Uh, they've already sold off the old frequency used by the analog stations to Verizon. They aren't moving the digital stations.
Because of the analog stations still in operation and the interference issues from so many (digital AND analog) stations being on at once, some of the digital transmitters operating now are on temporary channels and WILL move again at transition time. That certainly applies to the stations using channels above 51.
Although your digital receiver probably displays a number with a decimal after it as the channel, much of the time that number is the old analog channel not the channel actually being used for the digital transmission.
With stations shifting around and a few new ones appearing, viewers will need to use the scan-channel or add channel functions to get the new/moved signals. So even those that think they're already set up have a little work left to do to see everything that their equipment can get.
Put in for our household's DTV converter box coupons... someone stole them in the mail. Called up to ask where they were, was told "by the terms of the law, we aren't allowed to issue a replacement if yours are never delivered to you."
My coupons were also stolen. I've had quite a bit of trouble with mail theft. They caught one local postal worker but it still continues. In my case it has always been things with likely/obvious value that vanish, never things like utility bills. I'll never get registration tags for my car by mail again.
I think it was a mistake issuing cards that didn't have the recipient name/address printed on them, and that lacked a requirement of photo ID and proof of address for redemption.
The digital signal I get is a little flaky but they are supposed to boost the signal after the switch.
they? Changes in digital facilities at the cut-over date vary on a case by case basis.
There are going to be fewer channels available for tv after the switch. We'll be using 2 through 51, except there is no channel 37 (that's kept silent for radio astronomy). Some stations will use the same digital facilities after the switch, so those probably won't improve. Some of the digital signals already on are using channels above 51 and will move. Due to interference issues, some digital signals are temporarily using lower power and/or a different channel. Those stations will likely have a change in signal coverage (mostly for the better) when the transition is complete. Some stations that are digital on UHF now will move to VHF channels (perhaps their former analog channel) when the analog signal is shut down. Although that may mean a better signal for some viewers, those who installed a UHF-specific antenna for DTV may find their antenna marginal. UHF antennas still pick up some VHF signal, more so with channels 7-13 than 2-6, but one would have to be in a pretty strong signal area for that to work. Some stations will be buying antennas or other equipment from other stations as channel-switches occur (transmitting antennas are generally made for a specific channel or narrow range of them) Rescheduling antenna and general engineering work will be a headache at the switch if the date changes.
Whatever you're using now, plan on using the channel-scan function to relocate stations that have moved after the change. In some places there may be new channels coming on the air (some are low power) scanning periodically to see what's out there isn't a bad idea.
You can see what's licensed or has construction permits for the various types of tv stations using the FCC TV database.
You can get an idea of relative signal coverage as well as what's in your area at tvfool.com. Seeing different colors for various relative signal levels in a stations' coverage is very helpful in determining what kind of antenna you might need to get a particular station. Using a good outdoor antenna, a preamp at the antenna, and modern low loss coax cable makes a huge difference for weak signals.
Some areas have analog low-power tv or translator (rebroadcast on shifted channel) stations that will continue to operate after the switch. If you're using a DTV converter for an analog tv you'll need a converter with a "pass-through" feature to allow those signals to bypass the converter and still get to the tv. (may require turning converter off for pass-through, much like behavior with old VCRs when not using VCR tuner)
Actually, you could produce certain levels of X-ray by using color CRT tube (non-broken!) if you misalign the rays so that they slam into steel mesh stencil, which is normally placed inside it, instead of passing through the holes of the mesh. If you ever played with magnet and TV screen, blurring the picture, changing the colors, you've got a doze of it.
That is why having unchecked magnetic field near your CRT monitors (grid power transformers, speakers with powerful magnets) is a BAD idea!
Uh, no... that's entirely wrong.
The electron beams (there are three for color) scan from the left side of the screen, and top to bottom to trace the picture. The beam size is greater than the opening hole or slot size in the aperture mask (the metal screen you speak of) and much of the beam energy normally is lost hitting the mask. The three beams passing through a given mask hole or slot come from different angles. Coming out the other side of the aperture mask (also known as a shadow mask) each beam normally can only hit the phosphor coating on the back of the screen face that produces the desired color (red, green, or blue). The three phosphor types are on the screen in a pattern of dot, segment, or line trios depending on the tube design.
Misadjustment of magnetic components by the electron guns, or stray magnetic fields near the screen result in beams hitting the wrong phosphor, causing the wrong colors to appear. A magnet near the screen, or a magnetized mask, may give a tie-dyed type of effect. Minor misadjustment usually causes a color shift near the screen edges or corners.
X-rays are not normally a problem if a tube is run at rated anode voltage and beam current (brightness). The lead added to the glass helps absorb the small amount of radiation that may be produced.
In the era of tube-type color televisions, the high voltage power supply was regulated by use of a shunt regulator tube circuit. Basically when the brightness was low, the shunt regulator would compensate by drawing the current that the screen wasn't in order to keep the load on the power supply (and thus the voltage) fairly constant. X-rays from color tvs got attention around 1964 when G.E. sold some cut-corner designed sets that lacked the usually metal caging around the shunt-regulator tube. Later TVs had lead added to (or even around) the regulator glass. The regulator voltage setting had been adjustable, often from the back of a set. Later it was usually factory preset, with the adjustment glued in place to prevent misadjustment.
The thing I don't full understand here is how a cooling device that is the same area as the chip itself accomplishes much. It moves the heat.
Think of heat flow as depending on two things; the temperature difference between source and destination, and the total thermal resistance in-between. The thermal resistance is usually expressed as the temperature rise in degrees C per Watt. A small amount of thermal compound filling in tiny voids reduces the resistance between the chip and the heatsink (a layer that's too thick actually adds resistance in-between). As far as the chip is concerned, a peltier device is like inserting a negative thermal resistance in series, bring down the total and increasing the heat flow. The heatsink will get hotter causing it to radiate/conduct more heat. Some of that heat is additional heat that came from the CPU, some is the heat from the power consumption of the peltier device.
End-users tend to look at just the thermal resistances from the I.C. package to ambient air, but that isn't the whole story. Are two chips with 65 Watts to dissipate equal? They might look the same to us, but a 45 nm chip being smaller than a 65 nm chip would have less surface area to transfer heat to the I.C. package. It is very likely that achieving a given chip-to-case thermal resistance is increasingly difficult as chips get smaller. With that in mind, it makes sense to be looking at new designs to improve heat flow from the hottest parts of the chip. The hottest parts matter the most since it is generally exceeding a certain temperature that causes damage or malfunction.
Some of the thermal and small-size considerations in chip design today resemble some that have been with us for a long time. Radio-frequency power transistors have had to use smaller chips than conventional power transistors for the sake of speed. Even 30 years ago, designers had to worry about metal-migration from the high current density (per unit area). Variations in temperature across a chip would lead to the hotter areas doing a thermal-runaway type thing (the properties would shift in such a way that the hotter area would take an increasing share of the current, getting even hotter...). Designers of what looked like one transistor sometimes had to break the Emitter into a number of sites run in parallel, each with an small on-chip current equalizing series resistor, just to make the heat generation across the chip more uniform.
I think some art museums really ought to have a corner for chip designs. Many skilled artists have worked hard to make chips what they are.
Techno-nonsense in shows has made me cringe more than once. There was an episode of Burn Notice where something was to be covertly X-rayed in the trunk of a car. Energized by a stun-gun, the radiation source was an electron gun broken off of a television picture tube (c.r.t.). Nevermind that not under vacuum that would be no more than a few arcing pieces of metal.
Now if they pulled a shunt-regulator tube out of an old set from a thrift store...
Think about it; you probably wouldn't think twice about trying to plug in an old television from the 50's would you?
Well actually... yes I would! If a 50's television sat for an extended period without being run, you'd run a very high risk of electrolytic capacitor failure if you simply plugged the set in and turned it on.
If you're lucky and haven't had the electrolyte dry up over the years, you still probably need to "reform" it by bringing up the voltage very gradually.
With many chipsets/motherboards already supporting SATA and the drives being widespread as well, many of US could enjoy much (about 6x ?) better than USB 2 port speeds for external drives by simply having the external ("e" in eSATA) connectors available.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work correctly with PlaysForSure, no matter how many times I've called Microsoft.
Place a cup of water in the oven along with the PlaysForSure device to avoid possible problems from excessive standing waves..
Some microwaves do last a very long time. It wasn't that long ago I finally stopped using one that had a mechanical timer. Except for not having a rotating tray, I really liked it. With no standby power for control electronics I figured I saved $1 a month in power for many years.
Many people cause premature failure of microwave ovens by routinely hitting the button that opens the door before the oven has stopped or they've hit stop. In many ovens that eventually causes the contacts in one of the door-interlock safety switches to burn up from directly interrupting the incoming power to the magnetron supply. It's a very simple fix, but most people don't know how or bother.
Just before the islamic revolution, the Shah had acquired US made bank note printing presses, the exact same used to make US dollars. So they can already make the most real fake notes
The Shah has been out of power for close to 30 years. The look and technology of U.S. currency has changed much in that time. There is much more to it than just the presses.
Being an oil-exporting nation, isn't it likely that Iran has enough cash without resorting to fake currency? Trade restrictions and currency are separate issues.
Instead of what sounds like raw-rectified power, they should have some intelligent (and too fast to see) flicker. Since LEDs could easily handled modulated power to send a data stream of something...
hmmm... car tail lights could too, but what to say?
The paper describes a method of simply and efficiently coupling energy from the transmitter VCO chip to the main antenna, making good use of the R.F. energy that chip provides. It seems that most of the power savings is from avoiding (power used by) an external buffer amplifier by eliminating the amplifier. That's great if the chip can provide sufficient output power, and if the spectral purity is good enough to comply with F.C.C. or other requirements. I'd expect that most cell phones need more transmit power than provided by the example in the paper, but perhaps the same methods are viable with higher power modules.
Note that the power savings only occurs in transmit mode, and the savings is only in the circuit providing signal to the antenna. Something like an iPhone has a bunch of other electronics and a display using considerable power, none of which is affected by the changes proposed in the paper.
What's presented is innovative but in reality isn't likely to do much for the overall power consumption of a complex product like an iPhone. The savings would be more likely to amount to something in smaller and and much simpler devices, more along the lines of battery powered WiFi or BlueTooth products.
Hmmm, I wonder if the people closely watching a black and white set that had wide video bandwidth would dream with the visible dot pattern on the parts of the picture where the most brightly saturated color was. One couldn't tell what color it was from, but one who knew what to look for could see it on a set with good focus and bandwidth.
The color subcarrier frequency for NTSC was picked at 3.579545 MHz. (In theory, TV police could sniff out that or similar PAL frequency to detect color sets radiating in B&W licensed households) Why such and odd choice for the frequency? For a horizontal scan rate of 15.734 KHz (previously 15.750 for B&W) and a vertical rate of 59.97 Hz, the dot pattern on one line was offset exactly half a dot from the adjacent line to minimize it being visible on black and white sets. (Color sets used filtering to avoid the dots, but that reduced detail until someone came up with comb filters... but that's another ramble...)
I wonder how much one could cut costs by making flat-panel greyscale displays? It would only need 1/3 as many pixels. I can just see it now... retro frames that look like the front of a 50's television hanging on the wall showing old shows in black and white. Someone could preload a system with a drive full of shows where the copyrights have run out.
I wonder if we'd grown up watching sets with the blue-lateral magnet out of adjustment, if we'd dream with everything having a blue fringe on one side, and yellow on the other?
I really really hope that future dreams don't have compression artifacts.
Well, a few years ago, when the Scientology documents were exposed to the public, I perused them out of curiosity. Even though I knew about Xenu, I was still surprised to see it all there in print. Then I ran across the man's story of getting to some advanced Thetan level, and he described the self-auditing with the e-meter. Something in his narrative caused the neurons in my own brain to fire just so, and I realized that this was what was being described in the textbook.
I think it would be interesting to research how detectable electrical currents in the human body relate to physical, mental, even emotional processes.
The E-meter isn't about anything as weird as trying to pick up signal currents in the body (at least not the model I have from about 30 years ago). It's just a resistance bridge, a device with a meter that can show small changes in resistance (inverse of conductivity). One puts a juice can in each hand and tensing of the grip and/or changes in perspiration cause a measurable shift as one responds to questions etc. It's basically doing just one of the things a so-called lie-detector does.
I was never a member of the church. I guess I should dig out the various booklets that are with the E-meter to see just how they used it. It's probably helpful in telling if someone has been successfully brainwashed or is holding back during questioning LOL.
Will someone help protect me against the free-trade exploit tool (DMCA takedown notice) that I'm told the church would use against me if/when I try to sell my E-meter on Ebay?
The most common use of firewire are removable hard drives and home video import from Mini-DV cams. There is nothing "pro" about either of those uses.
Video input doesn't have to come from just the cheapest consumer cameras! There are certainly some video producers and television stations using cameras with a Firewire interface too. Although USB 2 can give speeds similar to Firewire 400, there are quite a few devices made requiring Firewire since it came along and was popular well before USB 2. (The earlier USB 1.x was about 40 times slower)
I'd like to see at least one eSATA port provided. It would not be a replacement for all Firewire applications, but it would help for faster transfers with external drives. From what I've seen, drives in USB 2 cases max out around 1 gigabyte per minute, some of the larger SATA drives deliver close to 6 gigabytes per minute. Since downloading video is getting to be more common, and people can save large files record DTV with things like the Eye-TV USB tuners, the need for faster external drives is growing.
I would hope that it would be trivial to add a eSATA connector since there's already chipset support for SATA internally. I know with the early MacBooks, the mobile version of the ICH7 interface supported a lower FSB speed than the desktop version. The desktop version had four SATA ports.
It would be helpful to provide a variation of the eSATA data connector which would make power available for external 2.5" drives.
Having 12 Volts available, Firewire ports are good for a few other odd things USB 2 isn't too. Maybe I'm the only one on the planet that has done it, but once by candlelight during a power failure I spliced together the Firewire end of an old iPod cable and the output end cut from an A.C. adaptor, making a cable that could power a common Speedstream DSL modem from my laptop to have net access during the power outage.
But that doesn't equate to less heat dissipated in total. While I'm sure such things influence the design of a cooling system, without any specifics, there is no reason to assume it's an advantage.
If it is exceeding a specified peak temperature at the chip, spreading the same amount of energy out certainly would help. Improvements in the package design for the CPU (lower thermal resistance) might be able to lower the chip temperature sufficiently without changing the amount of power radiated. Of course improving the heat flow from the chip package to heatsink, or heatsink to ambient air, would have a similar advantage. Those methods would not require an increase in the number of systems or CPUs.
Whether Intel could actually have the chip run hotter depends of what the failure modes are. Elevated temperature generally increases the long term failure rate even if it doesn't cause short term failure. If Intel could get away with actually reducing core voltage (and thus power) slightly while still supporting the specified clock, that would be preferable to running hot.
If a design pushes CPUs closer to thermal maximums to reduce air conditioning costs, it is important to note that the time-to-failure in the event of a cooling system problem is reduced. One should plan for backup cooling, down-clocking or some other means of functioning during a cooling system malfunction.
Why would anyone want to have a light bulb with a data connection?
That was my first question too. Should we use more technology just because we can?
Addressable light bulbs might be great for legislated, remote or automatic control of energy reduction, but what about the waste when the bulb fails? There's a switching supply that gets tossed every time a CFL fails.
It would pave the way for a webcam in every light bulb. Should our light bulbs have firewalls? Will someone engineer a light bulb that streams the contents of our networks out hidden in the R.F. noise they radiate? Something new to increase the trade imbalance too. Just think of the possibilities...
It looks like it might be a good hair-dryer for hamsters, but it would radiate so much radio-frequency noise it could cause significant problems being used for computing. It certainly would be illegal to offer systems for sale using this case in the U.S.
Most people wouldn't drive a car with the muffler and catalytic converter removed. It's unfortunate that some may get poorly shielded cases like this and be just as much of a nuisance without even realizing it.
They want to SELL spectrum that'd be used for "free" service? That doesn't make sense.
It's also questionable just what they consider "not a major source of interferrence".
Some people may go to considerable trouble to pick up weak DTV signals. Signals that are weak could not be easily detected by networking gear that didn't have a large antenna attached.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is well known for ignoring community input regarding such things as media consolidation. Just when you think think current administration can't get away with anything more, it happens... (look for things stuffed into the bailout bill for instance).
There's some behind the scenes activity to try and head off actions the next administration might take to respond to the public. Here's an example.
Do you send regular mail through UPS or FedEx? No. I don't know about you, but I'd trust them more with my mail than the USPS
There are some serious problems with the USPS. Even after local media reported one postal employee being prosecuted for mail theft, it is still happening where I am. Mail with hand-written (but clearly readable) addresses (which included things like birthday and holiday cards) was often missing. Of course that's the sort of mail that might have a few dollars cash in it. Also missing, automotive registration tags, $40 credit cards for DTV converter discount....
With quite a few illegals in the state I'm in, I guess I'd expect a market for stolen auto tags. I've observed some people that can't get licenses anyway getting cheap as-is (run but fail smog) cars at Goodwill and somehow get tags for them. Add some meth users here and there and mail isn't so reliable anymore. At least private businesses are very quick to get rid of problematic employees. The government employees seem to cover for each other. (At least my complaints always got routed to the wrong people)
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the same people have credit apps/cards sent to vacant addresses and snag those too.
I feel sorry for the many good people who work for the postal service, because it doesn't take many bad apples to make the whole service look untrustworthy.
I think part of what makes companies like UPS function well is the need to be competitive. ISPs usually don't feel enough competition. If a community can do it's own fiber, I think that's great. In that case it could be more like a local-government assisted co-op.
Biden's from Delaware, the credit and banking capital of the U.S. He's the one that sponsored, introduced, and rallied support for the "anti-bankruptcy" bill which caused many families to lose their homes over the last three years.
Get your facts straight. You're fingering the wrong guy. From the wikipedia:
"The increase in Republican majorities in the Senate and House after the 2004 elections breathed new life into the bill, which was introduced in its current form by the chairman of the Finance Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.[7] The bill was supported by President George W. Bush. Tom DeLay also championed the controversial legislation. The bill passed by large margins, 302-126 in the House[8] and 74-25 in the Senate[9], and was signed into law by President Bush."
The earlier version HR-833, which saw a pocket veto by Bill Clinton, was sponsored by Rep. George Gekas [R-PA]. Leading up to that, S-625 (which never became law) was sponsored by Sen. Charles Grassley [R-IA].
Under the old bill, homes were protected; under the new bill they were not.
That claim isn't true either. It's those who had their homes for shorter periods that were limited to $125,000 protection of equity under the law. Very few struggling people that have had their homes a short time have near that much equity, so most of the time that isn't a problem either. Related wikipedia text from same bill:
"Under the new law, the homestead exemption, which allows bankruptcy filers in some states to exempt the value of their homes from creditors, is limited in various ways. If a filer acquired their home less than 1,215 days (40 months) before filing, or if they have been convicted of security law violations or been found guilty of certain crimes, they may only exempt up to $125,000 (adjusted periodically), regardless of a state's exemption allowance. Filers must also wait 730 days before they are allowed to use their state's exemptions."
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Uh, they've already sold off the old frequency used by the analog stations to Verizon. They aren't moving the digital stations.
Because of the analog stations still in operation and the interference issues from so many (digital AND analog) stations being on at once, some of the digital transmitters operating now are on temporary channels and WILL move again at transition time. That certainly applies to the stations using channels above 51.
Although your digital receiver probably displays a number with a decimal after it as the channel, much of the time that number is the old analog channel not the channel actually being used for the digital transmission.
With stations shifting around and a few new ones appearing, viewers will need to use the scan-channel or add channel functions to get the new/moved signals. So even those that think they're already set up have a little work left to do to see everything that their equipment can get.
Put in for our household's DTV converter box coupons... someone stole them in the mail. Called up to ask where they were, was told "by the terms of the law, we aren't allowed to issue a replacement if yours are never delivered to you."
My coupons were also stolen. I've had quite a bit of trouble with mail theft. They caught one local postal worker but it still continues. In my case it has always been things with likely/obvious value that vanish, never things like utility bills.
I'll never get registration tags for my car by mail again.
I think it was a mistake issuing cards that didn't have the recipient name/address printed on them, and that lacked a requirement of photo ID and proof of address for redemption.
The digital signal I get is a little flaky but they are supposed to boost the signal after the switch.
they? Changes in digital facilities at the cut-over date vary on a case by case basis.
There are going to be fewer channels available for tv after the switch. We'll be using 2 through 51, except there is no channel 37 (that's kept silent for radio astronomy).
Some stations will use the same digital facilities after the switch, so those probably won't improve.
Some of the digital signals already on are using channels above 51 and will move. Due to interference issues, some digital signals are temporarily using lower power and/or a different channel. Those stations will likely have a change in signal coverage (mostly for the better) when the transition is complete.
Some stations that are digital on UHF now will move to VHF channels (perhaps their former analog channel) when the analog signal is shut down. Although that may mean a better signal for some viewers, those who installed a UHF-specific antenna for DTV may find their antenna marginal.
UHF antennas still pick up some VHF signal, more so with channels 7-13 than 2-6, but one would have to be in a pretty strong signal area for that to work.
Some stations will be buying antennas or other equipment from other stations as channel-switches occur (transmitting antennas are generally made for a specific channel or narrow range of them)
Rescheduling antenna and general engineering work will be a headache at the switch if the date changes.
Whatever you're using now, plan on using the channel-scan function to relocate stations that have moved after the change. In some places there may be new channels coming on the air (some are low power) scanning periodically to see what's out there isn't a bad idea.
You can see what's licensed or has construction permits for the various types of tv stations using the FCC TV database.
You can get an idea of relative signal coverage as well as what's in your area at tvfool.com. Seeing different colors for various relative signal levels in a stations' coverage is very helpful in determining what kind of antenna you might need to get a particular station.
Using a good outdoor antenna, a preamp at the antenna, and modern low loss coax cable makes a huge difference for weak signals.
Some areas have analog low-power tv or translator (rebroadcast on shifted channel) stations that will continue to operate after the switch. If you're using a DTV converter for an analog tv you'll need a converter with a "pass-through" feature to allow those signals to bypass the converter and still get to the tv. (may require turning converter off for pass-through, much like behavior with old VCRs when not using VCR tuner)
Actually, you could produce certain levels of X-ray by using color CRT tube (non-broken!) if you misalign the rays so that they slam into steel mesh stencil, which is normally placed inside it, instead of passing through the holes of the mesh. If you ever played with magnet and TV screen, blurring the picture, changing the colors, you've got a doze of it.
That is why having unchecked magnetic field near your CRT monitors (grid power transformers, speakers with powerful magnets) is a BAD idea!
Uh, no... that's entirely wrong.
The electron beams (there are three for color) scan from the left side of the screen, and top to bottom to trace the picture. The beam size is greater than the opening hole or slot size in the aperture mask (the metal screen you speak of) and much of the beam energy normally is lost hitting the mask. The three beams passing through a given mask hole or slot come from different angles. Coming out the other side of the aperture mask (also known as a shadow mask) each beam normally can only hit the phosphor coating on the back of the screen face that produces the desired color (red, green, or blue). The three phosphor types are on the screen in a pattern of dot, segment, or line trios depending on the tube design.
Misadjustment of magnetic components by the electron guns, or stray magnetic fields near the screen result in beams hitting the wrong phosphor, causing the wrong colors to appear. A magnet near the screen, or a magnetized mask, may give a tie-dyed type of effect. Minor misadjustment usually causes a color shift near the screen edges or corners.
X-rays are not normally a problem if a tube is run at rated anode voltage and beam current (brightness). The lead added to the glass helps absorb the small amount of radiation that may be produced.
In the era of tube-type color televisions, the high voltage power supply was regulated by use of a shunt regulator tube circuit. Basically when the brightness was low, the shunt regulator would compensate by drawing the current that the screen wasn't in order to keep the load on the power supply (and thus the voltage) fairly constant. X-rays from color tvs got attention around 1964 when G.E. sold some cut-corner designed sets that lacked the usually metal caging around the shunt-regulator tube. Later TVs had lead added to (or even around) the regulator glass.
The regulator voltage setting had been adjustable, often from the back of a set. Later it was usually factory preset, with the adjustment glued in place to prevent misadjustment.
The thing I don't full understand here is how a cooling device that is the same area as the chip itself accomplishes much. It moves the heat.
Think of heat flow as depending on two things; the temperature difference between source and destination, and the total thermal resistance in-between. The thermal resistance is usually expressed as the temperature rise in degrees C per Watt. A small amount of thermal compound filling in tiny voids reduces the resistance between the chip and the heatsink (a layer that's too thick actually adds resistance in-between). As far as the chip is concerned, a peltier device is like inserting a negative thermal resistance in series, bring down the total and increasing the heat flow. The heatsink will get hotter causing it to radiate/conduct more heat. Some of that heat is additional heat that came from the CPU, some is the heat from the power consumption of the peltier device.
End-users tend to look at just the thermal resistances from the I.C. package to ambient air, but that isn't the whole story. Are two chips with 65 Watts to dissipate equal? They might look the same to us, but a 45 nm chip being smaller than a 65 nm chip would have less surface area to transfer heat to the I.C. package. It is very likely that achieving a given chip-to-case thermal resistance is increasingly difficult as chips get smaller. With that in mind, it makes sense to be looking at new designs to improve heat flow from the hottest parts of the chip. The hottest parts matter the most since it is generally exceeding a certain temperature that causes damage or malfunction.
Some of the thermal and small-size considerations in chip design today resemble some that have been with us for a long time. Radio-frequency power transistors have had to use smaller chips than conventional power transistors for the sake of speed. Even 30 years ago, designers had to worry about metal-migration from the high current density (per unit area). Variations in temperature across a chip would lead to the hotter areas doing a thermal-runaway type thing (the properties would shift in such a way that the hotter area would take an increasing share of the current, getting even hotter...). Designers of what looked like one transistor sometimes had to break the Emitter into a number of sites run in parallel, each with an small on-chip current equalizing series resistor, just to make the heat generation across the chip more uniform.
I think some art museums really ought to have a corner for chip designs.
Many skilled artists have worked hard to make chips what they are.
Techno-nonsense in shows has made me cringe more than once. There was an episode of Burn Notice where something was to be covertly X-rayed in the trunk of a car. Energized by a stun-gun, the radiation source was an electron gun broken off of a television picture tube (c.r.t.).
Nevermind that not under vacuum that would be no more than a few arcing pieces of metal.
Now if they pulled a shunt-regulator tube out of an old set from a thrift store...
Think about it; you probably wouldn't think twice about trying to plug in an old television from the 50's would you?
Well actually... yes I would! If a 50's television sat for an extended period without being run, you'd run a very high risk of electrolytic capacitor failure if you simply plugged the set in and turned it on.
If you're lucky and haven't had the electrolyte dry up over the years, you still probably need to "reform" it by bringing up the voltage very gradually.
Before we know it skynet will have control....
This looks like a job for Bender
With many chipsets/motherboards already supporting SATA and the drives being widespread as well, many of US could enjoy much (about 6x ?) better than USB 2 port speeds for external drives by simply having the external ("e" in eSATA) connectors available.
The Macintosh and the OS as separate parts or something else?
Prior to the Macintosh, and for some time after that, the Apple II series computers were the biggest-shipping product and profit center for Apple.
I have a 22+ year old microwave that won't die.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work correctly with PlaysForSure, no matter how many times I've called Microsoft.
Place a cup of water in the oven along with the PlaysForSure device to avoid possible problems from excessive standing waves..
Some microwaves do last a very long time. It wasn't that long ago I finally stopped using one that had a mechanical timer. Except for not having a rotating tray, I really liked it.
With no standby power for control electronics I figured I saved $1 a month in power for many years.
Many people cause premature failure of microwave ovens by routinely hitting the button that opens the door before the oven has stopped or they've hit stop. In many ovens that eventually causes the contacts in one of the door-interlock safety switches to burn up from directly interrupting the incoming power to the magnetron supply. It's a very simple fix, but most people don't know how or bother.
Just before the islamic revolution, the Shah had acquired US made bank note printing presses, the exact same used to make US dollars. So they can already make the most real fake notes
The Shah has been out of power for close to 30 years. The look and technology of U.S. currency has changed much in that time. There is much more to it than just the presses.
Being an oil-exporting nation, isn't it likely that Iran has enough cash without resorting to fake currency?
Trade restrictions and currency are separate issues.
Instead of what sounds like raw-rectified power, they should have some intelligent (and too fast to see) flicker. Since LEDs could easily handled modulated power to send a data stream of something...
hmmm... car tail lights could too, but what to say?
The summary is misleading.
The paper describes a method of simply and efficiently coupling energy from the transmitter VCO chip to the main antenna, making good use of the R.F. energy that chip provides. It seems that most of the power savings is from avoiding (power used by) an external buffer amplifier by eliminating the amplifier.
That's great if the chip can provide sufficient output power, and if the spectral purity is good enough to comply with F.C.C. or other requirements. I'd expect that most cell phones need more transmit power than provided by the example in the paper, but perhaps the same methods are viable with higher power modules.
Note that the power savings only occurs in transmit mode, and the savings is only in the circuit providing signal to the antenna. Something like an iPhone has a bunch of other electronics and a display using considerable power, none of which is affected by the changes proposed in the paper.
What's presented is innovative but in reality isn't likely to do much for the overall power consumption of a complex product like an iPhone. The savings would be more likely to amount to something in smaller and and much simpler devices, more along the lines of battery powered WiFi or BlueTooth products.
They just took up to the space station a machine that makes drinking water out of PISS. Now THAT'S impressive.
As impressive as that is, the U.S. market is pretty demanding.
To have a real hit here they'd have to make one that turns piss back into beer...
Hmmm, I wonder if the people closely watching a black and white set that had wide video bandwidth would dream with the visible dot pattern on the parts of the picture where the most brightly saturated color was. One couldn't tell what color it was from, but one who knew what to look for could see it on a set with good focus and bandwidth.
The color subcarrier frequency for NTSC was picked at 3.579545 MHz. (In theory, TV police could sniff out that or similar PAL frequency to detect color sets radiating in B&W licensed households) Why such and odd choice for the frequency? For a horizontal scan rate of 15.734 KHz (previously 15.750 for B&W) and a vertical rate of 59.97 Hz, the dot pattern on one line was offset exactly half a dot from the adjacent line to minimize it being visible on black and white sets. (Color sets used filtering to avoid the dots, but that reduced detail until someone came up with comb filters... but that's another ramble...)
I wonder how much one could cut costs by making flat-panel greyscale displays? It would only need 1/3 as many pixels. I can just see it now... retro frames that look like the front of a 50's television hanging on the wall showing old shows in black and white. Someone could preload a system with a drive full of shows where the copyrights have run out.
I wonder if we'd grown up watching sets with the blue-lateral magnet out of adjustment, if we'd dream with everything having a blue fringe on one side, and yellow on the other?
I really really hope that future dreams don't have compression artifacts.
Well, a few years ago, when the Scientology documents were exposed to the public, I perused them out of curiosity. Even though I knew about Xenu, I was still surprised to see it all there in print. Then I ran across the man's story of getting to some advanced Thetan level, and he described the self-auditing with the e-meter. Something in his narrative caused the neurons in my own brain to fire just so, and I realized that this was what was being described in the textbook.
I think it would be interesting to research how detectable electrical currents in the human body relate to physical, mental, even emotional processes.
The E-meter isn't about anything as weird as trying to pick up signal currents in the body (at least not the model I have from about 30 years ago). It's just a resistance bridge, a device with a meter that can show small changes in resistance (inverse of conductivity). One puts a juice can in each hand and tensing of the grip and/or changes in perspiration cause a measurable shift as one responds to questions etc. It's basically doing just one of the things a so-called lie-detector does.
I was never a member of the church. I guess I should dig out the various booklets that are with the E-meter to see just how they used it. It's probably helpful in telling if someone has been successfully brainwashed or is holding back during questioning LOL.
Will someone help protect me against the free-trade exploit tool (DMCA takedown notice) that I'm told the church would use against me if/when I try to sell my E-meter on Ebay?
The E-meter isn't a fake or an unauthorized copy.
The most common use of firewire are removable hard drives and home video import from Mini-DV cams. There is nothing "pro" about either of those uses.
Video input doesn't have to come from just the cheapest consumer cameras! There are certainly some video producers and television stations using cameras with a Firewire interface too.
Although USB 2 can give speeds similar to Firewire 400, there are quite a few devices made requiring Firewire since it came along and was popular well before USB 2. (The earlier USB 1.x was about 40 times slower)
I'd like to see at least one eSATA port provided. It would not be a replacement for all Firewire applications, but it would help for faster transfers with external drives. From what I've seen, drives in USB 2 cases max out around 1 gigabyte per minute, some of the larger SATA drives deliver close to 6 gigabytes per minute. Since downloading video is getting to be more common, and people can save large files record DTV with things like the Eye-TV USB tuners, the need for faster external drives is growing.
I would hope that it would be trivial to add a eSATA connector since there's already chipset support for SATA internally. I know with the early MacBooks, the mobile version of the ICH7 interface supported a lower FSB speed than the desktop version. The desktop version had four SATA ports.
It would be helpful to provide a variation of the eSATA data connector which would make power available for external 2.5" drives.
Having 12 Volts available, Firewire ports are good for a few other odd things USB 2 isn't too.
Maybe I'm the only one on the planet that has done it, but once by candlelight during a power failure I spliced together the Firewire end of an old iPod cable and the output end cut from an A.C. adaptor, making a cable that could power a common Speedstream DSL modem from my laptop to have net access during the power outage.
But that doesn't equate to less heat dissipated in total. While I'm sure such things influence the design of a cooling system, without any specifics, there is no reason to assume it's an advantage.
If it is exceeding a specified peak temperature at the chip, spreading the same amount of energy out certainly would help. Improvements in the package design for the CPU (lower thermal resistance) might be able to lower the chip temperature sufficiently without changing the amount of power radiated. Of course improving the heat flow from the chip package to heatsink, or heatsink to ambient air, would have a similar advantage. Those methods would not require an increase in the number of systems or CPUs.
Whether Intel could actually have the chip run hotter depends of what the failure modes are. Elevated temperature generally increases the long term failure rate even if it doesn't cause short term failure. If Intel could get away with actually reducing core voltage (and thus power) slightly while still supporting the specified clock, that would be preferable to running hot.
If a design pushes CPUs closer to thermal maximums to reduce air conditioning costs, it is important to note that the time-to-failure in the event of a cooling system problem is reduced. One should plan for backup cooling, down-clocking or some other means of functioning during a cooling system malfunction.
Why would anyone want to have a light bulb with a data connection?
That was my first question too. Should we use more technology just because we can?
Addressable light bulbs might be great for legislated, remote or automatic control of energy reduction, but what about the waste when the bulb fails? There's a switching supply that gets tossed every time a CFL fails.
It would pave the way for a webcam in every light bulb. Should our light bulbs have firewalls?
Will someone engineer a light bulb that streams the contents of our networks out hidden in the R.F. noise they radiate? Something new to increase the trade imbalance too. Just think of the possibilities...
It looks like it might be a good hair-dryer for hamsters, but it would radiate so much radio-frequency noise it could cause significant problems being used for computing.
It certainly would be illegal to offer systems for sale using this case in the U.S.
Most people wouldn't drive a car with the muffler and catalytic converter removed.
It's unfortunate that some may get poorly shielded cases like this and be just as much of a nuisance without even realizing it.
They want to SELL spectrum that'd be used for "free" service? That doesn't make sense.
It's also questionable just what they consider "not a major source of interferrence".
Some people may go to considerable trouble to pick up weak DTV signals. Signals that are weak could not be easily detected by networking gear that didn't have a large antenna attached.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is well known for ignoring community input regarding such things as media consolidation. Just when you think think current administration can't get away with anything more, it happens... (look for things stuffed into the bailout bill for instance).
There's some behind the scenes activity to try and head off actions the next administration might take to respond to the public. Here's an example.
Do you send regular mail through UPS or FedEx? No. I don't know about you, but I'd trust them more with my mail than the USPS
There are some serious problems with the USPS. Even after local media reported one postal employee being prosecuted for mail theft, it is still happening where I am. Mail with hand-written (but clearly readable) addresses (which included things like birthday and holiday cards) was often missing. Of course that's the sort of mail that might have a few dollars cash in it.
Also missing, automotive registration tags, $40 credit cards for DTV converter discount....
With quite a few illegals in the state I'm in, I guess I'd expect a market for stolen auto tags.
I've observed some people that can't get licenses anyway getting cheap as-is (run but fail smog) cars at Goodwill and somehow get tags for them.
Add some meth users here and there and mail isn't so reliable anymore. At least private businesses are very quick to get rid of problematic employees. The government employees seem to cover for each other. (At least my complaints always got routed to the wrong people)
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the same people have credit apps/cards sent to vacant addresses and snag those too.
I feel sorry for the many good people who work for the postal service, because it doesn't take many bad apples to make the whole service look untrustworthy.
I think part of what makes companies like UPS function well is the need to be competitive.
ISPs usually don't feel enough competition. If a community can do it's own fiber, I think that's great. In that case it could be more like a local-government assisted co-op.
Biden's from Delaware, the credit and banking capital of the U.S. He's the one that sponsored, introduced, and rallied support for the "anti-bankruptcy" bill which caused many families to lose their homes over the last three years.
Get your facts straight. You're fingering the wrong guy. From the wikipedia:
"The increase in Republican majorities in the Senate and House after the 2004 elections breathed new life into the bill, which was introduced in its current form by the chairman of the Finance Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.[7] The bill was supported by President George W. Bush. Tom DeLay also championed the controversial legislation. The bill passed by large margins, 302-126 in the House[8] and 74-25 in the Senate[9], and was signed into law by President Bush."
The earlier version HR-833, which saw a pocket veto by Bill Clinton, was sponsored by Rep. George Gekas [R-PA]. Leading up to that, S-625 (which never became law) was sponsored by Sen. Charles Grassley [R-IA].
Under the old bill, homes were protected; under the new bill they were not.
That claim isn't true either. It's those who had their homes for shorter periods that were limited to $125,000 protection of equity under the law. Very few struggling people that have had their homes a short time have near that much equity, so most of the time that isn't a problem either.
Related wikipedia text from same bill:
"Under the new law, the homestead exemption, which allows bankruptcy filers in some states to exempt the value of their homes from creditors, is limited in various ways. If a filer acquired their home less than 1,215 days (40 months) before filing, or if they have been convicted of security law violations or been found guilty of certain crimes, they may only exempt up to $125,000 (adjusted periodically), regardless of a state's exemption allowance. Filers must also wait 730 days before they are allowed to use their state's exemptions."