Most laser printers now have considerable processing oomph, with a RISC CPU or two. Hows about instead of putting down yellow dots, the printer just refuses to print anything resembling the size, shape, and color of money? A little rough pattern-matching against the top 50 currency images would do most of the job.
Funny similarity between the two-- they both sanitize the area around the White House. The rooftops of the WH and adjacent buildings are *awfully* pristine. Also Congressional Hill is fuzzed quite a bit.
Harmless I guess but not terribly detrimental to the bad guys trying to find these places.
After a thorough study of PC noise, I came to a few conclusions:
The most noise often comes from the CPU fan. Make sure there are no wires running over the fan. If it's noisy, peel the sticker off the bearing in the back and squirt in a little 3-in-one oil. if it's still noisy, replace it with a quieter one!. Usually bigger means quieter.
Second noisemaker, the tiny fan often seen on video cards. Again, oil it and/or replace it with a bigger, quieter one.
Third noisemaker, old or high RPM disk drives. Replace with new quiet ones, or if SCSI, relocate them to the nearest closet.
Fourth noisemaker, case fan. Clean, lube, and/or replace with a bigger and/or quieter one.
Fifth, the power supply fans. Same routine.
it's not hard to buy 28dba fans with pretty blue LED's at a very reasonable price. Buy them in bulk for even better savings. Buy some shrink-wrap tubing as ina few cases you'll have to shorten or patch fan wires to oddball fan connectors.
After that, get one of those cheap fan speed control panels with the three knobs. Dial back the fan speeds as far as you dare.
Note that the power supplies without fans and without an external heat-sink are just transferring most of the fanning duty to the case fan. They may dissipate a little heat through their contact with the case, but most of it will depend on the case fan to waft air through it. You may need to upgrade that fan if you install one of those well-vented power supplies.
Then sit back and enjoy the quiet:)
You've obviously never used a Micro-Vax. They're these humdrum beige boxes, smallish and incredibly heavy for their small size. Also incredibly slow.
Last time I powered one up, it took about 12 minutes for VMS to get up to the point where it told me: "Your license for TCP/IP has expired". While mulling this over, it informed several other licenses had expired. IIRC I did get a login prompt about 30 minutes after power-up.
I think I was able to salvage the power cord, and a SCSI terminator. Everything else went into the dumpster.
Love the word fungible. It means something like "exchangeable for similar things". Web surfing is NON-FUNGIBLE. That means if we were not web-surfing, as a respite from the stress of working with computers, we'd NOT be working, we'd be walking to the vending machines, looking out the window at the girls, or otherwise unwinding from the daily headaches.
Let's count the things tha are completely and verifiably wrong in the article:
Peltiers are efficient-- NOT! They have an EER of way less than 1.0. A window air conditioner is above 10. End of discussion.
There's no way to make them more efficient-- think-- they have their cold side right next to their hot side-- there's a lot of thermal conductivity there, effectively undoing a big percentage of the cooling.
It's NOT more efficient to draw electrical power than to draw engine power. Somehow the kids think the alternator turns for free. Nope, it draws engine power just like the old AC, and as all defvices are less than 100% efficient, it has to be LESS efficient to use the power downstream from the alternator. { Minor caveat-- the alternator has the advantage of being able to put out more constant power-- direct drive from the engine to the compressor results in less AC (but not necessarily lower efficiency AC) available at slow engine speeds.)
A typical auto AC puts out 30,000 to 50,000 BTUS/hr of cooling. A 1x1 inch peltier chip does about 150 BTU/hr at a cost of $9.95 on the surplus market. To duplicate a regular car AC would require 200 to 350 chips, $2000 to $3500. Plus a bunch more alternators, they'd need 1400 amps, about 20 alternators. Hard to fit them all under the hood.
Peltiers do not last forever. They're prone to breakage due to cyclic stresses and degradation from humidity.
A REALLY bad aricle. The laws of thermodynamics rule.
each layer of logic takes many steps of masking, diffusion, etching, washing. Each step, even if carefully done, kills a certain percentage of the chips. If you try adding another layer of logic, the yield goes WAAAY down, making the whole process uneconomical
You have a 2D-3D mismatch-- heat gets produced in 3D but carried off in only 2D. It's hard enough to cool one thin layer, much harder to keep two layers cool enough.
There's considerable capacitive coupling between the layers.. Signal rise times go blooeay, as does the signal to noise ratio. All bad things.
Even if you could build and test the layers separately, you still are going to lose chips in the bonding and wiring process.
IBM has been promising this kind of thing for about 30 years now. With ideas like frozen mercury for interconnects. Hasnt happened yet.
Notice the article doesnt give any useful details. Solar-powered ion-thrusters have been studied since 1959 or so. They are inextricably limited to providing really teeeeensy amounts of thrust. The only big winning point is you don't need much reaction mass to throw out, as the stuff goes out really quickly. Downside is you don't have much power to work with, and you can't make more than a very tenuous cloud of ions (they repel each other).
>$700 worth of copper? What are you doing, mining your own?
Thats what the fine article said. $700
>I doubt even the magnets cost that much.
The going price for disk drive magnets seems to be around zero or slightly lower. I got big box, about 80 large ones for $5 at a surplus place. I shudda offered less.
> - Running for 50,000 - 150,000 miles or so between replacements or refurbishments, which comes out to no more than 1000-3000 hours at highway speeds or no more than about 10,000 hours at a typical cycle.
So once a year you inspect and/or replace the brushes and squirt some grease into the bearings. If you're living off the grid you probably ave plenty of time on your hands.
I get your point about the wasted excitation power. How about you open up the alternator and replace the rotor winding with some good magnets? That also eliminates the need for the brushes and their replacement.
I didnt even mention the mismatch of rotational speeds, as used 8x 5hp gearboxes go for about $8 on ebay. And while you're pulling the alternator off a car, you can grab the serpentine belt too. A good DIY'er should be able to make a large cogged driving pulley out of plywood and popsicle sticks. Not terribly esthetic and might get iced up in a bad winter.
This isnt a new idea-- probably half the geeks out there have imagined such a device. A quick peek at uspto.gov shows at least six patents along these lines, going back to 1975! IIRC the PLATO group was thinking along these lines too circa 1978.
BTW the economics are impossible-- each key would cost around $20. Plus you'd need at least two gold-plated contacts per key to supply power and data.
A more practical approach would be to project a scanning laser image up through translucent or fiber-optic'ed keytops.
>Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
A lot of folks wouldnt consider a design that is maybe 10% of average, 5x the weight, 10x the cost to be "good enough". You have to trap and skin a lot of muskrats to pay for that windmill, the tower, the inverters, the batteries, and enough land to hide all the above in.
Thanks for your comments, I didnt realize there was a magnetic path through the backing plate.
But I wouldnt call a design "very well done" if it requires $700 of copper, where a car alternator is around 1/10th the size and uses maybe 1/10th the copper.
I'm all for wind power but IMHO this isnt an example of excellent engineeringl far from it. The good news is, it's not hard to do better than this.
> The wave pattern of the power doesn't matter.
It does if, as the article mentions, they're using separate voltmeters and ammeters. My old Simpson 269 meter has been known to indicate 600% too high on pointy waveforms. Such as the ones you get when driving a battery with rectified AC.
>Efficiency only matters with regard to space taken and cost of the raw parts compared to the electricity produced. If you had a source of magnets, wire, wood and metal that was cheap/free, then your windmill could be pretty inefficient.
The choice seems to be: spend $700 and lots of time and materials to build a 12% efficient alternator, of unproven reliability, or spend $100 for a 95% efficient auto alternator, proven, and easily purchaseable and replaceable. Hmmmmm....
Yep, although it's fun to build things, it's a bit iffy when you can just buy something for 10% of your cost that works 10 times better.
For $700 on eBay you could buy SEVEN new auto alternators, or 28 used ones. They're good for about 500 watts each, are already built, tested, good for several million revolutions, have built-in rectifiers and voltage regulators for charging batteries, and have what you need for good efficiency.
Hmmm, still doesnt smell right... No mention of a wattmeter. A large magnetic gap. No closed magnetic path. No design equations. It's really hard to hit all the right sweet spots when winging it.
Plus it's really easy to be fooled when charging batteries-- the voltage may measure 48 volts, and the amps might measure 50, but that doesnt make 2400 watts. Batteries draw current only at the top of each cycle, so there's never that many amps and volts around at the same time. Your typical Radio-Shack meter is going to indicate hundreds of percent too hig-- a common stumbling-block for experimenters.
A true RMS-reading wattmeter is likely to show much less power. Sorry to be a spoil-sport.
>I'd take 12% if it meant I was saving some money and the enviroment.
Ah, that's the rub... Let's see how much money we're saving:
Electricity costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. If you had a windmill with a 100% efficient generator, that generated a kilowatt in a good wind, you might average maybe 3 cents an hour of avoided cost, depending on your average wind speed. 3 cents an hour for a year is $262 a year of avoided electricity cost. With a 12% efficient generator you're saving about $30. You're losing $230 a year by going with your homebrew generator. And very good generators are available at car junkyards for $40.
Also note that from the $262 per year you should subtract the interest costs of your investement in this whole rigamarole (~$10 if you steal or scrounge parts, ~$500 if you buy everything), the costs of maintaining the windmill, batteries, and inverters (~$100 year as a wild guess), plus the cost of your time spent in maintaining everything.
Oh, plus maybe pay back the original cost over a period of 10 years, another $10 to $500 per year.
Doesnt look like a money-maker, or even a money-saver.
making your own generator with magnets and wire is just plain crazy. Designing and building an efficient generator is WAY beyond anybody's homebrew ability. You need to know electromagnetics, have a source of silicon steel laminations, the ability to stamp them out to 0.010" precision, the ability to wind interleaved 6-phase coils, and much more.
The only wattage mentioned is "36 watts" from turning it by hand, and using not a WATTMETER, but a voltmeter. Voltmeters are notoriously inaccurate at measuring "wattage", especally of weird waveforms you're likely to get from a homebrew generator. Also if thye were turning it by hand as hard as they could, the output should have been around 250 watts, assuming an average efficiency generator. So if we use these figures, it looks like their homebrew generator is only about 12% efficient.
Ahem, if you look at the patent, it's mostly (patently) ludicrous. Just a few points:
Calling Hedy Lamarr a "scientist" is a bit of a stretch. If you read her autobiography, she sounds more like a very vain and scatterbrained barbie doll. (Not to mention, bisexual, which makes the book really *hot*)
First of all, she didnt seem to have a clue that radio waves don't make it very far in water. Water, eswpecially salty water, conducts electricity, which shorts out radio waves.
How is the transmitter supposed to sync up with the receiver?
The local oscillators of that era were not too stable-- you couldnt depend on a LC tuned oscillator to stay on frequency, especially given the temperature, humidity, and vibrations inherent in a torpedo.
Most jammers already assume there's going to be some manual frequency hopping, so they used a braod-spectrum noise source to cover a wide swath of spectrum.
This is MY theory of vulnerability, I discovered it all by myself, yes, me, my theory, all mine.
My theory is:
COUGH! Ahimmm! Ahhiiiim! Cough!
Here it is:..... Cough! Ahimmm!
.. okay, now we're ready... my theory, which is all mine... is.....
ALL DINOSAURS... whoops, make that, all ICMP packets, in my theory, which is mine, all packets with information that I should act upon, and coming from a multitude of unknown, untrustable, unverifiable, unadministered, uncertified, uncertifiable, and unknowable sources, those packets, SHOULD BE PERHAPS NOT BE TREATED AS SUPER HOLY GOSPEL!
That is my theory, it's all mine.
Seriously folks, anybody looking at the ICMP design, if they have the slightest IQ, can see the problems with following unverifiable orders coming in from the ether. Perhaps if there was some way of telling that the ICMP packet came from a gosh-darn white-hat router, or using some common sense instead of just blindly following orders.... Not exactly an Einstein concept.... And don't patents have to be "non-obvious"?
Yep, and you can get more mileage out of your car by taping cow-magnets to the fuel line. This article is laughably ludicrous. Let me elucidate the high points:
Making the power supply filter capacitors "20% bigger" is a silly idea, for MANY reasons:
Most electrolytics come with a -20% to +100% tolerance. Because of their construction, it's hard for the manufacturers to get them much closer than that.
Plus in any well-designed power supply the capacitors are intentionally chosen a bit oversize to handle 50Hz or low line voltage situations.
Electrolytics have a steep cap versus temperature curve. The engineers know this and specify 40% bigger caps to handle the times you use your CD player in Alaska.
The filter caps are isolated from the audio circuits by a voltahge regulator chip, which provides about 60 to 90 db of isolation. There's just NO WAY one can notice the effects of a 20% change in capacitance, when the effects are mulffled by a factor of a million to a billion.
The original filter caps have to be very specially chosen for compatibility with the high frequencies and ripple currents. Is it likely the average joe tweaker is going to choose something that approaches what the actual power supply designer chose? Not likely.
Replacing the power supply diodes with "faster" ones is a waste of time and money. Any noise the old diodes generate (if any) is many decades above thre audio range. Plus the CD player has to pass FCC emission limits, so they can't be too noisy to begin with. Skip this mod.
Changing op-amps is really ridiculous. Op amps are always used with huge amounts of negative feedback, which reduces their individual quirks and distortion by a huge factor. I've worked with dozens of op-amps, and have never found one that's not capable of handling your typical audio. A typical 30 cent op-amp already has about 0.001% distortion, thousands of times lower than a golden-eared indivuidual can discern. Skip this step too.
Tapping into the DAC outputs is a REALLY bad idea. Apparently this guy hasnt a clue about Nyquist limits and sampling rates. You HAVE to filter the output of the DAC's, as they're intrinsically rife with sampling-rate related harmonics and aliasing. Those op-amps are there for a reason!. Don't even think of doing this.
Putting caulking on the crystal is wet-your-pants funny! There's absolutely no need for this. Crystals are designed to resonate at one frequency. They're totally insensitive, by factos of a billion or more, to any other vibrationary frequency. As an example, there are very precise aerospace radios, with dozens of crystals, none of them caulk-damped, used for life-critical navigation and landing systems, and they work just fine for decades of constant use in vibraty, shaky old prop planes. Put the rope caulk around your windows, not on your crystals.
If you like the look of gold-plated jacks, install them. There will be absolutely no discernible difference in the sound, but they look neater.
Sorry to rain onthis guys parade, but IMHO there should be at least a token nod towards reality.
>I was just trying to point out that there are lots of alternative methods to make ethanol, and they don't have to be all that energy intensive.
True, but there's only so much farmland around, and if you want to keep producing as much corn, you have to spread fertilizers (made from Methane?), pesticides, irrigate, plow, and harvest, all of which uses gas for the farm machinery.
Not to mention the gas used to transport the stuff to the distillery.
A low-energy approach to fermentation has to take into account the cost of tying up the machinery for a longer time, plus the cost of all that corn tied up for a longer time. Not to mention possibly lower conversion to ethanol efficiency.
Distillation is unlikely to ever be a low-energy process. Alternative sources of heat are hard to fahom. There are only so many dry and burnable corncobs available for free nearby, all the rest would have to be hauled (more gas) and paid for.
from my (somewhat limited) font of thermodynamic wisdom:
If you block the light with a black screen, eventually the screen is going to heat up to equilibrium, until it's radiating as much heat as it is receiving. Half of that heat is going to radiate towards earth. You've lost half of your blocking efficiency right there.
If you're a tad cleverer, you'll make the inside side white or reflective. That will cut down the radiation towards the earth quite a bit.
But now you notice the device is tending to de-orbit itself-- that's because the impinging photons impart a teensy bit of momentum. To keep it in orbit, you have to push it outwards, which is a bit of a problem, or maybe worse:
To push it outwards, you need to extert the same force. That's going to take rockets and energy and mass--- hmmm, could this require the same or more energy than the amount you're blocking? My math isnt that good to even begin to estimate this.
Just using Murphy's law, which is usually correct, one might expect it might take as much energy as you're blocking to keep this thing in orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
"PROTECT MODE"????? The CPU has already pre-empted that term. Hows about calling it PCMCIA "Protection Compromised-- Microsoft Can't Improve Anything"
Most laser printers now have considerable processing oomph, with a RISC CPU or two. Hows about instead of putting down yellow dots, the printer just refuses to print anything resembling the size, shape, and color of money? A little rough pattern-matching against the top 50 currency images would do most of the job.
Harmless I guess but not terribly detrimental to the bad guys trying to find these places.
- The most noise often comes from the CPU fan. Make sure there are no wires running over the fan. If it's noisy, peel the sticker off the bearing in the back and squirt in a little 3-in-one oil. if it's still noisy, replace it with a quieter one!. Usually bigger means quieter.
- Second noisemaker, the tiny fan often seen on video cards. Again, oil it and/or replace it with a bigger, quieter one.
- Third noisemaker, old or high RPM disk drives. Replace with new quiet ones, or if SCSI, relocate them to the nearest closet.
- Fourth noisemaker, case fan. Clean, lube, and/or replace with a bigger and/or quieter one.
- Fifth, the power supply fans. Same routine.
it's not hard to buy 28dba fans with pretty blue LED's at a very reasonable price. Buy them in bulk for even better savings. Buy some shrink-wrap tubing as ina few cases you'll have to shorten or patch fan wires to oddball fan connectors.After that, get one of those cheap fan speed control panels with the three knobs. Dial back the fan speeds as far as you dare.
Note that the power supplies without fans and without an external heat-sink are just transferring most of the fanning duty to the case fan. They may dissipate a little heat through their contact with the case, but most of it will depend on the case fan to waft air through it. You may need to upgrade that fan if you install one of those well-vented power supplies. Then sit back and enjoy the quiet :)
You've obviously never used a Micro-Vax. They're these humdrum beige boxes, smallish and incredibly heavy for their small size. Also incredibly slow. Last time I powered one up, it took about 12 minutes for VMS to get up to the point where it told me: "Your license for TCP/IP has expired". While mulling this over, it informed several other licenses had expired. IIRC I did get a login prompt about 30 minutes after power-up. I think I was able to salvage the power cord, and a SCSI terminator. Everything else went into the dumpster.
Love the word fungible. It means something like "exchangeable for similar things". Web surfing is NON-FUNGIBLE. That means if we were not web-surfing, as a respite from the stress of working with computers, we'd NOT be working, we'd be walking to the vending machines, looking out the window at the girls, or otherwise unwinding from the daily headaches.
- Peltiers are efficient-- NOT! They have an EER of way less than 1.0. A window air conditioner is above 10. End of discussion.
- There's no way to make them more efficient-- think-- they have their cold side right next to their hot side-- there's a lot of thermal conductivity there, effectively undoing a big percentage of the cooling.
- It's NOT more efficient to draw electrical power than to draw engine power. Somehow the kids think the alternator turns for free. Nope, it draws engine power just like the old AC, and as all defvices are less than 100% efficient, it has to be LESS efficient to use the power downstream from the alternator. { Minor caveat-- the alternator has the advantage of being able to put out more constant power-- direct drive from the engine to the compressor results in less AC (but not necessarily lower efficiency AC) available at slow engine speeds.)
- A typical auto AC puts out 30,000 to 50,000 BTUS/hr of cooling. A 1x1 inch peltier chip does about 150 BTU/hr at a cost of $9.95 on the surplus market. To duplicate a regular car AC would require 200 to 350 chips, $2000 to $3500. Plus a bunch more alternators, they'd need 1400 amps, about 20 alternators. Hard to fit them all under the hood.
- Peltiers do not last forever. They're prone to breakage due to cyclic stresses and degradation from humidity.
A REALLY bad aricle. The laws of thermodynamics rule.Notice the article doesnt give any useful details. Solar-powered ion-thrusters have been studied since 1959 or so. They are inextricably limited to providing really teeeeensy amounts of thrust. The only big winning point is you don't need much reaction mass to throw out, as the stuff goes out really quickly. Downside is you don't have much power to work with, and you can't make more than a very tenuous cloud of ions (they repel each other).
Thats what the fine article said. $700
>I doubt even the magnets cost that much.
The going price for disk drive magnets seems to be around zero or slightly lower. I got big box, about 80 large ones for $5 at a surplus place. I shudda offered less.
> - Running for 50,000 - 150,000 miles or so between replacements or refurbishments, which comes out to no more than 1000-3000 hours at highway speeds or no more than about 10,000 hours at a typical cycle.
So once a year you inspect and/or replace the brushes and squirt some grease into the bearings. If you're living off the grid you probably ave plenty of time on your hands.
I get your point about the wasted excitation power. How about you open up the alternator and replace the rotor winding with some good magnets? That also eliminates the need for the brushes and their replacement.
I didnt even mention the mismatch of rotational speeds, as used 8x 5hp gearboxes go for about $8 on ebay. And while you're pulling the alternator off a car, you can grab the serpentine belt too. A good DIY'er should be able to make a large cogged driving pulley out of plywood and popsicle sticks. Not terribly esthetic and might get iced up in a bad winter.
BTW the economics are impossible-- each key would cost around $20. Plus you'd need at least two gold-plated contacts per key to supply power and data. A more practical approach would be to project a scanning laser image up through translucent or fiber-optic'ed keytops.
>Perfect is the enemy of good enough. A lot of folks wouldnt consider a design that is maybe 10% of average, 5x the weight, 10x the cost to be "good enough". You have to trap and skin a lot of muskrats to pay for that windmill, the tower, the inverters, the batteries, and enough land to hide all the above in.
But I wouldnt call a design "very well done" if it requires $700 of copper, where a car alternator is around 1/10th the size and uses maybe 1/10th the copper.
I'm all for wind power but IMHO this isnt an example of excellent engineeringl far from it. The good news is, it's not hard to do better than this.
> The wave pattern of the power doesn't matter. It does if, as the article mentions, they're using separate voltmeters and ammeters. My old Simpson 269 meter has been known to indicate 600% too high on pointy waveforms. Such as the ones you get when driving a battery with rectified AC. >Efficiency only matters with regard to space taken and cost of the raw parts compared to the electricity produced. If you had a source of magnets, wire, wood and metal that was cheap/free, then your windmill could be pretty inefficient. The choice seems to be: spend $700 and lots of time and materials to build a 12% efficient alternator, of unproven reliability, or spend $100 for a 95% efficient auto alternator, proven, and easily purchaseable and replaceable. Hmmmmm....
For $700 on eBay you could buy SEVEN new auto alternators, or 28 used ones. They're good for about 500 watts each, are already built, tested, good for several million revolutions, have built-in rectifiers and voltage regulators for charging batteries, and have what you need for good efficiency.
Plus it's really easy to be fooled when charging batteries-- the voltage may measure 48 volts, and the amps might measure 50, but that doesnt make 2400 watts. Batteries draw current only at the top of each cycle, so there's never that many amps and volts around at the same time. Your typical Radio-Shack meter is going to indicate hundreds of percent too hig-- a common stumbling-block for experimenters.
A true RMS-reading wattmeter is likely to show much less power. Sorry to be a spoil-sport.
Electricity costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. If you had a windmill with a 100% efficient generator, that generated a kilowatt in a good wind, you might average maybe 3 cents an hour of avoided cost, depending on your average wind speed. 3 cents an hour for a year is $262 a year of avoided electricity cost. With a 12% efficient generator you're saving about $30. You're losing $230 a year by going with your homebrew generator. And very good generators are available at car junkyards for $40.
Also note that from the $262 per year you should subtract the interest costs of your investement in this whole rigamarole (~$10 if you steal or scrounge parts, ~$500 if you buy everything), the costs of maintaining the windmill, batteries, and inverters (~$100 year as a wild guess), plus the cost of your time spent in maintaining everything. Oh, plus maybe pay back the original cost over a period of 10 years, another $10 to $500 per year. Doesnt look like a money-maker, or even a money-saver.
The only wattage mentioned is "36 watts" from turning it by hand, and using not a WATTMETER, but a voltmeter. Voltmeters are notoriously inaccurate at measuring "wattage", especally of weird waveforms you're likely to get from a homebrew generator. Also if thye were turning it by hand as hard as they could, the output should have been around 250 watts, assuming an average efficiency generator. So if we use these figures, it looks like their homebrew generator is only about 12% efficient.
This is not a great example of good DIY-ing.
- Calling Hedy Lamarr a "scientist" is a bit of a stretch. If you read her autobiography, she sounds more like a very vain and scatterbrained barbie doll. (Not to mention, bisexual, which makes the book really *hot*)
- First of all, she didnt seem to have a clue that radio waves don't make it very far in water. Water, eswpecially salty water, conducts electricity, which shorts out radio waves.
- How is the transmitter supposed to sync up with the receiver?
- The local oscillators of that era were not too stable-- you couldnt depend on a LC tuned oscillator to stay on frequency, especially given the temperature, humidity, and vibrations inherent in a torpedo.
- Most jammers already assume there's going to be some manual frequency hopping, so they used a braod-spectrum noise source to cover a wide swath of spectrum.
So as often is the case, nothing to see here.Needless to say, you can fool yourself if you confuse rote mimicry for actual understanding.
My theory is:
COUGH! Ahimmm! Ahhiiiim! Cough!
Here it is: ..... Cough! Ahimmm!
That is my theory, it's all mine. Seriously folks, anybody looking at the ICMP design, if they have the slightest IQ, can see the problems with following unverifiable orders coming in from the ether. Perhaps if there was some way of telling that the ICMP packet came from a gosh-darn white-hat router, or using some common sense instead of just blindly following orders.... Not exactly an Einstein concept.... And don't patents have to be "non-obvious"?
- Making the power supply filter capacitors "20% bigger" is a silly idea, for MANY reasons:
- Most electrolytics come with a -20% to +100% tolerance. Because of their construction, it's hard for the manufacturers to get them much closer than that.
- Plus in any well-designed power supply the capacitors are intentionally chosen a bit oversize to handle 50Hz or low line voltage situations.
- Electrolytics have a steep cap versus temperature curve. The engineers know this and specify 40% bigger caps to handle the times you use your CD player in Alaska.
- The filter caps are isolated from the audio circuits by a voltahge regulator chip, which provides about 60 to 90 db of isolation. There's just NO WAY one can notice the effects of a 20% change in capacitance, when the effects are mulffled by a factor of a million to a billion.
- The original filter caps have to be very specially chosen for compatibility with the high frequencies and ripple currents. Is it likely the average joe tweaker is going to choose something that approaches what the actual power supply designer chose? Not likely.
- Replacing the power supply diodes with "faster" ones is a waste of time and money. Any noise the old diodes generate (if any) is many decades above thre audio range. Plus the CD player has to pass FCC emission limits, so they can't be too noisy to begin with. Skip this mod.
- Changing op-amps is really ridiculous. Op amps are always used with huge amounts of negative feedback, which reduces their individual quirks and distortion by a huge factor. I've worked with dozens of op-amps, and have never found one that's not capable of handling your typical audio. A typical 30 cent op-amp already has about 0.001% distortion, thousands of times lower than a golden-eared indivuidual can discern. Skip this step too.
- Tapping into the DAC outputs is a REALLY bad idea. Apparently this guy hasnt a clue about Nyquist limits and sampling rates. You HAVE to filter the output of the DAC's, as they're intrinsically rife with sampling-rate related harmonics and aliasing. Those op-amps are there for a reason!. Don't even think of doing this.
- Putting caulking on the crystal is wet-your-pants funny! There's absolutely no need for this. Crystals are designed to resonate at one frequency. They're totally insensitive, by factos of a billion or more, to any other vibrationary frequency. As an example, there are very precise aerospace radios, with dozens of crystals, none of them caulk-damped, used for life-critical navigation and landing systems, and they work just fine for decades of constant use in vibraty, shaky old prop planes. Put the rope caulk around your windows, not on your crystals.
- If you like the look of gold-plated jacks, install them. There will be absolutely no discernible difference in the sound, but they look neater.
Sorry to rain onthis guys parade, but IMHO there should be at least a token nod towards reality.The FA mentions the babe int the movie was Miss Universe 1957. A bit of resume inflation there. She was only the second runner up. Still, wow.
True, but there's only so much farmland around, and if you want to keep producing as much corn, you have to spread fertilizers (made from Methane?), pesticides, irrigate, plow, and harvest, all of which uses gas for the farm machinery.
Not to mention the gas used to transport the stuff to the distillery.
A low-energy approach to fermentation has to take into account the cost of tying up the machinery for a longer time, plus the cost of all that corn tied up for a longer time. Not to mention possibly lower conversion to ethanol efficiency.
Distillation is unlikely to ever be a low-energy process. Alternative sources of heat are hard to fahom. There are only so many dry and burnable corncobs available for free nearby, all the rest would have to be hauled (more gas) and paid for.
How's about we just stop buying SUV's?
from my (somewhat limited) font of thermodynamic wisdom: