My meter is locked inside my house, and unless I unlock the door and let them in, they aren't allowed to force their way in.
That violates almost every building code I've heard of for decades. You're probably grandfathered in, but don't expect to see this in new construction, and if you ever remodel that general part of the house, expect a hassle from them demanding the meter be moved outdoors. The theory is if the building is burning the FD wants to come in and rescue your kids but they can't shut the power off before spraying water if the meter is inside the building. Ditto the gas meter which is also almost always located outdoors for the same reason.
I don't even think they are legally allowed to enter in an emergency
This happens and is never prosecuted if procedure is followed. Usually falls under some kind of "good Samaritan" law WRT someone is trying to commit suicide via gas leak, or someone is about to suffocate due to gas leak, or the neighbors are about to die in a fireball. Procedure involves reporting their trespassing to the police and owner after the fact, etc etc. There's about 80 bazillion examples similar to this, like doing CPR, breaking someones car window to snatch a kid out of a burning car, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater when the theater actually is on fire, etc.
If its anything like our local water utility, when our 15 year old smart meter broke about 5 years ago and simply stopped responding, they send out a private contractor plumber (Its a local govt monopoly psuedo-private water util, so its essentially the mayors bro-in-law, campaign donor, frat bro, etc). The contractor is paid $X to replace that meter. All the contractor cares about is having a working meter when he leaves and physical safety and collecting his flat rate fee of $X. As long as you don't chase him off with the same shotgun that destroyed the meter, he couldn't care less how the meter got broken. In fact he gets paid per meter, so if he knows your activities will result in more $$$ for him, he probably would buy you a beer if you did it intentionally. I was sweating bullets since I had been troubleshooting a new 150 watt microwave power amplifier about 5 feet from my meter "around the time" it broke. Then again I've done even higher power things before and after with no apparent damage. Those meters are apparently pretty tough. My guess is lightning got the water meter, this smart meter was old enough that it worked on top of the phone lines somehow, and obviously the cold water pipe is a pretty good ground, so...
Now some back office bean counter might... MIGHT... notice your meter has been replaced 6 times in the last year and then start asking questions, but since the contractor just throws old meters in the recycle bin they don't really have a case, as long as you admit nothing.
I must say that smart meters I've experienced are more like the Bell 500 series phone than the $9 walmart phone, in terms of build quality and toughness. I suppose if a tradition of billing the customer instead of the co-op existed, they'd sell pieces of junk that fall apart while charging an arm and a leg for them. I think it would take a lot of guts to provide enough force to destroy the smart meters I've got on my house for power and water. I don't think my smart power meter would be bothered by a mere wooden baseball bat, for example.
Its simpler than that. Ask a fireman or an electrician. You clip the sealing tag using wirecutters, that loosens the clamp ring that falls to the ground, you kinda pull and twist on the meter and it sorta snaps out. Its pretty much the first thing you do when you walk into a burning building with a water hose. Depends how far away you live from a volunteer fire dept I guess. My father in law was a volunteer fireman and I've done a substantial amount of home electrical work.
The difference between a "electronic remote switch" and a meter is you have to trespass on the property usually very visible from the street, then F around for five minutes the first time you do it (probably under 10 seconds once you know how to remove the band) and you've covered the area with fingerprints. Tons of evidence, at least some risk of capture. With a remote radio operated switch, although they do not exist for obvious current interruption rating reasons, if they did, you could just drive down the road with zero risk.
Ha ha ha. They're trying to set up a massive confuseopoly to collect more money while providing less service. Those meters are expensive and they're not providing them out of the goodness of their heart.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning...
I read it as the only thing better than being surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls is being a multimillionaire tech startup CEO surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls.
the trees that pulled up underground cables when they fell
That is the one line summary of why you do not want buried lines in a wide scale disaster scenario.
Aerial repair would have been one dude, one truck, and 15 minutes (well, maybe 30 depending on length of run, etc). Its a heck of a lot easier to do aerial work with two bucket trucks instead of one guy with a ladder, but it can be done. Two guys with buckets can do more in 5 minutes than one guy with a ladder can do in 30 minutes, and the bucket guys are going to be limited more by mental than physical exhaustion.
Buried repair is going to be an entire team involving excavator machines, maybe a bulldozer, maybe a directional boring machine depending on landscape, several days minimum for a large team of workers. Also you pretty much need a team to lay heavy buried cable but one (admittedly strong) dude can do aerial by himself.
Windows are expensive per square inch, and have horrific insulating value when they're closed compared to a wall, so "post air conditioning era" houses tend to have ridiculously poor ventilation. No cross ventilation, small windows, awkward aerodynamics... I hate having to run the air conditioner when its 65 degrees outside, but if I don't it'll be 85 degrees in the house. Most office buildings such as the one I work in have no windows that can open. None. All we have is two entrance doors and a large number of fire doors, and a couple trap doors onto the roof. I grew up in a 1930s house (already old when I got there...) and it had excellent ventilation because that's all they had before air conditioning. Ventilation design features have not been constructed into homes since maybe the 50s.
More like 10 times. I know what I speak of... working in the general greater telecom field for approaching two decades, both sides of the biz, multiple companies.
Aerial fiber vs buried fiber is, on the very long run, across 3 different companies, is around 10:1 ratio of time for MTTR.
Something no one on/. wants to talk about in the bash-fest is that if a tree is ripped out of the ground, it'll destroy buried lines just as well as it'll destroy aerial lines. It'll just take 10 times longer to fix the ripped up buried lines. As a betting man I'd place money that on average people with buried lines are/will suffer worse service on average than aerial.
Buried is expensive; Simplistic way to "fix" things is to throw money. Burial seems the obvious way to waste the money. Probably not gonna help.
What no one wants to admit is basically its was a class-1 hurricane-over-land and Florida knows exactly how to clean up after those every year and has decades of experience doing it, but Ohio has no freaking idea.
Just think about anecdote time. When I was a kid a tipped over tree knocked the line off our house after a major storm. One lineman with a ladder and replacement fuses and a spool of cable and some splices fixed it in, no kidding, less than 15 minutes. If that was underground and the overturned tree ripped that up, well, that would have taken three guys with shovels and a ditchwitch and maybe a front end loader... maybe a couple days labor for a couple linemen?
Yeah but that doesn't really mean anything. You misspelled "ablative"... what that means is its essentially burned off as it does its thing.
So... Compared to Chinese made oak (not kidding, supposedly they've used wood) PICA-X will be thinner and lighter. But again, a NEO shield is going to be a lot thinner and lighter than a deep space shield. Both will be lighter than if they used wood...
Standard/. car analogy is an aluminum block is lighter than a steel block. That does not mean that a aluminum 5 liter V8 block has to be lighter than a 5 HP steel lawnmower engine block simply because its made of aluminum.
"It's actually the most powerful stuff known to man. Dragon is capable of re-entering from a lunar velocity, or even a Mars velocity with the heat shield that it has."
I'm surprised they overspec'd a NEO capsule like that. Unless the plan all along is its a deep space capsule. He may mean capable as in theoretically it wouldn't flame out at a 1:1 safety ratio from Mars, so feel quite confident that at NEO with a 10:1 safety ratio you've got nothing to worry about. A standard/. car analogy is that theoretically each wheel ramp for my car could individually hold about 2.5 of my cars on each ramp... I wouldn't do that, but knowing how over-spec'd the ramps are I don't worry about them collapsing while working under the car. (they're truck ramps, and I use them to lift a little compact car)
the thinking goes exactly opposite: for every kWh of energy dissipated by the appliances in your house, you're consuming (roughly) another kWh to pump that thermal energy out of your house.
Yeah they might think that; they'd be wrong. Ask a guy who knows thermodynamics, maybe from chem eng classes or physics, about the COP coefficient of performance of a refrigeration unit, or the trendy consumer level term SEER which boils down to a simplified real world average long term measured COP, whereas COP is usually expressed theoretically solely given mechanical perfection and specified temps/pressures/refrigerants. Its been illegal in the US to install anything with a SEER under 13 for half a decade or so, as in you'd have to smuggle it into the country and it couldn't be UL listed and would never pass a building inspection. That doesn't mean that until 6 years ago everyone installed SEER 1 units as you claim, either. Even my relatively ancient system at home, at least 10 years old now, was something like a 12. Illegal to install now, but not bad, not bad at all.
To some extent you can visualize it qualitatively, like each sq meter of my house exterior has a kilowatt space heater applied to it when the suns up, my 30 amp oven can be cooking dinner, blah blah but somehow a mere 20 amp compressor keeps the inside cool as a cucumber... so 1:1 clearly doesn't apply.
I'm pretty sure going to an asteroid or Mars is going to take something a little more substantial.
Its OK to be kind of minimal, because by the time the.gov guys get a ship out there, the.com guys will already have a hotel, resort, convention center, pr0n studio, condos complete with HGTV "flip that martian condo" TV show, etc.
Kind of like worrying about carrying everything you need to go camping in the wilderness on the back of a little honda scooter, well don't worry about where to keep the tent and the MREs if by the time you get to your destination, your destination looks like Vegas.
Spacex could make a deep space capsule, but they probably are not at this time.
As for taking a NEO capsule and flinging it unmodified into deep space, there's some pretty significant thermal issues that get bolted into the design pretty early, for example a NEO capsule assumes it can radiate (or adsorb) heat facing the earth in almost one complete hemisphere. This doesn't mean its impossible for a "decent NEO capsule" to also be a "decent deep space capsule". There are other inherent issues in some bolted on equipment like commo and navigation. In general life is harder and heavier when you don't have the earth filling one hemisphere. You can always make a NEO-only capsule slightly lighter than a deep space capsule.
There are also certain mission trajectory issues. One whacked out Apollo emergency return trajectory had the capsule entering pretty steep at damn near escape velocity which is an immensely higher thermal load than merely controlled descent from low earth orbit. You could baby the trajectory of a deep space capsule and just declare some "survivable with a massive shield" abort orbits to be unsurvivable. But generally a deep space heat shield is going to be much heavier and higher speed rated than a NEO heat shield.
Another interesting topic is electrical, longer missions trend toward solar until you need potable water at which time the fuel cell "waste" of distilled H2O comes in handy. Obviously (?) deep space capsule means longer mission means more O2 storage so you need to build into the design of the NEO capsule space to store more O2 that a NEO could ever require which takes excess weight.
I'm curious. The worst thing they do is phone me up and ask when I would like to book my car in for servicing.
My guess was a couple years ago there was that big scandal where everyone who got themselves into a car crash claimed the car accelerated all on its own, because on TV the night before they saw someone get away with the same story. Once the TV newsies tired of the stories, the "incidents" stopped happening.
Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.
Well, you asked for it. I've been a happy customer of these guys no financial gain. This is buying a complete system with case and everything although you get to purchase drives and possibly RAM separately.
This box is commercial / semi-industrial grade and is basically a router platform ready to go.
You have to carefully avoid google to avoid finding "single digit wattage" PC-like hardware.
Only on/. would a guy paying $75/month for cablemodem to connect to a $2000 gaming PC that gets a new $500 graphics card every couple months worry about 5 watts of electricity, considering that in a civilized area 1 watt costs about $1 per year.
What kind of box would run 100 watts as a router, no routers use zero watts, so you need a delta between the router and the PC, and 6 months out of the year I'm paying to heat anyway, so 100 watts of electricity merely means the equivalent of 100 watts less of natgas. If you go laptop I can't even find a laptop power supply that can draw 100 watts.
Also that ridiculous 100 watts would cost me about $5/month. Well worth the staggering expense to avoid Cisco.
That's why I build my own from a very basic Debian install. Since most of the routers out there are just embedded Linux boxes using iptables...
... which are never updated or only updated with security patches when shamed into doing it...
My debian based firewall is about 15 seconds of "apt-get update apt-get upgrade" away from the most recent security patches.
why would I pay for what I can build for free
A 486/50 clocked down to 25 so as to be fanless could run "a couple megs" with no serious bus or CPU issues about a decade ago. Pretty much anything made in the last decade has WAY more than enough "compute power" to be a firewall.
$100 of electricity instead of router hardware provides 25 watts extra power continuously for 5.7 years.
Also I can run some pretty advanced stuff on my firewall that you can't get with commodity NAT boxes.
people didn't usually have access to free compilers, and for many types of hardware (e.g., 8-bit desktops like the TRS-80), there simply weren't any good development tools. Another big win for C was that because it was so widely available, it became easy to find programmers who could code in it; it fed on its own success in a positive feedback loop.
History repeats itself in microcontroller land. Microcontroller land is full of "free for students" "free for noncommercial use" stuff. Find me a working Scala implementation for a 384 byte (not megabyte, not kilobyte) 10F220 PIC. And now compile that code for a demo on some TI thing, maybe port it to picoblaze for a FPGA demo...
Re:Think of it as standardized assembly programmin
on
What's To Love About C?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
you can pretty much predict what assembly instructions it's going to generate
Which is really important, because sometimes you end up debugging at that level or working hand in hand with inline assembly code.
If there is no OS, or you're writing the OS, C is the way to go.
Yeah, that was kind of my point that bandwidth is much more expensive than video cards. Lets say they're streaming out high def video, so you need a decent reasonably recent nvidia card just to run vdpau or whatever the windows equivalent is. So the net change in hardware cost is zero yet the net change in bandwidth cost is immense.
ON the other hand, as I guy who likes strategy gaming and (real) RPGs and hex based military combat something like a "VNC" server access to a hosted game is kinda interesting. Theoretically I could pop into a Civ6 game from desktop, tablet, or phone. The killer problem is how to handle all the different screen resolutions. Also I imagine the temptation to "share" an account must be immense.
ain't gonna ask about the one that's the big black hole
Thats the goatse particle. Agreed, best left unobserved. Its metastable and decays emitting Santorum particles, which are toxic little things also best left unobserved.
The quality of the experience comes down to two specific factors: image integrity and control response. The former is going to require significant increases in bandwidth, because the current 5mbps level needs to rise to 10-15mbps to really solve the artifacting issues that are present in the first-gen cloud systems as they stand right now
Wouldn't it be infinitely cheaper and just as effective at keeping the upgrade treadmill running and the pirated copys stopped to merely upload maps and textures, rather than trying to run a whole video connection across the net? Essentially MMORPG already have no RPG unless you count middle school playground as RPG, now just remove the MM, leaving a "O" game?
US companies are forbidden by law to pay bribes so they have to go about it a round about way.
Oh spare me. Its called hiring an onsite expediter, not all this legal foolishness. Sometimes you have to hire a whole team of expediters. All above board, income taxes paid and everything. Amazing how nothing happens over there until you "hire" an "expediter" and then magically everything works. Sometimes they're called "inspectors". There's a whole culture organized around it.
To the best of my knowledge they only sell the replicator model now.... the "good" news is they sell it fully assembled and tested just remove from box and plug in, the "bad" news is instead of a mere $1200 or whatever its more like $2K with dual extruders.
Rapman product is the specified "about $1200", maybe thats what the original poster purchased.
The printrbot is much cheaper around $500 but seemingly perpetually out of stock.
build without already owning an entire machine shop.
I own a full machine shop, and unfortunately there are no 3-d printer blueprints. plenty of STL files and assembly diagrams to be printed but a dude with a milling machine and a lathe has to figure out how to make the parts on his own and some of them are rather mysterious from a traditional machining standpoint. I should probably sharpen up my cad skills and create and release a set of traditional machinist prints for a near-reprap printer, like a huxley or a mendel. It would seem a heck of a lot simpler to retrofit my CNC mill to extrude, or simply find a buddy to print me a set of parts.
I think he's asking for something more like a Garmin 72H which has a screen with navigation and a NMEA output. There's probably a cheaper one out there... You're looking at $100 or so, guess it depends on how you define "reasonable price".
This is very much like the cell phone/ipod touch situation where its dramatically cheaper to buy each separate, but if you insist on both in one case you'll have to pay a lot of extra money.
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My meter is locked inside my house, and unless I unlock the door and let them in, they aren't allowed to force their way in.
That violates almost every building code I've heard of for decades. You're probably grandfathered in, but don't expect to see this in new construction, and if you ever remodel that general part of the house, expect a hassle from them demanding the meter be moved outdoors. The theory is if the building is burning the FD wants to come in and rescue your kids but they can't shut the power off before spraying water if the meter is inside the building. Ditto the gas meter which is also almost always located outdoors for the same reason.
I don't even think they are legally allowed to enter in an emergency
This happens and is never prosecuted if procedure is followed. Usually falls under some kind of "good Samaritan" law WRT someone is trying to commit suicide via gas leak, or someone is about to suffocate due to gas leak, or the neighbors are about to die in a fireball. Procedure involves reporting their trespassing to the police and owner after the fact, etc etc. There's about 80 bazillion examples similar to this, like doing CPR, breaking someones car window to snatch a kid out of a burning car, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater when the theater actually is on fire, etc.
If its anything like our local water utility, when our 15 year old smart meter broke about 5 years ago and simply stopped responding, they send out a private contractor plumber (Its a local govt monopoly psuedo-private water util, so its essentially the mayors bro-in-law, campaign donor, frat bro, etc). The contractor is paid $X to replace that meter. All the contractor cares about is having a working meter when he leaves and physical safety and collecting his flat rate fee of $X. As long as you don't chase him off with the same shotgun that destroyed the meter, he couldn't care less how the meter got broken. In fact he gets paid per meter, so if he knows your activities will result in more $$$ for him, he probably would buy you a beer if you did it intentionally. I was sweating bullets since I had been troubleshooting a new 150 watt microwave power amplifier about 5 feet from my meter "around the time" it broke. Then again I've done even higher power things before and after with no apparent damage. Those meters are apparently pretty tough. My guess is lightning got the water meter, this smart meter was old enough that it worked on top of the phone lines somehow, and obviously the cold water pipe is a pretty good ground, so...
Now some back office bean counter might ... MIGHT ... notice your meter has been replaced 6 times in the last year and then start asking questions, but since the contractor just throws old meters in the recycle bin they don't really have a case, as long as you admit nothing.
I must say that smart meters I've experienced are more like the Bell 500 series phone than the $9 walmart phone, in terms of build quality and toughness. I suppose if a tradition of billing the customer instead of the co-op existed, they'd sell pieces of junk that fall apart while charging an arm and a leg for them. I think it would take a lot of guts to provide enough force to destroy the smart meters I've got on my house for power and water. I don't think my smart power meter would be bothered by a mere wooden baseball bat, for example.
Its simpler than that. Ask a fireman or an electrician. You clip the sealing tag using wirecutters, that loosens the clamp ring that falls to the ground, you kinda pull and twist on the meter and it sorta snaps out. Its pretty much the first thing you do when you walk into a burning building with a water hose. Depends how far away you live from a volunteer fire dept I guess. My father in law was a volunteer fireman and I've done a substantial amount of home electrical work.
The difference between a "electronic remote switch" and a meter is you have to trespass on the property usually very visible from the street, then F around for five minutes the first time you do it (probably under 10 seconds once you know how to remove the band) and you've covered the area with fingerprints. Tons of evidence, at least some risk of capture. With a remote radio operated switch, although they do not exist for obvious current interruption rating reasons, if they did, you could just drive down the road with zero risk.
trying to provide you with better service
Ha ha ha. They're trying to set up a massive confuseopoly to collect more money while providing less service. Those meters are expensive and they're not providing them out of the goodness of their heart.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning...
I read it as the only thing better than being surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls is being a multimillionaire tech startup CEO surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls.
the trees that pulled up underground cables when they fell
That is the one line summary of why you do not want buried lines in a wide scale disaster scenario.
Aerial repair would have been one dude, one truck, and 15 minutes (well, maybe 30 depending on length of run, etc). Its a heck of a lot easier to do aerial work with two bucket trucks instead of one guy with a ladder, but it can be done. Two guys with buckets can do more in 5 minutes than one guy with a ladder can do in 30 minutes, and the bucket guys are going to be limited more by mental than physical exhaustion.
Buried repair is going to be an entire team involving excavator machines, maybe a bulldozer, maybe a directional boring machine depending on landscape, several days minimum for a large team of workers. Also you pretty much need a team to lay heavy buried cable but one (admittedly strong) dude can do aerial by himself.
Air conditioning? Open a window.
Windows are expensive per square inch, and have horrific insulating value when they're closed compared to a wall, so "post air conditioning era" houses tend to have ridiculously poor ventilation. No cross ventilation, small windows, awkward aerodynamics... I hate having to run the air conditioner when its 65 degrees outside, but if I don't it'll be 85 degrees in the house. Most office buildings such as the one I work in have no windows that can open. None. All we have is two entrance doors and a large number of fire doors, and a couple trap doors onto the roof. I grew up in a 1930s house (already old when I got there...) and it had excellent ventilation because that's all they had before air conditioning. Ventilation design features have not been constructed into homes since maybe the 50s.
quadruples
More like 10 times. I know what I speak of... working in the general greater telecom field for approaching two decades, both sides of the biz, multiple companies.
Aerial fiber vs buried fiber is, on the very long run, across 3 different companies, is around 10:1 ratio of time for MTTR.
Something no one on /. wants to talk about in the bash-fest is that if a tree is ripped out of the ground, it'll destroy buried lines just as well as it'll destroy aerial lines. It'll just take 10 times longer to fix the ripped up buried lines. As a betting man I'd place money that on average people with buried lines are/will suffer worse service on average than aerial.
Buried is expensive; Simplistic way to "fix" things is to throw money. Burial seems the obvious way to waste the money. Probably not gonna help.
What no one wants to admit is basically its was a class-1 hurricane-over-land and Florida knows exactly how to clean up after those every year and has decades of experience doing it, but Ohio has no freaking idea.
Just think about anecdote time. When I was a kid a tipped over tree knocked the line off our house after a major storm. One lineman with a ladder and replacement fuses and a spool of cable and some splices fixed it in, no kidding, less than 15 minutes. If that was underground and the overturned tree ripped that up, well, that would have taken three guys with shovels and a ditchwitch and maybe a front end loader ... maybe a couple days labor for a couple linemen?
Yeah but that doesn't really mean anything. You misspelled "ablative"... what that means is its essentially burned off as it does its thing.
So... Compared to Chinese made oak (not kidding, supposedly they've used wood) PICA-X will be thinner and lighter. But again, a NEO shield is going to be a lot thinner and lighter than a deep space shield. Both will be lighter than if they used wood...
Standard /. car analogy is an aluminum block is lighter than a steel block. That does not mean that a aluminum 5 liter V8 block has to be lighter than a 5 HP steel lawnmower engine block simply because its made of aluminum.
"It's actually the most powerful stuff known to man. Dragon is capable of re-entering from a lunar velocity, or even a Mars velocity with the heat shield that it has."
I'm surprised they overspec'd a NEO capsule like that. Unless the plan all along is its a deep space capsule. He may mean capable as in theoretically it wouldn't flame out at a 1:1 safety ratio from Mars, so feel quite confident that at NEO with a 10:1 safety ratio you've got nothing to worry about. A standard /. car analogy is that theoretically each wheel ramp for my car could individually hold about 2.5 of my cars on each ramp... I wouldn't do that, but knowing how over-spec'd the ramps are I don't worry about them collapsing while working under the car. (they're truck ramps, and I use them to lift a little compact car)
the thinking goes exactly opposite: for every kWh of energy dissipated by the appliances in your house, you're consuming (roughly) another kWh to pump that thermal energy out of your house.
Yeah they might think that; they'd be wrong. Ask a guy who knows thermodynamics, maybe from chem eng classes or physics, about the COP coefficient of performance of a refrigeration unit, or the trendy consumer level term SEER which boils down to a simplified real world average long term measured COP, whereas COP is usually expressed theoretically solely given mechanical perfection and specified temps/pressures/refrigerants. Its been illegal in the US to install anything with a SEER under 13 for half a decade or so, as in you'd have to smuggle it into the country and it couldn't be UL listed and would never pass a building inspection. That doesn't mean that until 6 years ago everyone installed SEER 1 units as you claim, either. Even my relatively ancient system at home, at least 10 years old now, was something like a 12. Illegal to install now, but not bad, not bad at all.
To some extent you can visualize it qualitatively, like each sq meter of my house exterior has a kilowatt space heater applied to it when the suns up, my 30 amp oven can be cooking dinner, blah blah but somehow a mere 20 amp compressor keeps the inside cool as a cucumber... so 1:1 clearly doesn't apply.
I'm pretty sure going to an asteroid or Mars is going to take something a little more substantial.
Its OK to be kind of minimal, because by the time the .gov guys get a ship out there, the .com guys will already have a hotel, resort, convention center, pr0n studio, condos complete with HGTV "flip that martian condo" TV show, etc.
Kind of like worrying about carrying everything you need to go camping in the wilderness on the back of a little honda scooter, well don't worry about where to keep the tent and the MREs if by the time you get to your destination, your destination looks like Vegas.
Ummm spacex is a company and orion is a capsule.
Spacex could make a deep space capsule, but they probably are not at this time.
As for taking a NEO capsule and flinging it unmodified into deep space, there's some pretty significant thermal issues that get bolted into the design pretty early, for example a NEO capsule assumes it can radiate (or adsorb) heat facing the earth in almost one complete hemisphere. This doesn't mean its impossible for a "decent NEO capsule" to also be a "decent deep space capsule". There are other inherent issues in some bolted on equipment like commo and navigation. In general life is harder and heavier when you don't have the earth filling one hemisphere. You can always make a NEO-only capsule slightly lighter than a deep space capsule.
There are also certain mission trajectory issues. One whacked out Apollo emergency return trajectory had the capsule entering pretty steep at damn near escape velocity which is an immensely higher thermal load than merely controlled descent from low earth orbit. You could baby the trajectory of a deep space capsule and just declare some "survivable with a massive shield" abort orbits to be unsurvivable. But generally a deep space heat shield is going to be much heavier and higher speed rated than a NEO heat shield.
Another interesting topic is electrical, longer missions trend toward solar until you need potable water at which time the fuel cell "waste" of distilled H2O comes in handy. Obviously (?) deep space capsule means longer mission means more O2 storage so you need to build into the design of the NEO capsule space to store more O2 that a NEO could ever require which takes excess weight.
I'm curious. The worst thing they do is phone me up and ask when I would like to book my car in for servicing.
My guess was a couple years ago there was that big scandal where everyone who got themselves into a car crash claimed the car accelerated all on its own, because on TV the night before they saw someone get away with the same story. Once the TV newsies tired of the stories, the "incidents" stopped happening.
Yikes those watts are all going into heat, so programming with that on your lap must be very much like pushing a space heater onto your thighs. Ouch.
Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.
Well, you asked for it. I've been a happy customer of these guys no financial gain. This is buying a complete system with case and everything although you get to purchase drives and possibly RAM separately.
http://www.zotacusa.com/
The zbox makes a great, ridiculously overpowered mythtv frontend.
http://soekris.com/
This box is commercial / semi-industrial grade and is basically a router platform ready to go.
You have to carefully avoid google to avoid finding "single digit wattage" PC-like hardware.
Only on /. would a guy paying $75/month for cablemodem to connect to a $2000 gaming PC that gets a new $500 graphics card every couple months worry about 5 watts of electricity, considering that in a civilized area 1 watt costs about $1 per year.
What kind of box would run 100 watts as a router, no routers use zero watts, so you need a delta between the router and the PC, and 6 months out of the year I'm paying to heat anyway, so 100 watts of electricity merely means the equivalent of 100 watts less of natgas. If you go laptop I can't even find a laptop power supply that can draw 100 watts.
Also that ridiculous 100 watts would cost me about $5/month. Well worth the staggering expense to avoid Cisco.
That's why I build my own from a very basic Debian install. Since most of the routers out there are just embedded Linux boxes using iptables ...
... which are never updated or only updated with security patches when shamed into doing it...
My debian based firewall is about 15 seconds of "apt-get update apt-get upgrade" away from the most recent security patches.
why would I pay for what I can build for free
A 486/50 clocked down to 25 so as to be fanless could run "a couple megs" with no serious bus or CPU issues about a decade ago. Pretty much anything made in the last decade has WAY more than enough "compute power" to be a firewall.
$100 of electricity instead of router hardware provides 25 watts extra power continuously for 5.7 years.
Also I can run some pretty advanced stuff on my firewall that you can't get with commodity NAT boxes.
people didn't usually have access to free compilers, and for many types of hardware (e.g., 8-bit desktops like the TRS-80), there simply weren't any good development tools. Another big win for C was that because it was so widely available, it became easy to find programmers who could code in it; it fed on its own success in a positive feedback loop.
History repeats itself in microcontroller land. Microcontroller land is full of "free for students" "free for noncommercial use" stuff. Find me a working Scala implementation for a 384 byte (not megabyte, not kilobyte) 10F220 PIC. And now compile that code for a demo on some TI thing, maybe port it to picoblaze for a FPGA demo...
you can pretty much predict what assembly instructions it's going to generate
Which is really important, because sometimes you end up debugging at that level or working hand in hand with inline assembly code.
If there is no OS, or you're writing the OS, C is the way to go.
Yeah, that was kind of my point that bandwidth is much more expensive than video cards. Lets say they're streaming out high def video, so you need a decent reasonably recent nvidia card just to run vdpau or whatever the windows equivalent is. So the net change in hardware cost is zero yet the net change in bandwidth cost is immense.
ON the other hand, as I guy who likes strategy gaming and (real) RPGs and hex based military combat something like a "VNC" server access to a hosted game is kinda interesting. Theoretically I could pop into a Civ6 game from desktop, tablet, or phone. The killer problem is how to handle all the different screen resolutions.
Also I imagine the temptation to "share" an account must be immense.
ain't gonna ask about the one that's the big black hole
Thats the goatse particle. Agreed, best left unobserved. Its metastable and decays emitting Santorum particles, which are toxic little things also best left unobserved.
The quality of the experience comes down to two specific factors: image integrity and control response. The former is going to require significant increases in bandwidth, because the current 5mbps level needs to rise to 10-15mbps to really solve the artifacting issues that are present in the first-gen cloud systems as they stand right now
Wouldn't it be infinitely cheaper and just as effective at keeping the upgrade treadmill running and the pirated copys stopped to merely upload maps and textures, rather than trying to run a whole video connection across the net? Essentially MMORPG already have no RPG unless you count middle school playground as RPG, now just remove the MM, leaving a "O" game?
US companies are forbidden by law to pay bribes so they have to go about it a round about way.
Oh spare me. Its called hiring an onsite expediter, not all this legal foolishness. Sometimes you have to hire a whole team of expediters. All above board, income taxes paid and everything. Amazing how nothing happens over there until you "hire" an "expediter" and then magically everything works. Sometimes they're called "inspectors". There's a whole culture organized around it.
I helped a friend build his Makerbot kit
To the best of my knowledge they only sell the replicator model now.... the "good" news is they sell it fully assembled and tested just remove from box and plug in, the "bad" news is instead of a mere $1200 or whatever its more like $2K with dual extruders.
Rapman product is the specified "about $1200", maybe thats what the original poster purchased.
The printrbot is much cheaper around $500 but seemingly perpetually out of stock.
build without already owning an entire machine shop.
I own a full machine shop, and unfortunately there are no 3-d printer blueprints. plenty of STL files and assembly diagrams to be printed but a dude with a milling machine and a lathe has to figure out how to make the parts on his own and some of them are rather mysterious from a traditional machining standpoint. I should probably sharpen up my cad skills and create and release a set of traditional machinist prints for a near-reprap printer, like a huxley or a mendel. It would seem a heck of a lot simpler to retrofit my CNC mill to extrude, or simply find a buddy to print me a set of parts.
I think he's asking for something more like a Garmin 72H which has a screen with navigation and a NMEA output. There's probably a cheaper one out there... You're looking at $100 or so, guess it depends on how you define "reasonable price".
This is very much like the cell phone/ipod touch situation where its dramatically cheaper to buy each separate, but if you insist on both in one case you'll have to pay a lot of extra money.