1. Small form factor devices. A cell phone WITHOUT a high-ratio DC-DC converter will always be smaller, lighter, and generate less heat than one WITH a high-ratio DC-DC converter. This is obvious. Therefore, under the suggested plan will either require larger devices, or DC-DC wall warts instead of the much-less-fashionable AC-DC wall warts that nobody likes.
Yes some devices will end up with DC-DC wall warts. This is particularly true for portable devices. For the non-portable ones, a DC-DC converter tends to be inside already -- perhaps with a lower ratio, but I have seen quite a lot of consumer electronics with 12V or 15V wall warts -- there is no way the actual electronics get 15V.
2. Ease of safety approval. It is cheaper, easier, and SAFER to have Underwriters Laboratories inspect and certify one (1) 120VAC -> 7.5VDC wall wart which can power a thousand (1,000) different devices, than it is to certify 1,000 different devices individually.
This is true.
I mean: Geez. This was all figured out a long time ago, with Edison vs. Westinghouse. Edison's Direct Current lost to Westinghouse's Alternating Current.
Power electronics change the game fundamentally. Long distance transmission is going DC, no matter how Edison vs. Westinghouse turned out. For the home I am hoping for stuff like PoE and USB. (USB is obviously too low voltage to be useful for the house, but at least it's better to have one wart for 7 devices.)
DC will make your muscles contract....and STAY contracted. So you're quite likely to get a (literal) death grip on whatever is shocking you.
But probably not at 48V. There is an excellent article which among other things discusses the relative risks of AC and DC. The problem with AC is primarily fibrillation.
You can't (simply) transform DC voltage to a different voltage.
Actually transforming DC is way cheaper and more efficient than transforming AC...
The 120v to 5V (or whatever) in your power supply is done before the AC is rectified to DC.
The 120V to 5V transformation is done by treating the AC as a fluctuating DC signal, and doing DC conversion. It is less efficient than proper DC to DC conversion, but not much, and it's way more efficient than using a traditional transformer.
It would be very nice to have say 48V DC around the house. Devices could easily have 48V to 5V or whatever switching supplies built in -- they would be small enough and give off so little heat that they could be inside the box instead of being wall-warts.
is there a relationship between St John (or the Hospitaliers) and Denmark, whose national flag is also a white cross (albiet offset) on red background?
No, the Danish flag fell from the sky in Estonia during the battle of Lyndanisse on the 15th of June 1219.
Just to clarify: even though a really good driver is better than ABS, they basicly use the same method. It's just that a really good driver is better at it.
Even the really good drivers don't get 4 brake pedals. The computer does.
I thought traction control was still pretty exclusive to high-end cars. ABS, of course, is just about everywhere. I transitioned to a car with ABS but I must be among one of the few who can safely drive without it, because I very rarely feel it trigger, even when braking relatively hard.
ABS will only trigger when you are in need of more braking than the car can actually provide. Hopefully not something that happens on a regular basis. ABS is a great help because it means in an emergency you can just slam the brakes immediately. The average driver, if put in a car without ABS or brake assist, takes 2 seconds or more to reach full braking power. With ABS and brake, full braking power is reached almost as soon as the brake is touched.
The ability to brake and steer at the same time is invaluable too. I find it very difficult to bring myself to do that though.
I'd say that the #1 downside of windfarms is that having them doesn't absolve you of building the enough 'traditional' plants to cover their capacity on calm days.
There are various solutions to this problem -- one is diversifying; the odds of having a calm, cloudy day during a drought are low. Another is changing rates, so that electricity is cheaper on windy or sunny days, combined with automation of household devices so that say the freezer cools down a few extra degrees and the washing machine starts when electricity is cheap. The lower off-peak rates would probably also make charging of hybrid cars more popular.
Wind power has the same problem, where the airflow downwind of a windfarm is colder, slower and more turbulent. That shows it has a very direct effect on the atmosphere. Whether it's a good one or not, we don't know.
Cities block wind much more than wind farms ever could. The concerns you raise are simply ridiculous.
It has become a fashionable trend to look for downsides to all new solutions, equating tiny and/or unknown downsides of the new solution with the large and known downsides of the existing ones. It is a lot like Luddism.
There's no way you're going to get console games of any quality for 77 games at $265 in any sort of 'free market'. That's just over $3 each and is less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs alone.
$265 obviously wasn't less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs for the game store owners...
There is a simple way to tell whether the disks are burned correctly. It is to simply run the autotest that you have to go out of your way to turn off. Why did you turn that off?
In the study they set the price for bluetooth 2.0 at $10 per unit, and 802.11g at $5. So much for the predictions that bluetooth would get dead cheap...
For me it was the ELF migration. I managed to get halfway through recompiling everything, then I gave up and switched to Red Hat. I may even have the hard drive around somewhere, in its half-way a.out/ELF state. Stuck with Red Hat ever since (Fedora now, of course.)
You already live in the living hell. Leap seconds already exist, and they aren't added on a strict schedule or known well in advance. Your code is already broken, but at least you are in good company: both NTP and POSIX are broken too.
Unfortunately NTP is broken for leap seconds -- the NTP time stamp stays the same during the leap second, effectively stopping time. Meinberg has a page which shows what happens. If NTP had been implemented correctly, it would keep time without leap seconds, but include an announcement of the accumulated leap seconds.
NTP is probably broken because POSIX time is broken. You never get the time 23:59:60 in POSIX. Instead you get 23:59:59 twice, or even stuff like 23:59:59.993 followed shortly by 23:59:59.123. Many services do not like time jumps, time stops, or time speedups/slowdowns. And those are the options if you stick with POSIX time.
And a little more heat may mean more evaporation which means more cloud cover, with higher albedoes that reflect more incoming heat, which cool things down again.
Cloud cover has the opposite effect. At night it keeps the heat from radiating into space. This effect more than offsets the higher albedo during the day.
An RPM is just a cpio archive with an extra header. What is the problem with that? (apart from the fact that GNU tar doesn't unpack cpio archives, would someone please fix that?)
As far as I can tell, a.deb is just a tar archive with an extra header. Why is that not evil?
THANKFULLY drivers for the chipset family that the 1820A uses are finally starting to trickle into patches to the kernel, but they're in a very very very alpha state at the moment. Maybe in half a year this won't be an issue anymore. =/
So your problem is being solved because an free software driver is being developed.
Trying to strongarm companies into releasing open source drivers by making closed-source ones a bitch to make work will NOT convince them to open their code (witness ATI and nVidia). We have to show them other merits to opening their code (being installed by default being a good one to start with -- assistance from the community in bugfixes being another).
As far as I can tell, strongarming is working fine in this case.
the people who counted tanks didn't have much hope of stopping the Warsaw Pact using only conventional weapons.
Actually the numbers of Warsaw Pact tanks was seriously and consistently overestimated by Western forces. The same is true for just about any other measure of Warsaw Pact military power.
Yes, I was off by 3 orders of magnitude. But hey, so Mammoth Mountain pollutes as much as 5000 homes, and how many volcanos like Mammoth Mountain exist? And how many towns with 5000 houses? I'm still not impressed.
Estimates state that Mammoth Mountain emits 50-150 tons of CO2 per DAY
Woohoo, ~50 thousand tons of CO2 a year.
According to solarenergy.org
"An average of 23,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted annually in each American home. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)". So Mammoth Mountain manages to pollute as much as 5 US homes. I'm so impressed.
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Yes some devices will end up with DC-DC wall warts. This is particularly true for portable devices. For the non-portable ones, a DC-DC converter tends to be inside already -- perhaps with a lower ratio, but I have seen quite a lot of consumer electronics with 12V or 15V wall warts -- there is no way the actual electronics get 15V.
2. Ease of safety approval. It is cheaper, easier, and SAFER to have Underwriters Laboratories inspect and certify one (1) 120VAC -> 7.5VDC wall wart which can power a thousand (1,000) different devices, than it is to certify 1,000 different devices individually.
This is true.
I mean: Geez. This was all figured out a long time ago, with Edison vs. Westinghouse. Edison's Direct Current lost to Westinghouse's Alternating Current.
Power electronics change the game fundamentally. Long distance transmission is going DC, no matter how Edison vs. Westinghouse turned out. For the home I am hoping for stuff like PoE and USB. (USB is obviously too low voltage to be useful for the house, but at least it's better to have one wart for 7 devices.)
But probably not at 48V. There is an excellent article which among other things discusses the relative risks of AC and DC. The problem with AC is primarily fibrillation.
Actually transforming DC is way cheaper and more efficient than transforming AC...
The 120v to 5V (or whatever) in your power supply is done before the AC is rectified to DC.
The 120V to 5V transformation is done by treating the AC as a fluctuating DC signal, and doing DC conversion. It is less efficient than proper DC to DC conversion, but not much, and it's way more efficient than using a traditional transformer.
It would be very nice to have say 48V DC around the house. Devices could easily have 48V to 5V or whatever switching supplies built in -- they would be small enough and give off so little heat that they could be inside the box instead of being wall-warts.
Marine freight runs on the cheap oil that's too dirty to be allowed anywhere else. This also holds back improvements in engine efficiency.
No, the Danish flag fell from the sky in Estonia during the battle of Lyndanisse on the 15th of June 1219.
If you have a video camera, it's most likely digital these days. So use Firewire, skip the capture card.
Even the really good drivers don't get 4 brake pedals. The computer does.
Partly because the computer has 4 individual brake pedals to play with, whereas the driver only gets one.
ABS will only trigger when you are in need of more braking than the car can actually provide. Hopefully not something that happens on a regular basis. ABS is a great help because it means in an emergency you can just slam the brakes immediately. The average driver, if put in a car without ABS or brake assist, takes 2 seconds or more to reach full braking power. With ABS and brake, full braking power is reached almost as soon as the brake is touched.
The ability to brake and steer at the same time is invaluable too. I find it very difficult to bring myself to do that though.
There are various solutions to this problem -- one is diversifying; the odds of having a calm, cloudy day during a drought are low. Another is changing rates, so that electricity is cheaper on windy or sunny days, combined with automation of household devices so that say the freezer cools down a few extra degrees and the washing machine starts when electricity is cheap. The lower off-peak rates would probably also make charging of hybrid cars more popular.
Cities block wind much more than wind farms ever could. The concerns you raise are simply ridiculous.
It has become a fashionable trend to look for downsides to all new solutions, equating tiny and/or unknown downsides of the new solution with the large and known downsides of the existing ones. It is a lot like Luddism.
$265 obviously wasn't less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs for the game store owners...
Planes are relatively rare at 20,000 miles...
There is a simple way to tell whether the disks are burned correctly. It is to simply run the autotest that you have to go out of your way to turn off. Why did you turn that off?
In the study they set the price for bluetooth 2.0 at $10 per unit, and 802.11g at $5. So much for the predictions that bluetooth would get dead cheap...
For me it was the ELF migration. I managed to get halfway through recompiling everything, then I gave up and switched to Red Hat. I may even have the hard drive around somewhere, in its half-way a.out/ELF state. Stuck with Red Hat ever since (Fedora now, of course.)
You already live in the living hell. Leap seconds already exist, and they aren't added on a strict schedule or known well in advance. Your code is already broken, but at least you are in good company: both NTP and POSIX are broken too.
NTP is probably broken because POSIX time is broken. You never get the time 23:59:60 in POSIX. Instead you get 23:59:59 twice, or even stuff like 23:59:59.993 followed shortly by 23:59:59.123. Many services do not like time jumps, time stops, or time speedups/slowdowns. And those are the options if you stick with POSIX time.
Cloud cover has the opposite effect. At night it keeps the heat from radiating into space. This effect more than offsets the higher albedo during the day.
Luckily LSB doesn't standardise the package management software, only the file format.
As far as I can tell, a .deb is just a tar archive with an extra header. Why is that not evil?
So your problem is being solved because an free software driver is being developed.
Trying to strongarm companies into releasing open source drivers by making closed-source ones a bitch to make work will NOT convince them to open their code (witness ATI and nVidia). We have to show them other merits to opening their code (being installed by default being a good one to start with -- assistance from the community in bugfixes being another).
As far as I can tell, strongarming is working fine in this case.
Actually the numbers of Warsaw Pact tanks was seriously and consistently overestimated by Western forces. The same is true for just about any other measure of Warsaw Pact military power.
Yes, I was off by 3 orders of magnitude. But hey, so Mammoth Mountain pollutes as much as 5000 homes, and how many volcanos like Mammoth Mountain exist? And how many towns with 5000 houses? I'm still not impressed.
Woohoo, ~50 thousand tons of CO2 a year.
According to solarenergy.org "An average of 23,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted annually in each American home. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)". So Mammoth Mountain manages to pollute as much as 5 US homes. I'm so impressed.