If I was running a company and our flagship product came out several years late, overhyped, underspeed, underfeatured, unable to run on most computers, frustrating to use, and it sold really poorly, causing billions of dollars of shortfalls in sales, well, yes, I'd try to do better the next time. No news here. The real problem is that Windows 7 is just a service pack for Vista. Many of the issues like DRM and slow I/O have just been lightly patched over with no real attempt to roll back to the somewhat simpler, faster Windows XP code base. When you're in a hole, stop digging, don't just paint the hole walls a more pleasing color.
Wait a sec, usually as you drink more alcohol things look BETTER, not worse. By midnight even Abe Vigoda or the E.T. game start to look pretty good. Meetings at a bar are not a very good place to estimate a game's goodness.
Usually you want to run servers 24 hrs a day. Sunlight is only there for 12 hrs minus cloudy times. That's why the 2.5x factor. I was even generous enough to assume you could track the sun with $12K.
And pumping it back to the grid is silly. There is no way to even pay the maintenance much less the interest on a $12K investment at 2 cents an hour.
The numbers on this are super dismal. To power a 300W server, you need about 5 square meters of solar collector. About $12,000 of panels to offset 2 cents an hour of power. Plus you need tons of storage batteries or substitute power for night and cloudy days. Yuck. A sensible company would only do this for PR or due to some government mandate or tax credit. Certainly not to save money or save energy.
the 1996 article is all hot air. You can't accurately subtract the latest written data, as the amplitude and phase of what was written and what is read vary by many percent. If you do a best-case subtraction you're left with a wild jumble of noisy amplitude and phase noise. The signal to noise ratio is way below zero, making recovery of a single bit not much over chance or 50%. Recovery of a whole byte would be miraculous, and rare. Not to mention useless.
Anyone that's looked at the analog signal from a disk head *knows* you can't get anything useful from an erased track, much less one rewritten with random data. Those microscopic pictures of the letters "IBM" showing though an erased area are only proof that the human eye can integrate and lock into large-scale expected data, which is the exact opposite of picking out individual random bits. You can simulate this yourself in a spreadsheet or program-- take a block of data, erase it by multiplying it by say 0.1, add in new random data at full amplitude and variable phase, then try to find the original data. Rotsa ruck.
There is a difference, a big one, between hand-crafted amateur point-to-point links and everyday mass-produced and deployed networks. The RONJA guys deserve a lot of credit for getting that much performance, but in the real world performance may be a couple of orders lower.
It's been investigated but the technology just won't work out. Light sensors have a strong speed/intensity tradeoff. Even with a several-inch wide lens you can't collect enough light to drive a sensor at more than a few kilobits/sec. And people hate to keep pointing the sensor at the opposite party.
And if the room has LED or CCFL lighting the interference from those is mighty intense.
Gibberish. EM and resonance are well-understood and have very little to do with efficient power transfer and nothing to do with your eyeball not absorbing watts.
Okay, let's do the math. To power my laptop takes about 30 watts. The best infrared detectors are about 30% efficient. So they'd have to beam about 100 watts to the detector. 100 watts hitting one square centimeter of cloth or plastic or paper is enough to start a fire. And way more than enough to blow out an eyeball in a millisecond.
Electrical engineering involves an intricate set of tradeoffs. When choosing how to couple two transmitter stages there are at least six basic ways to do it: Direct, capacitive, single-tuned, double-tuned, critcally coupled, overcoupled, tapped, T-section, balun, and many more. The one you choose depends on a lot of factors, efficiency, power level, bandwidth, phase linearity, space, shielding, cost, parts availability, reliability, feedback, adjustability, temperature stability, and more.
Seeing as there are all these methods and criteria, it's just not possible that there is one "new" scheme that is better in every category than the 80 years supply of coupling schemes.
In particular, a "wireless" method is going to lose on efficiency-- it's not going to be more than 5% efficient. So you would not use it coupling to a medium or high power stage.
And there are other severe gotchas, like susceptibility to feedback and EMI.
There may be certain niches where one would chose this method, but it's unlikely to be a major player, especially since all the other methods are parent-free.
The clue is in the phrase "1400kw per day". That is meaningless. Totally meaningless. "kw" if it means kilowatts, is a unit of how much work is being done per unit time. For instance one watt is one joule of work being done each second. Or as mechanical equivalent, two kilograms moved one meter in one second. So saying "1400kw per day" is equivalent of saying "1.4 million joules per second per day", which is physically meaningless.
The numbers on the display jibe with my interpretation-- there is pitifully little energy being collected, way under a penny a month. And LCD displays can be made to run on very little current, they're basically tiny capacitors that just need to be charged-- microamps at most.
And it's a waste, those piezoelectric panels cost hundreds of dollars. In a heated and lighted subway there is plenty of AC power available. There is no point in spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on this. It's a waste of resources.
If you look at their display, it's showing about 3600 watt-seconds. And they don't have any more digits on the display, so they can only go up to 9999 watt-seconds.
Now do a teensy bit of unit math, and reckon there are 3.6 million watt-seconds in a kilowatt hour.
Now if electricity costs ten cents a kilowatt-hour, a watt-second is worth 1/280000 of a cent. So that horn-blowing display is telling us they've generated a whole 1/100 of a cent. If my math is right.
Ah, no, you don't get something for nothing. The mat must be receiving work, i.e. force times distance, so the walker must be supplying it. And how much work is that? Assume 130 pounds and one tenth of an inch for one second, that's 1/40th of a horsepower, or about 20 watts. If someone is stepping on it every second, that's 2 watts average. Piezoelectrics are not too efficient, say 5%, so we have 0.1 watts electric. If electricity costs 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, the mat is generating about nine cents of electricity a year. Even if the mat cost $2 to make and install, it does not even pay the interest.
> So what if it doesn't recover the monetary investment? Things would be a lot better off it PROFIT! wasn't the sole motivation behind any decision.
How? It took energy to make those floor devices. If they don't ever generate as much energy as it took to make them, we've wasted energy. How are we better off wasting energy?
Moreover if the things are really inefficient, then it means you're turning the people's food energy to nothing. It took a lot of energy and $$$ to feed those folks. Again, we're wasting expensive food and the energy it took to make and transport and cook that food.
I can't get to TFA, but it seems mighty unlikely to have that much fissile material just so happen to gather together, and not be poisoned by cadmium, boron, lead, or other neutron absorbers, and have it stay together and not have a negative temperature coefficient slowing it down, and not form bubbles and geysers and other instabilities, and have it push asymmetrically in one direction, for many hours (cf: speed of sound). Wayaaay too many things to believe before breakfast.
It matters not one whit whether they can push X watts Y meters. What matters is the the efficiency plug to socket. Anything over 25% is unlikely. Anything under 80% is wasteful.
And it's important to not cook anybody's eyeballs into 3-minute hard-boiled eggs in the process.
Experience with radar waves shows that any flux over 5 milliwatts per square centimeter is going to cause cataracts. Not good.
What, checklists? Will never happen. Hospitals are run by and for the convenience of doctors, not by patients. No doctor is going to agree to be held to a checklist, where deviation from it may be cause for a lawsuit. Circumstances and patients vary widely-- there's no way a checklist can have the right steps for every situation. Especially in the emergency room where there is always a time lag between what has to be done and what is known.
The "study" is fraught with the "western Electric study" fallacy-- anytime you pay attention to a group of people, they're going to change their behavior. They might just as well have found that putting a bowl of M & M's on the nurses desk reduced errors.
Folks like JR Oppenheimer and Von Neumann did the math in their heads circa 1950 and they both advised the govt the concept was totally ridiculous. Congress thanked them for their input and went ahead anyway, appointing total idiots to head Civil Defense and giving them a miniscule budget, just enough to field a few Nike sites and buy lots of crackers in camo 55-gallon drums.
You see govt has to *appear* to be doing something, even when the job is undoable. And if it helps the MI complex, that's a twofer. And if you can fool the public by staging a "test" every five years, no problemo.
You might notice in the sixth graf they casually mention that the countermeasures conveniently did not deploy. How convenient.
You make me tired too. I hate having to explain very basic geometry time and again. It does not matter much what the launch place is, it's the target. Vandenburg can only only protect a relatively small area around itself. It's doubtful it can hit anything targeted at LA. An LA targeted missile will be slewing several degrees across range.
The basic geometry and economics of the situation has been know for over 100 years. You may note a certain lack of solutions to similar problems that are 100's of times simpler, like anti-artillery artillery.
But that does not stop the MI complex from trying. Say a few billion $ for Nike, then Nike Zeus. A few billion more for the pyramids in NoDak. Then billions for "Star Wars". All total fiascos.
It's been known for quite a while in defense circles that it's generally a poor idea to have a weapojg, defensive or offensive, that can be gotten around at miniscule cost to the other side.
For example, defensive missles, due to the basic geometry of the scenario, can only protect from missles coming through a very narrow cone. You see missles can't slew sideways worth a darn when in boost, and not at all post-boost. The incoming missle is bearing down at 18,000 MPH or more, even a small angle off results in an impossible to hit target. I know, in the movies and artistic simulations you ALWAYS see missles hit at ridiculous angles, but in the real world it's a no-go.
So all the bad guys have to do is target a place that is a couple hundred miles from the nearest interceptor base, or launch from an unusual angle, or use low-trajectory missles, or use say a Cessna to deliver the bomb. Voila, or whatever the word is in NK-speak, you've bypassed a trillion dollar defense system.
Way back when memory was $1 a byte, and all programs ran in batch mode overnight, it seemed a super idea to make disk look like memory. The idea being that there was always more time, but lots of people could not afford another 64k bytes of real memory. It also let IBM sell a whole new set of very expensive CPU's and memory mapping boxes.
Now today when memory is about a million times cheaper and we expect millisecond response times, those thirty years of computer science and marketing are just an ancient millstone around our necks. Unfortunately everyone just expects to have unlimited, although stuttering, memory. Soo many programs read in a whole file into memory, then build a tree of it all, in memory, and they wonder why the disk light is on all the time.
Folks, it's not 1968 anymore. Go out and buy a 64-bit address space mother board for $55, splurge and buy as much REAL memory as you can afford, turn off the virtual memory backing file, and enjoy reliable memory that's all 3 nanoseconds away.
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If I was running a company and our flagship product came out several years late, overhyped, underspeed, underfeatured, unable to run on most computers, frustrating to use, and it sold really poorly, causing billions of dollars of shortfalls in sales, well, yes, I'd try to do better the next time. No news here. The real problem is that Windows 7 is just a service pack for Vista. Many of the issues like DRM and slow I/O have just been lightly patched over with no real attempt to roll back to the somewhat simpler, faster Windows XP code base. When you're in a hole, stop digging, don't just paint the hole walls a more pleasing color.
Wait a sec, usually as you drink more alcohol things look BETTER, not worse. By midnight even Abe Vigoda or the E.T. game start to look pretty good. Meetings at a bar are not a very good place to estimate a game's goodness.
Usually you want to run servers 24 hrs a day. Sunlight is only there for 12 hrs minus cloudy times. That's why the 2.5x factor. I was even generous enough to assume you could track the sun with $12K.
And pumping it back to the grid is silly. There is no way to even pay the maintenance much less the interest on a $12K investment at 2 cents an hour.
The numbers on this are super dismal. To power a 300W server, you need about 5 square meters of solar collector. About $12,000 of panels to offset 2 cents an hour of power. Plus you need tons of storage batteries or substitute power for night and cloudy days. Yuck. A sensible company would only do this for PR or due to some government mandate or tax credit. Certainly not to save money or save energy.
the 1996 article is all hot air. You can't accurately subtract the latest written data, as the amplitude and phase of what was written and what is read vary by many percent. If you do a best-case subtraction you're left with a wild jumble of noisy amplitude and phase noise. The signal to noise ratio is way below zero, making recovery of a single bit not much over chance or 50%. Recovery of a whole byte would be miraculous, and rare. Not to mention useless.
Finally, we have some sanity peeking through.
Anyone that's looked at the analog signal from a disk head *knows* you can't get anything useful from an erased track, much less one rewritten with random data. Those microscopic pictures of the letters "IBM" showing though an erased area are only proof that the human eye can integrate and lock into large-scale expected data, which is the exact opposite of picking out individual random bits. You can simulate this yourself in a spreadsheet or program-- take a block of data, erase it by multiplying it by say 0.1, add in new random data at full amplitude and variable phase, then try to find the original data. Rotsa ruck.
There is a difference, a big one, between hand-crafted amateur point-to-point links and everyday mass-produced and deployed networks. The RONJA guys deserve a lot of credit for getting that much performance, but in the real world performance may be a couple of orders lower.
It's been investigated but the technology just won't work out. Light sensors have a strong speed/intensity tradeoff. Even with a several-inch wide lens you can't collect enough light to drive a sensor at more than a few kilobits/sec. And people hate to keep pointing the sensor at the opposite party.
And if the room has LED or CCFL lighting the interference from those is mighty intense.
Gibberish. EM and resonance are well-understood and have very little to do with efficient power transfer and nothing to do with your eyeball not absorbing watts.
Okay, let's do the math. To power my laptop takes about 30 watts. The best infrared detectors are about 30% efficient. So they'd have to beam about 100 watts to the detector. 100 watts hitting one square centimeter of cloth or plastic or paper is enough to start a fire. And way more than enough to blow out an eyeball in a millisecond.
All they'd have to do is build a fuse right into the capacitor, as in using thin wires for the connections. A no-brainer.
Putting capacitors in parallel is not a novel idea. Been done for over 200 years now. So at first glance this patent looks challengeable.
Now of course they could patent the exact combination of plates and dielectric and packaging , if it is any way novel and non-obvious.
Electrical engineering involves an intricate set of tradeoffs. When choosing how to couple two transmitter stages there are at least six basic ways to do it: Direct, capacitive, single-tuned, double-tuned, critcally coupled, overcoupled, tapped, T-section, balun, and many more. The one you choose depends on a lot of factors, efficiency, power level, bandwidth, phase linearity, space, shielding, cost, parts availability, reliability, feedback, adjustability, temperature stability, and more.
Seeing as there are all these methods and criteria, it's just not possible that there is one "new" scheme that is better in every category than the 80 years supply of coupling schemes.
In particular, a "wireless" method is going to lose on efficiency-- it's not going to be more than 5% efficient. So you would not use it coupling to a medium or high power stage.
And there are other severe gotchas, like susceptibility to feedback and EMI.
There may be certain niches where one would chose this method, but it's unlikely to be a major player, especially since all the other methods are parent-free.
The clue is in the phrase "1400kw per day". That is meaningless. Totally meaningless. "kw" if it means kilowatts, is a unit of how much work is being done per unit time. For instance one watt is one joule of work being done each second. Or as mechanical equivalent, two kilograms moved one meter in one second. So saying "1400kw per day" is equivalent of saying "1.4 million joules per second per day", which is physically meaningless.
The numbers on the display jibe with my interpretation-- there is pitifully little energy being collected, way under a penny a month.
And LCD displays can be made to run on very little current, they're basically tiny capacitors that just need to be charged-- microamps at most.
And it's a waste, those piezoelectric panels cost hundreds of dollars. In a heated and lighted subway there is plenty of AC power available. There is no point in spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on this. It's a waste of resources.
If you look at their display, it's showing about 3600 watt-seconds. And they don't have any more digits on the display, so they can only go up to 9999 watt-seconds.
Now do a teensy bit of unit math, and reckon there are 3.6 million watt-seconds in a kilowatt hour.
Now if electricity costs ten cents a kilowatt-hour, a watt-second is worth 1/280000 of a cent.
So that horn-blowing display is telling us they've generated a whole 1/100 of a cent. If my math is right.
Ah, no, you don't get something for nothing. The mat must be receiving work, i.e. force times distance, so the walker must be supplying it. And how much work is that? Assume 130 pounds and one tenth of an inch for one second, that's 1/40th of a horsepower, or about 20 watts. If someone is stepping on it every second, that's 2 watts average. Piezoelectrics are not too efficient, say 5%, so we have 0.1 watts electric. If electricity costs 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, the mat is generating about nine cents of electricity a year. Even if the mat cost $2 to make and install, it does not even pay the interest.
> So what if it doesn't recover the monetary investment? Things would be a lot better off it PROFIT! wasn't the sole motivation behind any decision.
How? It took energy to make those floor devices. If they don't ever generate as much energy as it took to make them, we've wasted energy. How are we better off wasting energy?
Moreover if the things are really inefficient, then it means you're turning the people's food energy to nothing. It took a lot of energy and $$$ to feed those folks. Again, we're wasting expensive food and the energy it took to make and transport and cook that food.
Is this a totally independent outbreak of imbecility, or is it related to the SD article from ~2002?
This piezoelectric idea is never going to recover the initial cost of construction and installation.
To generate real amounts of power at near zero cost, just let the people walk up the escalator and harness the power of the steps going backwards.
I can't get to TFA, but it seems mighty unlikely to have that much fissile material just so happen to gather together, and not be poisoned by cadmium, boron, lead, or other neutron absorbers, and have it stay together and not have a negative temperature coefficient slowing it down, and not form bubbles and geysers and other instabilities, and have it push asymmetrically in one direction, for many hours (cf: speed of sound). Wayaaay too many things to believe before breakfast.
It matters not one whit whether they can push X watts Y meters. What matters is the the efficiency plug to socket. Anything over 25% is unlikely. Anything under 80% is wasteful.
And it's important to not cook anybody's eyeballs into 3-minute hard-boiled eggs in the process.
Experience with radar waves shows that any flux over 5 milliwatts per square centimeter is going to cause cataracts. Not good.
What, checklists? Will never happen. Hospitals are run by and for the convenience of doctors, not by patients. No doctor is going to agree to be held to a checklist, where deviation from it may be cause for a lawsuit. Circumstances and patients vary widely-- there's no way a checklist can have the right steps for every situation. Especially in the emergency room where there is always a time lag between what has to be done and what is known.
The "study" is fraught with the "western Electric study" fallacy-- anytime you pay attention to a group of people, they're going to change their behavior. They might just as well have found that putting a bowl of M & M's on the nurses desk reduced errors.
Folks like JR Oppenheimer and Von Neumann did the math in their heads circa 1950 and they both advised the govt the concept was totally ridiculous. Congress thanked them for their input and went ahead anyway, appointing total idiots to head Civil Defense and giving them a miniscule budget, just enough to field a few Nike sites and buy lots of crackers in camo 55-gallon drums.
You see govt has to *appear* to be doing something, even when the job is undoable. And if it helps the MI complex, that's a twofer. And if you can fool the public by staging a "test" every five years, no problemo.
You might notice in the sixth graf they casually mention that the countermeasures conveniently did not deploy. How convenient.
You make me tired too. I hate having to explain very basic geometry time and again. It does not matter much what the launch place is, it's the target. Vandenburg can only only protect a relatively small area around itself. It's doubtful it can hit anything targeted at LA. An LA targeted missile will be slewing several degrees across range.
The basic geometry and economics of the situation has been know for over 100 years. You may note a certain lack of solutions to similar problems that are 100's of times simpler, like anti-artillery artillery.
But that does not stop the MI complex from trying. Say a few billion $ for Nike, then Nike Zeus. A few billion more for the pyramids in NoDak. Then billions for "Star Wars". All total fiascos.
It's been known for quite a while in defense circles that it's generally a poor idea to have a weapojg, defensive or offensive, that can be gotten around at miniscule cost to the other side.
For example, defensive missles, due to the basic geometry of the scenario, can only protect from missles coming through a very narrow cone. You see missles can't slew sideways worth a darn when in boost, and not at all post-boost. The incoming missle is bearing down at 18,000 MPH or more, even a small angle off results in an impossible to hit target. I know, in the movies and artistic simulations you ALWAYS see missles hit at ridiculous angles, but in the real world it's a no-go.
So all the bad guys have to do is target a place that is a couple hundred miles from the nearest interceptor base, or launch from an unusual angle, or use low-trajectory missles, or use say a Cessna to deliver the bomb. Voila, or whatever the word is in NK-speak, you've bypassed a trillion dollar defense system.
Way back when memory was $1 a byte, and all programs ran in batch mode overnight, it seemed a super idea to make disk look like memory. The idea being that there was always more time, but lots of people could not afford another 64k bytes of real memory. It also let IBM sell a whole new set of very expensive CPU's and memory mapping boxes.
Now today when memory is about a million times cheaper and we expect millisecond response times, those thirty years of computer science and marketing are just an ancient millstone around our necks. Unfortunately everyone just expects to have unlimited, although stuttering, memory. Soo many programs read in a whole file into memory, then build a tree of it all, in memory, and they wonder why the disk light is on all the time.
Folks, it's not 1968 anymore. Go out and buy a 64-bit address space mother board for $55, splurge and buy as much REAL memory as you can afford, turn off the virtual memory backing file, and enjoy reliable memory that's all 3 nanoseconds away.