Modern gas furnaces are around 90% efficient, so heat costs 3.8 cents/kWh. Replacing that with 15 cent/kWh resistive electric heat is most certainly not equivalent.
OK 4 to 1 ratio sounds bad. However you're using an unreasonably low cost per them and high cost of electricity.
Also don't forget the capital costs. Rough estimate, $5000 for a furnace, guaranteed (to fail in) ten years, 365 days a year, only use the furnace half the year, 24 hours at a time, it costs about $0.028 per hour in capital costs. Let's add some scheduled maintenance, replace the air filter a few times, clean the duct work every couple years or decades, add a reasonable cost of money (interest or whatever). Figure three cents per hour fixed cost of natural gas heating, if the thermostat never turns on.
Estimate the furnace outputs on average maybe a KW between on and off times. The furnace air blower is a one HP motor.
Then figure cost per therm is higher, round it up to maybe 4 cents per KWh. Then add the fixed costs, we're up to maybe 7 cents per KWh equivalent.
Finally, move out of Connecticut or CA where cost per KWh is about a quarter per hour, and move.. anywhere else... to get maybe 8 cents per KWh for electricity.
Of course, gas heat merely warms your toes, but the electrical heat provides "entertainment" or whatever television is.
At 15 cents per kWh, that's $26 per year. That's like having to buy a case of beer for your TV every six months.
Where I live, we need some level of home heating 6 months out of the year. Now you're down to $13 since every watt not provided by the TV has to come from my HVAC system, a watt here a watt there its all the same. Of course for 3 months out of the year, my roughly 10 C.O.P. air conditioning system has to use 1/10th of the dissipated energy to pump the heat back outside, raising it to $13.75 annual cost. Of course most people don't live in CA so the electricity costs at least 1/3 to 1/2 less than your cost.
There can be local "microclimate" benefits. When I had two giant power sucking dell servers in my basement, they raised the temperature of the basement enough that I didn't need to dehumidify the air... Also the sound of whirring servers is music to my ears compared to the rumble of dehumidifiers. My wife had no such refined musical taste and found the noise from both to be offensive, Oh well. Another "microclimate" benefit is well known to any cat owner whom has any horizontal electronic device that dissipates a couple watts... Growing up, one could always find the VCR or TV or shortwave radio, merely by looking under the cat.
Now the real question, is what will rot your brain more, watching TV for a year, or drinking $13.75 worth of beer? I'd suggest drinking the beer and selling the TV for more beer money. You can recycle the beer cans, and beer can replace a significant portion of your caloric intake reducing your food bills, at least for a few years. Also a good dark beer like Guinness provides valuable vitamins and minerals, the watery stuff isn't as healthy.
contains no less than 240 footnotes as of today. Then of course there is some BSD licensed code in there.
I remember this girl in one of my computer science classes (no, not "the girl", it was almost 50:50 at this small private Wisconsin College). At the start of the semester she declared her "dream" was to develop new technologies at microsoft. I remember thinking she didn't know anything, because microsoft develops virtually nothing serious, anything interesting came from acquisitions.
"But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use." If the color corresponded closely with the wavelength of laser weapons resistant/protective eye-wear could be developed of such materials.
We have simpler and cheaper absorptive filters for that already. But, making it invisible to the IR lasers used for laser rangefinders could come in handy, although it wouldn't take long to train tank crews to lase something next to the tank rather than the tank itself.
Maybe you could make it wideband enough to defeat IR heat sensitive cameras. That would be interesting. Would it look like an absolute zero patch rather than a hot engine? Probably wouldn't take long to reprogram the missiles to home in on the tank sized absolute zero patch rather than the tank sized hot engine patch. Leading to the "hot" new countermeasure technology of smashing open a couple liquid He dewars a couple hundred feet away as decoys. If you block all radiative heat emission, it's gotta go somewhere, maybe into a giant heat plume? Conducting it into the ground isn't a good idea, you'll get a tron-like heat trail to home in on. Maybe reprogram the missile to home in on the megawatt sized small hot air plume...
This is out of scope for Wikipedia. It sounds like this should be an entirely separate project. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should not have video:
Why? Just cause you say so? The wiki folks already enjoy deleting as many articles they can, so I'm sure you can work with them to delete as many videos as you can.
Took me about a minute to realize they were writing about the old italian guy.
My thinking was interrupted by the space probe of the same name that used a gravitational assist off the earth, and on the way took a couple cool pictures to tune up the cameras.
I also recognize that every government on this planet exercises sovereignty over their borders and that said governments have a legitimate interest in preventing known bad actors from entering their country. It has nothing to do with "if you are innocent you have nothing to hide". Given the ease with which one can obtain falsified identification documents are you really that surprised that they've expanded the entry/exit process into biometrics?
What you're missing, is this harassment only applies to legal entries. The borders remain utterly wide open for illegals. Regulations like this are only there to hassle middle class people or fools who still believe in the rule of law in the USA. The method of BSing the populous is to claim it'll solve terrorism or some other BS. So, if you don't want the "legal" hassle, fly into mexico or canada and simply walk across like everyone else. That plays into the other Orwellian theme of modern america, which is to make it impossible for any individual to not be a criminal, thus making oppression of anyone at any time "OK".
Think of why the roman empire fell. In summary, it was because for too many people it was easier to live without the empire, than with it. This is just another government growth that we are obviously better off without, than with. And so goes the empire. That's why this individual failure of the american empire is important, even when individuals claim they will not be affected by it.
that's good feedback, what price would you like to see for a 200+ page quarterly with minimal ads?
I hate to give two replies to the same comment, but I came up with a better answer.
When I got MAKE, my wife thought I was crazy to pay $$.$$ for one copy of a magazine, because to her the magazine industry has moved and magazine now means stuff like Electronic Design and Communications Technology which I get for free because I'm me (although I would pay just to get Bob Pease's column), or those womens magazines that are entirely ads, complementary copy, and a little scare-mongering. So she thinks something called a "magazine" with that kind of price is crazy.
But I thought it was a fair deal for a high quality, high end printing, soft cover book, somewhat more interesting than your average book, that is also a little cheaper than you'd expect because it has some ads, but its OK that it has some ads, because they are actually interesting and relevant. I'd probably have been willing to pay more for that "book" (but don't go raising your price, OK?)
So, do you wanna try and market the worlds most expensive magazine that's worth every penny, or try to market a high-quality paperback book that costs less than most would expect? If you wanna call it a magazine, expect people to complain about the high price, and if you call it a paperback technical manual containing numerous short essays, expect people to compliment you on it's low price. It's all how you would prefer to talk about it. That's my free advice, worth every penny.
that's good feedback, what price would you like to see for a 200+ page quarterly with minimal ads?
OK fair enough, a thick, well written magazine seems to deserve a heavier price... Somewhat... The ads are actually pretty cool in that they are very closely targeted toward a "maker mindset" and thus are actually very interesting to me, unlike the ads in most publications.
Which brings up the good point, that in the old days, america's elite read scientific american, so they had "elite" ad rates, so the magazine was cheap and thick. Now in the modern era, since in my opinion Sci-Am began to suck, not cheap or thick anymore. In your case, since your subscriber profile probably leans extremely toward highly intelligent individuals, engineers, scientists, programmers, technicians, creative types, whom are (on average) highly compensated, and (on average) very influential in their workplace, probably more so than most magazines I've read, given those subscriber characteristics why aren't your ad rates high enough to make the magazine cheap?
do you use the digital edition?
No
do you subscribe?
Yes sir and I have every single issue published, on my bookshelf, and its one of the few magazines I keep "permanently".
it's possible to get MAKE for less than the cost of just about any magazine/book comparable,
I'm just saying, the price is high. I'm picturing some dude picking up a copy at B&N flipping thru it, thinking its cool, and falling over when he sees the cover price. Then again, 2600 isn't cheap and it's thinner. The value per dollar is pretty good, but it's only available in big chunks of dollars.
How about thinner issues, more often? Might make it more "interactive". Or give up the "issue" idea and just call it a serial book or a series of books or something like that.
I overall like it anyway, and you got my money so I guess that's good enough for my case...
You would find that by making it non-removable, Apple managed to make it 40% bigger in size.
Never having owned or disassembled a MAC laptop, are MAC laptop batteries enclosed in giant shock mounted bullet-proof safes or something? I assure you the run of the mill PC laptop does not have that kind of packaging loss, at least in the numerous ones I've disassembled.
The "real DIY" that you're referring to is pretty much based on using wikipedia, google, and downloading manufacturers data sheets. None of that works well in a magazine format.
On the other hand, a magazine of weird ideas and unusual experiments does provide some fun and inspiration and something to begin moving along the wiki/google/datasheets path. Its difficult to read an issue and not find something new and interesting to think about.
The intro stuff in Make and "real DIY" complement each other not oppose each other.
Finally, your phrase "hardware mashup" is a fairly accurate way of looking at engineering design work. Add a little math, some goals a little more complicated than "have some fun", add some economic constraints, and use a heck of a lot more individual components, and its getting pretty close to "real" engineering design work. A magazine about "fun engineering", is not so bad.
I wish they could do something about the high price.
Tell me the meaningful service the stock market provides and I'll listen, but I'm hard pressed to find the value in their service.
For the corporations, the ability to raise money for higher risk capital purchases than banks (were) willing to tolerate. For the short term investors, seemingly infinite liquidity compared to almost any other form of investment. For the long term investors, while the baby boomers are pouring money in, its a great ponzi scheme, at least until the baby boomers start pouring money out on a net basis.
Play a couple games of "railroad tycoon deluxe" or "RRT2" or whatever, and get back to us. There's a game genre that needs new releases.
The way to do that is to do almost exactly the same thing as everybody else, no matter how mind blowing stupid it is. Plenty of people realized that banks etc were not nearly as sound as commonly believed years ago. Those that tried to act on this were fired long ago since they weren't making as high a ROI as those willing to invest in dodgy hedgefunds etc.
The key is not so much making a high ROI, as it was the separation of risk from transaction fees. My local bank would loan to anyone, as they immediately sold the loan and pocketed a transaction fee. They couldn't care less if any payments were made. Very few people realize how "investment"-type companies like banks turned into little more than a commissioned salesforce. And commissioned salespeople only make money on transaction volume, not long term return on investment.
SELECT * FROM advertising_revenue_table, list_of_local_business_table WHERE advertising_revenue_table.business_name = list_of_local_business_table.business_name
AND advertising_revenue_table.cost_of_ad_space_purchased = 100
AND list_of_local_business_table.owners NOT IN (select names from list_of_publishers_buddies) ORDER BY cost_of_ad_space_purchased ASC
Forget to follow these instructions, and you can very easily kill a lineman or blow up your generator.
1) Far more likely you'll vaporize your generator. Hook up a 3 KW generator to an entire neighborhood drawing maybe 300 kW and your generator goes poof. The only way you'll kill a lineman if the broken line feeds only your house and the break is an open circuit as opposed to short. Worst case is in between, turning a torn line tangled in a tree into a multi-KW space heater... Kind of like one of those electric charcoal starters but on a much larger scale.
2) The "real" reason it's illegal is, as you'll quickly discover, a male to male cable will probably fall out of the dryer plug at some point and then you've got a couple KW at 220 volts on large bare copper connectors less than an inch apart in a pitch dark room on the floor, or perhaps it'll hit something somewhat conductive on its way to the ground and start a huge fire, or perhaps the kids will play with it and get vaporized. The most likely failure mode of this experiment is electrocution of yourself and/or your family rather than a lineman. After all, the linemen are already working with live power on the "other" side of the broken line... they know what to do, and you don't.
3) You'll also quickly discover that you can't start up your furnace, water heater, sump pump, TV, and microwave all at the same instant although they may all run steady state. Expect alot of fun when the fridge and sump pump simultaneously start up, especially at 2am. You'll get lots of practice reseting breakers and restarting the generator.
4) Built in "permanent" generators are generally built to run and refuel 24x7. "Portables" generally are built to run a tankful and get put away till tomorrow. Portables will have some inherent design engineering "issues" such as gas caps next to red hot mufflers. So be really careful whem refilling. Hurry up and you'll turn into a torch. Also your 4 cycle will inevitably run out of oil at some point, hope you're checking the oil and/or the low oil shutoff works before the engine is trashed.
5) Since this is probably one of the most dangerous things you can possibly do, try not to do anything without thinking about each step very pessimistically. Also no booze, no waking up at 2am to refuel while half asleep. The greatest danger is doing something stupid, and being lucky, so you do it again until you croak.
good idea. 1 cent for them, 40 cents for the transaction fee. You really need to jump to $5+ to make it worthwhile.
Ironically, you posted this on a site that "solved" the micropayment transaction cost problem by allowing large donations and then deducting pennies from the balance for each pageview. I was a slashdot subscriber in the early 2000s, and that's how it worked at that time. I also got interesting bonuses like seeing stories "earlier". Maybe I could pay to get access to a wikipedia thats not been savaged by those deletionist idiots?
The bigger problem for wikipedia is allowing the legal system to weasel in via the money channel. So, I paid $10 to join, how come I can't post blatant propaganda wherever I please, or if the current admins randomly delete stuff people think is important why can't I, whom paid $10, get to delete the holocaust entry when and if I want? And you better let me or return my money and/or get sued for breach of contract. It would be a huge legal minefield.
GPS unit 1341235423523 bought 50 gallons of gas but only drove 50 miles per the GPS. Odd that Prius is only getting 1 MPG.
Aside from extreme examples, I look forward to watching tax agents bust down doors of people whom have poorly maintained cars because they "must" be tax cheats. My old 1980's plymouth horizon got 30 MPG on a good day, but when the choke stuck during winter I was lucky to get double digit MPGs on short trips.
I suspect the next step is location based taxes. For example parking a car within 500 feet of a church is free, yet anyone whom parks within 500 feet of an adult video stores will have their visit documented on a public web site and charged a $50 parking fee. Or anyone whom doesn't attend / park nearby a church every week will pay a higher tax "Y".
Then of course there are the known tobacco smokers whom drive within X feet of a public school where it's illegal to have or use tobacco products within X feet. Or gunowners. Etc.
Wikipedia is correct; DC current cannot pass through a capacitor, so it is indeed impedance rather than resistance.
You, ah, reading the same wikipedia page I am? We agree about impedance and AC current etc, but the wikipedia page is a totally different topic.
Output impedance From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Internal resistance)
and then a whole bunch of talk about internal resistances of batteries and such.
What I was getting at is that in a sense an output impedance is a complex measurement with a real an imaginary component, and an internal resistance of a battery (or a big super cap in a DC application) is basically an output impedance with a zero "j" or reactive component. But any one in the industry would laugh if you called it an output impedance instead of an internal resistance.
The whole internal resistance thing is relevant to this super duper capacitor in that if it's low enough, a short circuit makes a big bang. If it's too high then it dissipates alot of energy as heat when you try to draw too much power out of it. If the internal resistance is way too high, you don't get to pull energy out of it fast enough to heat up or blow up anything including itself. The original post was just the usual fear of technology, what I don't understand must be evil, etc, and I'm thinking that a super duper capacitor like this would be inherently safe if it's internal resistance is high enough. I saw talk of micron scale conductors, so I don't envision directly driving a photoflash with this thing...
In summary, no perfect current or voltage sources exist. All power supplies can be modeled as a "perfect" supply with a series resistance.
In practice the difference can be huge. Short out an old fashioned 10 aH zinc copper gravity cell and nothing particularly interesting occurs due to its high internal resistance. Short out a 10 aH nicad, and good luck dodging the shrapnel.
Another amusing comparison, when NiMH batteries were very new, like in the late 80s, RC car racers like myself were impressed that they held around twice the charge of the old NiCd technology. However, the internal resistance was so high, that they didn't go so fast. I guess in the intervening decades NiMH now has a low enough resistance to use in RC cars, but that sure wasn't always the case.
Internal resistance has always been the problem for supercapacitors. I remember being quite disappointed when, as a kid a few decades ago, I bought one of those newfangled carbon based super caps, like 0.1 farad at 5.5 volts, and expected if a couple thousand uF made a shower of sparks when shorted out, 0.1 farad should make like an atomic explosion when shorted, however the internal resistance of the cap was like multiple ohms so it didn't even spark. I vaguely remember that once charged it ran a LED a long time though.
The problems super caps always had (until now?) is you need a ultra high conductivity for the plates to get a low internal resistance and a ultra low conductivity for the dielectric (not dialectic, that's another story) to get low leakage currents, and both have to be compatible with each other (from an electrical standpoint, sodium metal foil and ultra purified water sounds like a good capacitor design, but from a chemical standpoint, maybe not so good. Chlorine is probably an even better insulator than water in this application). Finally it would be nice if it were made without toxic waste like PCBs or beryllium oxide insulators (both of which have been used in electronics applications in the past). And then there's minor little things like mechanical stability, manufacturing problems, and material sources like tantalum. Their claim to have worked around all those problems is what makes this patent very impressive, if true.
From the numbers in the summary, a fully-charged one of these would supply enough energy to propel a 3300lbs (1500kg) car from 0 to 1100mph (500m/s)
Ahhh you must be from the Theoretical Physics Department, over here in Engineering we have wind resistance, friction and efficiency to worry about.
Not much wind resistance in space. This might be useful for satellite power. Certainly the lifespan of small earth orbiting satellites seems limited by nicad battery life. Capacitors would have no age limit, other than maybe leaking electrolyte all over. (Geosynch satellites eventually run out of station keeping fuel, this wouldn't help them much)
I could list quite a few amsats with burned out batteries, heres the most famous, that came back to life a couple decades after the shorted nicads failed open. http://www.amsat.org/amsat/sats/n7hpr/ao7.html
Here's an interesting site and quote about satellite batteries.
There are 5 battery systems that are fed through a Battery Current Regulator (BCR) at 28v. To-date they have used NICADs. AMSAT is looking at other newer types, like Metal Hydride and Lithium Ion to get more capacity at lower rate, plus the number of times a battery can be charged. They still favor the NICADs because they can be charged more often then the newer ones before they have to be replaced. Robin used slides to show the details of the satellite inside and out.
"So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them. Can you explain to us what value you bring to SUN, and why we shouldn't just hire or reward the 3rd party contributors directly?"
Which of the six developers who's work I committed do you propose to hire? If they're busy vetting other people's code, when will they have time to keep writing this great stuff?
This is known as the "developer as interior decorator" model, where the developer is hired on their ability to mix and match code that is in good taste that blends attractively with the existing architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern gas furnaces are around 90% efficient, so heat costs 3.8 cents/kWh. Replacing that with 15 cent/kWh resistive electric heat is most certainly not equivalent.
OK 4 to 1 ratio sounds bad. However you're using an unreasonably low cost per them and high cost of electricity.
Also don't forget the capital costs. Rough estimate, $5000 for a furnace, guaranteed (to fail in) ten years, 365 days a year, only use the furnace half the year, 24 hours at a time, it costs about $0.028 per hour in capital costs. Let's add some scheduled maintenance, replace the air filter a few times, clean the duct work every couple years or decades, add a reasonable cost of money (interest or whatever). Figure three cents per hour fixed cost of natural gas heating, if the thermostat never turns on.
Estimate the furnace outputs on average maybe a KW between on and off times. The furnace air blower is a one HP motor.
Then figure cost per therm is higher, round it up to maybe 4 cents per KWh. Then add the fixed costs, we're up to maybe 7 cents per KWh equivalent.
Finally, move out of Connecticut or CA where cost per KWh is about a quarter per hour, and move.. anywhere else... to get maybe 8 cents per KWh for electricity.
Of course, gas heat merely warms your toes, but the electrical heat provides "entertainment" or whatever television is.
Not much difference using those numbers...
At 15 cents per kWh, that's $26 per year. That's like having to buy a case of beer for your TV every six months.
Where I live, we need some level of home heating 6 months out of the year. Now you're down to $13 since every watt not provided by the TV has to come from my HVAC system, a watt here a watt there its all the same. Of course for 3 months out of the year, my roughly 10 C.O.P. air conditioning system has to use 1/10th of the dissipated energy to pump the heat back outside, raising it to $13.75 annual cost. Of course most people don't live in CA so the electricity costs at least 1/3 to 1/2 less than your cost.
There can be local "microclimate" benefits. When I had two giant power sucking dell servers in my basement, they raised the temperature of the basement enough that I didn't need to dehumidify the air... Also the sound of whirring servers is music to my ears compared to the rumble of dehumidifiers. My wife had no such refined musical taste and found the noise from both to be offensive, Oh well. Another "microclimate" benefit is well known to any cat owner whom has any horizontal electronic device that dissipates a couple watts... Growing up, one could always find the VCR or TV or shortwave radio, merely by looking under the cat.
Now the real question, is what will rot your brain more, watching TV for a year, or drinking $13.75 worth of beer? I'd suggest drinking the beer and selling the TV for more beer money. You can recycle the beer cans, and beer can replace a significant portion of your caloric intake reducing your food bills, at least for a few years. Also a good dark beer like Guinness provides valuable vitamins and minerals, the watery stuff isn't as healthy.
Or is it more of a hodge podge of pieces that are added as needed? Is it a gnarled tree or sculpted marble?
It is a thing that works. If commercial software tried that metaphor, it would almost be competitive.
Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corporation
contains no less than 240 footnotes as of today. Then of course there is some BSD licensed code in there.
I remember this girl in one of my computer science classes (no, not "the girl", it was almost 50:50 at this small private Wisconsin College). At the start of the semester she declared her "dream" was to develop new technologies at microsoft. I remember thinking she didn't know anything, because microsoft develops virtually nothing serious, anything interesting came from acquisitions.
"But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use." If the color corresponded closely with the wavelength of laser weapons resistant/protective eye-wear could be developed of such materials.
We have simpler and cheaper absorptive filters for that already. But, making it invisible to the IR lasers used for laser rangefinders could come in handy, although it wouldn't take long to train tank crews to lase something next to the tank rather than the tank itself.
Maybe you could make it wideband enough to defeat IR heat sensitive cameras. That would be interesting. Would it look like an absolute zero patch rather than a hot engine? Probably wouldn't take long to reprogram the missiles to home in on the tank sized absolute zero patch rather than the tank sized hot engine patch. Leading to the "hot" new countermeasure technology of smashing open a couple liquid He dewars a couple hundred feet away as decoys. If you block all radiative heat emission, it's gotta go somewhere, maybe into a giant heat plume? Conducting it into the ground isn't a good idea, you'll get a tron-like heat trail to home in on. Maybe reprogram the missile to home in on the megawatt sized small hot air plume...
The self-appointed content fascists on Wikipedia should result in a great reduction in the amount of storage needed.
Agreed. Why does the wikipedia need more storage, when their main focus seems to be deleting other peoples articles?
You'd think they would "upgrade" to smaller disks not bigger disks. Move the whole think to a single small SD card or something.
This is out of scope for Wikipedia. It sounds like this should be an entirely separate project. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should not have video:
Why? Just cause you say so? The wiki folks already enjoy deleting as many articles they can, so I'm sure you can work with them to delete as many videos as you can.
Took me about a minute to realize they were writing about the old italian guy.
My thinking was interrupted by the space probe of the same name that used a gravitational assist off the earth, and on the way took a couple cool pictures to tune up the cameras.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/images/moon.html
I also recognize that every government on this planet exercises sovereignty over their borders and that said governments have a legitimate interest in preventing known bad actors from entering their country. It has nothing to do with "if you are innocent you have nothing to hide". Given the ease with which one can obtain falsified identification documents are you really that surprised that they've expanded the entry/exit process into biometrics?
What you're missing, is this harassment only applies to legal entries. The borders remain utterly wide open for illegals. Regulations like this are only there to hassle middle class people or fools who still believe in the rule of law in the USA. The method of BSing the populous is to claim it'll solve terrorism or some other BS. So, if you don't want the "legal" hassle, fly into mexico or canada and simply walk across like everyone else. That plays into the other Orwellian theme of modern america, which is to make it impossible for any individual to not be a criminal, thus making oppression of anyone at any time "OK".
Think of why the roman empire fell. In summary, it was because for too many people it was easier to live without the empire, than with it. This is just another government growth that we are obviously better off without, than with. And so goes the empire. That's why this individual failure of the american empire is important, even when individuals claim they will not be affected by it.
that's good feedback, what price would you like to see for a 200+ page quarterly with minimal ads?
I hate to give two replies to the same comment, but I came up with a better answer.
When I got MAKE, my wife thought I was crazy to pay $$.$$ for one copy of a magazine, because to her the magazine industry has moved and magazine now means stuff like Electronic Design and Communications Technology which I get for free because I'm me (although I would pay just to get Bob Pease's column), or those womens magazines that are entirely ads, complementary copy, and a little scare-mongering. So she thinks something called a "magazine" with that kind of price is crazy.
But I thought it was a fair deal for a high quality, high end printing, soft cover book, somewhat more interesting than your average book, that is also a little cheaper than you'd expect because it has some ads, but its OK that it has some ads, because they are actually interesting and relevant. I'd probably have been willing to pay more for that "book" (but don't go raising your price, OK?)
So, do you wanna try and market the worlds most expensive magazine that's worth every penny, or try to market a high-quality paperback book that costs less than most would expect? If you wanna call it a magazine, expect people to complain about the high price, and if you call it a paperback technical manual containing numerous short essays, expect people to compliment you on it's low price. It's all how you would prefer to talk about it. That's my free advice, worth every penny.
that's good feedback, what price would you like to see for a 200+ page quarterly with minimal ads?
OK fair enough, a thick, well written magazine seems to deserve a heavier price... Somewhat... The ads are actually pretty cool in that they are very closely targeted toward a "maker mindset" and thus are actually very interesting to me, unlike the ads in most publications.
Which brings up the good point, that in the old days, america's elite read scientific american, so they had "elite" ad rates, so the magazine was cheap and thick. Now in the modern era, since in my opinion Sci-Am began to suck, not cheap or thick anymore. In your case, since your subscriber profile probably leans extremely toward highly intelligent individuals, engineers, scientists, programmers, technicians, creative types, whom are (on average) highly compensated, and (on average) very influential in their workplace, probably more so than most magazines I've read, given those subscriber characteristics why aren't your ad rates high enough to make the magazine cheap?
do you use the digital edition?
No
do you subscribe?
Yes sir and I have every single issue published, on my bookshelf, and its one of the few magazines I keep "permanently".
it's possible to get MAKE for less than the cost of just about any magazine/book comparable,
I'm just saying, the price is high. I'm picturing some dude picking up a copy at B&N flipping thru it, thinking its cool, and falling over when he sees the cover price. Then again, 2600 isn't cheap and it's thinner. The value per dollar is pretty good, but it's only available in big chunks of dollars.
How about thinner issues, more often? Might make it more "interactive". Or give up the "issue" idea and just call it a serial book or a series of books or something like that.
I overall like it anyway, and you got my money so I guess that's good enough for my case...
You would find that by making it non-removable, Apple managed to make it 40% bigger in size.
Never having owned or disassembled a MAC laptop, are MAC laptop batteries enclosed in giant shock mounted bullet-proof safes or something? I assure you the run of the mill PC laptop does not have that kind of packaging loss, at least in the numerous ones I've disassembled.
The "real DIY" that you're referring to is pretty much based on using wikipedia, google, and downloading manufacturers data sheets. None of that works well in a magazine format.
On the other hand, a magazine of weird ideas and unusual experiments does provide some fun and inspiration and something to begin moving along the wiki/google/datasheets path. Its difficult to read an issue and not find something new and interesting to think about.
The intro stuff in Make and "real DIY" complement each other not oppose each other.
Finally, your phrase "hardware mashup" is a fairly accurate way of looking at engineering design work. Add a little math, some goals a little more complicated than "have some fun", add some economic constraints, and use a heck of a lot more individual components, and its getting pretty close to "real" engineering design work. A magazine about "fun engineering", is not so bad.
I wish they could do something about the high price.
Tell me the meaningful service the stock market provides and I'll listen, but I'm hard pressed to find the value in their service.
For the corporations, the ability to raise money for higher risk capital purchases than banks (were) willing to tolerate. For the short term investors, seemingly infinite liquidity compared to almost any other form of investment. For the long term investors, while the baby boomers are pouring money in, its a great ponzi scheme, at least until the baby boomers start pouring money out on a net basis.
Play a couple games of "railroad tycoon deluxe" or "RRT2" or whatever, and get back to us. There's a game genre that needs new releases.
The way to do that is to do almost exactly the same thing as everybody else, no matter how mind blowing stupid it is. Plenty of people realized that banks etc were not nearly as sound as commonly believed years ago. Those that tried to act on this were fired long ago since they weren't making as high a ROI as those willing to invest in dodgy hedgefunds etc.
The key is not so much making a high ROI, as it was the separation of risk from transaction fees. My local bank would loan to anyone, as they immediately sold the loan and pocketed a transaction fee. They couldn't care less if any payments were made. Very few people realize how "investment"-type companies like banks turned into little more than a commissioned salesforce. And commissioned salespeople only make money on transaction volume, not long term return on investment.
SELECT *
FROM advertising_revenue_table, list_of_local_business_table
WHERE advertising_revenue_table.business_name = list_of_local_business_table.business_name
AND advertising_revenue_table.cost_of_ad_space_purchased = 100
AND list_of_local_business_table.owners NOT IN (select names from list_of_publishers_buddies)
ORDER BY cost_of_ad_space_purchased ASC
Forget to follow these instructions, and you can very easily kill a lineman or blow up your generator.
1) Far more likely you'll vaporize your generator. Hook up a 3 KW generator to an entire neighborhood drawing maybe 300 kW and your generator goes poof. The only way you'll kill a lineman if the broken line feeds only your house and the break is an open circuit as opposed to short. Worst case is in between, turning a torn line tangled in a tree into a multi-KW space heater... Kind of like one of those electric charcoal starters but on a much larger scale.
2) The "real" reason it's illegal is, as you'll quickly discover, a male to male cable will probably fall out of the dryer plug at some point and then you've got a couple KW at 220 volts on large bare copper connectors less than an inch apart in a pitch dark room on the floor, or perhaps it'll hit something somewhat conductive on its way to the ground and start a huge fire, or perhaps the kids will play with it and get vaporized. The most likely failure mode of this experiment is electrocution of yourself and/or your family rather than a lineman. After all, the linemen are already working with live power on the "other" side of the broken line... they know what to do, and you don't.
3) You'll also quickly discover that you can't start up your furnace, water heater, sump pump, TV, and microwave all at the same instant although they may all run steady state. Expect alot of fun when the fridge and sump pump simultaneously start up, especially at 2am. You'll get lots of practice reseting breakers and restarting the generator.
4) Built in "permanent" generators are generally built to run and refuel 24x7. "Portables" generally are built to run a tankful and get put away till tomorrow. Portables will have some inherent design engineering "issues" such as gas caps next to red hot mufflers. So be really careful whem refilling. Hurry up and you'll turn into a torch. Also your 4 cycle will inevitably run out of oil at some point, hope you're checking the oil and/or the low oil shutoff works before the engine is trashed.
5) Since this is probably one of the most dangerous things you can possibly do, try not to do anything without thinking about each step very pessimistically. Also no booze, no waking up at 2am to refuel while half asleep. The greatest danger is doing something stupid, and being lucky, so you do it again until you croak.
Other than that, no problem.
good idea. 1 cent for them, 40 cents for the transaction fee. You really need to jump to $5+ to make it worthwhile.
Ironically, you posted this on a site that "solved" the micropayment transaction cost problem by allowing large donations and then deducting pennies from the balance for each pageview. I was a slashdot subscriber in the early 2000s, and that's how it worked at that time. I also got interesting bonuses like seeing stories "earlier". Maybe I could pay to get access to a wikipedia thats not been savaged by those deletionist idiots?
The bigger problem for wikipedia is allowing the legal system to weasel in via the money channel. So, I paid $10 to join, how come I can't post blatant propaganda wherever I please, or if the current admins randomly delete stuff people think is important why can't I, whom paid $10, get to delete the holocaust entry when and if I want? And you better let me or return my money and/or get sued for breach of contract. It would be a huge legal minefield.
GPS unit 1341235423523 bought 50 gallons of gas but only drove 50 miles per the GPS. Odd that Prius is only getting 1 MPG.
Aside from extreme examples, I look forward to watching tax agents bust down doors of people whom have poorly maintained cars because they "must" be tax cheats. My old 1980's plymouth horizon got 30 MPG on a good day, but when the choke stuck during winter I was lucky to get double digit MPGs on short trips.
I suspect the next step is location based taxes. For example parking a car within 500 feet of a church is free, yet anyone whom parks within 500 feet of an adult video stores will have their visit documented on a public web site and charged a $50 parking fee. Or anyone whom doesn't attend / park nearby a church every week will pay a higher tax "Y".
Then of course there are the known tobacco smokers whom drive within X feet of a public school where it's illegal to have or use tobacco products within X feet. Or gunowners. Etc.
it is pretty ridiculous to keep budgets stagnant or to lower them and then expect the same output or better.
Better not say that too loud or the private sector managers might get some ideas...
Wikipedia is correct; DC current cannot pass through a capacitor, so it is indeed impedance rather than resistance.
You, ah, reading the same wikipedia page I am? We agree about impedance and AC current etc, but the wikipedia page is a totally different topic.
Output impedance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Internal resistance)
and then a whole bunch of talk about internal resistances of batteries and such.
What I was getting at is that in a sense an output impedance is a complex measurement with a real an imaginary component, and an internal resistance of a battery (or a big super cap in a DC application) is basically an output impedance with a zero "j" or reactive component. But any one in the industry would laugh if you called it an output impedance instead of an internal resistance.
The whole internal resistance thing is relevant to this super duper capacitor in that if it's low enough, a short circuit makes a big bang. If it's too high then it dissipates alot of energy as heat when you try to draw too much power out of it. If the internal resistance is way too high, you don't get to pull energy out of it fast enough to heat up or blow up anything including itself. The original post was just the usual fear of technology, what I don't understand must be evil, etc, and I'm thinking that a super duper capacitor like this would be inherently safe if it's internal resistance is high enough. I saw talk of micron scale conductors, so I don't envision directly driving a photoflash with this thing...
Now its good that this thing allegedly won't explode while being charged
Welcome to the wonderful world of internal resistance.
Wikipedia files it under output impedance, although no one outside of maybe textbooks refers to it that way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_resistance
In summary, no perfect current or voltage sources exist. All power supplies can be modeled as a "perfect" supply with a series resistance.
In practice the difference can be huge. Short out an old fashioned 10 aH zinc copper gravity cell and nothing particularly interesting occurs due to its high internal resistance. Short out a 10 aH nicad, and good luck dodging the shrapnel.
Another amusing comparison, when NiMH batteries were very new, like in the late 80s, RC car racers like myself were impressed that they held around twice the charge of the old NiCd technology. However, the internal resistance was so high, that they didn't go so fast. I guess in the intervening decades NiMH now has a low enough resistance to use in RC cars, but that sure wasn't always the case.
Internal resistance has always been the problem for supercapacitors. I remember being quite disappointed when, as a kid a few decades ago, I bought one of those newfangled carbon based super caps, like 0.1 farad at 5.5 volts, and expected if a couple thousand uF made a shower of sparks when shorted out, 0.1 farad should make like an atomic explosion when shorted, however the internal resistance of the cap was like multiple ohms so it didn't even spark. I vaguely remember that once charged it ran a LED a long time though.
The problems super caps always had (until now?) is you need a ultra high conductivity for the plates to get a low internal resistance and a ultra low conductivity for the dielectric (not dialectic, that's another story) to get low leakage currents, and both have to be compatible with each other (from an electrical standpoint, sodium metal foil and ultra purified water sounds like a good capacitor design, but from a chemical standpoint, maybe not so good. Chlorine is probably an even better insulator than water in this application). Finally it would be nice if it were made without toxic waste like PCBs or beryllium oxide insulators (both of which have been used in electronics applications in the past). And then there's minor little things like mechanical stability, manufacturing problems, and material sources like tantalum. Their claim to have worked around all those problems is what makes this patent very impressive, if true.
From the numbers in the summary, a fully-charged one of these would supply enough energy to propel a 3300lbs (1500kg) car from 0 to 1100mph (500m/s)
Ahhh you must be from the Theoretical Physics Department, over here in Engineering we have wind resistance, friction and efficiency to worry about.
Not much wind resistance in space. This might be useful for satellite power. Certainly the lifespan of small earth orbiting satellites seems limited by nicad battery life. Capacitors would have no age limit, other than maybe leaking electrolyte all over. (Geosynch satellites eventually run out of station keeping fuel, this wouldn't help them much)
I could list quite a few amsats with burned out batteries, heres the most famous, that came back to life a couple decades after the shorted nicads failed open.
http://www.amsat.org/amsat/sats/n7hpr/ao7.html
Here's an interesting site and quote about satellite batteries.
http://www.qarc.on.ca/minoct02.htm
There are 5 battery systems that are fed through a Battery Current Regulator (BCR) at 28v. To-date they have used NICADs. AMSAT is looking at other newer types, like Metal Hydride and Lithium Ion to get more capacity at lower rate, plus the number of times a battery can be charged. They still favor the NICADs because they can be charged more often then the newer ones before they have to be replaced. Robin used slides to show the details of the satellite inside and out.
Yahoo announced plans to retain user data for no longer than 90 days and to anonymize data.
They've been doing that to groups.yahoo.com for years... just kidding (sort of)
"So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them. Can you explain to us what value you bring to SUN, and why we shouldn't just hire or reward the 3rd party contributors directly?"
Which of the six developers who's work I committed do you propose to hire? If they're busy vetting other people's code, when will they have time to keep writing this great stuff?
This is known as the "developer as interior decorator" model, where the developer is hired on their ability to mix and match code that is in good taste that blends attractively with the existing architecture.