I live downtown in a *small* rural community. I can take my 900Mhz cordless to the corner store, the parks, and a couple of restaurants without it dropping calls
I used to do that exact same thing, except I was living near downtown Minneapolis. My Lucent 9510 DSS cordless would work up to ~4000 feet, which included most of my local hangouts, and most of the walk to work. I only stopped carrying it around when I got my cell.
Oddly, I then moved to rural NH, and no longer have cell coverage, and even the ~4000 ft range of the old cordless barely gets me to the neighbor's place. Hmm, maybe I should look into this...
Even worse is that, now, most DMVs make you sign your identification card digitally (like you do with your UPS deliveries)
I'm always astonished how poorly most digitizers work (Target, Best Buy being the worst I usually run into), with results that only vaguely look like my signature.
It could be worse, when companies like UPS started doing this, the quality and resolution was *terrible*. Back in 1997 or so, my brother sent me a package which I signed for, and they were advertising the "you can track your package online, and even see who signed for it." The resulting signature was so funny, I kept it. (Before you flame me for posting my signature, look at the actual image).
I gave it a run.....Definitely better than mapquest....Map moves smoothly, instead of having to click and wait for a reload. Nicer interface....
Seems nice, aside from apparently not knowing any addresses in New Hampshire outside of the major cities (None of my test addresses in Hanover, Enfield, Claremont, or Grantham work).
It also has some very, very bizarre routing. For example, to go from Grantham, NH to Manchester NH (a simple drive S on I-89), it has me go *North* on I-89 for 6.2 miles and then turn around.
Hopefully they'll get a full database online sometime, and fix the obvious glitches...
I've noticed that when I order stuff with Supersaver free shipping during a non-holiday period, the stuff arrives amazingly fast.
I'm sure this depends on where you are. Typically if I use their Supersaver shipping, it's a real crapshoot. Typically, when I do Supersaver, it ends up getting shipped via Airborne/DHL. This has two problems:
For some reason, packages shipped to my office (zip code 03755) have a disturbing tendency to get shipped to the DHL office in Enfield, NH (just down the road), and then spend 4 or 5 days bouncing around "Wilmington, OH" with "Failed delivery attempts" before showing up here. I'm still not sure whether the packages actually get diverted to Wilmington, OH, or if their tracking system is just screwed, but in either case it takes either 4-5 days or quite a bit of bitching to get them to unwedge their system and cough up my package. This has happened 4 times so far
Airborne also has a real history of re-using tracking numbers. It's fun wondering where my product is, and they *insist* that a package shipped on 1/28/05 to Hanover, NH was actually delivered on 1/06/05 to Morrisville, NC. Meanwhile, the actual package is still bouncing around... (this one came from Adobe, not Amazon, however)
I've found it's worth the extra few bucks to actually have my packages delivered...
I could give a tracking number for these so that you could all take a gander, but that would violate the terms of their usage agreement. Hmmm, for some reason the number 71868976281 comes to mind...
The vision system has to be the most efficient way to grab the randomly placed tetras during autonomous
It probably is. But from my experience watching IR trackers and line-followers do particularly poorly, I truly do expect other non-camera solutions to present themselves, and do well.
This time, however, they have created a game that requires specialized software rather than hardware, and they have also included in the kit of parts a ready-to-assemble chassis and gearbox
Oh, so you already have a nice mechanism for scoring tetrahedrons that works reliably and can't be optimized?
There is still plenty of work to be done, and plenty of design as well.
The end result is that we will have a robot to work with in a week, instead of four, and the programming team can start hacking at that while the drivetrain team finishes our "real" robot with a better drivetrain.
Umm, for non-rookie teams this isn't even a real advantage, since unlike last year you can do useful code testing with last year's bot controller since the board is the same (except possibly for firmware.)
(Go team 95)
They've done some things to make the programming easier and are practically forcing us to use this camera vision system when most veteran teams didn't bother with infrared sensors that were available last year, which basically destroys any competitive advantage our team (217) seems to have had.
I'm somewhat ambivalent. As a coach with a team with a fairly good history (Team 95, Lebanon, NH), and last year's programming coach, I'm somewhat disappointed that the playing field has been leveled, since my students worked very hard learning basic PID theory, coding it up, implementing interrupt drivers, etc, and now a good chunk of that has been done. And we had made an art form of turning Bosch drill motors into nice, accurate, and reliable drive systems, only to have those replaced. But it's a minor disappointment...
Then again, there is a *lot* that can still be done, and a *lot* of room for creativity. It will be nice to see what teams can do if they *don't* have to be as concerned with some of the other issues.
Then again, who says you have to use the camera vision system? It's slick, but I've seen and programming FIRST bots that can do one heck of a lot in autonomous mode without feedback sensors (Stack Attack in particular had some very clever bots).
(always mechanical problems) I'm kind of disappointed as a programmer since it's all going to come down to lack of mechanical failures and driver skill.
I don't mind that driver skill is a factor---our team has worked hard on training drivers. Mechanical failures don't bother me much either, since in the Real World of engineering you have to design for those sorts of issues as well. No time like the present to learn about redundancy and fall-back strategies (for example, last year we stopped using our large ball handling arm mid-competition and concentrated on what we did well: small-ball handling. And did well because of it).
A barcode isn't just a price, but a code representing an item, which in the cashregister is linked to a price.
At Walmart, yes. At some retailers, no. At a major clothing retailer that I won't name (but they use Linux for their POS, as a hint), the bar codes on the item price tag(they don't use the UPC codes) contain an item number and the price of the item. Yes, that means they have to go an re-tag every item when they need to change the price. Yes, that's a stupid way to do things. But it is what they do. You could probably get away with murder using bar-code swapping at their store.
Years ago, I went to a panel discussion at an SF convention about how books are adapted to film. The authors on the panel had all had their works adapted.
First up was Barry Longyear, whose novel Enemy Mine was turned into a "B" movie. He rattled off a good-natured Hollywood horror story.
I've been to a similar panel in the early 90's, where the author (I forget which), mentioned something very close to "...you realize early on that you have to let go a bit. It's very much
like selling your car to the used car salesman; you hope that it is taken good care of, but it's really out of your control now" and mentioned how badly they had butchered his work.
As the article summary notes, this isn't a problem for dual-tuner PVRs.
It is, just less of one, since it still increases programming conflicts.
When I first noticed this happening, I tended to pad all my recordings by 5 minutes each way.... But that effectively makes all my recordings an hour longer as far as conflict resolution goes (since they now intrude on the half hour before and half hour after each program). So I have to do it much more selectively.
I'd be happier if they had a "conditional padding" in that the Tivo would pad my programs out if there weren't any conflicts, but if a conflict arose just forget about the padding, or ask me what to do like a normal conflict.
It (should) go without saying that you would go into the military with an IT MOS.
And those with experience in the military know that your MOS doesn't guarantee anything. I know a 74C (Telecommunications Operator - Maintainer)that has spent a good fraction of his time on duty as a 77F (Petroleum Supply Specialist) and a 31B (MP).
Don't think that if a recruiter tells you something you can bank on it.
Garden Gnome 1.0 is scheduled for release on my lawn this spring...
If it's a Debian Garden Gnome, you'll have to leave it in the back yard until it's weathered and outdated, and then move it to the front yard after it's demonstrated its stability for two years...
But the original post seems more along the lines of what Flying Buffalo has been doing forever...
Indeed, I've been playing "Heroic Fantasy" from Flying Buffalo for a loooooong time (since the early 1980s). I played Illuminati through them as well for quite some time, but then they lost their license from SJ Games.
Heck, I still have a number of board games and supplements I bought from Flying Buffalo eons ago (when they had their own retail store)...
Yeah, that was a pretty big building. I used to work at K-25 (and later at the main Lab's High Flux Isotope Reactor, see some of my other posts), and one year we held a 10K race for plant employees. 10K was 3.5 laps around the K-25 building.
I've been in the building as well, and it was rather scary, as it had mostly become a warehouse for equipment that was contaminated, Top Secret, or, in most cases both.
Then again, the whole site was rather creepy, in that half of my office was walled off as having contact radiation contamination, and that when I went to talk with my boss I had to pass two 5 foot square areas chained off with yellow and purple chain while making the 100 foot walk between buildings...
I should go back and see what they've done with the place now that it's somewhat more public...
Infections can and do spread through the body at an exponential rate once they break loose.
Indeed. Back in 1996 I nicked myself shaving while in Texas on a conference. The next day it was all nasty and infected, but I thought "Hmmm, I'll get it treated on monday after I get back to Minnesota."
By the time I had gotten home the infection had spread further, and I spent the next 4 days in the hospital under observation, with an IV of antibiotics and feeling like complete crap. Took me over two months to really recover.
Seriously, leave the doctoring to MD's (google is *not* your friend when it comes to medicine), and make a bee-line to a doctor if you suspect you are ill.
Re:The hard part...
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.
Who needs meta-data? I was planning on having it select a random track and waiting until it got to the right song...
The primary issue in obtaining high efficiencies is in (as you stated) efficiently recycling the waste heat. I can only assume that the inventors would be attempting to shrink the secondary cycle along with the gas turbine. The physics really aren't all that different, so it should just be a matter of materials.
It's more complicated than that. The 60 percent efficiencies mentioned are for large combined cycle plants, in which the secondary cycle is a steam cycle. The second you do that, it's not just a gas turbine any more...
Additionally, using a secondary cycle requires not just a second flow loop, but also requires a heat exhanger to move energy from the first cycle to the second, and those generally aren't small or light.
As another poster mentioned, a lot of these factors don't scale well, i.e. small turbines just don't work as well as large ones.
Trying to make an efficient micro-turbine like this should be quite interesting. Viscosity will play a much bigger role - your entire flow regime will have the effects normally confined to the boundary layers on larger turbines.
You are correct. However, much of the fluid mechanics of very small microturbines is rather well understood, so the basic goal isn't unreasonable. And usually the answer to viscosity is speed---small turbines generally spin very, very fast.
Gas Turbines are some of the most efficient fuel -> energy converters known to man.
Actually, in terms of the overall thermodynamic efficiency, they aren't all that great. 40% efficiency is *very* good for a Brayton cycle (i.e. turbine engine) system, but is fairly easily done with a large-scale steam system. Microturbines tend to run around 25%, which means that (a) you need a fairly big recuperator to run efficiently (which doesn't seem to be part of the MIT design), and (b) you need to be able to reject a lot of waste heat (so running your laptop on one of these means you'll be blowed 200+ watts out the back).
Not that gas turbines are without their advantages. Their specific power (weight per kW) is very good, so for the same amount of power the engine is very light compared to most other engine types (which is why they use them in aircraft). They also start and stop quickly compared to steam turbine systems. And they can be nicely combined with other systems like a steam system to make a combined cycle, the whole system can be fairly efficient.
But, by themselves, they aren't all that efficient.
Many FIRST teams are like this, yes, but not all. The Ohio State University mentors three FIRST teams, and on each the students do about as much of the design work as the mentors do.
Indeed, as a two-time coach of team 95 (Lebanon High School), I know of at least one team that does their own design and fabrication (albeit with a lot of guidance and oversight from coaches). Programming, too (having had to teach two different teams about basic PID-controller theory).
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of robots that were entirely designed and built by sponsors. Although you can't always tell, as I've seen some very good build quality out of some of the student members as well.
It does, but it doesn't charge while the device is on. I believe the USB doesn't deliver enough juice to run the device and charge the batteries, but if the device is off it will charge the batteries.
Mine does charge on USB, even when the device is on, but admittedly the charge rate isn't all that good. Perhaps they have tweaked this for the T5, as charging off of the USB port seems popular these days (for example, it's one of the highlighted features of the recent iPods).
So I guess it's not a new feature, just an improved one.
You know, the problem with this whole discussion is that if Lucas *did* decide to release the "original" versions, we would still expect him to cleanup the matte lines, fix the light sabre glows, digitally clean-up the prints, tweak the soundtracks, etc., so they wouldn't really be the "original" versions.
I'm not to sure that would be the case. People with access to the widescreen Lasderdisc version of the trilogy seem pretty happy with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to do that exact same thing, except I was living near downtown Minneapolis. My Lucent 9510 DSS cordless would work up to ~4000 feet, which included most of my local hangouts, and most of the walk to work. I only stopped carrying it around when I got my cell.
Oddly, I then moved to rural NH, and no longer have cell coverage, and even the ~4000 ft range of the old cordless barely gets me to the neighbor's place. Hmm, maybe I should look into this...
I'm always astonished how poorly most digitizers work (Target, Best Buy being the worst I usually run into), with results that only vaguely look like my signature.
It could be worse, when companies like UPS started doing this, the quality and resolution was *terrible*. Back in 1997 or so, my brother sent me a package which I signed for, and they were advertising the "you can track your package online, and even see who signed for it." The resulting signature was so funny, I kept it. (Before you flame me for posting my signature, look at the actual image).
And MacOS, see Lairware's site.
Seems nice, aside from apparently not knowing any addresses in New Hampshire outside of the major cities (None of my test addresses in Hanover, Enfield, Claremont, or Grantham work).
It also has some very, very bizarre routing. For example, to go from Grantham, NH to Manchester NH (a simple drive S on I-89), it has me go *North* on I-89 for 6.2 miles and then turn around.
Hopefully they'll get a full database online sometime, and fix the obvious glitches...
I'm sure this depends on where you are. Typically if I use their Supersaver shipping, it's a real crapshoot. Typically, when I do Supersaver, it ends up getting shipped via Airborne/DHL. This has two problems:
I've found it's worth the extra few bucks to actually have my packages delivered...
I could give a tracking number for these so that you could all take a gander, but that would violate the terms of their usage agreement. Hmmm, for some reason the number 71868976281 comes to mind...
If you look carefully, you can compare those photos to the ones I took in 2000, and can see the increase in decay.
It probably is. But from my experience watching IR trackers and line-followers do particularly poorly, I truly do expect other non-camera solutions to present themselves, and do well.
Oh, so you already have a nice mechanism for scoring tetrahedrons that works reliably and can't be optimized?
There is still plenty of work to be done, and plenty of design as well.
The end result is that we will have a robot to work with in a week, instead of four, and the programming team can start hacking at that while the drivetrain team finishes our "real" robot with a better drivetrain.
Umm, for non-rookie teams this isn't even a real advantage, since unlike last year you can do useful code testing with last year's bot controller since the board is the same (except possibly for firmware.) (Go team 95)
I'm somewhat ambivalent. As a coach with a team with a fairly good history (Team 95, Lebanon, NH), and last year's programming coach, I'm somewhat disappointed that the playing field has been leveled, since my students worked very hard learning basic PID theory, coding it up, implementing interrupt drivers, etc, and now a good chunk of that has been done. And we had made an art form of turning Bosch drill motors into nice, accurate, and reliable drive systems, only to have those replaced. But it's a minor disappointment...
Then again, there is a *lot* that can still be done, and a *lot* of room for creativity. It will be nice to see what teams can do if they *don't* have to be as concerned with some of the other issues.
Then again, who says you have to use the camera vision system? It's slick, but I've seen and programming FIRST bots that can do one heck of a lot in autonomous mode without feedback sensors (Stack Attack in particular had some very clever bots). (always mechanical problems) I'm kind of disappointed as a programmer since it's all going to come down to lack of mechanical failures and driver skill.
I don't mind that driver skill is a factor---our team has worked hard on training drivers. Mechanical failures don't bother me much either, since in the Real World of engineering you have to design for those sorts of issues as well. No time like the present to learn about redundancy and fall-back strategies (for example, last year we stopped using our large ball handling arm mid-competition and concentrated on what we did well: small-ball handling. And did well because of it).
At Walmart, yes. At some retailers, no. At a major clothing retailer that I won't name (but they use Linux for their POS, as a hint), the bar codes on the item price tag(they don't use the UPC codes) contain an item number and the price of the item. Yes, that means they have to go an re-tag every item when they need to change the price. Yes, that's a stupid way to do things. But it is what they do. You could probably get away with murder using bar-code swapping at their store.
First up was Barry Longyear, whose novel Enemy Mine was turned into a "B" movie. He rattled off a good-natured Hollywood horror story.
I've been to a similar panel in the early 90's, where the author (I forget which), mentioned something very close to "...you realize early on that you have to let go a bit. It's very much like selling your car to the used car salesman; you hope that it is taken good care of, but it's really out of your control now" and mentioned how badly they had butchered his work.
It is, just less of one, since it still increases programming conflicts.
When I first noticed this happening, I tended to pad all my recordings by 5 minutes each way.... But that effectively makes all my recordings an hour longer as far as conflict resolution goes (since they now intrude on the half hour before and half hour after each program). So I have to do it much more selectively.
I'd be happier if they had a "conditional padding" in that the Tivo would pad my programs out if there weren't any conflicts, but if a conflict arose just forget about the padding, or ask me what to do like a normal conflict.
And those with experience in the military know that your MOS doesn't guarantee anything. I know a 74C (Telecommunications Operator - Maintainer)that has spent a good fraction of his time on duty as a 77F (Petroleum Supply Specialist) and a 31B (MP).
Don't think that if a recruiter tells you something you can bank on it.
If it's a Debian Garden Gnome, you'll have to leave it in the back yard until it's weathered and outdated, and then move it to the front yard after it's demonstrated its stability for two years...
Indeed, I've been playing "Heroic Fantasy" from Flying Buffalo for a loooooong time (since the early 1980s). I played Illuminati through them as well for quite some time, but then they lost their license from SJ Games.
Heck, I still have a number of board games and supplements I bought from Flying Buffalo eons ago (when they had their own retail store)...
Yeah, that was a pretty big building. I used to work at K-25 (and later at the main Lab's High Flux Isotope Reactor, see some of my other posts), and one year we held a 10K race for plant employees. 10K was 3.5 laps around the K-25 building.
I've been in the building as well, and it was rather scary, as it had mostly become a warehouse for equipment that was contaminated, Top Secret, or, in most cases both.
Then again, the whole site was rather creepy, in that half of my office was walled off as having contact radiation contamination, and that when I went to talk with my boss I had to pass two 5 foot square areas chained off with yellow and purple chain while making the 100 foot walk between buildings...
I should go back and see what they've done with the place now that it's somewhat more public...
Indeed. Back in 1996 I nicked myself shaving while in Texas on a conference. The next day it was all nasty and infected, but I thought "Hmmm, I'll get it treated on monday after I get back to Minnesota."
By the time I had gotten home the infection had spread further, and I spent the next 4 days in the hospital under observation, with an IV of antibiotics and feeling like complete crap. Took me over two months to really recover.
Seriously, leave the doctoring to MD's (google is *not* your friend when it comes to medicine), and make a bee-line to a doctor if you suspect you are ill.
Who needs meta-data? I was planning on having it select a random track and waiting until it got to the right song...
It's more complicated than that. The 60 percent efficiencies mentioned are for large combined cycle plants, in which the secondary cycle is a steam cycle. The second you do that, it's not just a gas turbine any more...
Additionally, using a secondary cycle requires not just a second flow loop, but also requires a heat exhanger to move energy from the first cycle to the second, and those generally aren't small or light.
As another poster mentioned, a lot of these factors don't scale well, i.e. small turbines just don't work as well as large ones.
You are correct. However, much of the fluid mechanics of very small microturbines is rather well understood, so the basic goal isn't unreasonable. And usually the answer to viscosity is speed---small turbines generally spin very, very fast.
(Disclaimer, I work for a company that makes very small turbines.)
Actually, in terms of the overall thermodynamic efficiency, they aren't all that great. 40% efficiency is *very* good for a Brayton cycle (i.e. turbine engine) system, but is fairly easily done with a large-scale steam system. Microturbines tend to run around 25%, which means that (a) you need a fairly big recuperator to run efficiently (which doesn't seem to be part of the MIT design), and (b) you need to be able to reject a lot of waste heat (so running your laptop on one of these means you'll be blowed 200+ watts out the back).
Not that gas turbines are without their advantages. Their specific power (weight per kW) is very good, so for the same amount of power the engine is very light compared to most other engine types (which is why they use them in aircraft). They also start and stop quickly compared to steam turbine systems. And they can be nicely combined with other systems like a steam system to make a combined cycle, the whole system can be fairly efficient.
But, by themselves, they aren't all that efficient.
Indeed, as a two-time coach of team 95 (Lebanon High School), I know of at least one team that does their own design and fabrication (albeit with a lot of guidance and oversight from coaches). Programming, too (having had to teach two different teams about basic PID-controller theory).
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of robots that were entirely designed and built by sponsors. Although you can't always tell, as I've seen some very good build quality out of some of the student members as well.
Mine does charge on USB, even when the device is on, but admittedly the charge rate isn't all that good. Perhaps they have tweaked this for the T5, as charging off of the USB port seems popular these days (for example, it's one of the highlighted features of the recent iPods). So I guess it's not a new feature, just an improved one.
Odd, I must be imagining that my T3 has been charging from my Palm USB cable for over a year (I've never unpacked the cradle).
I'm not to sure that would be the case. People with access to the widescreen Lasderdisc version of the trilogy seem pretty happy with it.