Well, you presumably live next to Mexico. Or Texas.
But this is being written on a Samsung lightweight notebook connected to a Lan on which sits a Samsung workgroup printer, and I paid for them myelf. Those guys are doing something right.
Personally I think the vacuum tubes are exceptionally stupid, and have been ever since MOSFETs could handle the power (and produce much less heat). Once upon a time people were "upgrading" their tube amps by replacing the input stages with higher quality, and lower noise, FET devices. But no, they are probably more robust than the CPU is with the pressure of the heatsink on it. The remaining available tube designs are basically military in origin.
In fact, I once had a tube catalog which had a section on tubes for computers, though these were of course for digital applications rather than analog.
Indeed. British authors used to get very upset over the way their books were pirated in the US, and the practice didn't really stop until the US publishing industry was sufficiently large and international to want protection of their own. But then developing nations, like entrepreneurs, always need a bit of help up the ladder. Who was it said "I never ask a man how he made his first million dollars?"
The weakest link in the audio chain is EARS. They deteriorate with time, and are affected by stuff like wax. But, as Beethoven knew, a lot of what happens in music happens inside your head, not in the air outside. At least audiophiles are like porn addicts, in that they keep a good few engineers (and MBAs) gainfully occupied to fuel their fantasies.
Anyway, I guess this scheme has only one usp: to try and kick start the recording industry again. As usual, decent music doesn't seem to figure very highly in the game plan.
I've got to say it, the site design sucks somewhat...navigation isn't brilliant, there doesn't seem to be a proper search, the W&G DVD ad is hard to see down in a corner, and the thing isn't shipping till the end of November...the press release on BBC-online just reads like a godawful press release (what writes these things and does it have a 6502 processor?) which detracts from the alternative and gently satirical brand image.
Great product, sack the marketing department. The PR people might be able to get a job with a well known OS company if they promise to switch their CPUs in public.
In his list of the books in the University of Paris, Francois Rabelais (16th. C) includes the "Ars honesta petandi in societas" which loosely translates as "how to fart politely in public". So other societies don't necessarily share modern views on this.
I'm actually curious to know whether having those humungous cooling plates on the top of CPUs and bridge devices might not actually increase unreliability due to increased pressures on the IC carrier, socket and mobo.
With all of these water coolers, the surface temp. can never go below ambient air, so getting a fast but quiet flow of air to well designed fins on the hotspots would seem a better option. Water cooling for vehicles works mainly because of the problems (with air cooling) of cooling places difficult of access, like around the valve guides on an IC engine, plus the desirability of maintaining a controlled temperature WELL ABOVE any sensible ambient. The objective here is to get the temp. down close to around 10-30C.
Using a Peltier device can get the die temp to below ambient but requires heat to operate which also has to be removed from the case- I have come across a case where people didn't understand this, cooled one device, an IR sensor,with the Peltier and then had the system fail because of overall thermal overload caused by the additional 120W needed to drive the Peltier stack. The answer would seem to me to be the one favored by Apple - well designed air cooling. As Intel and AMD cpus are the SUVs of the processor world, add heat pipes or fluorinert bags to transfer heat efficiently within the case to where the airstream can run most effectively.
No, because a microcomputer is a device that uses a microprocessor, which is a CPU that runs on microinstructions (as distinct from a mainframe which has (...had) a much larger instruction set.) Now that P4s (and especially G4s) basically have mainframe architectures, and minicomputers are dead, perhaps we should just drop the inane terminology altogether. PC (personal computer) and server work just fine.
Rainwater is slightly acid, from nitrogen oxides, and pond water often contains acidic organics as well as bicarbonate ion. The net effect of all that sodium hydroxide is likely to be very small indeed. In fact, if you are producing what the local water company calls "trade effluent", they like the pH to be slightly alkaline and don't care whether it is sodium or calcium ion.
Having said that, the shock waves and removal of oxygen can kill or traumatise a lot of fish and any birds near the surface. Which makes this a somewhat redneck experiment: I have no problem with people letting off big bangs, but not when they carelessly kill things in the neighborhood.
An article in Sci Am in 1999 (which doesn't appear to be on the internet version, unfortunately) went into considerable detail on the technology needed for this type of fuel cell. The small quantities of methanol, and the dilution with water, means the risk is pretty low (you could cause more trouble, I guess, breaking out the lithium from your batteries and adding it to water - don't try this at home,folks).
For those who are asking, that article also explains why it is difficult to scale these cells up to automotive use.
One problem for the automotive industry is that methanol attacks many of the components of the current fuel distribution system, which is quite sensitive to the chemical composition of what it carries. At one time you could find carburetor conversion kits for some British motorcycles which included gaskets of different materials to handle this problem, and I tried this during the 1970s fuel crisis. Handling pure methanol without a standard fuel pump is not much fun, but it surely cleans out the carbon from the engine and the experiments were worth it just from that point of view.
And btw, rubbing alcohol WILL NOT WORK in your methanol fuel cell, neither will vodka.
Someone has to deal with cross-border crime. If the Russian (or whoever) government is incapable of catching their own criminals - and these were apparently primarily thieves, not just crackers - then, much as we might dislike the methods, the FBI is doing us all a favor.
Having said that, it is a pity that cases like this cannot be tried in the International Criminal Court, where the issue of legitimate and illegitimate means of gathering evidence could be impartially considered.
Sorry if this sounds a bit sharp, but anyone who thinks a capacitor can hold enough energy to give a short boost to a vehicle (let alone being in series...it would be parallel) isn't qualified to discuss the subject. If you think batteries are a big,heavy way to store energy, you ain't seen nothing till you come to capacitors.
I ask again: where are these commercial fuel cells? How long does it take to build up mass in a new technology? I'm going to be using a Zimmer frame before these babies are parked at the mall in large numbers.
The big problem I see is the availability of batteries. For instance, companies like Ovonics are supposedly commercialising NiMH (the technology BEFORE lithium.) I have been trying for two years to design a half way reasonable electric bicycle. I have a battery specification which is within the range of claimed traction battery designs in NiMH (12 or 13.2V, 5-60AH, 600W over 5 minutes and 400W average over discharge. Hardly rocket science.) Yet a battery of this spec is still not available on the commercial market except in limited series production to large customers. The obvious conclusion is that the technology isn't yet marketable. Which means that lithium ion has a chance when...2020? As for fuel cells, they have been a promising technology for the last 50 years plus, but the problems (world supply of platinum limited, high temperatures needed for high efficiencies, corrosive media, thermal management, carbon monoxide and dioxide poisoning, seem always on the verge of being solved but never getting there. And don't forget that unlike a battery, a fuel cell's output is limited by the membrane capacity: the ability to produce high peaks for short periods is missing. The last time I read an article on the future of fuel cells was the dead wood version of Scientific American in 1999. I'm not aware of any real breakthroughs since.
Meanwhile, the direct injection electronically controlled turbo diesel just goes on getting more and more efficient, and cleaner. And smaller. And lighter. And more reliable.
"Mobile phones have screens that suck, feeble processors and not enough bandwidth. So you need to be really clever to transmit a picture of someone that doesn't look weird. Give us lots of money and we might tell you how to do it".
Noise means that energy is being wasted somewhere and is created by vibration. Although the relationship may not be simple, you might expect that the lower noise a drive has, the better its reliability. As an example, a fluidic bearing should be quieter than a ball bearing because there are no parts showing a combination of rolling, sliding and knocking between clearances.
Actually, insulation is the last thing you need. It's precisely static fields, which require insulation to develop, that cause the problem. For instance, one of the smallest research and military high voltage generator designs, a modified Van der Graaf, uses a flow of an insulating fluid instead of the rubber belt of the high school version. Thermal flow in a suitably designed oil bath could build up exactly the charge you want to avoid. And a glass ball could bring its own problems - a static field could go through it as if it wasn't there.
The other problem, of course, is interfaces which have to pierce the shield, and where the main electrical nasties tend to get in.
Funnily enough, back around 1990 there was some interest in using those arrays of points mentioned in the article to go back to tube technology for hardened military devices. So much so that we tried to evaluate them as possible ESD protectors for telecoms applications. I have a feeling that they are one of those ideas which goes around every 10 years or so, starting when someone works out once again what the overvoltage protection spikes on overhead power cables are for, and works down the scale.
Too true. In fact, Aristotle was a great observer. I suspect that if he had been around in the Renaissance he'd have been right there with Galileo mocking the Schoolmen for their stupidity and their desire to believe what they read in books. It was the prelates of the church and the regents of the universities who were idiots, and people like Galileo and Francis Bacon who went to prison or house arrest because they stood up to them.
Yes, you are right and I was extremely careless. Especially given that I did a project on the photoelectric effect at school as a result of reading Einstein's original paper...mea culpa
The NYT is guilty of trying to reduce physics to the "one great man" syndrome - the idea that the team leader is everything and everyone else is nothing. Rutherford's unnamed assistants were no less than Geiger and Marsden, major physicists in their own right, and the equation of scattering from the nucleus was never thought up by Rutherford - he gave the problem to a mathematician, according to Cambridge legend without telling what the results were needed for so the mathematician wouldn't claim part of the credit.
In the same way Mrs. Einstein did much of the work on special relativity (the divorce settlement gave her the Nobel money but Einstein was allowed to have the prize in his sole name), Geoffrey Hewish managed to leave Jocelyn Bell out of the account when she discovered pulsars, and Newton was in touch with most of the scientific talent of his day - and famously tried to rubbish anyone who might have had any of his ideas first (Leibnitz and calculus, for instance.)
I think this list itself is OK - but I'd rather have a less pop science look at the attributions, which might show a lot more about how science REALLY works, i.e. not mad scientist with weird assistant raising the lightning rod.
The actual number of MP required to equal 35mm quality depends totally on what you are doing. In a series of tests years ago, I believe it was established that most hand held users of 35mm cameras could not achieve a resolution much over 25lp/mm under normal conditions. Roughly speaking - and I'll explain why roughly - this is equivalent to a 2.1MPx digital sensor.
On a tripod, and assuming no subject movement, resolution will be limited by a combination of the film capability and the lens capability. This gets quite complicated because with conventional film the resolution degrades fairly gracefully. As the detail gets smaller lens contrast is lost, but also film contrast is lost because of scatter, flare, grain pattern. In theory a Leitz 50mm lens operating at around f/5.6 can achieve an equivalent of about 30MPx, but in practice nothing like this will be achieved by most subjects most of the time.
However, there are other fiddle factors. First, digital camera makers lie^x^x^x apply interpretation to their camera sensors. A camera advertised as 2.1MPx tends to have rather fewer actual working pixels, the rest is done by "interpolation", a process which involves removing artefacts, a degree of dither, and the fact that most image sensor cells, instead of having RGB sensor sites, have in effect RGBG with twice as many green, owing to the need for an XY matrix. It also loses performance because, having only a small photosensor, the lens design is compromised. All the years of 35mm lens development do not apply to the tiny short focussed lenses of small digital cameras. Second, there is no direct equivalence between film photography, with its analog response (gradual degradation of image as detail gets smaller) and digital sensors which are all or nothing. Increased subject contrast increases resolution on analog cameras but can only increase the contrast on a digital sensor. Finally, with a film camera you can increase resolution and image quality at the expense of light sensitivity by changing film.
My conclusion: I suspect that for most people most of the time something like a Canon G2 is perfectly adequate. But if you want to take high res photos on a tripod, if you need to use long or short focus lenses, if you want the highest color resolution, you need film.
Since you can currently get this quite easily, buy the G2 now, keep the 35mm system and wait till the pros start discarding their second hand bodies when the pixel count goes up to 22 or 30. There will be some bargains, and with your 35mm system you can always get the performance when you need it, using that old clunky silver technology.
At least the Ca. legislature seems to know its economy is largely science-based. And I suspect that, like most advances in medicine, this will be a transient phase: stem cell research will ultimately end the need to use foetal stem cells.
Why only two cheers? Because despite its advanced society, huge technical capabilities and social progressiveness, California has failed as yet to shoulder its world-wide policing responsibilities to bring about regime change in backward, religious fundamentalist places like Washington and Florida.
Remote controlled fighter aircraft? How easy is it to jam a radio? Line of sight communications would be too short range. And what about mountainous areas where the signal can suddenly interfere or go to zero?
You'll have to control your aircraft from above using satellites. And before long countries like India and Pakistan should have the technology to deliver the EMP bombs that will knock them out.
Actually, I am old enough, though not as old as Mr. Jagger (I don't hold with titles.) But when he went to the LSE it was not a "prestigious school for future CEOs". It was a left-wing institution which promoted statist economics, the sort of place that provided think-tank fodder for socialist governments, and command-economy thinkers for the Treasury. Which may be why Jagger went into music instead...
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But this is being written on a Samsung lightweight notebook connected to a Lan on which sits a Samsung workgroup printer, and I paid for them myelf. Those guys are doing something right.
But no, they are probably more robust than the CPU is with the pressure of the heatsink on it. The remaining available tube designs are basically military in origin.
In fact, I once had a tube catalog which had a section on tubes for computers, though these were of course for digital applications rather than analog.
It's just as well you don't design tanks. With a pinhole through the armor you could deliver anything from blast to nerve gas.
Indeed. British authors used to get very upset over the way their books were pirated in the US, and the practice didn't really stop until the US publishing industry was sufficiently large and international to want protection of their own. But then developing nations, like entrepreneurs, always need a bit of help up the ladder. Who was it said "I never ask a man how he made his first million dollars?"
Probably hardly at all. Radio transmitters are rather efficient in the power stages nowadays and 200mW is very low compared to the screen consumption.
Anyway, I guess this scheme has only one usp: to try and kick start the recording industry again. As usual, decent music doesn't seem to figure very highly in the game plan.
Great product, sack the marketing department. The PR people might be able to get a job with a well known OS company if they promise to switch their CPUs in public.
In his list of the books in the University of Paris, Francois Rabelais (16th. C) includes the "Ars honesta petandi in societas" which loosely translates as "how to fart politely in public".
So other societies don't necessarily share modern views on this.
With all of these water coolers, the surface temp. can never go below ambient air, so getting a fast but quiet flow of air to well designed fins on the hotspots would seem a better option. Water cooling for vehicles works mainly because of the problems (with air cooling) of cooling places difficult of access, like around the valve guides on an IC engine, plus the desirability of maintaining a controlled temperature WELL ABOVE any sensible ambient. The objective here is to get the temp. down close to around 10-30C.
Using a Peltier device can get the die temp to below ambient but requires heat to operate which also has to be removed from the case- I have come across a case where people didn't understand this, cooled one device, an IR sensor,with the Peltier and then had the system fail because of overall thermal overload caused by the additional 120W needed to drive the Peltier stack. The answer would seem to me to be the one favored by Apple - well designed air cooling. As Intel and AMD cpus are the SUVs of the processor world, add heat pipes or fluorinert bags to transfer heat efficiently within the case to where the airstream can run most effectively.
No, because a microcomputer is a device that uses a microprocessor, which is a CPU that runs on microinstructions (as distinct from a mainframe which has (...had) a much larger instruction set.) Now that P4s (and especially G4s) basically have mainframe architectures, and minicomputers are dead, perhaps we should just drop the inane terminology altogether. PC (personal computer) and server work just fine.
Having said that, the shock waves and removal of oxygen can kill or traumatise a lot of fish and any birds near the surface. Which makes this a somewhat redneck experiment: I have no problem with people letting off big bangs, but not when they carelessly kill things in the neighborhood.
The small quantities of methanol, and the dilution with water, means the risk is pretty low (you could cause more trouble, I guess, breaking out the lithium from your batteries and adding it to water - don't try this at home,folks).
For those who are asking, that article also explains why it is difficult to scale these cells up to automotive use.
One problem for the automotive industry is that methanol attacks many of the components of the current fuel distribution system, which is quite sensitive to the chemical composition of what it carries. At one time you could find carburetor conversion kits for some British motorcycles which included gaskets of different materials to handle this problem, and I tried this during the 1970s fuel crisis. Handling pure methanol without a standard fuel pump is not much fun, but it surely cleans out the carbon from the engine and the experiments were worth it just from that point of view.
And btw, rubbing alcohol WILL NOT WORK in your methanol fuel cell, neither will vodka.
Having said that, it is a pity that cases like this cannot be tried in the International Criminal Court, where the issue of legitimate and illegitimate means of gathering evidence could be impartially considered.
I ask again: where are these commercial fuel cells? How long does it take to build up mass in a new technology? I'm going to be using a Zimmer frame before these babies are parked at the mall in large numbers.
Meanwhile, the direct injection electronically controlled turbo diesel just goes on getting more and more efficient, and cleaner. And smaller. And lighter. And more reliable.
"Mobile phones have screens that suck, feeble processors and not enough bandwidth. So you need to be really clever to transmit a picture of someone that doesn't look weird. Give us lots of money and we might tell you how to do it".
Noise means that energy is being wasted somewhere and is created by vibration. Although the relationship may not be simple, you might expect that the lower noise a drive has, the better its reliability. As an example, a fluidic bearing should be quieter than a ball bearing because there are no parts showing a combination of rolling, sliding and knocking between clearances.
The other problem, of course, is interfaces which have to pierce the shield, and where the main electrical nasties tend to get in.
Funnily enough, back around 1990 there was some interest in using those arrays of points mentioned in the article to go back to tube technology for hardened military devices. So much so that we tried to evaluate them as possible ESD protectors for telecoms applications. I have a feeling that they are one of those ideas which goes around every 10 years or so, starting when someone works out once again what the overvoltage protection spikes on overhead power cables are for, and works down the scale.
Too true. In fact, Aristotle was a great observer. I suspect that if he had been around in the Renaissance he'd have been right there with Galileo mocking the Schoolmen for their stupidity and their desire to believe what they read in books. It was the prelates of the church and the regents of the universities who were idiots, and people like Galileo and Francis Bacon who went to prison or house arrest because they stood up to them.
Yes, you are right and I was extremely careless. Especially given that I did a project on the photoelectric effect at school as a result of reading Einstein's original paper...mea culpa
In the same way Mrs. Einstein did much of the work on special relativity (the divorce settlement gave her the Nobel money but Einstein was allowed to have the prize in his sole name), Geoffrey Hewish managed to leave Jocelyn Bell out of the account when she discovered pulsars, and Newton was in touch with most of the scientific talent of his day - and famously tried to rubbish anyone who might have had any of his ideas first (Leibnitz and calculus, for instance.)
I think this list itself is OK - but I'd rather have a less pop science look at the attributions, which might show a lot more about how science REALLY works, i.e. not mad scientist with weird assistant raising the lightning rod.
On a tripod, and assuming no subject movement, resolution will be limited by a combination of the film capability and the lens capability. This gets quite complicated because with conventional film the resolution degrades fairly gracefully. As the detail gets smaller lens contrast is lost, but also film contrast is lost because of scatter, flare, grain pattern. In theory a Leitz 50mm lens operating at around f/5.6 can achieve an equivalent of about 30MPx, but in practice nothing like this will be achieved by most subjects most of the time.
However, there are other fiddle factors. First, digital camera makers lie^x^x^x apply interpretation to their camera sensors. A camera advertised as 2.1MPx tends to have rather fewer actual working pixels, the rest is done by "interpolation", a process which involves removing artefacts, a degree of dither, and the fact that most image sensor cells, instead of having RGB sensor sites, have in effect RGBG with twice as many green, owing to the need for an XY matrix. It also loses performance because, having only a small photosensor, the lens design is compromised. All the years of 35mm lens development do not apply to the tiny short focussed lenses of small digital cameras.
Second, there is no direct equivalence between film photography, with its analog response (gradual degradation of image as detail gets smaller) and digital sensors which are all or nothing. Increased subject contrast increases resolution on analog cameras but can only increase the contrast on a digital sensor.
Finally, with a film camera you can increase resolution and image quality at the expense of light sensitivity by changing film.
My conclusion: I suspect that for most people most of the time something like a Canon G2 is perfectly adequate. But if you want to take high res photos on a tripod, if you need to use long or short focus lenses, if you want the highest color resolution, you need film.
Since you can currently get this quite easily, buy the G2 now, keep the 35mm system and wait till the pros start discarding their second hand bodies when the pixel count goes up to 22 or 30. There will be some bargains, and with your 35mm system you can always get the performance when you need it, using that old clunky silver technology.
Why only two cheers? Because despite its advanced society, huge technical capabilities and social progressiveness, California has failed as yet to shoulder its world-wide policing responsibilities to bring about regime change in backward, religious fundamentalist places like Washington and Florida.
You'll have to control your aircraft from above using satellites. And before long countries like India and Pakistan should have the technology to deliver the EMP bombs that will knock them out.
Actually, I am old enough, though not as old as Mr. Jagger (I don't hold with titles.) But when he went to the LSE it was not a "prestigious school for future CEOs". It was a left-wing institution which promoted statist economics, the sort of place that provided think-tank fodder for socialist governments, and command-economy thinkers for the Treasury. Which may be why Jagger went into music instead...