I noticed the same thing. But AA NiMH are getting cheap enough that you hit the break-even point at 3-5 recharges. ($.35 - $.50 each for alkaline AA, $6.27 for 4 NiMH AA) So when my kids got a gaming console for Christmas and I was too cheap to buy any C batteries, I just created my own C shell out of a bit of cardboard and tape. Three AA's last 18 hours on a charge.
I was going to try to make D batteries out of 3 AA batteries but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
In Diablo, certain scavenger types would actually regenerate health by eating corpses of their comrades.
It made for interesting strategy if you were into that sort of thing. If you got attacked by a mob of these guys, you could just kill one or retreat past a corpse of something you had aready killed. Then as the live ones got too close you only had to damage them until they retreated. They'd go off to feed on the corpse and you could pick them off at your leisure.
Not sure about this particular car, but last December I was in a position where I really could have benefitted from an electric car. I searched the nets and found several that would have done well for me except I couldn't afford one yet. The one I liked the most was currently being used for a commute of about 44 miles and being recharged at work during the day. He was reporting a little less than 250 watt-hours per mile. This is from his charge meter to his odometer, so it included all the inefficiencies in the actual car. I pay 6.936 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity at my power sockets, so it would cost me 1.734 cents per mile. For a 300 mile "fillup" that would cost $5.21
Compare that to my current costs for my gasoline car. I get almost 30 miles to the gallon of gasoline. Gasoline here at the cheap places costs $2.57 per gallon. For a 300 mile fillup that costs me $25.70.
You would have to insert your own electric and gasline costs, but at current prices I don't think there is anywhere in the United States that the numbers wouldn't favor the electric substantially.
> How about the transmission line waste?
As I understand it, the transmission line waste is not really a super big issue. That's why we use high voltage lines to transmit power long distances. The bigger loss is by the step-down transformers at the receiving end. Maybe we could get someone who is more of an expert to get better exact numbers, but I understood it was about 10% loss at each transformer. Assuming two transformers (this is really a guess. There could be up to 4 or as little as one, depending...) that's 19% loss.
Compare that with the transmission ineffeciencies of transporting gasoline. How much diesel does it take for a truck to haul 10,000 gallons of gasoline from the refinery to the pump? If he gets 10 miles per gallon and has to haul it 1000 miles, he only gets 1% loss. Again, I'm just guessing on the load size and mileage but it gives me a ball-park figure.
You also have to take into account that the electricity is transported very safely and cheaply. Having extra trucks on the roads and having to pay the drivers to transport the gasoline are additional issues.
Electric cars really are more efficient and cost effecient than their gasoline powered counterparts. The newer electric motors are lighter and more effecient and have a lot more power than even a decade ago. Maintenance is minimal compared to gasoline engines and they last longer if you replace the brushes a couple of times. Battery maintenance is a bit more of an issue and the batteries do wear down over time and need to be replaced or revamped after however many cycles. But these problems are minimal. The real problems are battery cost, range, refueling time and refueling availability. But if this article is correct, they may have solved at least the battery cost and range issues. I could live with the other ones. If I really could get a electric car the size of a Prius for $38,000 that went 300 miles on a 5 hour charge, I'd do it in a minute. Just the gasoline savings on my commute would cover the car payments.
Why can't I find Open Source IPTV PVR software?
on
A Look at IPTV
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· Score: 1
OK, but it seems MythTV isn't compatible with IPTV. One of the main components of the MythTV setup is the video capture card. So you run an analog signal into it and it digitizes it.
Well, OK. I see that you could connect your MythTV box between your set-top box and your TV. But isn't it less efficient to convert the digital signal to analog, convert it back to digital to record it, and then convert it back to analog to watch it?
My nephew recently got upgraded to a system where they ran fiber to his house, then cat5 cables to the rooms where the TV set-top boxes were. It looks an awful lot like IPTV to me. He was a little bit bummed because the PVR that he had with his previous satellite system didn't work any more, and asked about a PVR for the new system. I did a little bit of research into IPTV and figured this should be a no-brainer. You should be able to plug a Linux box into the hub just as easily as a set-top box. I figured there should be some open source software that emulates a set-top box and allows you to watch TV on your Linux box's monitor.
But I couldn't find any. The tech support guy at the provider says they're working on a PVR solution, but it won't be available for "a couple of months". I figured maybe this is just new technology and we hackers haven't had time to come up with an open source solution yet.
But then these guys post that they've had IPTV for YEARS now. So that can't be the problem. I can't see how it would be so hard to capture a few sessions and decode the protocols from the set-top box to the provider, and the protocols are all documented in RFCs and linked from wikipedia. So why can't I find any open source IPTV PVR software? Do I just suck at searching? Are there legal issues? Compatibility issues with different providers? Not enough interest yet and I should just build it myself?
If there's one thing I can't tolerate, it's intolerance!
I'm goint to bash, discredit, and spread hate and personal intolerance.
And I am a bigot bigot who definitely deserves scorn and scrutiny, not praise.
I thought flying was rocket science until I took flying lessons. The actual flyinf of the plane is pretty easy and not very dangerous. It's pretty much just common sense. Airplanes are much more simple mechanically than cars. They don't even have transmissions. The only reason people think they're so dangerous is that, unlike when you're in a car, you can't just pull over to the side if you have a flat tire. Why do you think you have to do a pre-flight inspection before each take-off?
Besides, there's a lot of room for error. I know from personal experience that most things that go wrong won't impact your safety much. From malfunctioning landing lights and nose-wheel shimmy dampeners to bird strikes and bad starters, most malfunctions just make a lot of noise or scare your passengers.
One thing I will recommend. If you're in the local flying club and you overhear two old geezers talking about "tap-dancing the rudders" trying to land on an old railroad track... take it with a grain of salt. Never mind that your instructor makes you practice short and soft field landings out the wazoo. Never mind that your dad used to practice landing on sand dunes and dirt roads on the way home from work. Make it a practice to only land on surfaces you know--airport runways if possible. Otherwise you might spend 3 days on a dry lake bed in California with nothing to eat except kangaroo rats and stink bugs. Not that it's particularly dangerous, mind you, but although airplanes are mechanically simpler than cars, they're also more fragile.
One of the most glaring evidences of bias in Civilization is the absence of the Slavery advancement. Slavery played such a HUGE part in the History of the world, it must have been left out on purpose.
But how could you put the concept into the game and portray it's true value to civilizations without making it seem like possibly a good thing? How could something so abhorrent have ever had any kind of value?
Probably they were wise in leaving it out.
Gotta be careful with those plastic fins on the fans. They're not very durable. Last week we had a guy with four or five pieces of paper in his hand, rolled up into a cylinder. He accidentally touched the processor fan with them and three of the fins busted right out. That made the rest of the fan imbalanced and it made a terrible racket until he yanked the power cord.
If a small cylinder of paper can break them, think what a pencil or a shoe could do.
I am one of the employees of Novell that moved to Linux last year. There was no formal training needed. Sure there was some installation and learning time, but there isn't anyone in my department that can't learn that stuff faster either by doing it once, or by asking the guy across the hall a couple of questions. Besides, for those of us who learned Unix and/or DOS while in college, we just had to dig a lot of it out of our memories.
I'd say the total time ($$) spent and training needed was comparable to upgrading from Windows 98 to 2000, or 2000 to XP.
Some of the engineers here kept one box with Windows or dual boot. Because there's usually one or two things that Linux just hasn't got right yet. I myself am totally Microsoft Free. There was one time when I borrowed a Windows box from a colleague because I was too lazy to get my Linux box to do the job. I think it was an expense report or something.
Another thing that might muddle the training cost issue is the fact that we have tons of lab machines. Right now I have 9 boxes in my office, running SUSE Linux in various flavors. Seven of them have the Windows 98/2000 certificate stickers still on them, despite being wiped clean when I installed Linux. But that's only because I scavanged most of them from the surplus closet and the outdated testing machines rack. Due to the better performance of Linux over Windows, I can use older boxes for my developement lab machines. In past years when the manager would say, "We're making out our budget for the next year. How many Microsoft licenses are we going to need?" I would have had to count up my lab machines and give him a total. This time it was pretty easy. The total formal training needed for all those machines to switch from Windows to Linux was zero. And since the product I'm working on is Linux based, and part of the testing I do includes installation, the time spent "moving to Linux" is also zero.
I thought maybe I had more machines in my office than the average, but I went down the hall and asked some of the other engineers, and I'm barely even in the top half. Not to mention the testing rack outside my office with 32 easily identifiable boxes.
He spoke on this quite a bit on the remarks track at the end of the 20th anniversary audio book version of Ender's Game.
He said he has actually written the screenplay himself--three times. It took three times for him to "get it right". But it will still have to be edited extensively by someone with more credibility before it gets filmed. He has no problem with that.
Although he has written screenplays before, they weren't for a major motion picture of this magnitude.
He said he doesn't feel any real need to stick extremely close to the story line. But he won't stand for anyone trying to make Ender be 16 years old and have a romantic interest. Not even Colonel Graff could manipulate a teen-ager into actually listening to an adult.
The way I understand it, geothermal energy isn't being CREATED by the earth, but rather just STORED there. So what happens when we suck all the heat out of the center of the earth?
I can see some advantages to that (no more earthquakes, volcano eruptions...) but isn't this just the identical problem to running out of oil?
If we converted all our energy needs to geothermal, what's the estimate of when we would run out?
I disagree completely. Don't limit yourself. Card has written TONS of stuff over the years, and allowing yourself to be offended over two essays could really deprive you of some excellent reading.
I like reading most of the stuff Card has written. A LOT. He can make me laugh, and he can make me cry. He can make me feel angry, disgusted, or hopeless. He can make me want to go out and slug someone, or stand up and cheer.
That, in my opinion, is the mark of a good writer, and he's one of the best. He ought to be--he's been doing it a long time. And he doesn't just write. He goes to workshops with other excellent writers. He compares his work and theirs. He gives and accepts critiques. He teaches students. He tries new things and merges them with old techniques. He's always working to make his writing better. And he thinks long and hard about things before he publishes them. I don't find myself wondering about loose ends that he forgot to wrap up as much as with some authors.
I remember participating in several on-line polls about what was the best fiction book people had ever read. It was pretty consistent that about 7 out of 10 would choose Ender's Game. That was pretty impressive to me. Now that was about 5 years ago, and there have been some pretty good fiction books come out since then, but I expect it would still be pretty high in the rankings. I know I've bought 4 copies myself because I tend to lose them when I lend them to nieces and nephews who get old enough to enjoy it.
Anyway, before you diss ALL of his non-fiction writing, read this.
Cellphones, ipods and even portable computers are not that power hungry that it would matter.
This was exactly what I thought when I read the topic.
Years ago I plugged my laptop into an airport plug for about 3 hours while waiting for a flight. I didn't feel quite right about "stealing" the power, so when I got home I thought I'd measure exactly how much it cost for me to run the laptop for 3 hours.
The only ammeter I had was limited to 10 Amps of DC current. I had to hook up a 12 volt battery through an inverter, through the adapter and into the laptop. I pulled the battery out of the laptop to make sure I wasn't measuring charging current or anything. The measurement came out just less than 9 watts.
Even ignoring any efficiency losses for the inverter and adapter, and choosing the most expensive prices for electricity around, I calculated I would have had to be stuck in that airport for more than 11 hours just to cost them a penny. If anyone had confronted me about it, I would have pulled out a penny and told them I was being generous and they could keep the change.
Granted laptops use more power these days with their fancier color displays and more powerful processors, but still actual power usage on these devices is even lower than the ratings printed on the labels.
To the other engineers: Are you aware of this kind of practice at your company?
More often we become aware of it when the competitor does it.
About 20 years ago there were a series of "shootouts" between Novell, Microsoft, and 3COM, to see which network OS was faster. That was when I was literated to the fact that tweaking parameters can make a HUGE difference in test results. If you have even more control, you can even tweak the tests. We used to have to supply "debunking" documents that explained how the competing companies got the results they published. Sometimes it was hard to reproduce their numbers, even tweaking our own sofware in the worst ways.
These days a lot of journalists try to maintain a neutral position. They go to great lengths to be fair, and document even tiny things that might give one product a slight edge over another. It gives them more credibility to those of us that have been through these product wars.
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I was going to try to make D batteries out of 3 AA batteries but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
It made for interesting strategy if you were into that sort of thing. If you got attacked by a mob of these guys, you could just kill one or retreat past a corpse of something you had aready killed. Then as the live ones got too close you only had to damage them until they retreated. They'd go off to feed on the corpse and you could pick them off at your leisure.
> How much will the power cost me?
Not sure about this particular car, but last December I was in a position where I really could have benefitted from an electric car. I searched the nets and found several that would have done well for me except I couldn't afford one yet. The one I liked the most was currently being used for a commute of about 44 miles and being recharged at work during the day. He was reporting a little less than 250 watt-hours per mile. This is from his charge meter to his odometer, so it included all the inefficiencies in the actual car. I pay 6.936 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity at my power sockets, so it would cost me 1.734 cents per mile. For a 300 mile "fillup" that would cost $5.21
Compare that to my current costs for my gasoline car. I get almost 30 miles to the gallon of gasoline. Gasoline here at the cheap places costs $2.57 per gallon. For a 300 mile fillup that costs me $25.70.
You would have to insert your own electric and gasline costs, but at current prices I don't think there is anywhere in the United States that the numbers wouldn't favor the electric substantially.
> How about the transmission line waste?
As I understand it, the transmission line waste is not really a super big issue. That's why we use high voltage lines to transmit power long distances. The bigger loss is by the step-down transformers at the receiving end. Maybe we could get someone who is more of an expert to get better exact numbers, but I understood it was about 10% loss at each transformer. Assuming two transformers (this is really a guess. There could be up to 4 or as little as one, depending...) that's 19% loss.
Compare that with the transmission ineffeciencies of transporting gasoline. How much diesel does it take for a truck to haul 10,000 gallons of gasoline from the refinery to the pump? If he gets 10 miles per gallon and has to haul it 1000 miles, he only gets 1% loss. Again, I'm just guessing on the load size and mileage but it gives me a ball-park figure.
You also have to take into account that the electricity is transported very safely and cheaply. Having extra trucks on the roads and having to pay the drivers to transport the gasoline are additional issues.
Electric cars really are more efficient and cost effecient than their gasoline powered counterparts. The newer electric motors are lighter and more effecient and have a lot more power than even a decade ago. Maintenance is minimal compared to gasoline engines and they last longer if you replace the brushes a couple of times. Battery maintenance is a bit more of an issue and the batteries do wear down over time and need to be replaced or revamped after however many cycles. But these problems are minimal. The real problems are battery cost, range, refueling time and refueling availability. But if this article is correct, they may have solved at least the battery cost and range issues. I could live with the other ones. If I really could get a electric car the size of a Prius for $38,000 that went 300 miles on a 5 hour charge, I'd do it in a minute. Just the gasoline savings on my commute would cover the car payments.
OK, but it seems MythTV isn't compatible with IPTV. One of the main components of the MythTV setup is the video capture card. So you run an analog signal into it and it digitizes it.
Well, OK. I see that you could connect your MythTV box between your set-top box and your TV. But isn't it less efficient to convert the digital signal to analog, convert it back to digital to record it, and then convert it back to analog to watch it?
My nephew recently got upgraded to a system where they ran fiber to his house, then cat5 cables to the rooms where the TV set-top boxes were. It looks an awful lot like IPTV to me. He was a little bit bummed because the PVR that he had with his previous satellite system didn't work any more, and asked about a PVR for the new system. I did a little bit of research into IPTV and figured this should be a no-brainer. You should be able to plug a Linux box into the hub just as easily as a set-top box. I figured there should be some open source software that emulates a set-top box and allows you to watch TV on your Linux box's monitor.
But I couldn't find any. The tech support guy at the provider says they're working on a PVR solution, but it won't be available for "a couple of months". I figured maybe this is just new technology and we hackers haven't had time to come up with an open source solution yet.
But then these guys post that they've had IPTV for YEARS now. So that can't be the problem. I can't see how it would be so hard to capture a few sessions and decode the protocols from the set-top box to the provider, and the protocols are all documented in RFCs and linked from wikipedia. So why can't I find any open source IPTV PVR software? Do I just suck at searching? Are there legal issues? Compatibility issues with different providers? Not enough interest yet and I should just build it myself?
If there's one thing I can't tolerate, it's intolerance!
I'm goint to bash, discredit, and spread hate and personal intolerance.
And I am a bigot bigot who definitely deserves scorn and scrutiny, not praise.
I thought flying was rocket science until I took flying lessons. The actual flyinf of the plane is pretty easy and not very dangerous. It's pretty much just common sense. Airplanes are much more simple mechanically than cars. They don't even have transmissions. The only reason people think they're so dangerous is that, unlike when you're in a car, you can't just pull over to the side if you have a flat tire. Why do you think you have to do a pre-flight inspection before each take-off?
Besides, there's a lot of room for error. I know from personal experience that most things that go wrong won't impact your safety much. From malfunctioning landing lights and nose-wheel shimmy dampeners to bird strikes and bad starters, most malfunctions just make a lot of noise or scare your passengers.
One thing I will recommend. If you're in the local flying club and you overhear two old geezers talking about "tap-dancing the rudders" trying to land on an old railroad track... take it with a grain of salt. Never mind that your instructor makes you practice short and soft field landings out the wazoo. Never mind that your dad used to practice landing on sand dunes and dirt roads on the way home from work. Make it a practice to only land on surfaces you know--airport runways if possible. Otherwise you might spend 3 days on a dry lake bed in California with nothing to eat except kangaroo rats and stink bugs. Not that it's particularly dangerous, mind you, but although airplanes are mechanically simpler than cars, they're also more fragile.
One of the most glaring evidences of bias in Civilization is the absence of the Slavery advancement. Slavery played such a HUGE part in the History of the world, it must have been left out on purpose. But how could you put the concept into the game and portray it's true value to civilizations without making it seem like possibly a good thing? How could something so abhorrent have ever had any kind of value? Probably they were wise in leaving it out.
Gotta be careful with those plastic fins on the fans. They're not very durable. Last week we had a guy with four or five pieces of paper in his hand, rolled up into a cylinder. He accidentally touched the processor fan with them and three of the fins busted right out. That made the rest of the fan imbalanced and it made a terrible racket until he yanked the power cord.
If a small cylinder of paper can break them, think what a pencil or a shoe could do.
I'd say the total time ($$) spent and training needed was comparable to upgrading from Windows 98 to 2000, or 2000 to XP.
Some of the engineers here kept one box with Windows or dual boot. Because there's usually one or two things that Linux just hasn't got right yet. I myself am totally Microsoft Free. There was one time when I borrowed a Windows box from a colleague because I was too lazy to get my Linux box to do the job. I think it was an expense report or something.
Another thing that might muddle the training cost issue is the fact that we have tons of lab machines. Right now I have 9 boxes in my office, running SUSE Linux in various flavors. Seven of them have the Windows 98/2000 certificate stickers still on them, despite being wiped clean when I installed Linux. But that's only because I scavanged most of them from the surplus closet and the outdated testing machines rack. Due to the better performance of Linux over Windows, I can use older boxes for my developement lab machines. In past years when the manager would say, "We're making out our budget for the next year. How many Microsoft licenses are we going to need?" I would have had to count up my lab machines and give him a total. This time it was pretty easy. The total formal training needed for all those machines to switch from Windows to Linux was zero. And since the product I'm working on is Linux based, and part of the testing I do includes installation, the time spent "moving to Linux" is also zero.
I thought maybe I had more machines in my office than the average, but I went down the hall and asked some of the other engineers, and I'm barely even in the top half. Not to mention the testing rack outside my office with 32 easily identifiable boxes.
He said he has actually written the screenplay himself--three times. It took three times for him to "get it right". But it will still have to be edited extensively by someone with more credibility before it gets filmed. He has no problem with that.
Although he has written screenplays before, they weren't for a major motion picture of this magnitude.
He said he doesn't feel any real need to stick extremely close to the story line. But he won't stand for anyone trying to make Ender be 16 years old and have a romantic interest. Not even Colonel Graff could manipulate a teen-ager into actually listening to an adult.
The way I understand it, geothermal energy isn't being CREATED by the earth, but rather just STORED there. So what happens when we suck all the heat out of the center of the earth?
I can see some advantages to that (no more earthquakes, volcano eruptions...) but isn't this just the identical problem to running out of oil?
If we converted all our energy needs to geothermal, what's the estimate of when we would run out?
I like reading most of the stuff Card has written. A LOT. He can make me laugh, and he can make me cry. He can make me feel angry, disgusted, or hopeless. He can make me want to go out and slug someone, or stand up and cheer.
That, in my opinion, is the mark of a good writer, and he's one of the best. He ought to be--he's been doing it a long time. And he doesn't just write. He goes to workshops with other excellent writers. He compares his work and theirs. He gives and accepts critiques. He teaches students. He tries new things and merges them with old techniques. He's always working to make his writing better. And he thinks long and hard about things before he publishes them. I don't find myself wondering about loose ends that he forgot to wrap up as much as with some authors.
I remember participating in several on-line polls about what was the best fiction book people had ever read. It was pretty consistent that about 7 out of 10 would choose Ender's Game. That was pretty impressive to me. Now that was about 5 years ago, and there have been some pretty good fiction books come out since then, but I expect it would still be pretty high in the rankings. I know I've bought 4 copies myself because I tend to lose them when I lend them to nieces and nephews who get old enough to enjoy it.
Anyway, before you diss ALL of his non-fiction writing, read this.
Years ago I plugged my laptop into an airport plug for about 3 hours while waiting for a flight. I didn't feel quite right about "stealing" the power, so when I got home I thought I'd measure exactly how much it cost for me to run the laptop for 3 hours.
The only ammeter I had was limited to 10 Amps of DC current. I had to hook up a 12 volt battery through an inverter, through the adapter and into the laptop. I pulled the battery out of the laptop to make sure I wasn't measuring charging current or anything. The measurement came out just less than 9 watts.
Even ignoring any efficiency losses for the inverter and adapter, and choosing the most expensive prices for electricity around, I calculated I would have had to be stuck in that airport for more than 11 hours just to cost them a penny. If anyone had confronted me about it, I would have pulled out a penny and told them I was being generous and they could keep the change.
Granted laptops use more power these days with their fancier color displays and more powerful processors, but still actual power usage on these devices is even lower than the ratings printed on the labels.
More often we become aware of it when the competitor does it.
About 20 years ago there were a series of "shootouts" between Novell, Microsoft, and 3COM, to see which network OS was faster. That was when I was literated to the fact that tweaking parameters can make a HUGE difference in test results. If you have even more control, you can even tweak the tests. We used to have to supply "debunking" documents that explained how the competing companies got the results they published. Sometimes it was hard to reproduce their numbers, even tweaking our own sofware in the worst ways.
These days a lot of journalists try to maintain a neutral position. They go to great lengths to be fair, and document even tiny things that might give one product a slight edge over another. It gives them more credibility to those of us that have been through these product wars.