The killer app is time shifting. Rather than setting a VCR/DVR to record your favorite show, or go to the movie theater at an appointed time, you can dictate exactly when to start, stop and pause your entertainment. Email is an example of this, I send you email, and my message is time-shifted to a point where it's convenient for you to respond.
The second killer app is going to be video conferencing. My relatives will all have web cams by the end of this year, and real time family conversations across state boundaries is important, especially for those with kids. But the video is crummy! USB 2.0 and faster video cameras will take us to a better picture locally, but only broadband and multicasting will take us the rest of the way. For broadband to truly work out, though, multicasting HAS to be implemented on a wider basis. It should become a requirement for IPv6 routers to deal properly with multicasting, and we need IPv6 so we can get our own IP address easily and cheaply for each device in each home.
But the real reason broadband hasn't picked up is that the consumer market cannot support the infrastructure. Nearly every major advancment that made it in the last hundred years made it because business adopted it. Business will NOT adopt broadband until it is as reliable as a T1, yet SDSL connections (which approach and pass a T1 in speed, and are often more reliable/dependable than other broadband services, not to be confused with ADSL) are as expensive as a T1 or better. Not only that, but a T1 can handle both phone and data, according to need.
Broadband is suffering right now as a consumer service, but isn't going to take off until business starts investing in its reliability and speed.
And it still bugs me that I can get 2Mb over cable modem from some web sites, but not others. My connection is fast enough, but web hosting sites need to get exponentially larger pipes for broadband to make a difference - either that or a fundamental shift has to take place in the way it works - perhaps a distributed model such as akami(sp, I know).
-Adam
My enemies hate me more than your enemies hate you. Mine put up better "why he sucks" sites.
The firmware was posted (finally) for the PIC16F877 controlling the whole thing. Disassembly shows much of it is regular code, but some appears to be encrypted - ie, not real code. At some point one hopes that they open this part up, but I doubt they will. One would need the configuration for the altera part as well to duplicate the whole thing, so this code, while important, is not going to put them out of business even if it weren't encoded (which could be the case - I haven't inspected it extremely closely - but the return from interrupt instruction and whole interrupt handler are valid and appear to be good code - just lots of other invalid code elsewhere, which could be encoded (not encrypted) text for the display...).
Anyway, it would become significantly more hackable if this code were opened. The TCP/IP stack is only a short leap from simple IP and TCP/IP stacks already freely available for this chip, there is plenty of code for controlling both the crystal lan chip and the mas MP3 decoder, so there is little they have to lose by opening it, except that it would give a peek into what's on the altera chip.
We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows
Not that I'm against MS making PHP faster on windows (the environment I run it in currently - XP, Apache, PHP), but you'd think that MS would see PHP as a competitor to ASP.
-Adam
You shake and shake the ketchup bottle - first none comes, and then a lottle.
1) Even superbright LEDs are not nearly bright enough. Find your favorite LED manufacturer, and check out the specs. The projecter bulbs are several hundred (if not thousand) of times brighter than even the brightest white LED. The array would be huge.
2) Superbright LEDs are not true white. They are white one of two ways: either three LEDs in the package (RGB) or a blue LED with phospher to emit RGB. So what? Well, the colors emitted by an LED are/very/ specific wavelengths. The color filters on the LCD will likely NOT match the LED colors closely enough to produce a good rendition. Projecter bulbs produce a nice even and wide band of wavelengths from just below visible to just above visible.
3) Lastly, the lenses in the projector are designed for a specific shape of light, whether it's point source, straight filament (and orientation), bent filament, etc. You'd have to add your own lens system to make an array of LEDs look like whatever bulb you're trying to emulate, and it likely won't fit into the space set aside for the regular bulb.
In short, you'll end up trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Not only will it not fit, but it won't work well if you can make it fit.
You'd spend far less money and time buying a few bright 19" screens, setting them up in array, placing fresnel lenses in front of each of them, and lining everything up perfectly so their images overlay each other (for brightness). And the monitors are rated for a lot more usage... Of course, you couldn't call it portable, but you now know how much portable really costs.
-Adam
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The current ratings on the web site are wrong, check out the data sheet first. Very low power.
As far as designing your own chip, the only suggestion I'd have is to pay very careful attention to power consumption which is (relatively) very high for nearly every configurable chip you can get. You may end up looking towards CPLDs.
You're obviously doing this for fun. Don't get any crazy ideas about making it useful for other people. There are far better and cheaper things you can get now. (think $100 palm)
So, for a display you can start off with the expensive $50 64x128 graphics LCD. (can't remember the source - email me), but I'd stay away from FPGAs or ASICs, they tend to suck current, and you'll be changing batteries every day. Look for an inexpensive 16 or 32 bit chip (mitsubishi makes a/very/ nice line of flash 16 bit chips for under $20), hook it up to the LCD, slap a touchscreen on there, and you'll still have tons of room to add other gizmos.
The box(es) you show on the page are way too small to comfortably hold the items you are shipping, and they are not NEARLY strong enough. You probably used boxes which are not new (ie, they've been weakened) and are cheap single wall, probably rated for maybe 30-60 pounds new?
You are shipping items that are as fragile as glass, and weigh 40-80 pounds. You need at LEAST new double wall cardboard boxes with a minimum of 6-10 inches of clearance on each side of the item filled with both a durable packing material(dense foam, cardboard, etc), and a light soft material (light foam, bubble wrap, etc. Then you need to INSURE each item for what it would cost you to replace it new. If they don't offer insurance on a particular service, then use a higher grade service or another company altogether.
It's sad to see when someone suffers the consequences of their inexperience, but honestly, you could have done better. You were probably worried about the packing job before you got them back.
Blame UPS all you want. They could have done better as well, but this is par for the course, and you finally got a good look at the lay of the land.
The charging batteries is going to be the toughie, and I'd suggest you give up there. If your device charges it as long as it's in the device and the device is plugged in, then you only need a single power supply that will supply a range of voltages.
The only problem to overcome with that is that you might accidently set the variable PS to the wrong voltage/polarity, or that some of your devices may require current limiting (some devices depend on he wall wart's ability to only deliver xxx mA, though they are getting rarer).
This is a business nightmare, since my device would be breaking all the consumer's items.
About the best solution you can do is to buy lighter/car/airplane adaptors for all your devices (which should be lighter and take up less space) and buy a 2 or 3 output 12V powersupply with lighter outputs (such as those from the venerable, though cheesy, RadioShack). It won't take up less space, and overall may not be lighter than what you're doing now, but that's really as far as you can take it without taking responsability for hooking a device up incorrectly to a more generic supply.
I could, however, design a two output supply with an LCD and a few buttons. You hook it up to your computer and preprogram various voltages/devices (including polarity, overcurrent protection, etc). Then disconnect it. When you want to use it, connect a cable between it and the device, and choose the device type from a simple LCD menu. It would verify that the proper device is connected (ie, the shaver generally has this resistance, the laptop has a lower resistance - non-invasive type of stuff) and it would output the correct voltage. If the current goes over it can disconnect and display an error, check the polarity, etc.
But that would be pretty close to the limit of what you could expect, and you'd still have to be careful connecting it to your devices. Imagine a device about the size of 3-4 handhelds stacked on top of each other with two outputs, a universal input (90-250VAC), two wires, and a bunch of connectors. I'd expect it would be in the range of $100 - $200, and probably only in kit form since UL and other certifications are thousands of dollars.
If that's what you want, no, there isn't anything like it on the market. If you're willing to pay that much, then you can probably get someone to build it (such as me;-)
-Adam
"It's pretty funny, actually. It all started when I thought inflammable was the opposite of flammable..."
Actually, the opposite is true. If you take a 400W power supply, and only use 200W it puts out significantly less heat than a 200W supply putting out 200W, due to design differences. Thus you could put a temp sensor in there and change the fan speed, and thus the sound output, based on the heat of the supply, and it would even be quieter.
In a recent discussion on an EE mailing list, the radio heads argued that since these boosters are often placed between the handset and the battery pack, then no benefit could be derived since the metal pack shielded them, effectively creating a small faraday cage.
Others noted that perhaps they could couple some RF from the inside of the unit to the edges or the antenna (which tends to be located close to the battery pack), but that that would only serve to increase the distortion of the radio transmission, even if it did increase the transmission power. Of course, if they did increase the power, then they are certianly not legal to use since nearly every phone you can buy is already at the FCC and FDA limit.
But if you want to/really/ increase your transmission inside your house then I've got some special oxygenized air I can sell you, since RF travels through oxygenized air far better than through lead. It's only $5 per can, and if you want to get in on the business, I can sell you a special oxygenator so you can make your own and make a bundle!
No matter how you look at it and what media you use, if you plan on storing this stuff indefinitely you'll have to go for a large (think medium - large shed size) jukebox. Even if you store it on, say, an EMC solution, you'll have to take old data offline at some point for cost and efficiency reasons.
That being said, remember that a run-of-the mill 16/10/40 CD-Recorder records at up to 140MB/s, which is well over your goal of 90MB/s. High-capacity CD-Rs can go to 800MB, so you'll end up writing 10,000 per day, and you'll want to use about 100 or more cd-rom drives to do the recording (for reasons of robustness, and to lengthen the average MTBF).
BUT it sets you up for an easy swap in later to switch to DVD-R, or the newest 100GB disc (vapor-hardware) technology, though you can't go much cheaper than CD-R, along with storage reliability of 5 years or so in decent circumstances, 10+ years in climate controlled lockers.
I'd imagine making CD-R cassettes that hold 10,000+ CD-Rs which simply get changed once a day (remember - 100 spindles of 100 CD-Rs is not much space, and can easily be handled by standard warehouse automation equipment). As a bonus, you can store them by day. Need a few hours on Oct 29? Just pull out one cassette. You'd have to trade out a CD-Recorder daily as well, but overall you're going to spend a LOT less than any other storage solution out there.
You can't get much cheaper than this, and the tradoffs may well be worth it to you. But it would likely be a fully custom which would take time to design. It might compare favorably to a cassette of 100.1TB IDE Hard drives, which would take up less space, and you don't have to worry so much about hardware failure since the drive electronics are switched daily.
The IPAQ 3635 is a mid range PDA for which linux is available. 16MB Flash, 32MB RAM, and a host of other niceties.
Right now it can be had for $450 or less new at some places, and compaq has a $150 rebate on this model, lowering it further to $300 or so. Hacking Linux on it would be great fun, and the hardware is pretty much exposed to the world, so hacking the hardware (if you're into that) can yield a great deal of fun as well.
-Adam
"Okay, we've destroyed his credit rating, repo'd his car, owes money to an escort agency, and is a wanted felon. What else?"
"List him as pregnant."
-UserFriendly
There are many reasons why large companies do not donate computer equipment:
By throwing it away, they obtain a tax writeoff, the same as they get write offs for depreciation if they simply store them in a big warehouse until they throw them away.
If they give them away or sell them they cannot obtain that writoff. If they give them away to a charity, they can obtain a bigger writeoff, but only if it is a registered charity, and if they fill out lots of paperwork and set themselves up for much larger audit problems than throwing them away.
Liability issues are also a big reason to not donate.
Lastly, licensing and security issues are time consuming to wrangle with. Sure, we can donate a computer, but actively erasing each hard drive takes take and energy, more than what would be gained by donating them to a real charity, and most charities do NOT want computers that come without software. Enterprise sized companies buy per seat licenses, and many licenses are payed yearly. If they no longer use a computer, they cannot transfer the license to the software loaded on it, since the license is part of a bulk of licenses and cannot be seperated out.
While I am all for giving old computer equipment away, it is a sticky situation. My company has a dozen or so 486 and low end pentium systems we would love to give away, but who wants them? You should be going after computers from smaller companies, where such problems are not as big an issue. While I worked for a contracter who had me working at Ford (dearborn, MI) I was told of huge warehouses of old computer equipment. They can't throw it away because of environmental issues, they can't give it away because of the effort needed to catalog and erase all the hardware. They had to replace x number of machines around dearborn per day, and it costs less to buy a computer, do a 15 minute install, and toss the old one on a pallet for storage than it does to do the same thing including a full HD erasure and paperwork to give the machine away. Then the computers can depreciate away, and eventually they will pay some computer scrap dealer to haul it all away, and they will grind everything up, seperate the bits, and sell the gold and other metal slag for a profit.
Everyone wants to save money now, and leave the problems for later. You try to go to your manager with a solution where you pay more now and have less of a problem later. You'll get much further if you make a way to put the problem on the back burner with little up front cost, and gloss over the fact that it'll cost more later.
If you want to see if you need a swap space in your normal day to day usage, make a ram drive and mount the swap space there.
Under win9x, there is a ramdrive system file that will do the job in config.sys. There are similar programs for 2k and xp. If you find that you never see an out of memory error then you've solved your problem,a nd your computer goes a teeny bit faster.
Modern OS's are pretty smart about it anyway, while they may grab a large chunk of the HD for a swap space, it's mainly to get a contiguous spot of drive so access is faster, and it hardly uses any of it. When it does, it puts little used memory spots in it, such as schedular tasks, which are checked once a minute, first, before it starts putting larger tasks, such as MS word docs, into it.
Lastly, code bloat is followed by data bloat. A program which, if careful, would need only 5MB of ram may well absorb 5x or more just because the programmers know there is always going to be enough swap space. You may find, with the ram drive, that you still run out of memory because apps are taking much more than you think they would. Word, when working on a 5k doc may well use more than 50MB, then save it back down to 5k when you're done editing. So, in short, you may be fine, but check your system utilities for a memory usage meter. It should show you physical memory useg, swap space used, swap file size, etc. See what apps need the most memory. Also remember that on days like tuesday when one might open 30 windows of their browser that you might run out of space.
They are completely responsible for the cable outside your home, you are responsible for the cable inside. They are providing you service over their cable. Hook your cable modem up to the outside access point and see if you still have problems. If you do, it is THEIR concern, and THEY are violating THEIR service agreement. If you don't have problems, then you should try using a splitter at that point, with one cable to your modem, another cable to a one-way filter (makes sure signals in your house don't get on the cable line - chances are they already have one in place) then to the rest of your house. Make sure all the connections are really good. A bad connection is often more a problem than one might think.
Even if you could find one, you'll find that the price will be significantly higher than two seperate cards. You can get a pcmcia 100BaseT card for under $40 now, and swapping isn't a huge pain.
These connections are meant for consumers, those who consume, not those who spew.
It's the difference between a water supply (lots of download) and a sewer pipe (lots of upload). You try reversing either one, it upsets people.
I suspect the reason ADSL works at all is they can have a very expensive piece of equipment to hear a tiny signal sent from your ADSL modem, and can send a very strong signal that your modem can understand. This lowers the cost of the modem, which now only has to listen to a nice strong signal, and send a relatively weak signal.
The other half of the apple is that most consumers want high download, slow upload, and while the ISP may have a symmetrical connection, they sell the upload capacity to colocators and hosting customers. It's almost like selling the same bandwidth twice, but in our current low bandwidth society, the upload and download capacity really need to be considered seperately, and perhaps even charged seperately. Pulling info off the net is cheap, but pushing info onto it is expensive. This will continue to be true as TV and other broadband services supply more information than they accept.
I doubt that this is the case at all. It would be very difficult to get a charge to travel in one of the serial ports wires and not get grounded on the way there. Furthermore, the serial port, being one of the available external ports, is generally very well protected from static discharge. The real problem here is that nearly every integrated mobo has the serial port contained in the northbridge/southbridge chipset, so discharge to the port means discharge to a critical IC in the computer as well.
Good mobos will have protection right at the port, including zener diodes and possibly MOVs (MOVs break down and conduct at high voltages, zeners prevent the voltage going above a certain point, in this case above or below 13 volts or so).
The actual IC will generally also contain similar protection.
But this isn't an issue of whether it happened, or is even a remote problem. This is the "The coffee burnt my lap" problem. In our increasingly litigious society we sue people for not warning us of possible problems. All computer and electronic devices say "Static electricity may cause damage to device." What these laywers apparently want is Palm to put in big bold letters that "This device may act as an additional path for static electricity to damage your computer or other palm attached device." Which is silly. The user, had they read their documentation, knows that both devices are sensitive to static. Do they think they are immune to it by ganging the devices up?
You might be surprised at how many beta testers worked on it, and how stable it is. Of course, you may never use it, but if you ever have to touch a windows machine again, pray that it's XP...
Windows 95 started shipping today a few years ago, WinXP hit RTM (realease to manufacture) this afternoon, and the court sent the trial back down today.
At this point, I bet the lawyers are scrambling to prepare a motion to stop shipment/distribution of WinXP, but can they succeed in less than 60 days? If so, they'll have dealt a good blow to MS - all those copies of WinXP sitting around in warehouses (we're talking several million boxes of product). This won't hurt MS much financially (much), but it'll be really interesting to see what happens then. MS would have to throw them away if the court required some unbundling. And if the court said, "No shipment until ruling" then MS would have a strong reason to help move the process along - including making some concessions they were unwilling to make a year ago.
Believe me - Microsoft, as a whole, is riding on WinXP, as it is the most stable MS product yet, not to mention that it's the first windows to realize their dream of five years - one version/code base for both home and coporate users.
We don't have anything that can reliably self-replicate in a controlled laboratory setting, and the technology to do so is still 8-10 years off. We don't need to even think about nano-tech replicating in the 'wild' for another decade or two beyond that. While the legal implications need to be worked out, we are still so far away that we should probably focus on legal implications for problems closer to home, like the balancing of copyright against fair use.
-Adam
Remember: If you want to get your story posted to slashdot mention nano-tech and law in your blurb. Submit early, submit often.
In fact, we can find out how hard this is by making a game for programmers, much like CRobots and Core Wars.
The game consists of a 3d battlefield of, say, 1600 pixels cubed. There is a missile which is launched somewhere in that space which is guranteed to hit above a certian height before heading back down. Your job is to code a script or program (which the game will interpret and run) that has access to:
3 radars that can be simultaneously pointed and operated
1 or more missiles which have a certian thrust (possibly variable), and a variable amount of deflection, as well as the ability to explode on command, sending lethal shrapnel up to 2 pixels away from its current location. This missile also has a limited radar.
Optionally you can also use a script or program to control the target missile, since enemies are obviously going to be upgrading their technology as we upgrade ours. The enemy missile might have to be more complex, though, sending dummy junk, using heat or radio/radar jamming, etc.
It might show people how difficult it really is to do, but that things are still within the realm of possibility.
A previous poster mentioned that the GPS was not used by the ABM missile to aim for the target, but was part of getting telemetry info for the test.
But even if it weren't true and the ABM missile was using the GPS signal for targetting, this is still a huge success. Getting two minute objects to fly that close to each other under computer control has been the biggest problem until now. Now that we've got the technology to do that we can move on to other methods of tracking the incoming missile. We need to remember that this is a complex system with several objectives. Every time we fail we learn something new, and when we meet one objective (even if the others are 'hard coded' or 'rigged') then we can move on to using real data for the hard coded or rigged objectives. This isn't far from programming a very complex application, and the techniques are surprisingly similar.
The cost and potential results, however, are far different and are what should really be discussed. It's not a matter of if it will work, but when, and the real problem is how does the gov't relationship with other countries and with our country's people change when we make it there.
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The killer app is time shifting. Rather than setting a VCR/DVR to record your favorite show, or go to the movie theater at an appointed time, you can dictate exactly when to start, stop and pause your entertainment. Email is an example of this, I send you email, and my message is time-shifted to a point where it's convenient for you to respond.
The second killer app is going to be video conferencing. My relatives will all have web cams by the end of this year, and real time family conversations across state boundaries is important, especially for those with kids. But the video is crummy! USB 2.0 and faster video cameras will take us to a better picture locally, but only broadband and multicasting will take us the rest of the way. For broadband to truly work out, though, multicasting HAS to be implemented on a wider basis. It should become a requirement for IPv6 routers to deal properly with multicasting, and we need IPv6 so we can get our own IP address easily and cheaply for each device in each home.
But the real reason broadband hasn't picked up is that the consumer market cannot support the infrastructure. Nearly every major advancment that made it in the last hundred years made it because business adopted it. Business will NOT adopt broadband until it is as reliable as a T1, yet SDSL connections (which approach and pass a T1 in speed, and are often more reliable/dependable than other broadband services, not to be confused with ADSL) are as expensive as a T1 or better. Not only that, but a T1 can handle both phone and data, according to need.
Broadband is suffering right now as a consumer service, but isn't going to take off until business starts investing in its reliability and speed.
And it still bugs me that I can get 2Mb over cable modem from some web sites, but not others. My connection is fast enough, but web hosting sites need to get exponentially larger pipes for broadband to make a difference - either that or a fundamental shift has to take place in the way it works - perhaps a distributed model such as akami(sp, I know).
-Adam
My enemies hate me more than your enemies hate you. Mine put up better "why he sucks" sites.
The firmware was posted (finally) for the PIC16F877 controlling the whole thing. Disassembly shows much of it is regular code, but some appears to be encrypted - ie, not real code. At some point one hopes that they open this part up, but I doubt they will. One would need the configuration for the altera part as well to duplicate the whole thing, so this code, while important, is not going to put them out of business even if it weren't encoded (which could be the case - I haven't inspected it extremely closely - but the return from interrupt instruction and whole interrupt handler are valid and appear to be good code - just lots of other invalid code elsewhere, which could be encoded (not encrypted) text for the display...).
Anyway, it would become significantly more hackable if this code were opened. The TCP/IP stack is only a short leap from simple IP and TCP/IP stacks already freely available for this chip, there is plenty of code for controlling both the crystal lan chip and the mas MP3 decoder, so there is little they have to lose by opening it, except that it would give a peek into what's on the altera chip.
-Adam
I was really surprised to see this tidbit:
We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows
Not that I'm against MS making PHP faster on windows (the environment I run it in currently - XP, Apache, PHP), but you'd think that MS would see PHP as a competitor to ASP.
-Adam
You shake and shake the ketchup bottle - first none comes, and then a lottle.
There are a few reasons why you couldn't do this:
/very/ specific wavelengths. The color filters on the LCD will likely NOT match the LED colors closely enough to produce a good rendition. Projecter bulbs produce a nice even and wide band of wavelengths from just below visible to just above visible.
1) Even superbright LEDs are not nearly bright enough. Find your favorite LED manufacturer, and check out the specs. The projecter bulbs are several hundred (if not thousand) of times brighter than even the brightest white LED. The array would be huge.
2) Superbright LEDs are not true white. They are white one of two ways: either three LEDs in the package (RGB) or a blue LED with phospher to emit RGB. So what? Well, the colors emitted by an LED are
3) Lastly, the lenses in the projector are designed for a specific shape of light, whether it's point source, straight filament (and orientation), bent filament, etc. You'd have to add your own lens system to make an array of LEDs look like whatever bulb you're trying to emulate, and it likely won't fit into the space set aside for the regular bulb.
In short, you'll end up trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Not only will it not fit, but it won't work well if you can make it fit.
You'd spend far less money and time buying a few bright 19" screens, setting them up in array, placing fresnel lenses in front of each of them, and lining everything up perfectly so their images overlay each other (for brightness). And the monitors are rated for a lot more usage... Of course, you couldn't call it portable, but you now know how much portable really costs.
-Adam
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You can get that LCD from jameco, 128x64 Graphics LCD
The current ratings on the web site are wrong, check out the data sheet first. Very low power.
As far as designing your own chip, the only suggestion I'd have is to pay very careful attention to power consumption which is (relatively) very high for nearly every configurable chip you can get. You may end up looking towards CPLDs.
-Adam
You're obviously doing this for fun. Don't get any crazy ideas about making it useful for other people. There are far better and cheaper things you can get now. (think $100 palm)
/very/ nice line of flash 16 bit chips for under $20), hook it up to the LCD, slap a touchscreen on there, and you'll still have tons of room to add other gizmos.
So, for a display you can start off with the expensive $50 64x128 graphics LCD. (can't remember the source - email me), but I'd stay away from FPGAs or ASICs, they tend to suck current, and you'll be changing batteries every day. Look for an inexpensive 16 or 32 bit chip (mitsubishi makes a
-Adam
I found Kids Freeware recently, which appears to have quite a selection.
-Adam
The box(es) you show on the page are way too small to comfortably hold the items you are shipping, and they are not NEARLY strong enough. You probably used boxes which are not new (ie, they've been weakened) and are cheap single wall, probably rated for maybe 30-60 pounds new?
You are shipping items that are as fragile as glass, and weigh 40-80 pounds. You need at LEAST new double wall cardboard boxes with a minimum of 6-10 inches of clearance on each side of the item filled with both a durable packing material(dense foam, cardboard, etc), and a light soft material (light foam, bubble wrap, etc. Then you need to INSURE each item for what it would cost you to replace it new. If they don't offer insurance on a particular service, then use a higher grade service or another company altogether.
It's sad to see when someone suffers the consequences of their inexperience, but honestly, you could have done better. You were probably worried about the packing job before you got them back.
Blame UPS all you want. They could have done better as well, but this is par for the course, and you finally got a good look at the lay of the land.
-Adam
You seem to have two needs:
;-)
1) Charge various batteries
2) Supply low voltage to sundry devices
The charging batteries is going to be the toughie, and I'd suggest you give up there. If your device charges it as long as it's in the device and the device is plugged in, then you only need a single power supply that will supply a range of voltages.
The only problem to overcome with that is that you might accidently set the variable PS to the wrong voltage/polarity, or that some of your devices may require current limiting (some devices depend on he wall wart's ability to only deliver xxx mA, though they are getting rarer).
This is a business nightmare, since my device would be breaking all the consumer's items.
About the best solution you can do is to buy lighter/car/airplane adaptors for all your devices (which should be lighter and take up less space) and buy a 2 or 3 output 12V powersupply with lighter outputs (such as those from the venerable, though cheesy, RadioShack). It won't take up less space, and overall may not be lighter than what you're doing now, but that's really as far as you can take it without taking responsability for hooking a device up incorrectly to a more generic supply.
I could, however, design a two output supply with an LCD and a few buttons. You hook it up to your computer and preprogram various voltages/devices (including polarity, overcurrent protection, etc). Then disconnect it. When you want to use it, connect a cable between it and the device, and choose the device type from a simple LCD menu. It would verify that the proper device is connected (ie, the shaver generally has this resistance, the laptop has a lower resistance - non-invasive type of stuff) and it would output the correct voltage. If the current goes over it can disconnect and display an error, check the polarity, etc.
But that would be pretty close to the limit of what you could expect, and you'd still have to be careful connecting it to your devices. Imagine a device about the size of 3-4 handhelds stacked on top of each other with two outputs, a universal input (90-250VAC), two wires, and a bunch of connectors. I'd expect it would be in the range of $100 - $200, and probably only in kit form since UL and other certifications are thousands of dollars.
If that's what you want, no, there isn't anything like it on the market. If you're willing to pay that much, then you can probably get someone to build it (such as me
-Adam
"It's pretty funny, actually. It all started when I thought inflammable was the opposite of flammable..."
Actually, the opposite is true. If you take a 400W power supply, and only use 200W it puts out significantly less heat than a 200W supply putting out 200W, due to design differences. Thus you could put a temp sensor in there and change the fan speed, and thus the sound output, based on the heat of the supply, and it would even be quieter.
-Adam
In a recent discussion on an EE mailing list, the radio heads argued that since these boosters are often placed between the handset and the battery pack, then no benefit could be derived since the metal pack shielded them, effectively creating a small faraday cage.
/really/ increase your transmission inside your house then I've got some special oxygenized air I can sell you, since RF travels through oxygenized air far better than through lead. It's only $5 per can, and if you want to get in on the business, I can sell you a special oxygenator so you can make your own and make a bundle!
Others noted that perhaps they could couple some RF from the inside of the unit to the edges or the antenna (which tends to be located close to the battery pack), but that that would only serve to increase the distortion of the radio transmission, even if it did increase the transmission power. Of course, if they did increase the power, then they are certianly not legal to use since nearly every phone you can buy is already at the FCC and FDA limit.
But if you want to
-Adam
I was wrong in my hasty calculations... 1 second != 1 minute...
So 140MB/minute = slower than 90MB/s. But the number of discs per day is correct.
-Adam
No matter how you look at it and what media you use, if you plan on storing this stuff indefinitely you'll have to go for a large (think medium - large shed size) jukebox. Even if you store it on, say, an EMC solution, you'll have to take old data offline at some point for cost and efficiency reasons.
.1TB IDE Hard drives, which would take up less space, and you don't have to worry so much about hardware failure since the drive electronics are switched daily.
That being said, remember that a run-of-the mill 16/10/40 CD-Recorder records at up to 140MB/s, which is well over your goal of 90MB/s. High-capacity CD-Rs can go to 800MB, so you'll end up writing 10,000 per day, and you'll want to use about 100 or more cd-rom drives to do the recording (for reasons of robustness, and to lengthen the average MTBF).
BUT it sets you up for an easy swap in later to switch to DVD-R, or the newest 100GB disc (vapor-hardware) technology, though you can't go much cheaper than CD-R, along with storage reliability of 5 years or so in decent circumstances, 10+ years in climate controlled lockers.
I'd imagine making CD-R cassettes that hold 10,000+ CD-Rs which simply get changed once a day (remember - 100 spindles of 100 CD-Rs is not much space, and can easily be handled by standard warehouse automation equipment). As a bonus, you can store them by day. Need a few hours on Oct 29? Just pull out one cassette. You'd have to trade out a CD-Recorder daily as well, but overall you're going to spend a LOT less than any other storage solution out there.
You can't get much cheaper than this, and the tradoffs may well be worth it to you. But it would likely be a fully custom which would take time to design. It might compare favorably to a cassette of 100
-Adam
The IPAQ 3635 is a mid range PDA for which linux is available. 16MB Flash, 32MB RAM, and a host of other niceties.
Right now it can be had for $450 or less new at some places, and compaq has a $150 rebate on this model, lowering it further to $300 or so. Hacking Linux on it would be great fun, and the hardware is pretty much exposed to the world, so hacking the hardware (if you're into that) can yield a great deal of fun as well.
-Adam
"Okay, we've destroyed his credit rating, repo'd his car, owes money to an escort agency, and is a wanted felon. What else?"
"List him as pregnant."
-UserFriendly
There are many reasons why large companies do not donate computer equipment:
By throwing it away, they obtain a tax writeoff, the same as they get write offs for depreciation if they simply store them in a big warehouse until they throw them away.
If they give them away or sell them they cannot obtain that writoff. If they give them away to a charity, they can obtain a bigger writeoff, but only if it is a registered charity, and if they fill out lots of paperwork and set themselves up for much larger audit problems than throwing them away.
Liability issues are also a big reason to not donate.
Lastly, licensing and security issues are time consuming to wrangle with. Sure, we can donate a computer, but actively erasing each hard drive takes take and energy, more than what would be gained by donating them to a real charity, and most charities do NOT want computers that come without software. Enterprise sized companies buy per seat licenses, and many licenses are payed yearly. If they no longer use a computer, they cannot transfer the license to the software loaded on it, since the license is part of a bulk of licenses and cannot be seperated out.
While I am all for giving old computer equipment away, it is a sticky situation. My company has a dozen or so 486 and low end pentium systems we would love to give away, but who wants them? You should be going after computers from smaller companies, where such problems are not as big an issue. While I worked for a contracter who had me working at Ford (dearborn, MI) I was told of huge warehouses of old computer equipment. They can't throw it away because of environmental issues, they can't give it away because of the effort needed to catalog and erase all the hardware. They had to replace x number of machines around dearborn per day, and it costs less to buy a computer, do a 15 minute install, and toss the old one on a pallet for storage than it does to do the same thing including a full HD erasure and paperwork to give the machine away. Then the computers can depreciate away, and eventually they will pay some computer scrap dealer to haul it all away, and they will grind everything up, seperate the bits, and sell the gold and other metal slag for a profit.
Everyone wants to save money now, and leave the problems for later. You try to go to your manager with a solution where you pay more now and have less of a problem later. You'll get much further if you make a way to put the problem on the back burner with little up front cost, and gloss over the fact that it'll cost more later.
-Adam
If you want to see if you need a swap space in your normal day to day usage, make a ram drive and mount the swap space there.
Under win9x, there is a ramdrive system file that will do the job in config.sys. There are similar programs for 2k and xp. If you find that you never see an out of memory error then you've solved your problem,a nd your computer goes a teeny bit faster.
Modern OS's are pretty smart about it anyway, while they may grab a large chunk of the HD for a swap space, it's mainly to get a contiguous spot of drive so access is faster, and it hardly uses any of it. When it does, it puts little used memory spots in it, such as schedular tasks, which are checked once a minute, first, before it starts putting larger tasks, such as MS word docs, into it.
Lastly, code bloat is followed by data bloat. A program which, if careful, would need only 5MB of ram may well absorb 5x or more just because the programmers know there is always going to be enough swap space. You may find, with the ram drive, that you still run out of memory because apps are taking much more than you think they would. Word, when working on a 5k doc may well use more than 50MB, then save it back down to 5k when you're done editing. So, in short, you may be fine, but check your system utilities for a memory usage meter. It should show you physical memory useg, swap space used, swap file size, etc. See what apps need the most memory. Also remember that on days like tuesday when one might open 30 windows of their browser that you might run out of space.
-Adam
They are completely responsible for the cable outside your home, you are responsible for the cable inside. They are providing you service over their cable. Hook your cable modem up to the outside access point and see if you still have problems. If you do, it is THEIR concern, and THEY are violating THEIR service agreement. If you don't have problems, then you should try using a splitter at that point, with one cable to your modem, another cable to a one-way filter (makes sure signals in your house don't get on the cable line - chances are they already have one in place) then to the rest of your house. Make sure all the connections are really good. A bad connection is often more a problem than one might think.
-Adam
Even if you could find one, you'll find that the price will be significantly higher than two seperate cards. You can get a pcmcia 100BaseT card for under $40 now, and swapping isn't a huge pain.
-Adam
These connections are meant for consumers, those who consume, not those who spew.
It's the difference between a water supply (lots of download) and a sewer pipe (lots of upload). You try reversing either one, it upsets people.
I suspect the reason ADSL works at all is they can have a very expensive piece of equipment to hear a tiny signal sent from your ADSL modem, and can send a very strong signal that your modem can understand. This lowers the cost of the modem, which now only has to listen to a nice strong signal, and send a relatively weak signal.
The other half of the apple is that most consumers want high download, slow upload, and while the ISP may have a symmetrical connection, they sell the upload capacity to colocators and hosting customers. It's almost like selling the same bandwidth twice, but in our current low bandwidth society, the upload and download capacity really need to be considered seperately, and perhaps even charged seperately. Pulling info off the net is cheap, but pushing info onto it is expensive. This will continue to be true as TV and other broadband services supply more information than they accept.
-Adam
I doubt that this is the case at all. It would be very difficult to get a charge to travel in one of the serial ports wires and not get grounded on the way there. Furthermore, the serial port, being one of the available external ports, is generally very well protected from static discharge. The real problem here is that nearly every integrated mobo has the serial port contained in the northbridge/southbridge chipset, so discharge to the port means discharge to a critical IC in the computer as well.
Good mobos will have protection right at the port, including zener diodes and possibly MOVs (MOVs break down and conduct at high voltages, zeners prevent the voltage going above a certain point, in this case above or below 13 volts or so).
The actual IC will generally also contain similar protection.
But this isn't an issue of whether it happened, or is even a remote problem. This is the "The coffee burnt my lap" problem. In our increasingly litigious society we sue people for not warning us of possible problems. All computer and electronic devices say "Static electricity may cause damage to device." What these laywers apparently want is Palm to put in big bold letters that "This device may act as an additional path for static electricity to damage your computer or other palm attached device." Which is silly. The user, had they read their documentation, knows that both devices are sensitive to static. Do they think they are immune to it by ganging the devices up?
Another lowest common denominator problem...
-Adam
You might be surprised at how many beta testers worked on it, and how stable it is. Of course, you may never use it, but if you ever have to touch a windows machine again, pray that it's XP...
-Adam
Windows 95 started shipping today a few years ago, WinXP hit RTM (realease to manufacture) this afternoon, and the court sent the trial back down today.
At this point, I bet the lawyers are scrambling to prepare a motion to stop shipment/distribution of WinXP, but can they succeed in less than 60 days? If so, they'll have dealt a good blow to MS - all those copies of WinXP sitting around in warehouses (we're talking several million boxes of product). This won't hurt MS much financially (much), but it'll be really interesting to see what happens then. MS would have to throw them away if the court required some unbundling. And if the court said, "No shipment until ruling" then MS would have a strong reason to help move the process along - including making some concessions they were unwilling to make a year ago.
Believe me - Microsoft, as a whole, is riding on WinXP, as it is the most stable MS product yet, not to mention that it's the first windows to realize their dream of five years - one version/code base for both home and coporate users.
If they can't get it out within a year...
-Adam
We don't have anything that can reliably self-replicate in a controlled laboratory setting, and the technology to do so is still 8-10 years off. We don't need to even think about nano-tech replicating in the 'wild' for another decade or two beyond that. While the legal implications need to be worked out, we are still so far away that we should probably focus on legal implications for problems closer to home, like the balancing of copyright against fair use.
-Adam
Remember: If you want to get your story posted to slashdot mention nano-tech and law in your blurb. Submit early, submit often.
The game consists of a 3d battlefield of, say, 1600 pixels cubed. There is a missile which is launched somewhere in that space which is guranteed to hit above a certian height before heading back down. Your job is to code a script or program (which the game will interpret and run) that has access to:
3 radars that can be simultaneously pointed and operated
1 or more missiles which have a certian thrust (possibly variable), and a variable amount of deflection, as well as the ability to explode on command, sending lethal shrapnel up to 2 pixels away from its current location. This missile also has a limited radar.
Optionally you can also use a script or program to control the target missile, since enemies are obviously going to be upgrading their technology as we upgrade ours. The enemy missile might have to be more complex, though, sending dummy junk, using heat or radio/radar jamming, etc.
It might show people how difficult it really is to do, but that things are still within the realm of possibility.
-Adam
A previous poster mentioned that the GPS was not used by the ABM missile to aim for the target, but was part of getting telemetry info for the test.
But even if it weren't true and the ABM missile was using the GPS signal for targetting, this is still a huge success. Getting two minute objects to fly that close to each other under computer control has been the biggest problem until now. Now that we've got the technology to do that we can move on to other methods of tracking the incoming missile. We need to remember that this is a complex system with several objectives. Every time we fail we learn something new, and when we meet one objective (even if the others are 'hard coded' or 'rigged') then we can move on to using real data for the hard coded or rigged objectives. This isn't far from programming a very complex application, and the techniques are surprisingly similar.
The cost and potential results, however, are far different and are what should really be discussed. It's not a matter of if it will work, but when, and the real problem is how does the gov't relationship with other countries and with our country's people change when we make it there.
-Adam