Once the vacuum has been created, the amount of energy required to maintain it is not significant assuming that there are no major leaks. I imagine that at the stations that the pod would enter a chamber where the air is removed before entering the main tube. Since most of the volume would be from the pod the amount of air needing to be removed would not be all that great. It also isn't a high vacuum, so it takes much less energy to obtain.
I imagine that in a DVR a decent SSD should do just fine. Each NAND block is good for several thousand write cycles. If you completely overwrote the SSD every 24 hours that would give you years of service, though even a DVR rarely overwrites the entire hard drive in 24 hours.
Just using a counterfeit chip could potentially introduce unintended behavior. I've dealt with a number of USB to serial chips and many of them are crap. I have cables that will just suddenly stop working, or the baudrates that suddenly change. I wouldn't be surprised if the counterfeit chips have similar problems. FTDI should be able to program their chip and expect it to work as designed. If it's counterfeit and it doesn't, then it's not their fault. They shouldn't have to debug problems in counterfeit chips. On top of that, the counterfeit chips eat into their bottom line. FTDI chips tend to be more expensive and for good reason. They're better chips. On top of that they have excellent documentation as well as library support for doing all sorts of things. Want to do i2c or JTAG with their USB to serial chips? It's fully documented with a library to support it.
I can tell you as someone who writes device drivers that trying to debug problems caused by some unknown counterfeit chip is a nightmare. After all, it's not your job to Q/A not only your own hardware, but cheap Chinese counterfeit chips as well.
As far as I can tell, sending an ASCII string is probably the best thing they could have done given that they're screwed no matter what they do.
No, their drivers belong to them and are designed to work with USB devices that have the FTDI vendor ID and FTDI product ID, which FTDI paid for. If the devices fail it is because they are counterfeit. With this change, nobody in their right mind will use counterfeit chips and distributors will be more careful about their supply chain. No matter what FTDI does people will complain. If their drivers just don't work at all it's basically the same as bricking the device. At least this way the device will continue to work. FTDI are in no way responsible for transmitting reliable data over counterfeit chips. If those manufacturers want reliable data then they should write their own damned drivers.
Probably because nobody would want to use a non-FTDI chip. I've worked on products where we specifically chose FTDI due to the features of the chip as well as the reliability. I have used a number of other non-FTDI USB to serial chips and had a lot of problems with them. In our case, we use the quad FTDI USB to serial chips and make use of features like i2c and JTAG support.
I really can't blame FTDI. After all, if the fake chips are causing a lot of support issues, that affects their bottom line as well as their reputation. Why should FTDI need to provide a bunch of support to customers who keep having problems with fake chips? By doing this they will drive the counterfeit chip manufacturers away since any product based on these chips will be rendered unusable from the start. The supply chain will also be more careful to prevent the fake chips from entering it.
A serial driver cannot just pop up a message and say that a fake device was detected. The next best thing is to do what they are doing.
One problem these counterfeit chips pose is that all the sudden companies like FTDI end up with a lot of support costs for people who bought shoddy products with the fake chips, which often don't work nearly as well as the real thing. This is a way for FTDI to crack down on the counterfeit chips. While it sucks for the consumers that end up with the fake chips, it will also help put a stop to the counterfeit chips since any product that uses them will not work.
At my company we make a number of development boards using the quad FTDI chips for the serial interface. We use them because in addition to RS232 they also can talk I2C and JTAG, among other things. I can reliably run the FTDI chips at 10Mbps. I've used other USB to serial devices in the past but I've had lots of problems with them. Some cables I bought, for example, will just suddenly stop working and I have to periodically reset the baud rates.
Why should FTDI have to bear the burden and support costs of counterfeit chips? If somebody else slaps the FTDI manufacturer ID and product ID onto their USB device then they deserve whatever happens. Why should FTDI have to spend resources supporting fake chips? By doing what they are doing, it will drive the fake chips out of the system and prevent future ones.
I work for a chip manufacturer and while there's a very low risk that someone will make fake chips like ours (very complex network processors), we have had to add features to our chips so that our end customers can prevent counterfeit equipment which just copies their software. We have some large customers who have been battling Chinese made counterfeit equipment.
The FTDI chips don't put out 12V or 5V. Most serial chips rely on a chip like a MAX232 to bump up the voltage to +/- 12V. The MAX232 and derivatives do not need an external 12v supply.
When I was in kindergarten I walked to school every day, it was only around 3 blocks away. Going to the park alone was also normal. The sad thing is that it is a lot safer today than it was back then. I consider myself quite liberal, but I detest the whole nanny state. I've also read numerous articles about parents who are arrested for leaving young children in the car, in the shade with the windows open while running into the grocery store.
Hell, reading this article reminded me about how my mother would go into a local supermarket to do some quick shopping while I watched my younger sister in the car. Today my mother would have been arrested.
As a kid I ran around all over the place without my parents hovering over me every second. I got out and got exercise and explored, something many parents won't allow today. That was before the days of the Internet or before cell phones or bike helmets. The only difference I would have with my own kids is to make them wear a bicycle helmet when riding (due to experience with how it saved the life of a relative several times) and possibly a cell phone.
Kids need to be kids and also to learn responsibility, not be coddled like crazy.
I have not had any non-OCZ drive fail. I bought an OCZ drive a couple of years ago and within two weeks of relatively light duty (Linux boot drive) it bricked.
Last year I was working on a project and the machine they gave me had an OCZ enterprise class drive. Within two weeks the drive was corrupting data, rendering the machine unusable. I will never buy another OCZ drive again. I still have two OCZ drives but they are backed up daily.
After my company switched to Microsoft Office 365 I had to use an outside email server to access my email because Office365 was so broken. IMAP didn't work at all. 99% of the time I got authentication failures due to problems on their end both for sending and receiving email. This problem lasted for almost a year. I ended up setting up Office365 to forward my email because otherwise I just couldn't access it at all. Eventually my work set me up with a Google account in addition to the Office 365 one.
Office365 is better now, though I still frequently have problems with it and it is slow, though not as bad as it used to be. Running Outlook was not an option since it doesn't run on Linux and the web interface sucks to put it mildly and is incredibly slow (it takes several minutes just to log in to the web interface).
I understand that the State Department's email system was very antiquated and had a lot of problems since congress refused to give them a budget to upgrade their IT infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised either if Clinton's email server was more secure than the State Department's server which has been known to be hacked.
How many times has Israel been caught spying on the US? All countries spy on each other. Senators conspiring with foreign heads of state though could be considered unamerican, however. It sounds like we were spying on Israel and some congress critters got caught up in it. In other words, the NSA was doing what it's supposed to be doing, monitoring and spying on foreign activity.
The yields are such that more often than not the binning doesn't produce nearly enough low-end chips so higher-end ones get their fuses blown to remove features.
My new one works better than my old ancient top loader. It depends on which one you get. It takes longer to wash, but it takes a lot less time drying now.
No, the HE soap is designed so it doesn't produce suds. Since the washer spins the clothes at a much higher speed, it gets more of the soapy water out. There's no noticeable soap in my clothes with my HE washer.
That's simply a matter of buying a cheap dishwasher. I recently replaced mine as well. It works much better than the old one, using less water and energy in the process and you can barely hear it running, plus the rack is much better protected so it should last a lot longer.
Tesla supercharging support for the P65/P70 models. There are many more. I see this a lot with high-end test equipment, for example. Although they often can't be upgraded later, the CPUs I work with are often intentionally crippled by blowing fuses to disable features for lower cost versions. When they're manufactured they have all the features and cores, only to have some disabled later.
I work on hardware that can do this. 99% of the firewalls used by home users are pure software firewalls because CAM memory is very expensive. I work for a company that makes CPUs specialized for packet processing and security, but even our low end CPUs are typically not used for the home firewall. Our current generation low end CPU can easily handle 10Gbps of traffic, our higher end ones can handle over 80Gbps of traffic with hardware offload engines for lookups, encryption, compression and packet processing.
With IPv4 one typically runs NAT so only one IP address is exposed to the Internet. With IPv6 NAT is not used. Each host has a unique globally identifiable IPv6 address. The ISP typically offers a/64 address where the last 64 bits are assigned to each host. With IPv6 each host is directly addressable from the Internet. With NAT, only the firewall is visible.
One problem I have with my ISP is I want a/56 so I can subnet it on my business account. You can't subnet a/64.
We have a saying in Silicon Valley, DWA. It means "driving while Asian". We tend to have a lot of recent Asian arrivals who should not be behind the wheel, especially in the crowded freeways of the Bay Area. I was in an accident a few years ago where the Asian driver who barely spoke English panicked when trying to change lanes and hit a bunch of cars, mine included. I happened to see the whole thing since I was stopped in the exit ramp at the time.
Then again, bad drivers aren't limited to Asians. Like JMJimmy's brother in law, my sister has destroyed a lot of cars over the years as well, though the last time was clearly the other driver's fault.
I remember back in grade school they did not have a lock cutter. The administration would just whack the combination locks with a hammer and they'd pop right open. I remember one of the non-Master locks popping completely apart and spilling its guts. It doesn't surprise me that it works for other types of locks as well. Locks are, after all, good at keeping honest people honest.
Some USB to serial adapters are better than others. I've found that the real FDT-based ones tend to be the best. USB to parallel adapters tend to have problems. For example, I have some label printers and cannot talk to them with the USB to parallel adapters but they work fine with a real parallel adapter or a parallel network print server. They also don't work well for bit banging and have a high latency if they can work at all.
It's actually a lot easier. In our case our eval boards normally came with multiple serial ports. All we had to do was put on a FDT quad USB to RS232 chip. No custom UID required. With Linux it's just plug and play, plug it in and you've got your serial console, plus we can reliably run it at much higher baud rates up to 10Mbps.
It's partly their fault, especially Saudi Arabia for pushing their puritanical form of Islam with all their money. In fact, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are actively funding ISIS and al-Qauda.
It's not surprising most of the hijackers of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. They've also screwed up places by building madrases to help push their fundamentalist puritanical version of Islam. Boys who go to these madrases for their education learn little except the Saudi brand of Islam along with hate for the west.
Just google ISIS funding.
Ever since 9/11 I've done whatever I can to stop supporting middle eastern countries and wean myself off of using oil. The fact that most of the 9/11 hijackers and their ringleader came from Saudi Arabia made me realize I don't want any of my money to go to fund these countries that promote terrorism.
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Once the vacuum has been created, the amount of energy required to maintain it is not significant assuming that there are no major leaks. I imagine that at the stations that the pod would enter a chamber where the air is removed before entering the main tube. Since most of the volume would be from the pod the amount of air needing to be removed would not be all that great. It also isn't a high vacuum, so it takes much less energy to obtain.
I imagine that in a DVR a decent SSD should do just fine. Each NAND block is good for several thousand write cycles. If you completely overwrote the SSD every 24 hours that would give you years of service, though even a DVR rarely overwrites the entire hard drive in 24 hours.
Just using a counterfeit chip could potentially introduce unintended behavior. I've dealt with a number of USB to serial chips and many of them are crap. I have cables that will just suddenly stop working, or the baudrates that suddenly change. I wouldn't be surprised if the counterfeit chips have similar problems. FTDI should be able to program their chip and expect it to work as designed. If it's counterfeit and it doesn't, then it's not their fault. They shouldn't have to debug problems in counterfeit chips. On top of that, the counterfeit chips eat into their bottom line. FTDI chips tend to be more expensive and for good reason. They're better chips. On top of that they have excellent documentation as well as library support for doing all sorts of things. Want to do i2c or JTAG with their USB to serial chips? It's fully documented with a library to support it.
I can tell you as someone who writes device drivers that trying to debug problems caused by some unknown counterfeit chip is a nightmare. After all, it's not your job to Q/A not only your own hardware, but cheap Chinese counterfeit chips as well.
As far as I can tell, sending an ASCII string is probably the best thing they could have done given that they're screwed no matter what they do.
No, their drivers belong to them and are designed to work with USB devices that have the FTDI vendor ID and FTDI product ID, which FTDI paid for. If the devices fail it is because they are counterfeit. With this change, nobody in their right mind will use counterfeit chips and distributors will be more careful about their supply chain. No matter what FTDI does people will complain. If their drivers just don't work at all it's basically the same as bricking the device. At least this way the device will continue to work. FTDI are in no way responsible for transmitting reliable data over counterfeit chips. If those manufacturers want reliable data then they should write their own damned drivers.
Probably because nobody would want to use a non-FTDI chip. I've worked on products where we specifically chose FTDI due to the features of the chip as well as the reliability. I have used a number of other non-FTDI USB to serial chips and had a lot of problems with them. In our case, we use the quad FTDI USB to serial chips and make use of features like i2c and JTAG support.
I really can't blame FTDI. After all, if the fake chips are causing a lot of support issues, that affects their bottom line as well as their reputation. Why should FTDI need to provide a bunch of support to customers who keep having problems with fake chips? By doing this they will drive the counterfeit chip manufacturers away since any product based on these chips will be rendered unusable from the start. The supply chain will also be more careful to prevent the fake chips from entering it.
A serial driver cannot just pop up a message and say that a fake device was detected. The next best thing is to do what they are doing.
One problem these counterfeit chips pose is that all the sudden companies like FTDI end up with a lot of support costs for people who bought shoddy products with the fake chips, which often don't work nearly as well as the real thing. This is a way for FTDI to crack down on the counterfeit chips. While it sucks for the consumers that end up with the fake chips, it will also help put a stop to the counterfeit chips since any product that uses them will not work.
At my company we make a number of development boards using the quad FTDI chips for the serial interface. We use them because in addition to RS232 they also can talk I2C and JTAG, among other things. I can reliably run the FTDI chips at 10Mbps. I've used other USB to serial devices in the past but I've had lots of problems with them. Some cables I bought, for example, will just suddenly stop working and I have to periodically reset the baud rates.
Why should FTDI have to bear the burden and support costs of counterfeit chips? If somebody else slaps the FTDI manufacturer ID and product ID onto their USB device then they deserve whatever happens. Why should FTDI have to spend resources supporting fake chips? By doing what they are doing, it will drive the fake chips out of the system and prevent future ones.
I work for a chip manufacturer and while there's a very low risk that someone will make fake chips like ours (very complex network processors), we have had to add features to our chips so that our end customers can prevent counterfeit equipment which just copies their software. We have some large customers who have been battling Chinese made counterfeit equipment.
The FTDI chips don't put out 12V or 5V. Most serial chips rely on a chip like a MAX232 to bump up the voltage to +/- 12V. The MAX232 and derivatives do not need an external 12v supply.
When I was in kindergarten I walked to school every day, it was only around 3 blocks away. Going to the park alone was also normal. The sad thing is that it is a lot safer today than it was back then. I consider myself quite liberal, but I detest the whole nanny state. I've also read numerous articles about parents who are arrested for leaving young children in the car, in the shade with the windows open while running into the grocery store.
Hell, reading this article reminded me about how my mother would go into a local supermarket to do some quick shopping while I watched my younger sister in the car. Today my mother would have been arrested.
As a kid I ran around all over the place without my parents hovering over me every second. I got out and got exercise and explored, something many parents won't allow today. That was before the days of the Internet or before cell phones or bike helmets. The only difference I would have with my own kids is to make them wear a bicycle helmet when riding (due to experience with how it saved the life of a relative several times) and possibly a cell phone.
Kids need to be kids and also to learn responsibility, not be coddled like crazy.
I have not had any non-OCZ drive fail. I bought an OCZ drive a couple of years ago and within two weeks of relatively light duty (Linux boot drive) it bricked.
Last year I was working on a project and the machine they gave me had an OCZ enterprise class drive. Within two weeks the drive was corrupting data, rendering the machine unusable. I will never buy another OCZ drive again. I still have two OCZ drives but they are backed up daily.
After my company switched to Microsoft Office 365 I had to use an outside email server to access my email because Office365 was so broken. IMAP didn't work at all. 99% of the time I got authentication failures due to problems on their end both for sending and receiving email. This problem lasted for almost a year. I ended up setting up Office365 to forward my email because otherwise I just couldn't access it at all. Eventually my work set me up with a Google account in addition to the Office 365 one.
Office365 is better now, though I still frequently have problems with it and it is slow, though not as bad as it used to be. Running Outlook was not an option since it doesn't run on Linux and the web interface sucks to put it mildly and is incredibly slow (it takes several minutes just to log in to the web interface).
I understand that the State Department's email system was very antiquated and had a lot of problems since congress refused to give them a budget to upgrade their IT infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised either if Clinton's email server was more secure than the State Department's server which has been known to be hacked.
How many times has Israel been caught spying on the US? All countries spy on each other. Senators conspiring with foreign heads of state though could be considered unamerican, however. It sounds like we were spying on Israel and some congress critters got caught up in it. In other words, the NSA was doing what it's supposed to be doing, monitoring and spying on foreign activity.
The yields are such that more often than not the binning doesn't produce nearly enough low-end chips so higher-end ones get their fuses blown to remove features.
My washing machine will happily use warm water or even hot for rinse and it's pretty new.
My new one works better than my old ancient top loader. It depends on which one you get. It takes longer to wash, but it takes a lot less time drying now.
No, the HE soap is designed so it doesn't produce suds. Since the washer spins the clothes at a much higher speed, it gets more of the soapy water out. There's no noticeable soap in my clothes with my HE washer.
That's simply a matter of buying a cheap dishwasher. I recently replaced mine as well. It works much better than the old one, using less water and energy in the process and you can barely hear it running, plus the rack is much better protected so it should last a lot longer.
Tesla supercharging support for the P65/P70 models. There are many more. I see this a lot with high-end test equipment, for example. Although they often can't be upgraded later, the CPUs I work with are often intentionally crippled by blowing fuses to disable features for lower cost versions. When they're manufactured they have all the features and cores, only to have some disabled later.
I work on hardware that can do this. 99% of the firewalls used by home users are pure software firewalls because CAM memory is very expensive. I work for a company that makes CPUs specialized for packet processing and security, but even our low end CPUs are typically not used for the home firewall. Our current generation low end CPU can easily handle 10Gbps of traffic, our higher end ones can handle over 80Gbps of traffic with hardware offload engines for lookups, encryption, compression and packet processing.
With IPv4 one typically runs NAT so only one IP address is exposed to the Internet. With IPv6 NAT is not used. Each host has a unique globally identifiable IPv6 address. The ISP typically offers a /64 address where the last 64 bits are assigned to each host. With IPv6 each host is directly addressable from the Internet. With NAT, only the firewall is visible.
One problem I have with my ISP is I want a /56 so I can subnet it on my business account. You can't subnet a /64.
We have a saying in Silicon Valley, DWA. It means "driving while Asian". We tend to have a lot of recent Asian arrivals who should not be behind the wheel, especially in the crowded freeways of the Bay Area. I was in an accident a few years ago where the Asian driver who barely spoke English panicked when trying to change lanes and hit a bunch of cars, mine included. I happened to see the whole thing since I was stopped in the exit ramp at the time.
Then again, bad drivers aren't limited to Asians. Like JMJimmy's brother in law, my sister has destroyed a lot of cars over the years as well, though the last time was clearly the other driver's fault.
It's even easier than that. All you need to do is lob a few big asteroids or comets. Even better it won't leave the planet a radioactive wasteland.
I remember back in grade school they did not have a lock cutter. The administration would just whack the combination locks with a hammer and they'd pop right open. I remember one of the non-Master locks popping completely apart and spilling its guts. It doesn't surprise me that it works for other types of locks as well. Locks are, after all, good at keeping honest people honest.
Some USB to serial adapters are better than others. I've found that the real FDT-based ones tend to be the best. USB to parallel adapters tend to have problems. For example, I have some label printers and cannot talk to them with the USB to parallel adapters but they work fine with a real parallel adapter or a parallel network print server. They also don't work well for bit banging and have a high latency if they can work at all.
It's actually a lot easier. In our case our eval boards normally came with multiple serial ports. All we had to do was put on a FDT quad USB to RS232 chip. No custom UID required. With Linux it's just plug and play, plug it in and you've got your serial console, plus we can reliably run it at much higher baud rates up to 10Mbps.
It's partly their fault, especially Saudi Arabia for pushing their puritanical form of Islam with all their money. In fact, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are actively funding ISIS and al-Qauda.
It's not surprising most of the hijackers of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. They've also screwed up places by building madrases to help push their fundamentalist puritanical version of Islam. Boys who go to these madrases for their education learn little except the Saudi brand of Islam along with hate for the west.
Just google ISIS funding.
Ever since 9/11 I've done whatever I can to stop supporting middle eastern countries and wean myself off of using oil. The fact that most of the 9/11 hijackers and their ringleader came from Saudi Arabia made me realize I don't want any of my money to go to fund these countries that promote terrorism.