Consider having several directional microphones mounted on a movable platform, upon which also a powerful chemical laser is mounted.
Point your microphone array in the vicinity of where the hoise is coming from, and sample their outputs - and perform cross-correlation on each microphone's output to find the time of maximal correlation to the others.
This gives you more precise aiming info.
Continue your iterative aim correction until your aim is precise, with all microphones now precisely equidistant from the noise source.
Your chemical laser, fully charged, is now aimed directly at the noisy bugger.
After seeing the description, and recalling the disassembly of my childhood toys, I put two and two together to form my best guess on how this thing worked.
You can sue anybody for anything... well, at least in California, you can. Its done everyday.
Getting a judgement in your favor is another story.
About that EULA.. if I put ANYTHING on my resume even approaching the language of a EULA, there isn't a company anywhere that would consider employing me while Microsoft tosses around deniability of responsibility with reckless abandon.
And businesses still adopt it! Even though the EULA clearly denies responsibility!
I often wonder what they are smoking in those business schools.
It annoys me to no end that business people - educated in so-called executive training classes - don't seem to care all that much about holding their software providers responsible for the software'e behaviour, but meanwhile, they will leave no stone unturned to verify the accountability of their employees.
These days, I get several query attempts to my machine per minute to see if someone's bot will respond.
I can easily see where rogue code can be inserted into code much like a phrase of legalese can easily be inserted into legal contracts so that people who sign the document without understanding it will unwittingly agree to stuff they would have otherwise violently objected to.
For instance, my neighbor unwittingly bought a car, and hidden amongst all the legalese was a clause where he accepted the car with "waiver of recourse". By the time he discovered a really nasty engine malfunction- temporarily patched so it would still run for a bit longer - the car dealer had already sold his payment contract to a third party, which then used the "holder in due course" UCC code Section 3 to hold him legally responsible for the payments, irregardless of his dissatisfaction with the car.
Its stuff like this that make me extremely leery of stuff I do not understand. I am not a lawyer, but I AM aware of what code can do, and for that reason, I insist on being able to understand what I am agreeing to or installing.
I have noted that so far, these rapidly spreading rogue code segments coursing over the internet ( Code RED, SQL Slammer, Melissa, etc. ) have been relatively benign and were mostly intent on spreading themselves, not in malicious mischief. Explaining to the boss one fine morning how the corporate database has been destroyed, account receivable unaccessable, customer contact database lost, etc. is not something I would cherish.
If business elects to take that risk, fine. But I don't wanna be involved in it.
I'll let their hiring manager hire those who will sign contracts without reading or understanding them, if he so desires. I do admit those people are easier to get along with socially, as their ethical restrictions are a lot more flexible and its easier for them to say "yes" without nitpicking, as I will do. But is it ethics or ignorance? I am terrified of sticking my hand in garbage disposals without personally verifying it is unplugged, as I KNOW what that machine is capable of.
I have survived so far with very little annoyance from unwanted software because of my understanding of how it works and how to do things in such a manner where I do not execute code I do not understand... ( Yes, including JavaScripts ). I can not visit a number of commercial sites, nor do business with a lot of internet banking sites. But then I consider its MY money they are putting at risk by using insecure and phising-prone technologies. The people who do such things have "people-skills" which enable them to find the someone who thinks they are worth a paycheck, not system skills.
Mark my words: There IS coming a day where we all wake up to find our system trashed. By someone that did it just for the fun of it. It will fly through the net just as fast as SQL slammer or Code Red did. Only this time, it will carry a destructive payload. Everyone who has ever played knocking down rows of stacked dominoes has seen how this would work.
I am sure you have seen those plastic toys that have been around for as long as I can remember ( and I am 55 ).
They have an image on them which animates when you view it at different angles.
The latest incarnation I have seen on this is the "sublimonal"(sic) ads on mall kiosks for Sprite.
And how about that "monster house" movie poster, where a house appears to eat a child when one walks by the display?
There was another movie before that which showed a house flying through interstellar space - darned if I can
t remember the name of the movie - but the poster was quite attention-getting.
This is a simple plastic lenticular screen overlaying a photo which has vertical strips of three images side by side, and which strip gets refracted to the viewer is determined by what angle the viewer sees it from.
Just seeing this article, and knowing how a LCD display does have a precise vertical pixel alignment and spacing - leads me to believe this whole thing is nothing more than placing a lenticular plastic lens of appropriate interstripe spacing on top of the LCD, thus yielding three low-resolution displays instead of one higher resolution displays.
The ones I have seen have always had a lot of "bleeding" from one image to another if you did not view it at one of the exact angles that refracted one particular vertical strip... which didn't make much difference when viewing an animated sequence.
Ihe idea of multilingual subtitles ( already suggested ) appears to me to be one of the best uses, as one could merely change his angle of viewing to get the language of choice.
If you know someone who works at a movie theater, they might be able to give you one of the old posters ( upon which you quickly remove the useful lenticular film to play with, and look at the actual poster to see how the lens array would refract the strips printed on the poster to the viewer.
I will bet you good odds this is a gas turbine coupled to a Lithium Bromide absorption chiller.
This technology has been used on ships for years.
For those of you old as I am, remember the old Arkla-Servel Gas Refrigerators? They used a very similar absorption technique, with all gravitic pumps. No moving parts except the door. Beautiful design. Some camper refrigerators still use the technology. They use an ammonia-water-hydrogen mix in the absorber.
These things work very similar to those athletic "cold packs" that get cold when they are mixed, except in this case, the active ingredients are looped back to be separated by thermal processes then remixed in an endless cycle. This is an oversimplified explanation, but its roughly how they work. In the far more efficient absorption process, a hygroscopic absorbent is used in lieu of a compressor to effect the pressure differences required for the phase changes responsible for the heat transfers.
In a Lithium-Bromide system, the process runs at a vacuum so the boiling point of water is below room temperature. By doing this, the actual refrigerant is plain old simple WATER!
Very environmentally friendly. In the event of a rupture, you lose vacuum and the system stops working. No explosions or smelly spraying as an ammonia-based system will do.
Why do I know about this? For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, I used to work at the Chevron Pascagoula Oil Refinery. It was the first job I had. We had a absorber unit over there which we used to keep our LNG tanks cold, using nothing more than waste heat from the refinery. I was fascinated as hell by that box, which looked like nothing more than two large pipes sitting one atop the other, one was hot, the other cool, while the LNG tanks were cold.
This was in the early 70's, and it was "old technology" then, but fascinating as hell to me. Luckily, when I let the management at Chevron know I found the thing so interesting, they put me in charge of it and I could study it to my heart's content.
And why am I posting here? I am very frustrated.
Over 100 people have just died during this latest heat wave to hit Southern California. I want so bad to start work on building another absorber, much like the one at Chevron, but I want to put the Generator unit at the focal point of a linear parabolic reflector, oriented East-West so it will track the sun without having to move it, and get the Sun to power the whole thing. So the hotter it gets outside, the colder it will get inside. I want to use those brand new "Segmented Electro Magnetic Array" motors they are developing for washing machines to give me fine control over the refrigerant pumps so I can track out variances in insolation and loading so I can keep the fluids balanced in the system. There is a lot of work on programming AVR microcontrollers so the system becomes intelligent enough to make the most cold as the system parameters vary.
In short, I am old, have the stuff on how to do it in me, but don't have money to do it, and don't have the energy any more to commute and make pretty for the workplace. This is something that if I do it, I am going to have to do it on my own house so I don't have to spend all my energies making presentations, looking pretty for the management folks, and useless commuting.
Its frustrating to see how frivolously we - as a society - spend our existing resources. Here we are, burning through our fossil oil - which will never be replaced - at a rate of 85 million barrels per day. Investment bankers, IP lawyers, executives, etc are "earning" more money than I will see in a lifetime, yet my dreams - as an engineer/scientist - will never see the light of day due to my lack of "people skills" which are required by the executive corporate hiring manager... and I have no idea how to get one of those "grants".
And yes, it will probably take several million dollars to make the first one, as I will have t
Re:death by dcma? who's death?
on
Death By DMCA
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I would beg to disagree with you that the content industry would be harmed. They will greatly enjoy their highly profitable monopoly enforced using taxpayer dollars.
What I do see being killed is the common public knowledge of how their stuff works.
As a nation, we are enforcing ignorance of computer literacy on an entire generation of young people. This, in my mind, is like making it a business practice to write legal documents in Farsi, but make education of the masses of the Farsi scripts illegal. This done, of course, to protect the businessmen's "right" to "encrypt" legal documents so the ignorant public would not be aware of what they are agreeing to.
I am just happy, for now, that the US does not control the world ( yet ), and some countries are embracing a standard technology for their computational infrastructure based on a standard programming language that cannot be legally banned at the stroke of someone's pen.
I would not be surprised at all if I come back a hundred years later via reincarnaton, only to be taught in Chinese that the ancient USA intentionally sentenced an entire generation of young people to computational illiteracy - for a song.
If they cannot execute arbitrary code, or retrieve hidden snippets of info from me, then I cannot get too antsy.
I can see where there could be a legitimate need to display an image from the web.
And whatever can be done, can be done poorly, as how could I expect the software to censor a pornographic image when it doesn't even know what one is?
Its the ability to execute arbitrary code or snoop that concerns me. These lead to identity theft, keyloggers, and kernel mode rootkits.
One who remains ignorant of STD's is apt to get one.
One who doesn't know how his machine works is apt to lose control of it.
Knowledge is what open source is all about - and why we can talk of security issues freely so it does not become a problem.
In an ideal world, letting someone know they have a security problem should rank about the same seriousness as advising a friend he forgot to zip up after a nature call.
This bird flu thing going around is a problem only because we don't know exactly how it works. If we did, we could easily sidestep it.
It never ceases to amaze me businesses tolerate the enforced ignorance paradigm that keeps putting us all at risk.
"Definitely the computer Matthew Broderick used in WarGames (IMSAI?) should be in there.
Yes, it was the IMSAI 8080. I have one. Bought as kit.
As far as I know, it was the upgrade to the original ALTAIR machine, S-100 bus. Except the IMSAI was more of the "industrial" version which had ample power supply, fans, fixed the clock problem, and the front panel interface was streamlined to be far easier to build.
Yet, it was still relatively inexpensive to manufacture. All stamped steel, plexiglass, and looked really cool.
The fun part was getting to design and build your own S-100 boards. There were lots of prototype boards available which had only the bus driver chips already in place, and you did the rest - usually with a wirewrap gun, of if you were really masochistic - a soldering iron. You really learned a lot about hardware design and how drivers worked by getting your BASIC interpreter linked through a homebrew 765 Floppy disk controller chip to drive those 8" floppy drives you lucked out to find at a swap meet.
No matter what you wanted, there was always some way to do it with a combination of software and hardware. Those were the good old days when even Radio Shack had walls of TTL chips available...
It wasn't the good old days for power consumption... those old TTL chips consumed noticable amounts of power when you got several handfuls of 'em up and running in the same box... as evidenced by how hot everything got. It seemed as bad sometimes as the old vacuum tubes. The power transformer in the IMSAI was by far the heaviest component in the whole machine. 16 volts AC secondary at 30 AMP Center-tapped. The filter capacitors were larger than beer cans.
1. Use the Sony Rootkit DRM hole to install relay clients.
2. Share through these relays.
3. Watch RIAA lawyers sue all who played a Sony DRM disk.
4. Enjoy music while enjoying the humorous antics of RIAA lawyers and technical staff trying to explain to judge just how the filesharing clients got installed.
"But nobody would run them, because they'd be hold accountable for every file passing through their system."
Botnet, anyone?
With most of today's online users completely ignorant of what their machine is doing, they don't need to know its running. Isn't this already done all the time?
In a way, I would almost find it funny to see the RIAA haul a wide range of completely confused people into court... people whose only "crime" was going online with a bug in their box.
Yeh, it makes me think of the physics behind Old Faithful.
Except we get lava, not hot water.
I think we all know how a "relaxation oscillator" works, and Mt. St. Helens sure looks like the physical implementation of one to me.
The difference is the volcano has the phase change difference of the liquid lava forming a dense rock upon cooling which introduces a significant chaotic factor into the dwell time, so no one knows just when its gonna cycle.
I wonder if they would use something like depleted uranium to make the casing of these kinetic bombs.
I am not talking the fissile U-235, rather the U-238 component which is what was NOT wanted for the fissile bomb.
From what I understand, Uranium is an extremely dense hard metal which has the properties needed for a gravitically powered inertial energy bomb ( aka "helluva big bullet") which garners its inertia by falling from orbit.
"While automakers and locksmiths are supposed to be the only groups that know where and how security information is stored in a car, the information eventually falls into the wrong hands."
I would download music, and it usually took me less than 15 seconds before I deleted it.
It wasn't worth the disk space, much less a purchase.
Yeh, they made my downloading activity ( Kazaa-Lite ) illegal, and I stopped doing it.
Yes, I was afraid of getting the lawyer letter in the mail.
But, these days I go into a music store, and the only stuff that I recognize is the old 60's and 70's pop hits. I have no idea what the other stuff sounds like.
But, being I like only a fraction of one percent of whats out there, it hardly makes sense for me to open my wallet. My odds are just as good buying the dime CD's at any garage sale if I am gonna chance it that way.
Enya was the last artist I got acquainted with over the net... and I also have every CD she put out. It stopped there.
Don't get the idea I am whining over not being able to download anymore... I don't really miss it all that much. I found other things to do - taking nice walks, gardening, reading... there is so many things out there that if one thing goes away, its really no big thing. Its like going to the restaurant and they won't serve my sauerkraut anymore. It wouldn't upset me all that much if I were told I'd never taste sauerkraut again. There are just so many other things to eat.
RIAA can pass all the law they want to make me lose interest in their product. I wonder how much they will have to spend to rekindle interest?
I was fortunate enough to live through the "Alka-Seltzer" era, when people would actually go out of their way to watch their commercial.
There have even been shows where the whole show is a collection of foreign commercials, and most were hilarious.
Most of the crap thought up here in America is just about as dull and boring as being forced to hear the details of Uncle Jessie's church wedding every five minutes while trying to enjoy a meal.
As a group of consumers, we have been trying for years to tell the advertising community to get their act together, but they have been extremely resilent as far as doing what they are gonna do, consumer be dammned. Why make commercials interesting when you can just go to Congress and get laws passed to prevent circumcision ( pun intended ) of the technologies they place to force viewing their ads?
The advertising agencies have already figured out it is corporate executives which pay their fees, not us little guys. And they know how to play the Corporate Boardroom game.
( Hell, some of us do that too... how many times have you seen a corporate site which is darned near unusable except when using high speed internet connections to a specific browser? Those webmasters know that some Corporate Moneyheads are far more impressed that the company logo rotates and sparkles than they are that the little piece of eye candy will hang up a non-compliant browser the customer is using, as well as using technologies apt to get hung up in firewalls and virus scanners, and taking forever and a day to load. The sell job is to the Moneyhead, hands shaken, papers signed, profit banked, customer be damned. )
Is there an advertising agency which even cares if the airing of their ads result in nothing more than frantic grabs of remotes to channel surf while the dull boring head of the advertiser prattles on with boring repeats of sales hype, saying one thing while unreadable disclaimers are flashed along the bottom of the screen?
If I come across as quite irritated at being manipulated in this manner, you read me correctly.
I do engineering. Many of my colleagues were in IT. The key word is "were".
Like many here, I got laid off from my job at a large-cap corp. Damn near all of us got the pink slip.
I noted several of the younger guys abandoned the years of IT training and security clearances they had and went into construction. I saw that in about four years, I don't think a one of them failed to become a millionaire... not only that, they now get to deduct their toys and expenses against their taxes.
My own feeling is if IT is what you really WANT to do, just as electronic design is what I WANT to do ( its what I am gonna do even if I do NOT get paid, aka "hobby" ), then go for it.
If you have family support obligations, you may wanna consider something not so easily outsourced and not so "commoditized" as IT.
When so many people have the same training as you do, you become just about as valuable to your employer as a quarter-inch commodity machine bolt. If you have the slightest defect, its just too easy to discard you and get another.
While this paradigm is very convenient for employers, it will make your life quite stressful.
The whole idea of the driver is to sell hardware, isn't it?
To me, trying to restrict the driver is like making unintelligible marketing brochures that only certain people can read. It restricts your sales to a subset of the market, when - sans the people you hired to obfuscate the brochure - you could have had the entire market!
I would love to see the geneticists cross the firefly light genes into a houseplant so as to create a "night-light" houseplant.
This is just for starters.
After this, engineer plants to produce "fruit" full of the chemicals needed for efficient fuel-cell operation. Hopefully, just the juice of this fruit would be usable by a fuel cell. In a pinch, one could do with a few fuel trees to power ones house and car if one had to live independently of supporting technologies.
Next stop, use the electric-eel genes, and create a standalone "power plant". Gang groups of these together with the appropriate inverters and our lawn trees could help power our homes. Fuel for thought as our diminishing petrochemical supply looks to be offset by an ever increasing availability of solar flux.
Yeh... I can see it. Millions of PC's out there. Just like SUV's, each requiring yet more and more power.
Oil seems to be headed for $70 / barrel.
We burn Oil to get Electricity.
We use electricity not only to run the computer, but now have to use even more to get the heat out of the offices.
Global warming seems to be a proven fact, even though its exact causes are still under much debate.
But I can tell you it takes much more energy to COOL an office than to WARM it.
This summer may be a real looloo on the power grid, if last winter's unusual warmth is any indication of future thermal trends.
I am wondering if all this extra power, just to animate thingies on a screen, is really worth it. For some, yes - I can see gamers appreciating the extra speed on realtime play, but for most business use, acting as terminal mode to fill forms?
I think now would be a good time to invest in energy stocks and energy-sector mutual funds. We have millions of fuel-guzzling SUV's in our motor fleet, and upcoming office complexes full of power-guzzling computers with even more power-guzzling air conditioning units coming online.
And we have no way of domestically producing the energy to run it all.
On top of that, many the people selling us energy don't like us.
Not only that, we live in a society where executives, sports stars, and movie idols are worth far more than technical people and engineers. As long as the Saudis keep our gas tanks full, who cares?
Its not a scenario I am comfortable with.
I understand air conditioning units need about two watts of power for each watt of heat released in an office building.... meaning if you put a 100 watt light bulb in a box, the air conditioner power needed to keep the temperature stable in that box will draw about 200 watts steady-state, making total power draw about 300 watts to run the 100 watt bulb.
( I am not confident of the above ratio I mentioned... I would appreciate it if another slashdotter who is more skilled in HVAC has more accurate info. )
For one computer, or one SUV, its not a big thing... but for millions of 'em?
I have seen small planes, ( like other small-engined things like motorbikes, leaf blowers, and lawn mowers ) that emit tremendous amounts of noise... like those small planes that carry advertising banners overhead at sports events.
Helicopters already get away with hovering at low altitudes over residential areas, and as most know, helicopters are incredibly noisy.
I forsee these spy planes may omit the mufflers so they can get more airtime per tank. I do not welcome a sky full of noisy airplanes buzzing overhead at low altitude run by the "authorities".
It annoys me when some kid gets one of those incredibly noisy gasoline powered skateboard thingies and spends the afternoon repeatedly going up and down the street. Maybe he only used a gallon of gas, but I find the incessant noise quite irritating.
How would the "authorities" handle stuff like this invading their "airspace"?
I already have to put up with a damned helicopter the neighboring city's police department bought, and they train over MY neighborhood. Believe me, these things can be incredibly noisy, and no-one seems to have the authority to tell a law-enforcement agency they can't fly those damned noisy things wherever they want.
My only hope is if they will annoy ENOUGH people, we can nix ANY proposition on the ballots to fund them - but so far they seem smart enough to pick out ONE neighborhood and give us the works - and do it in an adjacent city so they don't piss off their local voters.
Please forgive my language, but every time I think about that damned noisy machine I can't do anything about, I start getting riled. It seems the only way I am going to get any peace is to move out to where it will just be economically infeasable for the authorities to go all the way out there to hover their noisy machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Point your microphone array in the vicinity of where the hoise is coming from, and sample their outputs - and perform cross-correlation on each microphone's output to find the time of maximal correlation to the others.
This gives you more precise aiming info.
Continue your iterative aim correction until your aim is precise, with all microphones now precisely equidistant from the noise source.
Your chemical laser, fully charged, is now aimed directly at the noisy bugger.
After seeing the description, and recalling the disassembly of my childhood toys, I put two and two together to form my best guess on how this thing worked.
Getting a judgement in your favor is another story.
About that EULA.. if I put ANYTHING on my resume even approaching the language of a EULA, there isn't a company anywhere that would consider employing me while Microsoft tosses around deniability of responsibility with reckless abandon.
And businesses still adopt it! Even though the EULA clearly denies responsibility!
I often wonder what they are smoking in those business schools.
It annoys me to no end that business people - educated in so-called executive training classes - don't seem to care all that much about holding their software providers responsible for the software'e behaviour, but meanwhile, they will leave no stone unturned to verify the accountability of their employees.
These days, I get several query attempts to my machine per minute to see if someone's bot will respond.
I can easily see where rogue code can be inserted into code much like a phrase of legalese can easily be inserted into legal contracts so that people who sign the document without understanding it will unwittingly agree to stuff they would have otherwise violently objected to.
For instance, my neighbor unwittingly bought a car, and hidden amongst all the legalese was a clause where he accepted the car with "waiver of recourse". By the time he discovered a really nasty engine malfunction- temporarily patched so it would still run for a bit longer - the car dealer had already sold his payment contract to a third party, which then used the "holder in due course" UCC code Section 3 to hold him legally responsible for the payments, irregardless of his dissatisfaction with the car.
Its stuff like this that make me extremely leery of stuff I do not understand. I am not a lawyer, but I AM aware of what code can do, and for that reason, I insist on being able to understand what I am agreeing to or installing.
I have noted that so far, these rapidly spreading rogue code segments coursing over the internet ( Code RED, SQL Slammer, Melissa, etc. ) have been relatively benign and were mostly intent on spreading themselves, not in malicious mischief. Explaining to the boss one fine morning how the corporate database has been destroyed, account receivable unaccessable, customer contact database lost, etc. is not something I would cherish.
If business elects to take that risk, fine. But I don't wanna be involved in it.
I'll let their hiring manager hire those who will sign contracts without reading or understanding them, if he so desires. I do admit those people are easier to get along with socially, as their ethical restrictions are a lot more flexible and its easier for them to say "yes" without nitpicking, as I will do. But is it ethics or ignorance? I am terrified of sticking my hand in garbage disposals without personally verifying it is unplugged, as I KNOW what that machine is capable of.
I have survived so far with very little annoyance from unwanted software because of my understanding of how it works and how to do things in such a manner where I do not execute code I do not understand... ( Yes, including JavaScripts ). I can not visit a number of commercial sites, nor do business with a lot of internet banking sites. But then I consider its MY money they are putting at risk by using insecure and phising-prone technologies. The people who do such things have "people-skills" which enable them to find the someone who thinks they are worth a paycheck, not system skills.
Mark my words: There IS coming a day where we all wake up to find our system trashed. By someone that did it just for the fun of it. It will fly through the net just as fast as SQL slammer or Code Red did. Only this time, it will carry a destructive payload. Everyone who has ever played knocking down rows of stacked dominoes has seen how this would work.
I say this with the
They have an image on them which animates when you view it at different angles.
The latest incarnation I have seen on this is the "sublimonal"(sic) ads on mall kiosks for Sprite.
And how about that "monster house" movie poster, where a house appears to eat a child when one walks by the display?
There was another movie before that which showed a house flying through interstellar space - darned if I can t remember the name of the movie - but the poster was quite attention-getting.
This is a simple plastic lenticular screen overlaying a photo which has vertical strips of three images side by side, and which strip gets refracted to the viewer is determined by what angle the viewer sees it from.
Just seeing this article, and knowing how a LCD display does have a precise vertical pixel alignment and spacing - leads me to believe this whole thing is nothing more than placing a lenticular plastic lens of appropriate interstripe spacing on top of the LCD, thus yielding three low-resolution displays instead of one higher resolution displays.
The ones I have seen have always had a lot of "bleeding" from one image to another if you did not view it at one of the exact angles that refracted one particular vertical strip... which didn't make much difference when viewing an animated sequence.
Ihe idea of multilingual subtitles ( already suggested ) appears to me to be one of the best uses, as one could merely change his angle of viewing to get the language of choice.
If you know someone who works at a movie theater, they might be able to give you one of the old posters ( upon which you quickly remove the useful lenticular film to play with, and look at the actual poster to see how the lens array would refract the strips printed on the poster to the viewer.
This technology has been used on ships for years.
For those of you old as I am, remember the old Arkla-Servel Gas Refrigerators? They used a very similar absorption technique, with all gravitic pumps. No moving parts except the door. Beautiful design. Some camper refrigerators still use the technology. They use an ammonia-water-hydrogen mix in the absorber.
These things work very similar to those athletic "cold packs" that get cold when they are mixed, except in this case, the active ingredients are looped back to be separated by thermal processes then remixed in an endless cycle. This is an oversimplified explanation, but its roughly how they work. In the far more efficient absorption process, a hygroscopic absorbent is used in lieu of a compressor to effect the pressure differences required for the phase changes responsible for the heat transfers.
In a Lithium-Bromide system, the process runs at a vacuum so the boiling point of water is below room temperature. By doing this, the actual refrigerant is plain old simple WATER!
Very environmentally friendly. In the event of a rupture, you lose vacuum and the system stops working. No explosions or smelly spraying as an ammonia-based system will do.
Why do I know about this? For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, I used to work at the Chevron Pascagoula Oil Refinery. It was the first job I had. We had a absorber unit over there which we used to keep our LNG tanks cold, using nothing more than waste heat from the refinery. I was fascinated as hell by that box, which looked like nothing more than two large pipes sitting one atop the other, one was hot, the other cool, while the LNG tanks were cold.
This was in the early 70's, and it was "old technology" then, but fascinating as hell to me. Luckily, when I let the management at Chevron know I found the thing so interesting, they put me in charge of it and I could study it to my heart's content.
And why am I posting here? I am very frustrated.
Over 100 people have just died during this latest heat wave to hit Southern California. I want so bad to start work on building another absorber, much like the one at Chevron, but I want to put the Generator unit at the focal point of a linear parabolic reflector, oriented East-West so it will track the sun without having to move it, and get the Sun to power the whole thing. So the hotter it gets outside, the colder it will get inside. I want to use those brand new "Segmented Electro Magnetic Array" motors they are developing for washing machines to give me fine control over the refrigerant pumps so I can track out variances in insolation and loading so I can keep the fluids balanced in the system. There is a lot of work on programming AVR microcontrollers so the system becomes intelligent enough to make the most cold as the system parameters vary.
In short, I am old, have the stuff on how to do it in me, but don't have money to do it, and don't have the energy any more to commute and make pretty for the workplace. This is something that if I do it, I am going to have to do it on my own house so I don't have to spend all my energies making presentations, looking pretty for the management folks, and useless commuting.
Its frustrating to see how frivolously we - as a society - spend our existing resources. Here we are, burning through our fossil oil - which will never be replaced - at a rate of 85 million barrels per day. Investment bankers, IP lawyers, executives, etc are "earning" more money than I will see in a lifetime, yet my dreams - as an engineer/scientist - will never see the light of day due to my lack of "people skills" which are required by the executive corporate hiring manager... and I have no idea how to get one of those "grants".
And yes, it will probably take several million dollars to make the first one, as I will have t
What I do see being killed is the common public knowledge of how their stuff works.
As a nation, we are enforcing ignorance of computer literacy on an entire generation of young people. This, in my mind, is like making it a business practice to write legal documents in Farsi, but make education of the masses of the Farsi scripts illegal. This done, of course, to protect the businessmen's "right" to "encrypt" legal documents so the ignorant public would not be aware of what they are agreeing to.
I am just happy, for now, that the US does not control the world ( yet ), and some countries are embracing a standard technology for their computational infrastructure based on a standard programming language that cannot be legally banned at the stroke of someone's pen.
I would not be surprised at all if I come back a hundred years later via reincarnaton, only to be taught in Chinese that the ancient USA intentionally sentenced an entire generation of young people to computational illiteracy - for a song.
I can see where there could be a legitimate need to display an image from the web.
And whatever can be done, can be done poorly, as how could I expect the software to censor a pornographic image when it doesn't even know what one is?
Its the ability to execute arbitrary code or snoop that concerns me. These lead to identity theft, keyloggers, and kernel mode rootkits.
One who remains ignorant of STD's is apt to get one.
One who doesn't know how his machine works is apt to lose control of it.
Knowledge is what open source is all about - and why we can talk of security issues freely so it does not become a problem.
In an ideal world, letting someone know they have a security problem should rank about the same seriousness as advising a friend he forgot to zip up after a nature call.
This bird flu thing going around is a problem only because we don't know exactly how it works. If we did, we could easily sidestep it.
It never ceases to amaze me businesses tolerate the enforced ignorance paradigm that keeps putting us all at risk.
Yes, it was the IMSAI 8080. I have one. Bought as kit.
As far as I know, it was the upgrade to the original ALTAIR machine, S-100 bus. Except the IMSAI was more of the "industrial" version which had ample power supply, fans, fixed the clock problem, and the front panel interface was streamlined to be far easier to build.
Yet, it was still relatively inexpensive to manufacture. All stamped steel, plexiglass, and looked really cool.
The fun part was getting to design and build your own S-100 boards. There were lots of prototype boards available which had only the bus driver chips already in place, and you did the rest - usually with a wirewrap gun, of if you were really masochistic - a soldering iron. You really learned a lot about hardware design and how drivers worked by getting your BASIC interpreter linked through a homebrew 765 Floppy disk controller chip to drive those 8" floppy drives you lucked out to find at a swap meet.
No matter what you wanted, there was always some way to do it with a combination of software and hardware. Those were the good old days when even Radio Shack had walls of TTL chips available...
It wasn't the good old days for power consumption... those old TTL chips consumed noticable amounts of power when you got several handfuls of 'em up and running in the same box... as evidenced by how hot everything got. It seemed as bad sometimes as the old vacuum tubes. The power transformer in the IMSAI was by far the heaviest component in the whole machine. 16 volts AC secondary at 30 AMP Center-tapped. The filter capacitors were larger than beer cans.
2. Share through these relays.
3. Watch RIAA lawyers sue all who played a Sony DRM disk.
4. Enjoy music while enjoying the humorous antics of RIAA lawyers and technical staff trying to explain to judge just how the filesharing clients got installed.
Botnet, anyone?
With most of today's online users completely ignorant of what their machine is doing, they don't need to know its running. Isn't this already done all the time?
In a way, I would almost find it funny to see the RIAA haul a wide range of completely confused people into court... people whose only "crime" was going online with a bug in their box.
Except we get lava, not hot water.
I think we all know how a "relaxation oscillator" works, and Mt. St. Helens sure looks like the physical implementation of one to me.
The difference is the volcano has the phase change difference of the liquid lava forming a dense rock upon cooling which introduces a significant chaotic factor into the dwell time, so no one knows just when its gonna cycle.
Not the thing for a good night's sleep.
I am not talking the fissile U-235, rather the U-238 component which is what was NOT wanted for the fissile bomb.
From what I understand, Uranium is an extremely dense hard metal which has the properties needed for a gravitically powered inertial energy bomb ( aka "helluva big bullet") which garners its inertia by falling from orbit.
Its already used in armor piercing bullets.
"While automakers and locksmiths are supposed to be the only groups that know where and how security information is stored in a car, the information eventually falls into the wrong hands."
I would download music, and it usually took me less than 15 seconds before I deleted it.
It wasn't worth the disk space, much less a purchase.
Yeh, they made my downloading activity ( Kazaa-Lite ) illegal, and I stopped doing it.
Yes, I was afraid of getting the lawyer letter in the mail.
But, these days I go into a music store, and the only stuff that I recognize is the old 60's and 70's pop hits. I have no idea what the other stuff sounds like.
But, being I like only a fraction of one percent of whats out there, it hardly makes sense for me to open my wallet. My odds are just as good buying the dime CD's at any garage sale if I am gonna chance it that way.
Enya was the last artist I got acquainted with over the net... and I also have every CD she put out. It stopped there.
Don't get the idea I am whining over not being able to download anymore... I don't really miss it all that much. I found other things to do - taking nice walks, gardening, reading ... there is so many things out there that if one thing goes away, its really no big thing. Its like going to the restaurant and they won't serve my sauerkraut anymore. It wouldn't upset me all that much if I were told I'd never taste sauerkraut again. There are just so many other things to eat.
RIAA can pass all the law they want to make me lose interest in their product. I wonder how much they will have to spend to rekindle interest?
You are apt to be doing this extensively when processing audio or video streams.
I did.
(Well, something had to supplant Taco Bell's cute little dog. )
I was fortunate enough to live through the "Alka-Seltzer" era, when people would actually go out of their way to watch their commercial.
There have even been shows where the whole show is a collection of foreign commercials, and most were hilarious.
Most of the crap thought up here in America is just about as dull and boring as being forced to hear the details of Uncle Jessie's church wedding every five minutes while trying to enjoy a meal.
As a group of consumers, we have been trying for years to tell the advertising community to get their act together, but they have been extremely resilent as far as doing what they are gonna do, consumer be dammned. Why make commercials interesting when you can just go to Congress and get laws passed to prevent circumcision ( pun intended ) of the technologies they place to force viewing their ads?
The advertising agencies have already figured out it is corporate executives which pay their fees, not us little guys. And they know how to play the Corporate Boardroom game.
( Hell, some of us do that too... how many times have you seen a corporate site which is darned near unusable except when using high speed internet connections to a specific browser? Those webmasters know that some Corporate Moneyheads are far more impressed that the company logo rotates and sparkles than they are that the little piece of eye candy will hang up a non-compliant browser the customer is using, as well as using technologies apt to get hung up in firewalls and virus scanners, and taking forever and a day to load. The sell job is to the Moneyhead, hands shaken, papers signed, profit banked, customer be damned. )
Is there an advertising agency which even cares if the airing of their ads result in nothing more than frantic grabs of remotes to channel surf while the dull boring head of the advertiser prattles on with boring repeats of sales hype, saying one thing while unreadable disclaimers are flashed along the bottom of the screen?
If I come across as quite irritated at being manipulated in this manner, you read me correctly.
Its not like they were trying to make any money off Miro, distribute his work under the table, or anything...
And they get bitchslapped?
I don't know what the bringers of the lawsuit were smoking, as I have recently seen many other people smoking the same brand.
Would they have felt any better if Google had offered to give them front page publicity for a handsome fee instead? ( paid to Google, of course... ).
Some people seem kinda weird these days, and don't seem to think anything is worth something unless they had to pay handsomely for it.
Personally, I appreciate all the blessings that come my way, my most treasured blessings I paid not a penny for.
Like many here, I got laid off from my job at a large-cap corp. Damn near all of us got the pink slip.
I noted several of the younger guys abandoned the years of IT training and security clearances they had and went into construction. I saw that in about four years, I don't think a one of them failed to become a millionaire... not only that, they now get to deduct their toys and expenses against their taxes.
My own feeling is if IT is what you really WANT to do, just as electronic design is what I WANT to do ( its what I am gonna do even if I do NOT get paid, aka "hobby" ), then go for it.
If you have family support obligations, you may wanna consider something not so easily outsourced and not so "commoditized" as IT.
When so many people have the same training as you do, you become just about as valuable to your employer as a quarter-inch commodity machine bolt. If you have the slightest defect, its just too easy to discard you and get another.
While this paradigm is very convenient for employers, it will make your life quite stressful.
The whole idea of the driver is to sell hardware, isn't it?
To me, trying to restrict the driver is like making unintelligible marketing brochures that only certain people can read. It restricts your sales to a subset of the market, when - sans the people you hired to obfuscate the brochure - you could have had the entire market!
I walk away, shaking my head...
I would love to see the geneticists cross the firefly light genes into a houseplant so as to create a "night-light" houseplant.
This is just for starters.
After this, engineer plants to produce "fruit" full of the chemicals needed for efficient fuel-cell operation. Hopefully, just the juice of this fruit would be usable by a fuel cell. In a pinch, one could do with a few fuel trees to power ones house and car if one had to live independently of supporting technologies.
Next stop, use the electric-eel genes, and create a standalone "power plant". Gang groups of these together with the appropriate inverters and our lawn trees could help power our homes. Fuel for thought as our diminishing petrochemical supply looks to be offset by an ever increasing availability of solar flux.
Yeh... I can see it. Millions of PC's out there. Just like SUV's, each requiring yet more and more power.
Oil seems to be headed for $70 / barrel.
We burn Oil to get Electricity.
We use electricity not only to run the computer, but now have to use even more to get the heat out of the offices.
Global warming seems to be a proven fact, even though its exact causes are still under much debate.
But I can tell you it takes much more energy to COOL an office than to WARM it.
This summer may be a real looloo on the power grid, if last winter's unusual warmth is any indication of future thermal trends.
I am wondering if all this extra power, just to animate thingies on a screen, is really worth it. For some, yes - I can see gamers appreciating the extra speed on realtime play, but for most business use, acting as terminal mode to fill forms?
I think now would be a good time to invest in energy stocks and energy-sector mutual funds. We have millions of fuel-guzzling SUV's in our motor fleet, and upcoming office complexes full of power-guzzling computers with even more power-guzzling air conditioning units coming online.
And we have no way of domestically producing the energy to run it all.
On top of that, many the people selling us energy don't like us.
Not only that, we live in a society where executives, sports stars, and movie idols are worth far more than technical people and engineers. As long as the Saudis keep our gas tanks full, who cares?
Its not a scenario I am comfortable with.
I understand air conditioning units need about two watts of power for each watt of heat released in an office building.... meaning if you put a 100 watt light bulb in a box, the air conditioner power needed to keep the temperature stable in that box will draw about 200 watts steady-state, making total power draw about 300 watts to run the 100 watt bulb.
( I am not confident of the above ratio I mentioned... I would appreciate it if another slashdotter who is more skilled in HVAC has more accurate info. )
For one computer, or one SUV, its not a big thing... but for millions of 'em?
I have seen small planes, ( like other small-engined things like motorbikes, leaf blowers, and lawn mowers ) that emit tremendous amounts of noise... like those small planes that carry advertising banners overhead at sports events.
Helicopters already get away with hovering at low altitudes over residential areas, and as most know, helicopters are incredibly noisy.
I forsee these spy planes may omit the mufflers so they can get more airtime per tank. I do not welcome a sky full of noisy airplanes buzzing overhead at low altitude run by the "authorities".
It annoys me when some kid gets one of those incredibly noisy gasoline powered skateboard thingies and spends the afternoon repeatedly going up and down the street. Maybe he only used a gallon of gas, but I find the incessant noise quite irritating.
How would the "authorities" handle stuff like this invading their "airspace"?
I already have to put up with a damned helicopter the neighboring city's police department bought, and they train over MY neighborhood. Believe me, these things can be incredibly noisy, and no-one seems to have the authority to tell a law-enforcement agency they can't fly those damned noisy things wherever they want.
My only hope is if they will annoy ENOUGH people, we can nix ANY proposition on the ballots to fund them - but so far they seem smart enough to pick out ONE neighborhood and give us the works - and do it in an adjacent city so they don't piss off their local voters.
Please forgive my language, but every time I think about that damned noisy machine I can't do anything about, I start getting riled. It seems the only way I am going to get any peace is to move out to where it will just be economically infeasable for the authorities to go all the way out there to hover their noisy machines.