Since the airplane laser is there to "jam" the missiles' optical/IR tracking instead of destroying them, it should certainly be possible to redesign the missiles' guidance system to use the airplane's anti-missile jamming laser as a homing beacon, turning the defense mechanism into a practical bull's eye target.
Since laser light is directional, a simple pin-hole shadow mask in front of a CCD would be enough to compute a satisfactory approach vector to keep the target within re-capture range.
Like many DHS and other agencies' schemes, they may initially look good on paper (particularly to the uninformed public) but are likely to be proven worthless money sinkholes practice since they rely on the premise that terrorists will be unable to adapt... much like the MPAA was banking on AACS, HDCP and BD+ never being broken. At best, I think this is a $40B money scheme to make the promoters' friends richer.
It just pisses me off because essentially they are saying: "If we opened it up we would have no way to lock in consumers and guarantee ourselves a profit in a non-competitive field. So we are just going to screw the consumers instead."
And we all know average consumers lack the knowledge or technical resources to copy the stuff (particularly from VGA/DVI/HDMI sources) in the first place and for pirates, it is always a simple matter of "break once, copy everywhere" that only delays things by a few hours or days at most.
Between actual lost sales to piracy (people who really want/need the media/software but download instead of buying) and the millions companies pour into DRM, I seriously wonder whether or not DRM pays for itself. In any case, HDCP today is completely irrelevant: with AACS broken, the raw media data is a far more desirable source than decoded and pre/post-processed raw data on the display link.
Since it's a device for imposing DRM, there's presumably some mechanism for forcing the user to buy and use it. What is the mechanism? What types of equipment require it?
HDMI is only a link-level protocol, electrical, cable and plug/jack specification much like 100BaseTX. HDCP is the actual DRM introduced along with HDMI and it has been adopted by both DVI and DisplayPort.
HDCP (be it over HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort) is only required for playing back DRM-infested media at full resolution on DRM-infested OSes like Vista.
If they eBay for $400, an even better business model would be: 1) Buy a bunch of $200 OLPC laptops 2) eBay them all for ~$400 3) more profits
OLPC should simply make its laptops available to the general public for $250-300 and use the extra profit margin to subsidize its give-away/discounted laptops in the target charity markets. This would reduce the number of machines bought/received on charity and resold on eBay for profit while also reducing profit margins on that scheme.
OLPC is doing a disservice to itself and its cause by being so inflexible in how it allows people to throw money at it... it is basically G1G1 or STFU.
Is there any labeling requirement for HD/BD releases to tell which codec they're using?
Read the labels and check out online databases. Obsolete MPEG2 is sadly most common (around 40% of titles) on the often preferred Blu-Ray while the vast majority of HD-DVD titles are VC1. H264 is by far the least common on either media, presumably because it is the most CPU-intensive CODEC.
At least BD has mandatory PCM audio as an HiFi-bound plus... but that's overkill, a total waste of storage space and unnecessary stream bitrate inflator for 99% of people.
The frame is 4x times the size (in area), and the disc only has about 4-5 times the capacity. So if they haven't changed the encoding formats, I think we are still going to have a lot of the same quality problems we had before.
Although higher picture resolution increases the amount of information that needs to be compressed, most of that extra data is spatially and temporally redundant, making it easier for CODECs to do their job more efficiently with enhanced precision.
SD is 720x480 while Full-HD is 1920x1080. Pixel-wise, this is a 6X improvement. Video CODEC wise, HD-DVD and BD support MPEG2 (DVD), VC-1 and H264. While MPEG2 is horrible at maintaining clean edges, H264 fares vastly better and can already produce decent 1080p at DVD-class (4-7Mbps) MPEG2 video stream rates: from what I have seen, 4Mbps 1080p H264 already looks better than 4Mbps 480p MPEG2.
One problem I have with the current HD marketplace is it is filled with 720p/1080i and MPEG2 encodings. I will not be buying HD-DVD/BD movies until the movies I want get re-released in 1080p H264/VC1 - I do not want to buy into half-baked HD.
As for which format will win the war, I do not really care but I am betting on HD-DVD for its cleaner/simpler specs and lower production costs. Whatever may be the case, I will most likely end up owning devices for both formats: PS3 for gaming/BD and PC HD-DVD-RW for everything else.
I've found that with lamemp3, 192 ABR or VBR with -q 2 or -h is probably the best compression you can get without sacraficing quality even for high-end audio equipment.
I have done some CBR MP3 testing a while ago to find out the best balance between bitrate and sound quality to maximize the playback time on my old 1GB MP3 player. 128kbps is definitely out of the picture since it completely mangles hit-hats like nobody's business. 160kbps is better but still unbearable on many hit-hats passages. 192kbps is far better but still occasionally failed at cleanly reproducing some heavy hit-hats passages on some of my test tracks. At 224kbps, no flaws were obvious enough to distract me and I could not clearly identify any further improvements with 256kbps.
Since my MP3 player is considerably lower-fi than my PC's Audigy2, I figured minor flaws on PC playback should be mostly unnoticeable on the MP3 player so I picked 192kbps for my portable collection - plenty good enough 99% of the time for me.
The fusion of technologies (phone + walkie-talkie ~= cordless phone) is obvious and not patentable. What is non-obvious and patentable is the various brands of glue (CDMA/GSM/etc. RF MACs and phone chipsets) that make this fusion possible.
One idea is to produce a "single" LED that actually has three diodes on it, red green and blue, to approximate the incandescent color quality
One big problem with RGB as a fixed white light source is that each LED needs a different supply voltage and current. For fixed white light applications, high-efficiency blue/violet/UV emitters with phosphorescent epoxy mix (a direct adaptation of fluorescent technology) is currently the preferred method. For variable lighting, RGB triple-emitter LED dies already do exist but the power levels within a single device make them useless for room lighting.
Lumiled's Luxeon series (1-5W power LEDs) have a number of cool/warm/neutral white models at 30-40 lumens/watt and they are phosphor conversion devices... much better than the LED porcupines some shops sell.
For example the metal in batteries and distributors is inherently valuable
It depends on the battery type. Lead-acid batteries contain kilograms of lead which is rather toxic and practically banned from use anywhere beyond automotive and industrial batteries... the only reasons lead batteries have not been banned yet under the RoHS/lead-free banner is the lack of economically competitive alternatives and the countless equipments in those two categories that depend on lead batteries and their very few technical advantages.
Lead is also rather worthless as far as metals in are concerned: nickel and silver are currently respectively ~10X and ~12X more valuable than lead... so the environmental charge/refund on lead-acid batteries is really not much more than that. The costs of de-constructing lead-acid batteries and refining their electrodes+electrolyte is probably close to on-par with the cost of "new lead" from refining by-products from refining other more valuable metals. Selling lead is one way ore processors can lighten their hazardous waste disposal burden.
While I understand and agree with the general intent behind what you said, I just wanted to make you aware that the "valuable metals" recycling argument does not apply to lead-acid batteries since recycled lead competes with "fresh" by-product lead.
Given that Nintendo frowns on store bundles, they are unlikely to endorse the retail eBay business as well. The store could see its next few Wii and other Nintendo-ware shipments cut off for a while.
Heck, maybe they could even integrate the AC adapter into the laptop and have one less bulky item to worry about.
My old Toshiba CDT430 has a built-in power supply and I must say it has been far less troublesome than my newer Compaq laptop's external brick with its god-damned barrel power connector - the slightest vibration is sometimes enough to end up on battery power... and with my current battery dead (I am currently meditating on new laptop VS new battery VS new desktop), it means lights out without warning. If I could figure out how to disassemble the battery pack without destroying it, I would try an NiMH conversion.
The main problem with integrated power supplies is they "waste" at least one cubic inch for line input caps, another cubic inch for line conditioning/PFC and output filters, another cubic inch for the main transformer and one more cubic inch for active devices with their heatsinks... that's about four cubic inches for a basic 100W universal single-rail AC-DC converter. Add the 20 minutes fast-charge option and we need another two cubic inches for beefier PFC, input filters, power transformer and heatsinks.
As much as I hate laptop power bricks and their cheap barrel connectors, they are here to stay - even more so if/once 10+h high-cycle-count battery life becomes standard: enough battery capacity to last through typical work days means no need to carry the 1lb brick and absolutely no desire to be stuck with a 1/2lb integrated charger all day long for over 90% of people.
Shrink a battery in a laptop and you can have enough extra room to have an additional 2-3 hard drives if one wanted.
I'd rather shed about a pound in overall weight and 1/4" in overall thickness yet still have triple the Wh capacity than have a bunch of extra unused internal peripheral bays wasting space, adding structural weak points and collecting dust puppies. Unlike cell phones and media players, there is still a fair amount of thickness and weight optimization left to do in current laptop designs where surface area is dictated by screen size.
When I need extra HDD space on the go, I lug around an external 2.5" or 3.5" USB drive. Otherwise, I do not want to bother with the unnecessary extra weight, heat, battery drain and bulkier machine.
Rather than tripling the life of a current battery, I can see this being used to power a laptop off a battery the size of a current cell phone battery and shrinking cell phone batteries to the size of a nickel. This will drastically reduce the size of several of our common devices such as Bluetooth headsets, cell phones, iPods (and other MP3 players), digital cameras, etc.
Great, more unworkably small displays, keypads and other tactile/visual HIDs.
I think many of those devices have already reached the limit where size is impeding usability and ruggedness. I personally cannot stand squinting at video on sub-3" LCDs and hate my current cell phone's ~1" wide keypad.
So is USB3 also supposed to get rid of USB1/2's insane CPU overhead at high speeds?
How much CPU time USB needs is a matter of which hardware interface the USB host has. - UHCI is the dumbest controller that only does SERDES and other continuous real-time stuff in hardware - only supposed to be used on USB1.x - OHCI does more data/protocol handling in hardware - the intended HCI for early USB2 hosts - EHCI does most handling in hardware
My desktop PC (3GHz P4-HT with i865G chipset) has UHCI USB2 controllers and I get ~20% CPU usage while writing to an USB2 disk (200GB Maxtor 6B200M0 in a NexStar3 eSATA/USB box) at 20MB/s. On the other hand, my laptop (1.8GHz A64 with nF3 chipset) has OHCI USB2 controllers and I can write at 24MB/s to the same external USB2 box with ~10% CPU load. With EHCI, the CPU load should be even lower.
USB is only a protocol, how much CPU overhead it will have only depends on how much of the protocol ASIC designers are willing or deem reasonable to implement in hardware. This is the same thing for TCP offload engines: extreme gamers want ultra-low latencies and are willing to pay extra for hardware-assisted network traffic processing on their network cards.
FW400 may be "only" 400Mbps but it is double-simplex 400Mbps - 800Mbps aggregate. USB2 may be "faster" at 480Mbps but it is half-duplex with 10% bandwidth reserved for host commands and more dead-time inserted between TX and RX packets while host and target devices' transceivers switch directions, wasting several microseconds each time.
The highest copy speed I have ever reached on FW400 is 32MB/s - limited by the ATA33-FW400 bridge chip (Oxford 911) while the highest speed I have ever seen with any combination of my USB2/480 external HDD boxes and PCs is 24MB/s with 18MB/s being more typical. Under the best circumstances, USB barely matches the SLOWEST speeds I take for granted on FW400. If I string two of my FireWire drives together and move data between the two boxes, I still get the same 24-30MB/s I am used to but if I try to do the same with USB2 and a hub, USB2 crawls at 8-10MB/s. In this scenario, FireWire is as much as 3X as fast as USB2.
With eSATA for external storage, USB3 (late 2008) for all sorts of high-bandwidth (4.8Gbps) devices and GbE for mainstream networking, FW3200 will become irrelevant soon enough: USB3 is supposed to be 4.8Gbps double-simplex fiber, blowing away FW3200 on raw speed and finally getting rid of USB1/2's half-duplex overhead.
Just thinking out-loud here: Did you trying pushing-in the Turbo button?
STACK OVERFLOW SYSTEM HALTED.
Stupid Turbo button ruined my * Quest games countless times and unfortunately for me, most were practically unplayable at the default 4.77MHz. My next PC was a 486DX33 on which many of those games were now too fast to be playable.
Personally: "Original language (if understood)" > "original + subtitles in a language I understand" > "dubbed well" > "on mute" > "dubbed badly";
I second that.
Me and a bunch of my friends watch anime and asian movies together (mix of fansubs and rentals) once a month and we always watch with original audio (usually japanese) and english subs... 90% of english dubs miserably fail to carry over any of the character from the original voice acting.
Si being one of the most abundant elements on the planet weights for a lot on the not-worth-it side... but the other rarer elements deposited on the chips could be a different story. Much of these could be recovered my melting thousands of ICs into a single ingot and passing it through an induction oven a few times to separate elements by sedimentation. Since most of the valuable elements used in Si-based ICs are heavier than Si, a fair amount of them would settle near the bottom.
In the days of pre-flip-chip ICs, scavengers were taking apart ICs to recover the gold bonding wires and gold-plated components because there was more gold per kg in electronics than raw ore. Depending on how prices for the other rare elements go, the above recycling process could become economically viable.
I'm just pointing out that fiber is not faster than copper. It provides more bandwidth, but the physical medium is actually slower.
It depends on what type of fiber and coax you are comparing. Wavelength and frequency are also factors in determining the propagation speed. For fiber, multi-mode 50um core fiber is faster than 62.5um and both are slower than single-mode (typically less than 6.25um core) fibers, 1.6um IR propagates faster than 1.1um IR, etc. Coax is basically a waveguide so the same general rules apply... larger cables have slower propagation and lower frequencies propagate faster. On top of physical dimensions (cable/fiber geometry) and signal spectrum, cable construction materials' electrical and optical properties (mainly dielectric constant for coax and refraction index for fiber) will also have considerable effect on propagation speed and bandwidth.
Single-mode fiber has much faster propagation speeds and higher bandwidth than multi-mode fiber but is considerably more expensive in every way so most of the fiber used for GbE-class sub-3km runs today is 50um multi-mode. It's not like anybody would ever notice the few microseconds difference between the fastest coax and slowest fiber... the process of (de-)modulating light is much faster and straight-forward than DSP-based QAM (de-)modulation on DOCSIS modems/CMTS or ADSL2+ modems/DSLAM so fiber has a 100+ microseconds latency advantage here that easily offsets slower "last-mile" multi-mode fiber propagation to nearby aggregation equipment. From there, ADSL (CO/remote), coax (HFC box) and pure-fiber networks become practically the same.
I thought that was a last resort? Whats so wrong with locking your bedroom door and waiting for the police to show up?
In a home invasion scenario, do you know beforehand whether or not the robbers are armed and what they are armed with? In most cases, you do not and if you hesitate on the first opening, you may not get a second chance at pulling that trigger. If you are lucky, the intruders will run away or surrender but if you are not, it could be game over for you.
As for the bedroom door, most interior doors are only 1/8-1/4" thick plywood panels hung on 1/2" thick frames robbers can easily kick their way through. If the invasion turns into a gun fight, dry wall and interior doors will not shield anyone from anything.
If I had a gun and got invaded, I would assess the number of intruders and take the first clean shot I can get since there is no telling what would happen if they found me out first.
20mA at 12v is therefore about 0.15 Watts or 150 milliwatts - which is hardly 1 WATT!
Huh? Please refrain from correcting "bad math" (although my post's numbers were correct - I said 200-400mW for the relay as per the linked PDF) with worse math of your own... 20mA (DC or RMS) x 12V (DC or RMS) = 240mW assuming negligible phase displacement if you drive the relay's coil with AC.
What I did say was 1W for the complete relay circuit which includes a number of things beyond the relay's coil such as the bootstrap power supply needed to power a subset of standby electronics and initial relay activation energy.
To translate, that's 342 Wh/kg (compared to 150-200 Wh/kg for Li-ion. And it has a lower discharge rate and doesn't lose capacity like Li-ion.
Much of the self-discharge we see in contemporary Li-ion batteries comes from built-in monitoring circuitry made necessary thanks to classic lithium chemistry's volatility. More advanced lithium technologies like AltairNano's NanoSafe will drastically improve lithium cell's reliability, durability, safety, high-current charge/discharge capability along with a few other parameters. Unfortunately though, all these improvement come at a slight cost in energy density.
I wonder how long it will be until they start licensing their technologies for general use - it would be really nice to have laptop/ups/phone/camera/etc. batteries with 6-10 years half-lives instead of the current 1-4. I would not mind paying $50 extra on my next Dell laptop to get a similar capacity NanoSafe battery upgrade and be practically guaranteed it will be the only battery I will ever need for it even if I keep the computer for 5-10 years.
Miliamps * Voltage = Power. Many of the relatively small (120V/4A) 24V relays I have used require 10-20mA for reliable activation... that's already between a quarter and half a watt for the coil alone.
Most of the power in a CRT goes into the H/V beam deflection electromagnets, not the electron gun. The H/V scanning electronics operate regardless of which color is being rendered. The filament heater also uses about 6W whenever the CRT is turned on. Between displaying 100% white at the highest brightness and the blackest black at the lowest brightness, there is only a 5-10% difference depending on resolution and refresh rates.
As for Fujitsu's 0W-standby monitor, they conveniently omit the fact that this extra relay's coil and related components will be drawing an extra 1W or so while the monitor/TV is on. I would prefer that they perfected ultra-low-power standby like 1W as the current typical appliance has 4-10W standby power: having standby rely on capacitors means standby would not work as expected every now and then if it's been too long since the previous power-up.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the airplane laser is there to "jam" the missiles' optical/IR tracking instead of destroying them, it should certainly be possible to redesign the missiles' guidance system to use the airplane's anti-missile jamming laser as a homing beacon, turning the defense mechanism into a practical bull's eye target.
Since laser light is directional, a simple pin-hole shadow mask in front of a CCD would be enough to compute a satisfactory approach vector to keep the target within re-capture range.
Like many DHS and other agencies' schemes, they may initially look good on paper (particularly to the uninformed public) but are likely to be proven worthless money sinkholes practice since they rely on the premise that terrorists will be unable to adapt... much like the MPAA was banking on AACS, HDCP and BD+ never being broken. At best, I think this is a $40B money scheme to make the promoters' friends richer.
And we all know average consumers lack the knowledge or technical resources to copy the stuff (particularly from VGA/DVI/HDMI sources) in the first place and for pirates, it is always a simple matter of "break once, copy everywhere" that only delays things by a few hours or days at most.
Between actual lost sales to piracy (people who really want/need the media/software but download instead of buying) and the millions companies pour into DRM, I seriously wonder whether or not DRM pays for itself. In any case, HDCP today is completely irrelevant: with AACS broken, the raw media data is a far more desirable source than decoded and pre/post-processed raw data on the display link.
HDMI is only a link-level protocol, electrical, cable and plug/jack specification much like 100BaseTX. HDCP is the actual DRM introduced along with HDMI and it has been adopted by both DVI and DisplayPort.
HDCP (be it over HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort) is only required for playing back DRM-infested media at full resolution on DRM-infested OSes like Vista.
If they eBay for $400, an even better business model would be:
1) Buy a bunch of $200 OLPC laptops
2) eBay them all for ~$400
3) more profits
OLPC should simply make its laptops available to the general public for $250-300 and use the extra profit margin to subsidize its give-away/discounted laptops in the target charity markets. This would reduce the number of machines bought/received on charity and resold on eBay for profit while also reducing profit margins on that scheme.
OLPC is doing a disservice to itself and its cause by being so inflexible in how it allows people to throw money at it... it is basically G1G1 or STFU.
Read the labels and check out online databases. Obsolete MPEG2 is sadly most common (around 40% of titles) on the often preferred Blu-Ray while the vast majority of HD-DVD titles are VC1. H264 is by far the least common on either media, presumably because it is the most CPU-intensive CODEC.
At least BD has mandatory PCM audio as an HiFi-bound plus... but that's overkill, a total waste of storage space and unnecessary stream bitrate inflator for 99% of people.
Although higher picture resolution increases the amount of information that needs to be compressed, most of that extra data is spatially and temporally redundant, making it easier for CODECs to do their job more efficiently with enhanced precision.
SD is 720x480 while Full-HD is 1920x1080. Pixel-wise, this is a 6X improvement. Video CODEC wise, HD-DVD and BD support MPEG2 (DVD), VC-1 and H264. While MPEG2 is horrible at maintaining clean edges, H264 fares vastly better and can already produce decent 1080p at DVD-class (4-7Mbps) MPEG2 video stream rates: from what I have seen, 4Mbps 1080p H264 already looks better than 4Mbps 480p MPEG2.
One problem I have with the current HD marketplace is it is filled with 720p/1080i and MPEG2 encodings. I will not be buying HD-DVD/BD movies until the movies I want get re-released in 1080p H264/VC1 - I do not want to buy into half-baked HD.
As for which format will win the war, I do not really care but I am betting on HD-DVD for its cleaner/simpler specs and lower production costs. Whatever may be the case, I will most likely end up owning devices for both formats: PS3 for gaming/BD and PC HD-DVD-RW for everything else.
I have done some CBR MP3 testing a while ago to find out the best balance between bitrate and sound quality to maximize the playback time on my old 1GB MP3 player. 128kbps is definitely out of the picture since it completely mangles hit-hats like nobody's business. 160kbps is better but still unbearable on many hit-hats passages. 192kbps is far better but still occasionally failed at cleanly reproducing some heavy hit-hats passages on some of my test tracks. At 224kbps, no flaws were obvious enough to distract me and I could not clearly identify any further improvements with 256kbps.
Since my MP3 player is considerably lower-fi than my PC's Audigy2, I figured minor flaws on PC playback should be mostly unnoticeable on the MP3 player so I picked 192kbps for my portable collection - plenty good enough 99% of the time for me.
The fusion of technologies (phone + walkie-talkie ~= cordless phone) is obvious and not patentable. What is non-obvious and patentable is the various brands of glue (CDMA/GSM/etc. RF MACs and phone chipsets) that make this fusion possible.
It depends on the battery type. Lead-acid batteries contain kilograms of lead which is rather toxic and practically banned from use anywhere beyond automotive and industrial batteries... the only reasons lead batteries have not been banned yet under the RoHS/lead-free banner is the lack of economically competitive alternatives and the countless equipments in those two categories that depend on lead batteries and their very few technical advantages.
Lead is also rather worthless as far as metals in are concerned: nickel and silver are currently respectively ~10X and ~12X more valuable than lead... so the environmental charge/refund on lead-acid batteries is really not much more than that. The costs of de-constructing lead-acid batteries and refining their electrodes+electrolyte is probably close to on-par with the cost of "new lead" from refining by-products from refining other more valuable metals. Selling lead is one way ore processors can lighten their hazardous waste disposal burden.
While I understand and agree with the general intent behind what you said, I just wanted to make you aware that the "valuable metals" recycling argument does not apply to lead-acid batteries since recycled lead competes with "fresh" by-product lead.
Given that Nintendo frowns on store bundles, they are unlikely to endorse the retail eBay business as well. The store could see its next few Wii and other Nintendo-ware shipments cut off for a while.
My old Toshiba CDT430 has a built-in power supply and I must say it has been far less troublesome than my newer Compaq laptop's external brick with its god-damned barrel power connector - the slightest vibration is sometimes enough to end up on battery power... and with my current battery dead (I am currently meditating on new laptop VS new battery VS new desktop), it means lights out without warning. If I could figure out how to disassemble the battery pack without destroying it, I would try an NiMH conversion.
The main problem with integrated power supplies is they "waste" at least one cubic inch for line input caps, another cubic inch for line conditioning/PFC and output filters, another cubic inch for the main transformer and one more cubic inch for active devices with their heatsinks... that's about four cubic inches for a basic 100W universal single-rail AC-DC converter. Add the 20 minutes fast-charge option and we need another two cubic inches for beefier PFC, input filters, power transformer and heatsinks.
As much as I hate laptop power bricks and their cheap barrel connectors, they are here to stay - even more so if/once 10+h high-cycle-count battery life becomes standard: enough battery capacity to last through typical work days means no need to carry the 1lb brick and absolutely no desire to be stuck with a 1/2lb integrated charger all day long for over 90% of people.
I'd rather shed about a pound in overall weight and 1/4" in overall thickness yet still have triple the Wh capacity than have a bunch of extra unused internal peripheral bays wasting space, adding structural weak points and collecting dust puppies. Unlike cell phones and media players, there is still a fair amount of thickness and weight optimization left to do in current laptop designs where surface area is dictated by screen size.
When I need extra HDD space on the go, I lug around an external 2.5" or 3.5" USB drive. Otherwise, I do not want to bother with the unnecessary extra weight, heat, battery drain and bulkier machine.
Great, more unworkably small displays, keypads and other tactile/visual HIDs.
I think many of those devices have already reached the limit where size is impeding usability and ruggedness. I personally cannot stand squinting at video on sub-3" LCDs and hate my current cell phone's ~1" wide keypad.
How much CPU time USB needs is a matter of which hardware interface the USB host has.
- UHCI is the dumbest controller that only does SERDES and other continuous real-time stuff in hardware - only supposed to be used on USB1.x
- OHCI does more data/protocol handling in hardware - the intended HCI for early USB2 hosts
- EHCI does most handling in hardware
My desktop PC (3GHz P4-HT with i865G chipset) has UHCI USB2 controllers and I get ~20% CPU usage while writing to an USB2 disk (200GB Maxtor 6B200M0 in a NexStar3 eSATA/USB box) at 20MB/s. On the other hand, my laptop (1.8GHz A64 with nF3 chipset) has OHCI USB2 controllers and I can write at 24MB/s to the same external USB2 box with ~10% CPU load. With EHCI, the CPU load should be even lower.
USB is only a protocol, how much CPU overhead it will have only depends on how much of the protocol ASIC designers are willing or deem reasonable to implement in hardware. This is the same thing for TCP offload engines: extreme gamers want ultra-low latencies and are willing to pay extra for hardware-assisted network traffic processing on their network cards.
FW400 may be "only" 400Mbps but it is double-simplex 400Mbps - 800Mbps aggregate. USB2 may be "faster" at 480Mbps but it is half-duplex with 10% bandwidth reserved for host commands and more dead-time inserted between TX and RX packets while host and target devices' transceivers switch directions, wasting several microseconds each time.
The highest copy speed I have ever reached on FW400 is 32MB/s - limited by the ATA33-FW400 bridge chip (Oxford 911) while the highest speed I have ever seen with any combination of my USB2/480 external HDD boxes and PCs is 24MB/s with 18MB/s being more typical. Under the best circumstances, USB barely matches the SLOWEST speeds I take for granted on FW400. If I string two of my FireWire drives together and move data between the two boxes, I still get the same 24-30MB/s I am used to but if I try to do the same with USB2 and a hub, USB2 crawls at 8-10MB/s. In this scenario, FireWire is as much as 3X as fast as USB2.
With eSATA for external storage, USB3 (late 2008) for all sorts of high-bandwidth (4.8Gbps) devices and GbE for mainstream networking, FW3200 will become irrelevant soon enough: USB3 is supposed to be 4.8Gbps double-simplex fiber, blowing away FW3200 on raw speed and finally getting rid of USB1/2's half-duplex overhead.
STACK OVERFLOW
SYSTEM HALTED.
Stupid Turbo button ruined my * Quest games countless times and unfortunately for me, most were practically unplayable at the default 4.77MHz. My next PC was a 486DX33 on which many of those games were now too fast to be playable.
I second that.
Me and a bunch of my friends watch anime and asian movies together (mix of fansubs and rentals) once a month and we always watch with original audio (usually japanese) and english subs... 90% of english dubs miserably fail to carry over any of the character from the original voice acting.
Si being one of the most abundant elements on the planet weights for a lot on the not-worth-it side... but the other rarer elements deposited on the chips could be a different story. Much of these could be recovered my melting thousands of ICs into a single ingot and passing it through an induction oven a few times to separate elements by sedimentation. Since most of the valuable elements used in Si-based ICs are heavier than Si, a fair amount of them would settle near the bottom.
In the days of pre-flip-chip ICs, scavengers were taking apart ICs to recover the gold bonding wires and gold-plated components because there was more gold per kg in electronics than raw ore. Depending on how prices for the other rare elements go, the above recycling process could become economically viable.
In a home invasion scenario, do you know beforehand whether or not the robbers are armed and what they are armed with? In most cases, you do not and if you hesitate on the first opening, you may not get a second chance at pulling that trigger. If you are lucky, the intruders will run away or surrender but if you are not, it could be game over for you.
As for the bedroom door, most interior doors are only 1/8-1/4" thick plywood panels hung on 1/2" thick frames robbers can easily kick their way through. If the invasion turns into a gun fight, dry wall and interior doors will not shield anyone from anything.
If I had a gun and got invaded, I would assess the number of intruders and take the first clean shot I can get since there is no telling what would happen if they found me out first.
Huh? Please refrain from correcting "bad math" (although my post's numbers were correct - I said 200-400mW for the relay as per the linked PDF) with worse math of your own... 20mA (DC or RMS) x 12V (DC or RMS) = 240mW assuming negligible phase displacement if you drive the relay's coil with AC.
What I did say was 1W for the complete relay circuit which includes a number of things beyond the relay's coil such as the bootstrap power supply needed to power a subset of standby electronics and initial relay activation energy.
Much of the self-discharge we see in contemporary Li-ion batteries comes from built-in monitoring circuitry made necessary thanks to classic lithium chemistry's volatility. More advanced lithium technologies like AltairNano's NanoSafe will drastically improve lithium cell's reliability, durability, safety, high-current charge/discharge capability along with a few other parameters. Unfortunately though, all these improvement come at a slight cost in energy density.
I wonder how long it will be until they start licensing their technologies for general use - it would be really nice to have laptop/ups/phone/camera/etc. batteries with 6-10 years half-lives instead of the current 1-4. I would not mind paying $50 extra on my next Dell laptop to get a similar capacity NanoSafe battery upgrade and be practically guaranteed it will be the only battery I will ever need for it even if I keep the computer for 5-10 years.
I said relay + other components.
Miliamps * Voltage = Power. Many of the relatively small (120V/4A) 24V relays I have used require 10-20mA for reliable activation... that's already between a quarter and half a watt for the coil alone.
http://pewa.panasonic.com/pcsd/product/pwr/pdf_cat/jq.pdf
There you go, miniature relays (less than 1/4 cubic inch) that operate in the 200-400mW area and this is data straight from a manufacturer.
Most of the power in a CRT goes into the H/V beam deflection electromagnets, not the electron gun. The H/V scanning electronics operate regardless of which color is being rendered. The filament heater also uses about 6W whenever the CRT is turned on. Between displaying 100% white at the highest brightness and the blackest black at the lowest brightness, there is only a 5-10% difference depending on resolution and refresh rates.
As for Fujitsu's 0W-standby monitor, they conveniently omit the fact that this extra relay's coil and related components will be drawing an extra 1W or so while the monitor/TV is on. I would prefer that they perfected ultra-low-power standby like 1W as the current typical appliance has 4-10W standby power: having standby rely on capacitors means standby would not work as expected every now and then if it's been too long since the previous power-up.