1) What's the sustained and peak current delivery? 10C? 25C? 50C? 2) Do you have to balance multi-cell packs like you do with current LiPo? 3) Can you use existing charging methods? 4) How much do they cost?
Assuming that this isn't sarcasm, there's a lesson to be learned here. If you are willing to operate on a shoestring budget, you can accomplish a lot. But you also have to be willing to look at your idea and honestly assess it's value and whether or not it's time to close up shop and move on to something else.
Hmm...showmanship I get. Steve Jobs was a master at it. Not offending the judge bothers me because that means they're not able to be objective. This also points out the dangers of allowing marketing to drive R&D.
George Carlin said "You nail two pieces of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you." I usually follow that statement with "If you don't believe me, go to Bed, Bath & Beyond." That's where you find a lot of infomercial products. Wal-Mart has an aisle for it too and so does True Value and Ace Hardware.
People seem to be more willing to buy stupid stuff than they are well-designed, practical, truly useful stuff. One could argue that this speaks volumes about the intelligence of the buying public. The segment of the population that comes up with stupid products knows this. Their goal is simply to make a lot of money as quickly as possible with minimal effort. The people who fund development are of the same mindset. The same can be said of the entire entertainment industry.
Can this be changed? Maybe. I often wonder if we created the scientific equivalent of American Idol, how would that alter public perception of geeks. If you could have an annual or bi-annual competition with huge rewards (we're talking 8 figures here) and a ton of publicity e.g. touring the talk-show circuit, would you be able to give the winners rock-star status thus encouraging more people to go for it instead of cranking out noise that some people think is music.
I'd be very interested to know a) why this kid didn't advance in his home state and b) why other kids did? Was the judging really objective or was there some bias somewhere? Did the judges base their decision on criteria other than real science? I don't think we've heard the whole story here.
But let's consider this: you write a research paper and submit it to one peer-review journal. They reject it. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to submit it to other journals? What if it turns out that your paper totally blows away popular theory and the rejection was simply a case of the reviewers sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalalalala...we're not listening to you..."?
For my own part, I do understand what it means to get screwed because somebody gamed the system. In my senior year in undergrad engineering, I was up for best senior project. A fellow student also entered and won. Her secret weapon turned out to be the fact that her boyfriend, who was a student at MIT with all the resources of such a place at his fingertips, was the one who did all the work. Everyone in the class told me that I got screwed. Was I pissed? Sure. The bitch got a special piece of paper at graduation. Where is she now? Who knows. Me, I started two successful businesses. The real lesson here is not to allow someone else determine your fate. Do your own thing and the market will decide if your efforts should be rewarded. Of course I say this and yet people make a crapload of money on shamwows. Doing your own thing doesn't necessarily mean it must be technically/scientifically brilliant.
From way back but this particular story comes from a friend who is a retired mold-maker. One of is many accomplishments is that he design the plastic molds for the original IBM PC. That story goes that IBM came to him to get the molds made and he asked them how many parts they planned to pull off the mold. Their totally serious answer was 150,000. Ten copies of the mold later, IBM had to farm out production to ten different parts of the country to keep up with demand.
But I digress. His most recent consulting job was to do some variations of a commemorative NASCAR race car. Not an original model but a copy with a few team-specific details. The client was planning to make 3000 kits. His estimate came in over $20k. So the client asked what the cost would be if they did 6000 kits. He decided to check with a friend in China. He showed me the quote letter that said they could do 6000 kits including all the molds delivered to the US for $8000 and the guy in China had written "Let me know if that's too much and I'll sharpen my pencil.
So here's a question: What if the leaking of these designs was intentional? There could be several motivations for doing this. One, maybe these aren't the actual designs and they are flawed in some subtle yet crucial way or perhaps multiple ways. Two, they aren't the actual designs but the goal was to lure the hackers in to determine their methods. Or three, that some peacenik thought that it was unfair that the US has all the cool toys and are attempting to achieve whirled peas by way of leveling the playing field.
Sadly, this is yet another example of a cool concept that isn't going to get very far (no pun intended) due to the lack of the über power supply. At best, multirotor helicopters with any sort of payload have an endurance of about 15 minutes. Until that number gets well above the 60 minute threshold, this is all drawing-board stuff. And I'm talking about 60 minutes of on-mission performance which doesn't include getting to and from base camp. You're really going to need some sort of ultra-capacitor or fuel cell.
Wouldn't this be similar to black holes in that although you can't see them, behavior of stars around them and energy emanating from them suggest that they are there?
I happen to be a search & rescue volunteer here in the southwestern US. (As a matter of interest, we are all 100% volunteers. We don't get paid for anything except fuel when we're on a search. We buy all of our own equipment and devote a lot of our own time to train regularly.) Recently, we were approached by some university students who built an inexpensive UAV ($3000) specifically for SAR uses. I personally though their platform had a lot of merit. It's a low-cost foam airplane that uses a customized version of Ardupilot to take photos regularly while flying a pattern over a designated region. They can photograph a square mile in about 30 minutes. You then have a couple of people do a photo analysis of the results. The photos are all geotagged so you can pull a coordinate off the photo for some object of interest. Sadly, the political climate is such that the tin-foil hat types have scared the county board of supervisors and the local Sheriff's office away from even trying the platform out on some training exercises. What's worse is that even though our SAR organization is an independent 501(c)3 and not part of any law-enforcement agency, the managers still won't try out the concept. I wonder how people would feel if some child died of exposure because we didn't have this tool in the toolbox.
This platform is also an order of magnitude cheaper than a DraganFlyer and can cover a hell of a lot more ground without changing out the battery. 15 minutes of air time isn't nearly enough.
I'm not talking about blocking. I want to eliminate those channels from the guide completely never to be seen again. Furthermore, surfing is impractical because the refresh rates are so slow.
So let me get this straight: This project won an award yet set-top-box delivery UI's still suck the big one. (Here's a big hint: prevent all the channels I don't ever want to see again from being seen e.g. the 36 friggin' shopping/infomercial channels) Makes you wonder what problems the other entrants attempted to solve.
Kick-ass concept (I have two close relatives who are Type 1 and on insulin pumps). But this seems to be only half the solution. You still have to monitor your levels to be absolutely sure and currently this is still an invasive albeit simple process. When a non-invasive measurement method that fits in a wristwatch arrives, then it will be a lot better form of treatment. You'll probably still have to keep insulin pens around for emergencies though.
This reminds me of the patent that was granted (and later revoked) for the method of swinging on a swing. http://www.google.com/patents/US6368227 So I'm forced to ask the obvious. How is virtual page turning novel and unique compared to doing it with paper?
How ironic that last night I was exploring 3D printer choices. This thing sounds interesting but A) no prices anywhere and B) cartridges? Really? How much material do they hold? Right now, 1kg of filament from Makerbot is about $40. Are these cartridges going to be competitively priced or is the company attempting to repurpose the inkjet printer business model (aka the razor blade model)? Aside from these obvious issues, I'm forces to ask what practical uses are there for full color other than printing out characters or possibly vehicles that require no painting. I'm still wondering if I can print production-quality parts. Here's a real world example. I currently use some custom electronics enclosures that I have CNC milled out of aluminum. They are about 8" x 6" x 4" overall size and they are made for me by a machine shop. I worked out the numbers and I figure that I can print them out of ABS for about $20 versus $170 and it would take about 5+ hours to print one versus 6-8 weeks lead time for 10 pieces. So in theory, the machine is starting to make sense. Printing one-off parts seems to be what people use these machines for and therefor they don't really care if they have to toss some failures or how long it takes to print. I'd be interested to hear peoples experiences.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds racist.
This would have more validity if the the title was "What Charles Koch & George Soros can teach use about campaign finance data"
Coriolis effect. Next FUD!
1) What's the sustained and peak current delivery? 10C? 25C? 50C?
2) Do you have to balance multi-cell packs like you do with current LiPo?
3) Can you use existing charging methods?
4) How much do they cost?
Assuming that this isn't sarcasm, there's a lesson to be learned here. If you are willing to operate on a shoestring budget, you can accomplish a lot. But you also have to be willing to look at your idea and honestly assess it's value and whether or not it's time to close up shop and move on to something else.
Hmm...showmanship I get. Steve Jobs was a master at it. Not offending the judge bothers me because that means they're not able to be objective. This also points out the dangers of allowing marketing to drive R&D.
George Carlin said "You nail two pieces of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you." I usually follow that statement with "If you don't believe me, go to Bed, Bath & Beyond." That's where you find a lot of infomercial products. Wal-Mart has an aisle for it too and so does True Value and Ace Hardware.
People seem to be more willing to buy stupid stuff than they are well-designed, practical, truly useful stuff. One could argue that this speaks volumes about the intelligence of the buying public. The segment of the population that comes up with stupid products knows this. Their goal is simply to make a lot of money as quickly as possible with minimal effort. The people who fund development are of the same mindset. The same can be said of the entire entertainment industry.
Can this be changed? Maybe. I often wonder if we created the scientific equivalent of American Idol, how would that alter public perception of geeks. If you could have an annual or bi-annual competition with huge rewards (we're talking 8 figures here) and a ton of publicity e.g. touring the talk-show circuit, would you be able to give the winners rock-star status thus encouraging more people to go for it instead of cranking out noise that some people think is music.
I'd be very interested to know a) why this kid didn't advance in his home state and b) why other kids did? Was the judging really objective or was there some bias somewhere? Did the judges base their decision on criteria other than real science? I don't think we've heard the whole story here.
But let's consider this: you write a research paper and submit it to one peer-review journal. They reject it. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to submit it to other journals? What if it turns out that your paper totally blows away popular theory and the rejection was simply a case of the reviewers sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalalalala...we're not listening to you..."?
For my own part, I do understand what it means to get screwed because somebody gamed the system. In my senior year in undergrad engineering, I was up for best senior project. A fellow student also entered and won. Her secret weapon turned out to be the fact that her boyfriend, who was a student at MIT with all the resources of such a place at his fingertips, was the one who did all the work. Everyone in the class told me that I got screwed. Was I pissed? Sure. The bitch got a special piece of paper at graduation. Where is she now? Who knows. Me, I started two successful businesses. The real lesson here is not to allow someone else determine your fate. Do your own thing and the market will decide if your efforts should be rewarded. Of course I say this and yet people make a crapload of money on shamwows. Doing your own thing doesn't necessarily mean it must be technically/scientifically brilliant.
IMHO, Java is the Visual Basic of the programming world. Try playing around with Raspberry Pi.
Some radical environmentalist person on their online dating profile writes "Genetically modified people need not apply."
From way back but this particular story comes from a friend who is a retired mold-maker. One of is many accomplishments is that he design the plastic molds for the original IBM PC. That story goes that IBM came to him to get the molds made and he asked them how many parts they planned to pull off the mold. Their totally serious answer was 150,000. Ten copies of the mold later, IBM had to farm out production to ten different parts of the country to keep up with demand.
But I digress. His most recent consulting job was to do some variations of a commemorative NASCAR race car. Not an original model but a copy with a few team-specific details. The client was planning to make 3000 kits. His estimate came in over $20k. So the client asked what the cost would be if they did 6000 kits. He decided to check with a friend in China. He showed me the quote letter that said they could do 6000 kits including all the molds delivered to the US for $8000 and the guy in China had written "Let me know if that's too much and I'll sharpen my pencil.
Oh, yeah, and they'll make the kits for about 1/4th the price including the molds than we could do them here in the states (true story).
So here's a question: What if the leaking of these designs was intentional? There could be several motivations for doing this. One, maybe these aren't the actual designs and they are flawed in some subtle yet crucial way or perhaps multiple ways. Two, they aren't the actual designs but the goal was to lure the hackers in to determine their methods. Or three, that some peacenik thought that it was unfair that the US has all the cool toys and are attempting to achieve whirled peas by way of leveling the playing field.
What I really want to know is if taking vitamin C adversely affects BCG treatment for bladder cancer. http://www.webmd.com/cancer/bladder-cancer/bacillus-calmette-guerin-bcg-for-bladder-cancer
Sadly, this is yet another example of a cool concept that isn't going to get very far (no pun intended) due to the lack of the über power supply. At best, multirotor helicopters with any sort of payload have an endurance of about 15 minutes. Until that number gets well above the 60 minute threshold, this is all drawing-board stuff. And I'm talking about 60 minutes of on-mission performance which doesn't include getting to and from base camp. You're really going to need some sort of ultra-capacitor or fuel cell.
"Aww, jeez, Officer, I shorted out the IMU and all the magic smoke leaked out."
Wouldn't this be similar to black holes in that although you can't see them, behavior of stars around them and energy emanating from them suggest that they are there?
I happen to be a search & rescue volunteer here in the southwestern US. (As a matter of interest, we are all 100% volunteers. We don't get paid for anything except fuel when we're on a search. We buy all of our own equipment and devote a lot of our own time to train regularly.) Recently, we were approached by some university students who built an inexpensive UAV ($3000) specifically for SAR uses. I personally though their platform had a lot of merit. It's a low-cost foam airplane that uses a customized version of Ardupilot to take photos regularly while flying a pattern over a designated region. They can photograph a square mile in about 30 minutes. You then have a couple of people do a photo analysis of the results. The photos are all geotagged so you can pull a coordinate off the photo for some object of interest. Sadly, the political climate is such that the tin-foil hat types have scared the county board of supervisors and the local Sheriff's office away from even trying the platform out on some training exercises. What's worse is that even though our SAR organization is an independent 501(c)3 and not part of any law-enforcement agency, the managers still won't try out the concept. I wonder how people would feel if some child died of exposure because we didn't have this tool in the toolbox.
This platform is also an order of magnitude cheaper than a DraganFlyer and can cover a hell of a lot more ground without changing out the battery. 15 minutes of air time isn't nearly enough.
I'm not talking about blocking. I want to eliminate those channels from the guide completely never to be seen again. Furthermore, surfing is impractical because the refresh rates are so slow.
So let me get this straight: This project won an award yet set-top-box delivery UI's still suck the big one. (Here's a big hint: prevent all the channels I don't ever want to see again from being seen e.g. the 36 friggin' shopping/infomercial channels) Makes you wonder what problems the other entrants attempted to solve.
The Machine was stored there but now it's just a big empty warehouse.
And another one for detonating the little explosives. (Obligatory "The Living Daylights" reference)
Kick-ass concept (I have two close relatives who are Type 1 and on insulin pumps). But this seems to be only half the solution. You still have to monitor your levels to be absolutely sure and currently this is still an invasive albeit simple process. When a non-invasive measurement method that fits in a wristwatch arrives, then it will be a lot better form of treatment. You'll probably still have to keep insulin pens around for emergencies though.
This reminds me of the patent that was granted (and later revoked) for the method of swinging on a swing. http://www.google.com/patents/US6368227
So I'm forced to ask the obvious. How is virtual page turning novel and unique compared to doing it with paper?
How ironic that last night I was exploring 3D printer choices. This thing sounds interesting but A) no prices anywhere and B) cartridges? Really? How much material do they hold? Right now, 1kg of filament from Makerbot is about $40. Are these cartridges going to be competitively priced or is the company attempting to repurpose the inkjet printer business model (aka the razor blade model)? Aside from these obvious issues, I'm forces to ask what practical uses are there for full color other than printing out characters or possibly vehicles that require no painting. I'm still wondering if I can print production-quality parts. Here's a real world example. I currently use some custom electronics enclosures that I have CNC milled out of aluminum. They are about 8" x 6" x 4" overall size and they are made for me by a machine shop. I worked out the numbers and I figure that I can print them out of ABS for about $20 versus $170 and it would take about 5+ hours to print one versus 6-8 weeks lead time for 10 pieces. So in theory, the machine is starting to make sense. Printing one-off parts seems to be what people use these machines for and therefor they don't really care if they have to toss some failures or how long it takes to print. I'd be interested to hear peoples experiences.