Sounds like whoever packages gaim for your distro is a moron. gaim's developers can't be faulted because someone else is screwing up the packaging.
I've never had any problem with upgrades or installations of gaim on any of my systems (Gentoo, and I used to use RedHat until 7.3), including the Windows port.
gaim blows away AOL's standard AIM client in terms of UI cleanliness, ease of use, and features. How the hell is it that the AIM protocol supports aliases for screen names (i.e. foobar43289342 displays as "John Smith") but only third-party clients actually support it? (i.e. aliases ARE saved on AOL's server with your buddy lists, but AOL's AIM client is about the only client out there that DOESN'T show them).
gaim also lets me strip out all color/fontsize changes from people's IMs. Some people have REALLY annoying color defaults.
gaim starts far faster than AIM.
There is one thing (and only one) that AIM handles better than gAIM, and that's when people use nonstandard character sets in away messages. gAIM bitches about a buggy client, AIM will display the away message, even though some characters will look like junk. I only see these away messages once or twice a month though.
Hmm, I had the fortune of APing out of 192, and started with third-semester math. The upper level engineering math courses were excellent. The only bad professor I had my freshman year (probably the worst one I had at Cornell) was for Chem 211 (Chem for Engineers), and I still pulled an A in that course despite the professor being the ultimate cure for insomnia. As bad as he was, he was nothing compared to my System Analysis professor at Rutgers.
While I didn't join a fraternity, I was in marching band and pep band while I was there. If anything, that sucked even more of my time, yet I had no problem with my courseload and I learned a HUGE amount.
To the guy who said "fix the doors yourself" - I just simply avoid that particular bathroom whenever possible instead. It's still utterly sad that it's been over a year and no one has fixed it, and I'm kind of curious if it will ever get fixed. If I fix it myself, I have no way of knowing how long it actually would have taken.:)
Yup, a lot of state schools are absolutely horrendous, even the ones with supposedly good reputations.
My undergraduate degree was from Cornell University - Most of my professors were top-notch, and my worst were nowhere near as bad as what the author of the linked article describes. I loved what I was doing, and didn't find things to be that difficult.
I am now finishing up my masters' degree at Rutgers University - While there are also some stellar professors there, the average and minimum quality of the professors is utterly horrendous, as is the quality of the academic facilities on the engineering campus. The roofs leak, half the desks in classrooms are broken, the bathrooms flood on a daily basis, and in one of the bathrooms a stall door has been broken without repair for over a year. These facts are especially sad given the $60 million state-of-the-art football stadium a half mile away which is in utterly perfect condition.
I have also had to change my definition of a bad professor since coming here - Before they were the boring ones that droned on in a monotone, but I've had professors here who would spend 20 minutes trying to work out a mistake they'd made in one equation, IF they even bothered to show up to class. My first semester here, one of my professors failed to show up to a quarter of the lectures, and did not even notify us.
The biggest problem is that the normal responses to a loud environment is to crank the volume up.
Earbuds make this worse because of their utterly crap isolation compared to circumaurals.
Good circumaurals and noise cancelling headphones of any type reduce background noise, reducing the volume that you listen to the actual music at because you don't need to drown out the background nearly as much.
Noise-cancelling circumaurals are the best in loud environments. I've heard the Bose QuietComforts are one of the few Bose products that aren't highly overpriced/overrated, although you can get amazingly good ANC for high-bass environments much cheaper. (I recall reading the Bose had a closed-loop ANC system, which can cancel much higher frequencies than the typical el-cheapo open-loop ones.) You can get Philips HN100s and HN110s for $15-20 including shipping on eBay, which are great on trains, in airplanes, and in cars. I have a pair of HN100s and LOVE them.
And if implemented properly (read: Using a graphite moderator so your power reactor can double as a weapons material production facility is a BAD IDEA).
The largest accident involving a properly designed commercial power reactor (TMI) released less radiation into the environment than your average coal-fired power pland does EVERY DAY.
Chernobyl doubled as a weapons materials production facility, which is one of the main reasons it went BOOM. The design was inherently unsafe, and in addition the operators were performing dangerous experiments on the reactor. Nearly all of the reactor's safety systems had been INTENTIONALLY disabled when it exploded.
GPS equipment: I've used a Garmin GPS 45 (OOOOLD!!!), Garmin eMap (very nice unit - too bad it's discontinued), and Lowrance iFinder (Looks great on paper - SD expansion, "hot" receiver, numerous other nifty features, but TBH it sucks. Their MapCreate software for uploading map data to the unit SUCKS. It can't even do turn-by-turn routing on your PC, at least Garmin MapSource can do routing on the PC and then upload a route that won't clutter the unit with lots of trash waypoints, even if the unit itself can't do onboard TBT routing.)
For a good hiking unit I'd stick with Garmin or Magellan. Garmin is the most evil with regards to proprietary add-ons, but honestly after my experiences with the Lowrance I'd stay with them anyway. The Garmin units are very polished and work very well. (Note: Magellans could be excellent too, I want to try one one of these days. Just do NOT buy Lowrance!)
Other equipment: Kyocera 6035 PalmOS PDA-phone, replaced last March with a Treo 600. I use GPX Spinner to convert emailed GPX files to HTML, and then plucker-build to convert these to Plucker format. (Yes, I have a geocaching.com subscription - it's worth the money.) Spinner is Windows-only but works fine for me with WINE.
Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop with DeLorme Topo USA. TUSA is GREAT. I can see all nearby geocaches for miles around. Usually the way things work is that on family vacations, we pick a hiking trail for the day. As time permits, I use the laptop to view caches near our route to the trailhead (and also near/on the trail itself) and the Kyo or Treo to look up cache descriptions. The laptop stays in the car, of course.
There are a number of forms of *IV - Most of them have major trouble jumping species. Good immune system or not, a virus that affects humans is going to have serious troubles infecting another species, especially a reptile. Many such virii have trouble even jumping between closely related species. (HIV vs. SIV)
This holds true for a number of other virii - Take Ebola Reston for example. Deadly to primates, but can't infect humans. Same for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). Most of the time SIV can't take hold in a human. (Although once or twice it has, and HIV evolved from there.)
Peak bitrate for DOCSIS cable modems is 30 Mbit/sec down. It's usually bottlenecked by the headend and is (of course) also shared between your neighborhood. It's also often capped by the ISP. (Cablevision caps to 10Mbit/user, many other providers cap lower)
Likewise, the 75 Mbps speed of WiMax (that's raw bitrate, actual throughput will be lower, just as with ANY multiuser networking system) is shared between all the users on the same base station.
They've been available for months, but have been considered heavily experimental and will still be considered heavily experimental for quite some time.
Even with a recent version of xorg and the latest NVidia binary drivers, generally considered the most robust and stable implementation of the composite extension available at the moment, using the composite extension is CRASH CITY. The composite extension still causes massive problems with the GLX and XV extensions, so much so that using GLX and Composite simultaneously is disabled by default. I've had so many problems with that extension that I outright disable it in my X configuration.
"It's called migraine. For whatever reason the neurons in some people's brain are way overexcitable. Zapping them with a repetitive stimulus causes them to go nuts and spew inflammatory chemicals. This inflames the membranes surrounding the brain. It is basically non-infectious "benign" meningitis; you don't have a virus eating your brain, it just feels like it. Depending on how vigorous the problem is, the pain ranges from mild discomfort to suicide headache."
Actually, while migraine is another (more common issue), it wasn't what I was thinking of. I was talking about epilepsy.
Prior to going on medication, my friend was at high risk of seizures just from being near fluorescent lights. CRT monitors would make him very sick.
Now that he's on medication, he's been seizure-free for a few years. He still can't go anywhere where the lighting is predominantly fluorescent for more than 10-15 minutes (and as a result is now on disability because of his medical conditions), and has to be VERY careful about what monitors he buys because flicker can make him VERY sick.
"and it shares uncanny resemblances to the new Sony PSP DRM (someone copied)."
And that's the exact problem. Sony is a massive company that's well-established in the industry. If the Sony executives had said to potential developers, "Perform fellatio on every single one of us if you want us to give you an SDK", the developers would've done so.
Tapwave, on the other hand, was a tiny no-name company with no leverage. To succeed, Tapwave would've had to do everything in their power to *encourage* developers to come to their platform. Instead, they instituted a DRM scheme that made a few developers happy, but drove a far larger number away. Thus, the Tapwave had almost no software support other than "normal" PalmOS apps which would've run better on other Palm units with faster processors and/or more features that made those units more attractive in the Zodiac's target market.
Remove the nice 3-D acceleration and all of the nice Tapwave-specific features, and what was left gets totally eclipsed by more functional PalmOS devices such as the Treo 650 or even the T600. (Given a choice of ONE PalmOS device, I would just barely take my current T600 over the Zodiac. I would take the 650 over a Zodiac in a heartbeat.)
As a few posters mentioned, Tapwave was REALLY restrictive about releasing the SDKs for the Zodiac-specific hardware in their products. As a result it was very difficult to develop for, as opposed to normal Palm apps.
It was a Palm with: Tons of RAM Great form factor Dual SD slots Best display available for any Palm device for quite some time *3D hardware acceleration* - the ONLY Palm device with that feature. Unfortunately, you couldn't use it with Tapwave's near-impossible-to-obtain SDK. If Tapwave had been more open with giving developers their SDK, there would have been MUCH better Zodiac-specific software support.
Unfortunately, Tapwave shot themselves in the foot with SDK licensing. They didn't have the leverage that Sony, Nintendo, etc. do over developers. Tapwave should've done everything they could have to get developers on board (read: Let anyone download the SDKs, just like with the basic PalmOS SDKs.)
You should've seen the Kyocera 6035. It's old by modern standards, but when it came out it was a great PDA and an AMAZING phone.
The T600 is a great leap forward from the Kyocera in terms of PDA features, but its phone functionality is a huge step back from the Kyo. Too bad the 7135 royally bombed and we probably won't see any more smartphones from Kyocera anymore.:(
(BTW, I do have a T600 now and love it, I just wish it had some of the 6035's telephony features such as built-in voice recognition which works very well and automatic entry of your voicemail password when dialing voicemail.)
That's a case of solving a problem that affects less than 1% of the population (Your specific application where ghosting/motion blur is actually a problem, as opposed to 99% of the population for whom it's been solved adequately on any decent LCD made in the past 5+ years.) in return for bringing back a problem that affects 25-50%+ of the population (flicker-induced eyestrain and headaches are extremely common) and produces SEVERE health risks for a non-insignificant number of people.
I'd rather have slight ghosting (which on any modern LCD is not noticeable, at least for me) rather than 60-75 Hz flicker.
And unlike one of my best friends, I'm not photosensitive (i.e. gets sick in the presence of flickering lights such as fluorescents and low refresh rate CRTs). I have a friend that is photosensitive and does video editing work, and basically HAS to have one of the following:
Extremely high refresh rate (100 Hz+) CRT or LCD
Even the extremely high refresh rate CRTs bother him a lot. I've had to reassure him when he goes monitor shopping that the fluorescents used in LCDs (almost always CCFLs) switch at rates a few magnitudes of order higher than normal fluorescent lights. (50-150 kHz instead of 60 Hz).
Unfortunately, the article is 100% false in its claims that Peltiers are more efficient than phase change heat pumps. Peltiers are known for being INCREDIBLY inefficient.
A car's alternator never "kicks in" - it's ALWAYS on.
The load it presents to the engine is proportional to the load on its outputs. If there's nothing connected to an ideal alternator, it will present zero load to the engine. (In reality, even an unloaded alternator presents a constant load due to friction.) As soon as you connect an electrical load to it, the alternator presents a larger mechanical load on the engine. (Usually equivalent to the electrical load multiplied by a constant which is the inverse of the alternator's efficiency. The efficiency of some alternators changes with load though due to the fact that alternators have to regulate their voltage output somewhat.)
The reason alternators provide no discernible (to the user) load on an engine is because the electrical loads they're driving are a small fraction of the engine's power. The largest automotive alternator I've seen was rated 120 amperes maximum. That's 1440 watts, which is on the order of 2 horsepower. (IIRC, 1HP is approx. 720-750 watts.) An A/C system alone uses more power than that. So, the system these students proposed combines an 80-90% efficient generator (the alternator) with a 10-20% (at best) efficiency heat pump, as opposed to an 80-90% efficient heat pump with a 99%+ efficient mechanical power transfer system. (The A/C compressor clutch.)
If you wanted to go for "fancy", I'd suggest the following:
Card that supports external antennas Pigtail adapter to a commmon connector such as N Variable attenuator (You can probably find junky units suitable for your purpose very cheap - calibrated ones are MUCH more expensive.) Antenna that uses the same connectors as the attenuator
Procedure: Find signal Turn attenuator up slowly until signal disappears Move around to pick up signal again Turn attenuator up even more Rinse and repeat
Too bad TDOA would be a royal pain to set up with his particular system without building some serious custom hardware. It's not like us hams who just set up an antenna switcher using PIN diodes and a 555 timer and connect the output to the antenna port of our handheld FM receiver.:)
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Sounds like whoever packages gaim for your distro is a moron. gaim's developers can't be faulted because someone else is screwing up the packaging.
I've never had any problem with upgrades or installations of gaim on any of my systems (Gentoo, and I used to use RedHat until 7.3), including the Windows port.
gaim blows away AOL's standard AIM client in terms of UI cleanliness, ease of use, and features. How the hell is it that the AIM protocol supports aliases for screen names (i.e. foobar43289342 displays as "John Smith") but only third-party clients actually support it? (i.e. aliases ARE saved on AOL's server with your buddy lists, but AOL's AIM client is about the only client out there that DOESN'T show them).
gaim also lets me strip out all color/fontsize changes from people's IMs. Some people have REALLY annoying color defaults.
gaim starts far faster than AIM.
There is one thing (and only one) that AIM handles better than gAIM, and that's when people use nonstandard character sets in away messages. gAIM bitches about a buggy client, AIM will display the away message, even though some characters will look like junk. I only see these away messages once or twice a month though.
"is the apparent difference bwteen torrents KiB and the KB on my internet something to do with headers and compression?"
He asked a question, I gave him the answer.
KiB = 1024
KB = 1000
Hmm, I had the fortune of APing out of 192, and started with third-semester math. The upper level engineering math courses were excellent. The only bad professor I had my freshman year (probably the worst one I had at Cornell) was for Chem 211 (Chem for Engineers), and I still pulled an A in that course despite the professor being the ultimate cure for insomnia. As bad as he was, he was nothing compared to my System Analysis professor at Rutgers.
:)
While I didn't join a fraternity, I was in marching band and pep band while I was there. If anything, that sucked even more of my time, yet I had no problem with my courseload and I learned a HUGE amount.
To the guy who said "fix the doors yourself" - I just simply avoid that particular bathroom whenever possible instead. It's still utterly sad that it's been over a year and no one has fixed it, and I'm kind of curious if it will ever get fixed. If I fix it myself, I have no way of knowing how long it actually would have taken.
Yup, a lot of state schools are absolutely horrendous, even the ones with supposedly good reputations.
My undergraduate degree was from Cornell University - Most of my professors were top-notch, and my worst were nowhere near as bad as what the author of the linked article describes. I loved what I was doing, and didn't find things to be that difficult.
I am now finishing up my masters' degree at Rutgers University - While there are also some stellar professors there, the average and minimum quality of the professors is utterly horrendous, as is the quality of the academic facilities on the engineering campus. The roofs leak, half the desks in classrooms are broken, the bathrooms flood on a daily basis, and in one of the bathrooms a stall door has been broken without repair for over a year. These facts are especially sad given the $60 million state-of-the-art football stadium a half mile away which is in utterly perfect condition.
I have also had to change my definition of a bad professor since coming here - Before they were the boring ones that droned on in a monotone, but I've had professors here who would spend 20 minutes trying to work out a mistake they'd made in one equation, IF they even bothered to show up to class. My first semester here, one of my professors failed to show up to a quarter of the lectures, and did not even notify us.
The biggest problem is that the normal responses to a loud environment is to crank the volume up.
Earbuds make this worse because of their utterly crap isolation compared to circumaurals.
Good circumaurals and noise cancelling headphones of any type reduce background noise, reducing the volume that you listen to the actual music at because you don't need to drown out the background nearly as much.
Noise-cancelling circumaurals are the best in loud environments. I've heard the Bose QuietComforts are one of the few Bose products that aren't highly overpriced/overrated, although you can get amazingly good ANC for high-bass environments much cheaper. (I recall reading the Bose had a closed-loop ANC system, which can cancel much higher frequencies than the typical el-cheapo open-loop ones.) You can get Philips HN100s and HN110s for $15-20 including shipping on eBay, which are great on trains, in airplanes, and in cars. I have a pair of HN100s and LOVE them.
And if implemented properly (read: Using a graphite moderator so your power reactor can double as a weapons material production facility is a BAD IDEA).
The largest accident involving a properly designed commercial power reactor (TMI) released less radiation into the environment than your average coal-fired power pland does EVERY DAY.
Chernobyl doubled as a weapons materials production facility, which is one of the main reasons it went BOOM. The design was inherently unsafe, and in addition the operators were performing dangerous experiments on the reactor. Nearly all of the reactor's safety systems had been INTENTIONALLY disabled when it exploded.
I've never had anything remotely like that happen with my eMap or my dad's GPS 45. That sounds very weird.
You mean when bookmarking your current position? Could be some weird map datum inconsistency...
Note that it's a LiveJournal entry - Which is NOT his main website.
Just Google here.
Either a retarded webadmin at Fuddruckers, or a more sinister hack. I'm suspecting the latter.
GPS equipment:
I've used a Garmin GPS 45 (OOOOLD!!!), Garmin eMap (very nice unit - too bad it's discontinued), and Lowrance iFinder (Looks great on paper - SD expansion, "hot" receiver, numerous other nifty features, but TBH it sucks. Their MapCreate software for uploading map data to the unit SUCKS. It can't even do turn-by-turn routing on your PC, at least Garmin MapSource can do routing on the PC and then upload a route that won't clutter the unit with lots of trash waypoints, even if the unit itself can't do onboard TBT routing.)
For a good hiking unit I'd stick with Garmin or Magellan. Garmin is the most evil with regards to proprietary add-ons, but honestly after my experiences with the Lowrance I'd stay with them anyway. The Garmin units are very polished and work very well. (Note: Magellans could be excellent too, I want to try one one of these days. Just do NOT buy Lowrance!)
Other equipment:
Kyocera 6035 PalmOS PDA-phone, replaced last March with a Treo 600. I use GPX Spinner to convert emailed GPX files to HTML, and then plucker-build to convert these to Plucker format. (Yes, I have a geocaching.com subscription - it's worth the money.) Spinner is Windows-only but works fine for me with WINE.
Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop with DeLorme Topo USA. TUSA is GREAT. I can see all nearby geocaches for miles around. Usually the way things work is that on family vacations, we pick a hiking trail for the day. As time permits, I use the laptop to view caches near our route to the trailhead (and also near/on the trail itself) and the Kyo or Treo to look up cache descriptions. The laptop stays in the car, of course.
HIV - HUMAN Immunodeficiency Virus
There are a number of forms of *IV - Most of them have major trouble jumping species. Good immune system or not, a virus that affects humans is going to have serious troubles infecting another species, especially a reptile. Many such virii have trouble even jumping between closely related species. (HIV vs. SIV)
This holds true for a number of other virii - Take Ebola Reston for example. Deadly to primates, but can't infect humans. Same for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). Most of the time SIV can't take hold in a human. (Although once or twice it has, and HIV evolved from there.)
Peak bitrate for DOCSIS cable modems is 30 Mbit/sec down. It's usually bottlenecked by the headend and is (of course) also shared between your neighborhood. It's also often capped by the ISP. (Cablevision caps to 10Mbit/user, many other providers cap lower)
Likewise, the 75 Mbps speed of WiMax (that's raw bitrate, actual throughput will be lower, just as with ANY multiuser networking system) is shared between all the users on the same base station.
75 is definately not 20 times 30...
Then decided the downsides (physical size and battery life) outweighed the benefits.
CF slots are a hell of a lot larger than SD slots.
They've been available for months, but have been considered heavily experimental and will still be considered heavily experimental for quite some time.
Even with a recent version of xorg and the latest NVidia binary drivers, generally considered the most robust and stable implementation of the composite extension available at the moment, using the composite extension is CRASH CITY. The composite extension still causes massive problems with the GLX and XV extensions, so much so that using GLX and Composite simultaneously is disabled by default. I've had so many problems with that extension that I outright disable it in my X configuration.
"It's called migraine. For whatever reason the neurons in some people's brain are way overexcitable. Zapping them with a repetitive stimulus causes them to go nuts and spew inflammatory chemicals. This inflames the membranes surrounding the brain. It is basically non-infectious "benign" meningitis; you don't have a virus eating your brain, it just feels like it. Depending on how vigorous the problem is, the pain ranges from mild discomfort to suicide headache."
Actually, while migraine is another (more common issue), it wasn't what I was thinking of. I was talking about epilepsy.
Prior to going on medication, my friend was at high risk of seizures just from being near fluorescent lights. CRT monitors would make him very sick.
Now that he's on medication, he's been seizure-free for a few years. He still can't go anywhere where the lighting is predominantly fluorescent for more than 10-15 minutes (and as a result is now on disability because of his medical conditions), and has to be VERY careful about what monitors he buys because flicker can make him VERY sick.
"and it shares uncanny resemblances to the new Sony PSP DRM (someone copied)."
And that's the exact problem. Sony is a massive company that's well-established in the industry. If the Sony executives had said to potential developers, "Perform fellatio on every single one of us if you want us to give you an SDK", the developers would've done so.
Tapwave, on the other hand, was a tiny no-name company with no leverage. To succeed, Tapwave would've had to do everything in their power to *encourage* developers to come to their platform. Instead, they instituted a DRM scheme that made a few developers happy, but drove a far larger number away. Thus, the Tapwave had almost no software support other than "normal" PalmOS apps which would've run better on other Palm units with faster processors and/or more features that made those units more attractive in the Zodiac's target market.
Remove the nice 3-D acceleration and all of the nice Tapwave-specific features, and what was left gets totally eclipsed by more functional PalmOS devices such as the Treo 650 or even the T600. (Given a choice of ONE PalmOS device, I would just barely take my current T600 over the Zodiac. I would take the 650 over a Zodiac in a heartbeat.)
As a few posters mentioned, Tapwave was REALLY restrictive about releasing the SDKs for the Zodiac-specific hardware in their products. As a result it was very difficult to develop for, as opposed to normal Palm apps.
It was a Palm with:
Tons of RAM
Great form factor
Dual SD slots
Best display available for any Palm device for quite some time
*3D hardware acceleration* - the ONLY Palm device with that feature. Unfortunately, you couldn't use it with Tapwave's near-impossible-to-obtain SDK. If Tapwave had been more open with giving developers their SDK, there would have been MUCH better Zodiac-specific software support.
Unfortunately, Tapwave shot themselves in the foot with SDK licensing. They didn't have the leverage that Sony, Nintendo, etc. do over developers. Tapwave should've done everything they could have to get developers on board (read: Let anyone download the SDKs, just like with the basic PalmOS SDKs.)
You should've seen the Kyocera 6035. It's old by modern standards, but when it came out it was a great PDA and an AMAZING phone.
:(
The T600 is a great leap forward from the Kyocera in terms of PDA features, but its phone functionality is a huge step back from the Kyo. Too bad the 7135 royally bombed and we probably won't see any more smartphones from Kyocera anymore.
(BTW, I do have a T600 now and love it, I just wish it had some of the 6035's telephony features such as built-in voice recognition which works very well and automatic entry of your voicemail password when dialing voicemail.)
That's a case of solving a problem that affects less than 1% of the population (Your specific application where ghosting/motion blur is actually a problem, as opposed to 99% of the population for whom it's been solved adequately on any decent LCD made in the past 5+ years.) in return for bringing back a problem that affects 25-50%+ of the population (flicker-induced eyestrain and headaches are extremely common) and produces SEVERE health risks for a non-insignificant number of people.
I was just about to say the same thing.
I'd rather have slight ghosting (which on any modern LCD is not noticeable, at least for me) rather than 60-75 Hz flicker.
And unlike one of my best friends, I'm not photosensitive (i.e. gets sick in the presence of flickering lights such as fluorescents and low refresh rate CRTs). I have a friend that is photosensitive and does video editing work, and basically HAS to have one of the following:
Extremely high refresh rate (100 Hz+) CRT
or LCD
Even the extremely high refresh rate CRTs bother him a lot. I've had to reassure him when he goes monitor shopping that the fluorescents used in LCDs (almost always CCFLs) switch at rates a few magnitudes of order higher than normal fluorescent lights. (50-150 kHz instead of 60 Hz).
Unfortunately, the article is 100% false in its claims that Peltiers are more efficient than phase change heat pumps. Peltiers are known for being INCREDIBLY inefficient.
A car's alternator never "kicks in" - it's ALWAYS on.
The load it presents to the engine is proportional to the load on its outputs. If there's nothing connected to an ideal alternator, it will present zero load to the engine. (In reality, even an unloaded alternator presents a constant load due to friction.) As soon as you connect an electrical load to it, the alternator presents a larger mechanical load on the engine. (Usually equivalent to the electrical load multiplied by a constant which is the inverse of the alternator's efficiency. The efficiency of some alternators changes with load though due to the fact that alternators have to regulate their voltage output somewhat.)
The reason alternators provide no discernible (to the user) load on an engine is because the electrical loads they're driving are a small fraction of the engine's power. The largest automotive alternator I've seen was rated 120 amperes maximum. That's 1440 watts, which is on the order of 2 horsepower. (IIRC, 1HP is approx. 720-750 watts.) An A/C system alone uses more power than that. So, the system these students proposed combines an 80-90% efficient generator (the alternator) with a 10-20% (at best) efficiency heat pump, as opposed to an 80-90% efficient heat pump with a 99%+ efficient mechanical power transfer system. (The A/C compressor clutch.)
If you wanted to go for "fancy", I'd suggest the following:
Card that supports external antennas
Pigtail adapter to a commmon connector such as N
Variable attenuator (You can probably find junky units suitable for your purpose very cheap - calibrated ones are MUCH more expensive.)
Antenna that uses the same connectors as the attenuator
Procedure:
Find signal
Turn attenuator up slowly until signal disappears
Move around to pick up signal again
Turn attenuator up even more
Rinse and repeat
Too bad TDOA would be a royal pain to set up with his particular system without building some serious custom hardware. It's not like us hams who just set up an antenna switcher using PIN diodes and a 555 timer and connect the output to the antenna port of our handheld FM receiver. :)