The idea is that, if we want to take clear radio-frequency "images" of distant images, it makes sense to avoid polluting the sections of the bandwidth where those images are to be found. No, I don't think any of these lower-power trasmitters will be broadcasting directly in these ranges. Unfortunately, most transmitters also transmit harmonics of their main frequency, at lower power. Consequently, everyone gives these frequencies, AND their lower harmonics, a pretty wide berth.
Agreed. I've got a IIIxe which is running on NIMH AAA batteries. I can charge-em up and use the hell out of it for about three weeks at a time. I've got two sets of battereis, so one is in the unit while the others are charging.
It has a 16 MHz CPU, 8 MB RAM, and monochrome LCD display. It's a very simple device, and goes a long way on very little. I can take it with me on a road trip over the weekend, use it as
an e-book reader
a spreadsheet
a note taker
a calendar
an alarm clock
you name it. If I REALLY need to, I can buy some regular AAA batteries while I'm out and about. It's not fancy, but it works well.
I went to work in summer 2000 (after finishing college December 1999). I was making 48k/year. Summer 2001, it rose to $52k/year (different contract). Summer 2002, it was 55k/year (got hired from a contract position). Summer 2003, I was laid off. I didn't find permanent, full-time work again until May 2004. After 11 months with negligible income, I'm currently somewhere between my 2001 and 2002 wages (in terms of annual salary).
My net income over the last two years has been dismal. I'm making less, per year, than I was two years ago. So, where's this wage and opportunity growth they're talking about? I'm seeing more evidence for the reduced real income that they've been observing for the last two years.
Prices are, for the most part, set by supply and demand. I say "for the most part," because there is some manipulation. We need to remember, though, that crude oil supply isn't the only factor in the supply side of the equation.
In 2003, there was blackout which affected several refineries in the Western U.S., and a pipeline shutdown in Arizona. These refineries supplied most of the gasoline being used in the western States, and the pipeline supplied much of the gas from refineries to distribution points in Arizona. Gas prices in Arizona skyrocketed for a couple weeks, until the refineries could return to normal operations and the pipeline could be re-opened. While the price of crude didn't vary during that time period, the supply of gasoline (not crude) was greatly diminished, causing a spike in prices.
Back in the '90's, many oil companies actually reduced their refining capacity. Meanwhile, gasoline consumption has continued to rise. Now, all the major refineries are operating at 95% capacity or higher. When they slow down at the change in seasons (summer-time gasoline has a different formula from winter-time gasoline, in most areas, and they have to shut down parts of the refinery to change formulas), the price tends to spike for a little while. But, the fact remains, the choke point in the current supply-demand equation, WRT gasoline, isn't the price of crude; it's the refining capacity. The supply is hitting limits, and the demand is still growing. All of this is pushing the price upward, which is pushing the profit margins, for the oil companies, upward.
Re:Far off, but going to happen
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
I used to wear a watch all the time, and I'd be completely lost all day long if I forgot it. I got a cell phone and about the same time, got a job programming full-time. When typing all day long, the watch bugged me, so I'd take it off. I'd often forget it when I went to lunch, or went home, etc, and started using my cell (which is clipped on my pocket or belt). Eventually I figured the watch is pointless..
Agreed, although, in my case, I bought a Palm IIIx. It has time, date, alarms, etc. The ability to have an alarm go off, on a particular day, at a particular time, set months in advance, is nice. Don't know too many wristwatches which can do that (I'm sure there is one, somewhere, which can, but I haven't seen it or felt a need to buy it). I don't wear a watch, anymore.
Also, since the Palm is small enough to put in my front pocket, I can take it with me, anywhere. With Plucker (which has been mentioned elsewhere), I always have reading materials with me. This comes in handy when I'm sitting in the dentist office, waiting on one of the kids. With BrainForest, I've got a top-notch notes-taking tool. Great for jotting down that idea, or for taking notes in a meeting at work. With TextPlus, I can input data pretty quickly, so the idea or the notes can be pretty detailed. I've also have Addition, which is a spreadsheet. I sometimes get some whining from my SO about "we should go back and look at the van/SUV at that car dealership." Just pull out the spreadsheet, figure up the monthly payments based on the price on the windshield, and the whining ends, immediately (new vehicles are too damned expensive, even with a six-year note). Takes less than 60 seconds, and I don't have to listen to her yap about it the rest of the day. Had to remove all the games, though; if there were games on it, our youngest would "disappear" with it for hours at a time, and I'd have dead batteries on my hands. No games = no excuse for him to mess with it. In short, small is very good and very useful You don't discover how useful until you've had it for a while.
I have a cellphone, too (provided by my employer). It gets used for the usual cellphone stuff, but that's it. My Palm contains pretty much everything else.
Remove the main pulley on the engine, and replace it with a special toothed one for this rig. Remove the alternator. Hell, remove the starter while you're at it. Put the special bracket on the engine. Mount the Integrated Starter Generator (the term has been around long before this product was announced) on the bracket. Use the toothed belt to connect the ISG to the main pulley. Mount the electronics box and connect it to the whole thing. Congratulations: you now have what's known as a light hybrid vehicle. The ISG can provide regenerative braking and off-the-line torque. Technically, you can kill the engine while you're sitting at the light, and the ISG has enough horsepower to spin the engine to operating speed (roll-starting it, essentially) and get you started off the line.
Ford has been playing with a prototype system similar to this. They got about 15% improvement in fuel economy. Considering the increased costs involved, they decided it wasn't worth it. Not for a measly 3-4 MPG on an Escape. For an Excursion, you're talking 1-2 more MPG.
Don't get me wrong; this helps. Just not as much as you might hope. It's a good step in the right direction, in an attempt to help reduce the fuel consumption of existing vehicles. And, as they mention, since there are NO internal modifications to the engine, it's a bolt-on accessory which your typical shade-tree mechanic could probably install on a Saturday.
If you've got solar or some other kind of distributed power generation, you can do it, too. It's called net metering. And yes, people with solar energy have the advantage, as their equipment usually produce the most during the peak times of the day, whereas they fall short during the off-peak times. At least a few people have ended up drawing more than they produce, but still ended up with a check from the electric company, because the peak-time contribution more than made up for the off-peak consumption.
Agreed. Used to work for a huge company. Now, I stick with smaller companies, but there are a couple things they need to have in place:
Some kind of development management. I've done some consulting development for a graphic design firm which had a web-based system for tracking what projects were currently under development, where they were in that development, and who was doing what. Their employees AND their clients could see it, and everyone was completely clear on what was going on, and when it could be expected. They weren't a software shop, but they still had development tracking/CRM tools in place.
Bug tracking. My current employer (a hospitality company) has a web-based system in place for tracking variations between "what the client expected" and what was delivered, and they actively use it to make sure the clients are well informed, and what they deliver is consistent with those expectations.
Some kind of revision control. My current employer has a Wiki in place for tracking projects, specs and their changes. It allows you to see what changed from one revision to the next. Additionally, I'm using Subversion for revision control on the actual development. The huge employer had a good revision control system in place, as well; their use of the sytem "converted" me to the idea. If they develop software, and they don't have any revision control system in place (even if it's making a.zip snapshot of the development every so often, and archiving it), they probably won't last long. The ability to "roll-back" to a previous revision, and compare "then" vs. "now" is a wonderful troubleshooting tool.
None of these things I've mentioned require significant expense on software. Subversion is free; the Wiki software is free (and it can be used for two of the above tasks). I've worked for too many companies, though, which no longer exist; none of these companies had ANY of the above tools in place. All the successful ones had at least one, if not all, of the above.
Amen. We've got Wiki in place where I can document what I understand the requirements to be. I then send links to all the major stakeholders in a project. We hash things out until we've got something everyone understands and agrees with. It is no where near a formal spec document, but it's enough to work from. Once everyone agrees "that looks good," I get to work.
Depending on the size of the project, I'll get a certain amount of development done and demo it to the stakeholders. Feedback gets worked into the page on the Wiki. Consequently, features get added, screens get changed, ideas for further development of the project get added, but we keep track of what needs to be completed for certain stages of development. You'd be surprised how well this works.
Yes, we have meetings. The results get captured in the Wiki; this way, if someone missed the meeting, they can still see what's up. Yes, adjustments to the specs and the design do occur. For our organization, this works well. We get a great deal of development done, and we roll-out new applications and features for our users on a regular basis. We never really get to the point of a heavily-detailed formal spec. But, we manage to make sure the stakeholders and developers are all on the same page, and the users get the apps they need. I have yet to run across an instance where I delivered an app, and the users looked at the results and said "that's not what we wanted."
Its iterative development to the hilt, and it works beautifully for us. It's very agile, responsive, fast-moving. Let's see an outsourcing company master that.
The benefits to hiring a local programmer are many. You can start them when you need them. You can have them work on ancillary tasks much easier to fill time (this becomes a problem when you've scheduled offshore resources and you can't deliver tasks for them for whatever reason, you still owe them). The turnaround time for resolving an issue is nearly immediate compared to the day long delay caused by time zones working with India.
My employer has clued into that fact. At first, management said they didn't need a programmer; the head of IT (now my boss) disagreed. My boss originally brought me in for 24 hours of work (contract). They were impressed with what I could do. Management would ask "can you make it do such-and-such," and they'd see it happen in a matter of seconds (usually a matter of changing some layout or cosmetic stuff) or a minute or so (adding another field to the output). After all that, they decided to bring me in part-time on contract. They kept asking, "can you make it do such-and-such," and I'd make it do what they wanted. They finally hired me on, full-time, with salary and benefits. Now, they're looking at adding more programmers.
Why the change? Because they saw value in what I could do, and it didn't take three weeks and a detailed spec before they saw results.
Early on, we had someone in the HR department complain that they didn't like having to key in the entire working address, city, state, zip, phone, fax, etc. for each new hire as they came on board (we've tripled in size since January '04). About 30% of the company works from home or other remote locations, but the other 70% work from one of five or six locations. Within 30 minutes I had tweaked the app so that, if they selected a location where the new hire was working, the fields were auto-populated; they could go back and edit as needed, but they didn't need to key it all in, every time. We're talking 30 minutes from HR person whining (and my overhearing it) to my demoing the new feature. They were amazed it could be done so fast. My response? "That's what happens when you've got a programmer on staff; if this job was outsourced to India, you MIGHT see this feature in two weeks." HR promptly decided they liked having a programmer onsite. They helped convince the management.
In my previous job, I managed the Software Configuration Management (SCM) system. They outsourced my job to India. This entailed flying my replacement in so I could train him (over the course of about four weeks), then laying me off. Management just didn't see any value to having someone onsite who did my task. From what I understand from those who weren't laid off, everyone hates that fact that it now takes forever to get stuff done; normally, they'd just drop by my cubicle and ask "what would it take to make such-and-such happen," and I could either do it, or give them a timeframe. If there was something they could do to accomplish the task (or accelerate its completion), I could lay it out on the spot. If there was anything unclear about what they wanted, or how they wanted it, we could discuss it on the spot and clear it up. Now, all such tasks are handled via e-mail or IM; things take longer to get done, and it usually takes multiple tries before the customer (employee in the US) gets what they actually want (communications problems). The solution to this (of course) is to lay off all the US employees and do the whole job in India. They haven't done that, though; they are starting to see some value in keeping experienced programmers, familiar with the existing systems, in place for further development on those systems.
It all comes back to value. If your employee doesn't see the value in what you do, or doesn't see value in having you around to do it, you're a prime candidate for outsourcing. Considering the fact that it took me 11 months to find a new full-time job, you'll understand if I'm keeping my eye on the "value" aspect.
I wholeheartedly agree that Straczynski could save Trek, assuming he's given a free hand.
I wonder how he'll handle not having to deal with Newtonian physics? One of the hallmarks of B5 was that the writers and animators actually had a good grasp of physics, i.e. you can change the ship's attitude without having to change direction. As someone who paid attention in physics class, I really enjoyed that aspect of the show. Now, when my kids watch it, they ask if spaceships can actually do that stuff, and I get an opportunity to make them think. Very few Trek episodes can do that.
For reference to prior art, just look to Samuel Morse (as in Morse Code). I mean, he developed an entire alphabet based on patterns of short and long clicks. It had different meanings for multiple clicks of various durations.
Before Microsoft claims license fees on this one, they better get the license from Morse's estate. If, that is, it hasn't gone into public domain.
During the original Gulf War (during the reign of Bush I), Military Intel was debriefing some captured Iraqi prisoners. One of them was some-or-another commander. They asked him which of our weapons he feared most. The people questioning him were expecting him to mention one of our smart bombs, Tomahawks, or something shiny and new. His response was "the B-52." The interrogators were perplexed; "but, your position was never hit by B-52's." "No," he replied, "but I saw one that was."
IIRC, this was the plane which invented the term "carpet bombing." Personally, I don't think I'd want to be sitting in my trench and watching a wall of fire and high explosive rolling across the desert in my direction. The Buffs could do that like no plane.
Agreed on the "weird" aspect. Spent a few months at Nellis, and got to see Buffs coming and going as part of some or another combat competition they had going at the time.
You're right about the "nose down" takeoff. My whole training group had their jaws on the ramp when we saw that; we're used to F-16's taking off with a 40 degree or better nose-up. It picked up speed, rolled out, then the tail lifted up, then the whole thing rose from the runway. Talk about counter-intuitive. Additionally, the main one I remember taxied and took off with the outriggers up, but there were NLT four KC-135's following it. From what I understood, it took off with a fairly low fuel load, then took on a full fuel load in the air.
The wingspan on the crazy thing was sufficiently wide, and the wash from the turbojets sufficiently strong, that they had to send some street-cleaning equipment out there to clean the rocks and dust from the runway before we could put any fighers out there.
In my case, I had some admin experience and some development experience, when I tackled a job as a Conf. Mgr. My official title was "software engineer," but I was administering their Revision Control system, StarTeam.
Yes, I did get to influence a lot of policies, and I quickly learned that Conf. Mgmt is NOT a bunch of useless administravia. There are very real benefits to such systems, if they are used properly.
Given the chance, go for it. It's a real eye-opener, and your development practices will never be the same.
Guys, it's a thermoacoustic Stirling. Stirling engines can do a variety of things. You can supply heat, and they will supply motion (usually a reciprocating motion, which works nicely when connected with a linear alternator). Or, you can supply motion (reciprocating), and they will move heat (i.e. usually cooling something). Sunpower has been making cryocoolers based on them for years. And yes, they even played with a module which would attach to a CPU and supercool it.
Hit Google and look for information on Stirling engines. Then, reduce the number of moving parts. Instead of a power piston and a displacer, they use sound waves as the displacer and the speaker as the power piston.
There are already companies at work trying to commercialize this technology. The guys at Purdue are re-inventing the wheel. Check the first link about thermoacousting Stirling engines, and you'll see they've been working on this for some time.
I discovered LaTex when I was a junior in College. I had an old laptop at the time; the battery lasted longer in text mode, so I usually just used vim to type my notes, instead of messing with X. After about two weeks of using it, I got to the point where I could key in LaTex equation descriptions almost as fast as the profs could write them on the board. After those two weeks, I could also read the LaTex descriptions well enough that I could read my notes without needing to render them to a page. Although, when it came time to put together a "single page of notes" for a big test, being able to render equations in small typefaces came in REALLY handy. More than once, someone else in the class would see my page of notes and want to make a copy, as it was more legible and more compact than anything handwritten. More than a couple of my professors were proficient with it as well (CompSci major).
Laugh all you want; it works. You just have to take the time to develop the necessary proficiency.
At a previous employer, we had network-based training materials we could access on various subjects. Each one was basically a glorified Flash file, complete with voice-over and demonstrations of various things. The person who'd purchased my workstation (the department manager) felt, as you do, that sound cards and speakers have no place in a corporate environment. Consequently, when I needed to access some of the training material, I couldn't hear a blasted thing. There was no "closed caption" for the voice-over, so the training was basically useless. After pointing this out, they promptly acquired a sound card and speakers for me. I usually used headphones instead of the speakers, but what the heck.
You know, when you watch NASCAR or other racing, they frequently have an onboard camera on one or more vehicles. They have some kind of sliding, flexible shield in front of the camera which can scroll out of the way when something gets on it, blocking the view.
Would something like that be too difficult to implement over a large, rectangular solar panel? Alternately, you could try a brush driven by Muscle Wire. They tried an experiment with it on Sojourner, and I understand that it worked. How hard would it be to make a "windshield washer"-type brush which would clean the dust off the PV on a Mars rover? Especially if it increased the lifetime of the rover.
Let me get this straight. They only decided a few hours ago that the flash memory in Spirit was the probable cause of the problems, and already, if a memory stick fails it:
First off, most Sysadmin jobs don't involve swapping a NIC or other hardware-related things. They involve configuring systems, installing applications, setting up access rights, applying hotfixes/service packs/upgrades, etc. Most of these things can be done remotely, whether in Windows or Unix environments. I should know; I've done both. Terminal Services under Windows makes this SO much easier (RDesktop allows Unix machines to access Windows Terminal Services, and Citrix makes ICA clients for Linux and Solaris), and SSH is the old standby for Unix/Linux systems (most Unix systems don't bother with a GUI-based app installation routine).
Additionally, many companies are outsourcing their ENTIRE IT operation to India. Tata Consultancy owns one of the largest datacenters in the world; they're located in India. Instead of having large numbers of systems in US-based datacenters and having India-based employees managing them, the Indian consulting firms are putting in their own datacenters and hosting sites/apps/etc. A VPN connection across the Pacific is all it takes for US-based employees to access their India-based applications. Sure, certain things still need local installations (wouldn't want to put your main fileserver in India if all the users are in the States), but increasingly, the applications are being hosted in India, as well. Consequently, if a system fails and they have to swap a NIC, it is done by someone collecting Indian wages, not US wages.
Yes, this will kick out 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 on separate lines. And yes, that is using a closure. I could've squashed it further, but this is relatively small, yet legible. Like Lisp, I could've put the whole "map" expression inside the parens on the "foreach" and done away with the intermediate array.
Additionally, since it can handle hashes of arrays of hashes of integers, floats and strings (mixed), it is about as free-form in its data structure capabilities as Lisp/Scheme. It takes a while to get used to all the different syntax needed for each level, but it CAN do it. If you have the Camel Book (Programming Perl), take a look at the example on pages 273-274, which will show you a hash of hashes, where each element may contain a string, an array or another hash. It's not quite as simple as the nested levels of parentheses used in Lisp/Scheme, but it's not far from it. Unlike C/C++ or Java, you don't have to declare the data structure; the structure is programmatically enforced, like Lisp/Scheme.
Oh, and by the way: #!/usr/bin/perl
sub example() {
my $bogus = "chessercat";
if ($bogus)
{
1;
}
else
{
0;
} }
print example() . "\n";
will also work. In this case, the "1" or "0" is implied to mean "return 1" or "return 0." This begs the question as to whether or not Perl is imperative (like C, Pascal, ForTran or COBOL), functional (like Lisp/Scheme) or object oriented (like Java/C++). The reality is that it is somewhere in between.
I, too, was quite impressed with Lisp/Scheme when I learned about it in college. The rest of the world, for whatever reason, seems uninterested in it, though. In the meantime, I've found that quite a few of the things I liked about Scheme are also applicable to Perl. This has allowed me to pull some "how did you do that??!" tricks, and still use a language which is readily available and reasonably popular.
I think the better way of putting it would be "$0.20 / watt, amortized over 20 years." Typically, they talk these days of $3-4 / watt of PV capacity. In other words, a 1 kW PV array will cost $3,000 - 4,000 (that's just the panels; inverters, batteries, etc. are extra). Where I live, we average 6.5 hours direct sunlight / day throughout the year. Consequently, if I have a 1 kW PV array, I can average about 6.5 kWh of electricity / day. 6.5 kWh / day x 365.25 days / year = 2,374 kWh / year.
Incidentally, we also pay about $0.075 / kWh around here. That 1 kW PV array would save me about $178 / year. If I can get PV equipment for $0.20 / watt, which is what they're talking about in this article, that would be about $200 for a 1 kW array; it would take me a little over a year for the savings on my electric bill to pay for the PV. Right now, the payoff is in on the order of 20 years. This would constitute a VERY good reason to go ahead and make the investment in PV.
How much sunlight do you get? Take a look at NREL's maps and see for yourself. Multiply the number of hours of sunlight you get (according to the map) * number of kilowatts the PV array provides, and you can get an idea of the number of kWh you could get. Minnesota gets less than we do (Missouri), but not as much as California. Considering the fact that electricity cost > $0.20 / kWh in some places in southern CA, you can understand why some people out there are already going this direction (for some of them, the payoff is
When a utility company invests in such equipment, they typically amortize the cost over 20 years. Consequently, if it costs $3,500 / kW of PV capacity, the area provides 6.5 hours direct sunlight daily, and it does it for 20 years, that would be:
$3,500 / (6.5 * 365.25 * 20) = $0.0737 / kWh for the current technology
$200 / (6.5 * 365.25 * 20) = $0.00421 / kWh for this tech
There is an F-16N, which is modified to Navy specs, but they were never produced in large numbers. Yes, they could handle carrier launch and landings.
F-16's flown by the USAF do have tail hooks, but they are used more for emergency landings (as in "severe hydraulic failure, extemely limited braking") and ground runs (as in "hook it down REAL good, because we need to test-run the engine without risking flight).
Modern F-16's (C/D, block 50/52) cost about $35 million apiece. Yes, you can hang a LANTIRN pod on it to give it IR navigation. F-15's were more in the $50-75 million range (having two engines, instead of one like the F-16, tends to up the price a bit). F-16's are relatively cheap, relatively small (less hangar space required), extremely nimble, and excellent at medium altitude. An F-15 would win out at 40k feet or better, but an F-16 has a definite maneuverability advantage in the 20-30k feet range.
Yes, I know a thing or two about them. I spent four years working on them.
Slashdot Mirror
There are certain parts of the bandwidth which are "off limits" to everyone, public or private.
Take a look here for some of the frequencies.
The idea is that, if we want to take clear radio-frequency "images" of distant images, it makes sense to avoid polluting the sections of the bandwidth where those images are to be found. No, I don't think any of these lower-power trasmitters will be broadcasting directly in these ranges. Unfortunately, most transmitters also transmit harmonics of their main frequency, at lower power. Consequently, everyone gives these frequencies, AND their lower harmonics, a pretty wide berth.
It has a 16 MHz CPU, 8 MB RAM, and monochrome LCD display. It's a very simple device, and goes a long way on very little. I can take it with me on a road trip over the weekend, use it as
- an e-book reader
- a spreadsheet
- a note taker
- a calendar
- an alarm clock
you name it. If I REALLY need to, I can buy some regular AAA batteries while I'm out and about. It's not fancy, but it works well.I went to work in summer 2000 (after finishing college December 1999). I was making 48k/year. Summer 2001, it rose to $52k/year (different contract). Summer 2002, it was 55k/year (got hired from a contract position). Summer 2003, I was laid off. I didn't find permanent, full-time work again until May 2004. After 11 months with negligible income, I'm currently somewhere between my 2001 and 2002 wages (in terms of annual salary).
My net income over the last two years has been dismal. I'm making less, per year, than I was two years ago. So, where's this wage and opportunity growth they're talking about? I'm seeing more evidence for the reduced real income that they've been observing for the last two years.
A little something I'd like to point out.
Prices are, for the most part, set by supply and demand. I say "for the most part," because there is some manipulation. We need to remember, though, that crude oil supply isn't the only factor in the supply side of the equation.
In 2003, there was blackout which affected several refineries in the Western U.S., and a pipeline shutdown in Arizona. These refineries supplied most of the gasoline being used in the western States, and the pipeline supplied much of the gas from refineries to distribution points in Arizona. Gas prices in Arizona skyrocketed for a couple weeks, until the refineries could return to normal operations and the pipeline could be re-opened. While the price of crude didn't vary during that time period, the supply of gasoline (not crude) was greatly diminished, causing a spike in prices.
Back in the '90's, many oil companies actually reduced their refining capacity. Meanwhile, gasoline consumption has continued to rise. Now, all the major refineries are operating at 95% capacity or higher. When they slow down at the change in seasons (summer-time gasoline has a different formula from winter-time gasoline, in most areas, and they have to shut down parts of the refinery to change formulas), the price tends to spike for a little while. But, the fact remains, the choke point in the current supply-demand equation, WRT gasoline, isn't the price of crude; it's the refining capacity. The supply is hitting limits, and the demand is still growing. All of this is pushing the price upward, which is pushing the profit margins, for the oil companies, upward.
And yes, these were purposeful manipulations on the part of the oil companies.
Agreed, although, in my case, I bought a Palm IIIx. It has time, date, alarms, etc. The ability to have an alarm go off, on a particular day, at a particular time, set months in advance, is nice. Don't know too many wristwatches which can do that (I'm sure there is one, somewhere, which can, but I haven't seen it or felt a need to buy it). I don't wear a watch, anymore.
Also, since the Palm is small enough to put in my front pocket, I can take it with me, anywhere. With Plucker (which has been mentioned elsewhere), I always have reading materials with me. This comes in handy when I'm sitting in the dentist office, waiting on one of the kids. With BrainForest, I've got a top-notch notes-taking tool. Great for jotting down that idea, or for taking notes in a meeting at work. With TextPlus, I can input data pretty quickly, so the idea or the notes can be pretty detailed. I've also have Addition, which is a spreadsheet. I sometimes get some whining from my SO about "we should go back and look at the van/SUV at that car dealership." Just pull out the spreadsheet, figure up the monthly payments based on the price on the windshield, and the whining ends, immediately (new vehicles are too damned expensive, even with a six-year note). Takes less than 60 seconds, and I don't have to listen to her yap about it the rest of the day. Had to remove all the games, though; if there were games on it, our youngest would "disappear" with it for hours at a time, and I'd have dead batteries on my hands. No games = no excuse for him to mess with it. In short, small is very good and very useful You don't discover how useful until you've had it for a while.
I have a cellphone, too (provided by my employer). It gets used for the usual cellphone stuff, but that's it. My Palm contains pretty much everything else.
Remove the main pulley on the engine, and replace it with a special toothed one for this rig. Remove the alternator. Hell, remove the starter while you're at it. Put the special bracket on the engine. Mount the Integrated Starter Generator (the term has been around long before this product was announced) on the bracket. Use the toothed belt to connect the ISG to the main pulley. Mount the electronics box and connect it to the whole thing. Congratulations: you now have what's known as a light hybrid vehicle. The ISG can provide regenerative braking and off-the-line torque. Technically, you can kill the engine while you're sitting at the light, and the ISG has enough horsepower to spin the engine to operating speed (roll-starting it, essentially) and get you started off the line.
Ford has been playing with a prototype system similar to this. They got about 15% improvement in fuel economy. Considering the increased costs involved, they decided it wasn't worth it. Not for a measly 3-4 MPG on an Escape. For an Excursion, you're talking 1-2 more MPG.
Don't get me wrong; this helps. Just not as much as you might hope. It's a good step in the right direction, in an attempt to help reduce the fuel consumption of existing vehicles. And, as they mention, since there are NO internal modifications to the engine, it's a bolt-on accessory which your typical shade-tree mechanic could probably install on a Saturday.
If you've got solar or some other kind of distributed power generation, you can do it, too. It's called net metering. And yes, people with solar energy have the advantage, as their equipment usually produce the most during the peak times of the day, whereas they fall short during the off-peak times. At least a few people have ended up drawing more than they produce, but still ended up with a check from the electric company, because the peak-time contribution more than made up for the off-peak consumption.
None of these things I've mentioned require significant expense on software. Subversion is free; the Wiki software is free (and it can be used for two of the above tasks). I've worked for too many companies, though, which no longer exist; none of these companies had ANY of the above tools in place. All the successful ones had at least one, if not all, of the above.
Amen. We've got Wiki in place where I can document what I understand the requirements to be. I then send links to all the major stakeholders in a project. We hash things out until we've got something everyone understands and agrees with. It is no where near a formal spec document, but it's enough to work from. Once everyone agrees "that looks good," I get to work.
Depending on the size of the project, I'll get a certain amount of development done and demo it to the stakeholders. Feedback gets worked into the page on the Wiki. Consequently, features get added, screens get changed, ideas for further development of the project get added, but we keep track of what needs to be completed for certain stages of development. You'd be surprised how well this works.
Yes, we have meetings. The results get captured in the Wiki; this way, if someone missed the meeting, they can still see what's up. Yes, adjustments to the specs and the design do occur. For our organization, this works well. We get a great deal of development done, and we roll-out new applications and features for our users on a regular basis. We never really get to the point of a heavily-detailed formal spec. But, we manage to make sure the stakeholders and developers are all on the same page, and the users get the apps they need. I have yet to run across an instance where I delivered an app, and the users looked at the results and said "that's not what we wanted."
Its iterative development to the hilt, and it works beautifully for us. It's very agile, responsive, fast-moving. Let's see an outsourcing company master that.
My employer has clued into that fact. At first, management said they didn't need a programmer; the head of IT (now my boss) disagreed. My boss originally brought me in for 24 hours of work (contract). They were impressed with what I could do. Management would ask "can you make it do such-and-such," and they'd see it happen in a matter of seconds (usually a matter of changing some layout or cosmetic stuff) or a minute or so (adding another field to the output). After all that, they decided to bring me in part-time on contract. They kept asking, "can you make it do such-and-such," and I'd make it do what they wanted. They finally hired me on, full-time, with salary and benefits. Now, they're looking at adding more programmers.
Why the change? Because they saw value in what I could do, and it didn't take three weeks and a detailed spec before they saw results.
Early on, we had someone in the HR department complain that they didn't like having to key in the entire working address, city, state, zip, phone, fax, etc. for each new hire as they came on board (we've tripled in size since January '04). About 30% of the company works from home or other remote locations, but the other 70% work from one of five or six locations. Within 30 minutes I had tweaked the app so that, if they selected a location where the new hire was working, the fields were auto-populated; they could go back and edit as needed, but they didn't need to key it all in, every time. We're talking 30 minutes from HR person whining (and my overhearing it) to my demoing the new feature. They were amazed it could be done so fast. My response? "That's what happens when you've got a programmer on staff; if this job was outsourced to India, you MIGHT see this feature in two weeks." HR promptly decided they liked having a programmer onsite. They helped convince the management.
In my previous job, I managed the Software Configuration Management (SCM) system. They outsourced my job to India. This entailed flying my replacement in so I could train him (over the course of about four weeks), then laying me off. Management just didn't see any value to having someone onsite who did my task. From what I understand from those who weren't laid off, everyone hates that fact that it now takes forever to get stuff done; normally, they'd just drop by my cubicle and ask "what would it take to make such-and-such happen," and I could either do it, or give them a timeframe. If there was something they could do to accomplish the task (or accelerate its completion), I could lay it out on the spot. If there was anything unclear about what they wanted, or how they wanted it, we could discuss it on the spot and clear it up. Now, all such tasks are handled via e-mail or IM; things take longer to get done, and it usually takes multiple tries before the customer (employee in the US) gets what they actually want (communications problems). The solution to this (of course) is to lay off all the US employees and do the whole job in India. They haven't done that, though; they are starting to see some value in keeping experienced programmers, familiar with the existing systems, in place for further development on those systems.
It all comes back to value. If your employee doesn't see the value in what you do, or doesn't see value in having you around to do it, you're a prime candidate for outsourcing. Considering the fact that it took me 11 months to find a new full-time job, you'll understand if I'm keeping my eye on the "value" aspect.
I wholeheartedly agree that Straczynski could save Trek, assuming he's given a free hand.
I wonder how he'll handle not having to deal with Newtonian physics? One of the hallmarks of B5 was that the writers and animators actually had a good grasp of physics, i.e. you can change the ship's attitude without having to change direction. As someone who paid attention in physics class, I really enjoyed that aspect of the show. Now, when my kids watch it, they ask if spaceships can actually do that stuff, and I get an opportunity to make them think. Very few Trek episodes can do that.
Eagerly anticipating more information on this.
Possibly so. It was in my training manual when I went through Basic, though, so I'm assuming there's some truth to it.
For reference to prior art, just look to Samuel Morse (as in Morse Code). I mean, he developed an entire alphabet based on patterns of short and long clicks. It had different meanings for multiple clicks of various durations.
Before Microsoft claims license fees on this one, they better get the license from Morse's estate. If, that is, it hasn't gone into public domain.
During the original Gulf War (during the reign of Bush I), Military Intel was debriefing some captured Iraqi prisoners. One of them was some-or-another commander. They asked him which of our weapons he feared most. The people questioning him were expecting him to mention one of our smart bombs, Tomahawks, or something shiny and new. His response was "the B-52." The interrogators were perplexed; "but, your position was never hit by B-52's." "No," he replied, "but I saw one that was."
IIRC, this was the plane which invented the term "carpet bombing." Personally, I don't think I'd want to be sitting in my trench and watching a wall of fire and high explosive rolling across the desert in my direction. The Buffs could do that like no plane.
Agreed on the "weird" aspect. Spent a few months at Nellis, and got to see Buffs coming and going as part of some or another combat competition they had going at the time.
You're right about the "nose down" takeoff. My whole training group had their jaws on the ramp when we saw that; we're used to F-16's taking off with a 40 degree or better nose-up. It picked up speed, rolled out, then the tail lifted up, then the whole thing rose from the runway. Talk about counter-intuitive. Additionally, the main one I remember taxied and took off with the outriggers up, but there were NLT four KC-135's following it. From what I understood, it took off with a fairly low fuel load, then took on a full fuel load in the air.
The wingspan on the crazy thing was sufficiently wide, and the wash from the turbojets sufficiently strong, that they had to send some street-cleaning equipment out there to clean the rocks and dust from the runway before we could put any fighers out there.
In my case, I had some admin experience and some development experience, when I tackled a job as a Conf. Mgr. My official title was "software engineer," but I was administering their Revision Control system, StarTeam.
Yes, I did get to influence a lot of policies, and I quickly learned that Conf. Mgmt is NOT a bunch of useless administravia. There are very real benefits to such systems, if they are used properly.
Given the chance, go for it. It's a real eye-opener, and your development practices will never be the same.
Guys, it's a thermoacoustic Stirling. Stirling engines can do a variety of things. You can supply heat, and they will supply motion (usually a reciprocating motion, which works nicely when connected with a linear alternator). Or, you can supply motion (reciprocating), and they will move heat (i.e. usually cooling something). Sunpower has been making cryocoolers based on them for years. And yes, they even played with a module which would attach to a CPU and supercool it.
Hit Google and look for information on Stirling engines. Then, reduce the number of moving parts. Instead of a power piston and a displacer, they use sound waves as the displacer and the speaker as the power piston.
There are already companies at work trying to commercialize this technology. The guys at Purdue are re-inventing the wheel. Check the first link about thermoacousting Stirling engines, and you'll see they've been working on this for some time.
I discovered LaTex when I was a junior in College. I had an old laptop at the time; the battery lasted longer in text mode, so I usually just used vim to type my notes, instead of messing with X. After about two weeks of using it, I got to the point where I could key in LaTex equation descriptions almost as fast as the profs could write them on the board. After those two weeks, I could also read the LaTex descriptions well enough that I could read my notes without needing to render them to a page. Although, when it came time to put together a "single page of notes" for a big test, being able to render equations in small typefaces came in REALLY handy. More than once, someone else in the class would see my page of notes and want to make a copy, as it was more legible and more compact than anything handwritten. More than a couple of my professors were proficient with it as well (CompSci major).
Laugh all you want; it works. You just have to take the time to develop the necessary proficiency.
At a previous employer, we had network-based training materials we could access on various subjects. Each one was basically a glorified Flash file, complete with voice-over and demonstrations of various things. The person who'd purchased my workstation (the department manager) felt, as you do, that sound cards and speakers have no place in a corporate environment. Consequently, when I needed to access some of the training material, I couldn't hear a blasted thing. There was no "closed caption" for the voice-over, so the training was basically useless. After pointing this out, they promptly acquired a sound card and speakers for me. I usually used headphones instead of the speakers, but what the heck.
That give you some ideas?
You know, when you watch NASCAR or other racing, they frequently have an onboard camera on one or more vehicles. They have some kind of sliding, flexible shield in front of the camera which can scroll out of the way when something gets on it, blocking the view.
Would something like that be too difficult to implement over a large, rectangular solar panel? Alternately, you could try a brush driven by Muscle Wire. They tried an experiment with it on Sojourner, and I understand that it worked. How hard would it be to make a "windshield washer"-type brush which would clean the dust off the PV on a Mars rover? Especially if it increased the lifetime of the rover.
Let me get this straight. They only decided a few hours ago that the flash memory in Spirit was the probable cause of the problems, and already, if a memory stick fails it:
pulls a "mars lander"
Man, even the memes are moving at Intenet speed.
First off, most Sysadmin jobs don't involve swapping a NIC or other hardware-related things. They involve configuring systems, installing applications, setting up access rights, applying hotfixes/service packs/upgrades, etc. Most of these things can be done remotely, whether in Windows or Unix environments. I should know; I've done both. Terminal Services under Windows makes this SO much easier (RDesktop allows Unix machines to access Windows Terminal Services, and Citrix makes ICA clients for Linux and Solaris), and SSH is the old standby for Unix/Linux systems (most Unix systems don't bother with a GUI-based app installation routine).
Additionally, many companies are outsourcing their ENTIRE IT operation to India. Tata Consultancy owns one of the largest datacenters in the world; they're located in India. Instead of having large numbers of systems in US-based datacenters and having India-based employees managing them, the Indian consulting firms are putting in their own datacenters and hosting sites/apps/etc. A VPN connection across the Pacific is all it takes for US-based employees to access their India-based applications. Sure, certain things still need local installations (wouldn't want to put your main fileserver in India if all the users are in the States), but increasingly, the applications are being hosted in India, as well. Consequently, if a system fails and they have to swap a NIC, it is done by someone collecting Indian wages, not US wages.
Anyone who's familiar with Lisp (or, in my case, Scheme) and Perl promptly discovers that Perl has more in common with Lisp than with C.
/usr/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl
Example:
#!
@_ = map { $_ * 2.0 } (1, 2, 3, 4, 5);
foreach (@_)
{
print "$_\n";
}
Yes, this will kick out 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 on separate lines. And yes, that is using a closure. I could've squashed it further, but this is relatively small, yet legible. Like Lisp, I could've put the whole "map" expression inside the parens on the "foreach" and done away with the intermediate array.
Additionally, since it can handle hashes of arrays of hashes of integers, floats and strings (mixed), it is about as free-form in its data structure capabilities as Lisp/Scheme. It takes a while to get used to all the different syntax needed for each level, but it CAN do it. If you have the Camel Book (Programming Perl), take a look at the example on pages 273-274, which will show you a hash of hashes, where each element may contain a string, an array or another hash. It's not quite as simple as the nested levels of parentheses used in Lisp/Scheme, but it's not far from it. Unlike C/C++ or Java, you don't have to declare the data structure; the structure is programmatically enforced, like Lisp/Scheme.
Oh, and by the way:
#!
sub example()
{
my $bogus = "chessercat";
if ($bogus)
{
1;
}
else
{
0;
}
}
print example() . "\n";
will also work. In this case, the "1" or "0" is implied to mean "return 1" or "return 0." This begs the question as to whether or not Perl is imperative (like C, Pascal, ForTran or COBOL), functional (like Lisp/Scheme) or object oriented (like Java/C++). The reality is that it is somewhere in between.
I, too, was quite impressed with Lisp/Scheme when I learned about it in college. The rest of the world, for whatever reason, seems uninterested in it, though. In the meantime, I've found that quite a few of the things I liked about Scheme are also applicable to Perl. This has allowed me to pull some "how did you do that??!" tricks, and still use a language which is readily available and reasonably popular.
I think the better way of putting it would be "$0.20 / watt, amortized over 20 years." Typically, they talk these days of $3-4 / watt of PV capacity. In other words, a 1 kW PV array will cost $3,000 - 4,000 (that's just the panels; inverters, batteries, etc. are extra). Where I live, we average 6.5 hours direct sunlight / day throughout the year. Consequently, if I have a 1 kW PV array, I can average about 6.5 kWh of electricity / day. 6.5 kWh / day x 365.25 days / year = 2,374 kWh / year.
Incidentally, we also pay about $0.075 / kWh around here. That 1 kW PV array would save me about $178 / year. If I can get PV equipment for $0.20 / watt, which is what they're talking about in this article, that would be about $200 for a 1 kW array; it would take me a little over a year for the savings on my electric bill to pay for the PV. Right now, the payoff is in on the order of 20 years. This would constitute a VERY good reason to go ahead and make the investment in PV.
How much sunlight do you get? Take a look at NREL's maps and see for yourself. Multiply the number of hours of sunlight you get (according to the map) * number of kilowatts the PV array provides, and you can get an idea of the number of kWh you could get. Minnesota gets less than we do (Missouri), but not as much as California. Considering the fact that electricity cost > $0.20 / kWh in some places in southern CA, you can understand why some people out there are already going this direction (for some of them, the payoff is
When a utility company invests in such equipment, they typically amortize the cost over 20 years. Consequently, if it costs $3,500 / kW of PV capacity, the area provides 6.5 hours direct sunlight daily, and it does it for 20 years, that would be:
$3,500 / (6.5 * 365.25 * 20) = $0.0737 / kWh for the current technology
$200 / (6.5 * 365.25 * 20) = $0.00421 / kWh for this tech
Which would you rather pay on your electric bill?
There is an F-16N, which is modified to Navy specs, but they were never produced in large numbers. Yes, they could handle carrier launch and landings.
F-16's flown by the USAF do have tail hooks, but they are used more for emergency landings (as in "severe hydraulic failure, extemely limited braking") and ground runs (as in "hook it down REAL good, because we need to test-run the engine without risking flight).
Modern F-16's (C/D, block 50/52) cost about $35 million apiece. Yes, you can hang a LANTIRN pod on it to give it IR navigation. F-15's were more in the $50-75 million range (having two engines, instead of one like the F-16, tends to up the price a bit). F-16's are relatively cheap, relatively small (less hangar space required), extremely nimble, and excellent at medium altitude. An F-15 would win out at 40k feet or better, but an F-16 has a definite maneuverability advantage in the 20-30k feet range.
Yes, I know a thing or two about them. I spent four years working on them.