In the last 20 years the astronomy textbooks have been re-written a number of times on so many topics. This is one of those areas of science that is still being developed and written during our lifetime. Fascinating to watch the story unfold.
On a lighter note, I guess the Vatican and the pope are willing to recognize that "little green men" are allowed to exist as well. If you go by those rules, then "those 7 days when it all happened" were even busier than we thought!
And, yes, my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek!
These devices serve a need - web surf, email, document edit, spreadsheets. If you exclude gamers, thats 80% of the market for a laptop. Personally, lugging a big heavy laptop is a no-go for a lot of us.
Agreed - no good reason to stop at the moon to get to Mars - except perhaps to dump the politicians out. You want to assemble and gather things - do it in LEO (low earth orbit) and then get out of LEO for Mars.
Is this good or bad? The media show of the few immeasurably rich going into space has brought good attention to the space programs, but at times, it has been humorous in a sad sort of way.
More money on robotic research, best bang for the buck in outer space, IMHO. Also, why do we need to go back to the moon in order to go to Mars? I see no rhyme or reason in that stupidity except thats what GW Bush wants, which means that it will probably disappear in a year or two.
Re:Was using MS Sailor 2007 XP
on
Jim Gray Is Missing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Agree with the above, he has only been gone less than 72 hours and he is on a 40 foot sailboat.
Cell phone will be useless out there, Marine band VHF will be good for line of sight off the mast (9 to 28 miles, YMMV) and nobody knows if he has a SSB rig on board.
Even with total equipment failure he should be good for at least a week. Pretty obvious that a lot of slash-dot folks don't do offshore sailing. Major concern is if he is solo on the boat, not tethered in, and goes over the side. Then you watch the boat sail (on autohelm) away from you, and then you are dead withing 3-4 hours from hypothermia.
If he know what he is doing, give him a few more days. If he is slopped in fog, does not have radar, he may be waiting for a combination of clear weather, and the right tides under the GG bridge. Need both right to get in under safely, especially if the motor has failed and you got to do it under sail. The 6-9 knots of tidal current under there are viscious. Also, the safest place to sit and wait is not near the channel where all the traffic is.
If China turns off the supply chain, North Korea crumbles. China can't piss off the rest of the world, but that does not mean that they will overtly support the west in pushing their "allied communist country" around.
Negotiators (high level) went from China to N Korea to privately slap their hand after the baby bomb was fired off.
On the other hand, if N Korea crumbles, China then has to deal with the refugeee problem across their border.
It is in China's best interest to maintain the status quo, and that is exactly what happened.
soft media of various forms have been used before. Glass substrates for disks, and aluminum substrates have both been around for years.
You want to reduce cost, you reduce the numbers of heads and disks. You want to reduce the power you reduce the number of heads and disks, drop the spindle speed and increase the seek time
I spent 15 years of my life designing disk drives and the chips for them, and a lot of them are still out there running in lots of machines.
Utterly stupid idea - As others have pointed out energy losses are due to rotational losses (friction and windage) in the drives after spinning up. Spindles in 3.5" drives with 1 or 2 platters (99.9% of the market) take about 1.2 amps of start current, and then speed maintenance on the order of 40ma to 200ma while running.
The article proposes adding multiple heads and more platters to the drive. With thinner platters, and proposes that thinner is cheaper. The cost in a disk is not the material it is made out of, but all of the processing associated with the preparation of that disk, machining, polishing, plating, etc etc. Not the price of the chunk of aluminum!
The most expensive thing in a drive is still the recording heads and the disks. The article goes on to propose adding more platters with more recording heads. More stupidity, pushing the cost of the drive through the roof for all the heads!
All of those heads add more frictional and windage losses, pushing the spindle current up.
Also, while in use the heaviest power consumption is in the servo. Those "seek times" that everyone likes to brag about take serious current to achieve. Add more heads and platters and this current goes up as well, and how thin the disks are will not effect this one bit.
So, higher cost for the drive, more current to maintain speed, and slower access time? It's not April First by any chance is it? Tin Foil Hat for this one.
The common parlance term for the "expert witness" among lawyers is "the courtroom whore" -- Lots of fancy sounding credentials, gotta have the doctroal degree, and willing to say anything for a price. Totally worthless idiots in most cases.
Besides:
"If you ask enought experts, you can confirm any opinion or theory."
I have no problem with people trying to run things cooler. Elsewher in this thread, people were proposing setting it up so they could turn the fan off. Not a good idea.
I designed the chip for something called TAFI (Temperature and Fan IC) a way back. This widget (or a variation on it) now sits inside every PC/Mac/Laptop/Desktop box on the planet that has variable speed fans, that cool on demand.
How it works (the simplified 2 mile high view)- Sitting over inside the microprocessor is a diode, that is at the same temperature as the microprocessor chip. The forward biased voltage of a diode changes with temperature. With some signal processing, you can turn that into a temperature number.
The temperature is available for readback over a serial bus. (SMA,SMB, I2C, the original was SMA if I remember correctly) A software routine reads the temperature and makes the call "cool me off" or "at desired maximum temperature" which gets turned into a number that gets loaded over the bus back to the TAFI chip. That number gets dumped into a DAC, which becomes the voltage for powering the DC motor fan.
Presto! Variable speed fans dependent on how hot the microprocessor is!
Before that, all the PC's had fans that ran full blast 24-7-365.
Whoever did the software better realize that they are messing with the thermal management system and could seriosly fry their computer, if they set things up to not cool enough. So like any hardware hack, YMMV and you are taking a chance of doing permanent damage to the machine.
The fan motor, in comparision to the processor, does not suck that much juice, so I expect that it won't change battery run time in a big major way. A little, but not gobs.
Frankly people are fixated on the charging time which is a waste of time.
That to me was some clueless marketing type doing the math without thinking.
If you can get the storage-leakage-capacitance-volume-weight issues solved, the rest is easy. (read the patent, I did the homework to find the damn thing) Trickle charge at home and make the device modular, so they can be "swapped out" on the road.All easily done.
The patent applied and received is US Patent: 7,033,406
Feel free to yank the patent off the USPTO web site.
Issue Date: April 25, 2006 (Hopefuly they are not 24 days late.)
Unit described in the patent:
Weight = 336 pounds Capacitance = 31 Farads Peak Voltage on the capacitors = 3500 V Energy stored = 52 KwH Size of Unit = 1 cubic foot (its in there read the fine print)
The patent also describes an energy distribution system that includes "fuel stations" that use the same capacitor storage, and charges capacitors at the fuel station during graveyard shift. (double conversion losses, but that can be argued, and there are MUCH better ways to do this)
The "ultra fast charging" as per the marketing/media blurbs are commented on in the patent, "if sufficient cooling for the charging and wire interconnect is avaialble...." so the guy writing the patent was aware of the issues with the resistive losses in the system.
The capacitince structures are a ceramic technology, using special dielectrics. A lot of content there on the chemistry and fabrication technology.
Not sure if this is vaporware or the "next big thing" - we shall see.
Research now ongoing that I am aware of: -- Transponder system to provide electronic relay between severed spinal cord sections. -- Artificial eye that connects to the optic nerve.
Those two are "out there" with no products out in time for christmas.:)
However there are heaps of things now on the market (pacemakers, insulin pumps, etc, etc) and more to come. All for the good.
Why are they wasting their time on this? 802.11 is "reasonably secure" for something that is only designed for 30 meters of distance.
You want tight security on something? Disconnect all the transmitters, receivers and ethernet cables. This is an utter waste of government money...
Oh... so ***that's*** why they are wasting time on this... Government funded research in a government run lab. Better to give the money to universities, at least there useful things (sometimes) happen.
I have sat on IEEE standards committees, boring political push and shove exercise that they can be. (hm... should I go AC here?)
802.11X in all its variations is largely a variation on modulation/BW schema, nothing new or exciting here. It's just another ISM band data link.
802.15.4 has some interesting applications in remote low speed data monitoring (aka ZigBee)
802.16.a (and the ones there after) have some exciting applications in distance networking. (WiMax)
What everyone has been trying to make WiFi (802.11X) do (which it is not designed for) will be done using 802.16, that one is designed for wireless links over multi km distances.
Google 802.16 WiMax and 802.15.4 Zigbee and you will find plenty to read.
This is UWB, it is spread spectrum. As such, it can have another signal smack in the middle of it (like a cell phone) and is pretty reslient to it. (I have seen the studies and observed some of the lab tests.)
Slashdot Mirror
In the last 20 years the astronomy textbooks have been re-written a number of times on so many topics. This is one of those areas of science that is still being developed and written during our lifetime. Fascinating to watch the story unfold.
On a lighter note, I guess the Vatican and the pope are willing to recognize that "little green men" are allowed to exist as well. If you go by those rules, then "those 7 days when it all happened" were even busier than we thought!
And, yes, my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek!
These devices serve a need - web surf, email, document edit, spreadsheets. If you exclude gamers, thats 80% of the market for a laptop. Personally, lugging a big heavy laptop is a no-go for a lot of us.
Agreed - no good reason to stop at the moon to get to Mars - except perhaps to dump the politicians out. You want to assemble and gather things - do it in LEO (low earth orbit) and then get out of LEO for Mars.
Is this good or bad? The media show of the few immeasurably rich going into space has brought good attention to the space programs, but at times, it has been humorous in a sad sort of way.
More money on robotic research, best bang for the buck in outer space, IMHO.
Also, why do we need to go back to the moon in order to go to Mars? I see no rhyme or reason in that stupidity except thats what GW Bush wants, which means that it will probably disappear in a year or two.
Agree with the above, he has only been gone less than 72 hours and he is on a 40 foot sailboat.
Cell phone will be useless out there, Marine band VHF will be good for line of sight off the mast (9 to 28 miles, YMMV) and nobody knows if he has a SSB rig on board.
Even with total equipment failure he should be good for at least a week. Pretty obvious that a lot of slash-dot folks don't do offshore sailing. Major concern is if he is solo on the boat, not tethered in, and goes over the side. Then you watch the boat sail (on autohelm) away from you, and then you are dead withing 3-4 hours from hypothermia.
If he know what he is doing, give him a few more days. If he is slopped in fog, does not have radar, he may be waiting for a combination of clear weather, and the right tides under the GG bridge. Need both right to get in under safely, especially if the motor has failed and you got to do it under sail. The 6-9 knots of tidal current under there are viscious. Also, the safest place to sit and wait is not near the channel where all the traffic is.
Too many variables, give him a few days.
the post is on a blog site, not on Google, April 1st a little early....
If China turns off the supply chain, North Korea crumbles. China can't piss off the rest of the world, but that does not mean that they will overtly support the west in pushing their "allied communist country" around.
Negotiators (high level) went from China to N Korea to privately slap their hand after the baby bomb was fired off.
On the other hand, if N Korea crumbles, China then has to deal with the refugeee problem across their border.
It is in China's best interest to maintain the status quo, and that is exactly what happened.
Old news, nothing surprising here.
soft media of various forms have been used before. Glass substrates for disks, and aluminum substrates have both been around for years.
You want to reduce cost, you reduce the numbers of heads and disks. You want to reduce the power you reduce the number of heads and disks, drop the spindle speed and increase the seek time
The idea was utterly stupid.
I spent 15 years of my life designing disk drives and the chips for them, and a lot of them are still out there running in lots of machines.
Utterly stupid idea - As others have pointed out energy losses are due to rotational losses (friction and windage) in the drives after spinning up. Spindles in 3.5" drives with 1 or 2 platters (99.9% of the market) take about 1.2 amps of start current, and then speed maintenance on the order of 40ma to 200ma while running.
The article proposes adding multiple heads and more platters to the drive. With thinner platters, and proposes that thinner is cheaper. The cost in a disk is not the material it is made out of, but all of the processing associated with the preparation of that disk, machining, polishing, plating, etc etc. Not the price of the chunk of aluminum!
The most expensive thing in a drive is still the recording heads and the disks. The article goes on to propose adding more platters with more recording heads. More stupidity, pushing the cost of the drive through the roof for all the heads!
All of those heads add more frictional and windage losses, pushing the spindle current up.
Also, while in use the heaviest power consumption is in the servo. Those "seek times" that everyone likes to brag about take serious current to achieve. Add more heads and platters and this current goes up as well, and how thin the disks are will not effect this one bit.
So, higher cost for the drive, more current to maintain speed, and slower access time?
It's not April First by any chance is it?
Tin Foil Hat for this one.
The common parlance term for the "expert witness" among lawyers is "the courtroom whore" -- Lots of fancy sounding credentials, gotta have the doctroal degree, and willing to say anything for a price. Totally worthless idiots in most cases.
Besides:
"If you ask enought experts, you can confirm any opinion or theory."
Not sure who said it, but it's valid IMHO.
I have no problem with people trying to run things cooler. Elsewher in this thread, people were proposing setting it up so they could turn the fan off. Not a good idea.
How it works (the simplified 2 mile high view)- Sitting over inside the microprocessor is a diode, that is at the same temperature as the microprocessor chip. The forward biased voltage of a diode changes with temperature. With some signal processing, you can turn that into a temperature number.
The temperature is available for readback over a serial bus. (SMA,SMB, I2C, the original was SMA if I remember correctly) A software routine reads the temperature and makes the call "cool me off" or "at desired maximum temperature" which gets turned into a number that gets loaded over the bus back to the TAFI chip. That number gets dumped into a DAC, which becomes the voltage for powering the DC motor fan.
Presto! Variable speed fans dependent on how hot the microprocessor is!
Before that, all the PC's had fans that ran full blast 24-7-365.
Whoever did the software better realize that they are messing with the thermal management system and could seriosly fry their computer, if they set things up to not cool enough. So like any hardware hack, YMMV and you are taking a chance of doing permanent damage to the machine.
The fan motor, in comparision to the processor, does not suck that much juice, so I expect that it won't change battery run time in a big major way. A little, but not gobs.
Perhaps get Dolly the sheep to sign up as a surrogate mother?
Everyone needs to get off of the charging time and the thermals thereof.
It is not important, if they got the capacitor to do the job then you trickle charge overnight, or swap out the capacitor structures.
everyone here is fixated on the amount of time to charge the bllody capacitor
the voltage is 3500 volts,
read the patent, I posted all the information on it yesterday at the original posting
sheesh!
dupe posting and dupe commentary...
having a car that never needed to be refilled with any type of fuel or energy would be great as well
the hot swap problem is a very easy thing to solve
the VC group funding them says something right there.
the voltages on the capacitor dielectric is message #2
ignore the idiot behind the curtain with the 3 minute charge up claim
Frankly people are fixated on the charging time which is a waste of time.
That to me was some clueless marketing type doing the math without thinking.
If you can get the storage-leakage-capacitance-volume-weight issues solved, the rest is easy. (read the patent, I did the homework to find the damn thing) Trickle charge at home and make the device modular, so they can be "swapped out" on the road.All easily done.
Gobs more information on wht they have is here:
http://www.rexresearch.com/weir/weir.htm
OK -
The patent applied
and received is US Patent: 7,033,406
Feel free to yank the patent off the USPTO web site.
Issue Date: April 25, 2006
(Hopefuly they are not 24 days late.)
Unit described in the patent:
Weight = 336 pounds
Capacitance = 31 Farads
Peak Voltage on the capacitors = 3500 V
Energy stored = 52 KwH
Size of Unit = 1 cubic foot (its in there read the fine print)
The patent also describes an energy distribution system that includes "fuel stations" that use the same capacitor storage, and charges capacitors at the fuel station during graveyard shift. (double conversion losses, but that can be argued, and there are MUCH better ways to do this)
The "ultra fast charging" as per the marketing/media blurbs are commented on in the patent, "if sufficient cooling for the charging and wire interconnect is avaialble...." so the guy writing the patent was aware of the issues with the resistive losses in the system.
The capacitince structures are a ceramic technology, using special dielectrics. A lot of content there on the chemistry and fabrication technology.
Not sure if this is vaporware or the "next big thing" - we shall see.
Jerry
Medical electronics are just entering a new age.
:)
Research now ongoing that I am aware of:
-- Transponder system to provide electronic relay between severed spinal cord sections.
-- Artificial eye that connects to the optic nerve.
Those two are "out there" with no products out in time for christmas.
However there are heaps of things now on the market (pacemakers, insulin pumps, etc, etc)
and more to come. All for the good.
Why are they wasting their time on this? 802.11 is "reasonably secure" for something that is only designed for 30 meters of distance.
You want tight security on something? Disconnect all the transmitters, receivers and ethernet cables. This is an utter waste of government money...
Oh... so ***that's*** why they are wasting time on this...
Government funded research in a government run lab. Better to give the money to universities, at least there useful things (sometimes) happen.
Take a look at this as a good example for someone who is blind:
& pid=601&dept=22
http://enablemart.com/productdetail.aspx?store=10
Lots of ALT text for the graphics, but still has pictures, more text based, no flash nonsense.
Kind of reminds you of a web site from 1995, not a lot of visual nonsense.
Um....
I have sat on IEEE standards committees, boring political push and shove exercise that they can be. (hm... should I go AC here?)
802.11X in all its variations is largely a variation on modulation/BW schema, nothing new or exciting here. It's just another ISM band data link.
802.15.4 has some interesting applications in remote low speed data monitoring (aka ZigBee)
802.16.a (and the ones there after) have some exciting applications in distance networking. (WiMax)
What everyone has been trying to make WiFi (802.11X) do (which it is not designed for) will be done using 802.16, that one is designed for wireless links over multi km distances.
Google 802.16 WiMax and 802.15.4 Zigbee and you will find plenty to read.
That's the great thing about "standards" there are so many to pick from!!!
Funny thing, the data thruput bottleneck is generally not at the 802.11X point anymore.
802.11"X" - hm, that has a nice ring to it.... Sorta sounds like upgrading my 80286 to a 386, to a 486, to a...
Seriously the 802.11 interface will shake out.
Stay tuned for 802.16A WiMax!
This is UWB, it is spread spectrum. As such, it can have another signal smack in the middle of it (like a cell phone) and is pretty reslient to it. (I have seen the studies and observed some of the lab tests.)
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_wideband