What is a Motorola 360? I have never ever seen one in use, nor a Sammy gear or a google glass for that matter. I guarantee that when apple sells 10 million iwatchrd the first year, we will all see them everywhere. And yes, I know what a moto 360 is, I'm just proving a point. Also, nobody knows what the iwatch will look like.
I have no idea how successful the iwatch will be, what I do know, it is already a long way from being perceived as being first. It is not walking into a market which has years of necessary frand patents. It is walking into a market with large companies Sony; Samsung; Google already having products(some on their second generation) and patents. Whatever the iwatch looks like they changed the game...and it is costing them now. Oh and I like the look of the Motorola 360 too, so its looking pretty good for an unlauched product.
Take a wander back to the first generation iPod, or the first iPhone. Apple did not invent those device classes.... they innovated them. They refined them.
Small innovative MP3 players had been around for years before the iPod came out... iRiver had some of the best ones available at the time, and they went far beyond what the iPod started out as. But the innovation was embedding a mass storage device, and a well thought out user interface, and having a relatively seamless process to load media onto the device, and creating a media market place to reduce friction in media sales, and really great marketing and advertising....
Same thing with the iPhone. It wasn't the first smart phone.... it was the first rational smart phone. The first with a sensible UX story. The first with seamless media integration.
All of this evolved EVERYONES expectations of what a smart phone could be and ultimately SHOULD be.
As others have pointed out Apple did not invent the GUI even before XEROX there were bold steps in that direction that simply fell flat... Even the LISA... the first Apple attempt at what became the Macintosh was a bloated piece of crap. Apple didn't invent the laptop either. Their first attempt was the Macintosh Portable... IBM Selectrics weigh less and take up less desk space.... forget about using it on your lap... your legs would go to sleep before you got the thing to boot. Their second attempt in each case was full of win.... Mac 128K took off.... and in its time so did the PowerBook 100... the first practical laptop by any manufacturer.
I was under the impression that while humans mostly cannot hear ultrasonic sounds, the existence of them can be perceived as a kind of "texture" to other sounds that we can hear. Removing these frequencies all together from all sounds sources can make stuff sounds more artificial.
Nope, it's 100% bullshit. Audiophiles cling to it as justification for spending money on 96 or 192 kHz shit. When recording a physical sound, the sum total of all frequency components interfering with each other will be recorded by the microphone. A microphone does not record individual frequency components, it records a physical pressure wave. Your ear picks up the effects of frequency components outside of its range interfering with frequency components inside its range. A microphone does the exact same thing.
96K and 192K sample rates with 24 or even 32 bit float sample widths have nothing to do with audiophile gear. It has to do with digital audio processing. Processing at higher sample rates during mixing and editing reduces losses and aliasing errors that creep into the audible portion of the signal from effects, filters, and summing. During final mastering the sample rate is down converted back to 44.1Khz 16 bit as the last step. If you do all the post-processing at 44.1Khz, 16 bit your effective SNR goes to hell in a bucket even with just a few of digital filters in the signal chain. Sure, you can start with a 44.1kHz source and up convert it using interpolation, but that is not as accurate as sampling the live source at 96 or 192kHz. Starting with really clean high resolution sources means that the final result has much better SNR than is possible otherwise.
RPi is an excellent machine, but the GPIO cannot handle realtime apps. What it really needs is a realtime I/O controller. Maybe something like an XMOS controller and an FPGA.
This is exactly what I do with with an Olimex PIC32 T-795H. It breaks the PIC32 IO out to breadboard compatible pins, and comes with an open source version of MMBASIC installed. It is easy to upgrade it to one of the later closed versions of MMBASIC that is more VB-like, and has better performance. Performance is not too bad, it processes about 1 BASIC token per microsecond. MMBASIC even supports treating the unused portion (192K) of FLASH as a file system, and can do autostart to a BASIC app, and it supports app chaining. You can literally plug this thing into a breadboard, plug it into a usb port, open a VT100 terminal and start writing code. On a Mac, you can use screen, but you'll need to modify the function key mappings to get the VT100 function keys the MMBASIC editor supports to work correctly. 32 bit 80MHz BASIC machine that is ready to rock.
You cannot win the Ops/W/$ race by spending resources on O-O-O. You have to be smart about the whole chain. FUs are cheap. Handling optimal cases is expensive in the current regimes. So change the rules. Suddenly difficult problems get easier... Intel and AMD and other incumbents are scared shitless of changing their aging ISAs, and Programming Models. And with good reason... they would be forcing every customer to recompile on version 0.1 releases of new compilers, and working with new hardware spins....
Does anyone now still program on 6800, 6502, or Z-80 for commodity level hardware? No! Because those machines are done. They were invented by people who had no concept of where things were going. Even Intel/AMD are pretty much clueless. They fear changing because it has huge costs. So instead they keep flogging an ISA that is so decrepit that it farts zombies!
Funny you should mention that. Lots of mainframe families were doing that decades ago. APP-LOADER: "Oh! Hey! This is a new code module, I don't have a local copy of the binary I need for this. It appears to also include a generic machine code block for my family of processor cores. No cached binary for me, it was built on a different serial numbered machine.... hold on a sec while I post-compile-schedule the instructions to my local object language and re-link it..... There ya go! This will run like oiled snot on me now! Oh! And I have automagically replaced the old incompatible object-binary with the new binary I just built! Have a nice day!"
I'd like nice toys like that on the desktop. Closest we get now from any vendor or OS zealot(s) is.... "Can I re-link this for you? It may run faster."
6502 didn't have a HCF instruction but it did have a key 6800 feature that later RISC machines lack. Almost all operations have an implied target. The A register, or in the 6800 the A/B register. The Mill seems to be making a better use of the implied target concept by putting all resultants on The Belt, thus reducing the classic register juggling that happens in complex code threads on all RISC machines. I think that this architecture has some legs. I hope they get some silicon taped out, and get LLVM hammered into shape to deal with a machine that doesn't expcicitly have globally named registers, or state for that matter.
So if they can legally access the data stored on the Irish servers, they must produce that information.
This is really simple:
One cannot refuse a court ordered demand for documents just because those documents are stored in safe deposit box in Switzerland. If the person in possesion of the deposit box key is before a US court, they must produce the documents stored in that Swiss bank, as ordered, come hell or high water. (IANAL) but this is just common sense. Is M$ Legal really this stupid?
Motorsports are considered sports, and their primary attribute isn't physical exertion (besides the extremely long race forms), it's knowledge and skill.
You clearly have never driven a vehicle set up for racing on a track for any length of time. It requires top notch driving skills, mental endurance, and a very large commitment to physical training. Race cars (any format) beat the shit out of the driver, even if they don't have a collision. The steering has almost no power assist, and the rate at which the pedals are used is orders of magnitude more often than driving the commute. Add to that the lateral Gs that keep trying to rip hands off the steering wheel, push legs/feet away from pedals, and push the drivers head out of the region that they can see their mirrors accurately. While it is true the racing harness keeps the torso pretty well strapped to the seat, it takes a lot of strength and endurance to keep out of oxygen debt when the toro is bring pounded around in that seat.
Over the years I have made mistakes on my taxes (before the last 5 years where the process of assessing data has become a WWW process) I have never once had the IRS 'screw' me on a mistake. If they said I owed them money... a careful review of the facts showed I was in err. And in other cases I was wrong in in their favor and they corrected the err, and even telling me what err I made.
On the other hand....
When I owed them money and could not pay, they were more vicious than the worst debt collector I can imagine. At one point I told an IRS agent who contacted me by phone. I was encouraged to take out a loan. When I refused I was threatened with fines, and prosecution. My response was thus: "You will not get paid until I get paid. You know damned well I have no assets you can legally seize. I will not take out a loan as you have insisted. If you persist in your threats, or garnish my meager wages, I will stop working. What will you do then? Prosecute me? I will go to prison. That will cost YOU far more money that what I owe. It is your move sir!" (and yes I did in fact have have such a discussion with an IRS agent over the phone, though the exact words may have been slightly different -- this is from long term memory. Note: this was before the IRS was ordered to take a kinder, gentler touch to tax collection.)
Ever since that phone call I got quarterly statements reminding me of the balance due. In following years when I was due a refund they informed me that it was applied to prior tax years, until it was all paid off. I think they set the 'Not a Sheep' flag on my SSN and have treated me accordingly ever since.
I take my tax liability seriously. 'Render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar.' If I can't pay it now I know they will find a to make it work. They just needed to understand that I was not going to bend over for them.
This is not legal advice. If you have assets the IRS can legally seize, you bet your ass they will seize them. At that time in my life I had nothing. All they could do is garnish my wages and threaten me with prosecution, and verbally abuse me.
One of my clients has both a Tesla and a ICE vehicle. After one trip he made, with me present, he was muttering under his breath.... should have taken the Tesla..... just wasted gas for no reason. It is way more cost effective to charge a Tesla than to put gas in an ICE vehicle.
Even for as heavy as it is.... I can tell you from personal experience the Tesla kicks the shit out of any muscle car I have been in where the driver put the hammer down.
Each of the US car makers (except Tesla... yet) sell many times the number of cars Mercedes does. The only reason I can see that the CEO of Dalmer-Benz piped up is because he feels threatened by the buzz Tesla has created. He decided to take it upon himself to get Mercedes into the news cycle. I cannot even remember the last time I saw Mercedes in the news. No I don't watch broadcast news.... or commercials when I can help it. Well Steve-o.... you just got Mercedes on my radar... good job... now... fuck off. I cannot afford your cars or a Tesla for that matter. I have not ever driven a Mercedes, nor do I think it likely that I ever will.
I have had a few occasions(all of these recently) to drive a Tesla(it is like driving an iPhone), and a '71 Rolls-Royce (it is like driving a really comfy sofa), a recent Porsche 944(I have driven go-carts that had a better ride, but damn it tracks like it is on rails), and a recent Caddy(well appointed, powerful, nice ride,but FFS the dash is busier than a F-16 cockpit) You know what? I like the Tesla. I have some issues with some of the exterior design choices they made... practical issues... areas where water and dirt collect that are hard to clean... rookie mistakes. Nothing major though.
Those guard bands are there because state of the art RF tech cannot create so called 'brick wall' filters that do not have serious, deleterious, in-band, cost, and/or component scale side effects. There is some aspects of RF physics that place some rather arbitrary limits on how we generate and detect wireless communications. The boffins keep chipping away at it... and it does get better over time... but bandwidth precision is one of those devils in the art that is hard to beat down.
Honestly, I think you've been drinking the anti-nuke koolaid that the scaremongers have been doling out.
This!
I got some RL 'threats' from some locals about a post (not on/.) I made regarding how over-the-top-shrill a suite of anti-nuke 'studies' was WRT radioactive effluent leaking into the ocean from Fukushima. I ended up telling the instigators to fuck off, then blocked them and their friends.
My position is that, yes this leakage is bad, but it is not nearly as dire as these crapware studies were implicating. They didn't even show anything resembling analysis to bolster their argument. It was just a rehash of TMI. "Leakage is BAD!!! Leakage is unacceptable!!1111 Mmmkay!?"
Yes it is bad, but it is not going to sterilize the Pacific basin (this was one of the long term outcomes suggested). So, come back when you have some EVIDENCE that this is going to do anything worse than make it a fairly unwise choice to eat seafood that comes from the regions around that part of the Pacific.
Putting nukes on large floating platforms is a fairly nice way to mitigate a lot of the problems that are most likely to do serious damage to the plant. OTOH... The Pacific is a really vicious bitch when she is unhappy. I have lived within sight of her for most of my life. I never turn my back on her when I am within her reach.;) I'd want to be shown high-confidence that such a platform cannot break loose, and if sunk would still be functional enough to complete a cold shutdown, without loss of containment.
As people who have been in the Seattle region for a while may recall, we lost a floating bridge because some idiots failed to close the access hatches on the flotation modules after storing a little bit of contaminated water in them, before a major storm. Oops!
So yeah... There'd need to be some serious effort put into making sure cockups like the I-90 floating bridge cannot happen.
If you could harness that heat in some way to create electrical or mechanical power, you're more efficient than today where that heat (read: energy) is used for NOTHING. I don't know why you seem to think that it wouldn't work, because auto manufacturers seem to think that it will (BMW, Honda - links in a previous post from someone else), and are engineering systems to do exactly that.
Oh you mean like a pair of turbo chargers do? That increases the intake pressure to improve the power efficiency of the ICE when it is running at high output? The turbo charger is a much more effective use of 'waste heat' than what Honda and BMW are doing. Oh and the 'waste heat' is also used to keep the catalytic converter active to break down all the partially burned hydrocarbons in the gas. Ask yourself why the turbine portion of the turbo-pump is as close to the exhaust-ports as practical? I'll give you a hint: for thermodynamic efficiency the input side of the turbine housing needs to be as hot as possible. Putting after the catalyst would reduce efficiency because the cat is consuming heat energy to oxidize the combustion products.
Heck, using the 'waste heat' from the coolant to warm/dehumidify the cabin, is a more efficient use than these tin selenide whiskers would ever be. So why do we use a rather bulky gas compressor for air-conditioning rather than a heat pump driven off 'waste heat'... After all PLG refrigerators (commonly found in RVs and RTs) have been using this technique for at least 40 years. Hint: it is more efficient to steal a few HP off the engine than to try and generate that energy off the coolant or the exhaust stream.
Bobbied is right, most of you here have no clue about thermodynamics... I know just enough to know most of you just don't get it.
What it really comes down to is there is simply not as much energy in the 'waste heat' from an ICE as most of you here seem to think. That 15% to 25% efficiency in ICEs hides the source of the losses. Most of the inefficiency comes from reciprocating mass, friction and pumping losses. What little energy is available in the exhaust systems (exhaust and cooling) is already being used and after that there is just not much left.
I agree with bobbied all the way around. The only big win here is going to be increased efficiency of RTGs, and those are only used in power systems where there really is no other option.
Your average less-than-a-dollar PIC microcontroller includes several fuse bits to do things like make it impossible to reprogram.
This is not true. All PIC programmable elements are reprogrammable. Including the protected portions. It is simply that those cells cannot be rewritten without bulk-erasing the block they are in.
There are MCUs that have Write-Once-Only FLASH, but PICs are not one of them.
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What is a Motorola 360? I have never ever seen one in use, nor a Sammy gear or a google glass for that matter. I guarantee that when apple sells 10 million iwatchrd the first year, we will all see them everywhere. And yes, I know what a moto 360 is, I'm just proving a point. Also, nobody knows what the iwatch will look like.
I have no idea how successful the iwatch will be, what I do know, it is already a long way from being perceived as being first. It is not walking into a market which has years of necessary frand patents. It is walking into a market with large companies Sony; Samsung; Google already having products(some on their second generation) and patents. Whatever the iwatch looks like they changed the game...and it is costing them now. Oh and I like the look of the Motorola 360 too, so its looking pretty good for an unlauched product.
Take a wander back to the first generation iPod, or the first iPhone. Apple did not invent those device classes.... they innovated them. They refined them.
Small innovative MP3 players had been around for years before the iPod came out... iRiver had some of the best ones available at the time, and they went far beyond what the iPod started out as. But the innovation was embedding a mass storage device, and a well thought out user interface, and having a relatively seamless process to load media onto the device, and creating a media market place to reduce friction in media sales, and really great marketing and advertising....
Same thing with the iPhone. It wasn't the first smart phone.... it was the first rational smart phone. The first with a sensible UX story. The first with seamless media integration.
All of this evolved EVERYONES expectations of what a smart phone could be and ultimately SHOULD be.
As others have pointed out Apple did not invent the GUI even before XEROX there were bold steps in that direction that simply fell flat... Even the LISA... the first Apple attempt at what became the Macintosh was a bloated piece of crap. Apple didn't invent the laptop either. Their first attempt was the Macintosh Portable... IBM Selectrics weigh less and take up less desk space.... forget about using it on your lap... your legs would go to sleep before you got the thing to boot. Their second attempt in each case was full of win.... Mac 128K took off.... and in its time so did the PowerBook 100... the first practical laptop by any manufacturer.
But the founding and initial success of Apple would not have happened without Wozniak.
And you never, ever would have heard of Wozniak without Jobs.
Ever.
Wozniak needed what Jobs brought to the table as much as Jobs needed what Woz brought. Each, without the other, would have been nothing.
^^ THIS!
Jobs was the Jelly to WOZ's peanut butter. Without both, you don't get to a PB&J, crusts or no.
I was under the impression that while humans mostly cannot hear ultrasonic sounds, the existence of them can be perceived as a kind of "texture" to other sounds that we can hear. Removing these frequencies all together from all sounds sources can make stuff sounds more artificial.
Nope, it's 100% bullshit. Audiophiles cling to it as justification for spending money on 96 or 192 kHz shit.
When recording a physical sound, the sum total of all frequency components interfering with each other will be recorded by the microphone. A microphone does not record individual frequency components, it records a physical pressure wave. Your ear picks up the effects of frequency components outside of its range interfering with frequency components inside its range. A microphone does the exact same thing.
96K and 192K sample rates with 24 or even 32 bit float sample widths have nothing to do with audiophile gear. It has to do with digital audio processing. Processing at higher sample rates during mixing and editing reduces losses and aliasing errors that creep into the audible portion of the signal from effects, filters, and summing. During final mastering the sample rate is down converted back to 44.1Khz 16 bit as the last step. If you do all the post-processing at 44.1Khz, 16 bit your effective SNR goes to hell in a bucket even with just a few of digital filters in the signal chain. Sure, you can start with a 44.1kHz source and up convert it using interpolation, but that is not as accurate as sampling the live source at 96 or 192kHz. Starting with really clean high resolution sources means that the final result has much better SNR than is possible otherwise.
RPi is an excellent machine, but the GPIO cannot handle realtime apps. What it really needs is a realtime I/O controller. Maybe something like an XMOS controller and an FPGA.
This is exactly what I do with with an Olimex PIC32 T-795H. It breaks the PIC32 IO out to breadboard compatible pins, and comes with an open source version of MMBASIC installed. It is easy to upgrade it to one of the later closed versions of MMBASIC that is more VB-like, and has better performance. Performance is not too bad, it processes about 1 BASIC token per microsecond. MMBASIC even supports treating the unused portion (192K) of FLASH as a file system, and can do autostart to a BASIC app, and it supports app chaining. You can literally plug this thing into a breadboard, plug it into a usb port, open a VT100 terminal and start writing code. On a Mac, you can use screen, but you'll need to modify the function key mappings to get the VT100 function keys the MMBASIC editor supports to work correctly. 32 bit 80MHz BASIC machine that is ready to rock.
Watch The Mill videos.... It is all spelled out.
You cannot win the Ops/W/$ race by spending resources on O-O-O. You have to be smart about the whole chain. FUs are cheap. Handling optimal cases is expensive in the current regimes. So change the rules. Suddenly difficult problems get easier... Intel and AMD and other incumbents are scared shitless of changing their aging ISAs, and Programming Models. And with good reason... they would be forcing every customer to recompile on version 0.1 releases of new compilers, and working with new hardware spins....
Does anyone now still program on 6800, 6502, or Z-80 for commodity level hardware? No! Because those machines are done. They were invented by people who had no concept of where things were going. Even Intel/AMD are pretty much clueless. They fear changing because it has huge costs. So instead they keep flogging an ISA that is so decrepit that it farts zombies!
Funny you should mention that. Lots of mainframe families were doing that decades ago. APP-LOADER: "Oh! Hey! This is a new code module, I don't have a local copy of the binary I need for this. It appears to also include a generic machine code block for my family of processor cores. No cached binary for me, it was built on a different serial numbered machine.... hold on a sec while I post-compile-schedule the instructions to my local object language and re-link it..... There ya go! This will run like oiled snot on me now! Oh! And I have automagically replaced the old incompatible object-binary with the new binary I just built! Have a nice day!"
I'd like nice toys like that on the desktop. Closest we get now from any vendor or OS zealot(s) is.... "Can I re-link this for you? It may run faster."
6502 didn't have a HCF instruction but it did have a key 6800 feature that later RISC machines lack. Almost all operations have an implied target. The A register, or in the 6800 the A/B register. The Mill seems to be making a better use of the implied target concept by putting all resultants on The Belt, thus reducing the classic register juggling that happens in complex code threads on all RISC machines. I think that this architecture has some legs. I hope they get some silicon taped out, and get LLVM hammered into shape to deal with a machine that doesn't expcicitly have globally named registers, or state for that matter.
USB 3.0 and 3.1 can supply 5V@2A or 12V@3A or 20V@ 5 Amps.
I think with 100W available melting a little plastic should be no problem.
So if they can legally access the data stored on the Irish servers, they must produce that information.
This is really simple:
One cannot refuse a court ordered demand for documents just because those documents are stored in safe deposit box in Switzerland. If the person in possesion of the deposit box key is before a US court, they must produce the documents stored in that Swiss bank, as ordered, come hell or high water.
(IANAL) but this is just common sense. Is M$ Legal really this stupid?
Motorsports are considered sports, and their primary attribute isn't physical exertion (besides the extremely long race forms), it's knowledge and skill.
You clearly have never driven a vehicle set up for racing on a track for any length of time. It requires top notch driving skills, mental endurance, and a very large commitment to physical training. Race cars (any format) beat the shit out of the driver, even if they don't have a collision. The steering has almost no power assist, and the rate at which the pedals are used is orders of magnitude more often than driving the commute. Add to that the lateral Gs that keep trying to rip hands off the steering wheel, push legs/feet away from pedals, and push the drivers head out of the region that they can see their mirrors accurately. While it is true the racing harness keeps the torso pretty well strapped to the seat, it takes a lot of strength and endurance to keep out of oxygen debt when the toro is bring pounded around in that seat.
It is even more profound for motorcycle racing.
Golf is a game (like chess, not a sport, like baseball) you play while walking around in a clear-cut that has been reseeded with grass.
Now get off of my lawn with your damn crooked sticks, dimpled balls, and silly looking shoes.
"...since the precise terrain it hit couldn't be determined in advance."
I believe the correct word is 'moonain'.
bzzzt
Terra is the latin name for Earth... thus terrain.
Luna is the latin name for Moon...
Therefore 'Lunain' would be the contextually correct word.
Thanks for playing though.
Over the years I have made mistakes on my taxes (before the last 5 years where the process of assessing data has become a WWW process) I have never once had the IRS 'screw' me on a mistake. If they said I owed them money... a careful review of the facts showed I was in err. And in other cases I was wrong in in their favor and they corrected the err, and even telling me what err I made.
On the other hand....
When I owed them money and could not pay, they were more vicious than the worst debt collector I can imagine. At one point I told an IRS agent who contacted me by phone. I was encouraged to take out a loan. When I refused I was threatened with fines, and prosecution. My response was thus: "You will not get paid until I get paid. You know damned well I have no assets you can legally seize. I will not take out a loan as you have insisted. If you persist in your threats, or garnish my meager wages, I will stop working. What will you do then? Prosecute me? I will go to prison. That will cost YOU far more money that what I owe. It is your move sir!" (and yes I did in fact have have such a discussion with an IRS agent over the phone, though the exact words may have been slightly different -- this is from long term memory. Note: this was before the IRS was ordered to take a kinder, gentler touch to tax collection.)
Ever since that phone call I got quarterly statements reminding me of the balance due. In following years when I was due a refund they informed me that it was applied to prior tax years, until it was all paid off. I think they set the 'Not a Sheep' flag on my SSN and have treated me accordingly ever since.
I take my tax liability seriously. 'Render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar.' If I can't pay it now I know they will find a to make it work. They just needed to understand that I was not going to bend over for them.
This is not legal advice. If you have assets the IRS can legally seize, you bet your ass they will seize them. At that time in my life I had nothing. All they could do is garnish my wages and threaten me with prosecution, and verbally abuse me.
One of my clients has both a Tesla and a ICE vehicle. After one trip he made, with me present, he was muttering under his breath.... should have taken the Tesla..... just wasted gas for no reason. It is way more cost effective to charge a Tesla than to put gas in an ICE vehicle.
SAAB was never able to build a cabin that didn't feel like a war plane. Their cars were tough though.... but repair parts? forgedaboudit.
Even for as heavy as it is.... I can tell you from personal experience the Tesla kicks the shit out of any muscle car I have been in where the driver put the hammer down.
Each of the US car makers (except Tesla... yet) sell many times the number of cars Mercedes does. The only reason I can see that the CEO of Dalmer-Benz piped up is because he feels threatened by the buzz Tesla has created. He decided to take it upon himself to get Mercedes into the news cycle. I cannot even remember the last time I saw Mercedes in the news. No I don't watch broadcast news.... or commercials when I can help it. Well Steve-o.... you just got Mercedes on my radar... good job... now... fuck off. I cannot afford your cars or a Tesla for that matter. I have not ever driven a Mercedes, nor do I think it likely that I ever will.
I have had a few occasions(all of these recently) to drive a Tesla(it is like driving an iPhone), and a '71 Rolls-Royce (it is like driving a really comfy sofa), a recent Porsche 944(I have driven go-carts that had a better ride, but damn it tracks like it is on rails), and a recent Caddy(well appointed, powerful, nice ride,but FFS the dash is busier than a F-16 cockpit) You know what? I like the Tesla. I have some issues with some of the exterior design choices they made... practical issues... areas where water and dirt collect that are hard to clean... rookie mistakes. Nothing major though.
Those guard bands are there because state of the art RF tech cannot create so called 'brick wall' filters that do not have serious, deleterious, in-band, cost, and/or component scale side effects. There is some aspects of RF physics that place some rather arbitrary limits on how we generate and detect wireless communications. The boffins keep chipping away at it... and it does get better over time... but bandwidth precision is one of those devils in the art that is hard to beat down.
I like this idea a lot more than floating nukes.
Honestly, I think you've been drinking the anti-nuke koolaid that the scaremongers have been doling out.
This!
I got some RL 'threats' from some locals about a post (not on /.) I made regarding how over-the-top-shrill a suite of anti-nuke 'studies' was WRT radioactive effluent leaking into the ocean from Fukushima. I ended up telling the instigators to fuck off, then blocked them and their friends.
My position is that, yes this leakage is bad, but it is not nearly as dire as these crapware studies were implicating. They didn't even show anything resembling analysis to bolster their argument. It was just a rehash of TMI. "Leakage is BAD!!! Leakage is unacceptable!!1111 Mmmkay!?"
Yes it is bad, but it is not going to sterilize the Pacific basin (this was one of the long term outcomes suggested). So, come back when you have some EVIDENCE that this is going to do anything worse than make it a fairly unwise choice to eat seafood that comes from the regions around that part of the Pacific.
Putting nukes on large floating platforms is a fairly nice way to mitigate a lot of the problems that are most likely to do serious damage to the plant. OTOH... The Pacific is a really vicious bitch when she is unhappy. I have lived within sight of her for most of my life. I never turn my back on her when I am within her reach. ;) I'd want to be shown high-confidence that such a platform cannot break loose, and if sunk would still be functional enough to complete a cold shutdown, without loss of containment.
As people who have been in the Seattle region for a while may recall, we lost a floating bridge because some idiots failed to close the access hatches on the flotation modules after storing a little bit of contaminated water in them, before a major storm. Oops!
So yeah... There'd need to be some serious effort put into making sure cockups like the I-90 floating bridge cannot happen.
If you could harness that heat in some way to create electrical or mechanical power, you're more efficient than today where that heat (read: energy) is used for NOTHING. I don't know why you seem to think that it wouldn't work, because auto manufacturers seem to think that it will (BMW, Honda - links in a previous post from someone else), and are engineering systems to do exactly that.
Oh you mean like a pair of turbo chargers do? That increases the intake pressure to improve the power efficiency of the ICE when it is running at high output? The turbo charger is a much more effective use of 'waste heat' than what Honda and BMW are doing. Oh and the 'waste heat' is also used to keep the catalytic converter active to break down all the partially burned hydrocarbons in the gas. Ask yourself why the turbine portion of the turbo-pump is as close to the exhaust-ports as practical? I'll give you a hint: for thermodynamic efficiency the input side of the turbine housing needs to be as hot as possible. Putting after the catalyst would reduce efficiency because the cat is consuming heat energy to oxidize the combustion products.
Heck, using the 'waste heat' from the coolant to warm/dehumidify the cabin, is a more efficient use than these tin selenide whiskers would ever be. So why do we use a rather bulky gas compressor for air-conditioning rather than a heat pump driven off 'waste heat'... After all PLG refrigerators (commonly found in RVs and RTs) have been using this technique for at least 40 years. Hint: it is more efficient to steal a few HP off the engine than to try and generate that energy off the coolant or the exhaust stream.
Bobbied is right, most of you here have no clue about thermodynamics... I know just enough to know most of you just don't get it.
What it really comes down to is there is simply not as much energy in the 'waste heat' from an ICE as most of you here seem to think.
That 15% to 25% efficiency in ICEs hides the source of the losses. Most of the inefficiency comes from reciprocating mass, friction and pumping losses. What little energy is available in the exhaust systems (exhaust and cooling) is already being used and after that there is just not much left.
I agree with bobbied all the way around. The only big win here is going to be increased efficiency of RTGs, and those are only used in power systems where there really is no other option.
Apparently, the author is a lunatic from some tin-selenide-pot university.
FTFY
++ funny! You deserve to win several Internets! Well played AC!
Your average less-than-a-dollar PIC microcontroller includes several fuse bits to do things like make it impossible to reprogram.
This is not true. All PIC programmable elements are reprogrammable. Including the protected portions. It is simply that those cells cannot be rewritten without bulk-erasing the block they are in.
There are MCUs that have Write-Once-Only FLASH, but PICs are not one of them.