I can cite eveidence of the fact that customers like the robotic service.
In Rensselaer, NY, there is a strip mall. In this strip mall, right directly side-by-side, are a Subway and a locally-owned deli called Roasted Red Pepper.
Subway makes very high-bread, low-content subs. Roasted red pepper makes very high-content subs on far better bread (though admittedly not as many types of bread). Let me put it this way: If you order olives on your sub, Subway might put four olive slices....almost one whole olive. Roasted Red Pepper loads 'em up.
Subway is very marginally less expensive, but not enough to cause any but the cheapest amongst us to choose them for cost.
Roasted Red Pepper has more and better seating.
Roasted Red Pepper has more stuff to put on your sub
Now, I'm not going to tell you that this branche of Subway is doing better than Roasted Red Pepper, but the thing that amazes me is that Subway has any customers at all with Roasted Red Pepper right next door to them.
The only explanation for this is the aforementioned lack of imagination.
Yeah, but we're not really talking high frequency at 60Hz, now are we?
More to the point, though, DC has no skin effect, ergo more of the existing conductor is used, not just the exterior, therefore, if anything, the size of the DC conductor is made even smaller (though by a small margin) by this fact.
- But they still need to have the transformers to step down the voltage
This is done with a pulse-width modulator. An AC-DC power supply already has one of these running from 380VDC anyway. The 380VDC in that case is derived from a type of rectifier called a voltage doubler (in the case of 120V sources) or a full-wave rectifier (in the case of 240V sources). The excess voltage then comes from the fact that we are getting peak, rather than RMS, voltage from the AC to the DC side.
The savings is in that the rectifiers are all consolidated. The pulse-width modulators can have an efficiency as high as 95% easily, whereas a whole switching PS can be as bad as 50% efficient.
The savings are in the economies of scale for the rectifier. A similar savings could be realised in the pulse-width modulator, too, but would be quickly wiped out by the increase in losses by making long wire runs at low voltages (5V and 12V).
- DC requires twice as many wires
Nope. Still two to complete a circuit, just like AC.
DC and AC both have their place. DC is good for short-haul power distribution, but if you short out the lines you'll destroy the entire power run. AC doesn't do that anywhere near as bad- which is why electric power is distributed as AC- it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
Actually, the losses incurred by DC in power distribution are voltage-related.... no easy way to convert the voltage. That said, newer high-voltage lines, such as the Cross Sound Cable that connects Long Island to Connecticut, are all DC. Now that the technology to make them practical is here, they are much better behaved and more efficient than their AC predecessors.
Speaking of conductor sizes, the article said this:
A DC system also would mean having to bring in larger cables than now exist with AC power.
I challenge this notion. Conductor size is not related to whether the power is AC or DC or what frequency of AC it might be; it is related to current.
Larger cables are needed when more current is passed. Traditionally, you need larger cables for DC, because traditionally, DC power systems were lower voltages (12, 24, 48) than AC systems, and these lower voltages required larger currents for same power (e.g. 100W= 830mA at 120V, but 8.3A at 12V). Running at 380V, however, you get to lower the current (excluding the reduced current caused by the 15% power savings) versus a 120V system.
Expanding on that, the reduced conductor size is proportional to the square of the reduced current. Simply by going from 120V to 380V (a factor of 3.17), you change the current flow downward by a factor of.32. This means you can change the cable cross-section area to by a factor of.1; you reduce the cable to one-tenth its original size; one tenth the copper.
If the police car in question is federal property because some federal funds went towards its purchase, then it logically follows that the folks who allegedly set it on fire were burning their own property, because, as taxpayers, they own the federal government.
As the latter part of that argument doesn't hold water, neither should the former.
Yes. If it did not do so, then interactive typing with the machine on the other end of the link would not happen.
To prove this, you can take two machines in your spare time, connect them with a switch or hub, no other network connection. SSH from one to the other, and watch the blinkenlights on the switch or hub as you type.
Actually, I think I am missing some important detail here....
The jitter is introduced between the keypress and the encoding of that keypress.... so how does the jitter get measured if there is no awareness of when the keypress took place aside from the post-jitter packet? In other words, how do you know that the packet is "late" if you don't know when the key was pressed?
It's already here: Harmony remotes do exactly what you ask for.
These look interesting. I'm going to have a closer look in a moment.
The problem I can see in the idea is that the power button on most devices is an overloaded function (in the computer science sense), i.e. same button to turn on as to turn off. Do these remotes have the ability to discern which devices are currently in what state, or do they remember the last state, opening up the possiblity of a missed signal or of someone (gasp) getting up and pushing the power button on something?
For the most part, only because she isn't interested. She just wants to watch TV. Meanwhile, she doesn't have the keen eye that I do and cannot tell the difference between the signal delivered straight from the satellite receiver via S-Video and the signal delivered from the same source via the VCR over composite, the latter of which will drive me bugnuts because, well, it looks blurry.
Otherwise, though, I want (and it appears another poster has presented a solution which I will check out in a moment) for it all not just to play together, but to play nicely together. I don't think you and I disagree there, and I don't have a problem with a bit of ranting on your part.
No offence was taken; and maybe I worded that a tad strongly, and for that, I apologise. I like the thinking of R. Buckminster Fuller that (very roughly paraphrased) the words you use should reflect your mindset and that words that express obsolete or incorrect ideas should not be used.
A PC wouldn't add much to the TV viewing experience. The TV viewing experience is complex enough as it is.
Let's talk about getting things arranged so that I can push one button labelled DVD, and have the DVD player, sound system and monitor turn on (if they weren't already) and all other components turn off; all components set the the correct inputs and ready to go.
Let's talk about then pushing, again, one button labelled VCR, and having the DVD player switch off, the VCR switch on, and the inputs all switch.
Let's talk about then pushing, again, one button labelled SAT, and having the VCR switch off, and the satellite reciever switch on, and, yes, you guessed it, all of the inputs switch accordingly.
Let's talk about then having a button labelled OFF, which, when pressed, turns off all of the components that are on.
Finally, let's talk about the navigation and play/FF/Rew/Stop/Rec buttons follow us from function to function.
Oh, one more thing. The monitor shouldn't switch on if there is a CD in the DVD player.... you don't need it.
Finally, let's talk about all of this working with the highest quality signal at any given time. That means component, DVI or HDMI for the DVD player and satellite, and composite for the VCR, but the end user shouldn't need to know this once the setup is done. In other words, my wife shouldn't need to know, at all, ever, how this is hooked up. It should just work.
Get me there, then we'll talk about adding new components.
Rupert Murdoch ($500M for myspace.com) gets to tug on his suspenders and say, "Guess I'm not so dumb after all."
Heh. Nobody should ever accuse him (or his buddy W, for that matter) of being dumb. It gives too much benefit of the doubt.
Getting serious for a second, though, it's good to see that MySpace is finally doing something about their search capability. You can put just about anything into their current search engine, and go through the results it returns with a fine-toothed comb and not find a single instance of any search term in the results. I think it just calls a random-number generator.
Actually, the only date system that is internally consistent, and consistent with other non-metric measures, is ISO-8631, which specifies year-month-date order. Most importantly, it sorts correctly without requiring you to code exceptions into your sorting algorithm.
Of course, this, too, means that 2006-08-02, 2006-08-03 and 2006-08-04 are unexceptional dates.
Okay, same protection as video DVD? Good. That means dvdbackup should work on these, too. In order to work in normal DVD players, the soundtrack would have to be DTS, AC3 or PCM, all of which can be software decoded (or simply played back in the case of PCM) with existing open-source tools. I'd wager they're going to go with AC3, because it has the biggest supported hardware base.
Read The Fine Paper that these folks wrote. It will reveal that they used the Perl module Lingua::EN::Tagger to parse the English language content into parts of speech. You can then download and install that module and experiment with it yourself.
I just did the experiment myself, and the result I get is that it identifies "time", "arrow", "fruit" and "banana" as nouns (incorrectly identifying "time" as a proper noun), and both instances of "flies" as a verb and both instances of "like" as prepositions.
My cable connection is with a few coper wires connected to my phone exchange... I guess it's not cable in the american sense of the owrd, or in the optus/telstra cable sense of the word, but its good enough for me!
I am American.
Traditionally and historically, cable has been a coaxial cable run along the streets, usually fairly close to where the telephone lines are, operated, in most cases, by a different provider than the telco. The cable carries an RF spectrum of TV channels, some occupying positions on the spectrum that are not available to broadcast because they are in use by other services. That's what we mean when we talk about analogue cable.
This is in a mutating state right now, though. Some of the spectrum has been sliced off, first for high-speed internet service, then for digital television, then for telephone service.
The high-speed internet requires a modem that has a coaxial connector on one side and an ethernet jack on the other.
The digital cable service requires a set-top box that connects to the coax and puts out a signal on a designated analogue TV channel (usually channel 3 or 4) and/or on a set of baseband connections and/or DVI or HDMI. Incidentally, traditional analogue cable also used converters like this in cases where you have a (very) old TV that doesn't have the cable channels or are subscribed to some premium channels, which would be scrambled, and need the converter to descramble them.
The digital phone service requires a "terminal" which has a coax connection on one side and a POTS socket on the other. You have to provide power to it, though, and if you lose power, you lose phone service too. These are usually implemented as VOIP.
You can also decouple the services. I get my television by satellite (better picture, better selection), my internet by cable (faster than DSL, FTTH not available in my area), and my telephone by traditional copper pair (it just works).
I might point out, though that there is additional competition coming in. In areas where FTTH is being offered (by the telco), they are offering the same trifecta as the cable company. The satellite provider offers internet, but it is very high-lag and very high-cost. It is therefore mostly of interest for rural areas
For the ideal vehicle, I think I agree with you on all aspects except for the form factor of the vehicle. Until about two years ago, I drove a Subaru Impreza, which did a marvelous job for my household of two. Unfortunately, it got terminated when an out-of-control SUV slammed into it on icy roads at highway speed. My car was completely under control until the impact knocked it into a ditch.
Give me an all-wheel-drive diesel plug-in hybrid sportwagon like my Impreza, and I'll be happy. As for the price of oil, I'll run it on biodiesel, which has a higher energy density than ethanol, and, unlike ethanol, hasn't lost half its energy content to the fermentation process.
Back to family cars, though, the Impreza isn't a good choice there. A Forrester or Legacy, on the other hand, is good for a family of five, as long as there isn't an obesity problem in the family.
Insurance companies aren't in business to pay for people's losses, they're in business not to pay for people's losses, because the less they pay out, the greater profit they make.
Insurance companies are corporate gamblers. They are betting you are a good driver and that your car won't get stolen or damaged. Your insurance premium is reflective of how good of a bet this is.
That said, when they lose the bet, they will try to weasel out of paying it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was so pissed off I mixed up the href and the text of my links. Let's try that again, shall we?
Wikiapedia Link
CIA World Factbook link
HUNGARY is in Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos /hu.html
You are only contributing to the worldly view that we Americans are a bunch of asshats. Knock it the hell off and do your god-damned homework!
I can cite eveidence of the fact that customers like the robotic service.
In Rensselaer, NY, there is a strip mall. In this strip mall, right directly side-by-side, are a Subway and a locally-owned deli called Roasted Red Pepper.
Subway makes very high-bread, low-content subs. Roasted red pepper makes very high-content subs on far better bread (though admittedly not as many types of bread). Let me put it this way: If you order olives on your sub, Subway might put four olive slices....almost one whole olive. Roasted Red Pepper loads 'em up.
Subway is very marginally less expensive, but not enough to cause any but the cheapest amongst us to choose them for cost.
Roasted Red Pepper has more and better seating.
Roasted Red Pepper has more stuff to put on your sub
Now, I'm not going to tell you that this branche of Subway is doing better than Roasted Red Pepper, but the thing that amazes me is that Subway has any customers at all with Roasted Red Pepper right next door to them.
The only explanation for this is the aforementioned lack of imagination.
Yeah, but we're not really talking high frequency at 60Hz, now are we?
More to the point, though, DC has no skin effect, ergo more of the existing conductor is used, not just the exterior, therefore, if anything, the size of the DC conductor is made even smaller (though by a small margin) by this fact.
- But they still need to have the transformers to step down the voltage
This is done with a pulse-width modulator. An AC-DC power supply already has one of these running from 380VDC anyway. The 380VDC in that case is derived from a type of rectifier called a voltage doubler (in the case of 120V sources) or a full-wave rectifier (in the case of 240V sources). The excess voltage then comes from the fact that we are getting peak, rather than RMS, voltage from the AC to the DC side.
The savings is in that the rectifiers are all consolidated. The pulse-width modulators can have an efficiency as high as 95% easily, whereas a whole switching PS can be as bad as 50% efficient.
The savings are in the economies of scale for the rectifier. A similar savings could be realised in the pulse-width modulator, too, but would be quickly wiped out by the increase in losses by making long wire runs at low voltages (5V and 12V).
- DC requires twice as many wires
Nope. Still two to complete a circuit, just like AC.
DC and AC both have their place. DC is good for short-haul power distribution, but if you short out the lines you'll destroy the entire power run. AC doesn't do that anywhere near as bad- which is why electric power is distributed as AC- it doesn't have the same safety issues and it can be transmitted long distances without major losses as it's being transmitted down the wire, not conducted.
Actually, the losses incurred by DC in power distribution are voltage-related.... no easy way to convert the voltage. That said, newer high-voltage lines, such as the Cross Sound Cable that connects Long Island to Connecticut, are all DC. Now that the technology to make them practical is here, they are much better behaved and more efficient than their AC predecessors.
obviously this begs the question of switching costs.
Actually, no. It does not beg the question; it prompts it.
Speaking of conductor sizes, the article said this:
A DC system also would mean having to bring in larger cables than now exist with AC power.
I challenge this notion. Conductor size is not related to whether the power is AC or DC or what frequency of AC it might be; it is related to current.
Larger cables are needed when more current is passed. Traditionally, you need larger cables for DC, because traditionally, DC power systems were lower voltages (12, 24, 48) than AC systems, and these lower voltages required larger currents for same power (e.g. 100W= 830mA at 120V, but 8.3A at 12V). Running at 380V, however, you get to lower the current (excluding the reduced current caused by the 15% power savings) versus a 120V system.
Expanding on that, the reduced conductor size is proportional to the square of the reduced current. Simply by going from 120V to 380V (a factor of 3.17), you change the current flow downward by a factor of .32. This means you can change the cable cross-section area to by a factor of .1; you reduce the cable to one-tenth its original size; one tenth the copper.
If the police car in question is federal property because some federal funds went towards its purchase, then it logically follows that the folks who allegedly set it on fire were burning their own property, because, as taxpayers, they own the federal government.
As the latter part of that argument doesn't hold water, neither should the former.
is this the case with ssh too?
Yes. If it did not do so, then interactive typing with the machine on the other end of the link would not happen.
To prove this, you can take two machines in your spare time, connect them with a switch or hub, no other network connection. SSH from one to the other, and watch the blinkenlights on the switch or hub as you type.
Actually, I think I am missing some important detail here....
The jitter is introduced between the keypress and the encoding of that keypress.... so how does the jitter get measured if there is no awareness of when the keypress took place aside from the post-jitter packet? In other words, how do you know that the packet is "late" if you don't know when the key was pressed?
It's already here: Harmony remotes do exactly what you ask for.
These look interesting. I'm going to have a closer look in a moment.
The problem I can see in the idea is that the power button on most devices is an overloaded function (in the computer science sense), i.e. same button to turn on as to turn off. Do these remotes have the ability to discern which devices are currently in what state, or do they remember the last state, opening up the possiblity of a missed signal or of someone (gasp) getting up and pushing the power button on something?
Why shouldn't your wife know how it's set up?
For the most part, only because she isn't interested. She just wants to watch TV. Meanwhile, she doesn't have the keen eye that I do and cannot tell the difference between the signal delivered straight from the satellite receiver via S-Video and the signal delivered from the same source via the VCR over composite, the latter of which will drive me bugnuts because, well, it looks blurry.
Otherwise, though, I want (and it appears another poster has presented a solution which I will check out in a moment) for it all not just to play together, but to play nicely together. I don't think you and I disagree there, and I don't have a problem with a bit of ranting on your part.
Sig says: DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'
I've seen this sig on a lot of threads, but never have I seen it be so incredibly insightful and appropriate as at this moment.
No offence was taken; and maybe I worded that a tad strongly, and for that, I apologise. I like the thinking of R. Buckminster Fuller that (very roughly paraphrased) the words you use should reflect your mindset and that words that express obsolete or incorrect ideas should not be used.
A PC wouldn't add much to the TV viewing experience. The TV viewing experience is complex enough as it is.
Let's talk about getting things arranged so that I can push one button labelled DVD, and have the DVD player, sound system and monitor turn on (if they weren't already) and all other components turn off; all components set the the correct inputs and ready to go.
Let's talk about then pushing, again, one button labelled VCR, and having the DVD player switch off, the VCR switch on, and the inputs all switch.
Let's talk about then pushing, again, one button labelled SAT, and having the VCR switch off, and the satellite reciever switch on, and, yes, you guessed it, all of the inputs switch accordingly.
Let's talk about then having a button labelled OFF, which, when pressed, turns off all of the components that are on.
Finally, let's talk about the navigation and play/FF/Rew/Stop/Rec buttons follow us from function to function.
Oh, one more thing. The monitor shouldn't switch on if there is a CD in the DVD player.... you don't need it.
Finally, let's talk about all of this working with the highest quality signal at any given time. That means component, DVI or HDMI for the DVD player and satellite, and composite for the VCR, but the end user shouldn't need to know this once the setup is done. In other words, my wife shouldn't need to know, at all, ever, how this is hooked up. It should just work.
Get me there, then we'll talk about adding new components.
Rupert Murdoch ($500M for myspace.com) gets to tug on his suspenders and say, "Guess I'm not so dumb after all."
Heh. Nobody should ever accuse him (or his buddy W, for that matter) of being dumb. It gives too much benefit of the doubt.
Getting serious for a second, though, it's good to see that MySpace is finally doing something about their search capability. You can put just about anything into their current search engine, and go through the results it returns with a fine-toothed comb and not find a single instance of any search term in the results. I think it just calls a random-number generator.
Actually, the only date system that is internally consistent, and consistent with other non-metric measures, is ISO-8631, which specifies year-month-date order. Most importantly, it sorts correctly without requiring you to code exceptions into your sorting algorithm.
Of course, this, too, means that 2006-08-02, 2006-08-03 and 2006-08-04 are unexceptional dates.
I hate the expression "Both Sides" that was used in the submission. It implies the assumption that there are only two sides.
If "both" sides piss you off, vote for someone else, like the Libertarian, or the Green, or the Socialist, or...
Okay, same protection as video DVD? Good. That means dvdbackup should work on these, too. In order to work in normal DVD players, the soundtrack would have to be DTS, AC3 or PCM, all of which can be software decoded (or simply played back in the case of PCM) with existing open-source tools. I'd wager they're going to go with AC3, because it has the biggest supported hardware base.
Read The Fine Paper that these folks wrote. It will reveal that they used the Perl module Lingua::EN::Tagger to parse the English language content into parts of speech. You can then download and install that module and experiment with it yourself.
I just did the experiment myself, and the result I get is that it identifies "time", "arrow", "fruit" and "banana" as nouns (incorrectly identifying "time" as a proper noun), and both instances of "flies" as a verb and both instances of "like" as prepositions.
In other words, no.
My cable connection is with a few coper wires connected to my phone exchange... I guess it's not cable in the american sense of the owrd, or in the optus/telstra cable sense of the word, but its good enough for me!
I am American.
Traditionally and historically, cable has been a coaxial cable run along the streets, usually fairly close to where the telephone lines are, operated, in most cases, by a different provider than the telco. The cable carries an RF spectrum of TV channels, some occupying positions on the spectrum that are not available to broadcast because they are in use by other services. That's what we mean when we talk about analogue cable.
This is in a mutating state right now, though. Some of the spectrum has been sliced off, first for high-speed internet service, then for digital television, then for telephone service.
The high-speed internet requires a modem that has a coaxial connector on one side and an ethernet jack on the other.
The digital cable service requires a set-top box that connects to the coax and puts out a signal on a designated analogue TV channel (usually channel 3 or 4) and/or on a set of baseband connections and/or DVI or HDMI. Incidentally, traditional analogue cable also used converters like this in cases where you have a (very) old TV that doesn't have the cable channels or are subscribed to some premium channels, which would be scrambled, and need the converter to descramble them.
The digital phone service requires a "terminal" which has a coax connection on one side and a POTS socket on the other. You have to provide power to it, though, and if you lose power, you lose phone service too. These are usually implemented as VOIP.
You can also decouple the services. I get my television by satellite (better picture, better selection), my internet by cable (faster than DSL, FTTH not available in my area), and my telephone by traditional copper pair (it just works).
I might point out, though that there is additional competition coming in. In areas where FTTH is being offered (by the telco), they are offering the same trifecta as the cable company. The satellite provider offers internet, but it is very high-lag and very high-cost. It is therefore mostly of interest for rural areas
For the ideal vehicle, I think I agree with you on all aspects except for the form factor of the vehicle. Until about two years ago, I drove a Subaru Impreza, which did a marvelous job for my household of two. Unfortunately, it got terminated when an out-of-control SUV slammed into it on icy roads at highway speed. My car was completely under control until the impact knocked it into a ditch.
Give me an all-wheel-drive diesel plug-in hybrid sportwagon like my Impreza, and I'll be happy. As for the price of oil, I'll run it on biodiesel, which has a higher energy density than ethanol, and, unlike ethanol, hasn't lost half its energy content to the fermentation process.
Back to family cars, though, the Impreza isn't a good choice there. A Forrester or Legacy, on the other hand, is good for a family of five, as long as there isn't an obesity problem in the family.
Insurance companies aren't in business to pay for people's losses, they're in business not to pay for people's losses, because the less they pay out, the greater profit they make.
Insurance companies are corporate gamblers. They are betting you are a good driver and that your car won't get stolen or damaged. Your insurance premium is reflective of how good of a bet this is.
That said, when they lose the bet, they will try to weasel out of paying it.
Large families and boats are both lifestyle choices as well. Choices which it's perfectly valid to criticize.
Not to mention that an SUV is not the best vehicle choice for a large family. A van is.