I bought my wife a 'Tornado' brand fan once. It
was loud all by itself, but it was significantly louder when the fan guard was right in front of it.
It actually made a "whirr" sound not unlike a Dustbuster or ShopVac.
It also lowers the velocity of the air at any
particular point, which reduces the wind noise around the non-moving components, such as fan guards, etc. I seem to recall wind resistance (and thus wind noise) goes up non-linearly, and so a
linear reduction in air velocity with constant CFM (implying a corresponding linear increase in surface area) still ends up reducing noise. A big component of noise comes from turbulence as well, which is why moving fan guards away from fans helps, and why reducing RPMs is so important.
The only way to retain CFM while reducing air velocity is to use more or larger fans at lower RPMs. In the end, you've gotta increase surface area.
If you read the article, the author includes an email he received after posting it that notes that the perforance of the tiles is affected by how much air is behind them. He (the person who emailed the article's author) also suggests a free-standing sound dampening panel behind the machine to prevent sound reflections from coming back into the room.
Personally, whem I move into a house (hopefully in the next 3-6 mos), I plan on sound-deadening the computer room. Since I want to be able to run wiring out-of-site, it might be attractive to put up a facade sound-deafining wall behind our desks to help dampen the machine noise. Most of the machine noise comes from the back, and absorbing it externally shopuld be rather effective, actually.
It might not seem like it could be that effective, but I can attest to the power of sound absorbing materials. When I visited our company's Houston location, I had occasion to walk down a corridor that had cubicle panels that alternated between metal and fabric surfaces. The fabric surfaces naturally absorb more noise. The difference in ambient noise due to those panels was so noticable that it felt like the side of my head was getting drawn towards the fabric panels, looking for the missing noise. If I walked to quickly down the hall, the passing panels almost made a whooshing noise.
This hints to me that the secret to a quieter computer room is good ceiling and wall coverings, and not necessarily the case itself.
Ah yess... I remember when "Microsoft Plus" came
out for Windows 95 (and people around where I was still called it the "Plus Pack"). My roommate installed one of the "high tech" themes (SciFi or
Robots or whatever it was called).
I've never really truly recovered. It's amazing how you largely don't notice the sound effects when you trigger them yourself. It's similarly amazing how maddening they can be when the guy next to you keeps triggering "Beep... snap... gloop... clink! Tronggggg... gloop.... shshshshshshshsh... Bleep!" (Adding about 2000mg daily intake of caffeine doesn't help either.)
To get "back at" him, I wired up a cron job on one of the Linux machines there in the basement to play every.MOD file I had handy at a time I knew I'd be in class and he'd be computing.:-) He tore out and hid the speaker from that computer, at which point I found an old Kraco car stereo speaker and magnetically mounted it within my case and connected it electrically with two unused jumpers and some ghetto engineering.
I miss college.
Makes me want to electrify my door knob again like
I did in my dorm room freshman year...
It's more along the lines of recognizing, at the organizational level, that certain words and phrases add a non-objective bent to discussions. To effectively combat this inherent bias against their organization's position, it makes sense to promulgate a strategy of avoiding those words and phrases.
That said, the FSF's use of Free in a deliberately provocative manner attempts to bias the discussion in the opposite direction.
It's hardly double-speak though. It's rhetorical strategy. It also gives the paranoid pedantic something to hold on to for that warm, fuzzy feeling.:-)
Actually, I have explained much of the details of
how to make the cart. All of the technical information required to design an Intellivision
cartridge is on my website. Certain specifics of
the cart I sold I've kept to myself.
The first number is the number of tasks.
The second number is "Average free cpu cycles per
display frame, divided by 25." On a real Intellivision with only the load-average app running, there's about 12500 free cycles (out of 14394 cycles per display frame). Approximately 1200
cycles are taken up by the display controller 'cycle stealing' from the CPU.
Yes. Someone at Texas Instruments apparently coined the term "sprite." I believe Karl Guttag once told me who came up with the term, but the name eludes me. They came up with it while developing the TMS9918 VDP. (The 9918A is the chip that the TI Home Computer and the Colecovision used. The 8-bit NES used a descendent of that chip. Karl was on that chip's design team.)
I'm pretty sure "MOB" was the term Commodore used in connection with its VIC chips. I don't know what term General Instruments used, other than 'objects', so I adopted the Commodore name.
The Aquarius home computer (jokingly called "The System for the 70s!") actually was unrelated to the Intellivision, except that both were marketed by
Mattel Electronics. The actual design and manufacture of the Aquarius was handled by an outside company.
The system itself was a CP/M capable Z-80 based computer. This is in contrast to the Intellivision Master Component, which used a CP-1600 CPU and was only truly fit for IntyOS.;-)
Kinda, but not quite. You are bounded in your available information content. Total information is given by "spatial information * temporal information." If you increase one, you decrease the other, at least if you hold the bitrate constant.
You're right that it's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in that its formulation is similar. (delta-X * delta-T == constant, so as you make delta-X smaller, delta-T gets bigger.) The difference is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is based on a single hard constant. For a video stream, the right-hand-side is basically dictated by "total bits" and varies by the stream.
And in the long run if the gadgets produced by your research make you rich, then you're going to keep researching*.
Oh, don't get me wrong. The technical innovation that powers all this otherwise "unnecessary" gadgetry is important to the advancement of the human race. I find it sad, but fitting, that entertainment is the largest subsidizer of most high-tech innovation.
Perhaps I'm just a tad bitter. I've been slogging though complicated specifications, helping to put together the next major turn of the crank on one of our processors at work. The main products driving these chips are things like wireless settop boxes, 3G cellphones and other doodads and gewgaws.
When you think about just how much mental effort goes into what are essentially high-tech toys, it can be a tad depressing. I work for what's essentially a toy company that sells to yuppies.:-) As the author of the article stated, this magnitude of divertion of mental resources can only really be supported by a wealthy economy.
Ahh well. I do know our processors go to other, slightly more society-advancing uses. Just like Pentiums get used in countless game boxes, effectively (if unintentially) subsidizing the handful of Beowulf clusters that are doing truly groundbreaking scientific research.
--Joe
Re:That would be a natural ceiling
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
I first read that as "over inhibited areas." I then thought "why don't those bastards live a little?"
Thomas Edison seemed to be interested in inventing for the sake of inventing. How else can you explain a mentality that expected a handful of 'minor inventions' per month and a 'major breakthrough' every couple months.
I know I'm oversimplifying, but given that one of Edison's "inventions" is credited with wide ranging life changes (the lightbulb, which he didn't invent but did radically improve the commercial viability of), it seems appropriate to consider his motivations. It didn't seem like he was out to change the world, but rather cast it in his image by inventing as many things as he could. Inventing for the sake of it.
It was rather Monty Pythonesqe -- as if the author got sacked 3/4ths of the way through and replaced by an ad copy-writer. (Much like the moose -> llama transition in Holy Grail.)
<sarcasm>
Holy shit! I just found out that half the people have below average IQ, too! Whatever will we do?
</sarcasm>
Actually, I'm pretty sure well over half of Americans are above their ideal weight. If we assume, however, that weights follow a normal distribution (which seems reasonable), then half of the population will be above the mean weight.
But it's easy to predict that wallpaper and ring tones for your telephone are highly unlikely to effect that change. That seems to be the sort of "innovation" that Stuart Jeffries is railing against.
--Joe
[P.S. Yes, 'effect,' not 'affect,' as in 'bring about.']
Slashdot Mirror
... which reminds me, I need to disable the startup sound on my most recent IT-issued laptop.
I always get disoriented when I fire up IE instead of Moz, because IE adds all those stupid click sounds when you click on links.
I bought my wife a 'Tornado' brand fan once. It was loud all by itself, but it was significantly louder when the fan guard was right in front of it. It actually made a "whirr" sound not unlike a Dustbuster or ShopVac.
Outside the case it was just a slight whine.
--JoeIt also lowers the velocity of the air at any particular point, which reduces the wind noise around the non-moving components, such as fan guards, etc. I seem to recall wind resistance (and thus wind noise) goes up non-linearly, and so a linear reduction in air velocity with constant CFM (implying a corresponding linear increase in surface area) still ends up reducing noise. A big component of noise comes from turbulence as well, which is why moving fan guards away from fans helps, and why reducing RPMs is so important.
The only way to retain CFM while reducing air velocity is to use more or larger fans at lower RPMs. In the end, you've gotta increase surface area.
--JoeIf you read the article, the author includes an email he received after posting it that notes that the perforance of the tiles is affected by how much air is behind them. He (the person who emailed the article's author) also suggests a free-standing sound dampening panel behind the machine to prevent sound reflections from coming back into the room.
Personally, whem I move into a house (hopefully in the next 3-6 mos), I plan on sound-deadening the computer room. Since I want to be able to run wiring out-of-site, it might be attractive to put up a facade sound-deafining wall behind our desks to help dampen the machine noise. Most of the machine noise comes from the back, and absorbing it externally shopuld be rather effective, actually.
It might not seem like it could be that effective, but I can attest to the power of sound absorbing materials. When I visited our company's Houston location, I had occasion to walk down a corridor that had cubicle panels that alternated between metal and fabric surfaces. The fabric surfaces naturally absorb more noise. The difference in ambient noise due to those panels was so noticable that it felt like the side of my head was getting drawn towards the fabric panels, looking for the missing noise. If I walked to quickly down the hall, the passing panels almost made a whooshing noise.
This hints to me that the secret to a quieter computer room is good ceiling and wall coverings, and not necessarily the case itself.
We shall see...
--JoeAh yess... I remember when "Microsoft Plus" came out for Windows 95 (and people around where I was still called it the "Plus Pack"). My roommate installed one of the "high tech" themes (SciFi or Robots or whatever it was called).
I've never really truly recovered. It's amazing how you largely don't notice the sound effects when you trigger them yourself. It's similarly amazing how maddening they can be when the guy next to you keeps triggering "Beep... snap... gloop... clink! Tronggggg... gloop.... shshshshshshshsh... Bleep!" (Adding about 2000mg daily intake of caffeine doesn't help either.)
To get "back at" him, I wired up a cron job on one of the Linux machines there in the basement to play every .MOD file I had handy at a time I knew I'd be in class and he'd be computing. :-) He tore out and hid the speaker from that computer, at which point I found an old Kraco car stereo speaker and magnetically mounted it within my case and connected it electrically with two unused jumpers and some ghetto engineering.
I miss college.
Makes me want to electrify my door knob again like I did in my dorm room freshman year...
--JoeYou're forgetting about terminal velocity, and it's relationship to surface area vs. mass...
--JoeIt's more along the lines of recognizing, at the organizational level, that certain words and phrases add a non-objective bent to discussions. To effectively combat this inherent bias against their organization's position, it makes sense to promulgate a strategy of avoiding those words and phrases.
That said, the FSF's use of Free in a deliberately provocative manner attempts to bias the discussion in the opposite direction.
It's hardly double-speak though. It's rhetorical strategy. It also gives the paranoid pedantic something to hold on to for that warm, fuzzy feeling. :-)
--JoeActually, I have explained much of the details of how to make the cart. All of the technical information required to design an Intellivision cartridge is on my website. Certain specifics of the cart I sold I've kept to myself.
FWIW, I have released the ROM image and source code to the game.
--JoeActually, it's "Beee Sevvunteeen Baaaaawwwwmerrrr", not a B-52.
--JoeThe first number is the number of tasks. The second number is "Average free cpu cycles per display frame, divided by 25." On a real Intellivision with only the load-average app running, there's about 12500 free cycles (out of 14394 cycles per display frame). Approximately 1200 cycles are taken up by the display controller 'cycle stealing' from the CPU.
--JoeThe 'free.fr' site's pretty bad, but the mirror sitting on my Linux box seems to be holding up just fine. So come slashdot me!
5:58pm up 344 days, 20:05, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
--JoeActually, there is. I've sold several 4-Tris cartridges. And no, don't ask if I'll make any more. I will if and when I do, and no sooner.
--JoeYes. Someone at Texas Instruments apparently coined the term "sprite." I believe Karl Guttag once told me who came up with the term, but the name eludes me. They came up with it while developing the TMS9918 VDP. (The 9918A is the chip that the TI Home Computer and the Colecovision used. The 8-bit NES used a descendent of that chip. Karl was on that chip's design team.)
I'm pretty sure "MOB" was the term Commodore used in connection with its VIC chips. I don't know what term General Instruments used, other than 'objects', so I adopted the Commodore name.
--JoeThe Aquarius home computer (jokingly called "The System for the 70s!") actually was unrelated to the Intellivision, except that both were marketed by Mattel Electronics. The actual design and manufacture of the Aquarius was handled by an outside company.
The system itself was a CP/M capable Z-80 based computer. This is in contrast to the Intellivision Master Component, which used a CP-1600 CPU and was only truly fit for IntyOS. ;-)
--JoeNot true. The ECS works with the Intellivision I as well.
Also, the full Keyboard Component WAS released in small quantities, but Mattel killed it and bought back most of the Keyboards. I actually own one.
--JoeKinda, but not quite. You are bounded in your available information content. Total information is given by "spatial information * temporal information." If you increase one, you decrease the other, at least if you hold the bitrate constant.
You're right that it's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in that its formulation is similar. (delta-X * delta-T == constant, so as you make delta-X smaller, delta-T gets bigger.) The difference is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is based on a single hard constant. For a video stream, the right-hand-side is basically dictated by "total bits" and varies by the stream.
--JoeOh, don't get me wrong. The technical innovation that powers all this otherwise "unnecessary" gadgetry is important to the advancement of the human race. I find it sad, but fitting, that entertainment is the largest subsidizer of most high-tech innovation.
Perhaps I'm just a tad bitter. I've been slogging though complicated specifications, helping to put together the next major turn of the crank on one of our processors at work. The main products driving these chips are things like wireless settop boxes, 3G cellphones and other doodads and gewgaws. When you think about just how much mental effort goes into what are essentially high-tech toys, it can be a tad depressing. I work for what's essentially a toy company that sells to yuppies. :-) As the author of the article stated, this magnitude of divertion of mental resources can only really be supported by a wealthy economy.
Ahh well. I do know our processors go to other, slightly more society-advancing uses. Just like Pentiums get used in countless game boxes, effectively (if unintentially) subsidizing the handful of Beowulf clusters that are doing truly groundbreaking scientific research.
--JoeI first read that as "over inhibited areas." I then thought "why don't those bastards live a little?"
Thomas Edison seemed to be interested in inventing for the sake of inventing. How else can you explain a mentality that expected a handful of 'minor inventions' per month and a 'major breakthrough' every couple months.
I know I'm oversimplifying, but given that one of Edison's "inventions" is credited with wide ranging life changes (the lightbulb, which he didn't invent but did radically improve the commercial viability of), it seems appropriate to consider his motivations. It didn't seem like he was out to change the world, but rather cast it in his image by inventing as many things as he could. Inventing for the sake of it.
--JoeIt was rather Monty Pythonesqe -- as if the author got sacked 3/4ths of the way through and replaced by an ad copy-writer. (Much like the moose -> llama transition in Holy Grail.)
--Joe<sarcasm> Holy shit! I just found out that half the people have below average IQ, too! Whatever will we do? </sarcasm>
Actually, I'm pretty sure well over half of Americans are above their ideal weight. If we assume, however, that weights follow a normal distribution (which seems reasonable), then half of the population will be above the mean weight.
--JoeBut it's easy to predict that wallpaper and ring tones for your telephone are highly unlikely to effect that change. That seems to be the sort of "innovation" that Stuart Jeffries is railing against.
--Joe
[P.S. Yes, 'effect,' not 'affect,' as in 'bring about.']
Imaginary numbers? I doubt SCO wants to be paid in dot-com stock.
--JoeI think tachyons tend to disagree with you, but it's hard to tell since they seem like they're talking backwards.
Uhm, yeah. The original post was a joke? It sounds like an algorithm that should go into LZip.
--Joe