Maybe someone can tell the difference between a $.25 DAC and a $100 DAC, but I can't.
You're generally speaking correct, but more correct if you're exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel. Cut off at $2.50 and you're good. $0.25 is like trying to use a 70s era lm741 as your preamp, with a lm386 as speaker driver.
It still boggles the mind that in 2011 there are "home hobbiest" types using LM386 chips as an audio amp, they're nice and cheap like your 25 cents but they whoosh out white noise into headphones like a trip to a seashore. There's better lower noise stuff so you don't have to hear a constant "ssssh" in your headphones, but thats more like $2.50 not $100. Also the lm386 is a great oscillator as the power voltage sags, like when batteries are getting weak, when the bass response starts sounding whacky you know you should have selected a chip designed after 1980.
Also your $.25 DAC is gonna be like half a really dirt cheap dual DAC and you're going to be lucky to get 40 dB cross channel separation and noise performance is going to be audibly foul, which I suppose is better than most normal humans can hear, although its pretty pitiful as a spec. Again, $2.50 instead of $.25 and you're back into territory where you probably don't have the gear to measure it, much less hear it.
Another classic "cheapie" characteristic is 3rd ord IMD products. You can hear those in heavy bass and I'm no audiophool type. Again, the $2.50 DAC and a $2.50 amp chip designed this century would eliminate the heard and measurable effect.
The market seems to be "$0.25 junk at walmart" or the audiophool class. Not much in between. Although I must say my ipod nano final audio amp is pretty decent with low noise, but some would say i-device = audiophool, well... whatever.
The standard/. car analogy is modern cars are more reliable than old cars, if you exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel like a yugo or a trabant or whatever China Motors is starting to ship.
I agree. A professional studio should buy the $5 cable instead of the $1 cable. Perhaps a laboratory should get the $10 cable and an EMP testing facility might pay $20 for additional shielding. For safety reasons, I'd go for two or possibly even three of those $20 cables in a satelite or space craft. But that still begs the question; who'd need the $1095 cable?
Begs the question is just filler in this application. You're not doin' it right.
As far as tech goes, RF engineering being an area of my expertise, for the most exotic 1.85mm coaxial connectors hand assembled and individually hand tested on a network analyzer and giving your grubby hands a physical printout of that actual individual cables test results, you are looking at around $200 for the connectors and assembly/testing service shipped to your door in a couple days. Think like Pasternack and RFcoax and places like that. You get to pay extra for each inch of the 0.085 rigid coax but thats a rounding error compared to the cost of assembly/testing unless you're using a really unreasonable length of coax...
I would assume if you want milspec traceable soldering technique and ISO9000 certified training for the tech work and xrayed connections and maybe a somewhat higher grade of connector with heavier gold plate, you could drop maybe $500 on a milspec aerospace cable, but I don't think it possible to legitimately spend more.
So your estimate's off by maybe a factor of 20 or so.
Supposedly HP made some weird 1 mm connector that only like 10 people in the world knew how to assemble correctly and cost over $1000 per connector, but I donno anything about that all heresay. I would imagine something that small would be rated over 100 GHz? Maybe 200 GHz?
The point of this RF foolishness is a standard SMA connector itself internally resonates really low in frequency like 18 GHz so if you want to do military radar or whatever you need something better, rarer, which translates to more expensive. The 1.85s are supposedly good to 70 GHz or so, maybe 80 if you can tolerate some frequency dependent matching. Sometimes you just can't use waveguide or justify its size and weight (think of WR-42 waveguide the size of your thumb and heavy as a piece of plumbing pipe, its pretty heavy compared to a 185 connector and some coax...)
You want to make a RF guy cry? Tell him you attached a plain SMA connector to a nice new 1.85 calibration load using a pipe wrench or a hammer or something. There's triple digits flushed down the drain in an instant. Maybe four digits. Cross threading too, that's not cool at those prices.
RF has an intense "knee" around 18 GHz for resonance reasons, you can buy SMA connectors at Mouser for like $2 a piece but you want to go exotic like 1.85 for higher frequencies and instantly you're dropping darn near 3 digits on each connector.
There is no "impossible" in RF, just "impossibly expensive to meet your requirements".
Its on the store side. I was tangentially involved in retail management a long time ago, and you could write off stolen goods as a business loss against whatever profit you made. Things get really flakey WRT wholesale loss vs retail loss and exactly which corporation eats the loss. Having a basically "captive" wholesale supplier means you can pretty much set the wholesale price you'd like, although that is questionably legal.
The other interpretation is the stereotypical housing bubble boom activity was to refinance, then head down to best buy and pick up a $5000 TV. After the refi cash dried up, you can now get the same TV for $500. Imagine that! Theoretically you deduct your mortgage interest so although you're stuck paying for a $1000 cable for 30 years, at least you aren't paying interest on it, compared to paying $25 on a credit card at 29% for probably the same 30 years I'm not entirely sure which is worse and too lazy to calculate it. Also after the housing bubble ended and people stopped paying their mortgage, if they bought the TV more than X months/years ago they can declare bankruptcy and keep the TV, which means the bank writes off the mortgage etc etc and they have a really nice TV in their new apartment.
Any reasonably thick lamp cord will do just fine as a speaker cable.
Go to your local home improvement store, locate the "12 volt outdoor garden lighting" area, assuming solar hasn't wiped these guys out, you can sometimes pick up off the shelf spools of really cheap heavy gauge stranded two conductor wire.
Theoretically, buying by the foot outta the electricians aisle should be cheaper, however, during one of the commodity boom/runups they were updating the price of the electricians aisle by-the-foot on a seemingly daily basis, but they never updated the price on the pre-printed spools of garden lighting wire. So I was paying maybe 10% over pre-boom per foot price for the garden wire, but I was cool with that because pay-by-the-foot had doubled or tripled and the pre-pack garden wire had not been marked up yet.
For something like the cost of an old fashioned DVD I wired up my whole 5.1 speaker system using garden wire. If I had used "best buy marked up cable prices" it probably would have cost $200 to buy all that wire.
With a wavelength of just under 10 miles for a 15kHz signal, the necessity of shielding is a matter of how long your speaker cable is.
Most people seem to have speaker wires that make great quarterwave dipole antennas annoyingly near the 15M / 10M / 6M ham radio bands or the 11M CB band. The problem is some classical, lets say, pre 00s audio output final power amps have something of a rectifying effect on the incoming RF. So you end up hearing clearly every trucker who drives by. Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable. Assuming your negative speaker lead either can be grounded, or already is grounded, a couple minutes with a swiss army knife and a length of old antenna / cable tv coaxial cable will either result in a trip to the ER if you have low DEX statistics, or a nice shielded speaker wire ready to install.
You can also spend some dough on RF ferrite chokes, but frankly its usually cheaper to use scrap cable, assuming you have some laying about.
(I'm not sure if it's actually a surveillance state if nobody's looking through the broken cameras.)
The purpose of a surveillance state is to encourage fear and intimidation and conformity and servility. You don't need to actually use the cameras to infect society with those values... just install them. Its to intimidate the permanently downwardly mobile middle class and the 60's radicals now turned grandparents, not to scare the lower class criminals.
I'm sure this is probably racially insensitive to discuss, but around here a "Chinese Firedrill" is where a car full of (drunk) people at a red light get out of the car, sprint around the car continually in a circle, and when the light turns green, or someone pukes, at which point everyone leaps back into the car, statistically likely to be a different driver. Then you drive away and repeat at the next stoplight. This is much more fun in the big city than the little village with only one stoplight. The reaction of the other drivers watching these antics is always funny. Well, thats what 5 digit UID/.ers did for fun in cars as kids before they invented smartphones and texting while driving and sex. Over the decades the prevalence of this has decreased with increasing enforcement of drunk driving laws and increased police militarization and paranoia (they are doing something weird, better call it into the terrorist hotline just in case, if you see something say something!). As a side issue I'm genuinely mystified why this activity is claimed as "Chinese" because I feel I should be able to come up with something far more racially insensitive to do at a stop light with a bunch of drunks, but then again I can't think of much else to do with a car full of drunks that doesn't involve expelling recently consumed bodily fluids. Maybe the name is a part of the "joke" making it even more ridiculous than it already is?
Anyway the point of this ramble is, whatever you call this fine upstanding activity, what happens if you boot the car with one rear, and while running the rear magically changes into another rear? Nothing? Onstar reports a suspected car jacking? Onstar reports a car full of drunken idiots?
1) Do you think this "seat weight distribution" seat key is more or less creepy than a "scratch and sniff" seat key? Ditto analysis for not just creepy, but success in the market, for example, facebook is creepy, yet also is a huge success?
2) How long until a virus is released that uploads the stored key data, for either this weight system, or my proposed odor sniffing system, to facebook or whatever social media platform of your choice? I'm giving it less than a year. I am undecided if fakes should count; an example of a fake would be a odor analysis system that randomly tweets "Captain, sensors $owner ate at taco bell last night" rather than actually sampling the air in the area to determine it. I suppose the weight distribution system might be sensitive enough to detect digestive rumblings or forcefully expelled gasses, so the possibility of this exists for that platform also.
Much more likely your bluetooth handsfree connected smartphone gets owned by a virus and you are given the option of paypal ing $10 to some.ru address OR having your facebook portrait photo changed to a synthetic generated digital image of your rear OR taking a medical tourism flight to Thailand to enhance the booty to match the newly virus uploaded "key". Personally I'd LOL big time and enjoy comments about my new portrait photo, but I know women are bipolar about seemingly randomly trying to show it off to the guys or keep it hidden from the guys, so I'm thinking freakout time for them.
But it may be able to cope with such slow changes. You aren't going to get fat in one day, and even less so leaner.
Clearly you are not one of those "carry the wallet in the rear pocket" types. Fat with cash on the right cheek (is this TMI?) on payday, Fing wallet is flat again the next day, or so it often seems (my budget strategy is cash only for frivolous junk/bar/restaurant if at all technologically possible, otherwise I wouldn't use cash other than vending machines).
Assuming a random statistical distribution of failure, and a short "timeout" between tests, the overall system success rate of a 98% success on first try followed by 98% on second try means you'll only have to try a third 98% success trial something around once for each owner of the car, assuming you own a car "about 4 years" or so, and assuming I did the math in my head correctly for 2500 days. I figure every 125000 times you boot up the car, you'll need a 4th try, that's booting up the car twice a day for 171 years. So "lock out after 6 attempts" seems safe enough to only happen accidentally a couple times in the lifetime of the product run?
Biggest problem is going to be embarrassment at having to get out of the car and try it again, if people see you doing that they're going to make all kinds of interesting assumptions about what happened to your rear last night, rough time doing doggie style or things are still too stretched out or sore back there today or whatever, so I'm thinking women would be waaaaaaay too embarrassed to buy one of these systems, even if it only happens once in a while.
...what happens in those 2 of 100 cases it detected your behind wrongly?:D
I would expect my wife's cruddy top 40 station on the radio presets, the default interior temperature turned up entirely too high, power seats adjusting themselves for a 5 foot person instead of a 6 foot person (which could be kinda hazardous for my neck), air handling system blowing air into my face (people with glasses don't seem to care, but non-glasses wearers tend to tear up after awhile of that) maybe even so far as her "set" of in dash GPS waypoints instead of my own.
Seriously though, am I the only one on/. who notices that footwear strongly affects both posture and back pain? Not to mention clothes? I would bet the machine would have "difficulty" figuring out the guy wearing snow pants and giant snow boots with back pain from shoveling snow is the same guy as the gym shorts and sandals dude in the summer. Maybe in places with no seasonal climate this would work. Note that where I live we can go from 40s F in jeans and tennis shoes to 30s F and a foot of snow with heavy thick boots to below zero F and snowmobile suits for safety (in case car breaks down, etc), and back again, all in the course of a week or so, a couple times each winter. Also suit and tie and dress shoes for work to bathing suit and tee shirt in the summer on the same day.
1) I have the entire "under the basement stairs" space plus two partial wiring closets in my house. Other than hoarding for the sake of hoarding, I can not fill them up. Do not spend money and severely constrain yourself to save space, that you do not need to save.
2) Do not highly standardize. My best purchases have been weird special one off this weekend only deals. Surplus sales, etc. In a corporate environment you Really need to standardize on one specific model of rack hardware to keep the spares situation manageable. This is meaningless at home. Do not turn down the opportunity of cheap GHz and cheap TB because you only collect dell 1U rackmounts or whatever.
3) You're cooling limited at the high end of rackmounts anyway, so who cares if you "could" get a rack sized NAS because it requires licenses and higher voltage three phase power anyway. I could wire multiple 15 amp ckts into my wiring closet, but the space heater effect would cause a fire. Thermal is your primary limit at home, usually. Also you get much more interesting experience with triple redundant physical servers, and better overall system reliability, than with one box three times the size. I have a small compute cluster hosting many LXC images, and by playing games with NFS etc I can back up each container to all three machines and furthermore can redeploy any container to any box based on load. You do need to standardized on all i386 or all amd64 to pull this off with LXC. In summary, get multiple small boxes, not one large box.
So, to ask a serious question: what do you propose for a solution that ISN'T socialism?
It requires intense social interaction and social cohesion (absolutely not multiculturalism compatible) but historically the solution in the early greco-roman world was utter social and political ostracism of those not participating in the gift economy. Key word is "early", decay set in toward the end. The roads from rome to modern france were not built by the nebulous concept of "rome" or even a roman govt dept, but were bought and paid for by none other than Julius Caesar. Fame in that era was not so much being good at kids ball games or being good and lip syncing and better at dancing, but by being the guy who built the city a nice bath house or fed the poor.
Also, politically, the poor tended to side with those who paid to feed them. It is exactly the same now, we just like to pretend it is not so. It is much more civilized to be honest about it.
The knee jerk response is this would never work in a "specialized advanced society" but I completely disagree. The best tech example I can think of is Shuttleworth/Ubuntu. Now multiply that by a hundred or thousand other projects, and we would be getting somewhere. Also if you're familiar with the role the ARRL plays WRT amateur radio, well funded charitable donation organizations like that also existed in ye olden days. Julius Caesar didn't really know very much about roads, other than who to hire to build some good ones. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, again, times about a hundred or thousand or so, is probably what we'd see a lot of. Also the analogy of temple/church vs the modern university is pretty apt, a nice endowment, lifetime chairs for the profs, its much more ancient of a funding concept than you'd superficially think.
Don't think this will work in a "divide and conquer" multicultural world, or in/. world where the only social interaction is in FPS video games. Or in a world where the predominant game theory strategy is "I don't care how much smaller the whole pie gets for everyone, all that matters is my individual slice gets larger". But, historically, it was possible and did work pretty darn well for centuries.
I know about this ancient world stuff because I have a 5 digit/. UID, I was there when it happened. More seriously, being reasonably well read is a result of a good (free) classical education, although I haven't read stuff like Plutarch's Lives in a couple decades I believe my post is overall a reasonable summary of how we did it in ye olden days. Or at least its the best spin they could put on it in the olden days back when they wrote about it.
Hmm I haven't run into any of that. I think I know the part you reference in the mage quests, where the "things" infest the village and you and some of the mages (faralda and friends) help the townies by wiping out the "things". I remember thinking this is all very nice, but if I F around instead of wasting the "things" and as a result faralda or whatever her name is gets killed off, then I'm going to have no one to train me on destruction spells, so I got it in gear before anyone got hurt, and all ended well. I suppose that makes it a "real" role playing game?
As for the console ports, console guys just seem to be gluttons for punishment, they'll be OK, they're used to the abuse, etc.
Skyrim comes out, they obviously should have taken a couple more months to bug-test given everything that's being found in the game constantly breaking
Whats broke? My only problem is the sound is correct, but the volume level is at least 30 db lower than every other game / music player on the machine. At first I thought it was just quiet, like those people that whined all the time about Doom 3 being dark, well, yeah, its supposed to be dark. Maybe skyrim is just in its quiet place. Yet I hear (pun) some people claim the sound is fine and perfectly normal, which is confusing to me. Also I hear all this stuff about just configure my sound for surround sound etc, but I don't have that kind of hardware, just plain ole stereo, so...
Other than that all I've heard is typical overheating 3d video card drama... "I've overclocked and over voltaged my video card, cpu, and memory, and intentionally undersped the cooling fans so they're quiet, and now the pc crashes all the time, so it must be skyrim's fault, yeah thats it".
So other than the sound sucks, and people with broken computers still have broken computers, I've not heard any problems.
I only have "a dozen or two" hours in, maybe it all goes to heck and blows up around level 30, I donno yet.
I actually paid for it, and everythings up to date according to steam. Maybe some of the "free" torrent versions suck? I donno.
Yes, but the existing planes are constantly updated. Military planes are not like commodity cars, which get build once and only receive new wipers every now end then. The airforce plans to use them for decades. Also, the insight gained will influence the next generation of fighters.
My grandfather the B-17 and B-24 pilot had some saying about the first couple hundred B-17 (or was it B-24?) engines pretty much being no good, lots of return to base after engine failure, a couple times for him personally, he even had a wing fire (obviously, survived, somehow). No big deal if the first couple hundred fail, because they made thousands.
Sounds like they're doing that with the F-22, the first couple hundred are kind of learning experiments. Whoops, they only made a couple hundred and then shut down the line. Well, thats not gonna work so well.
When are we getting college degree programs not tied to a campus. I want to enroll at Midwest States University. Take some courses at Illinois State some at the University of Kentucky, some at University of Tennessee, and graduate with a BA after 4 years.
You've just described my undergrad "career" or whatever you want to call it, although all different schools.
Some places let anything transfer, some let you test out even if they won't categorically no-questions asked transfer, and some are rat bastards about forcing you to take certain specific classes at their school, sometimes no rhyme or reason. My advice, especially in this era of online education, is shop around.
I had the privilege (?) of taking calculus in high school (didn't give a F, got C in return, actually not bad for doing nothing but show up), at a 4 year college that I hated I got a B for both semesters, at a tech school for an associates degree I got perfect As, in fact the prof joked that I wrote the answer key for several exams. Was not permitted transfer credit or testing out for calc anywhere except my final degree granting online school (lakeland.edu), thank god I didn't have to take calc a fourth time, although it probably would have been pretty easy. On the other hand, I took a boring philosophy 101 class at the 4-year and every school I ever went to gave me credit for it. Also got credit everywhere for my public speaking associates class and my sociology class. Generally the fluffier the class the most likely they'll transfer it, and the more "hard science" the less likely they'll give credit.
Also testing out is easy if you know the stuff, but they made it a PITA, perhaps they only offer 2 testing sessions per semester total, and you've got ten classes you think you can skip... Even worse some schools only allow you to test out of a certain number of credits... So you could probably test out of 10 classes, but that would take 5 semesters or about 3 years, and they only permit 32 credits or 8 classes worth of "testing out", which would still take at least one and a third years assuming 3 semesters per year, and easy "A" never hurt anyones GPA, so... Lets just say I found Early American History pretty easy the second time around.
You can safely assume they will require you to spend at least one year at your graduating school, regardless how many specific or general credits you get.
I'd guess partly because disciplines got more and more complex to the point where there was significant theory (e.g. engineering today is more about mathematics and less about hands-on work with steel than it was in 1910), and partly for prestige reasons.
Mostly financial reasons. My home town has a tech school, a state extension public U, and a tiny more than 150 year old psuedo-religious private U (psuedo-religious in that I attended for a year and it was religious in that you had to take "a" religion or philosophy class to graduate, but it was not religious in that it only grants doctor of divinity degrees)
The tech school was affordable nearly full time on full time minimum wage and only offered per credit hour classes. The public extension U was about twice the cost per credit hour OR "full time" tuition at 12 or more credits cost the same as about 20 credits. The expensive little private U was about twice the cost per credit of the public U but "full time" tuition at 12 or more credits was bonkers crazy far over 20 individual credits something like $10K/semester after all the full time student fees last time I checked.
So you can quadruple your income by changing from a "tech school" to a "private university", roughly. And the govt will backstop all the loans, so there is no reason not to raise prices to the roof, once it changes from a "cash transaction" to a "long term govt guaranteed debt transaction".
I've downloaded and watched several of the video lecture series from OCW. The 100 level calc videos are awesome for light viewing as a refresher course. Needless to say I have not used calc in any form in the previous 20 years, but it all kind of comes back while having the videos on in the background.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no "taking" or "signing up" there are just course pages, with syllabus, suggested readings, sample historical tests and answer keys, etc. Its not like taking a "real online course" with a fixed schedule and having forced graded discussion groups and locally proctored exams (been there, done that, as "real" online for credit undergrad classes). At least as far as I've seen over the past few years (OCW is a decade old now)
the game's budget is estimated to be as high as $100 million
What in the world could they have possibly spent that on? I'm struggling to figure it out. Even if 3/4 went to marketing and executive bonuses, that would still be a rather large sum of money.
Since these certificates seem to be much finer granularity than degree programs, if they proliferate
WRT to granularity, I'd be happy if video support for the 10 year old OCW program proliferated beyond the 100 level courses.
Some of the higher level class "OCW support" is kind of minimal. Some of the course pages are as minimal as a textbook and a schedule. I'm unimpressed. Here, let me provide you with the "/. discount special vlm CS certificate program" : "Knuth TAOCP, schedule, start on page one first book first day, end on last page last book last day. Also read some of Graham's lisp works. click here for your cert". I'm not demanding every course ever offered be videoed, but I'd like to see video of more than the intro classes. I can almost enumerate across OCW, openyale, and stanford online all the non-100 level classes with video lectures that exist.. lets see there is a decent thermodynamics video series, I guess we can count linear algebra and diffeqs as non-100 level, there is a decent crystallography video series oh and that roman architecture series is pretty decent... thats about it?
In comparison I offer up Harvard's 5 foot shelf of classics, which has been available for about 100 years now, and no one has ever bothered to offer a certificate for it... I donno if a cert is "inevitable". (Note the 5 foot wall of classics and the fiction "wall" of two dozen or so volumes, is more or less how I ended up self educated, despite my formal education occasionally getting in the way)
Rather, MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within the Institute that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.
So you'll get a cert from "Internet-U" stating you watched a video.
BTW the OCW calculus video series rocks as a refresher course. HIGHLY recommended. I wish they had video for more than just their 100 level intro courses.
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Maybe someone can tell the difference between a $.25 DAC and a $100 DAC, but I can't.
You're generally speaking correct, but more correct if you're exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel. Cut off at $2.50 and you're good. $0.25 is like trying to use a 70s era lm741 as your preamp, with a lm386 as speaker driver.
It still boggles the mind that in 2011 there are "home hobbiest" types using LM386 chips as an audio amp, they're nice and cheap like your 25 cents but they whoosh out white noise into headphones like a trip to a seashore. There's better lower noise stuff so you don't have to hear a constant "ssssh" in your headphones, but thats more like $2.50 not $100. Also the lm386 is a great oscillator as the power voltage sags, like when batteries are getting weak, when the bass response starts sounding whacky you know you should have selected a chip designed after 1980.
Also your $.25 DAC is gonna be like half a really dirt cheap dual DAC and you're going to be lucky to get 40 dB cross channel separation and noise performance is going to be audibly foul, which I suppose is better than most normal humans can hear, although its pretty pitiful as a spec. Again, $2.50 instead of $.25 and you're back into territory where you probably don't have the gear to measure it, much less hear it.
Another classic "cheapie" characteristic is 3rd ord IMD products. You can hear those in heavy bass and I'm no audiophool type. Again, the $2.50 DAC and a $2.50 amp chip designed this century would eliminate the heard and measurable effect.
The market seems to be "$0.25 junk at walmart" or the audiophool class. Not much in between. Although I must say my ipod nano final audio amp is pretty decent with low noise, but some would say i-device = audiophool, well ... whatever.
The standard /. car analogy is modern cars are more reliable than old cars, if you exclude the absolute bottom of the barrel like a yugo or a trabant or whatever China Motors is starting to ship.
I agree. A professional studio should buy the $5 cable instead of the $1 cable.
Perhaps a laboratory should get the $10 cable and an EMP testing facility might pay $20 for additional shielding.
For safety reasons, I'd go for two or possibly even three of those $20 cables in a satelite or space craft.
But that still begs the question; who'd need the $1095 cable?
Begs the question is just filler in this application. You're not doin' it right.
As far as tech goes, RF engineering being an area of my expertise, for the most exotic 1.85mm coaxial connectors hand assembled and individually hand tested on a network analyzer and giving your grubby hands a physical printout of that actual individual cables test results, you are looking at around $200 for the connectors and assembly/testing service shipped to your door in a couple days. Think like Pasternack and RFcoax and places like that. You get to pay extra for each inch of the 0.085 rigid coax but thats a rounding error compared to the cost of assembly/testing unless you're using a really unreasonable length of coax...
I would assume if you want milspec traceable soldering technique and ISO9000 certified training for the tech work and xrayed connections and maybe a somewhat higher grade of connector with heavier gold plate, you could drop maybe $500 on a milspec aerospace cable, but I don't think it possible to legitimately spend more.
So your estimate's off by maybe a factor of 20 or so.
Supposedly HP made some weird 1 mm connector that only like 10 people in the world knew how to assemble correctly and cost over $1000 per connector, but I donno anything about that all heresay. I would imagine something that small would be rated over 100 GHz? Maybe 200 GHz?
The point of this RF foolishness is a standard SMA connector itself internally resonates really low in frequency like 18 GHz so if you want to do military radar or whatever you need something better, rarer, which translates to more expensive. The 1.85s are supposedly good to 70 GHz or so, maybe 80 if you can tolerate some frequency dependent matching. Sometimes you just can't use waveguide or justify its size and weight (think of WR-42 waveguide the size of your thumb and heavy as a piece of plumbing pipe, its pretty heavy compared to a 185 connector and some coax...)
You want to make a RF guy cry? Tell him you attached a plain SMA connector to a nice new 1.85 calibration load using a pipe wrench or a hammer or something. There's triple digits flushed down the drain in an instant. Maybe four digits. Cross threading too, that's not cool at those prices.
RF has an intense "knee" around 18 GHz for resonance reasons, you can buy SMA connectors at Mouser for like $2 a piece but you want to go exotic like 1.85 for higher frequencies and instantly you're dropping darn near 3 digits on each connector.
There is no "impossible" in RF, just "impossibly expensive to meet your requirements".
Its on the store side. I was tangentially involved in retail management a long time ago, and you could write off stolen goods as a business loss against whatever profit you made. Things get really flakey WRT wholesale loss vs retail loss and exactly which corporation eats the loss. Having a basically "captive" wholesale supplier means you can pretty much set the wholesale price you'd like, although that is questionably legal.
The other interpretation is the stereotypical housing bubble boom activity was to refinance, then head down to best buy and pick up a $5000 TV. After the refi cash dried up, you can now get the same TV for $500. Imagine that! Theoretically you deduct your mortgage interest so although you're stuck paying for a $1000 cable for 30 years, at least you aren't paying interest on it, compared to paying $25 on a credit card at 29% for probably the same 30 years I'm not entirely sure which is worse and too lazy to calculate it. Also after the housing bubble ended and people stopped paying their mortgage, if they bought the TV more than X months/years ago they can declare bankruptcy and keep the TV, which means the bank writes off the mortgage etc etc and they have a really nice TV in their new apartment.
Any reasonably thick lamp cord will do just fine as a speaker cable.
Go to your local home improvement store, locate the "12 volt outdoor garden lighting" area, assuming solar hasn't wiped these guys out, you can sometimes pick up off the shelf spools of really cheap heavy gauge stranded two conductor wire.
Theoretically, buying by the foot outta the electricians aisle should be cheaper, however, during one of the commodity boom/runups they were updating the price of the electricians aisle by-the-foot on a seemingly daily basis, but they never updated the price on the pre-printed spools of garden lighting wire. So I was paying maybe 10% over pre-boom per foot price for the garden wire, but I was cool with that because pay-by-the-foot had doubled or tripled and the pre-pack garden wire had not been marked up yet.
For something like the cost of an old fashioned DVD I wired up my whole 5.1 speaker system using garden wire. If I had used "best buy marked up cable prices" it probably would have cost $200 to buy all that wire.
With a wavelength of just under 10 miles for a 15kHz signal, the necessity of shielding is a matter of how long your speaker cable is.
Most people seem to have speaker wires that make great quarterwave dipole antennas annoyingly near the 15M / 10M / 6M ham radio bands or the 11M CB band. The problem is some classical, lets say, pre 00s audio output final power amps have something of a rectifying effect on the incoming RF. So you end up hearing clearly every trucker who drives by. Trivially fixed with a bit of shielded coaxial cable. Assuming your negative speaker lead either can be grounded, or already is grounded, a couple minutes with a swiss army knife and a length of old antenna / cable tv coaxial cable will either result in a trip to the ER if you have low DEX statistics, or a nice shielded speaker wire ready to install.
You can also spend some dough on RF ferrite chokes, but frankly its usually cheaper to use scrap cable, assuming you have some laying about.
(I'm not sure if it's actually a surveillance state if nobody's looking through the broken cameras.)
The purpose of a surveillance state is to encourage fear and intimidation and conformity and servility. You don't need to actually use the cameras to infect society with those values... just install them. Its to intimidate the permanently downwardly mobile middle class and the 60's radicals now turned grandparents, not to scare the lower class criminals.
I'm sure this is probably racially insensitive to discuss, but around here a "Chinese Firedrill" is where a car full of (drunk) people at a red light get out of the car, sprint around the car continually in a circle, and when the light turns green, or someone pukes, at which point everyone leaps back into the car, statistically likely to be a different driver. Then you drive away and repeat at the next stoplight. This is much more fun in the big city than the little village with only one stoplight. The reaction of the other drivers watching these antics is always funny. Well, thats what 5 digit UID /.ers did for fun in cars as kids before they invented smartphones and texting while driving and sex. Over the decades the prevalence of this has decreased with increasing enforcement of drunk driving laws and increased police militarization and paranoia (they are doing something weird, better call it into the terrorist hotline just in case, if you see something say something!). As a side issue I'm genuinely mystified why this activity is claimed as "Chinese" because I feel I should be able to come up with something far more racially insensitive to do at a stop light with a bunch of drunks, but then again I can't think of much else to do with a car full of drunks that doesn't involve expelling recently consumed bodily fluids. Maybe the name is a part of the "joke" making it even more ridiculous than it already is?
Anyway the point of this ramble is, whatever you call this fine upstanding activity, what happens if you boot the car with one rear, and while running the rear magically changes into another rear? Nothing? Onstar reports a suspected car jacking? Onstar reports a car full of drunken idiots?
1) Do you think this "seat weight distribution" seat key is more or less creepy than a "scratch and sniff" seat key? Ditto analysis for not just creepy, but success in the market, for example, facebook is creepy, yet also is a huge success?
2) How long until a virus is released that uploads the stored key data, for either this weight system, or my proposed odor sniffing system, to facebook or whatever social media platform of your choice? I'm giving it less than a year. I am undecided if fakes should count; an example of a fake would be a odor analysis system that randomly tweets "Captain, sensors $owner ate at taco bell last night" rather than actually sampling the air in the area to determine it. I suppose the weight distribution system might be sensitive enough to detect digestive rumblings or forcefully expelled gasses, so the possibility of this exists for that platform also.
Much more likely your bluetooth handsfree connected smartphone gets owned by a virus and you are given the option of paypal ing $10 to some .ru address OR having your facebook portrait photo changed to a synthetic generated digital image of your rear OR taking a medical tourism flight to Thailand to enhance the booty to match the newly virus uploaded "key". Personally I'd LOL big time and enjoy comments about my new portrait photo, but I know women are bipolar about seemingly randomly trying to show it off to the guys or keep it hidden from the guys, so I'm thinking freakout time for them.
But it may be able to cope with such slow changes. You aren't going to get fat in one day, and even less so leaner.
Clearly you are not one of those "carry the wallet in the rear pocket" types. Fat with cash on the right cheek (is this TMI?) on payday, Fing wallet is flat again the next day, or so it often seems (my budget strategy is cash only for frivolous junk/bar/restaurant if at all technologically possible, otherwise I wouldn't use cash other than vending machines).
Assuming a random statistical distribution of failure, and a short "timeout" between tests, the overall system success rate of a 98% success on first try followed by 98% on second try means you'll only have to try a third 98% success trial something around once for each owner of the car, assuming you own a car "about 4 years" or so, and assuming I did the math in my head correctly for 2500 days. I figure every 125000 times you boot up the car, you'll need a 4th try, that's booting up the car twice a day for 171 years. So "lock out after 6 attempts" seems safe enough to only happen accidentally a couple times in the lifetime of the product run?
Biggest problem is going to be embarrassment at having to get out of the car and try it again, if people see you doing that they're going to make all kinds of interesting assumptions about what happened to your rear last night, rough time doing doggie style or things are still too stretched out or sore back there today or whatever, so I'm thinking women would be waaaaaaay too embarrassed to buy one of these systems, even if it only happens once in a while.
...what happens in those 2 of 100 cases it detected your behind wrongly? :D
I would expect my wife's cruddy top 40 station on the radio presets, the default interior temperature turned up entirely too high, power seats adjusting themselves for a 5 foot person instead of a 6 foot person (which could be kinda hazardous for my neck), air handling system blowing air into my face (people with glasses don't seem to care, but non-glasses wearers tend to tear up after awhile of that) maybe even so far as her "set" of in dash GPS waypoints instead of my own.
Seriously though, am I the only one on /. who notices that footwear strongly affects both posture and back pain? Not to mention clothes? I would bet the machine would have "difficulty" figuring out the guy wearing snow pants and giant snow boots with back pain from shoveling snow is the same guy as the gym shorts and sandals dude in the summer. Maybe in places with no seasonal climate this would work. Note that where I live we can go from 40s F in jeans and tennis shoes to 30s F and a foot of snow with heavy thick boots to below zero F and snowmobile suits for safety (in case car breaks down, etc), and back again, all in the course of a week or so, a couple times each winter. Also suit and tie and dress shoes for work to bathing suit and tee shirt in the summer on the same day.
because it saves space
highly standardized
The guy isn't going to be hosting so many servers
Those are the guys three problems.
1) I have the entire "under the basement stairs" space plus two partial wiring closets in my house. Other than hoarding for the sake of hoarding, I can not fill them up. Do not spend money and severely constrain yourself to save space, that you do not need to save.
2) Do not highly standardize. My best purchases have been weird special one off this weekend only deals. Surplus sales, etc. In a corporate environment you Really need to standardize on one specific model of rack hardware to keep the spares situation manageable. This is meaningless at home. Do not turn down the opportunity of cheap GHz and cheap TB because you only collect dell 1U rackmounts or whatever.
3) You're cooling limited at the high end of rackmounts anyway, so who cares if you "could" get a rack sized NAS because it requires licenses and higher voltage three phase power anyway. I could wire multiple 15 amp ckts into my wiring closet, but the space heater effect would cause a fire. Thermal is your primary limit at home, usually. Also you get much more interesting experience with triple redundant physical servers, and better overall system reliability, than with one box three times the size. I have a small compute cluster hosting many LXC images, and by playing games with NFS etc I can back up each container to all three machines and furthermore can redeploy any container to any box based on load. You do need to standardized on all i386 or all amd64 to pull this off with LXC. In summary, get multiple small boxes, not one large box.
So, to ask a serious question: what do you propose for a solution that ISN'T socialism?
It requires intense social interaction and social cohesion (absolutely not multiculturalism compatible) but historically the solution in the early greco-roman world was utter social and political ostracism of those not participating in the gift economy. Key word is "early", decay set in toward the end. The roads from rome to modern france were not built by the nebulous concept of "rome" or even a roman govt dept, but were bought and paid for by none other than Julius Caesar. Fame in that era was not so much being good at kids ball games or being good and lip syncing and better at dancing, but by being the guy who built the city a nice bath house or fed the poor.
Also, politically, the poor tended to side with those who paid to feed them. It is exactly the same now, we just like to pretend it is not so. It is much more civilized to be honest about it.
The knee jerk response is this would never work in a "specialized advanced society" but I completely disagree. The best tech example I can think of is Shuttleworth/Ubuntu. Now multiply that by a hundred or thousand other projects, and we would be getting somewhere. Also if you're familiar with the role the ARRL plays WRT amateur radio, well funded charitable donation organizations like that also existed in ye olden days. Julius Caesar didn't really know very much about roads, other than who to hire to build some good ones. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, again, times about a hundred or thousand or so, is probably what we'd see a lot of. Also the analogy of temple/church vs the modern university is pretty apt, a nice endowment, lifetime chairs for the profs, its much more ancient of a funding concept than you'd superficially think.
Don't think this will work in a "divide and conquer" multicultural world, or in /. world where the only social interaction is in FPS video games. Or in a world where the predominant game theory strategy is "I don't care how much smaller the whole pie gets for everyone, all that matters is my individual slice gets larger". But, historically, it was possible and did work pretty darn well for centuries.
I know about this ancient world stuff because I have a 5 digit /. UID, I was there when it happened. More seriously, being reasonably well read is a result of a good (free) classical education, although I haven't read stuff like Plutarch's Lives in a couple decades I believe my post is overall a reasonable summary of how we did it in ye olden days. Or at least its the best spin they could put on it in the olden days back when they wrote about it.
Hmm I haven't run into any of that. I think I know the part you reference in the mage quests, where the "things" infest the village and you and some of the mages (faralda and friends) help the townies by wiping out the "things". I remember thinking this is all very nice, but if I F around instead of wasting the "things" and as a result faralda or whatever her name is gets killed off, then I'm going to have no one to train me on destruction spells, so I got it in gear before anyone got hurt, and all ended well. I suppose that makes it a "real" role playing game?
As for the console ports, console guys just seem to be gluttons for punishment, they'll be OK, they're used to the abuse, etc.
Skyrim comes out, they obviously should have taken a couple more months to bug-test given everything that's being found in the game constantly breaking
Whats broke? My only problem is the sound is correct, but the volume level is at least 30 db lower than every other game / music player on the machine. At first I thought it was just quiet, like those people that whined all the time about Doom 3 being dark, well, yeah, its supposed to be dark. Maybe skyrim is just in its quiet place. Yet I hear (pun) some people claim the sound is fine and perfectly normal, which is confusing to me. Also I hear all this stuff about just configure my sound for surround sound etc, but I don't have that kind of hardware, just plain ole stereo, so...
Other than that all I've heard is typical overheating 3d video card drama... "I've overclocked and over voltaged my video card, cpu, and memory, and intentionally undersped the cooling fans so they're quiet, and now the pc crashes all the time, so it must be skyrim's fault, yeah thats it".
So other than the sound sucks, and people with broken computers still have broken computers, I've not heard any problems.
I only have "a dozen or two" hours in, maybe it all goes to heck and blows up around level 30, I donno yet.
I actually paid for it, and everythings up to date according to steam. Maybe some of the "free" torrent versions suck? I donno.
lots of return to base after engine failure, a couple times for him personally, he even had a wing fire
I mean he had a couple aborted missions due to engines burning out, and once he had a wing fire, not caught fire each time.
Actually its almost exactly like taking the water pump out of a 1960 ford falcon and being surprised you can't use it on a 2011 ford F-150.
Yes, but the existing planes are constantly updated. Military planes are not like commodity cars, which get build once and only receive new wipers every now end then. The airforce plans to use them for decades. Also, the insight gained will influence the next generation of fighters.
My grandfather the B-17 and B-24 pilot had some saying about the first couple hundred B-17 (or was it B-24?) engines pretty much being no good, lots of return to base after engine failure, a couple times for him personally, he even had a wing fire (obviously, survived, somehow). No big deal if the first couple hundred fail, because they made thousands.
Sounds like they're doing that with the F-22, the first couple hundred are kind of learning experiments. Whoops, they only made a couple hundred and then shut down the line. Well, thats not gonna work so well.
When are we getting college degree programs not tied to a campus. I want to enroll at Midwest States University. Take some courses at Illinois State some at the University of Kentucky, some at University of Tennessee, and graduate with a BA after 4 years.
You've just described my undergrad "career" or whatever you want to call it, although all different schools.
Some places let anything transfer, some let you test out even if they won't categorically no-questions asked transfer, and some are rat bastards about forcing you to take certain specific classes at their school, sometimes no rhyme or reason. My advice, especially in this era of online education, is shop around.
I had the privilege (?) of taking calculus in high school (didn't give a F, got C in return, actually not bad for doing nothing but show up), at a 4 year college that I hated I got a B for both semesters, at a tech school for an associates degree I got perfect As, in fact the prof joked that I wrote the answer key for several exams. Was not permitted transfer credit or testing out for calc anywhere except my final degree granting online school (lakeland.edu), thank god I didn't have to take calc a fourth time, although it probably would have been pretty easy. On the other hand, I took a boring philosophy 101 class at the 4-year and every school I ever went to gave me credit for it. Also got credit everywhere for my public speaking associates class and my sociology class. Generally the fluffier the class the most likely they'll transfer it, and the more "hard science" the less likely they'll give credit.
Also testing out is easy if you know the stuff, but they made it a PITA, perhaps they only offer 2 testing sessions per semester total, and you've got ten classes you think you can skip... Even worse some schools only allow you to test out of a certain number of credits... So you could probably test out of 10 classes, but that would take 5 semesters or about 3 years, and they only permit 32 credits or 8 classes worth of "testing out", which would still take at least one and a third years assuming 3 semesters per year, and easy "A" never hurt anyones GPA, so ... Lets just say I found Early American History pretty easy the second time around.
You can safely assume they will require you to spend at least one year at your graduating school, regardless how many specific or general credits you get.
I'd guess partly because disciplines got more and more complex to the point where there was significant theory (e.g. engineering today is more about mathematics and less about hands-on work with steel than it was in 1910), and partly for prestige reasons.
Mostly financial reasons. My home town has a tech school, a state extension public U, and a tiny more than 150 year old psuedo-religious private U (psuedo-religious in that I attended for a year and it was religious in that you had to take "a" religion or philosophy class to graduate, but it was not religious in that it only grants doctor of divinity degrees)
The tech school was affordable nearly full time on full time minimum wage and only offered per credit hour classes. The public extension U was about twice the cost per credit hour OR "full time" tuition at 12 or more credits cost the same as about 20 credits. The expensive little private U was about twice the cost per credit of the public U but "full time" tuition at 12 or more credits was bonkers crazy far over 20 individual credits something like $10K/semester after all the full time student fees last time I checked.
So you can quadruple your income by changing from a "tech school" to a "private university", roughly. And the govt will backstop all the loans, so there is no reason not to raise prices to the roof, once it changes from a "cash transaction" to a "long term govt guaranteed debt transaction".
I've downloaded and watched several of the video lecture series from OCW. The 100 level calc videos are awesome for light viewing as a refresher course. Needless to say I have not used calc in any form in the previous 20 years, but it all kind of comes back while having the videos on in the background.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no "taking" or "signing up" there are just course pages, with syllabus, suggested readings, sample historical tests and answer keys, etc. Its not like taking a "real online course" with a fixed schedule and having forced graded discussion groups and locally proctored exams (been there, done that, as "real" online for credit undergrad classes). At least as far as I've seen over the past few years (OCW is a decade old now)
the game's budget is estimated to be as high as $100 million
What in the world could they have possibly spent that on? I'm struggling to figure it out. Even if 3/4 went to marketing and executive bonuses, that would still be a rather large sum of money.
Since these certificates seem to be much finer granularity than degree programs, if they proliferate
WRT to granularity, I'd be happy if video support for the 10 year old OCW program proliferated beyond the 100 level courses.
Some of the higher level class "OCW support" is kind of minimal. Some of the course pages are as minimal as a textbook and a schedule. I'm unimpressed. Here, let me provide you with the "/. discount special vlm CS certificate program" : "Knuth TAOCP, schedule, start on page one first book first day, end on last page last book last day. Also read some of Graham's lisp works. click here for your cert". I'm not demanding every course ever offered be videoed, but I'd like to see video of more than the intro classes. I can almost enumerate across OCW, openyale, and stanford online all the non-100 level classes with video lectures that exist .. lets see there is a decent thermodynamics video series, I guess we can count linear algebra and diffeqs as non-100 level, there is a decent crystallography video series oh and that roman architecture series is pretty decent ... thats about it?
In comparison I offer up Harvard's 5 foot shelf of classics, which has been available for about 100 years now, and no one has ever bothered to offer a certificate for it... I donno if a cert is "inevitable". (Note the 5 foot wall of classics and the fiction "wall" of two dozen or so volumes, is more or less how I ended up self educated, despite my formal education occasionally getting in the way)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
Somewhat misquoted
MIT ... will enable students to ... earn certificates.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219
Rather, MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within the Institute that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.
So you'll get a cert from "Internet-U" stating you watched a video.
BTW the OCW calculus video series rocks as a refresher course. HIGHLY recommended. I wish they had video for more than just their 100 level intro courses.