Actually, this is rarely the case anymore. Older hearing aids had separate earmolds but most modern hearing aids are built into the actual earmold itself and don't have that separate behind-the-ear component. The only modern ones that still need them are the very strong ones that can't fit inside an earmold, the very cheap ones, or the ones that are for children or temporary use. An adult could use the same mold for 5-10 years, but a child needs a new one every couple of years or so as they grow. Sometimes when I've had to send a hearing aid in for repair ( 2 weeks or so ) I've been given a behind-the-ear loaner, but other than that I've not worn one with a separate earmold in 20 years.
The first thing I'll tell you is that fundamentally they're all pretty much the same. In general they're all made with equivalent components and the only real difference is Bells and Whistles. It's the only thing the companies can do to differentiate themselves from other manufacturers. Unless you've got some special type of loss, a basic simple model will probably work just fine compared to something fancy. The biggest choice comes down to size and how self-conscious you are about it. Generally, the smaller they are, the weaker they are and more expensive. You're paying for vanity.
You can probably forget about insurance covering it. Almost no health insurance will cover them. They're considered non-essential, "cosmetic" devices. My company provides very good health insurance and only once over the past 30 years have they ever covered -any- of my hearing aid purchases. 11 years ago (during the dot.com boom) I actually had a company cover part of one ( $1000 of a $2800 purchase ) but that was an anomaly. If you're lucky they might cover the hearing exam but considering most places give you that free as part of the purchase process it doesn't do much good. I've had a couple insurance companies tell me "no we don't cover them, but we offer these great coupons" which were basically a 25% discount off of something that was marked up 100% to begin with.
The most important thing I can tell you is to get a Costco, Sam's Club, or other shopping club membership. I have a Costco membership and have bought my last two sets of hearing aids there. They were 1/3 the price that I was charged at regular hearing aid stores. Costco had audiologists that were just as qualified as the regular stores, and sold the same models/manufacturers as the regular stores. As an example, my last "hearing aid store" model cost $2800 in 1999. The three I've bought since then ( the last two a couple of years ago ) cost $890-$1000 each and were far better than the $2800 model.
I had a set of these, they were packaged with a baseball game. Not just one but four triggers, one under each finger. Sure it's a lot bigger but it still puts trigger controls under the main control stick. And it beats the patent by at least 10 years.
They actually weren't bad. They had an arcade style stick on top that worked well. The numeric keypad was mostly worthless from a gaming perspective. The triggers worked fairly well as long as you were trying to pull them one at a time. Trying to pull more than one at once was awkward with trying to hold the controller and work the joystick.
I had it done 5 years ago. Paid $3200, insurance covered about $50. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
I had complications the first night ( the flaps shifted ) and had to have them redone the next day, but even with that things were better than contacts within a week. I had starring / halo issues at night for about six months but those gradually faded.
It's a wonderful site on anything involving historical space exploration and rocketry. I've been going there for years. I have a lot of these wonderful historical sites. These are quasi-related:
This summer a couple of my coworkers and I won free XBoxes from my company through a technical awards program. This was a new program so we didn't actually receive them but knew they were coming sometime in the future. After a couple weeks we learned that we could get them then, or wait and get XBox 360s when they were released. Naturally ( two of us already had XBox ) we decided to wait.
A couple of months or so ago we started hearing stories about the expected shortage of 360s and mentioned to management that we weren't finding them for pre-order in anything but bundles of $700+ for the good unit ( is anybody -really- going to want the non-HD/wireless version? The extra features of the enhanced model for the extra $100 seems awfully cheap to me ). We were told to go ahead and pre-order ourselves each a bundled system so we would have them on release. We were all very impressed with our management with this extra step up. My two coworkers each ordered a bundle at the Walmart web site ( one of the only one left that we could find that were still selling them ). I decided to hold off until closer to the launch date to get more information.
A few weeks ago another coworker of mine won. He asked if he could get something else because he really wasn't interested in the 360 and didn't even own a television in the first place. Management said sure, just keep the value close to the 360 bundle. He ended up buying a Nikon D50 which is a very nice Digital SLR camera; much more useful to him than the 360. One of my coworkers decided to give up his 360 and go with the D50 as well. His ordered 360 shows up on Monday and he has to ship it off to a coworker in a different city that missed the pre-order. I found out about this a few days ago. They got their cameras a couple weeks ago and are really happy with them.
I like the looks of the 360 and it's capabilities, but I've been having a hard time working up motivation for it. I'm sure I'll end up buying one but I'm in no great hurry to get one now. Sure the unit itself is great but I'm just not seeing the games that make me want to put up with the launch hassle to get one. Particularily when I have no idea when I'd actually get one. I'd rather not be forced to buy a bundle with a few so-so launch titles but wait until sometime next year when they have games that I actually want and I can just walk in and buy it.
I ordered my camera this afternoon. It's not as good as the Nikon, but it's a much smaller Canon that's much more convenient for travel. Hopefully I'll have it by the holiday next week, but I know it's going to be quicker and easier than it would be for me to get a 360.
Air normally contains (roughly) 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, and trace amounts of a couple of dozen other molecules. This is increasing the amount of Oxygen and Hydrogen in the air entering the engine and conversely lowering the ratio of the Nitrogen, Argon and other (mostly nonvolatile) gases. This will naturally allow for a quicker, hotter, more complete burn that generates more power and less naughty parts like Nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.
I would imagine that the additional Oxygen provides a large chunk of the benefits, rather than it just being attributed to the Hydrogen.
They've actually invented a way to use some handy prepackaged "air for burning" (distilled water) that is (relatively) efficient and simple to make by using electrolysis. Not too much of it, because there it can be too much of a good thing. Try running an engine off pure oxygen and see what you get. You'd still get explosions, but they'd likely be uncontained this time around. The amount of electricity to electrolyse a lot of water would be quite counter-productive anyway.
I would imagine you could get much of the same results if you could figure out a way to filter some of the Nitrogen out of the incoming air. Unfortunately, there's no good, cheap, efficient way to do that... yet....
This says nothing about the underlying problem. Was the release date incorrectly scheduled from the start? Did it change mysteriously while the person was incarcerated? Did the system just incorrectly say "Release this guy" on a random day? Did it give the wrong person to be released? If so, was there any similarities between the two inmates? There just isn't enough information here to make any guesses.
Was it a contractor or an in-house developed project would also be interesting. As well as what happened to the inmates who were released late? Is it just "tough luck" for them?
The biggest issue is to only have one specific sound source you're trying to muffle. You have to place the microphone as near to the sound source as possible, and the location of your speaker will depend on how long it takes to process the signal. It will also be highly directional unless you rig something up with multiple speakers all aimed in different directions. You will also need to be a certain distance away to allow the reverse-phase sounds to merge and cancel each other out.
The other issue is that it will only work on low pitched sounds, the lower the better. The slower the frequency, the more time you have to do the math and output your opposite signal. High frequency sounds you can pretty much forget about being able to process.
One use for this might be to muffle a single exhaust pipe from a loud motor, but you won't be able to get it to work for general noise. The reason it works in Noise-cancelling headsets is that the microphone is located at the destination of the sound (your ear), rather than at the source. The closer you can get it either end, the better it will work. It's not really worth doing it in Software
One interesting thought about quieting individual fans or motors is to use an Adaptive algorithm. Because most of these devices make a consistent repeating sound, it would be interesting to be able to anticipate the sound source over time and broadcast an estimated calculation before the current sound is even processed and use the processed result to tweak the future estimation. This would work on only reasonably consistent sources and there would be issues with feedback and unexpected noise changes.
I agree both of these things are hot, my issue was the entire machine's power supply was only 63.5 watts. This was shared between the CPU, keyboard, motherboard, RAM, two floppy drives, graphics card, and whatever else you had plugged in to it. If the machine came with only a single floppy, the second bay had a load resistor plugged into it that was required to keep the power supply happy. This load resistor is what he burned himself on.
My issue was more how did it manage to get that hot with what little wattage was left over after running the rest of the system. One of the primary upgrades for those ( besides more ram ) was a bigger power supply.
I started working on computers back in the 80's when everybody had their own custom case, style, and philosophy. I worked for a well known mom-and-pop computer shop in our city that had a reputation for low prices so I was working on pretty much everything. Many of the higher-end PC's were built with the large-computer mentality of the mainframe / minicomputer era of over-engineering. Besides being overpriced, many included filters over the fan because "real computers" had them. Most of the time the filters were more trouble than they were worth.
The primary problem was that people were not cleaning the filters. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Putting filters over your fans means that somebody has to regularily check and change them. I've had PC's on shop floors that had the filters so clogged with oil and gunk that the fans they were covering burned out from overload. After I replaced them and explained everything to them I might have to go back 6 months later to do the exact same thing because "they hadn't got around to changing them". I've burned my fingers on parts inside some of those machines, and that was the days before heat sinks in the first place.
Filters are good as long as you're going to religiously inspect them every month or so and clean or replace them.
As a passing curiosity, does anybody know exactly how much heat the load resistor on one of the old original 63.5 watt PC's put out when you had it hooked up in place of the 2nd floppy drive? I remember one particular system that was in a dusty factory. Somebody had jury-rigged a filter across the front of the system using window screen and medical gauze. The gauze had gunked up so much the fan in the power supply was basically worthless. A coworker managed to get a second degree burn off the load-resistor and I never could figure out how that managed to happen with something that only had 63.5 watts in the first place.
As a balloon and airship pilot, I find this completely ridiculous. Equilibrium is a -very- tenuous thing. When flying a helium balloon, you can go up 10 feet simply by throwing a handful of sand out of the basket. Even though this airship is much larger, the same principle applies. You cannot add or drop large amounts of weight in flight or you would be completely out of control.
Just dropping a few tons of weight would throw an airship thousands of feet into the air. Everything about weight control must happen -very- slowly because that is the only way the aircraft can be adjusted to the changing weights and still maintain control. Modern airships achieve a large amount of their lift to the engines and aerodynamic affects, most of which disappears when they are stationary or moving slowly. Airships are in no way or form manueverable in anything but light winds. There's a reason an airship requires dozens of people to run out on the ground and grab ropes to dock it.
The other obvious problem is the updrafts and downdrafts and other winds associated with a forest fire. Trying to fly something like this over one would be suicide. With the rapidly rising and falling columns of air and the huge surface area of the craft, it would be completely uncontrollable at best and ripped apart at worst. Even if you could vent enough lifting gas ( hydrogen or helium ) to keep from crashing, it would take hours or days to refill the gas to lift something of that mass again.
This is an interesting idea, but it must be taken in context. Takeoffs and landings should be made early in the morning or late in the day when winds are calmer. Inclement weather may prevent landing at all due to the weather hazards involved. A large ground crew will be needed to help with controlling the craft. A huge amount of mass can be transported, but the logistics of supporting such an unwieldingly large craft have to be accounted for as well. There's no way this could be a battlefield-deployment system without complete air and ground control.
I remember reading proposals for something like this that were going around in the late 40's and 50's. The idea was that you would use nuclear weapons to blast out a canal/sea into the interior of Libya. The aims weren't to lower the sea level, but to provide an area of high evaporation and moisture content that would dramatically increase the rainfall in Egypt, Israel, and the Arabian peninsula.
A lot of people were really interested in the idea and the UN even investigated it, but it finally died due to concerns about the fallout and radiation and such, particularily amongst the Libyans and people downwind of the blasts.
It's a very interesting idea, but the amount of rock and earth that would have to be moved using conventional mining and digging is prohibitive. Many people were also uneasy about affecting weather patterns that dramatically, no matter what the immediate gain.
Actually, I tend to agree with both of you. The term "Civil War Widow" came from the US Government because they were still being paid pensions from their husbands' civil war service. Confederate soldiers exempted of course, although I believe many of the Confederate Civil War Widows received a stipend from "Southern Charitable Organizations" for the equivalent.
Only 3 weeks was awesome and they were glad to have it. Just 54-60 years before was the California Gold Rush when the travel time was a lot longer. If you went by land it was 5-6 months IF you arrived at all. Lots of people died along the trail. If you went by sea it was more like 1-3 months IF you lived. Lots of people died of disease by crossing Panama on foot or were lost sailing all the way around South America.
Nowdays, people get pissy when their four hour flight gets delayed for an hour because of bad weather. People don't really realize how much and in how short a time things have changed in this world. There are people alive who can tell you about the 1906 earthquake and fire because they were there. The last of the civil-war widows only died a year or two ago.
People talk about "Ancient History" but it really wasn't all that long ago.
Why don't you try something simple and turn your access-point antenna 90 degrees?
In normal antennas, the strongest signal is perpendicular to it with the weakest above it or below it ( pointing at it or away from it ). This is fine if you point the antenna straight up and you're on the same floor because the strongest reception radiates horizontally out around it. If you're two floors below it, try turning the antenna 90 degrees so the sweet spot aims down toward you.
If this doesn't work well enough for you, the next best thing might be to try a third-party firmware for your access point if it's available. I'm using the Linksys WRT54G and the Sveasoft firmware allows you to increase the power past the out-of-the-box settings. I bumped my power up 25% and that made my connections much more stable.
If those don't work, the next cheapest option might be to invest in a new antenna for your AP. Most antennas for AP's are omni-directional. They broadcast out in all directions. My main AP happens to be against an outside wall, so I installed a directional antenna that would only radiate towards the inner 180 degrees of the house. Optimally that could "double your power" in the house at the expense of the guy next door getting free net access off of you.
Re:I dont want to steal their thunder..
on
Titan's Alien Thunder
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Everything is a trade-off.
No matter what you do, it takes a huge amount of resources to orbit Saturn, so it made sense to load up as many instruments as you can for economy of scale. It's 22 feet x 13 feet and weighs six tons. It's taken it seven years to get to Saturn. The cost of building, launching, and staffing 3 or 4 smaller devices would be a great deal more.
Cassini's two cameras are only one megapixel (1024 pixels square) but their versatility far outweighs this "low resolution". They are wide-angle and narrow angle with a range of filters that can see in visible, infrared, and ultraviolet. The narrow angle can see a penny at a distance of 4km. The biggest problem with Cassini is that it's only got a 140 Kbps data rate back to earth. All 12 of Cassini's instruments have to share this pipe, so there isn't any spare bandwidth. To make things worse, Cassini doesn't have a scan-platform so you have to aim the whole thing to transmit and take pictures. A higher resolution camera wouldn't give you that much benefit at the cost of a lot longer transfer time. That was the point of the dual cameras. Wide-angle to look at everything and narrow-angle to zoom in on the interesting stuff.
The Mars Rovers are even more limited. They can transfer 11 Kbps direct to earth, or 128 kbps relayed through the Mars orbiters.
It all comes down to one of those old military sayings. Armchair generals discuss tactics. Real generals discuss Logistics. The supply lines in space are very long or non-existent.
Okay, I have no idea how that got submitted. Must have been a UPS glitch.:)
What I was saying was, I use "broken" UPS with used batteries that I can get for next to nothing. Old car batteries have worked well for me. I charge them up fully with a normal car battery charger before I hook them up to the UPS guts. Even if they can't provide the surge to start a car anymore, they can still usually provide enough power to run the computer through a few-second glitch and a minute or two shutdown. Even if I have to replace them once every couple of years, they haven't really cost me anything in the first place.
I just want the UPS to carry me through the few second brownout or outtage. If the power is out for more than 10 seconds, chances are it's going to be off for a while and I trigger the shutdown on the systems. I don't plug the monitors into the UPSs because 21" monitors take too much current draw and why bother leaving them on just to watch the shutdown. I've been using a half-dozen UPS like this for 10 years now, and haven't spent more than $100 or so total.
Having said that, I have one Main server that runs on a normal UPS that can keep it, the main router, and the internet link up for an hour. This -does- need to stay up because it's too much of a pain to restart everything. Everything else can shut off until the power resumes.
I've taken a rather pragmatic approach to the whole UPS situation. The power in my house and at my company is usually pretty stable, except for an occasional flicker once in a while, usually during a thunderstorm. My philosophy is to use the UPSs only long enough to handle a flicker or to keep the systems up long enough to do a shutdown. The power only goes out for more than 30 seconds no more than once a year or so. I don't really feel the need to spend much (any) money to handle something that only happens once or twice a year.
I can get broken UPS for free, just for hauling them away. Unless it's taken a lightning hit or something, 90% of the time the electronics are fine and the battery has gone bad.lectronics are fine and it's the battery that's toast.
I'm not affiliated with Sveasoft, although I'm running their firmware on two access points of mine. I've browsed their forums, and while I'm not a subscriber I've considered it. Much of this discussion appears to be misleading of the actual facts as I see them.
Sveasoft modified the GPL'd Linksys firmware adding a lot of features, capabilities and bug fixes. Originally, the firmware and source code were freely available on the Sveasoft ftp site. There were usually two versions: a work-in-progress and a latest-stable-release. The work-in-progress was exactly that - new features that may or may not be working, old features that might be broken, and miscellaneous instabilities or anomalies. The source code for the work-in-progress was not always available, but then people were told not to use the work-in-progress unless they had a specific reason to do so. People were told to download the stable release unless they were willing to help test the unstable version or put up with it's limitations.
Tech support was handled on the forums. This worked pretty well for knowledgable people, but became increasingly difficult when people would download the work-in-progress and then have things that wouldn't work. A few months ago, several individuals started complaining about GPL responsibilities and demanded the source-code to the work-in-progress be posted. This despite the fact the work-in-progress wasn't an actual release, but a testing copy.
Sveasoft became disillusioned by the amount of vitriol and demands from these annoying individuals and decided to switch to a subscription basis for the prerelease versions. The source code and binaries for release versions would still be available for download, but the bleeding edge would only be available to people who paid the $20/year subscription or worked out an arrangement with Sveasoft. They said they'd be more than happy to waive the fee if you were contributing something to the effort. That could be help with coding, writing documentation, online support, testing features, or many other ways to assist their efforts. Propose something to them.
They never refused to release the source code. They release the source code when they do an actual release of the firmware, when it's nice and stable and working. Sveasoft has said everybody can freely redistribute the release versions of their firmware and source code. They've never said that you cannot redistribute the pre-release versions, but that if you do, you've basically forked the code and it's your release now. You provide all support and further maintainance on it and you forfeit your subscription to future prerelease versions.
None of this I have a problem with. It's an unreleased version of the code; they shouldn't be expected to support it. If one of my beta testers leaks my code to the internet, I'm certainly not going to be sympathetic if someone downloads it and has problems with it and calls my tech support for help. Why should Sveasoft? They've done a nice service to the community and released many versions of firmware that are greatly advanced over the standard Linksys versions. It's annoying when a few obnoxious weekend-lawyers try to nickel-and-dime the literal words of the GPL rather than respect the intentions and values of the people who wrote it. Nothing Sveasoft has done persuades me that they have anything other than these values at heart and that they're being unfairly singled out for persecution. It's unfortunate that a few annoying individuals have to ruin things for the rest of us.
I wish Sveasoft the best of luck going forward, and congratulate them on what they've accomplished so far.
Pretty much... Each US state is pretty much the same size or bigger than single european countries. A large network of fast rail lines is one thing when major cities are 100-150 miles apart, but look at the distances involved when you get out of the north-east and California. To say nothing of the rugged terrain and the low population density in the majority of the country. Past a couple hundred miles, it makes more sense in time and money to fly.
Re:I happen to write fax server software.
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 1
What version of "R" are you using? I'll agree with you that it's quirky. This is one of those sections that I only touched on and the original author has left long ago. There was work done specifically for UTF-8 in some of the recent releases and I believe it actually works, but the problem is that the core database of "R" isn't Unicode yet so it's not as complete as it could be. The SMTP gateway doesn't get as much development resources as it should because it's a freebie for most installations. Notes and Exchange gets the attention.
There is some work going on now that might make you happier.
I happen to write fax server software.
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's the #1 fax server in the country and quite probably the world. Modesty forbids telling you which one, but it starts with an 'R'. I didn't write the core code, but I've written a lot of the additional functionality and touched the majority of the code base over the years. I trust it to be nice and stable, and it has a reputation for reliability and consistency.
Having said that, whenever I send a fax I always send it with "Hold for Preview" so I can look at it first. There is often a big difference between the way a document looks when printed and it looks when faxed, and I want to make sure it looks good and is exactly what I want it to be. The best you can get out of fax is 200x200 black & white if you want to have any general compatibility with the fax machines of the world. If for some reason I can't preview it, I send a test one back to myself and make sure that looks ok. Then I forward it to the real destination or send it to them with exactly the same settings and the exact same source.
People have said "don't you trust your server" and I'm like "would you type a letter and print it out and mail it sight unseen?" There are often differences between the on-screen representation, the printed output, and the faxed output. In particular if you don't realize that fax resolution is 1/6 to 2/3 the resolution of a document printed on a regular printer. I've had people try to fax 600dpi color photos to a 200dpi black and white fax machine then complain about how bad it looks. What do you expect? You have to understand the limitations of your media.
Go back and reread it: "power capacity, current flow and cost.
No arguments that Lithium Ion has much better energy to weight ratio. They've also got a considerably higher price. I bought a 12v 7ah batter last week for $50. The equivalent in Lithium Ion would cost much more. This is a tiny one seater that already costs $15000 or so, Lithium Ion would spike the price significantly.
Lead Acid can also provide much higher current surges than Lithium Ion can. Very helpful for accelerating from a stop. While Lithium Ion is much better than it used to be, it still can't provide the oomph that Lead Acid can. So you'd probably need even more of them to provide equivalent current flow. Granted, you would save some weight based on the weight reductions of the batteries themselves.
And lastly, Lead Acid is much less finicky than the Lithium Ions. Much less picky about temperatures, cooling, charging and discharging, and all around easier to deal with. To say nothing of the safety issues, heat problems, and disposal concerns of Lithium Ion. There's a reason most UPS manufacturers still use the heavy old Lead Acid batteries instead of the NiMh or Lithium Ion. Unless size and weight is your primary issue, Lead Acid is still the better economic choice.
I'm not saying that eventually NiMh or Lithium wont eventually take over, but they've got a lot of things they have to overcome before you'll be able to walk into Sears and buy a Lithium Ion DieHard for your car.
I own several of the VIA boards ( M10000's in particular ) and this doesn't seem to be any smaller than what I've already got. The size of the heatsink and fan in the pictures seems to make it about he same height as any of the other motherboards. It looks even a little bigger if you consider you've now got a separate SODIMM socket on the bottom for the memory. It looks like if you just went with a regular memory socket on the top, it'd still be shorter than that huge chunk of aluminum.
I also don't understand the "minimalist backpanel" with only a VGA, Ethernet, and cardbus connectors. Everything else ( all the usual suspects - audio, USB, TV-out, etc ) are headers on the motherboard. I'd be much happier if they made -everything- use sockets or pin headers on the motherboard. This way you could mount the motherboard and sockets separately any way you wanted, without having to have access to the edge of the board. I ran into this problem with one of my projects where I was trying to mount a motherboard flat in the bottom of a toolbox. The motherboard fit fine, but I didn't have room to plug the cables into the motherboard backpanel. This was an unusual project that is trying to be as small and unobtrusive as possible and keep all cables hidden inside the case, which is a tupperware type storage container. I would have loved to be able to plug all of them directly into the top of the motherboard. As it is, I had to mount the motherboard on edge with the backpanel facing up, because that was the only way I could get the room to plug the cables in ( VGA, USB and network ). Made the whole thing a lot bigger than it had to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is rarely the case anymore. Older hearing aids had separate earmolds but most modern hearing aids are built into the actual earmold itself and don't have that separate behind-the-ear component. The only modern ones that still need them are the very strong ones that can't fit inside an earmold, the very cheap ones, or the ones that are for children or temporary use. An adult could use the same mold for 5-10 years, but a child needs a new one every couple of years or so as they grow. Sometimes when I've had to send a hearing aid in for repair ( 2 weeks or so ) I've been given a behind-the-ear loaner, but other than that I've not worn one with a separate earmold in 20 years.
The first thing I'll tell you is that fundamentally they're all pretty much the same. In general they're all made with equivalent components and the only real difference is Bells and Whistles. It's the only thing the companies can do to differentiate themselves from other manufacturers. Unless you've got some special type of loss, a basic simple model will probably work just fine compared to something fancy. The biggest choice comes down to size and how self-conscious you are about it. Generally, the smaller they are, the weaker they are and more expensive. You're paying for vanity.
You can probably forget about insurance covering it. Almost no health insurance will cover them. They're considered non-essential, "cosmetic" devices. My company provides very good health insurance and only once over the past 30 years have they ever covered -any- of my hearing aid purchases. 11 years ago (during the dot.com boom) I actually had a company cover part of one ( $1000 of a $2800 purchase ) but that was an anomaly. If you're lucky they might cover the hearing exam but considering most places give you that free as part of the purchase process it doesn't do much good. I've had a couple insurance companies tell me "no we don't cover them, but we offer these great coupons" which were basically a 25% discount off of something that was marked up 100% to begin with.
The most important thing I can tell you is to get a Costco, Sam's Club, or other shopping club membership. I have a Costco membership and have bought my last two sets of hearing aids there. They were 1/3 the price that I was charged at regular hearing aid stores. Costco had audiologists that were just as qualified as the regular stores, and sold the same models/manufacturers as the regular stores. As an example, my last "hearing aid store" model cost $2800 in 1999. The three I've bought since then ( the last two a couple of years ago ) cost $890-$1000 each and were far better than the $2800 model.
http://www.vidgame.net/COLECO/COLVIS.html - Third Controller from the top. Yes, I actually bought an Adam. Paid all of $50 US for it.
I had a set of these, they were packaged with a baseball game. Not just one but four triggers, one under each finger. Sure it's a lot bigger but it still puts trigger controls under the main control stick. And it beats the patent by at least 10 years.
They actually weren't bad. They had an arcade style stick on top that worked well. The numeric keypad was mostly worthless from a gaming perspective. The triggers worked fairly well as long as you were trying to pull them one at a time. Trying to pull more than one at once was awkward with trying to hold the controller and work the joystick.
I had it done 5 years ago. Paid $3200, insurance covered about $50. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
I had complications the first night ( the flaps shifted ) and had to have them redone the next day, but even with that things were better than contacts within a week. I had starring / halo issues at night for about six months but those gradually faded.
I'm 20/15. Best $3200 I've ever spent.
It's a wonderful site on anything involving historical space exploration and rocketry. I've been going there for years. I have a lot of these wonderful historical sites. These are quasi-related:
t s/
http://www.astronautix.com/
The home page of this site.
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.com/
A site on the history of nuclear weaponry.
http://www.fas.org/
The Federation of American Scientists. Look on the left menu for links to weapons, rockets, missiles...
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplane
The Nine Planets - A site about our solar system.
Every time I find a good historical site, I add it to my collection. Wikipedia.org just goes without saying.
This summer a couple of my coworkers and I won free XBoxes from my company through a technical awards program. This was a new program so we didn't actually receive them but knew they were coming sometime in the future. After a couple weeks we learned that we could get them then, or wait and get XBox 360s when they were released. Naturally ( two of us already had XBox ) we decided to wait.
A couple of months or so ago we started hearing stories about the expected shortage of 360s and mentioned to management that we weren't finding them for pre-order in anything but bundles of $700+ for the good unit ( is anybody -really- going to want the non-HD/wireless version? The extra features of the enhanced model for the extra $100 seems awfully cheap to me ). We were told to go ahead and pre-order ourselves each a bundled system so we would have them on release. We were all very impressed with our management with this extra step up. My two coworkers each ordered a bundle at the Walmart web site ( one of the only one left that we could find that were still selling them ). I decided to hold off until closer to the launch date to get more information.
A few weeks ago another coworker of mine won. He asked if he could get something else because he really wasn't interested in the 360 and didn't even own a television in the first place. Management said sure, just keep the value close to the 360 bundle. He ended up buying a Nikon D50 which is a very nice Digital SLR camera; much more useful to him than the 360. One of my coworkers decided to give up his 360 and go with the D50 as well. His ordered 360 shows up on Monday and he has to ship it off to a coworker in a different city that missed the pre-order. I found out about this a few days ago. They got their cameras a couple weeks ago and are really happy with them.
I like the looks of the 360 and it's capabilities, but I've been having a hard time working up motivation for it. I'm sure I'll end up buying one but I'm in no great hurry to get one now. Sure the unit itself is great but I'm just not seeing the games that make me want to put up with the launch hassle to get one. Particularily when I have no idea when I'd actually get one. I'd rather not be forced to buy a bundle with a few so-so launch titles but wait until sometime next year when they have games that I actually want and I can just walk in and buy it.
I ordered my camera this afternoon. It's not as good as the Nikon, but it's a much smaller Canon that's much more convenient for travel. Hopefully I'll have it by the holiday next week, but I know it's going to be quicker and easier than it would be for me to get a 360.
Air normally contains (roughly) 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, and trace amounts of a couple of dozen other molecules. This is increasing the amount of Oxygen and Hydrogen in the air entering the engine and conversely lowering the ratio of the Nitrogen, Argon and other (mostly nonvolatile) gases. This will naturally allow for a quicker, hotter, more complete burn that generates more power and less naughty parts like Nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.
I would imagine that the additional Oxygen provides a large chunk of the benefits, rather than it just being attributed to the Hydrogen.
They've actually invented a way to use some handy prepackaged "air for burning" (distilled water) that is (relatively) efficient and simple to make by using electrolysis. Not too much of it, because there it can be too much of a good thing. Try running an engine off pure oxygen and see what you get. You'd still get explosions, but they'd likely be uncontained this time around. The amount of electricity to electrolyse a lot of water would be quite counter-productive anyway.
I would imagine you could get much of the same results if you could figure out a way to filter some of the Nitrogen out of the incoming air. Unfortunately, there's no good, cheap, efficient way to do that... yet....
This says nothing about the underlying problem. Was the release date incorrectly scheduled from the start? Did it change mysteriously while the person was incarcerated? Did the system just incorrectly say "Release this guy" on a random day? Did it give the wrong person to be released? If so, was there any similarities between the two inmates? There just isn't enough information here to make any guesses.
Was it a contractor or an in-house developed project would also be interesting. As well as what happened to the inmates who were released late? Is it just "tough luck" for them?
Does anyone have any additional information?
The biggest issue is to only have one specific sound source you're trying to muffle. You have to place the microphone as near to the sound source as possible, and the location of your speaker will depend on how long it takes to process the signal. It will also be highly directional unless you rig something up with multiple speakers all aimed in different directions. You will also need to be a certain distance away to allow the reverse-phase sounds to merge and cancel each other out.
The other issue is that it will only work on low pitched sounds, the lower the better. The slower the frequency, the more time you have to do the math and output your opposite signal. High frequency sounds you can pretty much forget about being able to process.
One use for this might be to muffle a single exhaust pipe from a loud motor, but you won't be able to get it to work for general noise. The reason it works in Noise-cancelling headsets is that the microphone is located at the destination of the sound (your ear), rather than at the source. The closer you can get it either end, the better it will work. It's not really worth doing it in Software
One interesting thought about quieting individual fans or motors is to use an Adaptive algorithm. Because most of these devices make a consistent repeating sound, it would be interesting to be able to anticipate the sound source over time and broadcast an estimated calculation before the current sound is even processed and use the processed result to tweak the future estimation. This would work on only reasonably consistent sources and there would be issues with feedback and unexpected noise changes.
I agree both of these things are hot, my issue was the entire machine's power supply was only 63.5 watts. This was shared between the CPU, keyboard, motherboard, RAM, two floppy drives, graphics card, and whatever else you had plugged in to it. If the machine came with only a single floppy, the second bay had a load resistor plugged into it that was required to keep the power supply happy. This load resistor is what he burned himself on.
My issue was more how did it manage to get that hot with what little wattage was left over after running the rest of the system. One of the primary upgrades for those ( besides more ram ) was a bigger power supply.
I started working on computers back in the 80's when everybody had their own custom case, style, and philosophy. I worked for a well known mom-and-pop computer shop in our city that had a reputation for low prices so I was working on pretty much everything. Many of the higher-end PC's were built with the large-computer mentality of the mainframe / minicomputer era of over-engineering. Besides being overpriced, many included filters over the fan because "real computers" had them. Most of the time the filters were more trouble than they were worth.
The primary problem was that people were not cleaning the filters. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Putting filters over your fans means that somebody has to regularily check and change them. I've had PC's on shop floors that had the filters so clogged with oil and gunk that the fans they were covering burned out from overload. After I replaced them and explained everything to them I might have to go back 6 months later to do the exact same thing because "they hadn't got around to changing them". I've burned my fingers on parts inside some of those machines, and that was the days before heat sinks in the first place.
Filters are good as long as you're going to religiously inspect them every month or so and clean or replace them.
As a passing curiosity, does anybody know exactly how much heat the load resistor on one of the old original 63.5 watt PC's put out when you had it hooked up in place of the 2nd floppy drive? I remember one particular system that was in a dusty factory. Somebody had jury-rigged a filter across the front of the system using window screen and medical gauze. The gauze had gunked up so much the fan in the power supply was basically worthless. A coworker managed to get a second degree burn off the load-resistor and I never could figure out how that managed to happen with something that only had 63.5 watts in the first place.
As a balloon and airship pilot, I find this completely ridiculous. Equilibrium is a -very- tenuous thing. When flying a helium balloon, you can go up 10 feet simply by throwing a handful of sand out of the basket. Even though this airship is much larger, the same principle applies. You cannot add or drop large amounts of weight in flight or you would be completely out of control.
Just dropping a few tons of weight would throw an airship thousands of feet into the air. Everything about weight control must happen -very- slowly because that is the only way the aircraft can be adjusted to the changing weights and still maintain control. Modern airships achieve a large amount of their lift to the engines and aerodynamic affects, most of which disappears when they are stationary or moving slowly. Airships are in no way or form manueverable in anything but light winds. There's a reason an airship requires dozens of people to run out on the ground and grab ropes to dock it.
The other obvious problem is the updrafts and downdrafts and other winds associated with a forest fire. Trying to fly something like this over one would be suicide. With the rapidly rising and falling columns of air and the huge surface area of the craft, it would be completely uncontrollable at best and ripped apart at worst. Even if you could vent enough lifting gas ( hydrogen or helium ) to keep from crashing, it would take hours or days to refill the gas to lift something of that mass again.
This is an interesting idea, but it must be taken in context. Takeoffs and landings should be made early in the morning or late in the day when winds are calmer. Inclement weather may prevent landing at all due to the weather hazards involved. A large ground crew will be needed to help with controlling the craft. A huge amount of mass can be transported, but the logistics of supporting such an unwieldingly large craft have to be accounted for as well. There's no way this could be a battlefield-deployment system without complete air and ground control.
I remember reading proposals for something like this that were going around in the late 40's and 50's. The idea was that you would use nuclear weapons to blast out a canal/sea into the interior of Libya. The aims weren't to lower the sea level, but to provide an area of high evaporation and moisture content that would dramatically increase the rainfall in Egypt, Israel, and the Arabian peninsula.
A lot of people were really interested in the idea and the UN even investigated it, but it finally died due to concerns about the fallout and radiation and such, particularily amongst the Libyans and people downwind of the blasts.
It's a very interesting idea, but the amount of rock and earth that would have to be moved using conventional mining and digging is prohibitive. Many people were also uneasy about affecting weather patterns that dramatically, no matter what the immediate gain.
Actually, I tend to agree with both of you. The term "Civil War Widow" came from the US Government because they were still being paid pensions from their husbands' civil war service. Confederate soldiers exempted of course, although I believe many of the Confederate Civil War Widows received a stipend from "Southern Charitable Organizations" for the equivalent.
Sounds like gaming the system, if you ask me.
Only 3 weeks was awesome and they were glad to have it. Just 54-60 years before was the California Gold Rush when the travel time was a lot longer. If you went by land it was 5-6 months IF you arrived at all. Lots of people died along the trail. If you went by sea it was more like 1-3 months IF you lived. Lots of people died of disease by crossing Panama on foot or were lost sailing all the way around South America.
Nowdays, people get pissy when their four hour flight gets delayed for an hour because of bad weather. People don't really realize how much and in how short a time things have changed in this world. There are people alive who can tell you about the 1906 earthquake and fire because they were there. The last of the civil-war widows only died a year or two ago.
People talk about "Ancient History" but it really wasn't all that long ago.
Why don't you try something simple and turn your access-point antenna 90 degrees?
In normal antennas, the strongest signal is perpendicular to it with the weakest above it or below it ( pointing at it or away from it ). This is fine if you point the antenna straight up and you're on the same floor because the strongest reception radiates horizontally out around it. If you're two floors below it, try turning the antenna 90 degrees so the sweet spot aims down toward you.
If this doesn't work well enough for you, the next best thing might be to try a third-party firmware for your access point if it's available. I'm using the Linksys WRT54G and the Sveasoft firmware allows you to increase the power past the out-of-the-box settings. I bumped my power up 25% and that made my connections much more stable.
If those don't work, the next cheapest option might be to invest in a new antenna for your AP. Most antennas for AP's are omni-directional. They broadcast out in all directions. My main AP happens to be against an outside wall, so I installed a directional antenna that would only radiate towards the inner 180 degrees of the house. Optimally that could "double your power" in the house at the expense of the guy next door getting free net access off of you.
Everything is a trade-off.
No matter what you do, it takes a huge amount of resources to orbit Saturn, so it made sense to load up as many instruments as you can for economy of scale. It's 22 feet x 13 feet and weighs six tons. It's taken it seven years to get to Saturn. The cost of building, launching, and staffing 3 or 4 smaller devices would be a great deal more.
Cassini's two cameras are only one megapixel (1024 pixels square) but their versatility far outweighs this "low resolution". They are wide-angle and narrow angle with a range of filters that can see in visible, infrared, and ultraviolet. The narrow angle can see a penny at a distance of 4km. The biggest problem with Cassini is that it's only got a 140 Kbps data rate back to earth. All 12 of Cassini's instruments have to share this pipe, so there isn't any spare bandwidth. To make things worse, Cassini doesn't have a scan-platform so you have to aim the whole thing to transmit and take pictures. A higher resolution camera wouldn't give you that much benefit at the cost of a lot longer transfer time. That was the point of the dual cameras. Wide-angle to look at everything and narrow-angle to zoom in on the interesting stuff.
The Mars Rovers are even more limited. They can transfer 11 Kbps direct to earth, or 128 kbps relayed through the Mars orbiters.
It all comes down to one of those old military sayings. Armchair generals discuss tactics. Real generals discuss Logistics. The supply lines in space are very long or non-existent.
Okay, I have no idea how that got submitted. Must have been a UPS glitch. :)
What I was saying was, I use "broken" UPS with used batteries that I can get for next to nothing. Old car batteries have worked well for me. I charge them up fully with a normal car battery charger before I hook them up to the UPS guts. Even if they can't provide the surge to start a car anymore, they can still usually provide enough power to run the computer through a few-second glitch and a minute or two shutdown. Even if I have to replace them once every couple of years, they haven't really cost me anything in the first place.
I just want the UPS to carry me through the few second brownout or outtage. If the power is out for more than 10 seconds, chances are it's going to be off for a while and I trigger the shutdown on the systems. I don't plug the monitors into the UPSs because 21" monitors take too much current draw and why bother leaving them on just to watch the shutdown. I've been using a half-dozen UPS like this for 10 years now, and haven't spent more than $100 or so total.
Having said that, I have one Main server that runs on a normal UPS that can keep it, the main router, and the internet link up for an hour. This -does- need to stay up because it's too much of a pain to restart everything. Everything else can shut off until the power resumes.
I've taken a rather pragmatic approach to the whole UPS situation. The power in my house and at my company is usually pretty stable, except for an occasional flicker once in a while, usually during a thunderstorm. My philosophy is to use the UPSs only long enough to handle a flicker or to keep the systems up long enough to do a shutdown. The power only goes out for more than 30 seconds no more than once a year or so. I don't really feel the need to spend much (any) money to handle something that only happens once or twice a year.
I can get broken UPS for free, just for hauling them away. Unless it's taken a lightning hit or something, 90% of the time the electronics are fine and the battery has gone bad.lectronics are fine and it's the battery that's toast.
I'm not affiliated with Sveasoft, although I'm running their firmware on two access points of mine. I've browsed their forums, and while I'm not a subscriber I've considered it. Much of this discussion appears to be misleading of the actual facts as I see them.
Sveasoft modified the GPL'd Linksys firmware adding a lot of features, capabilities and bug fixes. Originally, the firmware and source code were freely available on the Sveasoft ftp site. There were usually two versions: a work-in-progress and a latest-stable-release. The work-in-progress was exactly that - new features that may or may not be working, old features that might be broken, and miscellaneous instabilities or anomalies. The source code for the work-in-progress was not always available, but then people were told not to use the work-in-progress unless they had a specific reason to do so. People were told to download the stable release unless they were willing to help test the unstable version or put up with it's limitations.
Tech support was handled on the forums. This worked pretty well for knowledgable people, but became increasingly difficult when people would download the work-in-progress and then have things that wouldn't work. A few months ago, several individuals started complaining about GPL responsibilities and demanded the source-code to the work-in-progress be posted. This despite the fact the work-in-progress wasn't an actual release, but a testing copy.
Sveasoft became disillusioned by the amount of vitriol and demands from these annoying individuals and decided to switch to a subscription basis for the prerelease versions. The source code and binaries for release versions would still be available for download, but the bleeding edge would only be available to people who paid the $20/year subscription or worked out an arrangement with Sveasoft. They said they'd be more than happy to waive the fee if you were contributing something to the effort. That could be help with coding, writing documentation, online support, testing features, or many other ways to assist their efforts. Propose something to them.
They never refused to release the source code. They release the source code when they do an actual release of the firmware, when it's nice and stable and working. Sveasoft has said everybody can freely redistribute the release versions of their firmware and source code. They've never said that you cannot redistribute the pre-release versions, but that if you do, you've basically forked the code and it's your release now. You provide all support and further maintainance on it and you forfeit your subscription to future prerelease versions.
None of this I have a problem with. It's an unreleased version of the code; they shouldn't be expected to support it. If one of my beta testers leaks my code to the internet, I'm certainly not going to be sympathetic if someone downloads it and has problems with it and calls my tech support for help. Why should Sveasoft? They've done a nice service to the community and released many versions of firmware that are greatly advanced over the standard Linksys versions. It's annoying when a few obnoxious weekend-lawyers try to nickel-and-dime the literal words of the GPL rather than respect the intentions and values of the people who wrote it. Nothing Sveasoft has done persuades me that they have anything other than these values at heart and that they're being unfairly singled out for persecution. It's unfortunate that a few annoying individuals have to ruin things for the rest of us.
I wish Sveasoft the best of luck going forward, and congratulate them on what they've accomplished so far.
Pretty much... Each US state is pretty much the same size or bigger than single european countries. A large network of fast rail lines is one thing when major cities are 100-150 miles apart, but look at the distances involved when you get out of the north-east and California. To say nothing of the rugged terrain and the low population density in the majority of the country. Past a couple hundred miles, it makes more sense in time and money to fly.
What version of "R" are you using? I'll agree with you that it's quirky. This is one of those sections that I only touched on and the original author has left long ago. There was work done specifically for UTF-8 in some of the recent releases and I believe it actually works, but the problem is that the core database of "R" isn't Unicode yet so it's not as complete as it could be. The SMTP gateway doesn't get as much development resources as it should because it's a freebie for most installations. Notes and Exchange gets the attention.
There is some work going on now that might make you happier.
It's the #1 fax server in the country and quite probably the world. Modesty forbids telling you which one, but it starts with an 'R'. I didn't write the core code, but I've written a lot of the additional functionality and touched the majority of the code base over the years. I trust it to be nice and stable, and it has a reputation for reliability and consistency.
Having said that, whenever I send a fax I always send it with "Hold for Preview" so I can look at it first. There is often a big difference between the way a document looks when printed and it looks when faxed, and I want to make sure it looks good and is exactly what I want it to be. The best you can get out of fax is 200x200 black & white if you want to have any general compatibility with the fax machines of the world. If for some reason I can't preview it, I send a test one back to myself and make sure that looks ok. Then I forward it to the real destination or send it to them with exactly the same settings and the exact same source.
People have said "don't you trust your server" and I'm like "would you type a letter and print it out and mail it sight unseen?" There are often differences between the on-screen representation, the printed output, and the faxed output. In particular if you don't realize that fax resolution is 1/6 to 2/3 the resolution of a document printed on a regular printer. I've had people try to fax 600dpi color photos to a 200dpi black and white fax machine then complain about how bad it looks. What do you expect? You have to understand the limitations of your media.
Go back and reread it: "power capacity, current flow and cost.
No arguments that Lithium Ion has much better energy to weight ratio. They've also got a considerably higher price. I bought a 12v 7ah batter last week for $50. The equivalent in Lithium Ion would cost much more. This is a tiny one seater that already costs $15000 or so, Lithium Ion would spike the price significantly.
Lead Acid can also provide much higher current surges than Lithium Ion can. Very helpful for accelerating from a stop. While Lithium Ion is much better than it used to be, it still can't provide the oomph that Lead Acid can. So you'd probably need even more of them to provide equivalent current flow. Granted, you would save some weight based on the weight reductions of the batteries themselves.
And lastly, Lead Acid is much less finicky than the Lithium Ions. Much less picky about temperatures, cooling, charging and discharging, and all around easier to deal with. To say nothing of the safety issues, heat problems, and disposal concerns of Lithium Ion. There's a reason most UPS manufacturers still use the heavy old Lead Acid batteries instead of the NiMh or Lithium Ion. Unless size and weight is your primary issue, Lead Acid is still the better economic choice.
I'm not saying that eventually NiMh or Lithium wont eventually take over, but they've got a lot of things they have to overcome before you'll be able to walk into Sears and buy a Lithium Ion DieHard for your car.
I own several of the VIA boards ( M10000's in particular ) and this doesn't seem to be any smaller than what I've already got. The size of the heatsink and fan in the pictures seems to make it about he same height as any of the other motherboards. It looks even a little bigger if you consider you've now got a separate SODIMM socket on the bottom for the memory. It looks like if you just went with a regular memory socket on the top, it'd still be shorter than that huge chunk of aluminum.
I also don't understand the "minimalist backpanel" with only a VGA, Ethernet, and cardbus connectors. Everything else ( all the usual suspects - audio, USB, TV-out, etc ) are headers on the motherboard. I'd be much happier if they made -everything- use sockets or pin headers on the motherboard. This way you could mount the motherboard and sockets separately any way you wanted, without having to have access to the edge of the board. I ran into this problem with one of my projects where I was trying to mount a motherboard flat in the bottom of a toolbox. The motherboard fit fine, but I didn't have room to plug the cables into the motherboard backpanel. This was an unusual project that is trying to be as small and unobtrusive as possible and keep all cables hidden inside the case, which is a tupperware type storage container. I would have loved to be able to plug all of them directly into the top of the motherboard. As it is, I had to mount the motherboard on edge with the backpanel facing up, because that was the only way I could get the room to plug the cables in ( VGA, USB and network ). Made the whole thing a lot bigger than it had to be.