I think the point Craven is trying to make is that there is literally hundreds of terawatts of energy stored as a temperature differential in the oceans.
I agree - on a small scale - not worth it.
But on a large scale, even if he can harness even 1% of that power, its there, and 'free' for the taking. The energy is flowing as heat conduction anyway, so anything he takes doesn't come from something else's 'budget'.
I think Craven is onto something. I know it is possible to exploit phase changes with relatively small temperature differentials, and the volumetric changes caused as a result of the phase changes can do useful work. I am definitely interested in Craven's work and wish him the best.
Yeh, I consider his medical experimentation smacks of quackery and doesn't help his credibility in my book, although I could see his glass subs, as glass is quite strong in compression. Because of the magnetic properties of glass ( or lack thereof ), such a sub would be much harder to locate through magnetic means. Although I have not researched it, glass, being a liquid, may have acoustical properties which may enable it to look more like just more seawater to a sonar unit. It is an interesting speculation which if I were still in a position to investigate further, I would.
With as much music out there as there is, combined with the distortion of the sample we would give them to compare to, I am very impressed they can do this.
The only thing that has really put a damper on my theatre enjoyment of a movie has nothing to do with P2P and a helluva lot to do with trailers and ads.
I expect ads on free TV, or if the movie was free.
But I paid premium price to see the movie.
I expect a premium presentation!
This means they are not supposed to waste my time with all sorts of preshow JUNK!
If I were making a presentation, and I asked my audience to sit through unwanted presentations from my kids, wife, mother-in-law, and every uncle in the family, do you think my recipient would stand ( err.. sit ) for it???
I see this whole anti-copying crap they are putting through Congress as means of getting legal teeth so when they start putting ads and promotions you can't skip through ( such as presently being tested via the FBI warning ), they think they will be able to thwart unofficial independent re-releases of the movie after it has been cleaned of crap.
So, go convince some congressmen to pass law for you protecting your rights to control how your customer can consume your product.
Dream on.
You see, I hate beans! If you are gonna serve me a meal with beans in it, I *will* push them aside and eat the rest. Go ahead and pass all the law you want saying I *must* eat the beans. You better not let that meal out of your sight in order to enforce your control, cause the first thing I'm gonna do is run away and hide somewhere and flick the beans out. Not only that, if I can find the same meal anywhere else without the beans in it, I'll be their customer, not yours.
As long as the video stream has to be presented in a form the human eye can perceive, it can be sensed by other electronic devices that duplicate our human ones, saved in public editable file formats, and cleaned up. I'd much rather see a clean, albeit somewhat lower quality, re-release than be forced to sit through ad after ad and have no control of my player.
I guess what I am trying to say is that all this effort to make the presentation absolutely unavailable to anyone who doesn't jump through all the prescribed hoops is alienating your paying customers!
So the movie leaked, is it really worth $20 to me to try to even get it for "free"??? Consider economics and the economics of mass production, and there is a helluva lot of "economic gain" if MPAA runs the show - and MPAA can have nearly all of it.
But if you deliver a product that is completely unusable in the state you insist on delivering it in, just be prepared for endless workarounds people will come up with to make it usable.
Policing your theatrical productions will be harder to enforce than illegal immigration...
Is it worth it to alienate your paying customers to go after those few that probably wouldn't pay for it anyway at a theatre?
My advice: forget it. Invest your resources in improving the theater experience. There is a difference between eating at home and eating out. If your customers don't like beans in their food, forcing beans on them at the restaurant will only encourage them to eat at home, where they have more control on the preparation of the meal.
I'll probably be modded "redundant" for even posting this. Every time this topic comes up, me and just about everyone else shouts out this is the problem. And no one listens to us.
Unlike your expensive marketing research, we don't even charge for analyzing the problem.
I often see more energy put into packaging than in the product. And it grieves me to see our resources being squandered so.
If the rest of the world sees America as a pig, even as an American citizen, I feel they are justified.
I am reminded of our wastefulness every Monday morning, which is trash day, and I see what I have for the trash man. 99% useless packaging.
A simple paper box would have sufficed nicely, and if made right ( no chemicals / disintegrates when wet ), I could have used it to mulch my garden. I have no problem with the glass and cans as long as they make it back to the recycle chain. Its that landfill crap thats gotta go. Land is just way too valuable to tie up as a garbage dump.
And just what energy source powered the synthesis of the liquid oxygen and alcohol. Granted we could probably distill the alcohol from plants, but what is powering the compressors that manufacture the liquid oxygen?
Given the present condition of the supply of energies we have available and our rates of consumption, is this yet another luxury for the few that will needlessly deplete our supply of fuels?
Yes, I know the rich can easily afford it.
And with yet more demand on a the growing scarcity of petrochemical fuels powering the whole shebang, I guess we just watch fuel costs for everybody step up another notch. Economics. Supply and demand.
Sometimes I wonder where our head is at when we choose to expend limited resources so frivously.
But then, I have wondered that for a long time on other matters... its a wonder to me that America is still a "superpower" given the way we squander our resources.
It looks like China may be the place to go if you wanna build anything. Just build it there, a safe haven from litigation, then let the world import it if they want.
It will make way for a very interesting economic condrundrum as the corporate entities using patent squatting paradigms and litigation to ensure their cash flow go head to head with marketing entities who are looking to buy their goods to market at the lowest possible cost.
Yup, I think things may get real interesting, as I don't think we are gonna have much luck forcing our dominance onto China the way we could with Iraq. The only thing we have that China needs is land... and its for sale too!
After reading the AC post, I was steaming. I didn't have any modpoints. I now see I wasn't the only one who got rubbed the wrong way.
I should have responded to your parent, the AC, not you.
Although I am not a HAM, I have many friends who are. I tinker with mostly the sciency stuff, they tinker with RF, and they have thoroughly impressed me with their intimate knowledge of how RF propagation really works. They have studied antenna theory and design relentlessly and have lots of freely shared empirical data backing up what they say. These guys have outdone every corporate lab I have ever been in, as the HAMS are internally driven to pursue this, whereas a lot of the corporate suit-guys are just pushing paper for a paycheck. Every corporate group I have been in seemed to have a couple of HAMS who knew how the thing is supposed to work, with a couple dozen more supervisory personnel hanging off his back.
When amateur radio operators report back that something is causing broadband interference, its not just a hobby thats getting trashed - its the entire RF environment that everyone uses thats getting trashed. An ambulance driver having trouble communicating on his radio is not in a position to pinpoint why his radio has degraded performance - he just knows he's having trouble contacting the hospital to let them know what's coming. We depend on people like the Amateur Radio operators to watch over the airwaves and bring anomalies out.
Sorry if I overreacted... if anyone even gets close to knocking a radio amateur, I start getting hot under the collar. In my mind, a radio amateur in a kindred tinkerer - one who knows how his stuff works.
People who speak from power get my obedience, but only people who speak from wisdom and knowledge get my respect.
China is the only other power out there strong enough to stand up to the US, and rapidly getting stronger ( economically ) as they develop their industrial capacity, while Americans gladly export theirs.
Watching the US get involved trying to enforce patent and copyright litigation over there could get really amusing - kinda like watching a winded fat kid fight a much more agile opponent. We would have never settled for paying China for the use of explosives, despite the fact I believe explosives were first developed in China.
We may yet see the day yet where in the USA, someone who can build something will be more valuable than someone who can ligigate over whether or not someone will be allowed to build it.
When I see a power line, I am also seeing a big dipole antenna.
It can transmit as well as receive.
There have been many attempts and sales of devices in the past which purports to use the entire power grid as an antenna, whose signals is routed through our special little box to your TV set, yours for only $19.95 postpaid, etc.
Yeh, you get the signal you wanted, as well as more crap you didn't than you can shake your stick at. Its like getting a free restaurant meal, thoroughly mixed with a bucket of garbage.
So, you put wide spectral content signal back into the power grid, you are gonna radiate our all over. This has been known since the days of Tesla and Marconi. Nothing new here.
We already have enough problem with accidental corona discharges filling the RF spectrum with unwanted broadband hash. Just one dirty insulator will screw up the RF environment for miles around.
Technically, yes, power lines could transmit data, but they were not optimized for this. Its old-style 300-ohm TV twin-lead at its best. It was notorious for picking up stray signals.
I do not think BPL was ever designed to send signals... it's designed like a cat trap, whose purpose is to trap investor dollars. Dollars from people quick to part with their money but slow to pick up the technical acumen to verify their claims.
One more thing, don't knock amateur radio HAMS. They are the last breed of guys we have who have a personal interest in RF. Most people seem as ignorant of their stuff as they are about their computers, and have no earthly idea how it works - as they just complain and pay someone else to make it work. Most amateur radio operators know exactly how their stuff works - especially if you ever meet one who builds from scratch. Its really unusual these days to talk to anyone who knows this field from its most fundamental levels, and their advice should be taken very seriously. Personally, I fear the passing of these guys who build things from the ground up, as many of the incoming people build things with dollars, and have no idea how it works - and physics, not finance, makes the ultimate decision of whether something will work or not.
Yeh, it seems cool to ask Congress to police the play yard.
But in the end, the reason they can do this is US!
We bend over way too easy for business. We are so damned obedient - they say "Internet Explorer Required" and we do as they say. Or, "You must have JavaScript enabled". or flash or adobe or whatever. And we comply.
Not near enough of us simply took our business elsewhere.
Business gets their way because they have the guts to go somewhere else at the slightest whim - ever tried to get a job? You get passed by for the slightest thing out of place... yet business expects us to configure our machines with known avenues for malware propagation just to see their site. Geez, do you think they would wanna do business with me if I insisted they open the till to their cash register open while doing business, and let me do whatever I will under the darkness cover of the DMCA??? Or would they consider me a tremendous security risk to allow in their store?
Even my damm bank requires Java Script to use their site - so I have to do my business personally at the teller. I can't seem to get across to them that I consider them asking me to enable scripting programs on my machine is equivalent of me asking them to let me in their safe, and not even be allowed to see what I do in there.
I have tried till I am blue in the face to fight business on this issue, but there is not enough of me to make a difference... for now I am just a whiner.
When one is seeking a job with business, one usually has sense to take a bath and dress up for the interview, don't come in complaining the office is the wrong color, and you won't work until they install whatever brand air conditioner you specify. The buyer needs to insist on the same respect. If one business is not flexible enough to use web standards. find another that does. If business insists from the get-go that you bend over, what kind of tone have they just set for any future dealings with them?
When we as a whole insist with our purchasing power that business conform to standard communication protocols, protocols we both understand, we will see an end to this sneakyware that is foisted upon us by businesses that insist we load other crap in just to see their site.
Its a big job to turn business around. They are big and used to getting their way. Even government gets in on the act as people are required by law to interact with them. One case in point is some forms the California DMV put in Adobe.pdf format. They used some peculiar new encoding scheme so I can't print the forms. Why in all blue blazes could they have not used the simple way already provided in all browsers to print things?
I can't tell you how many times I have walked away from a business deal when the salesman tries to close the deal and hands me a stack of fine print and smiles, saying "just sign here". If he needs that much fine print, there's something wrong somewhere. I would not ask him to agree to such a thing. Why is he asking me to?
I think the Mexican thing is just a smokescreen - any diversion the Gov't can get to justify their crap so they don't have a revolutionary-style Boston Tea Party on their hands while they implement these draconian measures to rid the populace of their freedoms.
"My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty"???
My guess is that with our continued import/export balance being so way out of kilter, and here we are pumping enormous amounts of "dollars" into our economy without the goods to back it up.
Read up on economics - money supply - fed interest rates - and required reserve margins for banks to see how they finangle this... money created by a bank from thin air because they had sufficient deposit on hand to cover the margin is loaned against one banks reserve to fund a buyer - who deposits the sum in yet another bank, which funds the reserve enabling yet another bank to issue backless funding. This house of cards is built on thin air! And its gonna come down just like the overinflated stock market. And its gonna be hard as hell for the government to find out who has any money to assess tax on!
Already, with most of yesteryear's massive employers going overseas for bulk labor, many of us are forced to "fend for ourselves", working for cash. Since the people we are doing the work for can't write us off, we get paid without the government being informed of the wealth transfer. As American Employment dwindle, people just don't die off, they find other ways to survive - which do not involve being employed by a tax-cooperating employer - we have to work directly for another individual - doing what we do - fixing his car, upgrading software, painting a house, whatever.
I think the government knows full good and well that people are still surviving - yet its difficult to get a tax collected on their earnings.
So, to me, its obvious what they are doing is getting a system in place so no one can buy or sell anything without reporting it to the government, so data aggregation can be used to determing lifestyle and expected tax levies. And to fund this monitoring system by the taxpayer - and do it without a revolt.
Companies having the wisdom of doing stuff like Larson or retaining people like Larson to help with their installations will not likely face the ire of those left irritated by the eyesores.
We humans are the only species on earth that can make the distinction between a fine meal and a mess. The difference means a helluva lot to us.
Exactly! Art and perception is just another facet of good design.
I often look at old architecture, old bridges, and other public works of the early 1900's and note the artistic touches - and miss it in today's modern poured-in-place world.
Over in old Pasadena, on Colorado Boulevard, there are some old bridges that bring tears to my eyes just to see them... they are so beautifully designed.
For me, there is a lot more than structural integrity alone on my mind as I construct a retaining wall on my property... there is a very important issue to me of what the wall looks like. The appearance of this wall is extremely important to me.... as well as my neighbors. ( It will be a cobblestone-brick design... labor intensive, but in my mind, worth it. )
Artists come in all types. Some work with technology ( us ), some with paint, some with architecture, as well as other media. All the work is a tribute to the artist and his culture.
I feel this is what it is to be human. Our existence is summarized in our art. Swine don't care...as long as they get fed. And that't the main difference between us and swine.
Yes - a little creativity now could save a helluva lot of irritation!
Where I go to college, there is a cellphone antenna array on the top of the tallest building - but you will have to really know what you are looking for to find it... its hidden in a work of art - and looks like part of the building!
Very well hid.
Maybe they should send some of their people to Disney to work in some of the theme parks to discover how Disney makes art. They are damn good at making one thing look like something else. And making it look good.
Even the cable company around here is finally getting into the act and now installing the aboveground workings of their neighborhood distribution electronics in faux fiberglass boulders which blend in with the decor of the neighborhood... those ugly green "breadboxes" they had were an eyesore, graffittied on, and often kicked in disgust. Nobody wanted that ugly thing gracing their front yard.
The thing looked as out of place as an abandoned old car battery.
They need to hire some artists... and use a little creativity so they don't create neighborhood eyesores.
I am mostly in hardware - but since my layoff from a big aerospace company five years ago, I have not seen much at all out there that pays worth a damm.
Pay is good for Engineering Managers, but what I love is just plain making things work - not lording over someone else. Actually, I really hate lording over anyone else - I wanna have the fun of designing the thing and bringing it to life.
It would have been a drudge to have to go back to work as a corporate pee-on. Since I have all the tools I need, I figured it was kinda stupid of me to be able to do this, but work in corporate where I not only supported myself, but often a team of several people who usually do nothing but get in the way.
I figured I had the technical skills and tools to make things work. Managers had the leadership skills to tell me what they wanted me to make work, and give me permission to use any tools I needed - or withhold permission if he needed to demonstrate his political power, and Executives had the organizational skills to determine which of us had to go if there were any arguments. I figure each of us were paid in the order of value to the company, and by that criteria I ranked last. Maybe I wasn't all that good - as I am kinda a perfectionist and do not work as fast as many. I believe errors are best handled before they have been replicated by production, or discovering one little error kept something big from working properly ( such as a successful rocket launch ). You know - the "do it right so you don't have to do it over" type mentality.
Yes, design can be fun, but we are after all, artists - and I think many relate to "starving artists". Go into EE or CS if your art is your passion, but go into something else - law, business, investments whatever if you need to support a family, as everything I see shows the United States has a pretty hefty surplus of trained EE and CS people.
If we were all that scarce, we would be snatched up faster than a stray quarter on the sidewalk.
Not that kids *are* doing this - its that kids *can* do this.
I can understand, if you have PHYSICAL access to the machine, you can make it do anything... but leaving control access open just makes me think of an ignorant shopkeeper who has no idea how the locks on his store doors work, and continuously carries on about coming into his store and finding out kids had a party in there last night.
It makes me wonder how seriously we really take the integrity of our computing infrastructure if no-one really understands how it works! Yes, we even have laws now on the books ENFORCING computer illiteracy (DMCA) just so we can continue the illusion of security through obscurity. Security through secrecy is no security at all. As a wise American Indian once told me that the most asinine thing he noted with the paleface is that he thinks he can own the wind.
An interesting book is out now detailing the conquests and military strategies of Alexander the Great. One of its stories detail a problem Alexander had coming up against a far superior Indian army... and they had War Elephants, where he had terrified horses. The book shows where Alexander figured out how to use his archers and javelin throwers to first blind then wound the blinded elephants, leaving the Indian Army the problem of what to do with a stampede of blinded, wounded, terrified War Elephants in their midst.
Alexander turned the Indian Army's strongest asset against them.
Now, we are outsourcing a lot of the programming to the critical parts of our OS to India. And even having American Legislators pass LAW to forbid American citizens from knowing exactly how it works.
How can we fix something without dependence on others if we have no idea how it works?
Our nation's computing infrastructure cannot be replaced as easily as one could replace a lemon car. Building the nation's computational infructure on unknown proprietary stuff in my mind is pure idiocy. To me, its like forcing building construction from wood when one man owns the tree farm, while the ground is littered with rocks and the constituents of concrete.
Could it be India never forgot Alexander's stragegy?
I can see the day when somebody overseas determines its time, and all our fancy systems start carrying on like a herd of wounded elephants... turning stuff on and off, etc.
God forbid we have military control systems also running this system... no telling what instructions it may tell the weapons interfaces.
"The labels are trying to maintain prices comparable to the physical world."
While everyone here is noting
The Public is trying to maintain interoperability comparable to the physical world.
All this DRM crap is result of MAN's law, not PHYSICAL law.
It can evaporate just as fast as Grey Davis's California Governorship.
For now, we need Government and the music industry to swing this pendulum HARD, so they will frustrate many, many, many people. Get 'em all riled up and get them off their asses.
Let Government bring themselves into the limelight - let them be like the neighbor which goes amok and irritates an entire neighborhood - upon which time all thats on everybody's mind is how to get those "bad people" out of the neighborhood. When people meet and swap stories commiserating bad politics, not sports, we are gonna see some change - big change - happen fast, as nothing the politician's head can hock out will be listened to, just as nothing Grey Davis' head could hock up would get people to ignore the energy crises he was instigating in California.
Every lawsuit filed against children over listening to a song becomes noticed - with the public fully aware that a politician's signature put that law in place.
Get the public riled enough, and DRM will go the way of the saucy deals Grey Davis cut with the bigwigs out here in California. If the politician in office won't fix the law, by golly, throw out the bastid and put someone else in there who will.
Yeh, heads will be bleating all over the place, just as heads are bleating now. Politicians will be faced with the choice of making the labels happy - but to do so will cost them their job, retirement, and any legal influence they have to make any sort of law.
For now, let 'em push the pendulum far out, so it will swing back,... HARD!!!!
Let's let everyone get burned really good so they have a good taste of what it feels like to lose what they thought were basic freedoms and rights.
You never miss the water 'till the well runs dry - but if the well ever does indeed run dry and you get really thirsty, one now has incentive to pay attention to the well and fiercely protect it.
I, for one, will rest much peacefully when the voices of the DRM-crowd carry just about as much weight as the head of Grey Davis hocking up words. Lots of blah but stripped of its administrative power by an irritated and angry populace.
I have to accept the fact we were created - as my existence is evidence of my creation.
But just how this happened has been the subject of endless speculation.
My sig indicates my exact sentiments on it. And yes, its taken right from the Bible.
Science is the word we use for the act of proving all things to get to the truth.
My take is if God does indeed exist as an entity, and deliberately created us as we are, does he expect us to use the intelligence he gave us to try to find him, or just mindlessly meander like sheep?
If indeed God created us as we are for a purpose, my logic tells me God intended me to find him through truth - that is provable - not speculation or "following the crowd".
The Bible and other Holy Books warn of this too: False Prophets, The path to truth being narrow and few will find it, etc.
If the God beliefs are true, and God wanted sheep, he could have stopped right there and then. Why create the intelligence that would just cause us to question authority, when we have no way of knowing if the authority is that of God, or of those who just use His name as the means to subjugate us?
Although I consider all religions as having honorable intentions, I don't know as any have it right. I consider it my responsibility to at least try to question things to get to the truth, just as an investor would not want his advisors mindlessly accepting whatever the 'leaders' of the day were saying.
Especially when history shows time and time again the leaders say whatever is necessary to promote their own self-serving empires.
I have an old house... and all the light fixtures use the screw-in edison bases.
So if someone wants to sell me new fluorescent, HID, LED, or whatever illuminating technology, it would help a helluva lot if its power connector was compatible with what I have in the house.
A marketer may try in vain to sell me some light bulb that won't work in my house. Yeh, it may be technically superior, but if it wants 86 volts at 307 Hz to run, and uses some weird socket I have trouble getting, what use is it?
Likewise, if some company produces something that won't use the standard file formats, its about as useful to me as a 86 volt / 307 Hz light bulb.
If I was really desperate for the light, I would suffer the inconvenience of using power converters to satiate the thing's inability to function naturally as part of my 'team', but it would be first to go when any compatible lighting solution appears.
Or to put it in business parlance, propritary file formats are "not team players" and won't work well with others. Just as the businessman has to reject people who won't work well with others, consumers need to do the same and reject businesses who produce incompatible products which need special treatment before they work.
I would see such a company producing such a thing as just another one of those PHB-led companies using investor-supplied capital to power bobbling marketingheads until they burn through their funding, leaving the PHB's explaining to the investors exactly how their investment monies disappeared - how not only are they not getting their promised phenomenal returns, they won't even get any of their original investment back, and at that time, the fine print on the prospectus will be shown to the investor so they can't even try to recover their funds from the people which were paid with their money.
Personally, I question why people who spend other's money designing incompatible stuff still have a job. And even more so, why do these people who hired these people still have a job? Coining incompatible file formats to me is just about as asinine as teaching students obscure languages in technical schools so no-one but alumni can communicate with them... in essence producing a class of students useless in society.
As long as we have dumb investors out there funding all this crap, this is gonna happen.
Regarding your lithium batteries and having equipment sensitive to battery voltage tolerances...
Either I go through batteries like a banshee, or I hardly ever use 'em at all, but expect 'em to work when I do need 'em.
Some things like MP3 players, power tools, or cameras get lots of heavy usage and substantial electron flows course their circuitry. Those get NIMH. NIMH has lousy shelf life, but if I use the things within a week of charging them, they work well, as I can refill 'em as needed.
There are other things which I will probably never use the available chemical energy stored in the cell, but I do want what it has available for use, even if its five or ten years from now. Things like the flashlight stored along my spare tire in the car, my volt-ohmmeter, my differential amplifier front-end test probe set. Calculators. Remote-controls. that sort of thing.
My biggest concern by far for these applications has been the leaking battery pack, which upon being ignored for several years, exudes a very corrosive electrolyte paste into the battery compartment of my thing, which I do not discover until I try to use the thing and discover it no longer works.
I have had countless disappointments with the ability of alkaline and NiCD/NiMH cells to hold their fluids. Alkaline tops the list by far, but I have also had leakage from things like those solder-in NiCd cells on motherboards leak and ruin the circuitry around it.
I have yet to see a lithium battery fail in this manner.
So for applications where I frequently "service" the battery, they get the rechargeable variety, as I will usually discover any chemical leakage before any significant damage is done.
For those applications which I install a battery then leave it alone for years, yet expect it to work when I use it, such as remote controls and test equipment, I insist on lithium cells if at all possible.
I was very delighted Everready came out with their Lithium AAA cells in addition to their AA cell. The first things I immediately upgraded to Lithium was all my remote controls, wireless mouse, and my beloved TI-85 graphing calculator, as all of the above still had operable alkaline cells, but I did not rest easy knowing at any time the cells could rupture and ruin some irreplacable equipment. I will note that my TI-85 graphing calculator did not like the slightly elevated voltage of brand new lithium cells, as evidenced by the LCD display contrast control going out of range, and not allowing me set it for a usable display. Being the calculator draws so little power, I figure I might be safe if I use older Lithiums in it when I age a few in the mouse or remotes, as a few month's service in a remote may drain enough "surface charge" from the cells to get the voltage proper for the calculator.
Those Everready lithium cells seem ideal for those cool little LED flashlights DORCY has been selling through WalMart and Target. It looks as if the combo of those technologies yield a handy little light you can prepare today for your "emergency kit" and know that when you need it, it will work. You know the drill - when you tuck a flashlight in your car's glove box because the last time you had the unfortunate thrill of discovering you had a flat tire, you were alone and it was pitch dark and you had to change the tire by feel. As you well know, most batteries won't last long in the glove compartment of a car because of the hot temperatures of summer.
If this new "oxyride" cell has the advantage of extremely long shelf life, let's compare it to Lithium. If it has larger capacity, lets compare it to the alkaline chemistry, or if it has more rechargeability, compare it to NiMH.
Each of the three battery chemistries is best suited to specific applications. Even though each chemistry will pinch-hit for the others, its not as ideal of fit as choosing the proper chemistry for the intended application.
I load up an old hard drive with DOS, the slideshow program, and a diskful of.jpg's and let it fly.
These go in minimal security places, like shopping malls. Ok, if someone gets malicious and vandalizes or steals the whole shebang, its not really any worse than if the trashman did it.
I mean, what he got was an old '286 with a 40MB 5.25" MFM HD and an old VGA monitor. Good enough to show photos of what's in the food court.
I just arrange things so that the still operational machines continue to work as designed until the bitter end.
I still have a couple of crates of old 40MB 5.25" MFM HD's and a couple dozen controllers still laying around I am slowly getting rid of this way.
I may get into designing a driver board for those large incandescent bulb-matrix displays one sees in front of many businesses, as I constantly see them not working proprely... it kinda pains me to see so much expensive hardware out there that does not function properly because the latest state-of-the-art computer systems don't run all that long before hanging up on something or other.
Its not at all like those old days I went through when I would get an embedded system going and expect it to go for years without any deviation at all. Much as one would design a motor and expect the same. There's nothing magic about sequencing the bulbs on a sign so they spell text, just as there is nothing magic about designing rotating magnetic fields in a motor so the shaft turns. We don't have to constantly maintain our fans either, unless they made them with badly designed bearings.
I still enjoy the breeze from 20 year old fans.
Why is it that the output of older computers is so neglected? Its paid for, and will continue to work for you as long as you give it some power.
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I agree - on a small scale - not worth it.
But on a large scale, even if he can harness even 1% of that power, its there, and 'free' for the taking. The energy is flowing as heat conduction anyway, so anything he takes doesn't come from something else's 'budget'.
I think Craven is onto something. I know it is possible to exploit phase changes with relatively small temperature differentials, and the volumetric changes caused as a result of the phase changes can do useful work. I am definitely interested in Craven's work and wish him the best.
Yeh, I consider his medical experimentation smacks of quackery and doesn't help his credibility in my book, although I could see his glass subs, as glass is quite strong in compression. Because of the magnetic properties of glass ( or lack thereof ), such a sub would be much harder to locate through magnetic means. Although I have not researched it, glass, being a liquid, may have acoustical properties which may enable it to look more like just more seawater to a sonar unit. It is an interesting speculation which if I were still in a position to investigate further, I would.
I wouldn't write this fella off yet.
"Fingerprinting algorithms", eh?
With as much music out there as there is, combined with the distortion of the sample we would give them to compare to, I am very impressed they can do this.
Or did they hire a bank of really knowledgeable people and have them type back?
If this is technological, I am quite impressed! Must be one helluva correlator.
--
Oh, the pain! Oh the pain!
I expect ads on free TV, or if the movie was free.
But I paid premium price to see the movie.
I expect a premium presentation!
This means they are not supposed to waste my time with all sorts of preshow JUNK!
If I were making a presentation, and I asked my audience to sit through unwanted presentations from my kids, wife, mother-in-law, and every uncle in the family, do you think my recipient would stand ( err.. sit ) for it???
I see this whole anti-copying crap they are putting through Congress as means of getting legal teeth so when they start putting ads and promotions you can't skip through ( such as presently being tested via the FBI warning ), they think they will be able to thwart unofficial independent re-releases of the movie after it has been cleaned of crap.
So, go convince some congressmen to pass law for you protecting your rights to control how your customer can consume your product. Dream on.
You see, I hate beans! If you are gonna serve me a meal with beans in it, I *will* push them aside and eat the rest. Go ahead and pass all the law you want saying I *must* eat the beans. You better not let that meal out of your sight in order to enforce your control, cause the first thing I'm gonna do is run away and hide somewhere and flick the beans out. Not only that, if I can find the same meal anywhere else without the beans in it, I'll be their customer, not yours.
As long as the video stream has to be presented in a form the human eye can perceive, it can be sensed by other electronic devices that duplicate our human ones, saved in public editable file formats, and cleaned up. I'd much rather see a clean, albeit somewhat lower quality, re-release than be forced to sit through ad after ad and have no control of my player.
I guess what I am trying to say is that all this effort to make the presentation absolutely unavailable to anyone who doesn't jump through all the prescribed hoops is alienating your paying customers!
So the movie leaked, is it really worth $20 to me to try to even get it for "free"??? Consider economics and the economics of mass production, and there is a helluva lot of "economic gain" if MPAA runs the show - and MPAA can have nearly all of it.
But if you deliver a product that is completely unusable in the state you insist on delivering it in, just be prepared for endless workarounds people will come up with to make it usable.
Policing your theatrical productions will be harder to enforce than illegal immigration...
Is it worth it to alienate your paying customers to go after those few that probably wouldn't pay for it anyway at a theatre?
My advice: forget it. Invest your resources in improving the theater experience. There is a difference between eating at home and eating out. If your customers don't like beans in their food, forcing beans on them at the restaurant will only encourage them to eat at home, where they have more control on the preparation of the meal.
I'll probably be modded "redundant" for even posting this. Every time this topic comes up, me and just about everyone else shouts out this is the problem. And no one listens to us.
Unlike your expensive marketing research, we don't even charge for analyzing the problem.
Useless packaging is another of my pet peeves.
I often see more energy put into packaging than in the product. And it grieves me to see our resources being squandered so.
If the rest of the world sees America as a pig, even as an American citizen, I feel they are justified.
I am reminded of our wastefulness every Monday morning, which is trash day, and I see what I have for the trash man. 99% useless packaging.
A simple paper box would have sufficed nicely, and if made right ( no chemicals / disintegrates when wet ), I could have used it to mulch my garden. I have no problem with the glass and cans as long as they make it back to the recycle chain. Its that landfill crap thats gotta go. Land is just way too valuable to tie up as a garbage dump.
Given the present condition of the supply of energies we have available and our rates of consumption, is this yet another luxury for the few that will needlessly deplete our supply of fuels?
Yes, I know the rich can easily afford it.
And with yet more demand on a the growing scarcity of petrochemical fuels powering the whole shebang, I guess we just watch fuel costs for everybody step up another notch. Economics. Supply and demand.
Sometimes I wonder where our head is at when we choose to expend limited resources so frivously.
But then, I have wondered that for a long time on other matters... its a wonder to me that America is still a "superpower" given the way we squander our resources.
It looks like China may be the place to go if you wanna build anything. Just build it there, a safe haven from litigation, then let the world import it if they want.
It will make way for a very interesting economic condrundrum as the corporate entities using patent squatting paradigms and litigation to ensure their cash flow go head to head with marketing entities who are looking to buy their goods to market at the lowest possible cost.
Yup, I think things may get real interesting, as I don't think we are gonna have much luck forcing our dominance onto China the way we could with Iraq. The only thing we have that China needs is land... and its for sale too!
I should have responded to your parent, the AC, not you.
Although I am not a HAM, I have many friends who are. I tinker with mostly the sciency stuff, they tinker with RF, and they have thoroughly impressed me with their intimate knowledge of how RF propagation really works. They have studied antenna theory and design relentlessly and have lots of freely shared empirical data backing up what they say. These guys have outdone every corporate lab I have ever been in, as the HAMS are internally driven to pursue this, whereas a lot of the corporate suit-guys are just pushing paper for a paycheck. Every corporate group I have been in seemed to have a couple of HAMS who knew how the thing is supposed to work, with a couple dozen more supervisory personnel hanging off his back.
When amateur radio operators report back that something is causing broadband interference, its not just a hobby thats getting trashed - its the entire RF environment that everyone uses thats getting trashed. An ambulance driver having trouble communicating on his radio is not in a position to pinpoint why his radio has degraded performance - he just knows he's having trouble contacting the hospital to let them know what's coming. We depend on people like the Amateur Radio operators to watch over the airwaves and bring anomalies out.
Sorry if I overreacted... if anyone even gets close to knocking a radio amateur, I start getting hot under the collar. In my mind, a radio amateur in a kindred tinkerer - one who knows how his stuff works.
People who speak from power get my obedience, but only people who speak from wisdom and knowledge get my respect.
China is the only other power out there strong enough to stand up to the US, and rapidly getting stronger ( economically ) as they develop their industrial capacity, while Americans gladly export theirs.
Watching the US get involved trying to enforce patent and copyright litigation over there could get really amusing - kinda like watching a winded fat kid fight a much more agile opponent. We would have never settled for paying China for the use of explosives, despite the fact I believe explosives were first developed in China.
We may yet see the day yet where in the USA, someone who can build something will be more valuable than someone who can ligigate over whether or not someone will be allowed to build it.
It can transmit as well as receive.
There have been many attempts and sales of devices in the past which purports to use the entire power grid as an antenna, whose signals is routed through our special little box to your TV set, yours for only $19.95 postpaid, etc.
Yeh, you get the signal you wanted, as well as more crap you didn't than you can shake your stick at. Its like getting a free restaurant meal, thoroughly mixed with a bucket of garbage.
So, you put wide spectral content signal back into the power grid, you are gonna radiate our all over. This has been known since the days of Tesla and Marconi. Nothing new here.
We already have enough problem with accidental corona discharges filling the RF spectrum with unwanted broadband hash. Just one dirty insulator will screw up the RF environment for miles around.
Technically, yes, power lines could transmit data, but they were not optimized for this. Its old-style 300-ohm TV twin-lead at its best. It was notorious for picking up stray signals.
I do not think BPL was ever designed to send signals... it's designed like a cat trap, whose purpose is to trap investor dollars. Dollars from people quick to part with their money but slow to pick up the technical acumen to verify their claims.
One more thing, don't knock amateur radio HAMS. They are the last breed of guys we have who have a personal interest in RF. Most people seem as ignorant of their stuff as they are about their computers, and have no earthly idea how it works - as they just complain and pay someone else to make it work. Most amateur radio operators know exactly how their stuff works - especially if you ever meet one who builds from scratch. Its really unusual these days to talk to anyone who knows this field from its most fundamental levels, and their advice should be taken very seriously. Personally, I fear the passing of these guys who build things from the ground up, as many of the incoming people build things with dollars, and have no idea how it works - and physics, not finance, makes the ultimate decision of whether something will work or not.
But in the end, the reason they can do this is US!
We bend over way too easy for business. We are so damned obedient - they say "Internet Explorer Required" and we do as they say. Or, "You must have JavaScript enabled". or flash or adobe or whatever. And we comply.
Not near enough of us simply took our business elsewhere.
Business gets their way because they have the guts to go somewhere else at the slightest whim - ever tried to get a job? You get passed by for the slightest thing out of place... yet business expects us to configure our machines with known avenues for malware propagation just to see their site. Geez, do you think they would wanna do business with me if I insisted they open the till to their cash register open while doing business, and let me do whatever I will under the darkness cover of the DMCA??? Or would they consider me a tremendous security risk to allow in their store?
Even my damm bank requires Java Script to use their site - so I have to do my business personally at the teller. I can't seem to get across to them that I consider them asking me to enable scripting programs on my machine is equivalent of me asking them to let me in their safe, and not even be allowed to see what I do in there.
I have tried till I am blue in the face to fight business on this issue, but there is not enough of me to make a difference... for now I am just a whiner.
When one is seeking a job with business, one usually has sense to take a bath and dress up for the interview, don't come in complaining the office is the wrong color, and you won't work until they install whatever brand air conditioner you specify. The buyer needs to insist on the same respect. If one business is not flexible enough to use web standards. find another that does. If business insists from the get-go that you bend over, what kind of tone have they just set for any future dealings with them?
When we as a whole insist with our purchasing power that business conform to standard communication protocols, protocols we both understand, we will see an end to this sneakyware that is foisted upon us by businesses that insist we load other crap in just to see their site.
Its a big job to turn business around. They are big and used to getting their way. Even government gets in on the act as people are required by law to interact with them. One case in point is some forms the California DMV put in Adobe .pdf format. They used some peculiar new encoding scheme so I can't print the forms. Why in all blue blazes could they have not used the simple way already provided in all browsers to print things?
I can't tell you how many times I have walked away from a business deal when the salesman tries to close the deal and hands me a stack of fine print and smiles, saying "just sign here". If he needs that much fine print, there's something wrong somewhere. I would not ask him to agree to such a thing. Why is he asking me to?
In the 50+ years of my existence, it sure seems like today we are more micromanaged and economically enslaved by debt than at any time I can remember.
Geez, today you even get your life savings seized for as little as sharing a song!
"My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty"???
My guess is that with our continued import/export balance being so way out of kilter, and here we are pumping enormous amounts of "dollars" into our economy without the goods to back it up.
Read up on economics - money supply - fed interest rates - and required reserve margins for banks to see how they finangle this... money created by a bank from thin air because they had sufficient deposit on hand to cover the margin is loaned against one banks reserve to fund a buyer - who deposits the sum in yet another bank, which funds the reserve enabling yet another bank to issue backless funding. This house of cards is built on thin air! And its gonna come down just like the overinflated stock market. And its gonna be hard as hell for the government to find out who has any money to assess tax on!
Already, with most of yesteryear's massive employers going overseas for bulk labor, many of us are forced to "fend for ourselves", working for cash. Since the people we are doing the work for can't write us off, we get paid without the government being informed of the wealth transfer. As American Employment dwindle, people just don't die off, they find other ways to survive - which do not involve being employed by a tax-cooperating employer - we have to work directly for another individual - doing what we do - fixing his car, upgrading software, painting a house, whatever.
I think the government knows full good and well that people are still surviving - yet its difficult to get a tax collected on their earnings.
So, to me, its obvious what they are doing is getting a system in place so no one can buy or sell anything without reporting it to the government, so data aggregation can be used to determing lifestyle and expected tax levies. And to fund this monitoring system by the taxpayer - and do it without a revolt.
Companies having the wisdom of doing stuff like Larson or retaining people like Larson to help with their installations will not likely face the ire of those left irritated by the eyesores.
We humans are the only species on earth that can make the distinction between a fine meal and a mess. The difference means a helluva lot to us.
I often look at old architecture, old bridges, and other public works of the early 1900's and note the artistic touches - and miss it in today's modern poured-in-place world.
Over in old Pasadena, on Colorado Boulevard, there are some old bridges that bring tears to my eyes just to see them... they are so beautifully designed.
For me, there is a lot more than structural integrity alone on my mind as I construct a retaining wall on my property... there is a very important issue to me of what the wall looks like. The appearance of this wall is extremely important to me.... as well as my neighbors. ( It will be a cobblestone-brick design... labor intensive, but in my mind, worth it. )
Artists come in all types. Some work with technology ( us ), some with paint, some with architecture, as well as other media. All the work is a tribute to the artist and his culture.
I feel this is what it is to be human. Our existence is summarized in our art. Swine don't care...as long as they get fed. And that't the main difference between us and swine.
Where I go to college, there is a cellphone antenna array on the top of the tallest building - but you will have to really know what you are looking for to find it... its hidden in a work of art - and looks like part of the building!
Very well hid.
Maybe they should send some of their people to Disney to work in some of the theme parks to discover how Disney makes art. They are damn good at making one thing look like something else. And making it look good.
Even the cable company around here is finally getting into the act and now installing the aboveground workings of their neighborhood distribution electronics in faux fiberglass boulders which blend in with the decor of the neighborhood... those ugly green "breadboxes" they had were an eyesore, graffittied on, and often kicked in disgust. Nobody wanted that ugly thing gracing their front yard.
The thing looked as out of place as an abandoned old car battery.
They need to hire some artists... and use a little creativity so they don't create neighborhood eyesores.
Pay is good for Engineering Managers, but what I love is just plain making things work - not lording over someone else. Actually, I really hate lording over anyone else - I wanna have the fun of designing the thing and bringing it to life.
It would have been a drudge to have to go back to work as a corporate pee-on. Since I have all the tools I need, I figured it was kinda stupid of me to be able to do this, but work in corporate where I not only supported myself, but often a team of several people who usually do nothing but get in the way.
I figured I had the technical skills and tools to make things work. Managers had the leadership skills to tell me what they wanted me to make work, and give me permission to use any tools I needed - or withhold permission if he needed to demonstrate his political power, and Executives had the organizational skills to determine which of us had to go if there were any arguments. I figure each of us were paid in the order of value to the company, and by that criteria I ranked last. Maybe I wasn't all that good - as I am kinda a perfectionist and do not work as fast as many. I believe errors are best handled before they have been replicated by production, or discovering one little error kept something big from working properly ( such as a successful rocket launch ). You know - the "do it right so you don't have to do it over" type mentality.
Yes, design can be fun, but we are after all, artists - and I think many relate to "starving artists". Go into EE or CS if your art is your passion, but go into something else - law, business, investments whatever if you need to support a family, as everything I see shows the United States has a pretty hefty surplus of trained EE and CS people.
If we were all that scarce, we would be snatched up faster than a stray quarter on the sidewalk.
Not that kids *are* doing this - its that kids *can* do this.
I can understand, if you have PHYSICAL access to the machine, you can make it do anything... but leaving control access open just makes me think of an ignorant shopkeeper who has no idea how the locks on his store doors work, and continuously carries on about coming into his store and finding out kids had a party in there last night.
It makes me wonder how seriously we really take the integrity of our computing infrastructure if no-one really understands how it works! Yes, we even have laws now on the books ENFORCING computer illiteracy (DMCA) just so we can continue the illusion of security through obscurity. Security through secrecy is no security at all. As a wise American Indian once told me that the most asinine thing he noted with the paleface is that he thinks he can own the wind.
An interesting book is out now detailing the conquests and military strategies of Alexander the Great. One of its stories detail a problem Alexander had coming up against a far superior Indian army... and they had War Elephants, where he had terrified horses. The book shows where Alexander figured out how to use his archers and javelin throwers to first blind then wound the blinded elephants, leaving the Indian Army the problem of what to do with a stampede of blinded, wounded, terrified War Elephants in their midst.
Alexander turned the Indian Army's strongest asset against them.
Now, we are outsourcing a lot of the programming to the critical parts of our OS to India. And even having American Legislators pass LAW to forbid American citizens from knowing exactly how it works.
How can we fix something without dependence on others if we have no idea how it works?
Our nation's computing infrastructure cannot be replaced as easily as one could replace a lemon car. Building the nation's computational infructure on unknown proprietary stuff in my mind is pure idiocy. To me, its like forcing building construction from wood when one man owns the tree farm, while the ground is littered with rocks and the constituents of concrete.
Could it be India never forgot Alexander's stragegy?
I can see the day when somebody overseas determines its time, and all our fancy systems start carrying on like a herd of wounded elephants... turning stuff on and off, etc.
God forbid we have military control systems also running this system... no telling what instructions it may tell the weapons interfaces.
"The labels are trying to maintain prices comparable to the physical world."
While everyone here is noting
The Public is trying to maintain interoperability comparable to the physical world.
All this DRM crap is result of MAN's law, not PHYSICAL law.
It can evaporate just as fast as Grey Davis's California Governorship.
For now, we need Government and the music industry to swing this pendulum HARD, so they will frustrate many, many, many people. Get 'em all riled up and get them off their asses.
Let Government bring themselves into the limelight - let them be like the neighbor which goes amok and irritates an entire neighborhood - upon which time all thats on everybody's mind is how to get those "bad people" out of the neighborhood. When people meet and swap stories commiserating bad politics, not sports, we are gonna see some change - big change - happen fast, as nothing the politician's head can hock out will be listened to, just as nothing Grey Davis' head could hock up would get people to ignore the energy crises he was instigating in California.
Every lawsuit filed against children over listening to a song becomes noticed - with the public fully aware that a politician's signature put that law in place.
Get the public riled enough, and DRM will go the way of the saucy deals Grey Davis cut with the bigwigs out here in California. If the politician in office won't fix the law, by golly, throw out the bastid and put someone else in there who will.
Yeh, heads will be bleating all over the place, just as heads are bleating now. Politicians will be faced with the choice of making the labels happy - but to do so will cost them their job, retirement, and any legal influence they have to make any sort of law.
For now, let 'em push the pendulum far out, so it will swing back,... HARD!!!!
Let's let everyone get burned really good so they have a good taste of what it feels like to lose what they thought were basic freedoms and rights.
You never miss the water 'till the well runs dry - but if the well ever does indeed run dry and you get really thirsty, one now has incentive to pay attention to the well and fiercely protect it.
I, for one, will rest much peacefully when the voices of the DRM-crowd carry just about as much weight as the head of Grey Davis hocking up words. Lots of blah but stripped of its administrative power by an irritated and angry populace.
I have to accept the fact we were created - as my existence is evidence of my creation.
But just how this happened has been the subject of endless speculation.
My sig indicates my exact sentiments on it. And yes, its taken right from the Bible.
Science is the word we use for the act of proving all things to get to the truth.
My take is if God does indeed exist as an entity, and deliberately created us as we are, does he expect us to use the intelligence he gave us to try to find him, or just mindlessly meander like sheep?
If indeed God created us as we are for a purpose, my logic tells me God intended me to find him through truth - that is provable - not speculation or "following the crowd".
The Bible and other Holy Books warn of this too: False Prophets, The path to truth being narrow and few will find it, etc.
If the God beliefs are true, and God wanted sheep, he could have stopped right there and then. Why create the intelligence that would just cause us to question authority, when we have no way of knowing if the authority is that of God, or of those who just use His name as the means to subjugate us?
Although I consider all religions as having honorable intentions, I don't know as any have it right. I consider it my responsibility to at least try to question things to get to the truth, just as an investor would not want his advisors mindlessly accepting whatever the 'leaders' of the day were saying.
Especially when history shows time and time again the leaders say whatever is necessary to promote their own self-serving empires.
So if someone wants to sell me new fluorescent, HID, LED, or whatever illuminating technology, it would help a helluva lot if its power connector was compatible with what I have in the house.
A marketer may try in vain to sell me some light bulb that won't work in my house. Yeh, it may be technically superior, but if it wants 86 volts at 307 Hz to run, and uses some weird socket I have trouble getting, what use is it?
Likewise, if some company produces something that won't use the standard file formats, its about as useful to me as a 86 volt / 307 Hz light bulb.
If I was really desperate for the light, I would suffer the inconvenience of using power converters to satiate the thing's inability to function naturally as part of my 'team', but it would be first to go when any compatible lighting solution appears.
Or to put it in business parlance, propritary file formats are "not team players" and won't work well with others. Just as the businessman has to reject people who won't work well with others, consumers need to do the same and reject businesses who produce incompatible products which need special treatment before they work.
I would see such a company producing such a thing as just another one of those PHB-led companies using investor-supplied capital to power bobbling marketingheads until they burn through their funding, leaving the PHB's explaining to the investors exactly how their investment monies disappeared - how not only are they not getting their promised phenomenal returns, they won't even get any of their original investment back, and at that time, the fine print on the prospectus will be shown to the investor so they can't even try to recover their funds from the people which were paid with their money.
Personally, I question why people who spend other's money designing incompatible stuff still have a job. And even more so, why do these people who hired these people still have a job? Coining incompatible file formats to me is just about as asinine as teaching students obscure languages in technical schools so no-one but alumni can communicate with them... in essence producing a class of students useless in society.
As long as we have dumb investors out there funding all this crap, this is gonna happen.
Either I go through batteries like a banshee, or I hardly ever use 'em at all, but expect 'em to work when I do need 'em.
Some things like MP3 players, power tools, or cameras get lots of heavy usage and substantial electron flows course their circuitry. Those get NIMH. NIMH has lousy shelf life, but if I use the things within a week of charging them, they work well, as I can refill 'em as needed.
There are other things which I will probably never use the available chemical energy stored in the cell, but I do want what it has available for use, even if its five or ten years from now. Things like the flashlight stored along my spare tire in the car, my volt-ohmmeter, my differential amplifier front-end test probe set. Calculators. Remote-controls. that sort of thing.
My biggest concern by far for these applications has been the leaking battery pack, which upon being ignored for several years, exudes a very corrosive electrolyte paste into the battery compartment of my thing, which I do not discover until I try to use the thing and discover it no longer works.
I have had countless disappointments with the ability of alkaline and NiCD/NiMH cells to hold their fluids. Alkaline tops the list by far, but I have also had leakage from things like those solder-in NiCd cells on motherboards leak and ruin the circuitry around it.
I have yet to see a lithium battery fail in this manner.
So for applications where I frequently "service" the battery, they get the rechargeable variety, as I will usually discover any chemical leakage before any significant damage is done.
For those applications which I install a battery then leave it alone for years, yet expect it to work when I use it, such as remote controls and test equipment, I insist on lithium cells if at all possible.
I was very delighted Everready came out with their Lithium AAA cells in addition to their AA cell. The first things I immediately upgraded to Lithium was all my remote controls, wireless mouse, and my beloved TI-85 graphing calculator, as all of the above still had operable alkaline cells, but I did not rest easy knowing at any time the cells could rupture and ruin some irreplacable equipment. I will note that my TI-85 graphing calculator did not like the slightly elevated voltage of brand new lithium cells, as evidenced by the LCD display contrast control going out of range, and not allowing me set it for a usable display. Being the calculator draws so little power, I figure I might be safe if I use older Lithiums in it when I age a few in the mouse or remotes, as a few month's service in a remote may drain enough "surface charge" from the cells to get the voltage proper for the calculator.
Those Everready lithium cells seem ideal for those cool little LED flashlights DORCY has been selling through WalMart and Target. It looks as if the combo of those technologies yield a handy little light you can prepare today for your "emergency kit" and know that when you need it, it will work. You know the drill - when you tuck a flashlight in your car's glove box because the last time you had the unfortunate thrill of discovering you had a flat tire, you were alone and it was pitch dark and you had to change the tire by feel. As you well know, most batteries won't last long in the glove compartment of a car because of the hot temperatures of summer.
If this new "oxyride" cell has the advantage of extremely long shelf life, let's compare it to Lithium. If it has larger capacity, lets compare it to the alkaline chemistry, or if it has more rechargeability, compare it to NiMH.
Each of the three battery chemistries is best suited to specific applications. Even though each chemistry will pinch-hit for the others, its not as ideal of fit as choosing the proper chemistry for the intended application.
I have some old DOS "slideshow" programs.
I load up an old hard drive with DOS, the slideshow program, and a diskful of .jpg's and let it fly.
These go in minimal security places, like shopping malls. Ok, if someone gets malicious and vandalizes or steals the whole shebang, its not really any worse than if the trashman did it.
I mean, what he got was an old '286 with a 40MB 5.25" MFM HD and an old VGA monitor. Good enough to show photos of what's in the food court.
I just arrange things so that the still operational machines continue to work as designed until the bitter end.
I still have a couple of crates of old 40MB 5.25" MFM HD's and a couple dozen controllers still laying around I am slowly getting rid of this way.
I may get into designing a driver board for those large incandescent bulb-matrix displays one sees in front of many businesses, as I constantly see them not working proprely... it kinda pains me to see so much expensive hardware out there that does not function properly because the latest state-of-the-art computer systems don't run all that long before hanging up on something or other.
Its not at all like those old days I went through when I would get an embedded system going and expect it to go for years without any deviation at all. Much as one would design a motor and expect the same. There's nothing magic about sequencing the bulbs on a sign so they spell text, just as there is nothing magic about designing rotating magnetic fields in a motor so the shaft turns. We don't have to constantly maintain our fans either, unless they made them with badly designed bearings.
I still enjoy the breeze from 20 year old fans.
Why is it that the output of older computers is so neglected? Its paid for, and will continue to work for you as long as you give it some power.