Yes. Speaking strictly about ALC products, you can either turn the lights on and off with control programs in the general purpose "HVAC" controllers (which have various configurations of inputs, along with a fully programmable microprocessor from the PPC family), or you can buy a Triatek (made by ALC) lighting system, which undoubtedly has more features for lighting, but isn't quite as general purpose.
Basically, the system is a set of networked control modules, each able to turn things on or off (Form C contact, 3A max), ramp up and down with a variable output signal (0-10VDC or 0-20mA), and sense inputs of several types (thermistor, dry contact, 0-10VDC, 0-5VDC, 0-20mA). The controller itself can handle timed schedules and network-viewable points (inputs or outputs on other modules, broadcast over the network). A central server hosts the software and user interface, but each module has its program flashed into EEPROM. Reprogramming is a matter of a few seconds, but loss of power doesn't necessarily cause catastrophic failure.
To sum up: you can control damned near anything with a system like this.
I work for a building automation contractor, and I can tell you, this stuff has been around for years. There's even a standard for stuff like this, and it's nothing nearly as lame as a new XML-DTD-that-will-save-the-world.
The standard is called BACnet (Building Automation and Control Network), and it was (and is) developed by ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers.
We (at my company) are a dealer for a particular brand of native BACnet controllers and software. It's all web-based. Everyone in the industry has web-based software now. Ours happens to be multi-site, too. And ours can interface easily with several hundred different manufacturers' products, including UPS and generator managers. We also frequently take direct control of chillers, which are huge power hogs. All of this can be programmed to maintain a steady climate, light areas appropriately, and keep equipment from failing prematurely, all while monitoring and controlling power usage.
This is hardly news, and certainly not standards-compliant.
I love ya baby but all I can think about is Kielbasa sausage, your butt cheese is warm. I check my dipstick, you need lubrication honey, My kielbasa sausage has just got to perform. Now get it on!
I see you walkin', but all I can think about is Dianetics, your butt cheese is warm. I check my dipstick, you need lubrication honey, My kielbasa sausage has just got to perform. Now I've been set loose - ah, I'm shooting my juice - ah, Right in your caboose. Now fuckin' get it on! Now get it on. Get it on!
Pigments are based on light. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are the three primary pigment colors only because they represent the abscence of one of the primary light colors.
Cyan is the abscence of red. It absorbs red light. Magenta is the abscence of green. It absorbs green light. Yellow is the abscence of blue. It absorbs blue light.
And the fourth color found in this group is black, a mixture of all 3 pigment colors. Black pigment is not the presence of all color. It's the presence of all light absorbtion.
The way that black BMW glinted in the sun is a result of the finish. A nice clearcoat tends to intercept and reflect some full-spectrum sunlight before it gets absorbed by the black paint. A matte finish just diffuses more, yet still reflects that light (just not all in the same direction).
So... black stuff doesn't reflect any light. At all. It's just the nearby non-black stuff that reflects light, making the entire object appear just almost black.
Here's a better option... It's cheaper and less susceptible to broken components.
Get any LCD monitor. Any size will do. Any size above 1280x1024 will probably be wasted. Just make sure it has at least one VGA input.
Then get a Viewsonic NextVision N6. Any and all video games and playback devices can route through that box to your computer monitor. It supports non-passthrough signals up to 1280x1024. Obviously, a VGA passthrough will be whatever you're sending without alteration. There's no perceptible delay for games, and it doesn't suffer the same color problems as the older VB50HRTV (which would make extreme white into black and vice versa).
They lost me long ago with the layer called "crappy music".
I still buy CD's occasionally, but they're never from the top 20 rack at Best Buy anymore. I used to get stuff from that rack all the time. Now, I look at it and see utter garbage for $18.99 where there used to be things like Smashing Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness", which I paid only $16.99 for.
Which brings us to the second deterrence layer that caused a loss of my business - price. When you used to get a good 2-disc set for $17, and now you get a barely listenable 1-disk (it's not a Compact Disc, and Phillips will vouch for it) set for $19, something is clearly wrong. Of course their sales are going south. Nobody wants to pay too much for crap that you're not allowed to use fully.
Somehow, though, these don't sound like "no-cost" solutions to me. The RIAA is winning battles, but losing the war. If they keep this up, and geeks everywhere keep telling people how they're being bent over, people will stop buying, at least enough that the record companies will feel pain. Just keep the pressure on them.
If you can hear the AGP bus humming in your PCI audio card, you need to move the audio card to the far slot. AGP is always at the top of the board (at least on every board I've seen). Put your audio card in the bottom slot.
This will accomplish two things. The first is that it will put distance between that 350 hojillion Hz GPU and your APU generating 20kHz signals. The second thing is, it puts the audio card on a PCI bus that's more than likely unused. PCI only supports 3 slots per bus. Most motherboards have 5 PCI slots. AGP is on its own bus. So those 6 slots are divided into 3 busses. 1 AGP slot by itself, 3 PCI slots on PCI bus 0, and 2 PCI slots on PCI bus 1.
I have an Audigy set up like this, and the problems I've had with it (and there have been many) have all been driver issues. I'd probably ditch the card completely if it weren't for the audio-in options (optical digital input... mmm...) and the front plug panel (5.25" bay panel with digital S/PDIF, MIDI din-5, and 1/4" headphone plugs).
I have SBC DSL (I'm in St. Louis County) and I pay $50 a month for it. I get 1.5/384. One thing to note, DSL reports is dog slow in this area.
dslreports.com consistently reports that I'm getting 128k down, yet all my downloads are in the 160K range (no, k isn't the same as K). Based on the conversion from k to K and the expected packet loss (they told me when I signed up to expect 30% at worst), it comes out right. I'm guessing the problem lies with dslreports.com's distinct lack of a midwest test server (at least the last time I checked).
On top of this, I have the benefit of good service (YMMV, of course. Look at all the problems other people have with them!), a stable connection (only 3 outages in 3.5 years, and one of those was a power-surge-toasted modem), and they let you run servers! Yes, web servers. Port 80. And I don't have to give my money to Charter Cable. Compared to them, SBC is fricking Mother Theresa.
I just don't see why SBC is evil. To be honest, the government needs to declare their stuff to be "infrastructure" and make it all government property, make SBC itself a department (think Department of Transportation here... roads are infrastructure too), and make telephones a proper monopoly instead of a total clusterfuck of capitalism where none belongs.
Ah, the logical fallacy of assuming that piracy is the reason the RIAA is losing sales.
This is Slashdot, where people think that everything must revolve around computers and that ordinary luddites that don't like current music have no effect on the market.
Your argument makes no sense anyway. If today's music wasn't crap, people would buy more of it. It's a copout to say, "Well, maybe everyone will pirate the good music." That's not even the issue. Piracy isn't the problem the RIAA is trying to solve... it's that pesky no-longer-the-MTV-demographic demographic that they can't control anymore. You're implying that reducing piracy will improve sales numbers, which begs the question, why would people buy music they think is bad?
Oh, that's right, it's an irrelevant issue and you're just scapegoating the common man (or geek) in order to justify ignoring consumers' rights. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify repealing the first amendment.
Heh... IMHO, it's a step above the James Bond theme. Mancini made some kick-ass stuff. Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, the love theme from Romeo & Juliet (the 60's one), Baby Elephant Walk from Hatari... the list could go on like that for a while.
How the hell can a Van Helsing video game be weak? Good god. The first thing I thought of when I saw the Van Helsing trailer was, "Wow, a Castlevania movie!" Really, how stupid do you have to be to screw up a game based on that?
I see your point here, but there is a Rare game I can think of that didn't fit that category. And that game would be Goldeneye. Now, I have several N64-era Rare games in my collection. Blast Corps, Goldeneye, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, yadda yadda yadda. Of them, only Goldeneye avoided the exact problems you speak of.
Thinking back, every Rare game I can remember had these exact problems. N.A.R.C., Cobra Triangle, RC Pro Am, Cabal, Time Lord, Donkey Kong Country, DKC2, DKC3, Killer Instinct, KI2... Then I look back at the list and realize that none of these games are classics without Nintendo's marketing department.
When did it start? Remember getting that jungle-printed videotape in the mail back in '94? If you remember it, you subscribed to Nintendo Power, the *only* official source of marketing and speculative brainwashing straight from the Pros!
I have no fuzzy feelings for Rare. THEY DESTROYED MY CHILDHOOD.:)
The superiority of Fahrenheit makes them jealous. How is it superior? Resolution.
To illustrate, in Celcius, 0 is the freezing point of water, 100 is boiling. In Fahrenheit, 32 is freezing, 212 is boiling. In Celcius, there are 100 integral degrees separating these two points. In Fahrenheit, there are 180.
So it's 33 degrees Fahrenheit outside this morning... that's 0.555555555555-> degrees Celcius. By noon, it gets up to a whopping 40 degrees Fahrenheit. That's an oh-so-easy-to-calculate 4.44444444444-> degrees Celcius.
"But," you whine, "32 is such a stupid number to base your calculations from!" Agreed. It is. So let's use something everyone agrees on - absolute zero. Celcius becomes Kelvin, Fahrenheit becomes Rankine. Now we have a logical starting point AND higher resolution.
Actually, it's just that the rest of the American public doesn't give a shit.
I make CAD drawings for a living. They're not heavy on details. They don't even have to be to scale most of the time. But when I do need something to scale, I get a ruler and count the ticks. I don't even care to look at whether I'm reading metric or imperial units on that ruler. I then match my drawing up tick-for-tick. Guess what... It's to scale. 1 ruler unit to 1 screen unit, whichever unit happens to be in use on each device.
Welcome to the wonderful, stress-free world of not caring a whole lot.
Well, there's the problem. Neither "systeme" nor "internationale" are words. We don't know what to switch to.
Maybe if you hadn't let the French dictate all your "standards", maybe we'd go along with it. Until you wise up and use something with a slightly less gay sounding name, maybe something like "International Standard", forget it.
And in return, you get to standardize on OUR DOLLARS. No more "Canadian dollars", "Australian dollars", or "Euros". We'll use your measurement units if we get to make you our financial bitch.
(And for the humor impaired, this is supposed to be funny.)
iTunes for Mac ignores Apple's HIG*. Apple is an equal-opportunity HIG-ignorer. In fact, Apple has been making it a point to abuse and destroy HIG's everywhere.
What I don't understand about the Windows HIG is why everything is set up for lefties. With the kind of marketshare Windows has, it should be for righties, not to mention the fact that most lefties prefer MacOS. And stupider still, in light of the "lefties prefer MacOS" thing, MacOS is set up for righties! WTF!
But this isn't an interface patent, really. There is no such thing as an interface patent. This is a look-and-feel patent which just happens to apply to an interface.
Lotus 1-2-3 had the look and feel of a piece of graph paper, available for many years at any office supply outlet.
iTunes has the look and feel of, well, iTunes. Other programs that do the same thing (play music on a computer) have other interface layouts. Winamp doesn't look like iTunes. Neither does Windows Media Player. Lsongs, on the other hand, is fucked. Linspire copied the look and feel of iTunes, knowingly trying to achieve their goals by clinging to Apple's coattails.
It's not about the interface, really. The interface is just a bunch of buttons, grid panes, scroll bars, etc. Apple will, however, protect the way they put the basic components together.
The last look-and-feel patent lawsuit I remember from Apple involved FuturePower and their iMac wannabe. Apple's rabid attack lawyers made that company their bitch, and with good reason. A computer that looks as distinctive as the iMac, yet is not an iMac, could damage Apple's reputation if it was poorly made. It's a form of corporate identity theft, really. Pretend to be someone else, then screw their life up royally. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I don't see why this is a bad patent. Apple is protecting what is rightfully theirs.
I get all my news from Stargate SG-1. On DVD. I sure wish they'd release season 7 already. I'm dying to find out if the world's gonna end or something.
Slashdot Mirror
do these systems control the lights
Yes. Speaking strictly about ALC products, you can either turn the lights on and off with control programs in the general purpose "HVAC" controllers (which have various configurations of inputs, along with a fully programmable microprocessor from the PPC family), or you can buy a Triatek (made by ALC) lighting system, which undoubtedly has more features for lighting, but isn't quite as general purpose.
Basically, the system is a set of networked control modules, each able to turn things on or off (Form C contact, 3A max), ramp up and down with a variable output signal (0-10VDC or 0-20mA), and sense inputs of several types (thermistor, dry contact, 0-10VDC, 0-5VDC, 0-20mA). The controller itself can handle timed schedules and network-viewable points (inputs or outputs on other modules, broadcast over the network). A central server hosts the software and user interface, but each module has its program flashed into EEPROM. Reprogramming is a matter of a few seconds, but loss of power doesn't necessarily cause catastrophic failure.
To sum up: you can control damned near anything with a system like this.
I work for a building automation contractor, and I can tell you, this stuff has been around for years. There's even a standard for stuff like this, and it's nothing nearly as lame as a new XML-DTD-that-will-save-the-world.
The standard is called BACnet (Building Automation and Control Network), and it was (and is) developed by ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers.
We (at my company) are a dealer for a particular brand of native BACnet controllers and software. It's all web-based. Everyone in the industry has web-based software now. Ours happens to be multi-site, too. And ours can interface easily with several hundred different manufacturers' products, including UPS and generator managers. We also frequently take direct control of chillers, which are huge power hogs. All of this can be programmed to maintain a steady climate, light areas appropriately, and keep equipment from failing prematurely, all while monitoring and controlling power usage.
This is hardly news, and certainly not standards-compliant.
I love ya baby but all I can think about is
Kielbasa sausage, your butt cheese is warm.
I check my dipstick, you need lubrication honey,
My kielbasa sausage has just got to perform.
Now get it on!
I see you walkin', but all I can think about is
Dianetics, your butt cheese is warm.
I check my dipstick, you need lubrication honey,
My kielbasa sausage has just got to perform.
Now I've been set loose - ah,
I'm shooting my juice - ah,
Right in your caboose.
Now fuckin' get it on!
Now get it on.
Get it on!
Singing and sausage in the same post!
Ph33r my photon men.
(I really should quit cheating, but it's just so darned fun! Single-player mode only, so don't get your dander up about online cheaters...)
Pigments are based on light. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are the three primary pigment colors only because they represent the abscence of one of the primary light colors.
Cyan is the abscence of red. It absorbs red light.
Magenta is the abscence of green. It absorbs green light.
Yellow is the abscence of blue. It absorbs blue light.
And the fourth color found in this group is black, a mixture of all 3 pigment colors. Black pigment is not the presence of all color. It's the presence of all light absorbtion.
The way that black BMW glinted in the sun is a result of the finish. A nice clearcoat tends to intercept and reflect some full-spectrum sunlight before it gets absorbed by the black paint. A matte finish just diffuses more, yet still reflects that light (just not all in the same direction).
So... black stuff doesn't reflect any light. At all. It's just the nearby non-black stuff that reflects light, making the entire object appear just almost black.
Ok, what about if the girls in games kick ass and wear cool space suits?
Here's a better option... It's cheaper and less susceptible to broken components.
Get any LCD monitor. Any size will do. Any size above 1280x1024 will probably be wasted. Just make sure it has at least one VGA input.
Then get a Viewsonic NextVision N6. Any and all video games and playback devices can route through that box to your computer monitor. It supports non-passthrough signals up to 1280x1024. Obviously, a VGA passthrough will be whatever you're sending without alteration. There's no perceptible delay for games, and it doesn't suffer the same color problems as the older VB50HRTV (which would make extreme white into black and vice versa).
They did it like this...
They did it like that...
They did it with the wiffle ball bat...
They lost me long ago with the layer called "crappy music".
I still buy CD's occasionally, but they're never from the top 20 rack at Best Buy anymore. I used to get stuff from that rack all the time. Now, I look at it and see utter garbage for $18.99 where there used to be things like Smashing Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness", which I paid only $16.99 for.
Which brings us to the second deterrence layer that caused a loss of my business - price. When you used to get a good 2-disc set for $17, and now you get a barely listenable 1-disk (it's not a Compact Disc, and Phillips will vouch for it) set for $19, something is clearly wrong. Of course their sales are going south. Nobody wants to pay too much for crap that you're not allowed to use fully.
Somehow, though, these don't sound like "no-cost" solutions to me. The RIAA is winning battles, but losing the war. If they keep this up, and geeks everywhere keep telling people how they're being bent over, people will stop buying, at least enough that the record companies will feel pain. Just keep the pressure on them.
If you can hear the AGP bus humming in your PCI audio card, you need to move the audio card to the far slot. AGP is always at the top of the board (at least on every board I've seen). Put your audio card in the bottom slot.
This will accomplish two things. The first is that it will put distance between that 350 hojillion Hz GPU and your APU generating 20kHz signals. The second thing is, it puts the audio card on a PCI bus that's more than likely unused. PCI only supports 3 slots per bus. Most motherboards have 5 PCI slots. AGP is on its own bus. So those 6 slots are divided into 3 busses. 1 AGP slot by itself, 3 PCI slots on PCI bus 0, and 2 PCI slots on PCI bus 1.
I have an Audigy set up like this, and the problems I've had with it (and there have been many) have all been driver issues. I'd probably ditch the card completely if it weren't for the audio-in options (optical digital input... mmm...) and the front plug panel (5.25" bay panel with digital S/PDIF, MIDI din-5, and 1/4" headphone plugs).
Wow, it must suck to be you.
I have SBC DSL (I'm in St. Louis County) and I pay $50 a month for it. I get 1.5/384. One thing to note, DSL reports is dog slow in this area.
dslreports.com consistently reports that I'm getting 128k down, yet all my downloads are in the 160K range (no, k isn't the same as K). Based on the conversion from k to K and the expected packet loss (they told me when I signed up to expect 30% at worst), it comes out right. I'm guessing the problem lies with dslreports.com's distinct lack of a midwest test server (at least the last time I checked).
On top of this, I have the benefit of good service (YMMV, of course. Look at all the problems other people have with them!), a stable connection (only 3 outages in 3.5 years, and one of those was a power-surge-toasted modem), and they let you run servers! Yes, web servers. Port 80. And I don't have to give my money to Charter Cable. Compared to them, SBC is fricking Mother Theresa.
I just don't see why SBC is evil. To be honest, the government needs to declare their stuff to be "infrastructure" and make it all government property, make SBC itself a department (think Department of Transportation here... roads are infrastructure too), and make telephones a proper monopoly instead of a total clusterfuck of capitalism where none belongs.
Q: Where does an 800 lb. gorilla sit?
A: Not on the 2000 lb. gorilla's chair, that's for sure.
As a guy who sits here at his desk with about 200 Visio-made drawings in a stack on his desk, I say...
ANYTHING IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR VISIO.
Thank you. That is all.
Ah, the logical fallacy of assuming that piracy is the reason the RIAA is losing sales.
This is Slashdot, where people think that everything must revolve around computers and that ordinary luddites that don't like current music have no effect on the market.
Your argument makes no sense anyway. If today's music wasn't crap, people would buy more of it. It's a copout to say, "Well, maybe everyone will pirate the good music." That's not even the issue. Piracy isn't the problem the RIAA is trying to solve... it's that pesky no-longer-the-MTV-demographic demographic that they can't control anymore. You're implying that reducing piracy will improve sales numbers, which begs the question, why would people buy music they think is bad?
Oh, that's right, it's an irrelevant issue and you're just scapegoating the common man (or geek) in order to justify ignoring consumers' rights. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify repealing the first amendment.
Heh... IMHO, it's a step above the James Bond theme. Mancini made some kick-ass stuff. Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, the love theme from Romeo & Juliet (the 60's one), Baby Elephant Walk from Hatari... the list could go on like that for a while.
How the hell can a Van Helsing video game be weak? Good god. The first thing I thought of when I saw the Van Helsing trailer was, "Wow, a Castlevania movie!" Really, how stupid do you have to be to screw up a game based on that?
Like this.
Penny Arcade is stuponfucious.
I see your point here, but there is a Rare game I can think of that didn't fit that category. And that game would be Goldeneye. Now, I have several N64-era Rare games in my collection. Blast Corps, Goldeneye, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, yadda yadda yadda. Of them, only Goldeneye avoided the exact problems you speak of.
:)
Thinking back, every Rare game I can remember had these exact problems. N.A.R.C., Cobra Triangle, RC Pro Am, Cabal, Time Lord, Donkey Kong Country, DKC2, DKC3, Killer Instinct, KI2... Then I look back at the list and realize that none of these games are classics without Nintendo's marketing department.
When did it start? Remember getting that jungle-printed videotape in the mail back in '94? If you remember it, you subscribed to Nintendo Power, the *only* official source of marketing and speculative brainwashing straight from the Pros!
I have no fuzzy feelings for Rare. THEY DESTROYED MY CHILDHOOD.
The superiority of Fahrenheit makes them jealous. How is it superior? Resolution.
To illustrate, in Celcius, 0 is the freezing point of water, 100 is boiling. In Fahrenheit, 32 is freezing, 212 is boiling. In Celcius, there are 100 integral degrees separating these two points. In Fahrenheit, there are 180.
So it's 33 degrees Fahrenheit outside this morning... that's 0.555555555555-> degrees Celcius. By noon, it gets up to a whopping 40 degrees Fahrenheit. That's an oh-so-easy-to-calculate 4.44444444444-> degrees Celcius.
"But," you whine, "32 is such a stupid number to base your calculations from!" Agreed. It is. So let's use something everyone agrees on - absolute zero. Celcius becomes Kelvin, Fahrenheit becomes Rankine. Now we have a logical starting point AND higher resolution.
We're not so crazy after all.
Actually, it's just that the rest of the American public doesn't give a shit.
I make CAD drawings for a living. They're not heavy on details. They don't even have to be to scale most of the time. But when I do need something to scale, I get a ruler and count the ticks. I don't even care to look at whether I'm reading metric or imperial units on that ruler. I then match my drawing up tick-for-tick. Guess what... It's to scale. 1 ruler unit to 1 screen unit, whichever unit happens to be in use on each device.
Welcome to the wonderful, stress-free world of not caring a whole lot.
Well, there's the problem. Neither "systeme" nor "internationale" are words. We don't know what to switch to.
Maybe if you hadn't let the French dictate all your "standards", maybe we'd go along with it. Until you wise up and use something with a slightly less gay sounding name, maybe something like "International Standard", forget it.
And in return, you get to standardize on OUR DOLLARS. No more "Canadian dollars", "Australian dollars", or "Euros". We'll use your measurement units if we get to make you our financial bitch.
(And for the humor impaired, this is supposed to be funny.)
iTunes for Mac ignores Apple's HIG*. Apple is an equal-opportunity HIG-ignorer. In fact, Apple has been making it a point to abuse and destroy HIG's everywhere.
What I don't understand about the Windows HIG is why everything is set up for lefties. With the kind of marketshare Windows has, it should be for righties, not to mention the fact that most lefties prefer MacOS. And stupider still, in light of the "lefties prefer MacOS" thing, MacOS is set up for righties! WTF!
* HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines.
But this isn't an interface patent, really. There is no such thing as an interface patent. This is a look-and-feel patent which just happens to apply to an interface.
Lotus 1-2-3 had the look and feel of a piece of graph paper, available for many years at any office supply outlet.
iTunes has the look and feel of, well, iTunes. Other programs that do the same thing (play music on a computer) have other interface layouts. Winamp doesn't look like iTunes. Neither does Windows Media Player. Lsongs, on the other hand, is fucked. Linspire copied the look and feel of iTunes, knowingly trying to achieve their goals by clinging to Apple's coattails.
It's not about the interface, really. The interface is just a bunch of buttons, grid panes, scroll bars, etc. Apple will, however, protect the way they put the basic components together.
The last look-and-feel patent lawsuit I remember from Apple involved FuturePower and their iMac wannabe. Apple's rabid attack lawyers made that company their bitch, and with good reason. A computer that looks as distinctive as the iMac, yet is not an iMac, could damage Apple's reputation if it was poorly made. It's a form of corporate identity theft, really. Pretend to be someone else, then screw their life up royally. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I don't see why this is a bad patent. Apple is protecting what is rightfully theirs.
I get all my news from Stargate SG-1. On DVD. I sure wish they'd release season 7 already. I'm dying to find out if the world's gonna end or something.
But there's no limit to the number of backups you can make. You can even make iTunes do incremental backups.
Try another flavor of Kool-aid.