There's been plenty of naming and shaming in this story so far. How about mentioning a few outfits that aren't wasteful? I'd like to direct some positive attention towards companies that pack appropriately.
As an example, I recently ordered some laptop RAM from OemPCWorld.com. I didn't have good specs on what modules would work, so I ordered 3, planning to return 2. According to their return policy, this is cool.
What arrived in the mail was a letter-size FedEx cardboard envelope. Inside that was my receipt and a half-size USPS cardboard return envelope, post-paid, which I'd added to my order to facilitate the return. Inside that were three tiny antistatic mylar bags, each with an SODIMM in it.
Absolutely perfect. I couldn't have packed it better if I'd tried; there was no wasted space, the 2 layers of cardboard provided more than enough protection against flex, and the whole thing weighed just a few ounces.
Another company that does things right: BG Micro. Recently ordered about $30 worth of stuff from them, some small tools, a few components, nothing huge. They wedged it all into the standard textbook-sized USPS box. The fragile bits were protected in individual boxes within, but most of the durable stuff just got a turn of bubble wrap, if that. It was sensible, and everything was in perfect shape when it arrived.
Another: Minimus. Does it bother you that the average first-aid kit contains about a 3:1 ratio of bandages to antiseptic wipes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I wanted to properly equip my kit, but Ididn't want to buy a box of 1,000 alcohol or iodine wipes. Thanks to Minimus, I didn't have to. They carry everything from ketchup and mustard packets, to single-use bug repellent towelettes, all sorts of medical supplies, laundry soap, hand sanitizer, even coffee and tea. I can't say enough good things about this company. I stocked up the entire family's first-aid kits, equipped my travel bag with some laptop screen wipes, and tried a new brand of toothpaste. The whole mess came in a 5x5x4-inch box, and that still left about half the box as air space. Single-use products are the epitome of excessive packaging, but I ordered for convenience. Besides, Burn-Jel isn't something I need a gallon of.
I'm not affiliated in any way with any of the above companies, just a satisfied customer. How about your experiences?
... telephone wiring systems, and similarly designed marine DC wiring systems, are not oversized.
I'm sure yours aren't, but I've seen plenty that are. When you're putting equipment 29 feet from the power bay and the spec calls for 6GA wire, and the next identical piece is 3 feet farther, and the spec calls for 2GA, something's oversized. It's easier than stocking connectors for every gauge, and they always err on the side of caution. I've seen 'em jump from 2GA to 4/0 when a run exceeded 50 feet.
I have no quarrel with using a 750KCMIL ground cable for the MGB, and 1/0 for the aisle feeders. Generously sized grounds are fine by me. But some of the power conductors are just absurd.
It is unfortunately not very practical to make large hollow multistrand conductors.
We could run water through them for cooling...
Seriously though, if I'd ever felt a power rack that was detectably above room temperature, I'd be tempted to agree with you. Human skin is pretty good at noticing subtle temperature changes. Of course a tiny temperature rise leaves a large margin of safety because thermal dissipation is some power of the temperature difference.
Busbars are normally used in power rooms because it's easy to add new battery strings or other gear along their length. A facility with the same power capacity but no spare floor space will usually use cable instead of busbars, because there's no need for modularity.
...the tolerance on commercial TTL was from 4.75 to 5.25V. Dropping even a quarter volt down the bus could mean that, with circuit board losses, many components were on out of tolerance voltage.
Yep, and after you convert to TTL Vcc, you've got to be careful about that stuff. But in a CO environment, the DC plant is nominal 48, floats at 52.something, and can drop to 40 during a hard discharge. Most of the equipment is built for 30-60 input range. That gives you a pretty wide margin of safety, even assuming the absurdly worst case that half the power system fails and all the load current is running through the other half.
That doesn't add up. Electric heat is usually the most expensive way to go, with gas, oil, or waste steam (when available) being much cheaper.
Assuming the building was electrically heated, then any electricity not wasted as heat by the lights would be used by the heaters. Same watts, same watts. In winter. In summer, the easier heating load from the efficient lights would translate to much lower cooling bills.
Assuming the building was heated with gas or oil, which is cheaper per BTU than electric heat, then in winter they'd use less electricity but more oil. For the same amount of heat, they'd spend less. Again, during summer, there'd be less cooling load.
Even in the case of electric heat, such loads are usually on "interruptible service" from the utility, which allows them to switch off large loads for short periods to manage the demands on the grid, in exchange for lower rates. The building lighting, of course, would not be on interruptible power. Any expensive electricity not burned by the lights would be replaced by cheap power in the heaters. Again, a savings.
I call bullshit. The installed cost of the LED lighting might not be made up by the power savings over its lifespan, but the energy bills will go down, no matter what. There's simply no way to tip that balance, unless gas gets more expensive than electric heat, which has never been the case.
You're looking at between 10 and 100 milliamps of loop current, depending on the equipment that serves your line and your distance from the CO. You might be able to rig a small radio, LED light, or battery trickle-charger, but that's about it.
Keep in mind that as soon as you draw more than 2mA or so, your line is considered "off-hook" and the switch begins supplying dialtone. You won't be able to receive calls while sneaking power.
Of course, that doesn't stop some jokers from creating an entire line of telco-powered spoof products.
48VDC is used by the Telcos for a multitude of reasons, efficiencey isn't one of them.
Ironically, now it could be.
A large part of the cost of a solar-electric system is in the charge controllers and inverters. You could cover the roof of a CO in photovolatic panels and you still wouldn't exceed the midday power usage, so there's no need for a charge controller. All the loads are directly DC, so there's no need for an inverter. Oh, and during a commercial power outage, having solar input reducing the load on the generator would contribute to marginally longer runtimes.
Knocking out the overhead components would dramatically shorten the payback period on the panels. Telcos are in a unique position to take advantage of this. Unfortunately they can't seem to look beyond next quarter.
They use DC because the systems originally ran completely off batteries. The battteries were charged fomr battery chargers on the power line. One of the reasons they did that was so the phones would keep working during a power outage. The original UPS.
Why are you using past-tense here? All the equipment in a CO, including a cellular MTSO, runs from 48vDC. The "bell cell" battery racks of yore have been replaced with modular VRLA systems, but it's still 2 volts per cell, 24 cells per string, thousands and thousands of amp-hours.
In the 1920s they were predicting broadcast power including transportation by wireless roller skates, sometime in the 1970s or so. Looks like we missed the target. Damn.
That 48vdc comes from the central office, where thousands of amps of it are used to power the switch, all the transport gear, and most of the auxilliary equipment. (Air conditioning is all AC powered, but everything else runs from the central DC plant.)
The power conductors in central offices are oversized out of paranoia, and because sometimes you have a foot-thick pileup of power cables leaving a fuse bay and you want to make really sure resistive heating is negligible. Also, most equipment has redundant power feeds, A and B, but either feed is large enough to handle the entire load. During normal operation when both sides are sharing the load, the resistive drop in the wires is absurdly low.
The other advantage of 48v is that it's below the 50v "low voltage" standard in the NEC, which means it's easier, legally, to work with. The 300-plus voltage they're using in this study loses that advantage.
Also consider this: AC voltage and power are measured RMS, but the insulation has to withstand P-P voltage. So to deliever the same power on the same conductors, the DC system's insulation has a greater margin of safety.
It's a shame more ISPs don't run freenet, tor, or i2p nodes. Usenet servers were a good idea, and torrent caching servers are a step in the right direction.
because this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live in.
No, I'm in Oakland, you insensitive clod!
It'd be nice if Oakland Wireless wasn't stillborn. Sad, really. Any local firmware hackers want to help us relight Ricochet? The next step involves disassembling SH3 code.
There's a freakish USB module that takes some of those CardBus cards and makes them into USB devices. I think it's simply exposing that same internal USB interface, and if you look at the supported cards list, it bears that out.
So if this device has been out for a while, why is the monolithic USB version news?
Actually, if you dig up the earliest docs on the Internet (ARPAnet), you'll find a lot of drawings of the intended use of the system. Most of them were totally wireless.
Did you think you were contradicting me? Yes, the internet can function with lots of wireless links. I'm simply saying that the low-level radio layer, known specifically as wifi, eight oh two dot eleven, isn't suitable because it has problems with fairness, channel sharing, mac spoofing, and acks. Your point is akin to saying that the internet can work over symmetric links, and IrDA is symmetric, therefore the internet should be all IrDA.
No. There are lots of radio protocols that would make a fine mesh network. Wifi isn't among them. By the time you've grafted enough patches and tweaks onto 802.11 to make it useful in a mesh, it barely resembles the original spec. Efforts to do so are colossal wastes of time, but they tend to achieve some measure of success simply because the media goes gaga over the word "wifi", whereas technically sensible projects who reject 802.11's absurd baggage don't tend to get the same amount of fawning press.
Slashdot is part of the problem, unfortunately. Anyone doing radio data work with something other than wifi is slapped with the ugly "proprietary" label, even when a fresh approach is exactly what's needed. Imagine if the Honda fanboy websites bitched every time a Caterpillar bulldozer was used in place of a Civic. Who cares if hatchbacks don't make good bulldozers? It's not our favorite!
If you're already on the grid, then yes, the payback period for photovoltaic panels is a few years or more. But weighed against the expense of running wires to a remote location, the initial cost of PV is vastly less in a lot of cases. When you include maintenance expenses, it's a no-brainer.
(The word "solar" describes so many types of energy, referring specifically to photovoltaic panels helps avoid confusion with things like solar heat. Really, all biomass fuels, including petroleum, started as solar, and wind gets its energy from the sun too.)
You're exactly right, Wi-fi is a last-meter solution, and people are trying to use it for last-mile and more. It'd be wonderful to see a solar-powered wireless mesh network, but not running 802.11anything!
What's interesting is that the Ricochet network has already been designed, deployed, proven, mismarketed, and abandoned. Metricom's routing protocol was vastly superior to anything else in this space, and now YDI's got the patents locked up.
Airespace was founded by a bunch of ex-Metricom brains, and it looks like they built many of the same smarts into the samecasing. Then Airespace got bought by Cisco and they call it the 1500. I wouldn't mind playing with a few dozen of these.
Anyway, if someone could convince YDI to open the intellectual property, that warehouse full of Ricochet poletops could be deployed anywhere in the world. The modems are cheap, the hardware is bulletproof, and did I mention they go a mile on the stock rubber ducks?
Toy-grade R/C gear is significantly worse than hobby-grade. The $20 Radio Shack Ferarri would barely get to the end of the driveway before it got hard to control. The kid with the CB whip was a genius!
And anyway, when your plane gets too far away for you to see it, you need a video downlink from it. It's about time for hobbyists to get serious about this stuff, and I vote we refer to video-equipped R/C planes as "aliens". Just so we can one day have a giantic air battle with the military version and call it "alien vs predator".
Carriers won't put new service on an analog-only phone anymore. I spent an afternoon trying in March. I have a bag phone with a POTS simulator, essentially it's a Cellsocket or Dock'n'talk built right into the phone. Generates ring voltage and dialtone, interprets DTMF *and* pulse dial, and generally rocks. I wanted to find a prepay plan with free incoming and run a BBS off that sucker, with a 300 baud modem on a C64, in the back of my car just for kicks;)
Verizon's counter-kids don't even know what the word "analog" means anymore. When I talked to the old guy in back, he laughed me out of the store.
The folks at Cingular, who I had service through several years ago but let lapse, thought it would "kick ass" to see "that old beast" running again, so we spent 2 hours trying to get their online activation system to do our bidding. I downloaded motbib23.txt and broke out the screwdriver while standing at the counter, but we couldn't get their system to take the phone's ESN. In the end it was fruitless.
None of the other places I called would even acknowledge that "analog" or "amps" or "brick phones" ever existed. Bastards.
David Darling has tons of info on spaceflight and advanced propulsion concepts. Some of them are present-day stuff, like ion thrusters and solar sails. Others are pure wild speculation, various forms of faster-than-light travel, etc. It's incredibly readable and quite broad.
Are you familar with ShouldExist and HalfBakery? They're also not sci-fi-specific, but a good place to check out ideas and post your own.
If you haven't played Star Control 2, (now available for PC as The Ur-Quan Masters), you ought to check it out. The action gameplay is every bit as fun as in SC1, but there's an incredible plot this time around.
As you work through the game, meeting new alien species and trying to free Earth from its enslavement, you meet the two subspecies of Ur-Quan, locked in eternal war. The Kzer-Za want merely to dominate all species in the galaxy. The Kohr-Ah, on the other hand, will stop at nothing short of total extermination.
Disturbing? Not really. They're aliens, after all. And that means none of it applies to the way we think about abused humans and their relations to society. Naah.
I was thinking that you could use this for training industrial workers. By coming up with a "pretty close" reproduction of a toxic smell, you could tell the workers exactly what to be on the lookout for, without having to resort to "sort of like almonds" generalizations.
Of course, having cheap gas monitors that warn the workers in advance would be even better, but equipment has safety guards on it already, and they're not 100% effective. Lives are saved when humans notice something amiss and react promptly. As a second line of defense, training and recognition could kick in when electronic monitors fail.
So far, all of the USB-over-EthernetdevicesI've found support only bulk and interrupt transfers, not isochronous transfers. That means no USB audio devices, and no cameras. (Some of them mention "digital camera" support, by which they mean "mount the card as mass storage or use PTP", not live viewfinder mode.) Several vendors specifically point out "in this firmware release", leading me to suspect that they plan to add isochronous support in the future. Except these products have been out for years and no such update has happened.
That's a shame, because a pile of cheap webcams at the end of such a device would be ideal for home security, machine vision on a tethered robot, and lots of other applications. Being able to pass USB data over a wifi link (using the integrated wifi in a laptop) would mean one less jack to snap off the motherboard. Looks like it's just not meant to be.
I should note: The USB-over-Cat-5 (or USB-over-fiber) devices DO support all types of transfers, because they're working at layer 1, just boosting the USB signal so it'll survive a few extra feet of UTP wiring. It's only the higher level devices, which wrap USB frames in Ethernet frames or IP packets, that can't support the stringent timing requirements of isochronous transfers.
Thousands of owners agree: You too should own a Kill A Watt meter if you don't already. Just please spell it correctly!
Seriously, I find mine coming in handy for more than just treehugging energy audits. It helped me diagnose a UPS whose charging circuit wasn't slipping into trickle mode, and was damaging batteries as a result. It lets me know whether certain devices will really run from the car's inverter, and once I plug them in, it lets me monitor the inverter's voltage drop.
What startled me when I first started playing with my Kill A Watt was how little of a difference CPU activity really makes, and how big a difference CRT brightness does. Black text on a white background is an energy hog, white text on a black background sips meagerly from the trough. I don't have an LCD to compare with, but I know they run their backlights full-brightness, so it's concievable that with a mostly-black image, the CRT's method of only lighting up the affected pixels might actually be more efficient than the LCD.
Science fiction is a fun place to go fishing for ideas. It's fiction now, but at one point, so were organ transplants and personal communicators.
Re:2 FPS?
on
Quake is 10
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· Score: 2, Informative
And a lot more playable on a 486DX40, also with 8 megs. The difference is that the DX2/66 clocked its bus at 33MHz, whereas the 40 was a real 40MHz bus. I was running a Trident 9400CXi in a VLB slot, and while only rated for a 33MHz bus, it did fine at 40.
Since the video card wasn't doing any of its own processing, moving the CPU-->Video data as fast as possible was the best thing you could do for that game. And you didn't need gobs of RAM either, if your hard drive was also sitting behind a fast VLB controller.
But what about the tetrahedron?
on
Earth Sandwich
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Dave Barr has been there, done that,years ago. He placed four marble tetrahedra at points on the globe (New Guinea, South Africa, Greenland and Easter Island) so that they describe a giant tetrahedron inside the earth itself.
Have you looked at Rent A Coder? That's the first outfit that comes to mind. (As of writing this post, there are no other posts showing, so forgive me if it's redundant.)
Also check your local (or not-so-local) Craigslist boards, people frequently post there looking for small programming projects.
Also also, call around to local charities, political groups with whom you agree, and other similar operations. See if you can identify ways their operation could be streamlined, and implement them.
Slashdot Mirror
There's been plenty of naming and shaming in this story so far. How about mentioning a few outfits that aren't wasteful? I'd like to direct some positive attention towards companies that pack appropriately.
As an example, I recently ordered some laptop RAM from OemPCWorld.com. I didn't have good specs on what modules would work, so I ordered 3, planning to return 2. According to their return policy, this is cool.
What arrived in the mail was a letter-size FedEx cardboard envelope. Inside that was my receipt and a half-size USPS cardboard return envelope, post-paid, which I'd added to my order to facilitate the return. Inside that were three tiny antistatic mylar bags, each with an SODIMM in it.
Absolutely perfect. I couldn't have packed it better if I'd tried; there was no wasted space, the 2 layers of cardboard provided more than enough protection against flex, and the whole thing weighed just a few ounces.
Another company that does things right: BG Micro. Recently ordered about $30 worth of stuff from them, some small tools, a few components, nothing huge. They wedged it all into the standard textbook-sized USPS box. The fragile bits were protected in individual boxes within, but most of the durable stuff just got a turn of bubble wrap, if that. It was sensible, and everything was in perfect shape when it arrived.
Another: Minimus. Does it bother you that the average first-aid kit contains about a 3:1 ratio of bandages to antiseptic wipes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I wanted to properly equip my kit, but Ididn't want to buy a box of 1,000 alcohol or iodine wipes. Thanks to Minimus, I didn't have to. They carry everything from ketchup and mustard packets, to single-use bug repellent towelettes, all sorts of medical supplies, laundry soap, hand sanitizer, even coffee and tea. I can't say enough good things about this company. I stocked up the entire family's first-aid kits, equipped my travel bag with some laptop screen wipes, and tried a new brand of toothpaste. The whole mess came in a 5x5x4-inch box, and that still left about half the box as air space. Single-use products are the epitome of excessive packaging, but I ordered for convenience. Besides, Burn-Jel isn't something I need a gallon of.
I'm not affiliated in any way with any of the above companies, just a satisfied customer. How about your experiences?
You mean the Crate Review System? Yes, hilarious.
I have no quarrel with using a 750KCMIL ground cable for the MGB, and 1/0 for the aisle feeders. Generously sized grounds are fine by me. But some of the power conductors are just absurd.
We could run water through them for cooling...
Seriously though, if I'd ever felt a power rack that was detectably above room temperature, I'd be tempted to agree with you. Human skin is pretty good at noticing subtle temperature changes. Of course a tiny temperature rise leaves a large margin of safety because thermal dissipation is some power of the temperature difference.
Busbars are normally used in power rooms because it's easy to add new battery strings or other gear along their length. A facility with the same power capacity but no spare floor space will usually use cable instead of busbars, because there's no need for modularity.
Yep, and after you convert to TTL Vcc, you've got to be careful about that stuff. But in a CO environment, the DC plant is nominal 48, floats at 52.something, and can drop to 40 during a hard discharge. Most of the equipment is built for 30-60 input range. That gives you a pretty wide margin of safety, even assuming the absurdly worst case that half the power system fails and all the load current is running through the other half.
That doesn't add up. Electric heat is usually the most expensive way to go, with gas, oil, or waste steam (when available) being much cheaper.
Assuming the building was electrically heated, then any electricity not wasted as heat by the lights would be used by the heaters. Same watts, same watts. In winter. In summer, the easier heating load from the efficient lights would translate to much lower cooling bills.
Assuming the building was heated with gas or oil, which is cheaper per BTU than electric heat, then in winter they'd use less electricity but more oil. For the same amount of heat, they'd spend less. Again, during summer, there'd be less cooling load.
Even in the case of electric heat, such loads are usually on "interruptible service" from the utility, which allows them to switch off large loads for short periods to manage the demands on the grid, in exchange for lower rates. The building lighting, of course, would not be on interruptible power. Any expensive electricity not burned by the lights would be replaced by cheap power in the heaters. Again, a savings.
I call bullshit. The installed cost of the LED lighting might not be made up by the power savings over its lifespan, but the energy bills will go down, no matter what. There's simply no way to tip that balance, unless gas gets more expensive than electric heat, which has never been the case.
You're looking at between 10 and 100 milliamps of loop current, depending on the equipment that serves your line and your distance from the CO. You might be able to rig a small radio, LED light, or battery trickle-charger, but that's about it.
Keep in mind that as soon as you draw more than 2mA or so, your line is considered "off-hook" and the switch begins supplying dialtone. You won't be able to receive calls while sneaking power.
Of course, that doesn't stop some jokers from creating an entire line of telco-powered spoof products.
A large part of the cost of a solar-electric system is in the charge controllers and inverters. You could cover the roof of a CO in photovolatic panels and you still wouldn't exceed the midday power usage, so there's no need for a charge controller. All the loads are directly DC, so there's no need for an inverter. Oh, and during a commercial power outage, having solar input reducing the load on the generator would contribute to marginally longer runtimes.
Knocking out the overhead components would dramatically shorten the payback period on the panels. Telcos are in a unique position to take advantage of this. Unfortunately they can't seem to look beyond next quarter.
Why are you using past-tense here? All the equipment in a CO, including a cellular MTSO, runs from 48vDC. The "bell cell" battery racks of yore have been replaced with modular VRLA systems, but it's still 2 volts per cell, 24 cells per string, thousands and thousands of amp-hours.
In the 1920s they were predicting broadcast power including transportation by wireless roller skates, sometime in the 1970s or so. Looks like we missed the target. Damn.
That 48vdc comes from the central office, where thousands of amps of it are used to power the switch, all the transport gear, and most of the auxilliary equipment. (Air conditioning is all AC powered, but everything else runs from the central DC plant.)
The power conductors in central offices are oversized out of paranoia, and because sometimes you have a foot-thick pileup of power cables leaving a fuse bay and you want to make really sure resistive heating is negligible. Also, most equipment has redundant power feeds, A and B, but either feed is large enough to handle the entire load. During normal operation when both sides are sharing the load, the resistive drop in the wires is absurdly low.
The other advantage of 48v is that it's below the 50v "low voltage" standard in the NEC, which means it's easier, legally, to work with. The 300-plus voltage they're using in this study loses that advantage.
Also consider this: AC voltage and power are measured RMS, but the insulation has to withstand P-P voltage. So to deliever the same power on the same conductors, the DC system's insulation has a greater margin of safety.
...but without the crypto.
It's a shame more ISPs don't run freenet, tor, or i2p nodes. Usenet servers were a good idea, and torrent caching servers are a step in the right direction.
It'd be nice if Oakland Wireless wasn't stillborn. Sad, really. Any local firmware hackers want to help us relight Ricochet? The next step involves disassembling SH3 code.
Those two interfaces are explained by Phil Karn.
There's a freakish USB module that takes some of those CardBus cards and makes them into USB devices. I think it's simply exposing that same internal USB interface, and if you look at the supported cards list, it bears that out.
So if this device has been out for a while, why is the monolithic USB version news?
Did you think you were contradicting me? Yes, the internet can function with lots of wireless links. I'm simply saying that the low-level radio layer, known specifically as wifi, eight oh two dot eleven, isn't suitable because it has problems with fairness, channel sharing, mac spoofing, and acks. Your point is akin to saying that the internet can work over symmetric links, and IrDA is symmetric, therefore the internet should be all IrDA.
No. There are lots of radio protocols that would make a fine mesh network. Wifi isn't among them. By the time you've grafted enough patches and tweaks onto 802.11 to make it useful in a mesh, it barely resembles the original spec. Efforts to do so are colossal wastes of time, but they tend to achieve some measure of success simply because the media goes gaga over the word "wifi", whereas technically sensible projects who reject 802.11's absurd baggage don't tend to get the same amount of fawning press.
Slashdot is part of the problem, unfortunately. Anyone doing radio data work with something other than wifi is slapped with the ugly "proprietary" label, even when a fresh approach is exactly what's needed. Imagine if the Honda fanboy websites bitched every time a Caterpillar bulldozer was used in place of a Civic. Who cares if hatchbacks don't make good bulldozers? It's not our favorite!
If you're already on the grid, then yes, the payback period for photovoltaic panels is a few years or more. But weighed against the expense of running wires to a remote location, the initial cost of PV is vastly less in a lot of cases. When you include maintenance expenses, it's a no-brainer.
(The word "solar" describes so many types of energy, referring specifically to photovoltaic panels helps avoid confusion with things like solar heat. Really, all biomass fuels, including petroleum, started as solar, and wind gets its energy from the sun too.)
You're exactly right, Wi-fi is a last-meter solution, and people are trying to use it for last-mile and more. It'd be wonderful to see a solar-powered wireless mesh network, but not running 802.11anything!
What's interesting is that the Ricochet network has already been designed, deployed, proven, mismarketed, and abandoned. Metricom's routing protocol was vastly superior to anything else in this space, and now YDI's got the patents locked up.
Airespace was founded by a bunch of ex-Metricom brains, and it looks like they built many of the same smarts into the same casing. Then Airespace got bought by Cisco and they call it the 1500. I wouldn't mind playing with a few dozen of these.
Anyway, if someone could convince YDI to open the intellectual property, that warehouse full of Ricochet poletops could be deployed anywhere in the world. The modems are cheap, the hardware is bulletproof, and did I mention they go a mile on the stock rubber ducks?
Toy-grade R/C gear is significantly worse than hobby-grade. The $20 Radio Shack Ferarri would barely get to the end of the driveway before it got hard to control. The kid with the CB whip was a genius!
And anyway, when your plane gets too far away for you to see it, you need a video downlink from it. It's about time for hobbyists to get serious about this stuff, and I vote we refer to video-equipped R/C planes as "aliens". Just so we can one day have a giantic air battle with the military version and call it "alien vs predator".
Carriers won't put new service on an analog-only phone anymore. I spent an afternoon trying in March. I have a bag phone with a POTS simulator, essentially it's a Cellsocket or Dock'n'talk built right into the phone. Generates ring voltage and dialtone, interprets DTMF *and* pulse dial, and generally rocks. I wanted to find a prepay plan with free incoming and run a BBS off that sucker, with a 300 baud modem on a C64, in the back of my car just for kicks ;)
Verizon's counter-kids don't even know what the word "analog" means anymore. When I talked to the old guy in back, he laughed me out of the store.
The folks at Cingular, who I had service through several years ago but let lapse, thought it would "kick ass" to see "that old beast" running again, so we spent 2 hours trying to get their online activation system to do our bidding. I downloaded motbib23.txt and broke out the screwdriver while standing at the counter, but we couldn't get their system to take the phone's ESN. In the end it was fruitless.
None of the other places I called would even acknowledge that "analog" or "amps" or "brick phones" ever existed. Bastards.
If you find one, let me know...
David Darling has tons of info on spaceflight and advanced propulsion concepts. Some of them are present-day stuff, like ion thrusters and solar sails. Others are pure wild speculation, various forms of faster-than-light travel, etc. It's incredibly readable and quite broad.
Are you familar with ShouldExist and HalfBakery? They're also not sci-fi-specific, but a good place to check out ideas and post your own.
If you haven't played Star Control 2, (now available for PC as The Ur-Quan Masters), you ought to check it out. The action gameplay is every bit as fun as in SC1, but there's an incredible plot this time around.
As you work through the game, meeting new alien species and trying to free Earth from its enslavement, you meet the two subspecies of Ur-Quan, locked in eternal war. The Kzer-Za want merely to dominate all species in the galaxy. The Kohr-Ah, on the other hand, will stop at nothing short of total extermination.
Their horrible story, and uncannily sympathizable justification for their "path", still unnerves me. I can't blame them. All I can do is fight back, and hope I don't meet too many of them at once. (The story in TOPNaF isn't complete, you have to play the game to get the whole background.)
Disturbing? Not really. They're aliens, after all. And that means none of it applies to the way we think about abused humans and their relations to society. Naah.
I was thinking that you could use this for training industrial workers. By coming up with a "pretty close" reproduction of a toxic smell, you could tell the workers exactly what to be on the lookout for, without having to resort to "sort of like almonds" generalizations.
Of course, having cheap gas monitors that warn the workers in advance would be even better, but equipment has safety guards on it already, and they're not 100% effective. Lives are saved when humans notice something amiss and react promptly. As a second line of defense, training and recognition could kick in when electronic monitors fail.
So far, all of the USB-over-Ethernet devices I've found support only bulk and interrupt transfers, not isochronous transfers. That means no USB audio devices, and no cameras. (Some of them mention "digital camera" support, by which they mean "mount the card as mass storage or use PTP", not live viewfinder mode.) Several vendors specifically point out "in this firmware release", leading me to suspect that they plan to add isochronous support in the future. Except these products have been out for years and no such update has happened.
That's a shame, because a pile of cheap webcams at the end of such a device would be ideal for home security, machine vision on a tethered robot, and lots of other applications. Being able to pass USB data over a wifi link (using the integrated wifi in a laptop) would mean one less jack to snap off the motherboard. Looks like it's just not meant to be.
I should note: The USB-over-Cat-5 (or USB-over-fiber) devices DO support all types of transfers, because they're working at layer 1, just boosting the USB signal so it'll survive a few extra feet of UTP wiring. It's only the higher level devices, which wrap USB frames in Ethernet frames or IP packets, that can't support the stringent timing requirements of isochronous transfers.
Thousands of owners agree: You too should own a Kill A Watt meter if you don't already. Just please spell it correctly!
Seriously, I find mine coming in handy for more than just treehugging energy audits. It helped me diagnose a UPS whose charging circuit wasn't slipping into trickle mode, and was damaging batteries as a result. It lets me know whether certain devices will really run from the car's inverter, and once I plug them in, it lets me monitor the inverter's voltage drop.
What startled me when I first started playing with my Kill A Watt was how little of a difference CPU activity really makes, and how big a difference CRT brightness does. Black text on a white background is an energy hog, white text on a black background sips meagerly from the trough. I don't have an LCD to compare with, but I know they run their backlights full-brightness, so it's concievable that with a mostly-black image, the CRT's method of only lighting up the affected pixels might actually be more efficient than the LCD.
Science fiction is a fun place to go fishing for ideas. It's fiction now, but at one point, so were organ transplants and personal communicators.
And a lot more playable on a 486DX40, also with 8 megs. The difference is that the DX2/66 clocked its bus at 33MHz, whereas the 40 was a real 40MHz bus. I was running a Trident 9400CXi in a VLB slot, and while only rated for a 33MHz bus, it did fine at 40.
Since the video card wasn't doing any of its own processing, moving the CPU-->Video data as fast as possible was the best thing you could do for that game. And you didn't need gobs of RAM either, if your hard drive was also sitting behind a fast VLB controller.
Dave Barr has been there, done that,years ago. He placed four marble tetrahedra at points on the globe (New Guinea, South Africa, Greenland and Easter Island) so that they describe a giant tetrahedron inside the earth itself.
Have you looked at Rent A Coder? That's the first outfit that comes to mind. (As of writing this post, there are no other posts showing, so forgive me if it's redundant.)
Also check your local (or not-so-local) Craigslist boards, people frequently post there looking for small programming projects.
Also also, call around to local charities, political groups with whom you agree, and other similar operations. See if you can identify ways their operation could be streamlined, and implement them.