Interesting that you bring up that example. We have been using bread machines for about five or six years. The first one wasn't flexible enough and it only made small loaves. The second one is great, but eventually we wore out the bread pan (fatigue cracks in the base where the kneading paddle attaches) and had to replace it. So we're in for several hundred dollars so far.
The flour is reasonably cheap, but when you figure in 3 cups per loaf, it starts to add up - maybe 25 to 30 cents per loaf. Good flour makes a huge difference in how consistently things turn out, too... you get what you pay for. The other stuff adds to the cost in a significant way too - honey is not cheap and when you make four or five loaves a week, you go through it pretty fast. Having said all that, fresh baked bread from the machine has way more texture and flavor than even the premium breads from the grocery store, so it's worth the cost. If you happen to have a good bakery nearby and you can run there at a moment's notice to pick up a fresh loaf, then I envy you.
It all comes back to what I said in my other post (about milling machines) - if you can buy a widget, then chances are it will be cheaper than making it yourself. Doing it yourself gives you the flexibility to customize things to your liking, and that's worth a lot in some cases, but it won't be cheaper than getting a mass-market equivalent.
I (used to) occasionally make mountainbike widgets on my milling machine, such as disc brake caliper adapters, rim brake booster arches, chainring bash guards, handlebar stems, and derailleur hangers, on my milling machine. I tried to focus on parts or sizes that weren't available in the general market or that someone needed but wasn't available on short notice, because in low volume, ANYTHING costs more to make than to buy, especially when you figure in the cost of tools (on top of your time - even at minimum wage). This fact disappointed a lot of people that figured that I should be able to make anything they could also buy at the local bike store, for 1/10 the price, because hey, you only have to pay for the metal, right?
The main convenience of home fab will be (or is) flexibility - you can effectively build good custom parts in low volumes. There is no economic viability to copying stuff you can already buy in the mass market, where the manufacturer has huge pressure to build it for the lowest possible cost.
What Wanker said, plus: Contrast ratio is 550:1, still not up to where CRTs are, and the resolution is 1280 x 1024.
I'll wait until 19" LCDs can do 1600 x 1200 at a reasonable price, AND have deep contrast ratio, AND a good real-world refresh rate. And I have two 19" monitors on my desk... good thing I don't have to move them often.
The Stirling engine allows you to produce mechanical work from a temperature difference. Some of the uses to which Craven plans to put his heat pump don't need mechanical work - so in that case it would be inefficient to put a Stirling engine in the middle of the system.
One cool way in which a variant of the Stirling engine could be used is that the cold water flow could be used as the cooling element in a fluid-piston Stirling engine, which is very well suited to pumping water. In this way the water would pump itself without extra energy input (other than the temperature difference between the cold water coming up and the warm water at the ocean surface), once it got going.
Some of his propellant experiments were forced on him by the government not allowing him to use high-grade peroxide, and/or the unwillingness of the vendor(s) of the stuff to ship it to him.
The other thing you have to take into consideration is that he ended up doing some groundbreaking work on deep-throttleable engines. Most rocket engines can't be throttled over any significant thrust range.
Comments in the code are for explaining WHY you did something, not for repeating what you did. If I choose to use a quicksort for some task, and there is a technical reason not to be using a heap sort even though on the surface it would appear to be better that way, then I can put that in comments and five years down the road I or my peers won't make a dumb mistake by swapping out the sort mechanism on a whim.
The other reason for putting in 'why' comments is that doing so might spark some critical thinking in your or your peers' brains down the road (even the next morning), and as a result you'll fix what you did before the product gets to the customers.
ooooh... 20 MPG. "Better than the worst SUVs" is not what the world needs. A motorcycle with 65 HP is FAST, it doesn't take up nearly as much road as a car, and it will get decent mileage. A bicycle with a 5 HP motor or engine would get you around town at 30 MPH or better, and that combination would get you mileage in the sixties at least.
Fair comment. Increased mental alertness directed at the traffic situation would make your driving better. However, getting caught up in a thought experiment, or a perilous situation, as described by the narrator of an audio book, is not good for your driving. While we can all say "well I'd turn it off when I found it to be getting too distracting", the reality is likely that most folks would only turn it off only after realizing they'd just had a close call.
Thanks for splitting hairs, and the gratuitous judgment on my mental abilities, AC. The poster didn't specifically mention driving, but the moderator added the note about self-driving tour guides, which makes my previous post a reasonably fair comment.
My daily 30 minutes (minimum) commute, between which endpoints there isn't public transportation that would take less than two hours each way, features a LOT of carnage that is typically due to people not paying enough attention at the right time. I'd be more than happy to give up the privilege of accumulating 45 miles on my vehicle every day for a bus seat, and I've used public transit at previous jobs where it was an effective way of getting there and back.
Seriously... I see way too many people that are doing who-knows-what behind the wheel, with visible evidence of the impact it has on the amount of attention they're paying to traffic. Weaving all over a lane, tailgating, running traffic lights, etcetera. I want my in-car entertainment to be duh-whatever. If it's something that makes you think, then it's reducing the bandwidth you have to be putting towards the road.
And those were built without the help of computers.
Not true. They didn't have electronic computers, but the reams of calculation done on electromechanical punchcard machines pioneered a lot of the numerical methods tricks still in use today. Richard Feynman described the calculating machines and their use in several of his books.
Not necessarily. If I'm searching for Brand X automotive parts, I do NOT want hits for brand Y. I do want hits for dealers of Brand X, and reviews of Brand X equipment, and I expect to get them, not shills for others' imitations. If it then turns out that the dealers also carry other brands, I can find them through the dealers' websites.
I assumed that the odds of it being in the equatorial plane are much less than it being close to the plane of the ecliptic. If it was orbiting the sun significantly out of the plane of the ecliptic, then the odds of it even getting close to Earth in the first place are... astronomical?
The GPS constellation orbits at about 20,000 km altitude, so they'll definitely be safe. The geosynchronous comsats are more vulnerable, but that's only significant if the asteroid were to approach in the equatorial plane. Since the equatorial plane is inclined about 23 degrees to the ecliptic, it's unlikely in the extreme that it would be able to hit a geosynchronous satellite.
That's fine if you're just interested in assigning blame. I (and a lot of others) were pointing out some ways to deal with the reality of unpatched Windoze distributions still being sold with new PCs.
Your gasoline vendor doesn't much care about what you do with the gas you buy - so long as it doesn't cause a big fireball at the service station. To that end, they protect the delivery mechanisms and they tell you not to smoke or produce sparks while refueling.
If not the writer of the article, then at least the DSL service provider should have added some not-very-fine print in their installation instructions, and possibly an appropriate service pack CD, to make sure that their new customer didn't instantly become a participant in the big ongoing worm/virus/spyware propagation chain.
Next to the user, the DSL service provider takes the biggest hit to their productivity when someone on their network gets their machine corrupted - you'd think they would take some precautions.
I'll bite. 100m diameter gives 7850 square meters area, so the power density is 7600 watts per square meter - toasty warm. I'd say that's between five and ten times what the inside of your microwave sees. You'd definitely want anything that's exposed to that intensity to reflect or deflect, rather than absorb, the radiation.
Since the beam was intended to be parallel, the distance doesn't matter. You could do this I suppose if you built a 100m diameter maser, although it's not immediately apparent to me how exactly that would be done.
Sure, but any rigid truss arrangement that can transfer the thrust generated by the sail in compression or bending loads will still be far heavier than a set of cables that can handle the same load in tension.
The microwave radiation thing wouldn't be an issue to the occupants of the ship - they're going to be sitting inside a metal enclosure, and will be shielded from the radiation the same way you are if you're standing in front of your countertop microwave waiting for the water to boil. Similarly, the metal enclosure can be designed as a deflector for the microwaves, so that it won't melt.
If you need a time tracking application, and part of the answer is a database, then use a COTS database, and custom forms as required. No need to write your own database engine. This is an example that's come up at one of my past employers - they bought a hideously expensive all-custom time and parts tracking system that required consulting $$ to develop each access menu, and it was such a piece of sh!t that we ended up getting one of our guys that had done some database dabbling on the side to create an app with equal functionality and much less overhead (not to speak of the cost) using an SQL database and some Borland Builder front-end pieces.
Cache them where? In the filesystem or in the registry? At a discoverable file or key location, presumably?
This would only be secure if the cache was secured using a secret key (i.e. using local serial number information that wasn't ever visible from the network a machine might be on).
Without getting caught up in titles, having local talent is a prerequisite for both doing in-house design and implementation, as well as for doing due diligence on outsourced product. If you're being put in a position of having to screen outsourcing vendors and their product, and you don't like it, then let your upper management know, and get out as fast as you can. Within the next couple of years, the real economics of outsourcing will become apparent to the upper management across North America, because the new-product release dates for everything the outsourcers make are going to lag behind the dates that in-house developement can achieve. Spending less on development does not equate more money in sales or profit. You still get what you pay for, and that's never been more true than it is in today's workplace.
Agreed. I was approaching it from a purely geometrical point of view. In my past life working on GPS receiver stuff, we'd typically acquire satellites very close to the horizon, but not get good signal to noise until they were at least 5 degrees above the horizon. As an offhand guess I think that would only knock about 1000km off the round-trip distance on a direct linkup. Once you start adding in space based relays, you can get some significant delays.
How does that work? In the worst case the satellite appears on the horizon, which adds one Earth radius to the range. The total distance changes to about 84000 km (from 72000km in the parent post), which still leaves the propagation time at under 1/3 second.
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The flour is reasonably cheap, but when you figure in 3 cups per loaf, it starts to add up - maybe 25 to 30 cents per loaf. Good flour makes a huge difference in how consistently things turn out, too... you get what you pay for. The other stuff adds to the cost in a significant way too - honey is not cheap and when you make four or five loaves a week, you go through it pretty fast.
Having said all that, fresh baked bread from the machine has way more texture and flavor than even the premium breads from the grocery store, so it's worth the cost. If you happen to have a good bakery nearby and you can run there at a moment's notice to pick up a fresh loaf, then I envy you.
It all comes back to what I said in my other post (about milling machines) - if you can buy a widget, then chances are it will be cheaper than making it yourself. Doing it yourself gives you the flexibility to customize things to your liking, and that's worth a lot in some cases, but it won't be cheaper than getting a mass-market equivalent.
I (used to) occasionally make mountainbike widgets on my milling machine, such as disc brake caliper adapters, rim brake booster arches, chainring bash guards, handlebar stems, and derailleur hangers, on my milling machine. I tried to focus on parts or sizes that weren't available in the general market or that someone needed but wasn't available on short notice, because in low volume, ANYTHING costs more to make than to buy, especially when you figure in the cost of tools (on top of your time - even at minimum wage). This fact disappointed a lot of people that figured that I should be able to make anything they could also buy at the local bike store, for 1/10 the price, because hey, you only have to pay for the metal, right?
The main convenience of home fab will be (or is) flexibility - you can effectively build good custom parts in low volumes. There is no economic viability to copying stuff you can already buy in the mass market, where the manufacturer has huge pressure to build it for the lowest possible cost.
What's the debate going to be about? :)
I'll wait until 19" LCDs can do 1600 x 1200 at a reasonable price, AND have deep contrast ratio, AND a good real-world refresh rate. And I have two 19" monitors on my desk... good thing I don't have to move them often.
One cool way in which a variant of the Stirling engine could be used is that the cold water flow could be used as the cooling element in a fluid-piston Stirling engine, which is very well suited to pumping water. In this way the water would pump itself without extra energy input (other than the temperature difference between the cold water coming up and the warm water at the ocean surface), once it got going.
The other thing you have to take into consideration is that he ended up doing some groundbreaking work on deep-throttleable engines. Most rocket engines can't be throttled over any significant thrust range.
The other reason for putting in 'why' comments is that doing so might spark some critical thinking in your or your peers' brains down the road (even the next morning), and as a result you'll fix what you did before the product gets to the customers.
ooooh... 20 MPG. "Better than the worst SUVs" is not what the world needs. A motorcycle with 65 HP is FAST, it doesn't take up nearly as much road as a car, and it will get decent mileage. A bicycle with a 5 HP motor or engine would get you around town at 30 MPH or better, and that combination would get you mileage in the sixties at least.
Fair comment. Increased mental alertness directed at the traffic situation would make your driving better. However, getting caught up in a thought experiment, or a perilous situation, as described by the narrator of an audio book, is not good for your driving. While we can all say "well I'd turn it off when I found it to be getting too distracting", the reality is likely that most folks would only turn it off only after realizing they'd just had a close call.
My daily 30 minutes (minimum) commute, between which endpoints there isn't public transportation that would take less than two hours each way, features a LOT of carnage that is typically due to people not paying enough attention at the right time. I'd be more than happy to give up the privilege of accumulating 45 miles on my vehicle every day for a bus seat, and I've used public transit at previous jobs where it was an effective way of getting there and back.
Seriously... I see way too many people that are doing who-knows-what behind the wheel, with visible evidence of the impact it has on the amount of attention they're paying to traffic. Weaving all over a lane, tailgating, running traffic lights, etcetera.
I want my in-car entertainment to be duh-whatever. If it's something that makes you think, then it's reducing the bandwidth you have to be putting towards the road.
Not true. They didn't have electronic computers, but the reams of calculation done on electromechanical punchcard machines pioneered a lot of the numerical methods tricks still in use today. Richard Feynman described the calculating machines and their use in several of his books.
Not necessarily. If I'm searching for Brand X automotive parts, I do NOT want hits for brand Y. I do want hits for dealers of Brand X, and reviews of Brand X equipment, and I expect to get them, not shills for others' imitations. If it then turns out that the dealers also carry other brands, I can find them through the dealers' websites.
I assumed that the odds of it being in the equatorial plane are much less than it being close to the plane of the ecliptic. If it was orbiting the sun significantly out of the plane of the ecliptic, then the odds of it even getting close to Earth in the first place are ... astronomical?
The GPS constellation orbits at about 20,000 km altitude, so they'll definitely be safe. The geosynchronous comsats are more vulnerable, but that's only significant if the asteroid were to approach in the equatorial plane. Since the equatorial plane is inclined about 23 degrees to the ecliptic, it's unlikely in the extreme that it would be able to hit a geosynchronous satellite.
That's fine if you're just interested in assigning blame. I (and a lot of others) were pointing out some ways to deal with the reality of unpatched Windoze distributions still being sold with new PCs.
Your gasoline vendor doesn't much care about what you do with the gas you buy - so long as it doesn't cause a big fireball at the service station. To that end, they protect the delivery mechanisms and they tell you not to smoke or produce sparks while refueling.
If not the writer of the article, then at least the DSL service provider should have added some not-very-fine print in their installation instructions, and possibly an appropriate service pack CD, to make sure that their new customer didn't instantly become a participant in the big ongoing worm/virus/spyware propagation chain.
Next to the user, the DSL service provider takes the biggest hit to their productivity when someone on their network gets their machine corrupted - you'd think they would take some precautions.
I'll bite. 100m diameter gives 7850 square meters area, so the power density is 7600 watts per square meter - toasty warm. I'd say that's between five and ten times what the inside of your microwave sees. You'd definitely want anything that's exposed to that intensity to reflect or deflect, rather than absorb, the radiation.
Since the beam was intended to be parallel, the distance doesn't matter. You could do this I suppose if you built a 100m diameter maser, although it's not immediately apparent to me how exactly that would be done.
Sure, but any rigid truss arrangement that can transfer the thrust generated by the sail in compression or bending loads will still be far heavier than a set of cables that can handle the same load in tension.
The microwave radiation thing wouldn't be an issue to the occupants of the ship - they're going to be sitting inside a metal enclosure, and will be shielded from the radiation the same way you are if you're standing in front of your countertop microwave waiting for the water to boil. Similarly, the metal enclosure can be designed as a deflector for the microwaves, so that it won't melt.
... Putting a sail at the back of a ship is like pushing on a rope, since the sail won't be rigid.
If you need a time tracking application, and part of the answer is a database, then use a COTS database, and custom forms as required. No need to write your own database engine. This is an example that's come up at one of my past employers - they bought a hideously expensive all-custom time and parts tracking system that required consulting $$ to develop each access menu, and it was such a piece of sh!t that we ended up getting one of our guys that had done some database dabbling on the side to create an app with equal functionality and much less overhead (not to speak of the cost) using an SQL database and some Borland Builder front-end pieces.
Cache them where? In the filesystem or in the registry? At a discoverable file or key location, presumably?
This would only be secure if the cache was secured using a secret key (i.e. using local serial number information that wasn't ever visible from the network a machine might be on).
Without getting caught up in titles, having local talent is a prerequisite for both doing in-house design and implementation, as well as for doing due diligence on outsourced product. If you're being put in a position of having to screen outsourcing vendors and their product, and you don't like it, then let your upper management know, and get out as fast as you can. Within the next couple of years, the real economics of outsourcing will become apparent to the upper management across North America, because the new-product release dates for everything the outsourcers make are going to lag behind the dates that in-house developement can achieve.
Spending less on development does not equate more money in sales or profit. You still get what you pay for, and that's never been more true than it is in today's workplace.
Agreed. I was approaching it from a purely geometrical point of view. In my past life working on GPS receiver stuff, we'd typically acquire satellites very close to the horizon, but not get good signal to noise until they were at least 5 degrees above the horizon. As an offhand guess I think that would only knock about 1000km off the round-trip distance on a direct linkup. Once you start adding in space based relays, you can get some significant delays.
How does that work? In the worst case the satellite appears on the horizon, which adds one Earth radius to the range. The total distance changes to about 84000 km (from 72000km in the parent post), which still leaves the propagation time at under 1/3 second.