. Mean while, cost of gas is going thorugh the roof because our idiot of a president feels that assaulting a foriegn nation to save his daddys good image was the best course of action. Cost of housing is going through the roof anywhere within an hours drive of a decent paying job so that it is impossible to live close to your job, or even survive without a car.
This used to be such a *nice* country to live in too.
the worst part is that the reality is simple: Those jobs are never comming back.
Ok, There are just a few basic steps to playing with a mess like this. They remain the same, no matter what type of power levels you're playing with.
First: This is important. You want to play with the main breaker box in a serious way, Call the power company, inform them that you need to work on the breaker box in your building. Ask them to come out and switch off the mains at the street! Verify that this was done using a simple volt meter. (you can get a $20 one at radio shack.) A simpler way of doing this is to check to see that a previously working light or outlet is now depowered. To be thorough however you should use the volt meter to check the output of each of the breakers.
Second: Inspect the wiring for Blue/White vs Black/white pairs. Blue and White is the old stuff, and is damn near garaunteed to fail if you try to reuse it. General advice is to give up on any Blue/White pairs if you have any reasonable chance of rewiring those circuits.
Third: Verify that all circuits are hanging off from the correct size breakers. 12 Gague wire can handle up to 20 Amps, 14 Gauge can handle 15 Amps, and 16 gague can handle 10 Amps. Anything wires smaller than that Should Not Be used at the breaker Box You can use a breaker that is rated for a lower amperage than the wire can handle, but not higher. I.E. You can use a 10 amp breaker with 12,14, or 16 gague wire, but a 20 amp breaker can only be used with 12 gauge wire.
Fourth: The mains from the street are 3 major cables. These are different than the wires that go to "normal" outlets and lights in your house. The normal outlets and lights in your house use 1 of the two mains from the street and ground. A 220 Outlet uses both of the mains from the street and ground. Thus a 220 outlet has 220 volts, or 2 110 volt circuits 180 dgrees out of phase for those amatuer electricians in the crowd. What you need in order to wire up 220 outlets are the usual gague wire, but the breaker is different. For a "normal" circuit, only one breaker is neaded because only one of the three wires is "hot" meaning that it sources power. In 220 outlets, two of the wires are "hot". This means that both hot wires need to be connected to a breaker. The same rules for cable sizes applies as before. When running 220, you must use a double breaker of the correct size for your wire. What this does is if one of the two circuits blows the breaker, the breaker will disconnect both "hot" wires, rendering the circuit completely dead.
Fifth: Although it may seem like a good idea, do not use a breaker with any wire that is not "hot" You do not ever want the circumstance where your "hot" wire is powered, but the ground wires are disconnected by a breaker.
Sixth: All of the wiring into the breaker box should be exactly the length needed. No excess wire should be stored in the box. All cables entering the box should be clamped securely in place. (a hardware store will have the clamps for use with just about any breaker box and cable.) The wires in the breaker box should all have their shielding completely intact. Replace any wires for which the shielding is missing or damaged. All wires should be mounted into the breakers such that no unshielded part of the wire is exposed. If it is, disconnect the wire, and trim it such that only shielded portions of the wire are exposed. As a general rule, the breakers should be wired to one and only one wire each. If you do not have enough breakers for all of your devices I strongly recommend buying a bigger breaker box. If you must wire more than one wire to any given breaker, that breakers size should be determined by the size of the smallest wire being connected to it. If you have a brekaer with a 12 gauge and a 16 gauge wire connected, then the breaker should be a 10 amp breaker.
Once you are done, use a standard issue voltmeter to verify that there is no conductivity between any circuits when the breakers are all in the off position. Then, switch the breakers one by one to the on position and make sure
It appears that the author of this article needs a little bit more physics before they should start claiming that things won't work... First, It should be noted that high profile places like Slashdot and the New Scientist *do* have an impact on where and how research money is spent. As such they have a certain responsibility to make an effort to verify the content (to a limited degree) of what they post.
As such, the article makes several assumptions which are patently false. The first is that the solar sail is a purely thermodynamic reaction which requires that it be governed by Carnot's law. The fact is that such a sail would in fact be affected (a very little) by an additional reaction which would add to the overall thrust provided. This additional reaction would be governed by Carnot's law, but would not contribute or detract in a significant way from the actual process used. The process which is being tapped for energy in the solar sail is the interaction of two bodies in motion ( the photon and the sail) this interaction, while requiring vast numbers of photons to have any noticeable affect, is *not* governed in any way by Carnot's equation. Saying that it does is akin to saying that an internal combustion engine will only work until it warms up! As we know from the daily commute, this is only true on Friday afternoons on the way home for the weekend.
Second, The author is assuming that the main interaction between the photons and the sail is simply absorption, or that if it is reflection then the sail itself only gains some heat from the interaction, and the photon looses some. The simple fact is that the sail will simply reflect the photons back in the direction that they came from, with a lower energy level (i.e. lower frequency) thus absorbing *kinetic* energy from the interaction. The absorption of photons is a parasitic affect that can be minimized by using the right materials for the sail. Of the remaining energy that is transferred to the sail, most will be kinetic energy, and some will be heat energy (and thus the material must be highly resistant to heat or it will be destroyed shortly after deployment).
The author has confused the idea that the sail will then radiate photons as it warms up. The difference is that the sail will radiate in all directions producing a null vector thrust, while the "solar wind" is unidirectional producing a vector thrust away from the sun. When coupled with gravity's vector thrust towards the sun, this can be used to produce thrust in almost any direction (much the way a sailing ship can sail almost directly at the wind by rearranging its sails)
How do we convince Linksys to play by the rules without proving to them that using open source materials was a bad idea in the first place.
If we simply force them to release the source by court action, it could make other companies very paranoid about using open source software in general, but if we let them go without obeying the rules, what kind of message does that send...
The right answer to this problem is to use the same benchmarking techniques that professional software and hardware vendors use in verification. Simply use a random but recorded factor in each test. Then you can compare two seperate sets of hardware against each other for exactly the same deterministic test, but the test itself is random. That way, you can avoid being susceptable to this kind of cheat while still maintaining a fair comparison between vendors.
As many people saw in Wired, there's already a prediction on this over at Long Bets [longbets.org]:
By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event. [longbets.org] The scary part is that in the year the prediction has been up, nobody has been willing to bet against him.
I'll take that bet! I figure chances are I'll be too dead to pay up anyway.
We Have Been missing the point alltogether. We should not be praising or badgering The MA DA's office for their descision to continue, rather we should be protesting the other Seven States for withdrawing their support. It is these other seven states DA's that are making the improper descisions and need to be corrected, but nowhere (except M$NBC) do we see any press given to these other seven. How are they to know that they are wrong if no one even mentions them.
With software, most programmers are writing code to run on systems (kernels, runtime libraries, and the like) that are usually proprietary. The inner details are not just neglected; the companies intentionally keep them secret and prosecute people who leak them.
Thats just plain crap. Anyone can read the contents of a bit of code, and reverse engineer it
a great deal more easily than reverse engineering the hardware without source code. Additionally, the source code for hardware does not translate into a garanteed working system, since the behavior is modified by all kinds of real world effects which are implementation specific. In theory, Hardware should match the design schematics, but in practice, the last step is allways to build it and cross your fingers.
With software, the option to read the raw assembler may in fact make more sense than reading the raw source (ever try reading source code written by japanese programmers who don't speak english??? I'll bet you haven't.) In any case, the simple fact is that programmers tend to build smaller projects in far less time, and make a lot of clumsy mistakes because there isn't a good software debug paradigm the way there is for hardware. Programmers chalk hard to track errors down as being just too hard to debug, and leave it at that. If a hardware engineer told his boss that he couldn't figure a bug out because it was too hard, he'd be fired for being too damn lazy to do his job.
First, unless I got the math wrong, 60GB for $102 (see pricewatch) is about 1.7 dollars / GB, whereas, PC133 is at 128M for $13 (see also pricewatch) which comes to $71 / GB so, Ram is still a *hell* of a lot more expensive.
Even beyond that however, the type of main memory that you put into a PC (this include PC1xx and DDR derivatives) are all descendents of what is called *dynamic* ram. The reason for this is because if the memory is not periodically refreshed, by re-writing the current value, the data will be lost. The advantages to this are that this data will perform much *much* faster than other types. The disadvantages are: it eats a lot of power. I don't know how many people notice, but your typical memory subsystem in todays PC gets warm (or if you're running RD Ram, change that to *hot*) That means that it is eating a fair amount of power, and just how much space are you going to use up inside the drive storing batteries for a drive? If you used the entire 5.25 inch half height bay for powering a 2GB PC133 drive, the batteries would run out in less than a week unless the drive had a constant power source.
There are several other types of ram. SRAM (not SDRAM) is so called Static Ram. Static ram as it implies does not require a refresh. The performance is slower, but the lack of refresh makes the rest of the system simpler. That doesn't mean that it will retain its memory after the power is off, its just older technology than current memory.
The last kind of memory is a much better kind, and is known as NV ram. That stands for Non-Volatile memory. NVRAM retains its value even after the power is turned off. NVRAM is used in some systems to retain value without the need for a battery backup. The disadvantage is that it is extremely expensive because it requires different manufacturing technology from "normal" ram. It is also quite slow by ram standards.
There are in addition, a number of different hybrid types that employ advantages of one or more of the listed types without some of the disadvantages, but all of these types have the major disadvantage that they are expensive.
Now, a drive built with one of these hybrid types does not nesescarily have a constant access time. The reason for that is, that in order to reduce the cost, manufacturers buy scrap rams. The drive electronics then separates the ram module into "sectors" (ussually 512 bytes each) and keeps track of which of these sectors have burned out memory. This is almost identical to the way that hard drives deal with damage to the platters: bad blocks. So the drive has to translate from logical block addresses (if IDE, or the equivalent for SCSI), and figure out which actual location the data should occupy. Additionally, the data to and from the drive is cached because it does offer the same types of advantages as it would for a normal drive. The gains by cacheing a Ram drive are less significant than cacheing its equivalent platter drive, but at that price, any extra gain is worth the effort.
So, the access time is reduced, but still variable.
as for the suggestions of using Ram to make a much larger cache, its a good idea and all, but it just changes the point during the computer use that the cost hit of loading data has to occurr. You really only have two basic choices with current software: Boot time, or Program start time. Your choice, but it all comes out the same in the wash if you turn your computer off when you're not using it.
There is an easy solution which most people tend to ignore.
Seal the case with some nice silcone compound, plug up the fan hole for the power supply, and disconnect the power supply fan (you will need to short the proper jumper in the power supply which means opening it.) Then, remove the CPU fan, and any other fans, but leave the CPU heatsink.
Now fill the case with Mineral Oil.
I am running a more sophistocated setup, with a larger machine, but the results are the same. I can run my Celeron 533 at 533 indefinitely with only the hard drive and the CDROM making any noise at all! I occasionally run my machine up to 800, without having to turn on any cooling, it will run that way for almost 8 hours before it heats up enough to be dangerous, but at 533 MHz, my CPU is running at 31 Degrees Celcius, and my MOBO is at 27 Degrees Celcius. This is at room temperature. The tamk that my machine is in is warm to the touch, but not hot.
I would offer up pictures, but my machine: www.geoskd.com will be out of commision while I move for the next few days. If you try back it will probably be up by this weekend.
The company took great pains to discuss flywheel safety. As you know, there is a pretty big danger of this massive disk spinning around at high speeds and suddenly breaking apart due to physical forces and spreading shrapnel around
everywhere.
Lets put it this way, 2kWH is enough to level a tank. I'm not sure what makes these guys think they can seriously contain one if it ever gets over charged.
Put Mildly, a 1000 uF cap at 250 Volts holds enough energy to blow a basketball sized whole 2 inches deep out of solid concrete. This bastard hols almost 40 times the energy, and is set up to hand all of it out as pure destruction. and 2kWH is not much energy. It would only run my apt for about 12 Hours, and thats just a computer, and some lights. It would run the average houshold for maybe 2 Hours. To be truly useful, these things would have to be on the order of 2-3 hundred kWH instead which would be enough energy to level a modest sized building. The nice thing about batteries, is that when they come apart, the system colapses into a state where the energy is trapped in the chemicals, and it is only through the *precise* configuration of a working battery that they can release the energy. Flywheels by their very nature let the energy go when they come apart. So the amount of energy you can get out of a battery under fault conditions tends to be significantly less than the total energy storage of the battery. Flywheel systems give you *all* of the energy back when they have a catastrophic fault.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, this is the third time this month I have heard this statistic, but It's about time we cleared a little of the BullSh*t around this topic.
The US graduates just over 40,000 engineers / ~250 Million individuals. This is about 1 in every 6000 people.
The pacific Rim graduates about 450,000 engineers / 2.7 Billion individuals. This is about 1 in every 6000 people.
The long and the short is that we are about on par as education goes, we are simply outnumbered on this planet at almost 30 : 1
As for lego, Their main malfunction has been pretty much just as TFA described: Bad market analysis coupled with a changing market. Shame on them for not doing their homework and we can all move on.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
Initially I thought the same thing, but here's, the problem: In order to heat the water, the heating element has to heat up itself and transfer large amounts of heat to water passing around it. This means that the heating element has to get extremely hot compared to the initial water temp. It also has to heat up very quickly (water on demand isn't really "on demand" when you have to wait 5 minutes). So, when you are done heating, you have a very hot element which still has much of the energy of the process in it. I'm guessing that for most water uses (sinks, dishwashers, etc) the water usage is so short that your efficiency would be a lot lower than you would othewise guess.
with a microwave heater, the element itself doesn't get hot, so it does in fact transfer all of the energy to the target without thermal conduction. I'm guessing that you can get reasonably efficient components these days, so it doesn't strike me as unreasonable that the overall efficiency of this device could be better than pure electric. Maybe even a lot better. I'm going to reserve judgement until I can see one in action.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
The magic bullet to project management and time estimation is simple. As someone who has worked as a manager of others, as a programmer, and in the construction business, I will sit here and tell you that projects can be estimated with tremendous accuracy. The secret is two fold: This first part is that the person doing the estimate has to be qualified and capable of doing the work him/her self. Second: The project needs to have already completed the first stages of design. While this seems like a lot just to get a project estimate, it is critical.
This is the reason that so many companies fail to estimate correctly. Either they have incompetent (read as nontechnical) people estimating the amount of time something will take, or else they are trying to estimate without having layed out the course of the overall design. People who know how to do this kind of estimation are in extreme demand, and unfortuately are extremely rare for the simple reason that most managers aren't qualified to do the work of those they manage. Those that are, have a tendency to start their own companies...
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
Most ads on TV, web pages, bullboards and anywhere else they put them just annoy me. If I am looking for a product of some kind, I look online, and do research on whats available. That is why I block ads in pop up windows, and immediately close all windows which do make it through. That is why I don't watch live TV anymore, but TIVO everything and watch it later. I appreciate that those same ads subsidize much of my entertainment experience (oh but wait, I *pay* for Cable TV access, and I *pay* for Network access, and I *pay* for music, and I *pay* for movies). Maybe the prices are less than what I would pay otherwise, but I am certain that many of the products I purchase would be cheaper if the manufacturers didn't waste so much money advertising to a market full of people like me. I am just surprised that they havn't figured out the hint by now.
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
The person giving the references in this article did not seem to be the long time UNIX user he claims to be.
first: He put his experience with Linux into a windows context, suggesting that he is in fact an experienced windows administrator.
second: he did not understand automatic updates. A feature which is and has been available on many linux distro's for quite some time, and a feature which is quite prevalent in UNIX especially from IBM
third: Red Hat Linux (even enterprise class) does not have a very restrictive hardware requirement, and the odds are pretty good that they would have needed to do the same hardware upgrades to run whatever windows system they eventually moved to.
fourth: Anyone who is an experienced administrator knows that the core operating systems are tremendously stable, be it windows or Linux, or UNIX, and that the instabilities in any system will be introduced by drivers needed for operation of application specific hardware (for example a custom cash register based peripheral or some such). This tells me that they had just such a piece of equipment in their systems, and that the vendor of this hardware did not supply working drivers. Further, I would conjecture that said supplier probably had a long standing windows driver, and had ported the drivers to the linux platform specifically at the request of this client. The result is what you would expect: a first generation driver which fails intermittently.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
I've gone back and forth and back again on this...and right now I'm of the mind that if you can't learn math by sense of smell, well, na-na-na, hey-hey-hey goodbye. Nobody held my hand through Asian, Russian, German and Indian math and computer science profs and incompetent grad student assistants and a myriad of other difficulties (in getting a BA mathematics). Yeah, it's not a perfect world, but if this kid was half as smart as he thinks he is, he'd have made it despite any obstacles. I mean, he kept going on about being a "verbal" learner...and if you're out there, dude, math is not a "verbal" topic...just FYI.
I do beleive that the author has in fact discovered that standardized testing and class rank in america's high schools are a poor reflection of academic and professional potential. I can't say for certain what these in fact indicate about a person, but they sure don't correlate well with anything I have ever been able to measure, except, possibly, ego.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
I don't understand what all the stir is about this topic. All the study says is that given the general population from which the sample was drawn, there is a measurable difference in IQ scoring. Maybe the test measures inteligence, maybe it doesn't, but everyone is treating this as though the researchers insulted them personally. Some women are downright nasty about how they portray these researchers, and some of the men are appologetic, while others are self righteous. Statistics say absolutely nothing about individuals, only the population as a whole. Why is it that everyone is so quick to forget that?
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
You are right however, doing the calculations based on the energy content of the gasoline is the wrong way to do it. You want to do the calculations based on the energy *output* of each type of motor, but even that is not quite accurate, since a well designed electric system does not require a transmission
It is no accident that the worlds faster RC (read as toy ) car is an electric car. With no transmission, this toy car was able to reach a top speed of 104 MPH and had sufficient low end acceleration to handle well on the race track as well. ICE's require a transmission because at low RPM they have almost no torque, and at high RPM they explode. This means that they have only a very narrow effective operational range. To extend this, transmissions are added to vehicles that use them. An electric motor however has a similar torque at almost all speeds of operation. like the ICE, electrics will fail at high RPM, but unlike the ICE that speed is much much higher for an electric motor. ICE's typically die at around 6500 RPM (10,000 RPM for race vehicles). Electric motors range anywhere from 20,000 RPM to 100,000 RPM before failure.
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
The work this fellow has done on his car does nothing to improve the fuel efficiency of his car. He is simply drawing more of the energy to drive the car from his houshold electrical supply. That electricity still had to be produced somewhere, and has its own set of inefficiencies associated with production. A typical 100 HP engine will consume 1 gallon of gas in 1/2 hour. 1 HP is roughly 800 watts. That means that one gallon of gas is roughly 40 killowatt hours. Todays electric prices ( here where I live ) are roughly $0.07 / killowatt hour. That means that for every gallon of gas he saves by using his house power, it would cost him $2.80 here in my town. Not much of a savings since gas costs about $2.60 / gallon...
The real advantage is that as the price of gas increases, the cost of electricity does not really change much. Also, in an oil crisis, countries that do not rely on oil for electricity (france) would still be able to operate their cars without interruption. So the real advantage this guy has is that when the next oil scare happens and you have to stand in line for three hours for each gallon of gas, he will be laughing as he spends his sundays relaxing instead of standing in line.
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
at the rate gas prices are increasing, you should break even in about 3 months...
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
There are several key reasons software has no value. One of the most important is people like me. I have a degree in engineering plus significant experience in programming any language you care to stick in front of me. I, however, do not work in a field which has even the remotest relevance to my education, and vice versa. I write open source programs during my free time for no other reason than it amuses me. I continue to support them and fix bugs because I am obsesive compulsive, but if I managed to single handedly destroy the entire programming profession I wouldn't loose any sleep over it. One of the key rules of economics is that something that is being given away for free has *no value*. I and others like me are ensuring that it has no value. The unwritten rule is that you won't take my idea and make money from it because nobody in their right mind would pay you. I'll admit that you can sell "support". The reason is that as programming goes, support sucks. nobody wants to do it, so you have a market for it, and a limited supply. This is true for software which is no fun to write (i.e. financial systems, accounting, etc...) nobody will touch it, so you can still make money writting these programs, but operating systems are really cool to play with, as are mp3 players, video software, compilers, etc... That makes these areas of programming far less likely to be profitable. The only reason games haven't fallen to the oss jauggernaught as well is because it takes non-programmer resources to produce a fun and competitive game, and those resources are once again limited, but fun programming is something that will be harder and harder to get paid to do, because people like me will do it for free.
-=geoskd
http://www.geoskd.com/
Just in time delivery is a Huge contributor to improvements in profitability. If you look at the cost of storing a single CD in on-site inventory for 3 months, you'll find that it amounts to almost $5 per unit over that time period. That means that by only having the inventory on site an average of a week or less reduces the retailers costs dramitacally. Haven't you ever wondered why wallmart can beat the musc chains prices every time? its not because of a volume discount... The record labels don't give *anyone* discounts. Its because of Just in time delivery services. Walmart gets their JIT services from UPS. The typical CD or Movie arrives at a given walmart store less than one week before it is sold. This is worlds better than HMV, FYE, Strawberries who traditionally sat on inventory as much as a year before either returning or selling it. If you look at the result, walmart ends up hardly returning any inventory to the manufacturer, because they never have enough left over to justify paying the return shipment fee. Remember, as with almost any product based industry shipping and storing costs account for the largest chunk of the pie. You have to be talking something the size of a washing machine before that is no longer true. walmart stores all of their inventory *on the shelves* making it all active inventory, but they never seem to run out... Its because the JIT computer systems automatically reorder when the on shelf levels reach a threshold. Then every morning, the employees take whatever shows up on the UPS truck and stock it on the shelves. No more doing a daily inventory to find out what needs to be restocked. The basic result is that all the waste is gone from the system. That means that walmart (and many of the other large retailers) are no longer ordering stock simply to throw it away in 6 months. It allows them to save money by not buying stuff from the labels that they can't sell. That is the real reason that the labels aren't selling as much: The retailers aren't buying and wasting as much of the material.
-=Geoskd
The Economy most certainly does suck. The unemployment statistic is badly skewed because it does not, and never has counted people like myself who graduated and either could not find work in our field, or found work and were promplty laid off before they qualified for unemployment benefits. Furthermore, someone who was making 55K per year who is now working at Mcdonalds, is no longer considered by any government statistics. The vast majority of those seeking work, are the recent grads. 75% of my graduating class of almost 2000 students is still looking for work, and of the remainder, many would consider themselves under-employed. The year after mine was worse, and this year is looking to be just as bad. We are graduating hundreds of thousands of people every year who will remain under employed or just plain un-employed and not show up on any statistic. Mean while, cost of gas is going thorugh the roof because our idiot of a president feels that assaulting a foriegn nation to save his daddys good image was the best course of action. Cost of housing is going through the roof anywhere within an hours drive of a decent paying job so that it is impossible to live close to your job, or even survive without a car.
This used to be such a *nice* country to live in too.
the worst part is that the reality is simple: Those jobs are never comming back.
-=geoskd
First: This is important. You want to play with the main breaker box in a serious way, Call the power company, inform them that you need to work on the breaker box in your building. Ask them to come out and switch off the mains at the street! Verify that this was done using a simple volt meter. (you can get a $20 one at radio shack.) A simpler way of doing this is to check to see that a previously working light or outlet is now depowered. To be thorough however you should use the volt meter to check the output of each of the breakers.
Second: Inspect the wiring for Blue/White vs Black/white pairs. Blue and White is the old stuff, and is damn near garaunteed to fail if you try to reuse it. General advice is to give up on any Blue/White pairs if you have any reasonable chance of rewiring those circuits.
Third: Verify that all circuits are hanging off from the correct size breakers. 12 Gague wire can handle up to 20 Amps, 14 Gauge can handle 15 Amps, and 16 gague can handle 10 Amps. Anything wires smaller than that Should Not Be used at the breaker Box You can use a breaker that is rated for a lower amperage than the wire can handle, but not higher. I.E. You can use a 10 amp breaker with 12,14, or 16 gague wire, but a 20 amp breaker can only be used with 12 gauge wire.
Fourth: The mains from the street are 3 major cables. These are different than the wires that go to "normal" outlets and lights in your house. The normal outlets and lights in your house use 1 of the two mains from the street and ground. A 220 Outlet uses both of the mains from the street and ground. Thus a 220 outlet has 220 volts, or 2 110 volt circuits 180 dgrees out of phase for those amatuer electricians in the crowd. What you need in order to wire up 220 outlets are the usual gague wire, but the breaker is different. For a "normal" circuit, only one breaker is neaded because only one of the three wires is "hot" meaning that it sources power. In 220 outlets, two of the wires are "hot". This means that both hot wires need to be connected to a breaker. The same rules for cable sizes applies as before. When running 220, you must use a double breaker of the correct size for your wire. What this does is if one of the two circuits blows the breaker, the breaker will disconnect both "hot" wires, rendering the circuit completely dead.
Fifth: Although it may seem like a good idea, do not use a breaker with any wire that is not "hot" You do not ever want the circumstance where your "hot" wire is powered, but the ground wires are disconnected by a breaker.
Sixth: All of the wiring into the breaker box should be exactly the length needed. No excess wire should be stored in the box. All cables entering the box should be clamped securely in place. (a hardware store will have the clamps for use with just about any breaker box and cable.) The wires in the breaker box should all have their shielding completely intact. Replace any wires for which the shielding is missing or damaged. All wires should be mounted into the breakers such that no unshielded part of the wire is exposed. If it is, disconnect the wire, and trim it such that only shielded portions of the wire are exposed. As a general rule, the breakers should be wired to one and only one wire each. If you do not have enough breakers for all of your devices I strongly recommend buying a bigger breaker box. If you must wire more than one wire to any given breaker, that breakers size should be determined by the size of the smallest wire being connected to it. If you have a brekaer with a 12 gauge and a 16 gauge wire connected, then the breaker should be a 10 amp breaker.
Once you are done, use a standard issue voltmeter to verify that there is no conductivity between any circuits when the breakers are all in the off position. Then, switch the breakers one by one to the on position and make sure
ok, where to start?
It appears that the author of this article needs a little bit more physics before they should start claiming that things won't work... First, It should be noted that high profile places like Slashdot and the New Scientist *do* have an impact on where and how research money is spent. As such they have a certain responsibility to make an effort to verify the content (to a limited degree) of what they post.
As such, the article makes several assumptions which are patently false. The first is that the solar sail is a purely thermodynamic reaction which requires that it be governed by Carnot's law. The fact is that such a sail would in fact be affected (a very little) by an additional reaction which would add to the overall thrust provided. This additional reaction would be governed by Carnot's law, but would not contribute or detract in a significant way from the actual process used. The process which is being tapped for energy in the solar sail is the interaction of two bodies in motion ( the photon and the sail) this interaction, while requiring vast numbers of photons to have any noticeable affect, is *not* governed in any way by Carnot's equation. Saying that it does is akin to saying that an internal combustion engine will only work until it warms up! As we know from the daily commute, this is only true on Friday afternoons on the way home for the weekend.
Second, The author is assuming that the main interaction between the photons and the sail is simply absorption, or that if it is reflection then the sail itself only gains some heat from the interaction, and the photon looses some. The simple fact is that the sail will simply reflect the photons back in the direction that they came from, with a lower energy level (i.e. lower frequency) thus absorbing *kinetic* energy from the interaction. The absorption of photons is a parasitic affect that can be minimized by using the right materials for the sail. Of the remaining energy that is transferred to the sail, most will be kinetic energy, and some will be heat energy (and thus the material must be highly resistant to heat or it will be destroyed shortly after deployment).
The author has confused the idea that the sail will then radiate photons as it warms up. The difference is that the sail will radiate in all directions producing a null vector thrust, while the "solar wind" is unidirectional producing a vector thrust away from the sun. When coupled with gravity's vector thrust towards the sun, this can be used to produce thrust in almost any direction (much the way a sailing ship can sail almost directly at the wind by rearranging its sails)
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
This presents an interesting problem.
How do we convince Linksys to play by the rules without proving to them that using open source materials was a bad idea in the first place.
If we simply force them to release the source by court action, it could make other companies very paranoid about using open source software in general, but if we let them go without obeying the rules, what kind of message does that send...
-=geoskd
www.geoskd.com
No, but you can cook a salmon rather well in a dishwasher.
With or without the dish liquid?
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
The right answer to this problem is to use the same benchmarking techniques that professional software and hardware vendors use in verification. Simply use a random but recorded factor in each test. Then you can compare two seperate sets of hardware against each other for exactly the same deterministic test, but the test itself is random. That way, you can avoid being susceptable to this kind of cheat while still maintaining a fair comparison between vendors.
-=Eric
www.geoskd.com
I'll take that bet! I figure chances are I'll be too dead to pay up anyway.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
We Have Been missing the point alltogether.
We should not be praising or badgering The MA DA's office for their descision to continue, rather we should be protesting the other Seven States for withdrawing their support. It is these other seven states DA's that are making the improper descisions and need to be corrected, but nowhere (except M$NBC) do we see any press given to these other seven. How are they to know that they are wrong if no one even mentions them.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
With software, the option to read the raw assembler may in fact make more sense than reading the raw source (ever try reading source code written by japanese programmers who don't speak english??? I'll bet you haven't.) In any case, the simple fact is that programmers tend to build smaller projects in far less time, and make a lot of clumsy mistakes because there isn't a good software debug paradigm the way there is for hardware. Programmers chalk hard to track errors down as being just too hard to debug, and leave it at that. If a hardware engineer told his boss that he couldn't figure a bug out because it was too hard, he'd be fired for being too damn lazy to do his job.
uhh, Sorry jim, but that's not correct.
-=Eric
www.geoskd.com
First, unless I got the math wrong, 60GB for $102 (see pricewatch) is about 1.7 dollars / GB, whereas, PC133 is at 128M for $13 (see also pricewatch) which comes to $71 / GB so, Ram is still a *hell* of a lot more expensive. Even beyond that however, the type of main memory that you put into a PC (this include PC1xx and DDR derivatives) are all descendents of what is called *dynamic* ram. The reason for this is because if the memory is not periodically refreshed, by re-writing the current value, the data will be lost. The advantages to this are that this data will perform much *much* faster than other types. The disadvantages are: it eats a lot of power. I don't know how many people notice, but your typical memory subsystem in todays PC gets warm (or if you're running RD Ram, change that to *hot*) That means that it is eating a fair amount of power, and just how much space are you going to use up inside the drive storing batteries for a drive? If you used the entire 5.25 inch half height bay for powering a 2GB PC133 drive, the batteries would run out in less than a week unless the drive had a constant power source.
There are several other types of ram. SRAM (not SDRAM) is so called Static Ram. Static ram as it implies does not require a refresh. The performance is slower, but the lack of refresh makes the rest of the system simpler. That doesn't mean that it will retain its memory after the power is off, its just older technology than current memory.
The last kind of memory is a much better kind, and is known as NV ram. That stands for Non-Volatile memory. NVRAM retains its value even after the power is turned off. NVRAM is used in some systems to retain value without the need for a battery backup. The disadvantage is that it is extremely expensive because it requires different manufacturing technology from "normal" ram. It is also quite slow by ram standards.
There are in addition, a number of different hybrid types that employ advantages of one or more of the listed types without some of the disadvantages, but all of these types have the major disadvantage that they are expensive.
Now, a drive built with one of these hybrid types does not nesescarily have a constant access time. The reason for that is, that in order to reduce the cost, manufacturers buy scrap rams. The drive electronics then separates the ram module into "sectors" (ussually 512 bytes each) and keeps track of which of these sectors have burned out memory. This is almost identical to the way that hard drives deal with damage to the platters: bad blocks. So the drive has to translate from logical block addresses (if IDE, or the equivalent for SCSI), and figure out which actual location the data should occupy. Additionally, the data to and from the drive is cached because it does offer the same types of advantages as it would for a normal drive. The gains by cacheing a Ram drive are less significant than cacheing its equivalent platter drive, but at that price, any extra gain is worth the effort.
So, the access time is reduced, but still variable.
as for the suggestions of using Ram to make a much larger cache, its a good idea and all, but it just changes the point during the computer use that the cost hit of loading data has to occurr. You really only have two basic choices with current software: Boot time, or Program start time. Your choice, but it all comes out the same in the wash if you turn your computer off when you're not using it.
-=Geoskd
There is an easy solution which most people tend to ignore.
Seal the case with some nice silcone compound, plug up the fan hole for the power supply, and disconnect the power supply fan (you will need to short the proper jumper in the power supply which means opening it.) Then, remove the CPU fan, and any other fans, but leave the CPU heatsink.
Now fill the case with Mineral Oil.
I am running a more sophistocated setup, with a larger machine, but the results are the same. I can run my Celeron 533 at 533 indefinitely with only the hard drive and the CDROM making any noise at all! I occasionally run my machine up to 800, without having to turn on any cooling, it will run that way for almost 8 hours before it heats up enough to be dangerous, but at 533 MHz, my CPU is running at 31 Degrees Celcius, and my MOBO is at 27 Degrees Celcius. This is at room temperature. The tamk that my machine is in is warm to the touch, but not hot.
I would offer up pictures, but my machine: www.geoskd.com will be out of commision while I move for the next few days. If you try back it will probably be up by this weekend.
-=Eric Schumann
The company took great pains to discuss flywheel safety. As you know, there is a pretty big danger of this massive disk spinning around at high speeds and suddenly breaking apart due to physical forces and spreading shrapnel around everywhere.
Lets put it this way, 2kWH is enough to level a tank. I'm not sure what makes these guys think they can seriously contain one if it ever gets over charged. Put Mildly, a 1000 uF cap at 250 Volts holds enough energy to blow a basketball sized whole 2 inches deep out of solid concrete. This bastard hols almost 40 times the energy, and is set up to hand all of it out as pure destruction. and 2kWH is not much energy. It would only run my apt for about 12 Hours, and thats just a computer, and some lights. It would run the average houshold for maybe 2 Hours. To be truly useful, these things would have to be on the order of 2-3 hundred kWH instead which would be enough energy to level a modest sized building. The nice thing about batteries, is that when they come apart, the system colapses into a state where the energy is trapped in the chemicals, and it is only through the *precise* configuration of a working battery that they can release the energy. Flywheels by their very nature let the energy go when they come apart. So the amount of energy you can get out of a battery under fault conditions tends to be significantly less than the total energy storage of the battery. Flywheel systems give you *all* of the energy back when they have a catastrophic fault.
-=Eric
www.geoskd.com