Where not only the so-called TIPs, (by which is meant a certain series of reasonably popular power transistors in TO220 packages, designed by Texas Instruments) but also other devices such as 2N2222, LM386, and "bipolar transistors" and so on, are no longer to be used. Just because they might not be the best choice for switching loads controlled by an Arduino or similar.
So, I am not an EE, but it seems like what he's actually saying is that the MOSFET takes an order of magnitude less turn-on current and that it wasts an order of magnitude less power as heat. Is that true? And if so, why would you not want to save power? Are your driver transistors doubling as a heater?
A lot of the energy budget depends on the circumstances. When running on batteries, power draw is much more of a concern than when running on mains power. Similar with heating -- it may or may not be anything that needs to be attended to. Now having said that, there are several good reasons to use the MOSFET instead of the bipolar transistor, but they are not so overwhelmingly good that it makes sense to discard all kinds of bipolar transistors just because ot that.
The turn-on current for the MOSFET comes from charging the capacitor formed by the gate -- the instantaneous current is C dV/dt, in other words, the faster the transistor is asked to turn on, the larger, though briefer, will the current pulse required be. Once the transistor is turned on it doesn't require any current to stay on. There will however be another similar current spike, in the opposite direction, when the transistor is to be turned off and the gate capacitor is discharged. When the load is something like a motor, these time requirements won't be all that strict, so a controller is quite likely to be capable of driving the transistor. Now, without the necessary additional protective passive components (diode across the motor, maybe also a resistor and capacitor "snubber" circuit there as well; further diodes and resistors and capacitors around the MOSFET that serve to "eat" the energy coming from the motor being turned off) -- there is a nonzero risk that the load will turn on and stay on, having fried the MOSFET and maybe also the output circuitry of the microcontroller or Arduino...
In contrast, the bipolar transistor will require a steady base current for as long as the load is to stay powered, and they are more robust, less sensitive to surges and other influence of the load, and this does make it easier to make the circuit reliable, easier to make it work and easier to make it keep on working properly, The TIP120 and many of its relatives, being Darlington pairs, do have a fairly large current gain, so the required drive current is likely to be small enough for the microcontroller IO line to drive. But they have a voltage drop, and corresponding power loss, and are thus less optimal for driving motors. Which may or may not be a problem-- it will all depend on the actual application.
Thus, using a MOSFET for a switch has its advantages and its pitfalls like everything else -- and I don't have any objections to Tom Jennings recommending MOSFETs over bipolars for turning things on or off. What I do object to is the wholesale discarding of all bipolar transistors as if turning things on and off with the MOSFETs were the be-all and end-all of all electronics -- as we well know that is not so.
Should one even bother to do anything about advice from someone who goes on about enhancement MOSFETs while everything else is rubbish, and then present the circuit symbols for Junction FETs as examples? Makes one wonder what else is inaccurate there.
Where not only the so-called TIPs, (by which is meant a certain series of reasonably popular power transistors in TO220 packages, designed by Texas Instruments) but also other devices such as 2N2222, LM386, and "bipolar transistors" and so on, are no longer to be used. Just because they might not be the best choice for switching loads controlled by an Arduino or similar.
This makes for a needless limiting of options -- If all one ever does is to turn things on or off from some microcontroller maybe, but with whatever designs I make I find that to be a small fraction of what is happening. The rest are things like multi-frequency linear or RF where all kinds of semiconductor devices might be applicable. Even vacuum tubes in some cases.
And then looking around the site and discovering the author is in his own words, "reasonably obsessed with the early history of electronic (not necessarily digital) computing" --- and then he advocates discarding what amounts to the elements of the analog electronic computers? This does not ring true.
From what I remember, the numerical keypads with 789 on the top row were inherited from ancient calculating machines, not entirely unlike the QWERTY ordering of the keyboard -- it was the way it was laid out and as it wasn't broke no-one ever bothered to fix it. There were some mechanical reasons for this originally, then it carried over to electronic calculator keyboards and then their descendants, the computers.
The phones keypad pedigree is different: from various circular dials that opened and closed a switch a number of times corresponding to the number the user wanted to dial, the keypads that replaced the dials got the numbers in a natural top-to-bottom ascending order, usually with keys organized in a 3 wide 4 tall matrix.
I use the keypad while paying bills. There are account numbers, the amounts themselves, then these other long identifier strings of numbers that makes it certain that the mony ends up where it is supposed to go. Much easier than using the top row.
As for caps lock -- since I use vi a lot, the accidental turning on of this makes a lot of confusion since the various letter commands are different between upper and lower case: j moves down, J joins the line and the following then u is undo but U is undo to original text of the line. Then:e! starts over for another try...
Changing it to ctrl isn't great either, I'd type away at some website like this, then hit ^A and a couple letters later it is all: Where TF is all my text gone! Damn...
Thus, most of the keyboards here have the key removed so as to avoid the above kinds of hassles.
The closest I can think of when it comes to real-world devices that have a large reduction ratio, would be something like the mechanical tachometer/hour counter combinations seen on old tractors and similar -- where the dial indicates something like "hours at 1500 RPM". That makes for a reduction rate of 900000 from the engine shaft to the rightmost wheel of the counting device if that were to rotate once per 10 hours.
But in these, the reduction would be done via several stages of worm-drives, and the reduced speed is important, not the increased torque. And they are thoroughly obsolete -- anything made since the 1980s would use electronic devices to do this.
For torque multiplication, this would require some seriously strong materials in the later stages. Even then, the total power would be limited by the maximum speed of the first stages as well as the maximum torque of the latter stages. Yes, with sufficiently strong materials it could move a house though it would have to do this over a period of several months. Hard to see how this could be practical outside of mechanical instrumentation applications.
Why would that be a probable outcome ? Why couldn't we just add a little bit of the aerosols, measure the effect, and slowly add some more ?
There is pretty good historical evidence of what did happen when a big volcano blew out lots of ash and particles. Mount Tambora for example, that had an eruption in 1815, and the following year, 1816, became known as "the year without a summer", because of this. There is no good reason to expect a significantly different outcome from filling the atmosphere with other similar particles. It will become colder.
On the other hand, this does argue for the possibility that the system can behave somewhat predictable, with negative feedback as it were, within a smaller range of excitations, like varying the speed of an aircraft as long as it runs faster than stall speed. But once driven past some inflection-point that we can expect to be there, given that the system is chaotic, all bets will be off.
Still, this suggested solution seems to be worse than the problem. The possible increased temperatures and CO2 will just make for better growth conditions for all kinds of plants, of which many are food for animals which in turn are eaten by humans. Less sunlight, less heat, less CO2 and there will be less foliage, then eventually less food available. How can that good for anything?
And finally, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a lot of argumentation about acid rain, caused by partculate pollution from coal-fired plants, where the sulfur was precipitated as acid. Countries have managed to put a stop to this kind of pollution, though there are still localized problems with particulate pollution in cities. And now there are someone arguing that this sort of thing actually could be worthwhile in an attempt to halt a perceived warming process?
This is supposed to "reverse" the climate change? As in making it essentially perpetually cloudy? This sounds nothing so much like a nuclear winter, though without the nukes...
How something like that is going to reverse anything, now climate being that chaotic as it is doesn't easily move forwards or backwards along some line, like a car or animal does. It will change it, sure. Probably to the nuclear winter-like conditions, as if that were anything better than today's situation. Or maybe this would also keep heat in, so we would get what is essentially a runaway greenhouse... now wasn't that what was supposedely the problem initially?
What advantage does this offer over traditional Julian Day numbering. where each day is sequentially numbered and their number is divisible by 7 on Mondays? As long as it is necessary to refer to civil or traditional time that can be easily converted.
From what I remember, NT 4 didn't support USB very well, if at all. Windows 2000 however, did work reasonably well with USB. So unless they had upgraded to Windows 2000 or XP, they would still be stuck with the PS/2 -connected devices.
Interestingly enough, the summary indicates that Hurd still doesn't support USB... that does limit the selection of useful hardware.
Nevermind the sound of gunfire -- what about the sound of electrical failure (ever heard the loud SNAP of a squirrel got in the way of 11 kV?) and the quite likely subsequent electrical fire? That's going to be the difficult one to run away from...
Norway's large sales of electric cars is mostly driven by positive incentives: electric cars may use the lanes reserved for busses and taxis, they go free of charge on the toll roads, they are not taxed with VAT when sold, and the yearly vehicle tax is only on the order of 400 kr as opposed to the approximately 3000 kr for cars with gasoline or diesel engines.
That car model, the Renault Laguna, is especially made to be modded for disabled people. I don't know what kind of disability the driver has (the article doesn't say, although he did have two epileptic seizures because of and during the hectic drive).
Epileptic seizures, and going 60 MPH (or 100 km/h as this is in Europe) or more. Twice. And still stayed on the road? Makes one wonder if there isn't any other modifications like lane-keeping there as well. Depending on the degree of epilepsy, but at that speed, say 30 m/s, one cannot be out cold for much more than a second before leaving the road.
It's been tried. IEC-60906-1 is currently used in Brazil only. In Europe there are still several different plugs and sockets in each country, although some of these can be interconnected.
Then there's all the various micro-usb variations for low-power...
Having once learned the so-called Imperial, US, system, here are some answers and translations:
The Ampere and Second are the same in SI and in the US systems of measurements, so the Coulomb would be as well. Sometimes the electron charge was more useful.
The force unit is pounds, abbreviated lb. The gravitational acceleration is 32 feet/second^2, and the mass unit is called the slug. Just like there is occasionally talk about the kgf (kilogram-force) in the metric system, there is also talk about the "pound-mass" in the US system, at the risk of confusion.
The electronic and electrical units were all SI- so the units were F/m and H/m (as well as Ohm*m for resistivity) -- no inches there. However, when specifying the sizes and shapes of microstriplines, inches were sometimes seen for lengths, widths, and thicknesses, in addition to millimeters calculated from the wavelengths of the RF signals. Wavelengths were calculated in millimeters using c=3*10^8 m/s, then converted to feet or inches as needed for antenna construction.
The US unit of work is foot-pound-force per second. (lb*ft/s) One of these would correspond to 1.3558 W. Horsepowers and BTU/s are other units that could be encountered.
Our Norwegian equivalent of the 2x4 is still called "to-tom-fire", which refers to wood with cross-section 48 mm by 96 mm after adjustment. I'd think it is similar elsewhere in Europe; that size of lumber is specified in millimeters.
Even though we've been using metric for more than a century, a few inch-measurements mostly in building materials remain, names for lumber sizes and pipe threads.
gallon, quart, pint, cup, ounce, tablespoon... all different names for what is really just volume -- why not stick with one of them and use multipliers for the larger and smaller sizes? There's also the advantage of the metric system that the cubic centimeter corresponds to 1 mL, so there is no real need for a separate volume unit (the Liter, originally the equivalent volume of a kilogram of water, being a cubic decimeter, is a secondary unit).
I'll agree however, that the inch can be somewhat convenient in metric and powers of 2: 1 inch is very close to 2^8 / 100 mm, which makes 5/8 inch very close to 16 mm. Provided the need for precision isn't too strict. Which also applies to binary representation of the decimal fractions, where the inaccuracy should be small enough so it doesn't matter for the job at hand. Most measured or calculated values won't have a nice exact representation in any numbering system anyways.
Hopefully this strip is not made in China
I'm crossing my fingers
According to the
link from cryptome than an AC has provided further down here, the hardware is indeed mostly made in China. What makes this US made to the satisfaction of the government is that the software that makes this thing what it is, is made in the US, replacing all the original code.
This document goes on at length about how that can be. As an EE, not a lawyer, I found the information that the "brain" is a SheevaPlug to be more interesting.
Some interesting info there.
This thing is based on the SheevaPlug hardware co-located with a power strip, with customized re-programming. An expensive wolf in sheep's clothing.
Actually, the main difference between fog and clouds is a matter of location: If you're looking at it from the outside it is a cloud; if you are inside it is fog.
As a buzzword this seems very similar to the nebulous definition that.NET had about 10 years ago -- it was supposed to do everything but no-one could explain exactly what it was or how it was supposed to do it.
There is the setuid patent, however, that was applied for by AT&T in 1972. But it is described as a mechanism, since that was before software patents were invented.
Over here, we say "0.4" for the drink of that size (many places sell beer in 0.4 L glasses) or the traditional 0.5L, the "half-liter" literally. Then there's the "0.6" for the thirstier people... none of this gets to be any more complicated than the "pint" or "cup". The latter is for coffee only, and comes in various sizes, so it isn't really quantified.
A10, M10 one millimeter apart? I'd rather use existing colloquialisms like "two by four" (even if the material in question actually measures 48 mm by 98 mm). Like for pipe threads, the size has become more of a label identifying the standard size rather than the measurement of the size itself, what with 1/2 inch pipes being closer to an actual 3/4 inch or 20 mm... Besides, M10 is already used as a designation for 10 mm threads of various pitches: M10 x 1.5 is the regular coarse thread, M10 x 1.25 is finer, and M10 x 1 is another, even finer pitch commonly used with light sockets, faucets, and brake line connectors.
Which reminds me, the purported metrication of iron pipe and standard pipe threads is bad enough. We still talk about 1/2 inch, 3/8 inch and so on, sizes of pipe threads, even if the external diameters are larger than that (1/2 inch pipe thread is nearly 20 mm in diameter) but lately the catalogs are advertising these in the style of R20, R25, R32 -- the number after the R being some approximate value of millimeters from the original inches, R20 being 3/4 inch pipe threads for example, which are about 24 mm outside diameter. At least, copper pipes has been metric for years, with sizes from 8mm and up, and the size label is the same as the actual size.
I have seen a renovation job done in a 100 year old house, where some rotten joists had to be replaced. These were original "2 by 4" as in actually measuring 51 mm by 102 mm. The replacements were made from the next larger standard size material, and no need to depend on the stores having the old sizes.
Kleinhenz, who are making the picotux, have had a server crash apparantly, according to http://www.kleinhenz.com/
Not sure if one could get Qt going on the Picotux however, besides, the startup time there is about 90 seconds from poweron to the time the busybox banner and prompt appears on the serial console.
The equipment shown in the featured blog is identified as a Renesas MS7724 development board. It has quite a lot more peripherals.
One wonders how much it would take to put some kind of roofing over the most vulnerable exterior equipment. Something like corrugated tin on a steel frame or whatever.
Or maybe a roof over the cafeteria and the rubbish bins, so that birds can't just come and steal baguettes.
I've never heard of such deleterious effects of a bird dropping anything on outdoor power station switchgear... what kind of vulnerable kit is this anyways?
Slashdot Mirror
Where not only the so-called TIPs, (by which is meant a certain series of reasonably popular power transistors in TO220 packages, designed by Texas Instruments) but also other devices such as 2N2222, LM386, and "bipolar transistors" and so on, are no longer to be used. Just because they might not be the best choice for switching loads controlled by an Arduino or similar.
So, I am not an EE, but it seems like what he's actually saying is that the MOSFET takes an order of magnitude less turn-on current and that it wasts an order of magnitude less power as heat. Is that true? And if so, why would you not want to save power? Are your driver transistors doubling as a heater?
A lot of the energy budget depends on the circumstances. When running on batteries, power draw is much more of a concern than when running on mains power. Similar with heating -- it may or may not be anything that needs to be attended to. Now having said that, there are several good reasons to use the MOSFET instead of the bipolar transistor, but they are not so overwhelmingly good that it makes sense to discard all kinds of bipolar transistors just because ot that.
The turn-on current for the MOSFET comes from charging the capacitor formed by the gate -- the instantaneous current is C dV/dt, in other words, the faster the transistor is asked to turn on, the larger, though briefer, will the current pulse required be. Once the transistor is turned on it doesn't require any current to stay on. There will however be another similar current spike, in the opposite direction, when the transistor is to be turned off and the gate capacitor is discharged. When the load is something like a motor, these time requirements won't be all that strict, so a controller is quite likely to be capable of driving the transistor. Now, without the necessary additional protective passive components (diode across the motor, maybe also a resistor and capacitor "snubber" circuit there as well; further diodes and resistors and capacitors around the MOSFET that serve to "eat" the energy coming from the motor being turned off) -- there is a nonzero risk that the load will turn on and stay on, having fried the MOSFET and maybe also the output circuitry of the microcontroller or Arduino...
In contrast, the bipolar transistor will require a steady base current for as long as the load is to stay powered, and they are more robust, less sensitive to surges and other influence of the load, and this does make it easier to make the circuit reliable, easier to make it work and easier to make it keep on working properly, The TIP120 and many of its relatives, being Darlington pairs, do have a fairly large current gain, so the required drive current is likely to be small enough for the microcontroller IO line to drive. But they have a voltage drop, and corresponding power loss, and are thus less optimal for driving motors. Which may or may not be a problem-- it will all depend on the actual application.
Thus, using a MOSFET for a switch has its advantages and its pitfalls like everything else -- and I don't have any objections to Tom Jennings recommending MOSFETs over bipolars for turning things on or off. What I do object to is the wholesale discarding of all bipolar transistors as if turning things on and off with the MOSFETs were the be-all and end-all of all electronics -- as we well know that is not so.
Where to begin?
Should one even bother to do anything about advice from someone who goes on about enhancement MOSFETs while everything else is rubbish, and then present the circuit symbols for Junction FETs as examples? Makes one wonder what else is inaccurate there.
The actual advice of throwing out anything designed in the past century is at sensitiveresearch.com/DoNotTIP/index.html.
Where not only the so-called TIPs, (by which is meant a certain series of reasonably popular power transistors in TO220 packages, designed by Texas Instruments) but also other devices such as 2N2222, LM386, and "bipolar transistors" and so on, are no longer to be used. Just because they might not be the best choice for switching loads controlled by an Arduino or similar.
This makes for a needless limiting of options -- If all one ever does is to turn things on or off from some microcontroller maybe, but with whatever designs I make I find that to be a small fraction of what is happening. The rest are things like multi-frequency linear or RF where all kinds of semiconductor devices might be applicable. Even vacuum tubes in some cases.
And then looking around the site and discovering the author is in his own words, "reasonably obsessed with the early history of electronic (not necessarily digital) computing" --- and then he advocates discarding what amounts to the elements of the analog electronic computers? This does not ring true.
From what I remember, the numerical keypads with 789 on the top row were inherited from ancient calculating machines, not entirely unlike the QWERTY ordering of the keyboard -- it was the way it was laid out and as it wasn't broke no-one ever bothered to fix it. There were some mechanical reasons for this originally, then it carried over to electronic calculator keyboards and then their descendants, the computers.
The phones keypad pedigree is different: from various circular dials that opened and closed a switch a number of times corresponding to the number the user wanted to dial, the keypads that replaced the dials got the numbers in a natural top-to-bottom ascending order, usually with keys organized in a 3 wide 4 tall matrix.
I use the keypad while paying bills. There are account numbers, the amounts themselves, then these other long identifier strings of numbers that makes it certain that the mony ends up where it is supposed to go. Much easier than using the top row.
As for caps lock -- since I use vi a lot, the accidental turning on of this makes a lot of confusion since the various letter commands are different between upper and lower case: j moves down, J joins the line and the following then u is undo but U is undo to original text of the line. Then :e! starts over for another try...
Changing it to ctrl isn't great either, I'd type away at some website like this, then hit ^A and a couple letters later it is all: Where TF is all my text gone! Damn...
Thus, most of the keyboards here have the key removed so as to avoid the above kinds of hassles.
The closest I can think of when it comes to real-world devices that have a large reduction ratio, would be something like the mechanical tachometer/hour counter combinations seen on old tractors and similar -- where the dial indicates something like "hours at 1500 RPM". That makes for a reduction rate of 900000 from the engine shaft to the rightmost wheel of the counting device if that were to rotate once per 10 hours.
But in these, the reduction would be done via several stages of worm-drives, and the reduced speed is important, not the increased torque. And they are thoroughly obsolete -- anything made since the 1980s would use electronic devices to do this.
For torque multiplication, this would require some seriously strong materials in the later stages. Even then, the total power would be limited by the maximum speed of the first stages as well as the maximum torque of the latter stages. Yes, with sufficiently strong materials it could move a house though it would have to do this over a period of several months. Hard to see how this could be practical outside of mechanical instrumentation applications.
Why would that be a probable outcome ? Why couldn't we just add a little bit of the aerosols, measure the effect, and slowly add some more ?
There is pretty good historical evidence of what did happen when a big volcano blew out lots of ash and particles. Mount Tambora for example, that had an eruption in 1815, and the following year, 1816, became known as "the year without a summer", because of this. There is no good reason to expect a significantly different outcome from filling the atmosphere with other similar particles. It will become colder.
On the other hand, this does argue for the possibility that the system can behave somewhat predictable, with negative feedback as it were, within a smaller range of excitations, like varying the speed of an aircraft as long as it runs faster than stall speed. But once driven past some inflection-point that we can expect to be there, given that the system is chaotic, all bets will be off.
Still, this suggested solution seems to be worse than the problem. The possible increased temperatures and CO2 will just make for better growth conditions for all kinds of plants, of which many are food for animals which in turn are eaten by humans. Less sunlight, less heat, less CO2 and there will be less foliage, then eventually less food available. How can that good for anything?
And finally, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a lot of argumentation about acid rain, caused by partculate pollution from coal-fired plants, where the sulfur was precipitated as acid. Countries have managed to put a stop to this kind of pollution, though there are still localized problems with particulate pollution in cities. And now there are someone arguing that this sort of thing actually could be worthwhile in an attempt to halt a perceived warming process?
This is supposed to "reverse" the climate change? As in making it essentially perpetually cloudy? This sounds nothing so much like a nuclear winter, though without the nukes...
How something like that is going to reverse anything, now climate being that chaotic as it is doesn't easily move forwards or backwards along some line, like a car or animal does. It will change it, sure. Probably to the nuclear winter-like conditions, as if that were anything better than today's situation. Or maybe this would also keep heat in, so we would get what is essentially a runaway greenhouse... now wasn't that what was supposedely the problem initially?
This is just wrong on so many levels...
What advantage does this offer over traditional Julian Day numbering. where each day is sequentially numbered and their number is divisible by 7 on Mondays? As long as it is necessary to refer to civil or traditional time that can be easily converted.
From what I remember, NT 4 didn't support USB very well, if at all. Windows 2000 however, did work reasonably well with USB. So unless they had upgraded to Windows 2000 or XP, they would still be stuck with the PS/2 -connected devices.
Interestingly enough, the summary indicates that Hurd still doesn't support USB ... that does limit the selection of useful hardware.
Nevermind the sound of gunfire -- what about the sound of electrical failure (ever heard the loud SNAP of a squirrel got in the way of 11 kV?) and the quite likely subsequent electrical fire? That's going to be the difficult one to run away from...
Norway's large sales of electric cars is mostly driven by positive incentives: electric cars may use the lanes reserved for busses and taxis, they go free of charge on the toll roads, they are not taxed with VAT when sold, and the yearly vehicle tax is only on the order of 400 kr as opposed to the approximately 3000 kr for cars with gasoline or diesel engines.
That car model, the Renault Laguna, is especially made to be modded for disabled people. I don't know what kind of disability the driver has (the article doesn't say, although he did have two epileptic seizures because of and during the hectic drive).
Epileptic seizures, and going 60 MPH (or 100 km/h as this is in Europe) or more. Twice. And still stayed on the road? Makes one wonder if there isn't any other modifications like lane-keeping there as well. Depending on the degree of epilepsy, but at that speed, say 30 m/s, one cannot be out cold for much more than a second before leaving the road.
It's been tried. IEC-60906-1 is currently used in Brazil only. In Europe there are still several different plugs and sockets in each country, although some of these can be interconnected.
Then there's all the various micro-usb variations for low-power ...
Having once learned the so-called Imperial, US, system, here are some answers and translations:
The Ampere and Second are the same in SI and in the US systems of measurements, so the Coulomb would be as well. Sometimes the electron charge was more useful.
The force unit is pounds, abbreviated lb. The gravitational acceleration is 32 feet/second^2, and the mass unit is called the slug. Just like there is occasionally talk about the kgf (kilogram-force) in the metric system, there is also talk about the "pound-mass" in the US system, at the risk of confusion.
The electronic and electrical units were all SI- so the units were F/m and H/m (as well as Ohm*m for resistivity) -- no inches there. However, when specifying the sizes and shapes of microstriplines, inches were sometimes seen for lengths, widths, and thicknesses, in addition to millimeters calculated from the wavelengths of the RF signals. Wavelengths were calculated in millimeters using c=3*10^8 m/s, then converted to feet or inches as needed for antenna construction.
The US unit of work is foot-pound-force per second. (lb*ft/s) One of these would correspond to 1.3558 W. Horsepowers and BTU/s are other units that could be encountered.
Our Norwegian equivalent of the 2x4 is still called "to-tom-fire", which refers to wood with cross-section 48 mm by 96 mm after adjustment. I'd think it is similar elsewhere in Europe; that size of lumber is specified in millimeters.
Even though we've been using metric for more than a century, a few inch-measurements mostly in building materials remain, names for lumber sizes and pipe threads.
gallon, quart, pint, cup, ounce, tablespoon... all different names for what is really just volume -- why not stick with one of them and use multipliers for the larger and smaller sizes? There's also the advantage of the metric system that the cubic centimeter corresponds to 1 mL, so there is no real need for a separate volume unit (the Liter, originally the equivalent volume of a kilogram of water, being a cubic decimeter, is a secondary unit).
I'll agree however, that the inch can be somewhat convenient in metric and powers of 2: 1 inch is very close to 2^8 / 100 mm, which makes 5/8 inch very close to 16 mm. Provided the need for precision isn't too strict. Which also applies to binary representation of the decimal fractions, where the inaccuracy should be small enough so it doesn't matter for the job at hand. Most measured or calculated values won't have a nice exact representation in any numbering system anyways.
Hopefully this strip is not made in China I'm crossing my fingers
According to the link from cryptome than an AC has provided further down here, the hardware is indeed mostly made in China. What makes this US made to the satisfaction of the government is that the software that makes this thing what it is, is made in the US, replacing all the original code.
This document goes on at length about how that can be. As an EE, not a lawyer, I found the information that the "brain" is a SheevaPlug to be more interesting.
Some interesting info there. This thing is based on the SheevaPlug hardware co-located with a power strip, with customized re-programming. An expensive wolf in sheep's clothing.
Actually, the main difference between fog and clouds is a matter of location: If you're looking at it from the outside it is a cloud; if you are inside it is fog.
As a buzzword this seems very similar to the nebulous definition that .NET had about 10 years ago -- it was supposed to do everything but no-one could explain exactly what it was or how it was supposed to do it.
There is the setuid patent, however, that was applied for by AT&T in 1972. But it is described as a mechanism, since that was before software patents were invented.
Some weeks ago, the comic Questionable Content had a plotline involving a new and very humanoid "chassis" for one of the characters.
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1998
And now this news --- well to paraphrase Mark Twain: Reality does not replicate fiction, but it rhymes.
Over here, we say "0.4" for the drink of that size (many places sell beer in 0.4 L glasses) or the traditional 0.5L, the "half-liter" literally. Then there's the "0.6" for the thirstier people... none of this gets to be any more complicated than the "pint" or "cup". The latter is for coffee only, and comes in various sizes, so it isn't really quantified.
A10, M10 one millimeter apart? I'd rather use existing colloquialisms like "two by four" (even if the material in question actually measures 48 mm by 98 mm). Like for pipe threads, the size has become more of a label identifying the standard size rather than the measurement of the size itself, what with 1/2 inch pipes being closer to an actual 3/4 inch or 20 mm... Besides, M10 is already used as a designation for 10 mm threads of various pitches: M10 x 1.5 is the regular coarse thread, M10 x 1.25 is finer, and M10 x 1 is another, even finer pitch commonly used with light sockets, faucets, and brake line connectors.
Which reminds me, the purported metrication of iron pipe and standard pipe threads is bad enough. We still talk about 1/2 inch, 3/8 inch and so on, sizes of pipe threads, even if the external diameters are larger than that (1/2 inch pipe thread is nearly 20 mm in diameter) but lately the catalogs are advertising these in the style of R20, R25, R32 -- the number after the R being some approximate value of millimeters from the original inches, R20 being 3/4 inch pipe threads for example, which are about 24 mm outside diameter. At least, copper pipes has been metric for years, with sizes from 8mm and up, and the size label is the same as the actual size.
I have seen a renovation job done in a 100 year old house, where some rotten joists had to be replaced. These were original "2 by 4" as in actually measuring 51 mm by 102 mm. The replacements were made from the next larger standard size material, and no need to depend on the stores having the old sizes.
Kleinhenz, who are making the picotux, have had a server crash apparantly, according to http://www.kleinhenz.com/
Not sure if one could get Qt going on the Picotux however, besides, the startup time there is about 90 seconds from poweron to the time the busybox banner and prompt appears on the serial console.
The equipment shown in the featured blog is identified as a Renesas MS7724 development board. It has quite a lot more peripherals.
One wonders how much it would take to put some kind of roofing over the most vulnerable exterior equipment. Something like corrugated tin on a steel frame or whatever.
Or maybe a roof over the cafeteria and the rubbish bins, so that birds can't just come and steal baguettes.
I've never heard of such deleterious effects of a bird dropping anything on outdoor power station switchgear ... what kind of vulnerable kit is this anyways?