Lets have some fun with the numbers, since the greater american population is completely innumerate and will never try it for themselves. A recent press release claimed that foxcon has some of the highest paid assembly line workers in the country at $290/month or at 6 day weeks 10 hours a day 4 weeks a month thats about $1.20/hr. A cousin in law of mine work(ed) in HR at an electronics assembler, and the illegal aliens they employed got a bit above minimum wage but not much, lets say $8/hr.
Now my old ipad 1 was I think, $400. So $200 for retail profit, $100 wholesale profit, figure labor and parts cost a 50:50 ratio that gives about $50 "worth" of labor to build a ipad 1. First of all I cry bogus as thats roughly 42 hours of work to assemble and pack a ipad into a box. That just screams bogus. I've done work inside apple products and its an unholy PITA to replace a battery requiring complete disassembly, but it never takes more than an hour for a completely inexperienced American to do it the first time, so I'm unclear why an experienced Chinese takes 42 times longer to do the same work. None the less, I'll stick with that ridiculous estimate.
OK so at 42 hours per ipad, labor in the usa for illegals at $8/hr would be 42*8=$336. The delta is supposedly $1400-$400 = $1000. So the cost of regulation is $1000-$336 = $664. I find that unlikely in the extreme.
I would estimate a "made in the USA" ipad would cost less than "a hundred bucks" more based on some knowledge of the electronics assembly trade. Which means, at dozens of millions sold, the execs would not get bonuses to the tune a hundred million or so.
Personally I think you are smoking some good dope if you think it would ONLY be a 50 dollar premium... Try more like 1-2 HUNDRED. Thats about how much these companies are saving per-phone by not having American workers manufacture them.
Unrealistic. I know of one radio equipment mfgr in Mississippi who builds Chinese quality stuff in the US very cheaply. I can think of actual examples of assembled electronics in the USA... you just claim it can't be done... who's more likely to be correct?
The problem is the differential is more like $20... on a million sold, thats a big executive bonus.
Why all the confusion? Its just like being on call, just like back in 1994, and getting a call at 2am, except you're (supposed to be) wide awake, and this call lasts 8 (or more) hours. Or "the call" is at 9am every monday instead of randomly like 3pm on saturday.
If you can handle being on call and doing "something" for an hour or two, doing "something" for 8 hours or so is not that big of a deal. One thing I've noticed is you can't as a civilian buy furniture as cheap as a company can buy for a cube, with the exception of office chairs. Everything else, lighting, desks, climate control, floor material, food, air quality, background music, bathroom facilities, everything but chairs are better at home than at work.
My crazy employer is old fashioned so I can't "work" at home unless its a callout or roughly once a year during a blizzard or roughly twice a year. In summary there's no way humanly possible to work at home if I want to work at home, but if they want me to work at home, then its OK and a great idea. Which is no big deal, you just convince the boss that its his bright idea all along. The world really is a live action role playing Dilbert cartoon. My wife worked at home for years and years when the kids were little. Its not as big of a deal as you'd think...
The other funny thing is that supposedly according to the comments one of the kids spending 5 minutes showing you her homework when she gets home is infinitely worse than the office... where the heck do you people work, I wanna apply. All I hear at the start and end of the week is endless hours of "weekend talk" about whos doing what on the weekend where. The morning after any idiotic sports event the sportsfans have to babble to each other for hours about who did what with whos ball. Did you see dancing with the stars last night and/or breaking bad and/or survivor and/or walking dead blah blah blah. Endless griping about meaningless BS. Then there's the guy who plays music... music you can't stand. And I work in old fashioned cubes not one of those crappy open plan areas. You guys must all work in a zen monastery, at least in comparison to my workplace. At their worst, my two kids are about a tenth the interference level of my coworkers.
how do I get a RSS feed of the video files so it just integrates with my existing shows? I'd like a high res RSS feed for mythnettv to eat, and/or a low res "youtube quality" feed for my doggcatcher android phone to eat.
I would like patent trolls if they did something positive for our culture. Patenting emoticons is a good start, but maybe they could have a paypal donation button or kickstarter goal to patent a button for "begs the question" and "couldn't care less" and "irregardless" and um, like, um, like using the like word like every like three seconds. I'd throw some bucks into a kickstarter for that.
With shipping, which was almost as much as the server itself, I paid $243.50 for this showpiece.
Hmmm $100 or so to ship? Someone's padding that expense line. I would not flinch at $25 to $50 but this smells of those ebay auctions where its $0.01 for the product and $50 to ship.
Two new ideas: 1) solar powered glider (doesn't have to get anywhere fast, just has to stay up) 2) a legal service could be mounted on random jet passenger craft.
GOOG or APPL should buy wireless bandwidth and mount the nodes on passenger planes.
Agreed. Its hard to believe, but if they're arrogant enough to think they're the highest ROI corporation in the entire world, then they can't make money by purchasing some other industry, even in a quasi-legal holding corporation kind of way, so they may as well give the money back.
Somehow, this basic concept got completely wiped out by...
... socially engineered tax laws.
If a company book value is $10 I wanna decide when to pay taxes on that $10, not have them decide to dole out $1/year of taxable income or whatever. The difference in marginal tax rate can be very high in the US, a substantial amount of lost money. I'd be pissed if I was near retirement age and owned APPL because I'd lose "lots" of money to taxes.
If we were a little less central govt controlled, and there were no tax implications, I'd STILL argue that if I bought a billionth of APPL then the intelligent thing is for them not to waste time and money shuffling paper to pay a dividend and instead let me cash in my billionth when I want to. To some extent wanting commission-free dividend payout checks is old world thinking, like from the 70s when sales-commissions were triple digit fees... In the modern era commissions are low enough to not matter as much anymore.
I do own enough electric company stock to nearly pay my electric bill using the dividends... Yes that IS a lot of dough tied up in utility stock, like about a car's worth of stock... Its kind of like buying my own solar array (or, my own nuke, I guess) but there is much less maintenance work involved for me. I think it would be funny if they ever formalized the relationship and merged the dividend office with the payment office allowing me to directly apply my dividends to my bill... but no, I get a hefty quarterly check and pay a e-bill out of my checking account monthly. Maybe I could ask them to deliver my dividend check to the billing office "care of account number blah"? In my infinite spare time I'll look into that.
In the long run opt 1 destroys the company. To some extent opt 1 means
Blast it I mean option 2.
Although known incompetence in management could mean trying to expand would just destroy the company, so some simply give the money back thru option 2 rather than trying to dotcom themselves... This is kind of rare due to peter principle but it does sometimes happen. Most of the time giving up on future growth means you're not expecting future growth means eventual death of the company
Not arrogant enough to call myself an expert, but using made up numbers, if you had 100 shares outstanding, and $10B in the bank, this is claiming you have nothing in the pipeline...
Option 1 to raise the value of outstanding shares by investing : Spend the dough on R+D or marketing or creating new markets or buying a productive company or "productive activity in general"
Option 2 buy the shares, dropping the supply in the wild to 90 shares, lower supply at constant demand equals higher price.
In the short run opt 2 makes the most money. In the long run opt 1 destroys the company. To some extent opt 1 means they can't think of anything productive to do with the money, so they're giving it back. Frankly this might be true.
To some extent its a vote of non-confidence in the execs or general market pessimism... if the execs were enhancing shareholder value by 10% per year (made up number) then diluting the existing shares by issuing 1% more shares to give to the execs seems "OK" to the stockholders because they're still getting 9% rate of return (again, made up). However if you expect the stock to flatline or drop, then the stockholders will get pissed off at the idea of paying 1% of their capital to the execs... even if the rest of the market tanks 50% and apple flatlines, that capital loss will still piss off the shareholders.
Also note that we live in a centrally controlled economy and the tax implications are wildly different if the $1 lives in book value (cash per share) aka paper profit which is a capital gain at a date of your choice in the future, vs $1 in dividends this year taxable as dividend income this year. On the date of record or whatever the exact term is, the stock drops in price by about the value of the share. If your dividend tax rate is high enough you can sell before that date and buy after that date, at a standard commission of course for each trade, which might be less than your tax loss. Assuming you believe in relatively constant taxes and relatively constant valuation.
The TLDR version is they are pessimistic about the future and can't think of any way to avoid problems.
Please. No more portmanteaus with -onomics on the end. I automatically think of Regan.
The good news is stupid -onomics words based on Reganonomics from the 80s, means we may finally be seeing the end of my nemesis, the (insert any noun)-gate as the journalist name of any controversy involving a politician, which came from ancient history in the 70s.
After sufficient "fermentation" or whatever it normally turns black. Look at milorganite, or garden manure. Or ask to help a RV owner or serious boater empty the blackwater tank.
Strange but true: If you use water blocks to cool a server, the cdrom eject button pokes out an extra 1/4 inch due to the cooling effect. Of course I haven't seen a new rackmount box with an internal cdrom in some years, so I guess this only applies to racks that are sagging with age (ugh)
I graduated with an even less practical degree (English/Creative Writing),... I had a lot of computer skills (mostly sysadmin) and wanted to find a job using them
I wish someone with your skills wrote more of the manuals I've had to read over the decades. Is the "tech writer" market that hard to get in?
A university education teaches you how to learn, and how to identify what to learn.
The problem is he's going up against people who merely have training in C++, and most places want to hire a guy with C++ skills, not someone who is educated.
The odds are even the languages you use to program will change within a decade.
True, but that's where the ageism kicks in and you won't be able to find a job anyway, so don't worry about it. Hire a recent grad to work 80 hour weeks, or a 30-something guy with a house, wife, and kids who wants 40 hour weeks... Hmm. Just to be nice we'll tell him he's not trained in "language fad of the month"
You could also look for working situations that are the intersection of psychology and computers, like AI or cognitive science-related applications.
User interface design? Although given recent trends a patent lawyer would probably be better at navigating that minefield. Lots of modern user interfaces are somewhat indicative of abnormal psych so you could travel that route too. What mental illness makes people think Microsoft is ready for the enterprise, etc? Take some accounting classes, especially forensic, you might "synergy" it all together into investigation work?
How can one with a degree that is not related to computers acquire a job that is centered around computers?
You don't. "Lots of people" with IT degrees are not able to get generic IT jobs, you will not either unless you're incredibly lucky, maybe your future boss graduated from the same place with the same pysch degree, or your best friend works there and is a reference, or parental connections, that kind of thing.
You need to get a job centered around computers at an employer centered around psych.
I had a pretty intense electronics and RF communications background, a long time ago that got me a "tangentially computer-ish" job at an intensely electronics and RF focused company. Eventually I went back for my formal CS degree (corporate tuition reimbursement, back in the "cheaper tuition days" so I didn't pay a cent)
Just a week or two ago there was a/. story where I mentioned my anecdote that most "psych research testing" I saw and heard of is done on or with computers now. Those profs and researchers would kill for a programmer/IT guy who actually knows their language and can intelligently cooperate with them to gather, transfer, and manipulate their data. You better hit the stat analysis programs hard, like R and S and all that. And work on your skills with graph generation.
Your sales pitch at the interview will have to be something along the lines of "so... you run psych research studies... I might not be a certificated expert on cloud based microsoft solutions, but I know psych and what you're trying to do... wouldn't it be nice to talk to a IT guy who speaks your language instead of their language (assuming this isn't a multicultural interview, in which case that language would be kind of awkward, better rephrase that). Make sure to talk in their terms about their work about a quarter of their time... too much and they'll think you're an unqualified guy trying to interview for a PHD position, too little and they won't get the idea that you live in their world.
Turns out the equivalent power transfer of a AC wave is the RMS voltage.
Err times the current, yeah. Ugh.
The point is the "average" of a DC line is... the peak. The "average" of a AC wave is the RMS voltage which is about 70% of the peak.
I put "average" in scare quotes because the actual integrated voltage of a sine wave is zero. Or sometimes the "average" is calculated another way. The number you're looking for is RMS root-mean-squared. take wild guess how you numerically calculate that...
Cost of electricity dwarfs cost of endpoint components, at least now a days, so cheapest way to transport = most watts thru a piece of wire. Watts is volts times amps The insulation determines the peak voltage. For DC the peak is also the operating voltage. For AC the peak is the... peak of the sine wave.
The graphical/intuitive answer is DC can run full output continuously, but a AC sine wave can only run full out for a zillionth of a second at the peak voltage. If somehow magically you made the AC signal run at the peak voltage all the time, then it could carry as much power as the DC line... it would also have become DC in the process.
You can also run some math. Obviously on long term average DC watts = volts which is constant times amps which is constant. Not so simple for AC. Turns out the equivalent power transfer of a AC wave is the RMS voltage. You can calculate it, but conceptually its the DC equivalent voltage.
USA wall outlet theoretically around 120 volts RMS which is 190 or so peak. Voltage is specd to plus or minus 10% so don't jump on me for being 5% low or whatever, I chose easy numbers because I'm lazy. You need to insulate to at least 190 volts. ten amps at 120 AC is 1200 watts. Those same wires could carry 190 volts of DC at ten amps or 1900 watts.
For a simple voltage limited transmission line, you'll always shove more power down the line if you go DC.
There are also AC power factor problems. And capacitive losses. and higher corona losses (well, that's debatable).
Things get complicated if you allow precisely 3 wires and no ground currents. Paralleling plus or minus won't help much. 3-phase AC might help. 3-phase is cool for other reasons like constant torque on a rotor shaft and stuff like that. Also it means you've got 50:50 chance the electricians hook up the motor to run in reverse which is always hilarious/tragic in industrial design.
AC power supplies in devices tend to be more tolerant of power fluctuations. An all DC shop might completely be halted by a power surge/spike that wouldn't bother a data center on AC.
Essentially you're just removing the rectifier from the power supply, putting it outside, and feeding the same old switching supply indoors. Not so. You could design a system that intentionally was more sensitive, but no one would intentionally do that.
or it will end up like 12VDC with at least 5+ connectors
The world seems to be converging on the Anderson Power Pole connector (which I believe is a (TM)). Cheap, high current, tough, reasonable simple to assemble...
All and all, 380VDC seems like a solution in search for a problem
See the above. Basically you're doing a lot of foolishness to remotely mount the rectifier diodes. Hard to buy ones below 99% efficient at that operation, so lots of Fing around for not much. I'd have to tentatively agree with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets have some fun with the numbers, since the greater american population is completely innumerate and will never try it for themselves. A recent press release claimed that foxcon has some of the highest paid assembly line workers in the country at $290/month or at 6 day weeks 10 hours a day 4 weeks a month thats about $1.20/hr. A cousin in law of mine work(ed) in HR at an electronics assembler, and the illegal aliens they employed got a bit above minimum wage but not much, lets say $8/hr.
Now my old ipad 1 was I think, $400. So $200 for retail profit, $100 wholesale profit, figure labor and parts cost a 50:50 ratio that gives about $50 "worth" of labor to build a ipad 1. First of all I cry bogus as thats roughly 42 hours of work to assemble and pack a ipad into a box. That just screams bogus. I've done work inside apple products and its an unholy PITA to replace a battery requiring complete disassembly, but it never takes more than an hour for a completely inexperienced American to do it the first time, so I'm unclear why an experienced Chinese takes 42 times longer to do the same work. None the less, I'll stick with that ridiculous estimate.
OK so at 42 hours per ipad, labor in the usa for illegals at $8/hr would be 42*8=$336. The delta is supposedly $1400-$400 = $1000. So the cost of regulation is $1000-$336 = $664. I find that unlikely in the extreme.
I would estimate a "made in the USA" ipad would cost less than "a hundred bucks" more based on some knowledge of the electronics assembly trade. Which means, at dozens of millions sold, the execs would not get bonuses to the tune a hundred million or so.
Personally I think you are smoking some good dope if you think it would ONLY be a 50 dollar premium... Try more like 1-2 HUNDRED. Thats about how much these companies are saving per-phone by not having American workers manufacture them.
Unrealistic. I know of one radio equipment mfgr in Mississippi who builds Chinese quality stuff in the US very cheaply. I can think of actual examples of assembled electronics in the USA... you just claim it can't be done... who's more likely to be correct?
The problem is the differential is more like $20... on a million sold, thats a big executive bonus.
Nokia fired 4000 smart phone assemblers in Finland, Hungary and Mexico last month, moving to Asia. Theres a press release from around feb 8th.
This /. article is probably a response, however indirect, to that.
Why all the confusion? Its just like being on call, just like back in 1994, and getting a call at 2am, except you're (supposed to be) wide awake, and this call lasts 8 (or more) hours. Or "the call" is at 9am every monday instead of randomly like 3pm on saturday.
If you can handle being on call and doing "something" for an hour or two, doing "something" for 8 hours or so is not that big of a deal. One thing I've noticed is you can't as a civilian buy furniture as cheap as a company can buy for a cube, with the exception of office chairs. Everything else, lighting, desks, climate control, floor material, food, air quality, background music, bathroom facilities, everything but chairs are better at home than at work.
My crazy employer is old fashioned so I can't "work" at home unless its a callout or roughly once a year during a blizzard or roughly twice a year. In summary there's no way humanly possible to work at home if I want to work at home, but if they want me to work at home, then its OK and a great idea. Which is no big deal, you just convince the boss that its his bright idea all along. The world really is a live action role playing Dilbert cartoon. My wife worked at home for years and years when the kids were little. Its not as big of a deal as you'd think...
The other funny thing is that supposedly according to the comments one of the kids spending 5 minutes showing you her homework when she gets home is infinitely worse than the office... where the heck do you people work, I wanna apply. All I hear at the start and end of the week is endless hours of "weekend talk" about whos doing what on the weekend where. The morning after any idiotic sports event the sportsfans have to babble to each other for hours about who did what with whos ball. Did you see dancing with the stars last night and/or breaking bad and/or survivor and/or walking dead blah blah blah. Endless griping about meaningless BS. Then there's the guy who plays music... music you can't stand. And I work in old fashioned cubes not one of those crappy open plan areas. You guys must all work in a zen monastery, at least in comparison to my workplace. At their worst, my two kids are about a tenth the interference level of my coworkers.
how do I get a RSS feed of the video files so it just integrates with my existing shows? I'd like a high res RSS feed for mythnettv to eat, and/or a low res "youtube quality" feed for my doggcatcher android phone to eat.
Anyone have it converted to texture format for orbiter yet?
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
I would like patent trolls if they did something positive for our culture. Patenting emoticons is a good start, but maybe they could have a paypal donation button or kickstarter goal to patent a button for "begs the question" and "couldn't care less" and "irregardless" and um, like, um, like using the like word like every like three seconds. I'd throw some bucks into a kickstarter for that.
With shipping, which was almost as much as the server itself, I paid $243.50 for this showpiece.
Hmmm $100 or so to ship? Someone's padding that expense line. I would not flinch at $25 to $50 but this smells of those ebay auctions where its $0.01 for the product and $50 to ship.
Two new ideas:
1) solar powered glider (doesn't have to get anywhere fast, just has to stay up)
2) a legal service could be mounted on random jet passenger craft.
GOOG or APPL should buy wireless bandwidth and mount the nodes on passenger planes.
Agreed. Its hard to believe, but if they're arrogant enough to think they're the highest ROI corporation in the entire world, then they can't make money by purchasing some other industry, even in a quasi-legal holding corporation kind of way, so they may as well give the money back.
Somehow, this basic concept got completely wiped out by ...
... socially engineered tax laws.
If a company book value is $10 I wanna decide when to pay taxes on that $10, not have them decide to dole out $1/year of taxable income or whatever. The difference in marginal tax rate can be very high in the US, a substantial amount of lost money. I'd be pissed if I was near retirement age and owned APPL because I'd lose "lots" of money to taxes.
If we were a little less central govt controlled, and there were no tax implications, I'd STILL argue that if I bought a billionth of APPL then the intelligent thing is for them not to waste time and money shuffling paper to pay a dividend and instead let me cash in my billionth when I want to. To some extent wanting commission-free dividend payout checks is old world thinking, like from the 70s when sales-commissions were triple digit fees... In the modern era commissions are low enough to not matter as much anymore.
I do own enough electric company stock to nearly pay my electric bill using the dividends... Yes that IS a lot of dough tied up in utility stock, like about a car's worth of stock... Its kind of like buying my own solar array (or, my own nuke, I guess) but there is much less maintenance work involved for me. I think it would be funny if they ever formalized the relationship and merged the dividend office with the payment office allowing me to directly apply my dividends to my bill... but no, I get a hefty quarterly check and pay a e-bill out of my checking account monthly. Maybe I could ask them to deliver my dividend check to the billing office "care of account number blah"? In my infinite spare time I'll look into that.
In the long run opt 1 destroys the company. To some extent opt 1 means
Blast it I mean option 2.
Although known incompetence in management could mean trying to expand would just destroy the company, so some simply give the money back thru option 2 rather than trying to dotcom themselves... This is kind of rare due to peter principle but it does sometimes happen. Most of the time giving up on future growth means you're not expecting future growth means eventual death of the company
Not arrogant enough to call myself an expert, but using made up numbers, if you had 100 shares outstanding, and $10B in the bank, this is claiming you have nothing in the pipeline...
Option 1 to raise the value of outstanding shares by investing : Spend the dough on R+D or marketing or creating new markets or buying a productive company or "productive activity in general"
Option 2 buy the shares, dropping the supply in the wild to 90 shares, lower supply at constant demand equals higher price.
In the short run opt 2 makes the most money. In the long run opt 1 destroys the company. To some extent opt 1 means they can't think of anything productive to do with the money, so they're giving it back. Frankly this might be true.
To some extent its a vote of non-confidence in the execs or general market pessimism... if the execs were enhancing shareholder value by 10% per year (made up number) then diluting the existing shares by issuing 1% more shares to give to the execs seems "OK" to the stockholders because they're still getting 9% rate of return (again, made up). However if you expect the stock to flatline or drop, then the stockholders will get pissed off at the idea of paying 1% of their capital to the execs... even if the rest of the market tanks 50% and apple flatlines, that capital loss will still piss off the shareholders.
Also note that we live in a centrally controlled economy and the tax implications are wildly different if the $1 lives in book value (cash per share) aka paper profit which is a capital gain at a date of your choice in the future, vs $1 in dividends this year taxable as dividend income this year. On the date of record or whatever the exact term is, the stock drops in price by about the value of the share. If your dividend tax rate is high enough you can sell before that date and buy after that date, at a standard commission of course for each trade, which might be less than your tax loss. Assuming you believe in relatively constant taxes and relatively constant valuation.
The TLDR version is they are pessimistic about the future and can't think of any way to avoid problems.
Please. No more portmanteaus with -onomics on the end. I automatically think of Regan.
The good news is stupid -onomics words based on Reganonomics from the 80s, means we may finally be seeing the end of my nemesis, the (insert any noun)-gate as the journalist name of any controversy involving a politician, which came from ancient history in the 70s.
After sufficient "fermentation" or whatever it normally turns black. Look at milorganite, or garden manure. Or ask to help a RV owner or serious boater empty the blackwater tank.
I...I am not even sure what say to that...
Strange but true: If you use water blocks to cool a server, the cdrom eject button pokes out an extra 1/4 inch due to the cooling effect. Of course I haven't seen a new rackmount box with an internal cdrom in some years, so I guess this only applies to racks that are sagging with age (ugh)
The problem with Qi is its about as "english language" as Shinjitai
I graduated with an even less practical degree (English/Creative Writing), ... I had a lot of computer skills (mostly sysadmin) and wanted to find a job using them
I wish someone with your skills wrote more of the manuals I've had to read over the decades. Is the "tech writer" market that hard to get in?
A university education teaches you how to learn, and how to identify what to learn.
The problem is he's going up against people who merely have training in C++, and most places want to hire a guy with C++ skills, not someone who is educated.
The odds are even the languages you use to program will change within a decade.
True, but that's where the ageism kicks in and you won't be able to find a job anyway, so don't worry about it. Hire a recent grad to work 80 hour weeks, or a 30-something guy with a house, wife, and kids who wants 40 hour weeks... Hmm. Just to be nice we'll tell him he's not trained in "language fad of the month"
Otherwise you will just be exploited and never make it up the career ladder. Sad but true.
Getting the degree won't change that result for almost all employees.
You could also look for working situations that are the intersection of psychology and computers, like AI or cognitive science-related applications.
User interface design? Although given recent trends a patent lawyer would probably be better at navigating that minefield. Lots of modern user interfaces are somewhat indicative of abnormal psych so you could travel that route too. What mental illness makes people think Microsoft is ready for the enterprise, etc?
Take some accounting classes, especially forensic, you might "synergy" it all together into investigation work?
How can one with a degree that is not related to computers acquire a job that is centered around computers?
You don't. "Lots of people" with IT degrees are not able to get generic IT jobs, you will not either unless you're incredibly lucky, maybe your future boss graduated from the same place with the same pysch degree, or your best friend works there and is a reference, or parental connections, that kind of thing.
You need to get a job centered around computers at an employer centered around psych.
I had a pretty intense electronics and RF communications background, a long time ago that got me a "tangentially computer-ish" job at an intensely electronics and RF focused company. Eventually I went back for my formal CS degree (corporate tuition reimbursement, back in the "cheaper tuition days" so I didn't pay a cent)
Just a week or two ago there was a /. story where I mentioned my anecdote that most "psych research testing" I saw and heard of is done on or with computers now. Those profs and researchers would kill for a programmer/IT guy who actually knows their language and can intelligently cooperate with them to gather, transfer, and manipulate their data. You better hit the stat analysis programs hard, like R and S and all that. And work on your skills with graph generation.
Your sales pitch at the interview will have to be something along the lines of "so... you run psych research studies... I might not be a certificated expert on cloud based microsoft solutions, but I know psych and what you're trying to do... wouldn't it be nice to talk to a IT guy who speaks your language instead of their language (assuming this isn't a multicultural interview, in which case that language would be kind of awkward, better rephrase that). Make sure to talk in their terms about their work about a quarter of their time... too much and they'll think you're an unqualified guy trying to interview for a PHD position, too little and they won't get the idea that you live in their world.
Turns out the equivalent power transfer of a AC wave is the RMS voltage.
Err times the current, yeah. Ugh.
The point is the "average" of a DC line is ... the peak. The "average" of a AC wave is the RMS voltage which is about 70% of the peak.
I put "average" in scare quotes because the actual integrated voltage of a sine wave is zero. Or sometimes the "average" is calculated another way.
The number you're looking for is RMS root-mean-squared. take wild guess how you numerically calculate that...
Cost of electricity dwarfs cost of endpoint components, at least now a days, so cheapest way to transport = most watts thru a piece of wire. ... peak of the sine wave.
Watts is volts times amps
The insulation determines the peak voltage. For DC the peak is also the operating voltage. For AC the peak is the
The graphical/intuitive answer is DC can run full output continuously, but a AC sine wave can only run full out for a zillionth of a second at the peak voltage. If somehow magically you made the AC signal run at the peak voltage all the time, then it could carry as much power as the DC line... it would also have become DC in the process.
You can also run some math. Obviously on long term average DC watts = volts which is constant times amps which is constant. Not so simple for AC. Turns out the equivalent power transfer of a AC wave is the RMS voltage. You can calculate it, but conceptually its the DC equivalent voltage.
USA wall outlet theoretically around 120 volts RMS which is 190 or so peak. Voltage is specd to plus or minus 10% so don't jump on me for being 5% low or whatever, I chose easy numbers because I'm lazy. You need to insulate to at least 190 volts. ten amps at 120 AC is 1200 watts. Those same wires could carry 190 volts of DC at ten amps or 1900 watts.
For a simple voltage limited transmission line, you'll always shove more power down the line if you go DC.
There are also AC power factor problems. And capacitive losses. and higher corona losses (well, that's debatable).
Things get complicated if you allow precisely 3 wires and no ground currents. Paralleling plus or minus won't help much. 3-phase AC might help. 3-phase is cool for other reasons like constant torque on a rotor shaft and stuff like that. Also it means you've got 50:50 chance the electricians hook up the motor to run in reverse which is always hilarious/tragic in industrial design.
AC power supplies in devices tend to be more tolerant of power fluctuations. An all DC shop might completely be halted by a power surge/spike that wouldn't bother a data center on AC.
Essentially you're just removing the rectifier from the power supply, putting it outside, and feeding the same old switching supply indoors. Not so. You could design a system that intentionally was more sensitive, but no one would intentionally do that.
or it will end up like 12VDC with at least 5+ connectors
The world seems to be converging on the Anderson Power Pole connector (which I believe is a (TM)). Cheap, high current, tough, reasonable simple to assemble...
All and all, 380VDC seems like a solution in search for a problem
See the above. Basically you're doing a lot of foolishness to remotely mount the rectifier diodes. Hard to buy ones below 99% efficient at that operation, so lots of Fing around for not much. I'd have to tentatively agree with you.