I'm a little dubious, on general principles. Plus my optometrist just suggested this new "blue-blocker" option for my glasses, it stops blue-laser light dead, a very impressive demonstration, but it paradoxically doesn't remove any blue from what you're looking at. Must be a very fine-tuned filter that just blocks one wavelength of blue. He talked on and on about the effects of blue light on sleep. Quite a hard-sell. And they want $140 for that option. Sounds like blue snake-oil to me.
Did anybody actually *think* before writing this article?
A cable box drawing "500 watts" would be cherry-red hot.
The rating of "500 watts" on the back is for cable boxes that have an accessory AC outlet, and the rating means that you can plug in a TV or whatnot rated at up to 500 watts. The cable box itself draws a whole lot less, like 15 watts, even less for the newer ones.
So what happens if you come to a stop and then want to turn right? You have a flywheel spinning real good and you're trying to change its axis. Either it's going to twist and bust its bearings and do considerable mayhem, or your car is going to go around the turn on two wheels. Fun times!
Economics. Burying is going to cost a lot. The ISPs would have to borrow money now to pay the diggers, and hope that they can recoup the cost in the long run. The up-front cost is like $2000 per city lot. The ISPs are unlikely to foot the bill, even though interest rates are at record lows.
If it's like the other continuous monitoring devices, it will be priced in the stratosphere, with sensors "needing" to be replaced every few days, at $75 a pop.
The physics of antennas is pretty darn basic electrodynamics. You need a quarter to half a wavelength to make an efficient antenna. Scientists and engineers have tried for well over a century to overcome that limitation, with not much success. It's pretty basic-- if you want to set up an EM field, you need to be able to have charges separated by a goodly amount relative to the wavelength. The emitting material is irrelevant, in fact you need a really good conductor as you make the antenna shorter, as it's radiation resistance goes way down with length. Gaphene not only does not seem to have any advantage, it's high resistance is a big disadvantage. Sounds super highly fishy.
Cmon, converting electric power to radio frequency AC is at best 80% efficient, and coupling it maybe 50% at best, and converting it back to DC 80% again. I get 32% best efficiency and those are for the most optimum situation. No way this will ever fly, economically. And since people are scared of their water meters e-field of a fraction of a watt, how are they going to feel about megawatts? Not gonna fly, or even crawl.
I have tried doing just that, at least 3 times. It's never appreciated by mgmt. They either already know, or have been actively avoiding learning about these problems, or are unwilling to spend money on it. They will either frown, deny your facts, not follow up on your suggestions, or just plain fire you for not being a team player. Been there, tried to "help", got canned twice, now I don't squawk about the SQL injection issues, phishing, spam, etc, etc, etc.
Just start looking for another job, with luck, at a less clueless place.
The USSR often gives jobs, usually non-cushy ones, to defectors. Lee Harvey Oswald got a job in a radio factory assembly line. I guess IT support is the modern equivalent.
Here's a hint. Any time you see a press release from a company or University PR department, ignore it. It's usually much worse than no information at all.
In this case they MAY have figured out how to lay down a supercapacitor on the back side of a silicon chip. Big whoop. You're talking about a few Farads at a few volts at most. Not a lot of energy storage possible there, certainly not enough to run a cell phone for more than a few seconds.
Get a bit better perspective on this by watching the tazing videos on YouTube.
Basically, it seems, if you repeatedly refuse to follow a simple police command, like "get out of the vehicle" or "lay down on the ground", after 10 or 20 repetitions, the cops have the option of tazing you. Apparently this is SOP. The old-school way was to chicken choke or baton-choke you. You decide which is better.
This isn't really news. The original version of the Smyth Report mentioned research into using Thorium. The second edition deleted that paragraph. It was the only notable change from edition to edition. We're pretty sure the KGB noticed the change and went, like, "Hmmmmm...".
I'm thinking there is some UL or ISO or Euro standard that makes it difficult to make server chassis out of flammable materials, and stack dozens of them in a rack, while running 240VAC through them and with lots of cooling air to fan the flames.
Ah yes, all we have to do is find an algebraic equation whose 1542 roots happen to match packet #1767 of the Angry Birds video. And whose coefficients take up less than 5%, 75 bytes lets say.
I thought up this compression scheme in 8th grade. even then I knew there just had to be some basic problem with it.
This could be a replay of the old days of mainframes. At more than one company, the engineers came up with mainframes on a desk, but the marketers could not see selling a desktop mainframe at the old 7-digit prices. So they just making the big boxes, til their eventual death. This happened to CDC, Data General, Digital, and Perkin-Elmer to name a few. Intel will undoubtedly survive, but it could be a long painful decline or change of direction. The "new architecture" fanatics there probably don't have much traction after the Itanium disaster.
Well, I never thought I'd be standing up for Microsoft, at least a little, But IMHO they had at least a LITTLE justification for putting up the warning message. Old Windows HAD to make MANY patches into the DOS resident code, and it depended on MANY undocumented data areas inside the DOS resident code. Any DOS clone, if it was to have a chance of running Windows, had to be very carefully engineered to match all those undocumented locations in DOS. The odds of Digital Research being able to guess all the exact locations that Windows depends on, and will depend on, is somewhat slight.
Farms on the Moon? Why stop there, how about dairy farms in S.P.A.C.E?
How's about we run a few numbers?
If we assume that 50 square meters can feed one person, ( quite an assumption, IMHO ), and if we round down sunlight to 1,000 watts per square meter, then you need about 50 kilowatts of light, 8 to 12 hours a day, to support one person. Well, no, you need water, minerals and some energy too, but lets ignore that.
Now LED's are at about 100 lumens per watt. Spread that out over a square meter and you have 100 lux. Sunlight is right around 130,000 lux,. So you need about 1,300 watts to light up one square meter to the same intensity as sunlight. Very roughly.
Solar cells and inverters and wiring have an end-to-end efficiency of around 10%. So you need about 13,000 watts of collected sunlight to light up one square meter of hydroponics.
So we need about 13 meter-square panels at right-angles all the time to the Sun to get 13,000 watts during sunny days on the Moon. Let's round that down to 10, as sunlight is a bit more potent there.
Now sunlight is only there about 2/3 the time, and off for like 10 days, so we need batteries, let's say those are 75% efficient, round-trip through the batteries and diodes and inverters.
So we're back up to about 20 meter-square panels to light up one meter. To light up 50 square meters, one person's worth, that's ONE THOUSAND SQUARE METER STEERABLE PANELS.
That's an awful lot of hardware. I'm not sure one person could maintain 1,000 panels-- wiping off the dust, checking the steering motors, repairing meteorite damage, freeing vacuum-welded joints, swearing at al the dust they've stirred up walking from panel to panel, etc, etc, etc.
Doesn't leave much time for farming, among other things.
And oh, where are you going to get the water for 50 square meters of whatnot growing?
Slashdot Mirror
What?
One smoking phone battery and:
* The plane is evacuated.
* The flight is cancelled.
What?
How would it not be enough to fling the phone out the door and carry on?
I'm a little dubious, on general principles. Plus my optometrist just suggested this new "blue-blocker" option for my glasses, it stops blue-laser light dead, a very impressive demonstration, but it paradoxically doesn't remove any blue from what you're looking at. Must be a very fine-tuned filter that just blocks one wavelength of blue. He talked on and on about the effects of blue light on sleep. Quite a hard-sell. And they want $140 for that option. Sounds like blue snake-oil to me.
Have they figured out how:
(1) To make a tube that sags just a few millimeters between pylons? Hint: A 1-inch thick steel tube sags several inches between those pylons.
(2) How to get people into space suits? Even the Air Force doesn't let pilots, even in wartime, sit in a plane at 70,000 feet without a space suit.
(3) How to get a common-carrier license, for a vehicle and tube without emergency exits?
Those are all pretty hard show-stoppers, and they seem to be working on everything but.
Did anybody actually *think* before writing this article?
A cable box drawing "500 watts" would be cherry-red hot.
The rating of "500 watts" on the back is for cable boxes that have an accessory AC outlet, and the rating means that you can plug in a TV or whatnot rated at up to 500 watts. The cable box itself draws a whole lot less, like 15 watts, even less for the newer ones.
So what happens if you come to a stop and then want to turn right? You have a flywheel spinning real good and you're trying to change its axis. Either it's going to twist and bust its bearings and do considerable mayhem, or your car is going to go around the turn on two wheels. Fun times!
Economics. Burying is going to cost a lot. The ISPs would have to borrow money now to pay the diggers, and hope that they can recoup the cost in the long run. The up-front cost is like $2000 per city lot. The ISPs are unlikely to foot the bill, even though interest rates are at record lows.
Some folks do get belligerent, my father for one.
If it's like the other continuous monitoring devices, it will be priced in the stratosphere, with sensors "needing" to be replaced every few days, at $75 a pop.
A semi-ridiculous idea.
It takes 200 million BTU equivalent of eletcricity to refine a ton of aluminum.
That's about the equivalent of 1,800 gallons of gasoline.
If using aluminum for the truck body ups the efficiency by 5 MPG, that would save 200 gallons for every 100,000 miles driven.
So you're still about 1,300 gallons in the hole.
A bad idea.
The physics of antennas is pretty darn basic electrodynamics. You need a quarter to half a wavelength to make an efficient antenna. Scientists and engineers have tried for well over a century to overcome that limitation, with not much success. It's pretty basic-- if you want to set up an EM field, you need to be able to have charges separated by a goodly amount relative to the wavelength. The emitting material is irrelevant, in fact you need a really good conductor as you make the antenna shorter, as it's radiation resistance goes way down with length. Gaphene not only does not seem to have any advantage, it's high resistance is a big disadvantage. Sounds super highly fishy.
A ridiculous press release.
Did they mention HOW RELIABLY it can tell a paper bag from a kid on a bigwheeler on the road?
If it is less than 99.99% correct, the first kid that gets run over will spawn a billion-dollar lawsuit.
Cmon, converting electric power to radio frequency AC is at best 80% efficient, and coupling it maybe 50% at best, and converting it back to DC 80% again. I get 32% best efficiency and those are for the most optimum situation. No way this will ever fly, economically. And since people are scared of their water meters e-field of a fraction of a watt, how are they going to feel about megawatts? Not gonna fly, or even crawl.
Don't even think of "helping".
I have tried doing just that, at least 3 times. It's never appreciated by mgmt. They either already know, or have been actively avoiding learning about these problems, or are unwilling to spend money on it. They will either frown, deny your facts, not follow up on your suggestions, or just plain fire you for not being a team player. Been there, tried to "help", got canned twice, now I don't squawk about the SQL injection issues, phishing, spam, etc, etc, etc.
Just start looking for another job, with luck, at a less clueless place.
No prob. You rarely find birds above 4,000 feet. Just put another placard in the plane "stay under xxx knots below yyyy feet in peacetime".
The USSR often gives jobs, usually non-cushy ones, to defectors. Lee Harvey Oswald got a job in a radio factory assembly line. I guess IT support is the modern equivalent.
Here's a hint. Any time you see a press release from a company or University PR department, ignore it. It's usually much worse than no information at all.
In this case they MAY have figured out how to lay down a supercapacitor on the back side of a silicon chip. Big whoop. You're talking about a few Farads at a few volts at most. Not a lot of energy storage possible there, certainly not enough to run a cell phone for more than a few seconds.
Get a bit better perspective on this by watching the tazing videos on YouTube.
Basically, it seems, if you repeatedly refuse to follow a simple police command, like "get out of the vehicle" or "lay down on the ground", after 10 or 20 repetitions, the cops have the option of tazing you. Apparently this is SOP. The old-school way was to chicken choke or baton-choke you. You decide which is better.
This isn't really news. The original version of the Smyth Report mentioned research into using Thorium. The second edition deleted that paragraph. It was the only notable change from edition to edition. We're pretty sure the KGB noticed the change and went, like, "Hmmmmm...".
So it's what, a $4 increase in a BOM that totals out around $200? This is news?
I'm thinking there is some UL or ISO or Euro standard that makes it difficult to make server chassis out of flammable materials, and stack dozens of them in a rack, while running 240VAC through them and with lots of cooling air to fan the flames.
let's say it's high noon and you have a plane with every outside surface covered with solar cells.
Now a 747-400 has a wing area of around 6000 square feet.
Full sunlight falling on 6000 square feet, or about 666 square yards, generates about 100,000 watts.
There are 746 watts per horsepower, so you have about 134 horsepower to work with.
Unfortunately a 747-400 needs about 80,000 horses just to stay in the air.
We are only about a factor of 600 short on the horsepower front.
Ah yes, all we have to do is find an algebraic equation whose 1542 roots happen to match packet #1767 of the Angry Birds video. And whose coefficients take up less than 5%, 75 bytes lets say.
I thought up this compression scheme in 8th grade. even then I knew there just had to be some basic problem with it.
This could be a replay of the old days of mainframes. At more than one company, the engineers came up with mainframes on a desk, but the marketers could not see selling a desktop mainframe at the old 7-digit prices. So they just making the big boxes, til their eventual death. This happened to CDC, Data General, Digital, and Perkin-Elmer to name a few. Intel will undoubtedly survive, but it could be a long painful decline or change of direction. The "new architecture" fanatics there probably don't have much traction after the Itanium disaster.
Well, I never thought I'd be standing up for Microsoft, at least a little, But IMHO they had at least a LITTLE justification for putting up the warning message. Old Windows HAD to make MANY patches into the DOS resident code, and it depended on MANY undocumented data areas inside the DOS resident code. Any DOS clone, if it was to have a chance of running Windows, had to be very carefully engineered to match all those undocumented locations in DOS. The odds of Digital Research being able to guess all the exact locations that Windows depends on, and will depend on, is somewhat slight.
Farms on the Moon? Why stop there, how about dairy farms in S.P.A.C.E?
How's about we run a few numbers?
If we assume that 50 square meters can feed one person, ( quite an assumption, IMHO ), and if we round down sunlight to 1,000 watts per square meter, then you need about 50 kilowatts of light, 8 to 12 hours a day, to support one person. Well, no, you need water, minerals and some energy too, but lets ignore that.
Now LED's are at about 100 lumens per watt. Spread that out over a square meter and you have 100 lux. Sunlight is right around 130,000 lux,. So you need about 1,300 watts to light up one square meter to the same intensity as sunlight. Very roughly.
Solar cells and inverters and wiring have an end-to-end efficiency of around 10%. So you need about 13,000 watts of collected sunlight to light up one square meter of hydroponics.
So we need about 13 meter-square panels at right-angles all the time to the Sun to get 13,000 watts during sunny days on the Moon. Let's round that down to 10, as sunlight is a bit more potent there.
Now sunlight is only there about 2/3 the time, and off for like 10 days, so we need batteries, let's say those are 75% efficient, round-trip through the batteries and diodes and inverters.
So we're back up to about 20 meter-square panels to light up one meter. To light up 50 square meters, one person's worth, that's ONE THOUSAND SQUARE METER STEERABLE PANELS.
That's an awful lot of hardware. I'm not sure one person could maintain 1,000 panels-- wiping off the dust, checking the steering motors, repairing meteorite damage, freeing vacuum-welded joints, swearing at al the dust they've stirred up walking from panel to panel, etc, etc, etc.
Doesn't leave much time for farming, among other things.
And oh, where are you going to get the water for 50 square meters of whatnot growing?